Last year, I wrote a great deal about the rise of “ventilation shutdown plus” (VSD+), a method being used to mass kill poultry birds on factory farms by sealing off the airflow inside barns and pumping in extreme heat using industrial-scale heaters, so that the animals die of heatstroke over the course of hours. It is one of the worst forms of cruelty being inflicted on animals in the US food system — the equivalent of roasting animals to death — and it’s been used to kill tens of millions of poultry birds during the current avian flu outbreak.
As of this summer, the most recent period for which data is available, more than 49 million birds, or over 80 percent of the depopulated total, were killed in culls that used VSD+ either alone or in combination with other methods, according to an analysis of USDA data by Gwendolen Reyes-Illg, a veterinary adviser to the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), an animal advocacy nonprofit. These mass killings, or “depopulations,” in the industry’s jargon, are paid for with public dollars through a USDA program that compensates livestock farmers for their losses.
That’s a “no true scotsman” fallacy.
Call it whatever you prefer. The fact is there are millions of vegans and vegetarians in the world today who are very much alive.
That’s not what no true Scotsman is. They aren’t saying fruitarian and breatharians aren’t real vegans, they’re saying that those are not representative of veganism as a concept.
But also, one can argue that they’re not vegans, because “possible and practicable” are part of the definition of veganism
And what’s the difference in the context of the fallacy?
The difference is that there’s no ad-hoc justification for excluding people who don’t understand nutrition from the umbrella term of veganism. They aren’t excluding them, they’re saying that those people make up a tiny, tiny minority and the population as a whole shouldn’t be equated to them.
That being said, I would make the argument that they aren’t real vegans in the first place, because like I said, “possible” and “practicable” are part of the definition. That isn’t ad-hoc, that’s just an established definition of what “vegan” means. It’s like saying someone who believes in a god isn’t an atheist. That’s not a no true Scotsman fallacy, it’s just a statement of fact.