1. Being "vegan" means not causing any animal death

All "vegans" start here. They believe that because
they don't consume any animal parts, they therefore
don't 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" one's 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.

Archived from group: alt>animals>ethics>vegetarian