Hitler was a vegetarian
No, he wasn’t. He occasionally followed and promotes a vegetarian diet, but he ate meat regularly throughout his life: skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/myth-check-was-hitler-a-vegetarian/
The concept vegans are bigger animal lovers is also balls. Fair enough if you're producing all your own food. Otherwise I can't see any difference between directly killing an animal to eat, or indirectly killing it to commercially produce plant based food.
Do you mean animals killed in the production of crops, due to being killed by farm machinery etc?
If so, the best way to reduce animals being killed by crop cultivation is to go vegan, because as much as 36% of crops worldwide are produced for the purpose of feeding farm animals, despite those animals providing a comparative fraction of human nutrition (it takes 100 calories worth of crops to produce 3 calories worth of beef). (www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel-animal-feed). Therefore the best way to reduce the amount of land used for crop agriculture, and therefore reduce the impact on wild animals affected by farming, is to move from a diet reliant on meat and dairy to a plant based diet.
There is also the environmental impact to consider. Going vegan is the single biggest difference a person can make to their carbon footprint except not having children. Beef and dairy are huge CO2 emitters. This is having a direct impact on the habitats of a large number of animals, particularly polar bears and seals who rely on polar ice to hunt. There are also animals affected by mass Amazonian deforestation to make way for cattle feeding lots. Veganism doesn’t just protect farm animals, it protects animals whose habitats are destroyed in the service of the meat and dairy industries.
I would also be interested to know - do you truly see no difference in farming animals and animals dying as a result of crop production? Do you think that day-old chicks being macerated alive, or male calves killed on the first day they’re born, or egg-laying hens being gassed at 18 months old are all exactly the same as animals dying in crop production? Not to mention that animals which die in crop production have had the opportunity to live freely up til then, rather than the often appalling conditions animals in farms endure.
Vegans know there is no way to live a life which has zero impact on animals. But 72 billion land animals and over 1.2 trillion aquatic animals killed for food around the world every year. The scale of it is staggering. It’s not possible to be an animal lover and male peace with those figures.
And unless you're in that minority of vegans that doesn't want to on an individual level, a view I can completely respect, but accepts that the best thing for animal welfare is for other people to eat ethically produced animal products, you're essentially hoping to expand the live export industry to other countries with even lower standards, which in my book is about as far from being an animal lover as anyone can be.
I’m not sure you understand. No vegan thinks the best thing for anyone is to eat ‘ethically produced animal products’ because there is no such thing as an ethically produced animal product. The entire concept, process and execution of factory farming is inherently unethical.
If people insist on eating animals and animal products it’s for them to determine the manner in which they can do so and best appease their conscience. But they aren’t going to get support from a vegan, because it’s still an inherently immoral thing to do.
Look at it this way - say you purchase a primark t-shirt for £2, knowing it was made in a factory by a child worker being paid pennies for their labour. You might say ‘this is justified to me because primark only use factories which are up to code on fire regulations’. You might think it’s better because at least they are doing something which is beneficial for their workers. But it doesn’t change the fact that it’s an inherently immoral act to buy a t-shirt made by an underpaid child labourer.