978
"Being vegan is unnatural"
(discuss.tchncs.de)
cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/55430533
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
978 points (100.0% liked)
Lemmy Shitpost
39620 readers
3678 users here now
Welcome to Lemmy Shitpost. Here you can shitpost to your hearts content.
Anything and everything goes. Memes, Jokes, Vents and Banter. Though we still have to comply with lemmy.world instance rules. So behave!
Rules:
1. Be Respectful
Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.
Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.
...
2. No Illegal Content
Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.
That means:
-No promoting violence/threats against any individuals
-No CSA content or Revenge Porn
-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)
...
3. No Spam
Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.
-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.
-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.
-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers
-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.
...
4. No Porn/Explicit
Content
-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.
-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.
...
5. No Enciting Harassment,
Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts
-Do not Brigade other Communities
-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.
-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.
-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.
...
6. NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that is NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that might be distressing should be kept behind NSFW tags.
...
If you see content that is a breach of the rules, please flag and report the comment and a moderator will take action where they can.
Also check out:
Partnered Communities:
1.Memes
10.LinuxMemes (Linux themed memes)
Reach out to
All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules. Striker
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
This is a ludicrous argument. If you truly believe that all animals have the same rights then the only internally consistent conclusion is the virtual extermination of the human species.
Life is a zero sum game. Something lives by consuming something else or displacing it for access to limited resources. Optimizing for the minimum harm to earth's ecosystem is always going to be the end of agriculture, housing, hunting, industry and basically everything other human institution. We're the most insidious invasive species ever and the world would be healthier without us mucking around.
So unless you're stumping for that, don't pretend to have the moral high ground. If you are, stop wasting your time shaming people and skip right to culling them.
Brother I am vegan (at least 95% in diet if you want to quibble over niche animal product additives). I'm just not going to shed tears over every single creature on earth like they're my family pet while losing sight of the purpose of harm reduction. Why is the few grams of milk powder in your chips more important than mass deforestation supporting your avocados and coffee?
If most militant vegans actually examined their emotional arguments before they posted them people would take them way more seriously. Animals suffering and dying might make you deeply uncomfortable but that's not a universal experience. You can't browbeat people out of 15k years of animal husbandry just because you personally couldn't stomach skinning a rabbit.
I advocate for humanity to live in harmony and balance with our environment, that is why I am anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist as well as vegan. Our history is plagued with exploitation, that can't be denied, but I am trying to change it and you are arguing that it cannot be changed and that we shouldn't even try.
Humanity's relationship with animals and nature has historically been exploitative but it doesn't need to be that way.
We have vastly increased our ability to produce food. There are ample resources available on the planet for all of us to share and live in abundance. Human greed and selfishness is rewarded by our society. That means our society needs to change.
I reject your argument that life is a zero-sum game. My happiness does not need to come at the expense of another's unhappiness. We can all work together to create a better future for all living things on our planet.
Then you're a fundamentally blind idealist or just lying to yourself. The absolute bare minimum, purely vegetarian footprint needed to support a human is about 0.2 acres (~800 m²). That's 0.2 acres of precious arable land that could support dozens of species of plants, insects and animals purely dedicated to one human and their crops. A diverse and thriving array of life traded for one person and a handful of domesticated species.
From there you're now looking at displacement and damage from housing, water usage, soil degradation, waste disposal, pest control and every other basic necessity. God forbid you get into modern niceties like health care, transportation, education, arts, sciences, etc...
Humans aren't friendly little forest nymphs, we're megafauna. Even the most benign and innocuous species of primates (such as lemurs and marmosets) peaked their populations in the high millions. Getting the human population down from 8.3 billion to a sustainable level is a 99%+ reduction. That's a more complete eradication than any genocide in recorded history, let alone the sheer amount of death and scope of institutional collapse.
That's just a flat fact of our reality. Either 99% of humans have no right to exist or humans are inherently a higher class of animal. Choose one.
Uh ooooooh... someone isn't familiar with how dependent our agriculture is on pesticides, petrochemicals and heavy industry 😬
We (currently) have ample oil and topsoil. Not ample sustainable food. Don't even get me started on out other niche limits, like our approach to peak mineral supply or pollinator collapse.
I'm not the one making the dichotomy! I'm fully in favor of all harm reduction possible (including a vegan/utilitarian vegan diet) for the obvious benefit of our own species. The commenter above is positing that there is no ethical direct/indirect violence toward any animals. It's impossible to hold that position while simultaneously pretending billions of people can exist.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. A simple rational examination of our limited resources is being discarded because "animals have human rights/you support slavery/you want animals to be raped". No, I have a very obvious and consistent position:
Humans are a higher class of animal and being good stewards of our only planet is crucial for our own well being. We thrive with nature and unnatural violence (like industrial animal farming) is bad for our psyche anyway. That doesn't mean animals can't or won't die to support our existence.
This stuff is so basic and fundamental; tradeoffs HAVE to be made. Pretending that the world can support life (let alone a good life) for billions of people without animal death/displacement/extinction is deranged. It's on the commenter to pick up the shambles of that position and make anything that can fit in the real world.
Dude, I never, ever wrote that there would be no competition for resources like land. That's fucking obvious. That doesn't make life a "zero sum game", a zero sum game means that every gain is someone elses' loss, and that at the end of the game there are no new resources created. That is strictly not true. We can take actions in life which benefit us without harming others.
In real life, humans have rights, but we also take a balanced view of rights when there are conflicts. For example, if we need to build some important infrastructure, that takes priority over the rights of whoever is living where that infrastructure needs to go. My argument is that the rights of animals not to be killed is more important than our desire to have a tasty meal. I'm not out here arguing we shouldn't build wind turbines because of their negative impacts on wildlife, because I know the positive impacts on countering climate change is better overall.
