CurrentB

I do live in a big city, and I've found the eating part to be a non issue after like a one month learning curve. I now miss absolutely nothing, and am healthier and spend less on food. The hard part is dealing with social situations, but it's not that bad.

I also had this sudden realization a year ago about the cruelty of animal usage in society and went vegan and my only regret is that I didn't do it sooner.

One other angle is there are the beginnings of consideration of cruelty to AI's. That's great that people are starting to consider it, to try to be compassionate out of the abundance of caution that it might matter.

But to then just straight up pay to have tens to hundreds of obviously sentient animal killed for you per year (and yes egg laying hens and dairy cows are killed in their youth, when they don't want to die) seems like a blind spot a lot of people have. I had it myself until recently, so I don't cast any judgment, but I also wish it was easier to make people just see the truth on this

I live here and I'd be thrilled if it loses this particular dumb cruel tradition.

Even if you think this is true generally of horses and humans, I can't understand feeling that it remains true regardless of setting and conditions for the horse? Like, they're overworked, never ever leave cement and heavy traffic and loud city noises and small confined spaces.

An era of seeing tourists do tourist things, and smelling horse shit in central Park?

Now I'm curious. Why can't the same land be used to grow a soy bean for human consumption vs animal consumption? I would naively assume that at worst some land might yield top quality crops but that it would at least be usable as an ingredient or something?

> Why is okay to kill a tree to build a home, kill a plant to eat, but not okay to kill an animal to eat? > Does the biological complexity of the organism make it more or less okay to kill it?

The ability to suffer is the distinguishing/relevant factor. We all know what suffering feels like and we know that animals have the capacity to suffer. We don't really know that trees do. I want to reduce the suffering I am responsible for.

> Is it okay to kill a cockroach or a rat in your home?

I probably would get rid of infestations in my home and feel bad about it.

It's not about having a 100% perfect record with not killing animals. It's about striving to minimize animal suffering as much as practicable. You're never going to reduce this to 0 animals. But you can get to 95% better than the average human pretty easily if you want.

With what exactly?

Do you want your kids to have colon cancer or heart disease because there is pretty strong evidence to suggest red meat contributes to these. And there's much stronger evidence for that than there is that suggests that vegetarian kids will be shorter and physically weaker (in fact I don't think there is much good evidence at all suggesting that).

Do you also have a problem with red meat?

Do you think it widely leads to behavior changes among people that support environmental causes?

Presumably you only would acquire female chickens to lay eggs. What happened to the male ones? (I don't recommend googling this).

What do you do with the cow when its milk yield drops after several pregnancies? what do you do with the male calves? Just keep them all as pets?

I think there are situations I could contrive where I'd say yeah its fine ethically to eat these things, but the general case still has victims.

And again, since maybe the first week without them, I truly haven't missed milk or eggs or anything else after eliminating them from my diet. Plant options are pretty good too and there are plenty of plants.

Personally that would be even worse for me, though I understand maybe "better" on a societal scale by some metrics. To feed a being every day and care for it, to gain its trust, to appreciate their individuality, then to have them killed when they reach some fraction of its potential lifespan, I just don't want to do that. I'm perfectly happy eating legumes.

I went vegan six months ago after being exposed to numbers like this and thinking about it a bit. In particular, imagining extending the empathy I felt for my pets to all these other unseen animals that really aren't much different. I thought I'd try it for a week to see how hard it was. It was so easy that I never looked back. These numbers all could be pretty close to zero and we humans would still thrive just as much as we are now, but causing much less suffering to other beings.