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This is true, but cavemen also regularly murdered other humans, a practice that we rightfully abandoned. "Cavemen did that too" is not enough justification for

• rpmisms 3y ago
  We also frequently kill each other, we've just abstracted/outsourced the process here in the West. Computers also simply abstract or outsource verbally communicating and thinking. Vegans also outsource killing animals to the farmers who mow down billions of small (and large!) animals and insects every year to grow their vegetables. We don't have the control you imagine we do. Edit: here's a source on vegans killing lots of animals https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10806-018-9733-8 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10806-018-9733-8
  • someplaceguy 3y ago
    Yup, as someone (who I don't remember) famously said: "if you want to kill the most animals, be a vegan". Edit: source (45 seconds): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvFixaZdvCg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvFixaZdvCg
    • rpmisms 3y ago
      I've killed the majority of my own meat this past year. That was one cow, two sheep, two deer, and a few dozen rabbits. An acre of soy takes orders of magnitudes more carnage.
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • hombre_fatal 3y ago
    I guess this reasoning could make sense to you if you never consider what animals eat nor how many habitats are destroyed to farm animals and grow cropland for them. For example, 80% of soy is grown to be fed to animals. A diet of plants causes the fewest animals to be killed: https://animalvisuals.org/projects/1mc/ https://animalvisuals.org/projects/1mc/ Of course, I don't think anyone who brings up crop deaths actually cares about animals dying since they never change their diet after being corrected. Their motive is to absolve themselves of moral responsibility, not genuine concern for animal lives.
    • rpmisms 3y ago
      I kill animals to eat. I have zero moral qualms about taking lesser life to feed myself, and my primary goal is the animal's quality of life and painlessness of death. I guarantee you that I kill fewer animals than you.
    • saithound 3y ago
      I think you misunderstand what your opponents argue using the crop deaths example. They're not making some utilitarian moral calculus argument that harvesting and eating plants causes more animal suffering than factory farming: that cannot be true, since farming large scale crop cultivation is a prerequisite of factory farming. No, the argument is popular because if you ask why vegan advocates don't campaign for eliminating agriculture entirely, it puts them in a complete double bind: 1. They can argue that they don't care about the sort of animal suffering that crop death entails, thereby reducing opposition to factory farming into a mere aesthetic preference for them, analogous to the sort of argument that goes "Mongolians shouldn't eat horse meat because it offends American sensibilities", which is rightfully not taken seriously by most people. 2. Or they can bite the bullet, say that they care about all animal suffering, and admit that they will campaign against eating plant matter as well once the lower hanging fruit of factory farming is taken care of. Since all possible ways of human sustinence will involve some animal suffering at some point, this makes it seem like they're eager to ride down on a slippery slope to voluntary human extinction, which is, again, rightfully not taken seriously by most people. Keep in mind that I'm not saying these anti-vegan arguments are right: in fact I think they're not, and I'm not here to argue them. All I'm telling you is that this is how the usual crop death counterarguments come across to many onlookers, with either answer making vegan advocacy seem ridiculous to the general public. E.g. your counterargument here matches type 2: people will wonder, if they go along with the plan and abandon eating animals, will you start advocating against planting crops next? Anti-vegan people will keep bringing the crop death issue up not because they're concerned about animal deaths (indeed, most of them will admit that they're not really concerned, and tell you that you shouldn't be either; at the time of writing, one of the responses to your very post already did this) but because responding to the crop death argument in any of the usual ways predictably makes vegan advocates look ridiculous and hypocritical.
• stouset 3y ago
  Nobody was arguing that “cavemen did it too” is an argument to continue some practice, just saying that it is reasonable to assume that wanting to eat meat is more likely to be the result of evolutionary pressure than brainwashing.
• hulitu 3y ago
  > This is true, but cavemen also regularly murdered other humans, a practice that we rightfully abandoned. CNN would politely want to disagree. /s