Would you be ok if someone were to kick a stray dog on the street?

A racist person chooses to be racist, as does someone who abuses people. At what point does free will end and the morally justifiable rule in a society begin?

Your choice should not take priority over the life of another living creature who did not choose to die to become your food. Let us respect the free will of 70 billion land animals and 2+ trillion marine life that want to live each year.

Just because something is legal does not mean it is morally right. Female genital mutilation is legal in some countries but does not mean it is right. One person’s free will to smoke cigarettes impedes with another’s free will to not inhale second-hand smoke.

It is true that the production and harvesting of crops does cause the death of animals like aphids, caterpillars, moths, worms, flies, locusts – and even birds, mice and rats.

The goal is to reduce harm. And about intentions. There is a difference between deliberately raising an animal to kill them vs. an accidental by-product of modern, mechanized harvesting. That’s like if a firefighter goes into a burning building and realizes he cannot save everyone so he does not try save anyone. Or the idea that if you are driving and you accidentally run over a dog vs deliberately trampling over it. [Earthling Ed]

Even so, more animals are killed due to animal agriculture because a farmed animal eats more plants throughout its lifetime and thus causes more secondary farm creatures to die. [MicTheVegan]

This sounds like a cognitive bias, moral licensing. If an action is not good, does it make a difference who does it and what other good deeds they might do otherwise?

Examples in society include the defense of sexual predators in the Catholic Church on the basis that they have contributed to the community.

One good deed does not really absolve a bad one. Although perfection is never achievable, we all can strive to do more good. Every meal is a choice to be a little bit better.

This fallacy is often manifested in statements like, “My parents, grandparents, and ancestors killed and ate animals so it’s okay for me to do so too.”

The reality is that your predecessors also did a lot of horrible and widely unaccepted stuff that would never hold up as a justification today. “It’s okay that I killed Bob because my grandpa was also a murderer.” People have also owned slaves, and committed crimes against humanity. [MicTheVegan]

The past is not an excuse to continue to do wrong in the present. Hurting animals today is especially no longer necessary to survive and thrive.

You are not helping predators or prey by hunting. Letting apex predators do the hunting by rewiliding, or reintroducing apex predators into the wild is better for the entire food chain, rivers, and ecology (TED). Apex predators pick the weak animals, whereas hunters pick the biggest animals for food or trophy, which goes against natural selection, and creates a transgression in that species. (For ex. There are fewer Asian tusked elephants being born because the tusked ones get hunted.) But apex predators are often decimated from the wild because livestock farmers don’t like them.

When predators hunt in the wild, the prey is eaten by scavengers, insects, bacteria, and goes back in the soil. Taking it out of the jungle breaks the cycle.

Hunting licenses paid for only 3% of the land for the National Wildlife Refuges. More could be earned by educational activities.

If you hunt to avoid this animal from dying a painful death from a predator, then you should hunt all animals because that’s true for everything in the wild – from grasshoppers to crows – and not hunt just the popular deer and lion. And then not take smiling photos next to them. (Earthling Ed)

Plants do not have a central nervous system, nor any pain receptors like animals do. They are incapable to feel pain.

Some plants react to stimuli, like caterpillars eating leaves triggers a release of more mustard oil which is toxic to caterpillars, or the mimosa pudica’s leaves close upon touch. However, this does not indicate “pain” and suffering. They are simply responding to their environment. Similar to how human skin creates more melanin (a tan) upon getting exposed to UV sunlight does not mean our skin is suffering in pain. (Micthevegan)

It takes a lot more plants to create meat. For ex. 30kg of forage needed for 1 kg of beef. [American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.]

Most bottled honey and any honey inside a product is from honey farms where the bees are manipulated and smoked to be docile workers. The queen bee’s wings are often clipped so she cannot fly anywhere. Because they are bred in massive scales, there is also a massive dying at the end of every season which we are funding by purchasing honey. It’s similar to the idea of milk or eggs or wool – though a byproduct, it still perpetuates an unjust system.

As for wild honey, the entire honey process is gross since the nectar is stored inside a bee’s tummy and then regurgitated back into the honey combs. Honey is bee vomit.

