Per the title. If an animal dies out in nature without any human involvement, shouldn’t it be considered vegan to harvest any of the useful parts from it (not nessicarily meat, think hide), since there was no human-caused suffering involved?
Similarly, is driving a car not vegan because of the roadkill issue?
Especially curious to hear a perspective from any practicing moral vegans.
Also: I am not vegan. That’s why I’m asking. I’m not planning on eating roadkill thank you. Just suggesting the existence of animal-based vegan leather.
I’m not vegan myself but I had asked a similar enough question to a vegan friend a while ago and liked his answer:
He said for him it’s 2 parts, 1 is that while the animal that died may not have been harmed by humans, the ecosystem that relies on scavenging carcasses will be hurt if humans effectively start removing their entire food source (same way we have driven species to extinction by hunting).
The 2nd part is that with humans everything with even the tiniest loop hole will get abused… Imagine that we say this is okay. Today it may be the odd naturally deceased animal, in a month it’ll start including animals “killed accidentally”, in a year it’ll be someone farming animals with some weird way of culling them so they can claim it’s still natural causes by some twisted logic… at the end of it we’d just not be able to trust any of it anyway so it’s easier to not even entertain the thought - the energy to figure it all out would be better spent on improving alternatives.