My favourite pro veganism quotation!

My favourite vegan quote is Theodor W. Adorno
“Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals."
Adorno who said it was a jew himself!

Flavour.

I get 5% fat mince. That's hardly any fat in the grand scheme of things. Nothing wrong with a nice serving of saturated fat anyway.

Protein is not all the same. Where did you get this information from? Look up 'complete' protein sources and 'incomplete' protein sources.

If quotes from fiction are allowed too, I'd add this from the Vulcan T'Pol in Star Trek: "You humans claim to be enlightened, yet you still consume the flesh of animals", and this from later on in the timeline, from Commander Riker: "We no longer enslave animals for food purposes...You've seen something as fresh and tasty as meat, but inorganically materialized out of patterns used by our transporters." (This parallels the development of lab-grown meat, in my view).

I'd also add this from Peter Singer: "We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet - for the sake of hamburgers."



The freedom of choice argument shouldn't apply when other sentient beings are harmed as a result of that choice. Murdering someone or torturing someone is also someone's choice, but we still ban both actions because they inflict unnecessary suffering on humans.



Therefore, you acknowledge that nonhuman animals do suffer in the meat industry in many instances: in fact, it's the majority of instances.

If you agree that unnecessary suffering is wrong, regardless of whether it's physical or not, this should logically lead you to reduce and eliminate your consumption of animal products. Indeed, severely intellectually disabled humans and human infants can't reason either, meaning that they would only experience "physical suffering" too. I doubt you would condone treating them in the way that we treat nonhuman animals reared for meat, however.

Also, your point about the wild is irrelevant: the alternative to farming and slaughtering animals for meat is not to release them into the wild, but to stop breeding as many animals, thereby preventing further beings from having to go through the cycle of suffering and misery prevalent in the meat industry.

It's a strange goal to want to reduce the number of animals being born: furthermore where do you envisage existing populations will go? Onto reservations? In that case they are scarcely more free than on an (ethical) farm.

Human infants at least have the potential to develop sentience in the future so they are out.

Mentally disabled people you have a stronger argument with, but look at how we respond to the idea of people eating beloved pet animals like cats and dogs, or animals with some sort of higher consciousness. It's not "reason or no reason". I think you'd be hard pressed to find a mentally disabled person with intellect lower than a cow or sheep in particular.

The differentiation I am making between physical and existential suffering is key to my position on the argument. Even the most ravening of carnivores value ethical husbandry, even if it's something as small and probably misguided as avoiding the battery eggs or bottom shelf meat in the supermarket: I certainly believe that insofar as it is financially viable animals should be raised to minimise the physical suffering they endure.

Not at all, I just don't see that morality comes into a predator-prey relationship, because frankly basic animalistic survival doesn't revolve around ethics - the lion doesn't consider the ethics of killing the gazelle, nor the shark of the fish or the polar bear of the seal.

I've not answered the question because it's irrelevant, but if it'll get you to actually answer the question of why veganism is fine with killing animals provided they aren't directly used for food or clothing, right and wrong are such undefinable concepts and subject to change depending on geolocation, species, and place in time that it's very difficult to say that humans and other animals are separated by a notion of morality.

So, given animals are killed every single day for our basic needs, dehomed and destroyed to clear building room for our towns and cities, dehomed and destroyed to provide the building materials for said towns and cities, have their habitats polluted, ultimately killing them, as a result of manufacturing, hunted and killed to protect crops (so even a vegan diet requires animals to die), why is the killing of animals presumably justified so long as we don't eat them? Is it just plain hypocrisy? Is it a case of never having thought about it (out of sight, out of mind as it were)?

Basic animalistic survival does not equate to eating meat, for the simple reason that we don't require meat in order to survive. You could also use "basic animalistic survival" to justify murdering other humans and enslaving them.

And, whether lions consider the ethics of what they do is irrelevant: why are you using lions as ethical role models? Lions also kill each other to steal their homes and their wives, and also kill each other's babies.

Finally, morality does apply in nature, and applies especially do us. Assuming for a moment that it is a predator-prey relationship, we have the mental capacity to decide whether this predator-prey relationship should be in existence in the first place.



Meeting humans' basic needs is justifiable under an anti-speciesist ethic: humans are rational and self-aware and have an interest in continuing to live. There's very little that's ethically problematic with the actual act of killing animals, because they have no preference to continue to live, and do not conceive of their existence on a time continuum. Therefore, killing animals in order to meet basic human needs is justifiable, and we also have to ask: what would have happened to these wild-animals had they not been killed? The answer is that they would've died deaths just as bad, if not worse.

By contrast, by shutting down the factory farms and outlawing the slaughterhouses, we don't have an effect on the wild (in fact, we'll probably have a positive effect, given that the meat industry is one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gas emissions), and we prevent further animals from having to suffer in the meat industry.

Now, all of the examples you cite are to do with wild-animals. To address your previous point about morality in nature, wild-animal suffering is actually incredibly important for many vegans (see Brian Tomasik and David Pearce's work, for instance), and the vegan community is increasingly on board with the idea of striving to eliminate wild-animal suffering too.

Thus, your fallacious appeal to hypocrisy itself rests on a false premise, namely that veganism is not concerned with animals "out of sight and out of mind".

Lions have wives??

Being kind to animals is a disease? Damn....