Yes, I’m quite aware vegans have a reason to be upset. Unfortunately, equating eating meat or drinking milk to personally murderering and torturing animals is not going to earn them any fans, and will in fact push people away from their just cause out of spite.
That’s not at all relevant to the comment I was responding to, though.
I mean, you are paying someone else to do those things for you. Or if you want to quibble over verbs, paying someone else to cause harm to animals for you.
If it’s not currently possible for you to eat a less harmful diet, that’s one thing. There’s a ton of ways that our lifestyles can cause harm, and it’s perfectly fine if you’re just not in a good place to change one particular aspect of it. Refusing to acknowledge the harm that you are causing is frankly much more concerning. From understanding comes action, after all.
I mean, you are paying someone else to do those things for you.
That’s not exactly what’s going on. I believe a more apt way to describe it would be paying somebody that has harmed animals. This may sound like a distinction without a difference, but I don’t believe it is. Whether I buy pork at a grocery store or not, they aren’t going to kill any fewer pigs because of it. It’s not like the slaughterhouse is going to butcher exactly one less pig because I stopped buying meat. If I decide not to buy pork chop the next time I go to a store, either somebody else buys the pork, it’s donated to a food bank right before expiry, or it’s just thrown away. The pig is already dead, and the meat goes somewhere regardless.
Unless you’re the type of person that eats meat every day, there is very little change you can make at an individual level. Of course, much like voting, change starts to happen once you get a lot of people to make that individual choice. Get 20 people to stop buying pork, and the store might order less. But at that point, I would argue it is far more of a societal issue. So while we are directly responsible for what happens to farm animals, I don’t think it’s at the level of us literally killing them ourselves.
Pardon me for fighting you on this, but I believe you are incorrect. You’re abdicating your responsibility, in assuming that those animals will always be killed.
Put it this way. If you lived next to a chicken farm, and drove over there any time you needed a chicken, and watched them kill it for you, would you have any qualms about saying it was killed for you? Why does having it go through a grocery store first somehow change this? However you get your meat, those animals were still killed for your benefit.
The average American eats about 250 pounds of meat in a year. That’s a bit over half a cow, or about one and a half pigs, or somewhere north of a hundred chickens. That’s the butcher’s bill, directly attributable to the average American. So to take your own words - yes, if you stop eating meat, exactly one pig will not be killed every year. Around one and half, actually.
Believing that animals are just like us s hardly and outlandish belief, on the facts. We’re evolutionarily closely related. We have basically the same skeleton. Skull, spine, rib cage, hips, 4 extremities. Arms and legs go: 1 big bone, 2 smaller bones, and lotsa little bones. It looks to be the same with the brain.
We expect vegans not to blow up slaughterhouses or such. Fair enough. But expecting them to shut up about their beliefs is a bit much, no? Expecting them not to tell people how they feel, not to kiss in public, or hold a pride para… Sorry, wrong prosecuted minority.
I’ve heard these takes about vegans for literal decades now, and not once has an actual vegan popped up to tell me that I’m a murderer.
Okay? The ONLY thing I mentioned was them calling people murderers. Glad you haven’t, but I have had that happen. Another thing I’ve seen that I have issue with is vegans pushing their diets on their carnivorous pets. Like cats. But I have literally no problem with 99% of vegans expressing their beliefs.
Yes, I’m quite aware vegans have a reason to be upset.
their just cause
Like I said. I even think they’re usually in the right. While I’m not a vegan for my own personal reasons, I hope they eventually make a positive change in the world.
