Vegan Gains



Richard Burgess, better known as Vegan Gains, is a Somali-Canadian vegan activist, bodybuilder and YouTuber. His channel has over 66 million views and 320,000 subscribers.

He is known for his highly-charged videos about bodybuilding and vegan nutrition, his diatribes and meltdowns against those he disagrees with (which includes "SJW" ideas, non-vegans, and other vegan YouTubers) and his abhorrent behaviour and attitudes toward other human beings in general.

In 2021, Burgess claimed that he agrees with killing carnivorous animals if it reduces "rights" violations. He also said he agrees with killing mice populations if the mice are damaging peoples property or eating human food (crops).

Vegan Gains or Vegan Ghoul?
When his 82-year-old grandfather was suffering from a fatal heart attack, Burgess video-recorded the event and intended to post it online in order to use his grandpa as an example of what happens to meat-eaters. Unsurprisingly, it was soon deleted at the request of his family. However, he later explained that his grandfather was abusive to him throughout his life and that this was a reason he filmed him on his deathbed.

When meat-loving bodybuilder Peter Czerwinski (a.k.a. Furious Pete) was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 30, Burgess stepped in to gloat at what he saw as Czerwinski’s "just desserts" [sic] for eating meat and promoting the death and suffering of animals through the use of novelty t-shirts etc, managing to leech heavily off of attention gained from Czerwinski’s enormous subscriber base in the process. He doubled down on the gloating when Czerwinski’s cancer returned after a remission.

Surprisingly, his response to Rich Piana getting cancer in 2016 was distinctly more empathetic.

Unsurprisingly, he returned to ghoulish form after the death of bodybuilder John Meadows. During a live stream, he reviewed a video of John's made a month before his passing. In the video, John stated he was hopeful about his heart health improving within a month. Upon hearing this Vegan Gains broke into hysterical and high-pitched laughter, cackling out "He died! He died the next month!  Oh that's too funny". During the same live stream, in an act of extreme empathy and compassion, he referred to John's son as a "loser", and "piece of fucking shit." After seeing a picture of John's son having caught a fish, he stated that "hopefully he dies of a heart attack soon too... hopefully that piece of crap also fucking dies in his sleep."

Other behaviour and stances
Burgess has confessed himself to be a sadist and misanthropist, and has repeatedly threatened — ironically, he claims — to attack and kill people (including children and babies) who eat animal products, while wielding a knife on camera.

In particular, he holds a strong aversion to vegan activist and former friend durianrider, the only YouTuber he refuses to mention on stream or in his videos. The hostility stems from durianrider's accusation of Burgess' wife flirting with vegan activist- Joey Carbstrong, as well as Burgess' concerns with durianrider's dietary advice and the rape allegations levied against him.

He also routinely posts aggressive and insult-filled video responses to other people he disagrees with, nearly always with the title form "[name] vs Vegan Gains". His targets include people on both sides of politics, extending to those who are not even making an argument but simply making a personal announcement they are not vegan or no longer vegan, which he feels the need to "debate" beyond simply correcting any misinformation he thinks they may have spread in their videos. For example, anti-social justice transgender YouTuber Blaire White’s announcement in 2018 that she had quit veganism after 10 years got a particularly virulent pair of responses from him, despite this being among her least offensive videos.

Burgess is hostile to feminism, all humans (he hates himself and therefore wants to inflict pain in others), Islam, defends and engages in casual racism and opposes Black Lives Matter,  and is against gender-neutral pronouns. He has attacked Laci Green for her criticisms of the Trump administration and the idea of false rape accusations, as well as transgender feminist Riley Dennis for opposing fat-shaming and for her (controversial) opinion that transgender-exclusionary dating preferences may be partly socially conditioned.

Elaborating on his decision to get a vasectomy, Burgess launched into a stunningly misogynistic diatribe. Although he implied (and later clarified) that he was just trolling, the gesture is still disturbing and in poor taste to say the least. Vegan Gain's "trolling" is usually quite ambiguous and is oftentimes confused for seriousness.

The same goes for later comments in the same video, in which he said that babies "make [him] sick", and expressed, in lurid and gory details, a desire to stomp them to death on the pavement. Regarding such trolling — especially on a video that is categorised under "Education" and not under "Comedy" — it might be worth recalling the following Ed Brayton quote: "If you spend a great deal of your time pretending to be an asshole to get a reaction from people... you aren't pretending. You are an asshole."

Burgess has been called out for his stances by saner vegan YouTubers such as Reg Flowers and Unnatural Vegan.

Health and nutrition
Burgess argues unequivocally for the nutritional superiority of veganism, to the point where he exaggerates its health benefits and makes such unjustifiably strong claims as "cancer is a preventable illness that is caused by animal products and can be treated through a whole foods vegan diet". He argues that humans are herbivores and takes the stance of "personal responsibility for your health" to the extreme endpoint of attributing people's ailments entirely to their consumption of meat and other animal products to the exclusion of any other factor. One result of this is that he takes the liberty to engage in fat shaming of women, ironically contrasting with his assertions that thin people such as Eugenia Cooney are "not naturally skinny" and have eating disorders.

Burgess relies on material from T. Colin Campbell’s book, , loosely based on the extensive China-Cornell-Oxford Project:

He doesn't mention that Campbell’s book has been heavily criticised for ignoring the existence of thriving long-lived societies with high intakes of animal protein, confusing correlation with causation, and ignoring data and referencing sources that do not support the authors’ conclusions.

YouTube restriction
In September 2021, all of Burgess's content was removed on his YouTube channel.

This led to speculations that Vegan Gains has been permanently banned from YouTube. However, Burgess has since responded claiming he received a second strike from YouTube for making a controversial response video to Enkiri Elite Fitness. A second strike means he cannot upload content for 2 weeks, so Burgess' account was only temporarily restricted, he was not banned.

Views on killing carnivores and mice
In April 2021, Burgess argued that he thinks killing carnivorous animals is a good idea and ideally all carnivorous animals need to be wiped out so other animals are not preyed upon. In response to this, That Vegan Teacher asked Burgess does that mean he believes "all the wolves, all the lions and all the predators should be killed". He replied "yeah" and stated his belief that in "most ecosystems most predatory species don't actually do much of anything to control prey populations". He has claimed that human intervention is more reliable to control animal populations such as using contraceptive guns. Burgess said that he is "against breeding animals, sterilize them all".

In October 2021, Burgess in a debate with Vegan Footsoldier said that "he's in favour of killing carnivorous animals" if it reduces "rights" violations. He did not define what he meant by "rights". In the same debate Burgess stated that he would be in favour of killing every bird of prey on the planet to protect one single mouse from being eaten. Other vegans have criticized these views as extreme and non-vegan.

Burgess has said that he is "totally fine" with people poisoning mice populations because they destroy human food (crops) and that poisoning mice is the ethical thing to do to reduce human starvation. His views on mice are contradictory.

Stopped clock
Burgess has had a couple of stopped clock moments. He has criticized and debunked the pseudoscientific claims of the carnivore diet. He cited a scientific study that refutes the insulin and weight loss claims of low-carb crank Gary Taubes, and is surprisingly correct in his contention that Taubes is not a scientist and is publishing misinformation to make money. He also has criticized the pseudoscientific claims of Paul Saladino.