vegandtippingit

There are a ton of vegan food recipe blogs on the internet (I have a google doc linking to a lot of them here). 

When it comes to ingredients in prepackaged food there are two lines of thought. One believes that it’s the use of larger ingredients (eg. larger ‘meat’ dead animal parts, dairy, eggs) that really contribute to animal violence and that you shouldn’t concern yourself with the tiny animal derived chemical ingredients on packaging (eg. The Vegan RD). The other side really hates the idea of consuming anything from or contributing in any way to violence towards animals (me) and they make lists like these and these.

As for the expensiveness I wrote a little about that here, but tl;dr: The price of food really varies by area and depends on what you’re purchasing. (I once overheard a conversation where two people were talking about their vegan friend and her buying things like 7$ whip cream and how expensive her food was. You do not need to buy those expensive items to be vegan, the same way nonvegans do not buy the most expensive things in the supermarket each visit.) As long as you are not in a food desert or suffering from extreme poverty I don’t think a vegan lifestyle is significantly more expensive, but yeah it can cost a little more here and there. 

Do you mind if I ask why you got interested in veganism? It will help me give you suggestions.

I don't know your family situation but as long as you have the ability to buy yourself food and you don't mind cooking for yourself I think you should be okay. The social dynamics around going vegan I think are more difficult.

Meals can be as intricate as you want them to be. If you only want to make simple things you can. For example, my usual bean recipes involve soaking 1-2 cups beans overnight, cooking them for approx. 50min by themselves at medium heat and then for the last 15-20 minutes adding in canned tomato, olive oil and a mix of spices, herbs and vegetables. Chili is really easy to make especially if you're using canned beans. Sandwichs, banana bread, stir fries, spaghetti etc. Really there's an infinite variety. You can check out Minimalist Baker's 30 min or less recipes (https://minimalistbaker.com/recipes/30-minutes-or-less/) for some inspiration if you'd like (though I find they do tend to make more fancy things). My favorite recipe blogs are http://theveganstoner.blogspot.ca/ and http://thegreekvegan.com/. There's also http://alloftheveganfood.tumblr.com/ which lists recipes by category with beautiful images.

Vegan cheeses do exist of course. Types and tastes will vary by brand. For example, I'm personally not a huge fan of Daiya but I love their pepperjack. Depending on your area you should be able to find them in supermarkets or healthfood/organic stores (healthfood stores usually stock some more vegan friendly items). You can also experiment with making your own. The recipe list I linked you to before has plenty on them. When I first went vegan just the knowledge of the violence that happened to make dairy kept me away from it. In fact one of the first articles I stumbled into on the subject talked about how dairy cheese was not even vegetarian. (Rennet, an enzyme used in many cheeses, is taken from the stomachs of dead male calves who are the byproduct of the dairy industry based on exploiting female cow's reproductive systems. If it's cheaper for a farmer to kill and replace a dairy cow (because as they age they make less milk) he will. None of this is vegetarian to me.) When I first went vegan I gravitated towards the soft texture of tofu because it was cheese like, but obviously you use it differently taste-wise. Unfortunately, it really depends on your location what quality of brand of cheese you'll find. Some vegans are really into replicating the tastes of nonvegan foods and that's fine and can help a lot of people. But I think it's also nice to be open to exploring new foods/tastes.

If you are committed to going vegan I would recommend getting more involved in the vegan community as it really helps to have that support. (It doesn't have to be in person. It can be through blogs, forums, books, youtube videos etc.) 

I would also recommend just taking some time to research health and nutrition. You can even check out the USDA Food and Nutrition Database which lets you look up the different nutritional components of different foods, but Veganhealth.org does give a good summary of the high nutrient foods it's good to include in your diet. I don't want to make it seem overwhelming, you can absolutely take it slow, I'm still trying to make my diet healthier years later, but you are changing your source of sustenance so some attention to diet planning while you're finding your footing I think will help you be healthier for the future.

I didn't pay attention to nutrition until a year after going vegan but I'd already been a vegetarian for six years and I came from a more vegetarian friendly culture, so I don't know how to best advise you. If it were me I'd probably first focus on just eating vegan meals, and then slowly maybe do a thing where each week I paid attention to a particular nutrient in my diet to get a feel for what a well-rounded diet looks like. If you haven't already looked at the plant plate (http://www.theveganrd.com/food-guide-for-vegans), I recommend it!

