this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2024
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Vegans: .. uh.. now what?
Vegans consume fewer plants than anyone else. It takes a LOT of plants to raise a cow, pig, or chicken. From an economic point of view, meat is a way of refining mountains of cheap, plentiful, safe plant products into a scarce, harmful and addictive luxury product. This comes up a lot, you'd be amazed how many plants rights activists your average vegan runs into.
Wouldn't you need to decimate the population of cows, pigs, and chickens in order to reduce their environmental impact? This argument always invokes an image of Thanos wiping out half the universe in order to 'save' it, but the people making this argument never seem to be receptive to acknowledging this point and just hand wave this step away.
Which would you prefer? A thousand people living freely or a hundred thousand people living in cages too small to stand up in?
Get outta here with pretending that big number = better. Those animals are raised in horrifying conditions explictly to be slaughtered. They wouldn't exist in the first place except for the cruelty and greed of the meat industry. We routinely acknowledge that there are 'fates worse than death' for people, but when it comes to animals people seem to forget that. With the ending of the meat industry, fewer animals would exist, but they would be much better cared for.
Ending the meat industry would result in the extinction of breeds we have engineered for meat and milk production.
Ending factory farming would significantly reduce numbers and increase quality of life for the animals.