I saw a post on lemmy about how we could prevent 133 holocausts by promoting animal rights and veganism. The article opened by doing some math about how many dogs you could torture and kill in order to be equivalent to taking a human life, and then how many animals humans kill, and concluded that we’re committing holocaust equivalents many times over.
I have respect for people who question the status quo and think seriously about morality. Thinking about slavery, it used to be argued “this is the natural order,” “this is actually the moral thing to do” and so on. It wasn’t easy then to stand up for what we now see as the obvious moral position. So I have some receptivity to this type of argument.
That said, I think back to when I was a Christian (atheist now), and was fully bought into the anti abortion movement. They argued that fetuses were human, that we were committing fetus holocausts all the time. Taking that view to its logical conclusion, one could justify things like killing a few (abortion doctors, judges) to save many (fetuses).
The author of the vegan piece was not advocating for such things. But one could ask why not. I think the fact the conclusion (133 holocausts) is so far outside accepted views should prompt some examination of the starting premises. (Is any killing of an animal for food the same as torturous factory farming, should we do something about animals that eat other animals etc)
I’m glad I read the piece because there’s value in hearing other perspectives. We can’t see ourselves and our own blind spots. I would have responded in-thread but that community description said “not a place for debate”, so tossing out this thought here.
You make a good point about killing for food. I’m against killing animals for food and would rather we switch to lab grown meat. It’s not fair to the animals that were created plump and killed unnaturally for the sake of eating. If it’s a survival situation, that’s different, you do what you can to survive. However, modern society is beyond simple survival, we have the resources and means to eliminate animal meat.
But then it begs the question “what about plants? They’re alive right?” Also “what about lab meat? Even though they’re not a full animal, it’s still living matter.”
To both those arguments, I’d say, yes, it’s still not fair to those lifeforms, however it is much more humane to kill lifeforms without a brain, and that only exist to reproduce. Animals have emotions that we can understand. Fear, joy, and content. They are intelligent. Plants and lab meat are not.
The thing is, when people try to argue that “killing” plants is also killing so I might as well just eat animals, apart from being an insane take as is imho, significantly fewer plants are harvested if you switch to a fully vegan diet. The net result is a lot fewer plants needed to sustain people vs. the oodles and oodles of plants and grains needed to feed cattle, pigs, whatever. There are these charts that show how much more efficient food intake really is if you cut out the middle-man - being animals - and just eat the plants they’d be fed instead.
People just try to discredit vegan whenever they can because of their own insecurities and cognitive dissonance. People who actively oppose veganism, that is