You don't need to know what a chicken believes to recognize that their behaviours indicate they do not want others to steal their eggs.

Can you demonstrate an example of animal exploitation where consent does not play a role?

This is the thing that really bothers me about the cauliflower substitutions - that it's being used as a substitute for foods that are meant to offer macronutrients. Cauliflower on it's own has extremely low calories. It's meant to be eaten for it's micronutrients and unique plant compounds. It does not provide enough macros to sustain a person, so if someone were eating a lot of cauliflower in place of their macro-sources they would be putting themselves into a starvation state.

However if any forms of fat and oil are used in it's preparation, then it might no longer even have the weight loss benefit that might come from that.

What?

I love tofu, I don't love cooking it (unless it's scrambled).

Now soy curls? There's an award winning ingredient.

If a dog is excited to see you, and trying their best to chase your hands with their head, is that not a form of the dog giving you consent for pets? Animals to some limited degree can give consent for things like that at least. But most other things, if they can't give consent then you should assume that you shouldn't do the thing.

A chicken has eggs for their own reasons. They can't give consent to give them away, but be realistic - do you really think there's a chance that a hen would consent to you taking what she believes are going to be her children? They are not yours to take. Why is my position of respecting consent and not exploiting animals absurd, as compared to concluding wholesale that they just can't give consent and therefor... what? Do we just do whatever we want to them?

How is it not a whataboutism? You're talking about a completely different form of exploitation that has nothing to do with animals (unless we're talking about habitat destruction displacing wild animals).

Proof?

What do you mean?

Okay, but that's a whataboutism and has nothing to do with animals. Think about the lowly bee, for example. People often get tripped up when it comes to bugs and veganism. They're smaller, and must be dumber right? And anyway their minds work in such an alien way to our own that we can't assume they even perceive things the way that we do.

And yet if you poke a beehive, the behavior of its inhabitants appears to be something that's functionally identical to anger, and they begin defending their colony in a way where they seem to be expressing something that strongly resembles a lack of consent to having their home assaulted. So even in this case of such a vastly different kind of animal it's natural to conclude that any taking of their honey is not wanted - not consented to - and thus is a form of exploitation.

There's nothing absurd about valuing consent.

That's also my hunch - that Buddhism in particular has a high percentage of vegans. I still would like to see the data though.

It's implicit in their stance against exploitation. A chicken, for example, cannot give their eggs to a human, with informed consent, and therefor taking their eggs is a form of theft and exploitation.