I’m a vegan and I actually partially agree with your sentiment about “quick death + no pain = maybe not too unethical”, and that’s actually the justification I used for a while to defend why I wasn’t vegan.

Just know that this view is not inherently incompatible with veganism. Go vegan because of the way the animals are treated while they’re alive. Also, most animals are not killed without suffer.

Cows for meat are possibly the only animal we eat that actually sometimes get decent treatment, if they’re pasture raised with no growth hormones. But non vegans act like this is significant. Only about 3% of cows get to live their entire lives on a pasture. I would commend someone if they actually held a strict rule that they only ate pasture raised beef, but I’ve never met anyone like that. That would mean you could never order beef from a restaurant, you could never eat beef your friends made, etc. unless you’re 100% sure it was pasture raised. Because just about every other cow had to live it’s entire life in a space so small it can’t even turn it’s head and doesn’t get to see outside.

That being said, virtually every other animal product does not have that going for them. Chicken is never pasture raised (too expensive), their lives are absolutely atrocious and the vast majority of the time they are killed by being hung on an assembly line upside down.

I’m not going to go into all the details but just know that, even if you do hold the belief that it’s okay for an animal to die if it is quick and painless, that you can still recognize that veganism is correct.

Please don’t let your experience with vegans push you away from it. There’s plenty of reasonable, kind, and understanding vegans.

Also btw, rescuing a shelter animal = vegan, buying a bred animal = not vegan.

Him hitting you out of nowhere with a passive aggressive “are you vegan?” was not the move, but you have to recognize a bigger picture here.

When animal abuse happens, and people see it, they are disgusted by it. It makes you feel awful inside, it makes you empathize with the animal.

But when animal abuse happens and you don’t see it, people don’t seem to care. I mean, what this fellow did to his dog is absolutely atrocious, but frankly it’s mild compared to the 25 million chickens killed daily (USA alone), who are often hung upside down in assembly lines for hours, not to mention the atrocious living conditions they had beforehand. And that’s just the surface.

Rather than passive-aggressively questioning your ethics like the other user here, I instead urge you to explore these feelings you have about animal cruelty, and think about what happens even when you don’t see it.

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Lol I figured that out shortly after typing my comment, hence deleting it

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Your very slightly incorrect internet comment has ignited me with a passion to correct you. The interval in Killing in the Name is not nine half steps, but rather a minor 9th, which is 13 half steps.

The most popular take among vegans (and this is coming from a vegan myself) is that breeding animals is awful, but adopting an animal from a shelter is great.

There’s a lot of reasons that vegans are not fans of pet ownership, mostly because there are very minimal regulations in place regarding their treatment. I’m sure everyone knows someone who doesn’t treat their pet well.

However, once an animal is born into this world, it already exists, and there’s only two options. Either we can care for it, or let it die.

That’s why vegans are okay with adopting pets but not with buying animals from mills. Buying animals from mills incentives the breeders to make more, taking them from shelters doesn’t profit / incentivize anyone. Let’s stop making more animals but take care of the ones that already exist.

This is an absurd take. Vegans have to sacrifice a lot. I absolutely love animals and it’s insane to me that someone can’t see the amount of torture and murder of animals there is out there.

I decided to cut out, as much as is reasonably possible, anything that was made by or is these animals. I don’t do this because I want to feel superior, I do it for the animals. Most vegans don’t do this for attention. Just because you see some vegans shouting online doesn’t mean we’re all like that.

Sometimes I just wanna wear an outfit that makes people laugh and smile…

I hate to get so semantical but using the word pedophile incorrectly just desensitizes the word. Pedophilia means being attracted to children, primarily meaning before or in the early stages of puberty, usually younger than 13. In fact, many pedophiles would not be attracted to someone aged 15+ because they are typically exclusively or primarily interested in prepubescent bodies.

That doesn’t mean this guy isn’t a total asshole, but he’s not a pedophile, and I think anyone can understand an adult sexting an older teen, while still absolutely horrid, is quite different from sexting a child.

Once again, absolutely not defending this guy, I don’t even know who he is… but I think it’s important not to desensitize the word.

Summer. Especially at night. I feel like summer nights are always the perfect temperature, makes up for it being too hot in the day.

I hope it was a suicide, I guess that feels wrong to say but I mainly just hope it wasn’t an accident.

This doesn’t legalize weed, but arguably it’s a step in the right direction.

I know this might sound strange but autistic people are roughly 3x more likely to be LGBT so you could consider going to an LGBT meetup. I’m neurodivergent and LGBT and that certainly matches my experience.

I am more than happy to be preachy about ending the suffering and abuse of literally billions of animals.

Listen, I appreciate someone who is at least not hostile towards vegans, but I hate this whole “I respect what vegans eat, so they should respect what I eat”. Sir, you are eating an animal that was most likely tortured and abused its entire life up until the point it was murdered

What if my dietary preference was cannibalism? Then would it be okay to shit on my dietary preference?

Not eating animals isn’t a dietary stance, it’s an ethical stance.

Okay but there’s a moral hierarchy when it comes to eating meat. Humans used to hunt, meaning we would kill animals that lived natural lives. Not to mention, we would typically target animals that were older or sickly, because we would have a harder time killing animals that are in their prime.

That’s so much different from modern day agriculture practices. We raise animals in fences so tight they can’t turn their heads, and feed them nasty stuff. We abuse the shit out of them until they reach the point where we deem them the most profitable then we kill them. There’s nothing natural about that.

Also, it’s really hard to know for sure, but we have a good amount of evidence that humans didn’t eat that much meat. First of all, the animals we hunted wouldn’t be nearly as fat as the animals we eat today. Secondly, there’s evidence that many humans ate roughly 100g of fiber per day, which is not possible if you had any serious amount of meat. Humans ate a lot of plants. 100g of fiber is an insane amount of plants.

Honestly I feel like the idea of “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” is so lame. Like I understand that you could find something technically ethically wrong with everything, but that statement just feels like a way for people who don’t want to give up certain things to justify themselves.

Capitalism, especially modern day capitalism where the government and companies collaborate, does lead to a lot of ethical issues. And yes, I understand that it is not liveable to give up everything that is unethical. But you can still have boundaries.

I mean like, buying oats and grains from a grocery store, which are typically grown domestically, compared to buying dead abused animals or bananas from a company that uses slave labor. Those are totally different things.

If you prioritize buying things that are made in countries that have better labor laws, and avoid animal products, then that’s a pretty damn good start.

I mean, most vegans would still commend your effort to reduce animal product consumption.

But from a moral standpoint, simply eating less animal products really doesn’t have much value. Imagine using your argument for other moral dilemmas.

“Racism is wrong, so I reduced the amount of racial slurs I use to only 1/3”
“Rape is wrong, so I only rape on Mondays now” (in reference to meatless Mondays)

I hate to be so militant about it, but you either think animal abuse is acceptable or you don’t.

Now, what I do think could be a moral standpoint, if you really want to still be able to eat meat, is to only eat “humane” meat. I put “humane” in quotes because even farmers with the best intentions are still killing animals young. I don’t personally believe any animal product can be humane, but even then I can recognize that any animal that was raised on a pasture and ate real food is more ethical to eat than one in a factory.

So if you genuinely only ate pasture raised beef and chicken (and you were sure about it), then I would say that is quite honorable.