I would also really recommend you supplement your diet with some B12. There are a lot of vegans unfortunately who do not supplement and claim you do not need to do so and I do not believe the science supports them. The misinformation has become such an issue that multiple vegan organizations came together to support an open letter on B12 (http://www.veganhealth.org/articles/everyvegan). 

Some anti-vegans will argue that vegans needing to supplement their diet shows it is not a nutritionally sound or natural diet. I personally would rather take a couple tiny tablets a week than violently kill innocent animals. As for it being unnatural, we do plenty of things that are considered 'unnatural'- eg. eat canned foods, go to hospitals- but they are convenient and logical in a modern world. The argument goes on w/ animal feed itself often being supplemented w/ B12, vegans obviously not being the only ones who supplement B12, and the plethora of things supplemented in the modern food system- Vitamin D in milk, Vitamin C in juice, Iron and B-vitamins in pasta, iodine in salt etc. Blah blah. But supplementing will help ensure your health and they should not be expensive. (I have a bottle of 100 1000microgram tablets which cost me about 15$. I take 2 a week and it lasts me the year.)

You can also start checking into what items around you are already vegan as no one wants to cook everything. If you’re unsure, google or email can be a vegan’s friend. For example, my usual email to companies about products that look vegan friendly but I just want to confirm, always goes, “Hello, I was wondering whether your product xyz contains any animal-derived ingredients?” 

There are a ton of vegan food recipe blogs on the internet (I have a google doc linking to a lot of them here). 

When it comes to ingredients in prepackaged food there are two lines of thought. One believes that it’s the use of larger ingredients (eg. larger ‘meat’ dead animal parts, dairy, eggs) that really contribute to animal violence and that you shouldn’t concern yourself with the tiny animal derived chemical ingredients on packaging (eg. The Vegan RD). The other side really hates the idea of consuming anything from or contributing in any way to violence towards animals (me) and they make lists like these and these.

As for the expensiveness I wrote a little about that here, but tl;dr: The price of food really varies by area and depends on what you’re purchasing. (I once overheard a conversation where two people were talking about their vegan friend and her buying things like 7$ whip cream and how expensive her food was. You do not need to buy those expensive items to be vegan, the same way nonvegans do not buy the most expensive things in the supermarket each visit.) As long as you are not in a food desert or suffering from extreme poverty I don’t think a vegan lifestyle is significantly more expensive, but yeah it can cost a little more here and there. 

Spice up your evening, and get your kids to eat their veggies without realizing it. This Cumin Lime Pea Soup from The Vegan 8 is sure to please all palates, and is great served hot or cold! Try this week’s Sanctuary Sweets lunch as soon as you can.

Ingredients:

1 (16 oz) bag of frozen, organic peas

1 small red onion, sliced about 1 ½ cups

1 tsp ground cumin

1 tsp sea salt

½ tsp ground black pepper (use ¼ tsp if your kids prefer food mild)

1 cup low sodium vegetable broth

1 Tbsp fresh lime juice

Garnish: lime zest and flaxseed crackers

Preparation:

Preheat an oven to 400 degrees and line a 9 inch round cake pan with a large piece of foil hanging over the sides.

Place the frozen peas on the bottom of the foil, topped with the sliced onion, cumin, salt and pepper. Don’t worry about mixing it because it will be pureed later. Fold over the foil and place another piece on top loosely.

Bake for 35-40 minutes until the onions are tender and sizzling.

Add all the roasted veggies to a blender with the broth and lime juice. Blend until pureed and smooth, about 30 seconds or so. Taste and add any more salt or lime juice, if desired. If you want a thinner soup, add more broth. I thought the consistency was perfect. Serve immediately or chill in the fridge for 1 hour. It honestly tastes amazing warm and chilled.

  Recipe and photo credit to:

Today’s forecast calls for rain and temperature in the 60’s.  Now some people would complain about weather like that.  Not me!  I am done with hot and humid weather.  I enjoy working in my garden without passing out from heat exhaustion.

Cooler weather calls for comfort bread, and that bread is called Cinnamon Oatmeal Bread with an Orange Cream Cheese Glaze.

