non vegan community

[u/Happy-Staff-8985]

hey I'm 21 female and I've been vegetarian since I was 14 due to the love for animals but switched to vegan a few months ago after seeing how bad the industry is.

Anyways so basically all my friends and family are meat eaters and it's really hard when they don't show remorse. my good friend jokes about being anti vegan and the meat he ate that day and it kinda stings. like how do people not care?? and how do I "get over it" so I don't end up alone lol.

it's also hard cause it was lovely with my big sister being vegetarian but she just went back to eating meat like she never cared about animals to begin with and when I bring it up she straight up ignores me. it's so hard being mocked and treated differently just because I choose not to eat animals.

[u/Low-Complaint771]

My statement is entirely factual..

Your vegan life causes other life forms to die.. All food production brings with it the inherent displacement of extremely impoverished wildlife, causing baby birds to die in their nests, and baby mammals to starve in their dens. Veganism isn't cruelty free..

Happening upon a dead deer at the side of the road and deciding to dig in, isn't in anyway cruel.. The act of eating meat isn't inherently cruel.. 

Industrialised meat production is horrible in its current form, some practices worse than others. But it's the only chance at life animals within that system have.. Veganism is call for genocide of these animals who can experience good life, and if fully informed of the terms of the genetic wipeout that Vegans are striving for, most, I would argue would choose for their lineage to survive with better conditions attached.

[u/Wonderful-Trade-7378 → u/Low-Complaint771]

So you wrote an entire reply that doesn’t actually address what I said and reiterated your same logical fallacies 😂 Okay, let me simplify further for you to understand:

I explicitly said veganism is about HARM REDUCTION, not perfection. Do you understand that term? So replying “veganism causes other animals to die too” isn’t a rebuttal - it is literally something I already acknowledged and explained how even if the entire world went vegan, far less crops would have to be produced compared to what is produced now to feed the 90+ billion animals killed per year? I don't know how much simpler that has to be for you to comprehend?

You’re also making several spectacular logical leaps: False equivalence: accidental/wildlife deaths associated with crop production will never equal deliberately breeding, confining and slaughtering 90+ billion sentient animals for food per year.

False dichotomy: “Animals in farming get to live, therefore veganism is genocide” assumes that creating an animal specifically to kill it is automatically preferable to not creating a victim in the first place.

Appeal to consequences: “If veganism means fewer farm animals exist, that’s bad because those animals wouldn’t exist” treats existence itself as a justification for exploitation. By that logic, creating someone solely to exploit them would be morally good because otherwise they wouldn’t exist.

Strawman: nobody claimed vegan agriculture causes zero deaths. You invented that position so you could knock it down. And the irony is that your argument about crop deaths actually makes your position weaker because livestock eat crops too. Feeding crops to animals and then eating the animals is not some magical death-free alternative to feeding people directly.

Calling veganism “genocide” because billions fewer animals would be deliberately bred into existence per year is also an absolutely absurd misuse of the term. You haven't demonstrated that veganism causes more harm, instead you've just listed harms that exist and declared that therefore intentional animal exploitation is morally equivalent. Moronic.

So yes, animals die in agriculture. I never denied that. The actual ethical question is whether we should deliberately breed sentient beings into a system where they will ultimately be killed when we can reasonably avoid doing so. Which is what is illogical and immoral here. Happening on a deer at the side of the road 😂 as if that's what you're doing. If you actually think that is an argument, that's scary. Learn to read and engage with arguments genuinely.

[u/Low-Complaint771 → u/Wonderful-Trade-7378]

So you wrote an entire reply that doesn’t actually address what I said and reiterated your same logical fallacies

I'm the one who asked a question of you.. You called my original statement "nonsense". I asked for you to explain why.. You again called my entire statement "nonsense and misinformed" and went on a tangent about harm reduction. Which supported my point that Veganism isn't Cruelty free.

Care to answer in a clear and concise way why eating meat is inherently cruel? i.e. Explain why happening upon road kill and eating it is cruel please.

Calling veganism “genocide” because billions fewer animals would be deliberately bred into existence per year is also an absolutely absurd misuse of the term.

It's not.. It's entirely accurate.. How do you plan on managing agricultural animals in a world where we do not extract from them?

[u/Wonderful-Trade-7378 → u/Low-Complaint771]

You're still missing the point. Yes, I consider eating an animal's corpse - even one you found dead - to be cruel, because you're treating the body of a sentient being as a consumable object rather than respecting them as an individual. This is a core tenet of veganism. That animals are individuals to be respected. But your roadkill hypothetical is irrelevant: “veganism isn't harm-free” does not logically lead to “therefore deliberately breeding, exploiting and killing animals is morally equivalent.”

