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Over the years I have been in, or witnessed, arguments from carnivores and others who are trying to discredit the vegan diet. This is a collection of some of the assertions and arguments that have been thrown at, or witnessed by, me.
I do not intend this to be a general purpose FAQ, there are plenty of those out there. This is just a resource for vegans who find themselves being attacked for being vegan.
I see this red herring from time to time. Reductio ad absurdum works in both directions:
So, a line has to be drawn between what is ethical to eat and what is not. I draw the line at kingdom animalia. Animals have central nervous systems, and are conscious and able to feel pain. Plants are not.
Also, if you're so concerned about plants, then you should definitely not eat animal flesh, since that animal killed far more plants before you ate it than you ever would have.
When I first became vegan It was difficult to be around pizza; I desperately craved cheese (I even sinned a few times in the first month or so). However, after being away from it, I no longer have that urge. And I can make vegan pizza.
As for the teeth, I notice a radical difference between a dog's or cat's canines and my own. Not to mention differences in jaw muscles and claws. Good luck taking down a gazelle with those canines.
Regardless, this is a pointless argument, as is presupposes that the diet our prehistoric ancestors ate was somehow optimum. From an evolutionary perspective, a successful organism is one that lives long enough to reproduce. Therefore a trait that causes one to die after childbearing years is irrelevant. Some traits other than diet that come to mind are: Huntingtons Chorea and Diabetes (late onset).
Unlike our prehistoric ancestors and our cats and dogs, we have two things: free will and an extensive (and growing) knowledge of nutrition. We can choose a diet for ethical reasons and devise a healthy diet within those constraints.
Remember, "predestination was doomed from the start" and "We must believe in free will, we have no choice" (the latter from I. B. Singer)
I've heard this a number of times, a particularily graphic case is here: http://www.emagazine.com/march-april_2002/0302advdis2.html
You can be unhealthy eating any diet. If you choose your diet for purely self-centered reasons, then, by all means, pick a diet that works for you (though you may question the wisdom of this approach after your bypass surgery).
If you have deeper reasons for choosing your diet, then you consult a doctor and/or nutritionist and figure out what is out of balance and fix it.
Anybody who takes animals' interests seriously will make their first priority to avoid all animal products. Now, some people may have a hard time with such a transition and it may take them a while to phase into complete veganism. Given that someone in that situation is committed to continuously decreasing their consumption of animal products, then I would say that using 'happy meat' (and milk and eggs) during that interim would reduce suffering and, therefore, would be a good choice. But don't be fooled! That does not make such products anything less than morally reprehensible.
A possibly related issue is that some animals are raised on range land that would not be suitable for any other kind of agriculture.... not sure what to say to that one (yet). Here's [John Robbins' answer to this].
However, this argument falls apart when you realize that we were "designed" to drink human milk, which is very different from other mammals' milk. I don't see how you can argue that it is natural to drink milk from another species. Furthermore, all other mammals wean their offspring at some point.
I don't see how you can argue that it is natural for an adult to drink milk from another species.
There is another misunderstanding in this argument: milk is for feeding the young. It is high protein food to fuel the rapid growth that mammals undergo. Once beyond a certain age, such food is no longer needed. An adult does not need this sort of food. You may as well put rocket fuel in your lawnmower.
There are two flaws with this:
The first was pointed out by Gary Francione (Animal Voices Radio, 2004), which is that this confuses unintentional or incidental harm caused by an action and intentional harm. There is a big difference between a lampshade made with petroleum which probably hurt some people as it was being produced and a lampshade made from the skin of a person killed in a Nazi concentration camp. Likewise, eating some wheat which resulted in a few field mice getting killed is very different from eating the flesh of an animal which was killed specifically so you could enjoy the taste of its flesh.
The second flaw is that 70% of the grain in this country is fed to livestock. So most of these unintentional deaths were for the sake of meat-eaters. Furthermore, since animals are very poor converters of protien (e.g. it takes 16 pounds of grain to produce a pound of beef) if everyone became vegan, we would only need a fraction of the livestock's portion of grain, thus resulting in yet fewer deaths.
It is impossible to be 100% pure, there will be a harm to any choice you make. But to leap from there to "why bother" is crazy.
The argument that probably follows from this is that the vegan diet is unnatural due to this need to take suplements (see above)
[Jack Norris] has the most complete research on B12 that I have seen: [What Every Vegan Should Know about Vitamin B12] and [Vitamin B12: Are you getting it?]
OK, in other words if the slightest hint of animal product sneaks into any part of your life, then you cannot say you are a vegan and if you do you are inconsistent and, therefore, a hypocrite.
Looks like a fundamentalist strawman to me.
We are living in a world which makes it exceedingly difficult to live a life according to principles that are measured in anything other than dollar bills. Animal products are everywhere because government subsidies and externalized costs make them cheaper than alternatives. Being absolutely 100% pure is imposible, not only for vegans, but for anybody trying to live a life according to some ethical standard. Don't like slavery? You better look at that chocolate bar you just ate. Don't like murder? You better look at where the diamonds in your wedding ring came from. Cruelty, murder and injustice are pervasive.