Ingredients for dough:

1 ½ cups quick oats 1 ½ cups boiling water 3 T vegan butter 3 T organic agave nectar 1 T organic brown sugar 2 t sea salt 2 ¼ t yeast 2 organic flax seed eggs 4-5 cups organic unbleached all-purpose flour 3 T vegan butter, melted 2 T organic cinnamon

Ingredients for glaze:

1 ½ T vegan cream cheese 3 T organic orange juice 2 T organic pure cane sugar

Method for dough:

Grease 2 medium loaf pans, set-aside.

In a large bowl mix together the oatmeal, and boiling water.  Add butter, agave nectar, brown sugar, and salt. Set-aside.

In the bowl of a stand mixer add yeast, 2 cups flour, and flax eggs.  Mix using the flat beater.

Change to the dough hook and add ½ cup of flour at time.  Dough should come clean from the sides of the bowl, knead dough for 3 minutes.

Place a clean kitchen towel over bowl and let the dough rise for 1 hour.

In the meantime make the glaze.

Method for glaze:

In a small sauce pan over a low flame add cream cheese, orange juice, and sugar.

Mix frequently until cream cheese has melted and the sugar has dissolved,

Remove from heat, and let cool.

Method for assembly:

Divide the dough into 2 pieces.  Roll each into a rectangle about 8" wide and 12" long.  Butter each dough with the melted butter and sprinkle with cinnamon.

Roll up the dough and press seams securely together.  Place each into a pan seam side down.  Cover pans and let rise again for 45 minutes.

Pre-heat oven to 375 degrees for 20 minutes before baking.

Bake on the middle rack for 40 minutes.

Let the loaves cool completely before glazing.

Raw Snickers Cheesecake | Serves 12

Ingredients

Base

1 cup almond meal

¼ cup raw cacao

6 pitted medjool dates

2 tbsp maple syrup/agave nectar

¼ cup unsweetened desiccated coconut

¼ tsp himalayan salt

Peanut Butter Fudge

1 cup natural crunchy peanut butter

1 1/2 tbsp coconut oil

¼ tsp himalayan salt

1 tbsp maple syrup

¼ cup raw cashews, soaked overnight or 4 hours min

Chocolate Layer

2 cups raw cashews, soaked overnight or 4 hours min

2/3 cup almond milk

½ cup raw cacao

¼ cup maple syrup/agave nectar

¼ cup virgin coconut oil

¼ tsp himalayan salt

Method

Line the bottom of a round cake tin with baking paper. Using a high speed blender or food processor mix ingredients for base until well combined. The mixture should be a slightly sticky consistency. Place mixture into cake tin and use your fingers to spread out mixture until nice and even. Set aside.

Place ingredients for the peanut butter fudge into the blender. Blend until mixture is combined but still has peanut pieces in it. When it is ready, scoop out mixture into cake tin and smooth out on top of the base with a rubber spatula. Place in the freezer and allow to set for 30 minutes.

Place ingredients for the chocolate layer in the blender and blend until it becomes a smooth consistency. This can take a few minutes. Once it is smooth and creamy, pour mixture on top of peanut butter fudge layer and smooth out evenly using a spatula. 

Place in the freezer for 2-3 hours. Remove set cheesecake from freezer and place in the fridge for ½ hour before serving.

16 oz of honey requires 1152 bees to travel 112,000 miles and visit 4.5 million flowers.

Most of the honey we get at supermarkets and stores don’t come from natural hives. 

Honey is an animal product, produced when bees digest nectar they have collected and then regurgitate it. It is an animal product, just like an egg or milk. Yes, a bee is an insect and not technically considered an animal by many people, but a bee’s body changes the composition of what it ingests, just like other animals.However, there is another reason vegans won’t eat honey, and that is because it is harmful to another living creature. According to Daniel Hammer, bees do experience pain and suffering while they are being exploited for their products (not just honey but also beeswax, royal jelly, and more). There is simply no way beekeepers, humane or otherwise, can avoid harming or killing bees while they are extracting the bees’ products. Many vegans choose their lifestyle because they wish to avoid harming any other creature, and so they choose not to eat honey.

Check out this couple of articles that are pretty complete about everything around this topic :) 

Why Honey is Not Vegan?

As a vegan, you depend upon beekeeping. It doesn’t matter if you never use beeswax or eat honey. You still depend on beekeeping. It is absolutely impossible not to. 

Because here’s the secret; you know all those delicious fruits and vegetables you eat? You wouldn’t have them if it wasn’t for bees, and here’s another secret; those bees were probably either kept by the farmer who grew them for the purpose of pollinating his/her crops, or moved to the farm during pollination season by a beekeeper. 