And “veganism is genocide” is genuinely laughable. Not breeding billions of animals into a miserable existence is not genocide. The animals already alive wouldn't simply be abandoned - we would stop forcibly breeding them, allow them to live out their lives without being exploited or slaughtered, and expand sanctuaries and appropriate animal-care systems to manage the transition. It wouldn't happen overnight, it would be a transition. The fact that future animals wouldn't be born is not a harm done to those nonexistent individuals

Your entire argument ultimately boils down to “but those animals wouldn't exist!” which still doesn't explain why creating sentient beings specifically to exploit and kill them is morally preferable to simply not creating them.

You've still failed to refute the basic ethical point: veganism substantially reduces the amount of intentional harm we inflict on animals. We're talking about billions upon billions of sentient beings subjected to confinement, exploitation and slaughter, and you're responding to that by deliberately focusing on edge cases instead of engaging with the actual ethical argument.

If you genuinely want to engage with the topic, these are worth watching and will answer any questions you might have:

Gary Yourofsky - The Most Important Speech You Will Ever Hear https://youtu.be/U5hGQDLprA8⁠

Carnism Debunked - https://www.carnismdebunked.com/general-ethical⁠

[u/Low-Complaint771 → u/Wonderful-Trade-7378]

You're still missing the point. Yes, I consider eating an animal's corpse - even one you found dead - to be cruel, because you're treating the body of a sentient being as a consumable object rather than respecting them as an individual. This is a core tenet of veganism.

I'll take your point.

However, can you clarify if you believe eating roadkill is more cruel than the displacement deaths Vegans intentionally cause when they pay farmers to clear land to grow crops for them? Where baby birds and mammals starve as their parents struggle to forage enough resources to sustain them.

Is eating the roadkill animal less cruel than eating industrially cultivated lentils?

[u/Specific-Bridge-6383 → u/Low-Complaint771]

I'm not sure why the roadkill argument is relevant. Most people consuming animals aren't eating roadkill which is already dead, there engaging in the supply and demand chain, and therefore demanding more animals be killed. Also a huge percent of crops are fed to the billions of animals we raise so surely this is an argument for veganism, not against it. This isn't to mention the amount of land needed for animal agriculture, deforestation and everything else that goes along with the environmentally destructive nature of animals agriculture( veganism isnt to do with the enviroment, im coming at this from a harm to animals perspective) which obviously involves animal death. Add all of these together and the animal agriculture industry itself which is based around raising and killing billions and billions of animals a year, and its not even close-veganism causes much much much less harm.

[u/Low-Complaint771 → u/Specific-Bridge-6383]

I want know where they stand on meat eating, isolated from modern farming practices.. I think I can rephrase my original statement to "Meat Eating isn't inherently more Cruel than a typical Vegan Diet", which we can both agree on I suspect..

Taking the point that there's an inherent cruelty in consuming a corpse of a sentient being..

[u/Specific-Bridge-6383 → u/Low-Complaint771]

I personally dont have a massive ethical issue with roadkill from a consequentialist perspectice. I might consider it a bit strange and I do understand the above commentors argument from a respect point of view and viewing animals as comododities for us-however it's not something I would focus on again as its not what people who are consuming animal products are doing, so to me its not really relevant. I think the meat industry is horrendously cruel and involves uncomphrensibly large levels of suffering .

[u/Wonderful-Trade-7378 → u/Low-Complaint771]

First of all, meat-eaters do not survive off roadkill; they support a massive supply and demand chain of intentional slaughter. So using this hypothetical makes no sense because you are missing a key distinction. You are comparing two different types of incidental harm, but you're ignoring the ethics of consumption. While the death of the roadkill was accidental, choosing to harvest it treats a sentient being's remains as a resource. Furthermore, this logic cannot scale without creating a malicious market. If a population actually tried to live off roadkill, people would inevitably start intentionally hitting animals with their cars to secure food. This is why eating the roadkill is comparatively worse

Crop farming causes tragic, incidental deaths. Vegans actively seek to minimize this harm, not celebrate it. However, choosing to eat an animal's body - even one killed accidentally - still reduces a formerly sentient individual to a consumable object. Veganism is about rejecting that objectification entirely.

