 Joe radio in Ireland, how are you? I'm good, thank you, how are you? Ah, good to be you, we're due to shoot you now in the next couple of minutes with Sean. Yep, totally ready. Joey Carbstrong is a former gang member and when a younger man in Australia spent time in prison and dealt with his addiction to drugs and alcohol, but now he's a vegan and spends most of his time arguing for a vegan lifestyle. Not only does he think meat is murder, he also thinks artificial insemination is rape. Joey, good afternoon. Good afternoon. If you were to describe a perfect world Joey, what would it look like? It would look like a world where both humans and animals are living in peace, in liberty, without being harmed, used or exploited for their bodies. That would be an ideal world for me. Would that mean no more zoos for instance? Yeah, no more animal prisons, no more, you know, exploiting animals for our benefit, for our entertainment, for our sensory pleasure. I don't think it's justified and nothing anyone can say can justify and act like that. Yeah, would that include also owning pets? The position on, vegan's position on pets is that we rescue animals from shelters that would otherwise face certain death, so euthanasia. We rescue them, so we offer the best life we can. Domestication is a problem that humans have created and the vegan way of looking at it is we either offer them a home as companion animals or they get a needle in their paw and they go to sleep. So that's quite different to what we do to farmed animals for food, quite different. They don't get rounded up, stuck in a slaughterhouse, chopped up into pieces for a burger. If we did that, I'm sure we will be arrested for animal cruelty because if they do it in Newland China and everyone put points to finger over there when there's blood on their own hands. Yeah, but just in with pets for a second though, if, you know, millions or tens of thousands of years ago, dogs decided they could have some sort of symbiotic relationship with humans and became, I suppose, what we call pets now. Isn't that nature at work? Isn't that a perfectly natural thing? Dogs decided to have a symbiotic relationship with humans. Human beings bred and domesticated these animals to do work for them. Domestication is a human created thing. It's not a natural thing. Domestication of farmed animals is from human beings, selectively breeding animals to use them to exploit them for their own benefit. I'll just ask you a question. Do you eat bacon sandwiches? I haven't had one today yet. You eat animals, animal flesh, yeah? I do, I do. Okay, what is your justification for condemning animals to a slaughterhouse and you want to talk about pets? You know, animals are being lowered down into gas chambers, thrashing in their last moments so we can eat their bodies. I mean, you know that we can be healthy on plants. What would farmers do in your vision of a perfect world, Joey? Would they completely switch away from, obviously they would switch away from breeding animals for consumption. What would they grow instead? I like how you side-swapped my question. Oh, because I didn't side-swap your question. I don't need to justify myself to you. No, no, no, I'm asking to justify the action. No, that's some sort of moral guardian for my actions or anyone else's actions. You're allowed to express an opinion, of course you are. It's not an opinion, my friend. It's not an opinion, but what would farmers do? Yeah. Well, in a world where they don't exploit animals for their bodies and send them to slaughterhouses, they'd be farming plants. What kind of plants? Plants that we can eat. There's thousands and thousands of different plants that farmers need to grow. Now, I sympathize with farmers, I really do. But there's a victim involved in this that no one's talking about and no one really cares about. And they're the pigs, the cows, the lambs, and the chickens that are getting strung up by their hoof and they're getting their feathers ripped off of their backs and they're getting slashed across the throat. No one seems to talk about this. I don't think we live in a society that even considers animals victims. Yeah, what do you think about that? Also as well, you've compared artificial insemination to rape in the sense that the cow doesn't give permission for this insemination. Compare it to rape? Yeah. What is it? What do you think it is? It's artificial insemination. Well, they're not giving... No, artificial insemination is a medical term for something that is... It's a medical procedure where a human being can give consent for that. Now, animals don't tell you that it's okay to shove your hand inside of their anus to stick a tube full of bull semen into their vagina, to impregnate them and to steal their children away from them. Where is the consent there? I mean, cows are very uncomfortable when they have a farmer's hand up their bottom. I mean, I just don't see why people want to play word games and think that a word is more offensive than violating animals' private parts. It's a bestiality-type process. I mean, people don't think that's weird, but they point the finger saying, oh, you shouldn't call it rape. What do you want us to call it? How do you know they don't give their