If you’ve ever eaten a cherry, almond, blueberry, tomato, melon, squash, raspberry, strawberry…hell, most fruits or veggies…you’ve benefited from beekeeping. There is simply no way to avoid it. If you leave it up to whatever pollinators happen to stop in from the surrounding area, your yields will suffer dramatically, which means less produce and less money for the farmer. Therefore, the easy and universally preferred method is to plop a few hives on the property. The girls will make sure that just about every last almond/cherry/blueberry flower is pollinated (They’re VERY good at what they do) and you can happily harvest a bumper crop. This is a universally used practice among food producers. 

And do you know the best way to help make sure the bees survive?

Keep them. Organically, without using any chemicals. And here’s a secret about beekeeping; you inspect the hives whether or not you take honey, to make sure the bees are healthy and doing well. (There are mites and diseases that can severely harm bees, and even as an organic beekeeper who doesn’t use chemicals on her girls there are methods I use to prevent/treat things like varroa mite infestation that can kill an otherwise healthy hive).

And yes, when you open a hive to inspect it, you might crush one or two bees. But tell me, honestly, that you’ve never killed an insect. Bees themselves will kill sick/non productive members of the hive to ensure the health of the hive as a whole; I don’t see how my accidentally squishing one to ensure the health of the other 50,000 is any different. 

And this is what all beekeepers do. And if you, as before mentioned, ever eat anything that isn’t grain-based, this is what took place to put that food on your plate. 

I would also like to point out that bees will store as much honey as they possibly can…which usually ends up being waaaaay more than they actually can use. To survive a log Iowa winter, my bees need about 100 lbs of honey per hive. Well, last year one hive had TWICE that. (I took 50 pounds, leaving them MORE than enough to get through the winter. I just checked on them today; they’re alive and healthy). 

You are NOT hurting them by taking a little honey for yourself, no more than you already are by looking in on them every two or three weeks to make sure they’re healthy. 

And again, if you ever eat any fruits or veggies, SOMEONE IS ALREADY KEEPING BEES TO POLLINATE THEM AND INSPECTING THEM TO MAKE SURE THEY’RE HAPPY AND HEALTHY. 

KEEPING BEES IS NOT WHAT IS KILLING BEES IT IS WHAT IS SAVING BEES. 

WITHOUT BEES YOUR VEGAN DIET IS IMPOSSIBLE.

WITHOUT THAT “EVIL” EXPLOITATION OF BEES YOUR VEGAN DIET IS IMPOSSIBLE. 

AGAIN, BEEKEEPING IS WHAT IS SAVING BEES NOT KILLING THEM. 

SO IF YOU EAT A LITTLE HONEY IT IS HONESTLY NO WORSE THAN EATING SOME ALMONDS AND FRUIT SALAD. 

Yes. You can keep bees without taking honey from them. But, as I said before, you’re ALREADY in the hive checking for diseases and pests. That, if anything, is what causes bees stress, not you taking a frame or two of honey (each frame of honey can hold 15 pounds!). 

Also, there’s a REASON you take honey from bees, not just because you want to eat it. 

See, like I said before, bees will store as much honey as they can. It’s instinctive. However, there’s only so much room in a hive to put stuff, and honey isn’t the only thing in a hive. They also need room to raise brood, store pollen, ect. Now, if they run out of room, they’ll start feeling overcrowded, which will trigger swarming activity. You can, of course, add more supers (boxes) to the hive, but there’s a limit on how many workers one queen can produce, and you don’t want more supers than they can police, even if all of them are stuffed full of honey. That way lies pests and raiding. So, what we want to do is make sure that they don’t feel overcrowded, while making sure that they don’t have more room than they can take care of. 

When bees feel overcrowded, they swarm. When they swarm, they raise a new queen. The old queen and half the bees will then leave to try and find someplace to start a new hive. 90% of swarms die. As a beekeeper, you don’t want this. 

