 Santa Claus, Rudolph the reindeer, kissing under mistletoe, sitting around a table with a turkey as a centerpiece, it's traditional. Many traditions are actually quite harmless, quite fun. I participate in them, but some traditions have inherently cruel implications. Today, we're going to analyze traditions and question whether or not we should participate in it just by virtue of it being a tradition. Let's go. Here's a tradition, bear baiting. Bear baiting is a blood sport in which a chain bear or one or more dogs are forced to fight one another. The bear's canine teeth are often removed and their claws may be filed down, giving them less advantage over the dogs. Now, this is pretty traditional in Britain. It was popular from the 12th until the 19th century. Henry VIII was a fan. He was probably a fan of decapitating people too, so I don't want to be a fan of anything Henry was a fan of. That's for sure. Bear baiting has been occurring in Pakistan since 2004. Let's look at this video of this tradition and then we can analyze if it should be continued. So basically, the tethered this bear to a rope and then they send two dogs in and they maul each other horrible. There's footage from Ukraine. Also happens in Russia. So bear baiting is a tradition that happens across many places. It's been outlawed and banned, but there's an example of a tradition we shouldn't continue because of its cruel nature. Now, when you look into a dairy farm, for example, you're going to find cows tethered, forcibly impregnated, calves stolen, sent to a slaughterhouse where they don't want to die. All to make the custard that is poured over a Christmas pudding because it's traditional. Bear baiting is an example of outward cruelty that you can see. The dairy industry is an example of hidden cruelty interwoven into Christmas tradition. Here's another traditional practice called kotskal patul. In English, it means strangle the duck. So this is a controversial event practiced in Yucatan in Mexico. What they do is they fill these colorful paper mache figures with live animals or vermin. This isn't the way they talk about vermin. That the town's children have rustled up. For the most part, that means iguanas, but the game's most sought after stuffing is an endangered marsupial called an opossum. So basically they either hang a duck by their feet by a beam and pull the duck's head off or they put reptiles or animals in a pinata and they smash the pinata. That's an example of a cruel and violent tradition. But here's a Christmas one. Have you heard of a turducken? They get a turkey raised in a factory farm, gas to death, decapitated, plucked, and they get a duck and a chicken factory farmed, put in the slaughterhouse, murdered against their will. And what they do is they stuff a turkey with a duck and the duck with a chicken. So I can't really see a morally significant difference between this tradition and the traditional consumption of intelligent conscious beings like turkeys, ducks, and chickens for Christmas dinner. In the meat industry, you can't see them. In this event here, you can clearly see them. But if you wanna see what happens to birds, look at the footage. The next tradition is extremely violent and the images are horrifying. The God Hear My Festival is a sacrificial event held by Hindus in Nepal. Now, this is a large-scale, slaughter, decapitation of animals, buffaloes, pigs, goats, chickens, pigeons. With the goal of pleasing God Hear My, the goddess of power. Wow, no better way to exert power than by abusing and killing and decapitating innocent, powerless animals. Wow, it is estimated that a quarter of a million animals were sacrificed during the God Hear My Festival in 2009. The images, just a sea of decapitated buffalo. They come along with swords and just chop all their heads off. So the other buffalo are watching. The others get decapitated. It's just that they contain them in this luck arena thing. It's a horrifying tradition, I think you'll all agree. Even people who aren't vegan would agree. But how is this festival different to decapitating cows used for beef? How is that different? Is it different because there's a bolt gun involved? So if they went past and they bolt gunned them all and decapitated, that would be okay. There is no morally significant difference decapitating these animals to please a God or decapitating animals in England, Australia, America to please your taste buds. And another example, why we shouldn't accept traditions if they are inherently cruel and violent. Now moving along to the Faroe Islands, we have the grind and you might have seen this in Seaspiracy and Sea Shepherd do a lot of investigations here. Railing in the Faroe Islands is a type of dive hunting that involves herding various species of whales and dolphins but primarily pilot whales into shallow bays to be beached, killed and butchered. Each year, an average of around 700 long finned pilot whales and several hundred Atlantic white-sided dolphins are caught over the course of the hunt season during the summer. The tradition dates back to the ninth century. Incredibly violent, the sea turns completely blood red. These animals are beautiful creatures, very intelligent beings, highly sentient and are being lured into this cove where they're just viciously butchered in the name of tradition. But again, if you're one of these people who eat seafood on a Friday during Christmas, how is the suffering caused to the sea animals that are on your Christmas table for that tradition any different to the suffering of these animals who are killed in the Faroe Islands for their tradition? And if your argument is, all artists don't care about fish, I only care about whales. Well, how many whales are caught up in the bycatch of the fishing nets that catch the fish you eat? I would argue for the same reason you care about whales, they're sentient and feel pain and don't want to die. You should care about fish too. Finally, we have the tradition of dog eating. Yulin Dog Meat Festival, very famous event and continuously protested against by meat eaters in the West. Dogs are not just eaten in China. Dogs are eaten in South Korea, Indonesia, Ghana, Nigeria, in South Korea, they're bred in farms. In Yulin, they are snatched off the street. Cats as well, cats as well. Dogs and cats been eaten around the world. Very common, how is eating dogs in any of these countries different to you sitting down with a pig's leg calling it a Christmas ham, a honey roasted Christmas ham on your Christmas table for your Christmas tradition. Pigs are almost identical to dogs by every single moral metric you could measure. In fact, it's almost like who's smarter out of pigs and dogs. They're pretty on par. Pigs are sensitive, sentient, conscious beings like dogs. They love to play with their young and root into the ground and they love to snuggle and they're the most beautiful, beautiful beings. No different to dogs, they're pink puppies essentially and pigs will suffer a horrible death usually in gas chambers or electrocuted and stabbed to death in a horrible blood filled slaughterhouse. How is that different from the tradition of Yulin? It's not Christmas. Traditions should be left at mistletoe and tinsel and we should leave the decapitated tortured animals off of our plates and start a new tradition, a vegan Christmas. So I hope by showing you examples of traditions that have animals who are members of a species you may care about and showing you how cruel and needless that is and juxtaposing that with animals you might not care about so much who are also victims of a violent tradition that you might participate in. I hope in doing this we've helped you understand if a tradition is cruel, violent and needless we shouldn't participate in it no matter how normal we think it is. Thanks for watching and here's to new beginnings and new, more ethical traditions. Peace.