this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2024
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Vegans: .. uh.. now what?
Vegans consume fewer plants than anyone else. It takes a LOT of plants to raise a cow, pig, or chicken. From an economic point of view, meat is a way of refining mountains of cheap, plentiful, safe plant products into a scarce, harmful and addictive luxury product. This comes up a lot, you'd be amazed how many plants rights activists your average vegan runs into.
Wouldn't you need to decimate the population of cows, pigs, and chickens in order to reduce their environmental impact? This argument always invokes an image of Thanos wiping out half the universe in order to 'save' it, but the people making this argument never seem to be receptive to acknowledging this point and just hand wave this step away.
The population of livestock is artificially high because of meat industries. Additionally, all animals in a meat producing farm will be killed already. That's the entire purpose. Simply slowing the reproductive rate of the industry would reduce the populations on a fairly short timeline. I'm a meat eater myself, but using the killing of animals as an argument AGAINST slowing meat production is not very logical.