About vegans

[The Grand Nudger]

Is there any proof that plants don't have feelings or thoughts?

You might as well ask the same about rocks.  Plants, for the most part, aren't interactive in the ways by which we accept that people or other animals have feelings.

You haven't demonstrated that we do need meat and other animal products.  In fact, the number of healthy vegans out there make it pretty clear that animal products are NOT necessary for human survival.

"We" do.  You may not, I may not, some of us could eat alot less of it, but livestock production is a necessity of human life and will be for as long as people require incomes, nutrition, or non ff based fertility.  Ruminant production is simply the best use of mildly arid or otherwise inarable land.  That's why there are so many cattle out west.  It's difficult to grow beans and greens. I suspect that at least one of those three qualifiers will always be true somewhere.

I like to imagine a future world in which meat becomes a comparative rarity, and the types of meat available drastically shift to animals we can densely stack vertically as well as horizontally without incurring difficult ethical objections.  Meat as a by-product of sustainable agriculture. The economics just don't work at present, and I could bitch to high heaven about that being a product, to some extent, of objectionable practices, poor long term decision making, and unreasonable consumer expectations..but it's important to understand why we raise livestock. I think that it's a great irony that an ethically vegan world would necessarily depend on ethical livestock production. The only alternative is to drill, baby drill...and how much suffering do we think we'll reduce in doing that? Little commented upon fact, human conflict amounts to a local extinction event for wildlife, and human conflict over oil (and human use of oil) has amounted to a global extinction event.

Any thorough discussion of a more ethical food production system has to include a significant reduction of petrochemicals, an allowance for the extermination or exclusion of pest species, and a means of bringing this production model to the poorest of us. Once that context is set as the framework, much of what we take for granted, even as vegans or vegetarians, is no longer valid or even remotely ethical.

(there are animal products in your computer, you certainly needed them to type your response.  )