consent? Or how do you know more to the point that a cow is capable of giving consent? They are not capable of giving consent. They are innocent beings. Just like a small child isn't capable of giving consent, that's why it's against the law to have sex with a small child because they cannot give consent. Now, in the same way, an animal is innocent, vulnerable. They cannot give consent. Now, I don't know if you're being serious with me, Sean, when you say, how do I know animals aren't giving consent? They avoid any interaction with their private parts. They try to avoid it. They hold them down in a rack. The cows, they hold them down in a rack so they don't move. So if a bull has sex with a cow, that's also rape because the cow is incapable of giving consent. If any animal has sex with any other animal, that's rape because they're incapable of giving consent. So rape is widespread. Excuse me, we are moral agents. Okay, you're a moral agent. You're a human being. You know right from wrong. What happens in nature happens in nature. Now, we cannot justify our actions because of what's happening in nature. You want to point to nature and say, are animals rape other animals? Animals eat other animals. Therefore, it's okay to rape each other and kill each other. That's a logical fallacy. That's an appeal to nature fallacy. It's one of the most basic logical fallacies actually. So you can't point to what animals are doing and say it's okay for us to act in that way because where's the civilized society? We're human beings. Remember, we're supposed to have morals and ethics that sort of hold together the foundation of our society. Now without them, if you want to point to the jungle and say, look, what's happening in the jungle? I'm allowed to go and kill whoever I want because lion's though. I mean, this is just a logical fallacy. Easy to point out. Aren't we part of nature? Or are we not part of it? Okay, so you're saying that it's okay to act in a way that animals act in nature? Are you making that claim? No, I'm saying aren't we part of nature? We are. We also have moral agency. Now, we are part of a civilized society, yes? Or are we savages? Well, one would like to think we're part of a civilized society. Okay, well, I think vegans are part of a civilized society where they don't condemn animals to slaughterhouses for an unnecessary reason. But I'd like to think in your mind, Sean, you're a civilized man, okay? And you would agree with me that causing unnecessary harm to innocent animals is immoral when we don't need you to survive. Now, when you point to nature and say, oh, animals are doing this, acting in this certain way, therefore it justifies our actions, that would justify a lot of actions, okay? That would justify a lot of actions. That's why it creates massive contradictions and we can't use that logic. Well, if you're like the fundamental idea of eating animals, humans have always eaten animals. So they enslave, slavery was around for 400 years just because something traditionally happens does not make it moral. You cannot appeal to history. You cannot appeal to a tradition because humans have been killing each other for thousands of years too. That does not make it moral and mean we should continue just because we've been stabbing animals and killing them for thousands of years doesn't mean it should continue. I mean, you don't see the contradiction there or the fallacy in that? Well, I don't know if you're comparing like with like necessarily because slavery obviously involved human beings and it would be an argument that animals have a different set of rights. No, no, I'm using the analogy, Sean. I'm saying you cannot look to history and justify an action by that. I'm not saying humans, animals. I'm saying you're pointing to history and tradition and saying it justifies an action in the current context of today. That's another fallacy. Now, what I'm saying to you is that human beings as part of nature have for hundreds of thousands of years eaten animals. It's irrelevant to the moral to the moral fabric of society today. Okay. Now, you look at a slaughterhouse. You show your children a slaughterhouse and you tell me if they naturally are drawn to eat those animals. If you want to talk about what's natural, go stab an animal in the throat and tell me if it gives you a natural feeling of hunger. Okay. You are not a natural killer. Okay. You're a compassionate man. Stabbing animals for burgers is not part of human nature. We are compassionate beings just because we force ourselves to kill an innocent beings and gone against our natural compassionate nature does not make it make it moral at all. So I challenge you to face a slaughterhouse. Face these animals in a slaughterhouse and tell me if it gives you a natural feeling of hunger because a true carnivore, a lion will see a limping, suffering animal and see food. You would try to help the animal. That's your natural instinct. Joey Carbstrung is a vegan educator and animal liberation activist. Joey, thanks very much for talking to us. Thanks, Sean. Take care, my friend. No worries, mate. See you later. Monkreath on News Talk with Gas Networks Ireland. Natural gas is compatible with a wide range of modern appliances. Gasnetworks.ie