You can, of course, purposefully let them start raising a new queen and then split a new hive off of the old one if you want to. I’ve done this myself. But this is not always desirable, for many reasons (no more room for more hives, can’t take care of more, don’t have a spare hive body on hand, ect.) There’s also the fact that a recently swarmed hive is susceptible to raiding by wasps/skunks (skunks LOVE to raid hives, the little bastards) or mice, as half the bees that would have defended it before are now gone. You don’t want this either; raiding can kill a hive as quick as disease or pests. (This is why I keep a VERY close eye on any hives that I’ve recently split, and have taken potshots at skunks in the backyard with a slingshot before. Not to kill them, just to scare them off.)

If you don’t want them to swarm, the easiest way to keep them from feeling cramped and give them a little new breathing room is to pull a few surplus honey frames they’ve filled up and replace them with empty frames. The girls will then happily go back to work filling the new empty frames with honey or brood or whatever they decide needs to go in all that new space. They don’t feel crowded any longer, the hive doesn’t swarm and stays strong, everyone’s happy. 

And what, then, am I supposed to do with these three frames of honey I pulled? Throw them away? Hell no. That’s 30-40 pounds of delicious, right there. 

Humans and bees have what’s called a symbiotic relationship. We both benefit from the arrangement. Don’t diss things if you don’t understand how they work. 

And, one more time…keeping bees is necessary for your vegan diet to remain viable. A beekeeper is going to inspect all of those hives anyway, which is the most stressful part of beekeeping for the bees. You are, with your eating habits, (and by that I mean ‘really just eating’, because there’s NO diet that doesn’t rely on beekeeping) reliant on this practice. Taking a frame or two of honey is the LEAST stressful part of inspecting a hive for the bees. 

As for the plantbased diet being impossible without bee farming… How did people eat vegetables for thousands of years? I am aware that it is an issue of monocropping with almond trees in California which requires bees to be brought in to pollinate them as bees cannot survive in the area on their own. I don’t get why the vegan ideology that you should leave animals in peace is considered so radical by some but whatever. No animal on this earth that I’m aware of, besides those we’ve domesticated and/or made dependent on us (through, say destroying their environments) should be said to rely on humans for their survival .

And people may say they’re too tiny to be of concern or ‘just insects’, but if you watch the documentary More Than Honey, it goes into how even tiny bees have the capacity to make agent choices. 

Btw, just pointing out that vegans live in system based in animal exploitation is obviously something we know?  It’s not ‘impossible’ to not depend on bee exploitation, it is literally a product of our current system’s bad agricultural practices. Does it seem normal to you, to have trucks moving bees around different countries each year (something they obviously do not experience well)? Why in the world would you want to argue for the inevitability of such a practice?

“A horse’s back is not a seat, it is a very complex and tender anatomical structure with extraordinary functions.It is enough to look at the nerve patterns in a horse’s back to understand how sensitive it is. It is no accident of course that the anatomical structure of the horse’s nervous system is so extraordinarily well constructed. It was no accident that the medial branches of the nervi spinales (the spinal cord nerves) which come out from the spinal cord (medulla spinalis) which is directly connected with the brain were placed so high on a horse’s back, under (and into) the very epidermis, above the spinous processes. Besides the obvious biomechanical function, the back has another very important function. The spinal cord’s work is to guarantee that the responses from the entire nervous system can communicate the senses of taste, smell, vision, hearing, and vestibular function to the brain, not to get lost in too much detail. On this especially vulnerable, sensitive organ, onto the medulla spinalis, the brain of the back, sits a rider.”— Alexander Nevzorov

In English, we call training a horse to accept a rider for the first time “breaking” it. I think that alone says a lot. 

Horses are often housed in small, walled-in spaces on their own, called stables. This goes against pretty much everything we know about horses’ natural and social behaviours, and is the cause of many horses engaging in stereotypic or disordered behaviour, also called as stable vices.

Horses are grazing animals. They naturally graze up to 18 hours a day and in these conditions their stomachs are never empty. In contrast, stabled horses are fed only 3-4 times a day for about 20 minutes at a time. This increases the risk of developing gastric ulcers. Horses allowed to graze almost never develop this condition, but it is observed in up to 60% of hobby/stabled horses.  

Horses’ epiphyseal plates only become fully developed between the ages of 6 and 9, horses are broken in and trained as early as 3 years old. Riding young and undeveloped horses increases the risk of painful and chronic spinal damage. In this study, over 90% of ridden horses had alterations in their spines.

