then her philosophy really is too simple, as i suspect your understanding of the vegan community is.

There's no such thing as a 'philosophy of the vegan community' - there are millions of individuals each with their own ideas.

You ever been to a dairy farm? You should see what happens when to cows are not milked. Imagine a barn full of dairy cows that can raise the dead with the noise because their udders are swollen and they are in a lot of pain. They are happy to be milked. Or should we exterminate all dairy cows so they don't have to produce milk anymore? Dairy cows make milk that is what they were breed to do and all they can do. Dairy cow are better fed and like in clean barns compared to most cattle.

I don't think that's the standard that most strict vegans use. Most strict vegans I know don't eat honey, but the bees will keep making it, regardless of what is "forced" upon them. The bees are "free" to leave. (I'm aware that they stay due to the presence of the queen, but the queen could theoretically leave too... but the bees just like making honey in that environment.)

Anyhow, I think the real vegan rationale is more like some sort of perceived "exploitation." That's a subjective term, but I think that's really what's going on in vegan philosophy. The animals might make the food anyway, but we are exploiting them to make food for us.

Of course, we also exploit plants too when we harvest parts of them like leaves or roots, which they have to regrow (or perhaps they even die or are completely consumed). Even by eating the fruit and not letting the seeds be dispersed naturally, we often interfere with reproduction.

The problem with all of these arguments is that you can keep going and going until you can't eat anything because you're exploiting it. I've even heard some vegans have arguments about whether we can eat leavened bread -- aren't you "exploiting" the yeast??

The question is just where you stop, because you have to eat something, and generally speaking, you'll end up exploiting or killing something else in the process... no matter what it is.

So a mother feeding her child directly is vegan, but a mother stockpiling bottles of her milk (so the father can feed as well) is not?

well, perhaps that's the moral. or perhaps it should be that a vegan that won't eat carrots doesn't represent the vegan community at all.

You're right - she was being philosophically rigorous.

Or perhaps the moral is that we generally eat food that was previously alive. Where we draw lines about exploiting that "life" is usually based on arbitrary divisions projecting human feelings and morals onto things that have a very different experience of the world.

For most of the vegans I know who have a problem eating honey, I think the carrot really represents a conundrum. It is really a greater problem to exploit the work of bees than it is to rip a living organism out of the ground and kill it completely to consume it? Some people say that the bees still have a nervous system that can feel pain or something and harming or exploiting them is a problem... but have you never had a garden and stepped on a plant, or tore a leaf, or made some sort of other damage or barrier or whatever to the plant's growth? The plant will respond (albeit more slowly). It is a living thing, and it has systems designed to react to the environment, as all animals do.

The line is always arbitrary. For most people in my experience, it's primarily about "cute and cuddly" things more than anything else... and I'm not sure that's a good thing to build a moral philosophy on.

No, in fact, it has been actually validated.

http://nutrition.stanford.edu/projects/az.html

My lady was once a raw food vegan fascist. One day she had the revelation that a carrot was alive and she couldn't bring herself to kill it. This led directly to the concept that all the food is alive, so fucking eat it. (or as I like to put it, THIS IS NECESSARY. LIFE FEEDS ON LIFE FEEDS ON LIFE FEEDS ON LIFE FEEDS ON...) A few years ago we were in the habit of eating a lot of chicken sausage. One day she asked me "Why is this sausage so good?" The answer was "because it's made out of pork". The moral is, people can change.

Because people are happier using anecdote to support their opinions than they are changing their opinions when confronted by facts.

It's all about feelings.

Well, if you go into that, plants cannot give consent either. It seems like the only way out for vegans is starving to death.

"Giving consent" assumes being aware of the implications of what is happening. Unless you assume animals have the mental capability of understanding the abstract notion of property and the difference between stealing and buying, the act of giving consent has no meaning for them.