It’s just using logic to destroy some common militant-radical-vegan arguments.
These people kill thousands of animals each years. And get angry that you kill a thousand and one.
They get angry that you say that human beings are more important than cows. But then they act as cows are more important than ants.
At the end that line of thinking is approaching religion levels of dogmatism. Thus why I feel compelled to rebate some arguments.
Your history for instance doesn’t really hold up. A little home leisure grows doesn’t provide for a family. To provide food for humans you do need proper agriculture, and proper agriculture, even traditional one, means the destruction of animal habitats and their massive killing.
If you don’t want to eat animals, specially the bigger ones because you feel sorry for them that’s ok. I would never question your personal choices. But if you start trying to enforce your personal choices on me, and start trying to moral shame me in a religious sort of way, then is when I have to push back. I already had my cup of religious moral shaming on catholic school, I don’t need more of it.
There’s nothing inmoral about eating meat. And not eating meat doesn’t make anyone a better person.
I think any vegan who is at least somewhat sane would say squishing an ant is not the same as killing a cow, because one is clearly more sentient and capable of experiencing suffering than the other. Obviously you don’t want to do either of them, and yes overpopulation and food waste causes us to kill enormous amounts of insects and wildlife. But I also don’t advocate for increasing the human population and try to waste absolutely 0 food because I know the impact it has. Buying food locally from non-factory farms is also much better, vegan or not.
It’s also true that animals consume and require MUCH more resources than just eating the plants ourselves, so even under that framing we are still doing significantly more harm because now we have to grow extra food, have space for these animals, and deal with the extra emissions from feeding/giving water/transport.
I absolutely can’t support myself nor anyone else with some backyard gardening, that’s definitely true. But with 2 people doing it in our leisure time, we reduced how often we have to buy any foods by about 40% by having ~8 fruit trees, 10 raised beds, and a freezer. Obviously this isn’t 0 harm because we do need a fence and sometimes have to trap and release some animals, but it is possible and not infeasable to feed a neighborhood by gardening like this, and it’s been done in many neighborhoods already.
You definitely can not exist without causing harm, and meat is not the ONLY negative thing to reduce, it’s just the most obvious and requires the least amount of legislature to actually reduce the harm from it. If we had a much smaller amount of cows that only ate the waste, that were humanely slaughtered, I think most vegans still be sad about it but not be nearly as upset, and meat would be a special thing rather than a staple.
It’s just using logic to destroy some common militant-radical-vegan arguments.
These people kill thousands of animals each years. And get angry that you kill a thousand and one.
They get angry that you say that human beings are more important than cows. But then they act as cows are more important than ants.
At the end that line of thinking is approaching religion levels of dogmatism. Thus why I feel compelled to rebate some arguments.
Your history for instance doesn’t really hold up. A little home leisure grows doesn’t provide for a family. To provide food for humans you do need proper agriculture, and proper agriculture, even traditional one, means the destruction of animal habitats and their massive killing.
If you don’t want to eat animals, specially the bigger ones because you feel sorry for them that’s ok. I would never question your personal choices. But if you start trying to enforce your personal choices on me, and start trying to moral shame me in a religious sort of way, then is when I have to push back. I already had my cup of religious moral shaming on catholic school, I don’t need more of it.
There’s nothing inmoral about eating meat. And not eating meat doesn’t make anyone a better person.
I think any vegan who is at least somewhat sane would say squishing an ant is not the same as killing a cow, because one is clearly more sentient and capable of experiencing suffering than the other. Obviously you don’t want to do either of them, and yes overpopulation and food waste causes us to kill enormous amounts of insects and wildlife. But I also don’t advocate for increasing the human population and try to waste absolutely 0 food because I know the impact it has. Buying food locally from non-factory farms is also much better, vegan or not.
It’s also true that animals consume and require MUCH more resources than just eating the plants ourselves, so even under that framing we are still doing significantly more harm because now we have to grow extra food, have space for these animals, and deal with the extra emissions from feeding/giving water/transport.
I absolutely can’t support myself nor anyone else with some backyard gardening, that’s definitely true. But with 2 people doing it in our leisure time, we reduced how often we have to buy any foods by about 40% by having ~8 fruit trees, 10 raised beds, and a freezer. Obviously this isn’t 0 harm because we do need a fence and sometimes have to trap and release some animals, but it is possible and not infeasable to feed a neighborhood by gardening like this, and it’s been done in many neighborhoods already.
You definitely can not exist without causing harm, and meat is not the ONLY negative thing to reduce, it’s just the most obvious and requires the least amount of legislature to actually reduce the harm from it. If we had a much smaller amount of cows that only ate the waste, that were humanely slaughtered, I think most vegans still be sad about it but not be nearly as upset, and meat would be a special thing rather than a staple.