Since purchasing and consuming animal products both depends on and contributes to animal agriculture, and animal farming necessitates rights violations against nonhuman animals, not being vegan when you have the option is synonymous with support for injustice. I believe that as leftists who purport ourselves to strive towards a more just society, and as human beings who generally value nonviolence and compassion, we should hold ourselves to a standard that doesn’t allow for the perpetuation of mass-slaughter. Let’s discourse!
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Why not just go for the more simple it’s better for the environment stance. At least in most cases. Some things need to be hunted to control populations and we should of course eat their meat instead of letting it go to waste. But in general eating meat from an animal you didn’t hunt or wasn’t hunted by someone else is bad for the environment compared to a vegetarian or vegan diet.
Hunting still purposefully kills individuals who don’t want to die. “Population control” wouldn’t be necessary if hunting organisations didn’t purposefully increase populations in order to have more to hunt. And eating their flesh is necessary in what way? Why not leave it to the wild animals then?
Not necessarily true. In Great Britain there is a huge overpopulation of deer because all their natural predators were hunted to extinction in the 1500s. And so deer population must be controlled by humans to protect forests as the deer come and eat the bark off of trees and the fauna wiping out biodiversity in forests. You couldn’t really leave the bodies for wild animals because it’s generally pretty polluting since most wild animals that eat meat generally don’t want to scavenge for food as it is much riskier to eat something that is decaying.
You could try and reintroduce the predators that were hunted instead of hunting more. And that doesn’t address the point of killing innocents for what, the environment? If environmental damage is a reason to kill someone wouldn’t humans be top of the list?
They do try and reintroduce predators like wolves into Great Britain, but there are 2 million deer in the UK and it’s not really viable to introduce enough wolves to combat that amount of deer in any kind of short time frame. As well as this, some of the most common deer species in the UK are non native so they shouldn’t be there anyway.
And your second argument is true but rather extreme since we should in general value human life over the life of other animals.
So you’re saying that we shouldn’t kill individuals based on how much they destroy the environment actually. Not being native doesn’t warrant execution and neither does being numerous. Some places have programs for neutering certain problematic species and while I would be careful about condoning those programs it certainly beat being shot and bleeding to death.
Being shot by an experienced hunter should lead to an almost instant death. And it’s not like everyone would go out and hunt animals just so they can eat meat. You are hunting the animals to try and control population with a byproduct of meat that can be consumed.
I’m saying we shouldn’t population control humans in the name of environmental protection, because ultimately, the average human life is more valuable than the average deer life. I support going vegan, but we still need to clean up the mess we made in the past with population control, and our only feasible way to do this in most cases is by hunting, and if we have to kill an animal to protect the local environment, why wouldn’t we want the deer to be hunted by experienced and well trained hunters who can make the death of the animal almost instant, and why should we let their body go to waste if we have to kill them anyway.
You don’t have to kill them to protect the environment and what you say about hunters as efficient and precise killers is incongruent with existing statistics. “I support going vegan” - are you vegan then? Clinging to a violent status quo while refusing to even so much as acknowledge the moral worth of its victims, because you feel as though they are so beneath you that you can take their lives and their bodies at will, is not something I would expect from a leftist, or even a decent person to begin with. Bad take.
I went vegan because the psychological impact on workers are among the worst in any industry. Communities with slaughterhouses have higher rates of suicide, addiction, overdose, domestic violence, homicide, rape, you name it. Working in industrial slaughter is literally inhuman, because we naturally feel empathy for animals. The way they struggle and scream and bleed is disturbing to all but the most psychopathic individuals, and we force the most desperate people to do it for shit wages. People who work in this industry end up with PTSD for fucks sake!
If you’ve ever been forced to slaughter a helpless animal by hand, you know what I mean. We can not expect other workers to do this dirty work for us, not when there are easy and cheap alternatives.
Consumer activism isn’t revolutionary, but cultivating an empathetic mindset definitely is.
