Why veganism and vegetarianism do not actually help the animals

Most vegans and vegetarians say its wrong to eat meat because its immoral to take away the animals life. Sounds reasonable on paper, however, there is another side to the story: if I buy a piece of meat, the farmer who raised that animal will use my money (that I paid for the meat) to buy food for the remaining animals that he still has on his farm. How do vegans expect farmers to raise thousands of animals unless there is money coming into the farmers bank account so he can purchase food for his animals?

If everybody on Earth went vegan, the farm animals we eat WOULD NO LONGER EXIST at all because there is no reason for a farmer to bother raising them anymore. What kind of farmer is going to say "okay, so I have hundreds of sheep on my farm, but I am going to continue feeding them and make myself go totally bankrupt because everybody on Earth is vegan and no longer buys animal products". Make absolutely zero sense. Farm animals would basically go extinct.

So if any vegans or vegetarians are reading this, I am interested in hearing your thoughts. I am curious to know how we are "saving" the animals lives by refusing to give our money to farmers who want to buy food or those animals to exist in the first place?

Let me first say I'm no vegan and that I love meat, with that said this is an incredibly dumb thread.

@vfighter: I challenge you to prove me wrong. Don’t tell me my thread is dumb until you prove it.

@sealionact: since you are making a personal insult against me (calling me stupid directly, rather than simply disagreeing with me) I’m reporting you.

That almost made sense. Now let's say the regular farmer raises cows for a living for 40 year of his life... This is a wild theory, but I'll risk saying that killing several generations of animals over the years means killing more animals that just letting the ones who are currently alive to die. But I'm no farmer, maybe they use the same cow forever and the animal just keeps growing body parts. If that's the case I'm sorry but I'm just a city boy.

5/10 Troll

@lavamelon: He wasn't lying though.

If this isn't a troll thread, it's one of the dumbest threads I've seen in a long time.

Most people are replying and criticising me without actually disproving me. I want somebody to PROVE that farmers would continue to breed and raise animals if there was no money involved. Calling me names won’t disprove my post.

@vfighter: I’m not stupid, so he’s lying. I am waiting for you to disprove my post. Calling me names won’t disprove me.

The posts that have been attacking you personally are against the rules and have been dealt with.

That said, it's not everyone else's job to prove you wrong. In law/science/philosophy the burden of proof is on whomever is making the assertion. If you want to demonstrate that you are right, then do so with data that supports your position.

Well, if everyone went vegan then sure, farmers would go out of business - but couldn't those same animals just fend for themselves and live in the wild? What makes you so sure they'd go extinct?

I actually know a few points that support the op's argument, but if he's too lazy to support his own topic I'm not going to do it for him.

If we're talking specifically about the current animals in farms, then yes, if the farmers had no money they most likely wouldn't be able to support the animals anymore.

But if everyone stopped eating meat, then animals wouldn't continue to be bred specifically for consumption, and future generations of animals would be spared an existence just to be food (a lot of the time in horrid conditions).

And I think it'd be safe to assume that if we no longer ate cows, pigs, chickens etc, then they would continue to exist in the wild (as they did before we started farming them).

That's not actually true of every domesticated farm animal but to what I said earlier, if the op thinks it's everyone else's job to prove him wrong I'm not going to make his argument for him.

Isn't the main issue with veganism with the quality of life of animals and how we kill them? Not that we eat them?

My issue with veganism is that its choosing that certain life is more important than other life. We should treat them all equally.
Plants communicate though sound, pheromones and have been known to share resources with each other. They have limited locomotion and have memory. They have a specific pheromone when they get damaged which is the equivalent of plants screaming (That's the certain smell grass produces after mowing). Just because its impossible to imagine what its like to be a plant where as animals are a lot easier to sympathise with.

@Byshop: Some animals might struggle more than others to reacclimatise to living in the wild, but over time, I'm sure they'd adapt and evolve.

But anyway, I'll leave it to OP to explain his/ her position properly.

Well yes, many breeds would probably become extinct, but then again why keep them going if they were bred for eating in the first place. Let the the uber turkeys and Belgian Blues see the lives out in peace, nestling together in some far away utopian pastures. Then again they could evolve into some deity like super heffers and rise up against their former subjugators and murders of their kin - who can blame em.

This is obviously a troll thread ... which is sad, I'd be surprised if anyone actually found a good reason against living vegan

oh, there is an interessting point. Yeah, the main issue is how poorly animals are treated, there you are right. I like the idea of all life being equal (even if I disagree), but it fails on one major point: For you to eat a cow, it itself needs to eat a lot of grass / soy. So if you eat a cow, you damage more "lifes" than if you eat the soy yourself. So even if your idea of life being equal is right, you can still say that eating soy is better than eating a cow

Yes but you need fertilizer for the soy right? Whats fertilizer made from? It's a cycle. So no. Then you've got to plant them some where, some where life lives. So you end up destroying life like bugs, other plants and bacteria as well. Anything you do affects life in some shape or form usually negatively.

