Why do so many people criticise vegans?

This thread has taken such a sad turn, the UK countryside and farms exists because it was built by people who lived on the land, with their families and animals. We are a part of nature, not apart from it.

Yes it absolutely is.

Bringing beings into existence for the sole purpose of exploiting, killing and eating them because they wouldn’t otherwise exist if we didn’t is probably the most insane justification I often hear.

By that logic dogs who are breed for the sole purpose of fighting would be acceptable, otherwise they wouldn’t exist either. In fact why stop there, we could breed any species for use, including humans. Is that ok because they wouldn’t have existed otherwise? No of course it’s not, It’s totally insane.

Because the cow wouldn't exist if it weren't bred for meat. I think that's the justification.

It's true, but I don't eat it and haven't for quite a while and I doubt I'll indulge in the future. It's quite a horrendous thought that this dead rotting flesh is being eaten.

That was life then, but now we know meat is an environmental disaster, maybe time to consume less

It's only their purpose because we make it so.

I agree with this. I'm a meat eater and most of my family are vegan, we had a vegan Xmas and it was gorgeous.
They DO show me up. I know this. They're right. I also know this.
They say I'm the most vegan meat eater they know 😂

What makes a cow less worthy of a good full life versus a dog though? You’re not actually answering. Probabaly because you don’t know.

A study by Harvard a few years ago reached more or less the same conclusions.

Scale is a large part of the issue. With demand for meat and dairy increasing year on year, we simply won't have enough planet to service it before long,.and as it is, the greenhouse gas emissions are about the same as all transport. Utter madness.

You're not being awkward, you're making a good point. There are still some people who continue to do what people have done for thousands of years.

I still feel though that most meat eaters would turn their nose up at hearts etc. Although they do eat them because they are in burgers and sausages together with lips, uterus etc.

I also think it is strange that there are so many people who eat cheap chicken every day but never taste it. It's always smothered in some kind of sauce. I don't have a problem with people enjoying a decent roast chicken sometimes but I don't understand the insistence on eating meat but avoiding tasting it.

When pulled pork first came to Britain it was only available from a trailer under a bridge over the Thames. I quite liked it but today you can only get pulled pork when it is mixed in with sugary BBQ sauce.

I think ultimately for me is that I don’t care because meat tastes so good. I grew up on a farm & I saw them go to slaughter & I went to slaughter houses with my Mum regularly but I felt no guilt about it, that was life

I've been vegan for about 5 years. I did it because I was on a health kick at the time. Nothing to do with animal welfare. But once I had stopped eating animal products, it made it easier to look at just how grim practices are. Welfare - dire. Also...I really don't want to eat animals that have been kept knee deep in their own poo, ingesting it (how could they not?) and being covered in it. Gross! It's also hard to tell which is meat from poo filled nightmare units and what is from clean units. Labels lie.

Humans have decided that that is their purpose, it doesn’t make it right that that is their purpose.

I've copied some of the article below, for reference:

Avoiding meat and dairy products is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet, according to the scientists behind the most comprehensive analysis to date of the damage farming does to the planet.
The new research shows that without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75% – an area equivalent to the US, China, European Union and Australia combined – and still feed the world. Loss of wild areas to agriculture is the leading cause of the current mass extinction of wildlife.

The new analysis shows that while meat and dairy provide just 18% of calories and 37% of protein, it uses the vast majority – 83% – of farmland and produces 60% of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions. Other recent research shows 86% of all land mammals are now livestock or humans. The scientists also found that even the very lowest impact meat and dairy products still cause much more environmental harm than the least sustainable vegetable and cereal growing.

The study, published in the journal Science, created a huge dataset based on almost 40,000 farms in 119 countries and covering 40 food products that represent 90% of all that is eaten. It assessed the full impact of these foods, from farm to fork, on land use, climate change emissions, freshwater use and water pollution (eutrophication) and air pollution (acidification).

“A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use,” said Joseph Poore, at the University of Oxford, UK, who led the research. “It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car,” he said, as these only cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Humans just 0.01% of all life but have destroyed 83% of wild mammals – study
Read more

“Agriculture is a sector that spans all the multitude of environmental problems,” he said. “Really it is animal products that are responsible for so much of this. Avoiding consumption of animal products delivers far better environmental benefits than trying to purchase sustainable meat and dairy.”

More can be read at the link I provided above.

@TempestTost I'm afraid the largest and most comprehensive scientific study of its kind, by Oxford University, disagrees with you. The science says that

Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding-meat-and-dairy-is-single-biggest-way-to-reduce-your-impact-on-earth

Link to study.

josephpoore.com/Science%20360%206392%20987%20-%20Accepted%20Manuscript.pdf

the scone thing, it’s against the law to not have it labelled with all ingredients so they’ll have known it was vegan or didn’t understand some of the ingredients and most would ask. more so due to allergies.

Very obviously, animals which are bred for food.
As I said, that's their purpose.
Being vegan isn't the pinnacle of morality. It's a viewpoint.

Incidentally are you American or from another country that uses US style spellings, or did you use AI to help you? A lot of US style spellings in your post. Just curious.

Will try to address each point individually tomorrow though.

@TempestTost so much in your post to refute but its too late tonight - am off to bed!

Yes, this is just what I mean.

The idea that veganism is better environmentally is bollocks. It's possible at a scale that can actually feed people only in an industrial farming, monoculture, petroleum based agricultural model, and that's why it comes out a bit better than that same model with animals. Which is to say - neither efficient nor sustainable.

The most sustainable and efficient agricultural models are always mixed farming models - because farm ecosystems, like natural ecosystems, have the most synergies and interactions when they include both plants and animals, and once you seriously try to reduce reliance on petroleum animal power of one kind or another becomes important on a farm.

Even in the odd historical pocket of veganism - and they are vanishingly rare - you will find there were not vegan farmers. Veganism in these scenarios was a privileged position that depended on other people getting their hands dirty. Because farming with only vegetation isn't efficient without oil based fertilizers.

So no - not everyone "knows" that not eating meat is better for the environment.

As for killing - all of us, whatever we eat, survive because of, and are in fact physically constituted by, dead organisms. All the ecosystems that sustain us are made up of both plants and animals, and are dependent on those existing in a cycle of life and death. Populations in nature are not some idealistic pastoral situation where every animal dies of old age, quite the contrary, it has always been usual for large parts of animal populations to die young. Which in general is not more awful than the few who live to old age and die of starvation, exposure, or an overload of parasites. Animal husbandry, when done properly, does not offer a worse life than nature for animal populations. (Not to get into the fact that farming monocultures of plants are really really terrible for animal populations of all kinds.)

I would submit that it is much better to understand our place in these systems, our dependence on other life, and respect it and look at it clearly, as opposed to trying to fool ourselves into thinking we can somehow exist outside of them so we don't need to feel our intimate, and in fact visceral, connection to other life in a way that feels uncomfortable.

So again, the whole "aw, you know you would be so much nicer if you just let those farm animals live out their life at the animal rescue, you just won't admit it cause you like the taste" isn't something I recognize, and I actually think it's shallow when it comes down to it.

But what if one or more of those children found a way of doing something really beneficial to the world?

Most likely they'll be yet another consumer in a Barratt box working in middle management, lets face it.

Something like 80% of soya is used as animal feed.

Avacados have absolutely nothing to do with being vegan.

Ever seen a happy animal in a slaughterhouse?

I've faced more ridicule for being vegan than I did for being gay. Wtf is that all about? I'm not saying I haven't faced homophobia, but it pales into insignificance with the amount of jibes I've received about not wanting to continue to participate in the perpetual suffering of animals. Fancy that 😯