this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2025
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It bothers me that vegetarians don't care beyond this very un-though-through concept of 'animals dying'.
Dairy is a product of the mass rape and imprisonment of cows in horrific factory farms, and chickens are also kept in massively over crowded and unsanitary conditions.
And this is not to mention the constant cullings of male animals, which aren't considered food as testosterone tastes so bad, and male animals can't produce eggs or milk.
Or the constant culling of animals that no longer produce eggs or milk to quota.
Or the mass culling of the diseased or at risk of disease from being forced to live in such disgusting environments.
Vegetarianism is not a moral stance, it's delusional and harms and kills animals at the same rate as eating both meat and dairy.
I get what you want to say and principally, I agree. However, I would highly advise against making better the enemy of perfect. Vegetarians usually are on the right track, they're often just not educated enough, thinking that some animal products can be sourced ethically (as demonstrated by the other comment).
In my experience, vegetarianism often is just a waypoint towards veganism.
If this were universally true, there would be a lot more vegans.
From my experience, vegetarians are more often than not, a way point towards eating meat again.
I didn't claim it was universally true.
In ireland, free range eggs are the norm, and most cows graze on actual fields. but, we have barely any wild areas anymore,.
I mean, plant agriculture isn't exactly great for wildlife either. Hell, being wildlife isn't great for wildlife. We theoretically could keep animals in a way that's fine for them, we just usually don't.
I eat a mix of free-range eggs and backyard eggs, and avoid milk where possible. Unfortunately the challenge scales pretty rapidly after that. Directly eating meat that can only be gotten in an unethical way feels a lot worse.
How does the math on that work? Less animals harmed is less animals harmed.
Free-range farming is barely a quality of life improvement over cages, look it up.
Only eating meat is only killing animals for meat.
Eating meat and dairy is both killing animals for meat, and raping and torturing animals for milk and eggs, which when these animals no longer produce to quota or become diseased, also gets them killed.
How is eating dairy harming fewer animals?
All animals livestock is unethical. There is no such thing as the ethical rape, torture and consumption of animals when humans can easily and cheaply live off plants. There is no excuse.
Eating meat but not eggs and dairy isn't even really in the discussion, though. If I tried it would be even harder than being vegan, because people wouldn't understand what I'm doing on top of it all.
Sentence A does not follow from B.
Animal livestock is not required in the production of food from plants.
Nor does livestock husbandry require rape, torture and consumption of animals.
I'd buy pasture-raised eggs instead if they were sold anywhere near me, by the way. And didn't buy anything when I had my own hens.
What do you do with all the useless male animals? In addition, the animal numbers don't work out either if animals are not killed regularly. You'd have a quasi-exponentially expanding farm, as cows go on to live 15 rather than 5 years and egg-laying chickens live to become 5 years rather than 1, except you can't squeeze milk or eggs from them at some point. And if you're at the point where you have to kill animals anyway, you may as well eat them.
Allowing old animals to retire would raise costs, but only proportionately. In my personal case, I inherited a flock, and they all died a natural death.
The breeding "process" as it exists is very problematic. There's research being done into hens that primarily give birth to more hens, but I'm not sure what progress has been made. The obvious other option is just to let them grow up, but now that I think of it roosters tend to fight each other anyway. Hmm, maybe I need to reassess chickens specifically.
Milk production could be stimulated with an injection. Bees make lots of honey.
Out of curiosity, what's your stance on wild animals? If you just want to pave everything over and have no non-human animals, there's an argument to be made for that. Usually when I talk to vegans their stance is more like animals should be allowed to live in some kind of natural state, and it's no problem when a wolf kills a stallion for certain abstract reasons. If I was a horse I'd much prefer pulling a cart.