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