Isn’t veganism essentially a religious belief? Even if not, it is equally illogical.
No. It seems like you don’t know what veganism is. It’s a philosophical stance and therefore completely different to any religion. It’s based n logical arguments. If you don’t like the suffering of animals and when they’re harmed without any necessity, it’s very likely that your core moral beliefs are the same as of any vegan.
It is logical. That’s why nobody can argue with the logic of the core arguments.
I’m curious. how is it illogical for you?
It is completly illogical and it tries to impose unnatural limitations - you know, like religions do.
My question was how it’s illogical to you and your answer is “it’s completely illogical”?
Like, how hard is it to write down a simple sentence in which you explain why it’s illogical!?
I can do you a favour and already unfold it: The vegan argument is that unnecessary harm towards animals should be avoided when it’s “possible and practical”, like when you live in a modern society, you don’t need to buy leather clothes or eat meat, there is no necessity to do so because of the incredible amount of alternatives, where no animal needs to be killed nor harmed.
To say thats illogical therefore means that you see no logic in avoiding unnecessary harm towards animals. So please, just start your response like this:
“I don’t see how it’s logical that we should avoid unnecessary harm towards animals, because…”
I’m not a vegan - but we are omnivores, we can eat plants. There is nothing unnatural about it. Let alone if you compare it to our modern ‘normal’ food, which is chock full of extra sugar, extra fat, extra protein, extra artificial additives like preservatives, sweeteners, and what not. It’s also factual that you can get more energy out of directly consuming plant material than eating an animal that consumed said plant material. If you take the biggest offenders for that, cows. You need 8 kg of feed for them to produce a kg of meat, this is known as it’s feed conversion ratio (source). Other animals (Like chicken and fish) are better, but a ration below 1 is essentially impossible.
I like the taste of meat as much as the next (average) person, but vegans do have a factual basis for their stance. But non-vegans rebuttal to that is realistically just “I don’t want to give up meat because I like it” not “the facts aren’t on your side.” - Lets be honest about that.
Although I entirely agree with the spirit of your point I’d like to add a long-winded side-note (essentially “and also”, not “but”). I guess when treated as a “title” Veganism is an inherently philosophical stance, but many conflate “Veganism” with “Having A Strictly Vegan Diet/Lifestyle” so my comment is for those people. Some who identify with the latter of the two (like myself) may be as such - or at least have become as such - for various other “logical reasons”. In the early-90s I inadvertantly became “mostly vegetarian, sometimes pescaterian” due to living with a vegetarian girlfriend. Working in an extremely physically strenuous career, and also coming from a childhood littered with various unexplainable health “issues”, I noticed (with hindsight) huge and surprising physiological benefits from that change. Due to that, and reading about how fundamental human classifying parameters are at the very herbivorous end of the spectrum (nails not claws, very long intestines, low-acidity digestive system which struggles to break down harder animal cell-walls in food, sweating through skin not tongue, mostly non-canine teeth, not having predatory close-set eyes, etc), I proceeded within a year to full vegetarianism - this time consciously. It took years to overcome the n00b mistakes (lack of nutritional knowledge, cooking skills, motivation) that usually eventually turn people back off vegetarianism, and at that point as some of the “fog of war” cleared I noticed a few lingering “issues” from my youth. I had researched food intolerances so did a test to find I was moderately intolerant to 3 types of meat and a few other odd things, and more importantly strongly intolerant to milk (and milk products). The followup consultant told me such a strong reaction indicates all animal-milk would be problematic, not just cow’s. That prompted going vegan in about 2013, with such a dramatic further health-improvement I had to tell myself not to obsess with “if only I’d known this 30 years ago”. Even though I have since become increasingly “philosophically vegan” through a kind of mental osmosis, the point I want to make here is that was really post-hoc, as a side-effect. My original drivers were “purely by accident, then conscious but for functional reasons”. These days - nearly 30 years after going vegetarian and more than 10 years after going vegan - I just do some resistance/weight-training each morning yet I’m far more healthy and “built” than I ever was throughout an effectively “acrobatic” career (even when training for that career 45hrs/week and eating half-kilo mincemeat-based meals as a teenager), even though I ended that career years ago. Those are also very “logical reasons” in addition to the usual “logical ethical vegan reasons regarding treatment of animals”, as also are the “logical ecological reasons” too (particularly the extreme amount of deforestation that is done to create grazing land for livestock).