The back of a horse is a very sensitive area, and regardless of the age saddles are known to cause damage to bones, muscle and tissue. The use of saddles restrict proper blood flow, which causes permanent tissue damage. Saddles, when improperly fitted, leave behind abrasions and wear and tear on the horse’s skin. (Every horse is unique, and one saddle seldom fits another horse at the stable. Money is often more important so many horses are being ridden with a badly fitting saddle.) The same can be said about bits — they cause pain and discomfort in one of the most sensitive areas of the horse’s body, and cause damage to their teeth, tongues and palate. 

The farm sanctuary where I often work has horses in its care, but we never ride them — we walk them regularly with bridles, just like we walk the cows! (They have lots of space to roam around in (forests and fields); the walks are just some extra exercise and stimulation for them. They get to see horses from the neighborhood too.)

I’ve worked with people who used to ride horses, and who now strongly regret their previous “hobby” or “sport”, and wonder why they didn’t realise what was wrong with it sooner. One of them told me that they were riding their horse normally, when all of a sudden they realised what they were doing and started crying. That was the end of their horse riding hobby. That was actually what lead to the sanctuary.

It’s often told that by whipping the horse you show them who’s the boss. Whips hurt. Horses have thinner epidermis than we do, which means that they feel more pain than we do, contrary to popular belief. Also, horses don’t have such hierarchy that’s based on power and violence, like we often think. The leader in the herd is the smartest horse, with most knowledge, usually one of the older ones.

All the time the sanctuary receives calls from owners, or ppl who know the owners, about their horses: they used to ride them, and now is forgotten to just die. Apparently it’s the way horse riding industry works: people get a new horse that’s younger and better for themselves or their kids. The internet is full of listings and auctions for unwanted horses produced by the horse riding industry, old and “useless”, with health problems and injuries that make them “inferior” and “no longer of use”, just because you can’t ride them. A horse’s life simply doesn’t have any worth if you can’t use them. Horses are no more than a vehicle to them, something to be used for entertainment and fun and then discarded when they become faulty and useless. 

It’s awful to watch what people have written about their old horses. “Working accelerator, brake pedal and steering wheel.”  “You can come and test-drive it.” Are we talking about a horse or a car? Do people want to take care of horses if they can’t ride them?

If you want to have fun while riding something, get a bike. Horses aren’t here for our butts, they’re here for their own lives. Animals don’t have to have a purpose for us to be allowed to live.

And here’s one last question: do horses want us to sit on their backs? Rhetorical question. 

There’s so many other things you can do with your horse. Riding is not a necessity for your horse’s well being, it can actually be the opposite.

Zoos don’t give a crap about endangered animals!

Here’s Why:

1. First of all, endangered species make up less than 1% of the population at zoos world-wide. 

2. Only 10% of the zoos in the entire world are registered for captive breeding and wildlife preservation.

3. Within those 10% of zoos, only 2% of the world’s threatened or endangered species are in their breeding programs.

4. Breeding programs at zoos are designed solely to draw attention and bring in revenue. (This is why rather than breeding endangered species, zoos breed species that are considered popular and/or cute to the public.)

5. Within the United States, not a single zoo has a policy to provide lifetime care to animals that are born inside the zoo.

6. As a result of this, animals become surplus and either are “discarded” of or sold to brokers, dealers, wholesalers, auctions, biomedical researchers, hunting ranches, and slaughterhouses (for the exotic meat trade or for their hides). Some zoos have even been called out for supporting vivisection (animal experimentation) on their surplus animals. 

To zoos, it doesn’t matter what’s morally right; they don’t care if they are benefiting a species or not. Zoos only care about what can bring them the most profit, and that is exploiting animals.

If zoos only were to “help endangered animals”, no one would complain! But zoos couldn’t care less about their animals as long as they are profiting from the exploitation of them!

Oh yeah, and I said that I worked with primates rescued from zoos? Yep, because there are no retirement plans in for-entertainment-purposes captivity: these monkeys came from a zoo that had to close and sold away all their young and healthy animals that other structures knew would bring in profit but guess what happens to all the older ones? To the “euthanasia” lane and in a single file por favor! The animals I worked with were simply the few lucky ones that ended up rescued by the sanctuary I worked at but there are countless others out there with a much darker end of story.

Zoos are glorified prisons for animals nothing more and the cringy greenwashing that they’ve been trying to give themselves these last few years with talks of contributing with the conservation of endangered animals is nothing but pretty sparkles to make us unaware and better hide how morally despicable they truly are.