About vegans

[bennyboy]

For me, the sentience of the animal is a big deal. Cows are basically big dogs. If I dont need to eat mammal meat I won't.

I was never a huge fan of lobster. Too expensive. Too much work, honestly. Ever order a whole lobster? I feel like I was on a demolition project.

Keeping in mind that I'm vegetarian, with leanings toward veganism, there's one thing to consider in regard to this argument: where do vegetable foodstuffs come from, and where does cattle feed come from?

I'm quite sure that big farms use huge machinery that will mulch the ground and almost anything in it-- ground-nesting birds, voles and mice, snakes, and so on. And then you introduce the idea of pesticides. So it seems to me that even eating vegetables involves the likely suffering and deaths of many animals.

The best case scenario would be hand-grown organic crops, though even then I'm not sure that tilling your land once a year wouldn't harm ground animals. So I change my mind-- the best scenario would be industrial food factories using algae grown in hydroponic solutions designed for optimum nutrition-- textured to feel enough like food to be palatable. In fact, I think this is really the only way to really protect animals from harm while still providing sufficient nutrition. Or you could grow plants in an artificial environment-- big 50-floor food factories sufficiently sealed to prevent even mice from getting in there and being inadvertently harmed (good luck with that).

Given these two options are impossible (and they are right now, if you intend to feed an entire population), then I'd say free-grazing animals like deer are likely to reduce suffering. If you kill a very large deer or elk, your family will eat for quite a long time. Because you are not feeding it grain (which would involve killing the same voles and so on as if you ate the grain yourself), then the mortal cost of the meat is relatively small.

The other side of things would be to decide that animals under a certain level of sentience don't matter. Then, we live on clams, maybe cockroaches, stuff like that.