Comment by iiGxC@slrpnk.net on Meat?

The difference between veganism and religion is that one is based on facts, the other is not.

It’s true that other species of animals are sentient, they have nervous systems similar enough to ours that we know they can feel pleasure and pain.
It’s true that we kill billions of them per year.
It’s true that the vast majority of them are factory farmed (74% worldwide, 99% in the US).
It’s true that humans at all stages of life can thrive on a properly planned vegan diet, according to most major health organizations.
It’s true that animal agriculture is extremely inefficient and loses a lot of calories from crops being put towards feeding animals (see: trophic levels)
It’s true that animal agriculture has a huge impact on the environment compared to feeding crops directly to humans.

so get out of here with that nonsense that veganism is religious zealotry. I don’t have time to cite a source for each point, but they’re all super easily verified. Veganism is looking at the impact of your choices with clear eyes and choosing compassion over personal pleasure. It’s choosing to live and let live, rather than forcing death and misery on other species because you like the taste of their flesh and secretions.

You are focusing on the word religious, but it’s the zealot that’s important here. Of course you lot are zealots. It doesn’t matter what argument is made against veganism, you will defend it - vehemently.

OK, maybe not all of you are radical to the point of, I dunno, bombing meat processing plants, but online, you make a up very vocal group of people. Enough that there are memes about y’all. It’s like linux folk, or the people over on lemmygrad, the anti-woke crowd, the feminists, and other vocal groups.

You get it :)

I ain’t mad at what people do with their own lives, but vegans are so easy to troll with this because it’s true.

I’m not vegan, but what are the counter arguments? It tastes good? It’s convenient?

Humans are omnivores, and have been for the lifespan of our species

There are a number of important nutrients that humans get from animal products that are difficult to get from plant-based sources, including vitamin B12, which is not present in land-based plant species (I’m not sure whether red algae counts as a plant, so I’m playing it safe with land-based)

That being said, a lot of people (myself included) eat far more animal products, particularly meat, than needed

There are a number of factors at play there, including government subsidies for feed crops and meat production artificially driving up its availability

From the research I’ve done, I think the most responsible diet would be a mostly plant-based one, but with the addition of chicken eggs from a responsible source, along with a basic mineral supplement for calcium/iron

This is one argument @darganon. We need nutrients from a variety of things. We can live without some of them but that can come at the cost of health later in life e.g Vegetarian women more likely to fracture hips in later life.

Furthermore:

animal-source foods (ASFs) are dense in bioavailable vitamins and minerals. ASFs are the only intrinsic food source of vitamin B12 [7] and contain more bioavailable forms of vitamins A and D, iron, and zinc than plant source foods (PSFs)

Source

Then there’s land-use:

• 86% of the global livestock feed intake in dry matter consists of feed materials that are not currently edible for humans

• Contrary to commonly cited figures, 1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2 for monogastrics

• Livestock consume one third of global cereal production and uses about 40% of global arable land

Source

It wouldn’t surprise me if we evolved to have balanced diet from multiple sources because they have the nutrients we require. We most likely don’t need all the meat we’re eating and we do a terrible job in developed countries with reducing waste. But just like a purely meat based diet, a purely plant based diet is just one of the extremes. To each their own though.

Eh, the real counter argument isn’t about their beliefs. That’s fine. Most of it is sound logic.

The problem is their insistence on not only being right, but being better.

The part that makes it silly is the assumptions that chain from there being a right and wrong about what we do with dead animals. It’s a corpse. What matters is how we treat the living animals, and they are utterly convinced that not only is their way the one true way, but that anyone who believes otherwise is a bad person. I’ve been using this troll for something like a decade, and it never, ever fails to draw someone throwing around terms like evil, heartless, cruel, psychopath, etc.

That’s the thing to counter argue, not any of the ecological stuff, or the need to treat living things well.

That assumption of moral authority is the point of the troll.

Why do you need a counter argument? X being valid/true has no impact on whether Y is valid/true. Attack an argument on the merits of the argument, not on the lack of merits of an alternative.

That said, the main argument in favor of eating meat is that humans evolved to eat meat, so our bodies need nutrients that are easier to find in meat (e.g. certain types of protein). However, meat was a much smaller portion of our diets in the past than it is today, so this argument is actually in favor of eating less meat, but still including meat in your diet.

The concepts of veganism aren’t really at odds with meat consumption. In many (most?) cases, vegans care most about the ethical treatment of animals (as opposed to vegetarians, who are more often motivated by nutrition), and our current meat processing industry is a lot less ethical than it was hundreds or thousands of years ago when most meat was either free range or wild. So I think it’s totally reasonable to take a middle ground and defend meat consumption on nutritional grounds while also defending veganism on ethical grounds.

I’m zealously against rape, zealously against slavery, why should people not be zealously against what they consider industrial mass murder of innocent lives? Zealousness isn’t bad in and of itself

“what they consider” being the important part here. People are zealously against what they consider the dilution of the “white gene pool”. Does that make them right? People are zealously against what they consider robbery by the state of their hard earned money. Should we condone it because they are zealous?