Bees gather honey for their own families and colony, not for humans. A bee can visit up to 10,000 flowers to make 1 teaspoon of honey. That’s like me going to a very far away grocery store to buy one week worth of food and then the next morning I see it’s all suddenly gone.

See video to better understand the negative impacts of the honey industry on bees and the environment

There are still all the health risks of eating eggs.

If the chickens were originally purchased from a farmer or breeder, you are still contributing to the problem with commercial egg production.

Chickens today have been selectively bred to be the most efficient for factory farming, producing up to 300 eggs a year rather than the 10 – 20 eggs that would be laid by the wild red jungle fowl, the ancestor from which modern hens have been engineered. Producing so many eggs leads to many problems for the hens like calcium depletion leading to fractures, egg binding (eggs getting physically stuck in their bodies), egg yolk peritonitis (yolk getting stuck in their bodies), and prolapses. Taking their eggs away also prevents them from their natural instinct of brooding over their eggs.

There is still a power imbalance. The hens are there to serve a purpose of providing a product. Unlike a dog or cat who are kept for the joy of their company, backyard hens are often killed once they stop producing eggs. If owners loved the hens, they could give hormone shots to reduce the speed at which they produce eggs to reduce the toll it takes on their bodies.

The reality is the world is not going to become vegan overnight. It will be a gradual process, and the slower demand will slowly adjust meat supplies.

There is nothing natural about the current animals in factory farms. They have been selectively bred and frankensteined to be the most efficient for factory farming and not to their own life’s wellbeing. Dairy cows have been modified to produce up to ten times more milk than they would naturally for its calf. Egg-laying hens have been bred to produce up to 300 eggs a year rather than the 10 – 20 they would produce naturally in the forest. Sheep have been modified to produce more wool than they would need in the wild and often give birth to more lambs than they would naturally. All modern turkeys were genetically bred to gain weight quickly and be stupid so that they are more manageable; so unnatural is the modern factory turkey that it cannot even have sex with each other — they are all artificially inseminated (Eating Animals).

These animals could be released into the wild to adjust on their own, or the last few species could be kept in animal sanctuaries from all the land freed up by no more factory farms.

If the welfare of species is your concern, then you should know factory farming is the biggest reason for species extinction as forests get cleared to produce cheap feed for livestock. (Earthling Ed)

Even if a farmers wants to give all its cows the best life possible, it is not possible. Biology and math do not support the idea of a cruelty free, perfect farm.

The average age of a cow is 20 years. If a farmer has 50 cows and grazes them on open fields, in 20 years he will have 3,000 cows to feed on the same plot of field. 50% of these will be born as bulls who do not produce milk and are useless to the farmer. This is impossible to sustain financially and the land will run out of free space. Very soon, the bulls will have to be slaughtered and the cows that produce less milk due to age will have to be sent away for slaughter as well if the farm is to remain profitable and not go bankrupt.

Supporting the dairy industry is indirectly supporting the beef, veal, and leather industry. See video for more.

All dairy farms need to have slaughter in order to stay profitable

The basis of ethical vegetarianism is to not hurt animals. But all dairy cows and egg laying hens are killed in slaughterhouses the same way. In fact, their suffering is even longer than cattle or chicken raised for meat because they live longer lives on factory farms. Please see video for more [explicit reality warning].

You can do both. Being vegan is a passive action, it requires very little active effort on your part.

For someone who cares about political campaign finance reform, you could say what about focusing on the war in the Middle East instead? This can go in circles. All causes are important, and doing one does not devalue the other.

We produce enough food to feed 12 billion people but 800 million still go hungry. Being vegan will allow us to use that food to not feed livestock and instead directly the humans who need it. You will also help reduce the displacement of tribes due to growing need for livestock feed farming in places like the Amazon. (Earthling Ed)

No religion says you should eat animals. Some religions say it is ok if you need to, but not that you have to.

Perhaps in those times people may have needed to eat animal products because there were limited choices in that geography. But we have progressed so much as a society. We use cars instead of walking, we can fly, we perform life saving transplant operations and more things that might have been considered strange when the scriptures were written.

The most important thing to remember is the essence of a teaching. A kind, merciful god would never want you to torture another living creature, drive extinction, and destroy the planet when you absolutely do not have to.