My goal as a vegan is to minimize suffering and death to all creatures. Being vegan is not a goal, it is the means, an ongoing process of examining one's own life and finding ways of bringing it closer to the ideal of eliminating suffering and death.
"Infinite striving to be the best is man's duty; it is its own reward. Everything else is in God's hands." -- Mahatma Gandhi
I'll let Gary Francione answer this one (he's far more eloquent than me): "Now if I were starving to death, would I kill an animal? I probably would. Then again, if I were starving to death, I might kill you. But we don't want to build a moral system on how I or anyone else would behave in an emergency."'
It is true that eating a little steak once in a while may not hurt me. Note the words "may" and "me".
I say "may" since the risk of getting diseased meat (E.Coli, BSE, &c.) is relatively low and the incremental damage to my cardiovascular system is also relatively minor. So, it is true that I could dine on animal foods on rare occassions and probably escape serious heath problems.
However, the more important word is "me". If you are vegetarian strictly for health reasons it is easy to justify eating animal foods once in a while, as shown above. I am well familiar with this situation since I was following the same logic the last several times I ate animal flesh. At the time, I was nominally vegetarian, but only for health reasons, so when a friend presented me with a beef casserole or a fish filet I was able to rationalize eating it. But, over time I learned more about the effect of such consumption on the environment, workers, and, most importantly, the cow, the damage caused is very obvious. That piece of steak won't hurt me, but it KILLS the cow!
In a strict sense that statement is true, however, the way many people use the word "choice" is troublesome. It seems to me that the words "choice" and "opinion" are often used by opponents to minimize or even deprecate the reasons behind that choice or opinion, as though my "choice" to become vegan has as much validity and importance as my "choice" to wear a green shirt.
It would be much more accurate to say that my conscience dictates that I choose to be vegan, however, my whims dictate that I wear a green shirt today. Tomorrow I will change my shirt (to the relief of my co-workers), but my veganism cannot be changed without a fundamental change in my ethical convictions and my moral imperitaves.
Here is where I think there is a fundamental problem: American culture does not value ethical convictions, or more accurately, actions sprouting from those convictions are not valued (in fact they are often reviled). American culture values convenience, fashion, and conformity above all else. You can say that you are opposed to fosil fuel consumption, suburban sprawl and global warming, but when you actually live without a car you will be considered a freak (I say this from personal experience).
In fact, I think such actions are cause many people to feel threatened, because on some level, they are afraid of awakening their own conscience. On more than one occasion I have had a carnivore tell me, as they are eating a hamburger: "Don't tell me where this came from." They fear the loss of their ignorance, and then attack you for "imposing yourself" on them.
A sign of this is the derogatory way the word "activist" is bandied about, as though someone who advocates a position and takes action based on that position is strange. Let me be clear about this: we are ALL activists, every moment of every day. Every product you buy is an implicit endorsement of how it is made. (TBD: a list of examples: slavery, child labor, torture, murder, &c.)
"if their [vegans'] concern were truly about reducing the pain and suffering of animals rather than trying to control the actions of other humans, wouldn't they be concentrating instead on stopping the actions of non-human carnivores and omnivores?"
First off, there is something qualitatively different about humans' treatment of animals and predatory animals' treatment of other animals: Eagles do not round up thousands of rodents into crowded, filthy barns, lions do not keep gazelles in feedlots feeding them ground-up sheep and antibiotics before marching them to their deaths. The prey of these animals live their lives normally up until the end, which is sad, but could not be called exploitation, torture or slavery, by any means.
Secondly, predators are physiologically set up for consuming animal flesh, and their instincts compel them to do so, for example, my cat has never been outdoors and has never directly tasted the flesh of another animal, but yet she is compelled to stalk squirrels and birds that she sees through the window.
Third, what right do humans have to dictate these animals' behavior?
What about hunter-gather societies and others who depend on hunting or domesticated animals to survive? What right do those of us in the developed world have to critisise them?
While I don't like any sort of killing, those who do it out of necessity are very different from those who have no such necessity but still enjoy the products of tortured and murdered animials just because we like the taste.
Furthermore, the deaths caused by hunter-gatherer societies is insignificant compared to that which we cause, therefore isn't of a lot of concern to me.
If everyone became vegan, what would happen to the animals?
This is a funny argument. I will admit that if everybody became vegan at the exact same time, we would have a lot of animals that would need to be cared for lest they starve. However, I don't think anybody could claim that such a thing is possible.
But in a reasistic situation, the marketplace will take care of it. When a person becomes vegan, the demand for animal products decreases, and the producers of such products will produce less. This means that fewer animals will be brought into existence, and if the number of vegans increases continuously, the numbers will gradually decline.