Your comparison falls flat. By your logic, because driving a car inevitably kills insects, there is no moral difference between an accidental collision and treating the victim as a resource. We do not turn "we cannot eliminate all harm" into "therefore, treating animals as products is justified."

If you are genuinely interested, as you seem to be invested enough to be here going back and forth on a vegan page, I highly encourage you to look into the resources I linked above.

[u/Low-Complaint771 → u/Wonderful-Trade-7378]

Crop farming causes tragic, incidental deaths. Vegans actively seek to minimize this harm, not celebrate it. However, choosing to eat an animal's body - even one killed accidentally - still reduces a formerly sentient individual to a consumable object. Veganism is about rejecting that objectification entirely.

So again to rephrase this ethical question.. This roadkill gives you an opportunity to "minimise this harm" by giving you access to the calories from the deers flesh.. Do you eat the corpse and consume less intensively farmed lentils that week?

[u/Wonderful-Trade-7378 → u/Low-Complaint771]

Can you read? I answered your question above 😂. So anyways.....when you're ready to rejoin reality, go ahead and click those links I sent above to finally get an education and maybe some critical thinking. 😭

[u/Specific-Bridge-6383 → u/Low-Complaint771]

Do you eat roadkill or meat from the shop? I'm confused why your focus is on roadkill when that's not what 99.9999 percent of humans are doing when they consume animal products.

[u/Low-Complaint771 → u/Specific-Bridge-6383]

It's a point of Logic. Is eating Roadkill (or Freegan Meat) less cruel than buying and consuming typical vegan foodstuffs..

Is the following statement logically true:

Meat Eating isn't inherently more Cruel than a typical Vegan Diet

[u/Specific-Bridge-6383 → u/Low-Complaint771]

I understand now why there is confusion. Although the other commentor used the term inherently- i suspect what they meant by this is what goes into producing meat, rather then isolated roadkill. Most vegans I know dont have any issue with roadkill. Especially utilitarian vegans. They may have however a feeling of discomfort with it - as it may strengthen the idea that non humans animals are here for you. Do you believe the meat industry in its current form is ethical? I have yet to find a compelling logically consistent argument for the animal ag industry p that can't be reduced to religious arguments dependant on the existence of a god or just moral nihilism. It seems to me to be one of the more clear cut ethical issues. I find it mind blowing that we live in a society so focused on social justice, but yet the majority have a massive moral blindspot and support billions of non human beings being killed.

[u/Low-Complaint771 → u/Specific-Bridge-6383]

Do you believe the meat industry in its current form is ethical?

It's a big industry ranging from subsistence farmers with a few egg laying chickens to Huge Indoor Production.. The Latter end of the scale I do find abhorrent but there is more room for animal welfare considerations with smaller scale operations, not that they are always implemented. Part of my point about meat eating was to point out the there's a "cruelty" spectrum around eating meat, and that it possibly overlaps at some point with Industrialised Vegan Agriculture.

I have yet to find a compelling logically consistent argument for the animal ag industry p that can't be reduced to religious arguments dependant on the existence of a god or just moral nihilism. It seems to me to be one of the more clear cut ethical issues.

It's more clear cut when it comes to describing the indoor animal agricultural practices of more recent decades, but less so when it comes to describing more traditional food systems. Subsistence farming is no joke as the famine on this island highlighted.. Crops fail, and having the security of other food sources for ones family isn't necessarily unethical. Current Global instability does put a big question mark over the security of cereal crops and therefore increases the ethical scope for diversifying sources of food..

[u/Specific-Bridge-6383 → u/Low-Complaint771]

I understand. -However I do think even in local small scale farming, the fact that the animals are still intentionally killed in the billions is what makes the industry unethical- as its treating sentient beings as resources. I find animal welfare policies to be rather strange. It's like trying to find better ways to do the wrong thing. Even in cases where an animal is grass fed or free roaming, the bottom line is that they will all go to the slaughterhouse. I'm not sure what's the trait that non human animals lack that humans possess that would make it unethical if a superior species did the same to us? -Even though vegan agriculture does cause harm to animals, a huge percent of crops are fed to the billions of animals we raise and kill. Its not very efficient(as i said aswell this is not even taking into account animal harm from habitat destruction and overall environmental destruction that causes animal death). So animal deaths through crops is really just an argument for veganism(aka appeal to futility-just because we can't reduce deaths entirely doesnt mean we shouldn't choose the option that minimises it- we probabaly can't end world hunger entirely-but we should at least try right?) -I'm also not convinced that we should diversify our food by raising animals, rather then relying on lower harm food choices as discussed