You're still in denial here. There can be symbiosis in nature where species can cohabitate to the benefit of both, but that's just two different niches being filled. It's a completely orthogonal topic to species competing for the same niche. It's not about building windmills and good vibes; human beings have overstepped our natural boundaries with billions of people in places we have absolutely no evolutionary excuse to be.
We've done this strictly because we can; it's the natural animal inclination to favor your own progeny and expand your access to resources. Our ability to adapt has broken the evolutionary game. We won. The mere existence of 8.3 billion humans causes an unfathomable amount of harm that can't be fixed by skipping "tasty meals". That's the ethical equivalent of whitewashing guilt and ignoring the structural problem.
So asserting something like "all animals have equal rights" is asinine. They clearly don't, and we can't change that without abandoning the 99% of human souls who stress the system beyond its natural ethical bounds (within the expected balance of evolution).
The carrying capacity of Earth is 2-4 billion people, and that's assuming an ultimate human primacy with no regard to other species (except in the amoral ways they could sustain human existence). A "harmless" existence is a fleeting fraction of that, the small niche filled as hunter-gatherer megafauna mammals. This is a hard physical fact no matter what universal rights we put on paper. The choice is quite literally billions of human lives against trillions of birds/insects/fish/critters/predators/prey in conflict with them. There's no free lunch.
Wait, are you saying that earth is overpopulated, now? I didn't realize I was in conversation with a nazi, but honestly, it explains a lot. Which ethnic group do you want to exterminate?
How's the weather in your fantasy land? You winning your fight against that straw man? I didn't say anything about over or under population, that's a completely different philosophical discussion. That would be a debate over questions like:
You are constricting your ethical ideal to automatically answer some of those questions. Here's a rephrasing of our conversation:
This axiom automatically answers many questions raised by the other facts.
You can whine and sarcastically deflect but that's the conclusion of your statement on total, universal animal rights. It's not an undefendable position, but you must understand you're pushing for a heavily restrained form of Anarcho-primitivism. If the concept of near total human civilization collapse for the benefit of other animals makes you uncomfortable (as it does for me), you'd want to reconsider that view in some way:
So I ask again, what's your choice? There's no free lunch.
Yep, nazi shit. Fuck off.
Yay I win!
And it has been largely the (petro)chemical industry responsible for this. The Haber-Bosch process transformed agriculture, but accounts for percent-level quantities of global energy consumption and carbon emissions. And it requires raw materials that are typically produced from hydrocarbons (although admittedly there are renewable options). And other nutrients typically come from mining (even organic options) - which displaces many species of all sorts. And this does not account for pesticides, etc., that others have mentioned.
Prior to the development of modern chemistry, our best sources of fertilizer were often animal manures - which require breeding, raising, and ultimately usually killing animals.
Sure, there is a lot we can do to minimize harm, and generally we should, and I try to myself as much as possible. But I'm not fooling myself into thinking that eating vegan or growing my food organically means nothing or no one suffered. Until we all go back to pre-agrarian societies, we will continue to cause large-scale destruction in some way. But of course this in itself would cause massive population decline and resultant suffering in humans.
There isn't any vegan out there who believes that. The point of veganism isn"t to be perfect, it's to reduce harm as much as practically possible.
Of course I am in favor of sustainable farming practices and minimizing use of fossil fuel industry products, but even with all of that factored in, the social/environmental impact of a vegan diet is hugely reduced, compared to a meat-eater's diet, and significantly healthier with massively reduced risk of heart disease and cancer among other conditions. That's not really a solid reason to go vegan IMO, I think animal welfare is the only reason that matters, but it's a nice bonus I guess.
True, but no one gives a shit when the consumed life is a plant.
People say the "plants feel pain" thing rhetorically, but it isn't a serious argument. And if they were somehow actually being serious, then this would actually strengthen the case to only consume plants due the efficiency of doing so vs consuming animal products.
Plants don't have to feel pain to be a lynch pin in the ecosystem supporting the animals around them. One less native plant is one less place to shelter or feed an endangered animal, or one less set of roots preventing the erosion of a habitat at risk.
Eliminating animal products mitigates the problem but it in no way absolves you from our exponential consumption of finite resources, and in many ways it's naive non-solution.
For example: culling and eating pest animals like deer is not vegan, but leaving them alone with no natural predators does exponentially more harm to all other animals that depend on the native plants decimated by an unchecked deer population. Eliminating the predators is a human-caused problem but washing our hands of the situation will kill far more.
Well, I have chosen to not reproduce. So at least my consumption has an expiration date. I'm sure this doesn't absolve me either, but it's what it is.
There is something truly distasteful about bringing a sentient being into existence for the sole purpose of exploiting it. Although I don't hunt (or fish), I don't take issue with it so long as it is done in a responsible manner. I know "responsible" is subjective, but I'm not taking an extreme position on it.
For the record I 100% agree with both of your positions in practice. We slightly differ on the topic of distaste for exploiting life.
IMO that's a function of how many human features we attribute to the life and how we exploit it. Thus it's very subjective and can only be looked at in the aggregate: slaughtering cows and pigs is distasteful because they bleed and scream like any mammal. Milking is exploitative but it can be a much less invasive process and a more fair exchange for a decent life of domestic animals. Think of the human job of a wet nurse, it doesn't inherently have to be shitty. In practice its just not feasible to have a benign and symbiotic relationship while providing milk for everyone.
I'm just here to rail against extreme positions like "all animals must have the same rights". It's such a seemingly benevolent statement that's loaded with much more complex implications when you apply it to reality.