Yes, zealousness isn’t bad in and of itself, nothing is. Everything is a matter of perspective. Maybe murder of humans could be considered a valiant, virtuous, and veritably honorable thing to do if one thought it could fend of the mass extinction event we are in. Rape could be justified by rapists as a necessary action to spread their seed.

Vegans aren’t the only people with justifications for what they do and what they consider right.

And you start from a base assumption that any of that matters in terms of food.

It’s like a retronym, picking facts to claim as a basis for a belief that’s rooted in a moral code.

No, veganism as a conclusion is a combination of facts and basic moral understanding, principles like “live and let live”, “do no harm”, and the golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do to you. If you’re a psychopath who doesn’t care how much harm, death, and suffering is caused in order to get sensory pleasure, I probably can’t convince you why veganism is worthwhile

Lmmfao.

There it goes. Straight to “oh, we’re super moral, and you’re evil/crazy if you don’t agree”

And you’re not a zealot talking like that. Okay champ, you are good boy, sure, you go.

do you disagree with all the ethical principles I mentioned, or the facts I listed? Or do you think that the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises?

Somehow, you think this is a debate. It isn’t. It’s me fucking around because vegans are zealots that call people that don’t agree with them psychopaths (which isn’t really a useful term now, the dsm classifies things differently, but I’m okay with the colloquial usage here, no worries).

What I do disagree with is the assumption that a cobbled together set of beliefs makes someone better than another, which is exactly what someone is showing when they start throwing around terms like psychopath willy nilly like that.

Seriously, dude, you already proved my point. It was inevitable that someone would, or just happened to be you. I’ve had my laugh, you’ve had your moment of feeling superior, so I think we both had a good time :)

I don’t think people who disagree with me are psychopaths. I think that given enough time and discussion I could convince most people that based on their own principles, veganism is the right thing to do. On the other hand, people who don’t give a fuck about how they affect others, would not be sympathetic to any line of reasoning I could think of. That’s all I was trying to say there

It’s true that humans at all stages of life can thrive on a properly planned vegan diet, according to most major health organizations.

Wait, including newborns? I mean, I doubt there’s a vegan alive who’s against breastfeeding, but for people who can’t breastfeed, baby formula isn’t vegan, is it?

Not trying to rag on the point you’re making btw

I think there is vegan formula, and using breastmilk is vegan since it’s consensually given, including breastmilk shared by other mothers

using breastmilk is vegan since it’s consensually given

the definition of veganism says nothing about consent, only exploitation. breastmilk is as vegan an cows milk.

Maybe your point would stand if humans had been bred to massively over-produce milk and had their babies taken from them so even more milk could be taken from them for profit and they had no agency in how their life went, from being bred in captivity and then impregnated in order to cause them to produce more milk to being killed when they stop producing milk.

This is a stupid take, even for you

humans are animals
veganism eschews exploiting animals
drinking a product from a human is exploitation

therefore

breast milk is not vegan

#3 is wrong (under normal circumstances, assuming the fluid was voluntarily given), and so obviously so that I’m going to assume you’re trolling and stop responding. Have a good one ✌️

You’re not being exploited if you consent. Cows can’t consent, mothers can. That’s the argument.

If we could somehow communicate w/ cows and get their consent, then cows milk could be vegan.

You’re not being exploited if you consent.

i think this is a tenet of so-called “anarcho” capitalism.

You’re not being exploited if you consent.

the definition of exploitation makes no mention of consent, and no clarification about consent is made in the vegan society definition.

It’s strongly implied in the negative sense. If we want to play the definition game, here’s Merriam Webster’s definition:

exploit (verb)
1: to make productive use of : utilize
exploiting your talents
exploit your opponent’s weakness
2: to make use of meanly or unfairly for one’s own advantage
exploiting migrant farm workers

Definition 2 is what I’m referring to. A baby consuming is certainly using milk for its own advantage, but the mother also benefits from the exchange. The mother cares about the health and comfort of the baby, and providing her milk can certainly be something she wants to do. Your argument only makes sense if you think children “unfairly” use the parents’ labor for their own gain as well (they consume far more than they contribute to family finances), vs parents willingly giving food and gifts to their children because they want to see them be happy and healthy.

The point here is “meanly or unfairly,” and a mother willingly giving her milk to her baby goes exactly counter to that.

Now, if the baby snuck into the mother’s bed and suckled without any consent or if the husband refused to purchase alternatives and essentially forced the mother to provide milk, I could see your point. But if the mother is choosing to give it, I honestly don’t see how that has anything to do with exploitation, at least in the negative sense. In the positive sense, humans absolutely exploit animals (e.g. vegans eat fruit and veggies pollinated by bees; humans are “exploiting” the bees, but the bees are also “exploiting” the flowers for pollen and nectar).

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