As families searched, a Texas medical school cut up their loved ones
www.nbcnews.com
The University of North Texas Health Science Center built a flourishing business using hundreds of unclaimed corpses. It suspended the program after NBC News exposed failures to treat the dead and their families with respect.

This may be a controversial post because it strays from the exploitation of non-human animals, but this is a story about human bodies being sold and used without their prior consent, which to me speaks to a similar (albeit more severe) indignity that non-human animals face in the medical industry. That is to say “this isn’t vegan”. Feel free to downvote this post heavily and say as much in the comments if you feel this isn’t on-topic for this community, as I know there are plenty of other places that will address this with an appropriate level of appallment.

  • @[email protected]English
    2•2 days ago

    To be honest, yes this should be forbidden, but active consent is often rare.

    And to be fair, these people are already dead. So I would say it is vegan, as this is not their purpose, they were not bred, not held and are also not eaten but used for education, research and helping living humans.

    Idk I dont find this that crazy? Even though family members should of course be able to claim the bodies, and yeah it is kinda sick to scratch corpses of poor people off the street and look at them only when they are dead.

    That context makes it more fucked up.

      • @[email protected]English
        4•21 hours ago

        If using a dead body for these purposes is exploitation or not is a philisophical or even religious/spiritual/belief question.

        As far as we know, if an animal dies, the corpse doesnt feel, experience or live anymore.

        As these animals (people) didnt die because of this, it is not exploitation, I would say.

        • @[email protected]English
          2•23 hours ago

          the barest definition of “exploit” is “use”. using animal products is the exact thing vegans don’t do.

          • @[email protected]English
            4•22 hours ago

            I’d argue it’s vegan to use animal products if and only if the animal has died through no means of your own and you are not indirectly causing more exploitation.

            Second hand leather is not vegan because you indirectly support the leather industry by fueling demand for leather. Someone may be more inclined to purchase something made of leather if they know they can resell it at a later date (like a leather sofa).

            However, I’d argue eating roadkill you accidentally killed yourself would qualify as vegan since there are no moral issues with that - consuming it doesn’t fuel the demand for animal exploitation. Additionally, it causes you to consume less food produced through industrial agriculture (which is not sustainable in its current form), making kt better for the environment.

            For me, exploitation := intentionally harming an animal as a means to an end

          • @[email protected]English
            2•21 hours ago

            I am not sure about exact definitions.

            But afaik vegans dont finance or encourage animal “use”. Like buying, buying for a lower price, eating in front of other people thus normalizing it etc.

            This doesnt apply at all in this case. There are no people (well, anymore) killing others to get medicinal corpses. So you dont normalize anything and you also dont fuel any market.

            I mean, we have laws for that. On a free market this could increase the demand and people could start killing people to sell them.

          • @[email protected]English
            1•21 hours ago

            I would say exploit is getting a benefit from someone without giving anything back.

            This is a corpse, it doesnt feel, you cant give it anything. As far as we know.

            You can bury it but this is really just a concern of the relatives etc.

            It’s also just living people that care about what happens with their body. My guess: this is a egoistic response, which is understandable, but makes no sense when you are dead.

            Simply because we cannot imagine how it is to be dead.

            That would be a point against opt-in.