ANIMAL FORUM

> On Feb 21, 1:55 am, Rudy Canoza wrote:
>> 1. Being vegan means not causing any animal death
>>
>> All vegans start here. They believe that because
>> they dont consume any animal parts, they therefore
>> dont cause any animals to die.
>>
>> This belief is provably false. Animals die all the
>> time in the course of commercial agriculture. Animals
>> are chopped to bits in the course of tilling fields, as
>> well as in the course of harvesting crops. Animals are
>> intentionally killed in and around food storage
>> facilities; for example, rodents are lethally trapped
>> and poisoned at grain storage facilities.
>>
>> The initial false vegan belief is a classic logical
>> fallacy: denying the antecedent. This belief runs as
>> follows:
>>
>> If I consume animal parts, I cause animals to die.
>>
>> I do not consume animal parts;
>>
>> therefore, I do not cause animals to die.
>>
>> This belief is false. There are other ways to cause
>> animals to die other than by consuming products made
>> from them.
>>
>> 2. Being vegan means I minimize my animal death toll
>>
>> False. To claim to be minimizing necessarily
>> presumes that a calculation has been made, even if only
>> a thought exercise. But it is trivially easy to show
>> that going vegan does not necessarily mean, in and of
>> itself, that one is minimizing ones animal death toll.
>>
>> The easiest way to see this is to compare two different
>> vegan diets. Unless the heroic but unrealistic
>> assumption is made that all fruit and vegetable foods
>> cause exactly the same animal death toll on a per
>> serving basis, then clearly two different vegan
>> diets, with different elements comprising each diet,
>> have different animal death tolls, one necessarily
>> higher than the other. The person consuming the higher
>> death toll vegan diet clearly is not minimizing his
>> overall animal death toll. The claim of veganism in
>> and of itself yielding the lowest harm outcome is false.
>>
>> 3. Going vegan necessarily means causing less animal
>> death than a lifestyle that includes animal products
>>
>> Still false. Which causes more animal deaths, a pound
>> of venison from a deer shot by the consumer, or a pound
>> of rice? Pound of venison: one dead deer. Pound of
>> rice: some unknowable number of animal deaths, but
>> certainly more than one. The issue is that *all* of
>> the deaths resulting from the cultivation of a rice
>> paddy are shared among *all* consumers of the rice from
>> that paddy. If cultivating a hectare of rice producing
>> land results in 100 animal deaths - undoubtedly on the
>> low side - then *each* consumer of rice from that
>> hectare shares in the responsibility for *all* 100
>> deaths. There are no fractional deaths, and no
>> proportional allocation of responsibility for them.
>
>
>
> Rudi a liawwwwww.