Then you have to harvest the soy beans. So your ripping something off the plant and causing it trauma, which requires it to heal.

@ArchoNils2: I dont think it's natural. Sure, it means less animals dying before a natural death occurs, but they will probably die a slower and more painful death that way.

Theres also the health issues. Unless you're very careful to take the correct supplements needed - especially b12 - you're likely to encounter physical and possibly psychological issues too.

Even environmental issues. Theres no such thing as faux fur, leather etc....its plastic. Plastic that comes with it's own drawbacks.

Then theres the ethical debate about using animals....Vegans tend to have no problem with keeping animals in captivity as long as its them looking after them, but there would be no guide dogs for the blind for example in a Vegan ruled world. Many Vegans insist on turning their pets into Vegans too, which I regard as downright animal cruelty.

But hey, let vegans be vegans I say. I simply dont like the food.

Then I will do it myself.

1) There is plenty of evidence to support the idea that if everybody went vegan, farmer would no longer have any financial motivation to raise animals in the first place. How will farmer even be able to afford the to purchase the food if he has no source of income. If you want proof of this theory from farmers directly, I have a video of a farmer claiming that there would be no farm animals in a vegan world. He says to a bunch of angry vegan protesters "do you realise that if people had your way, do you think that will be better for the animals? The will be no animals, why would there be any animals, we can produce animals for nothing can we", one of the vegan protestors asks him why there would be no animals, and the farmer responds with "well because, we only produce them for food". Since this is a farmer saying this, nobody else can refute unless they understand animal farming better than an animal farmer can. Well, here is the video, go to 00:20 and you will see the farmer saying this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDukZKYuQwE&t=364s

2) If we we release domestic animals into the wild, they would likely have a hard time surviving because they domesticated animals have lost most of their survival instincts. Domestic sheep are way too friendly and docile, they have no idea how to spot or outrun predators since they have been living under human protection for far too long. Try putting a domestic sheep in the middle of the African wilderness, and see how long it survives against all the lions and hyenas. Why wouldn't they go extinct?

@lavamelon: They're not the points you're looking for....

And in another argument, if everyone gave up smoking there would be no need for tobacco factories anymore.

Re: point 2, just eat all of the animals before turning vegan.

I don't think you got my point. You feed the soy to cows too. And for 1kg of cow you need more kgs of soys. So eating the cow causes more "soy suffering" than directly eating the soy.

@ArchoNils2: not really because people pound for pound, people require more energy than cows, which means more food. I know what you are going to say cows eat more though because they are bigger (Am I right?) While true. It brings me back to my previous post. It's a cycle. Everything needs to eat something. Everything has a "role". Everything has produces something for something else. I can't justify choosing what I want to suffer and kill. I would rather kill indiscriminately for food.(Id rather not kill anything at all, no animals, plants, insects or anything, lab grown meat for the win!) than try to choose the moral high ground.

You are conflating Veganism, vegetarianism, and conservationists. Being a vegan does not mean you are a conservationist.

More importantly I don't think you watched Jurassic Park.....

There is a scene Ian Malcolm is Hammond are talking and Ian Malcolm is against the idea of the park. Hammond attempts the use the false equivalence of condors as an example. Stating that if he had achieved the same process Ian Malcolm would be all for it. Malcolm explains that the lose of natural environment through human expansion is what caused their extinction, not a geo-physical event.

In the same right, the idea of veganism is multi-facet. The farm animals no longer resemble their wild neighbors anymore than dogs resemble or behave as wolves. Through years of domestication this animals would be unable to survive and in reality represent entirely unnatural and domesticated breed where their ecological lost would not be felt because they technically shouldn't exist and in the numbers that they do.

Further the argument is not about "saving" the animals but rather the inhumane and unnatural treatment of these animals. Many vegans are actually fine with sustainably sourced and ethically sound meat sources. They simply choice not to utilize them for personal choices. The impacts of meat production are real ecological and economic drain due the inefficiency of meat production requiring multiple steps of passing nutrients.

That being said, I was a vegetarian for 7 years about 20 years ago and now very much enjoy all types of foods including meat. There's nothing wrong with enjoying meat. There's also nothing wrong with not enjoying it either.

I still don't think you understand my point. The ration of what a cow eats and how much food you get from it isn't in the favor of the animal. I've seen many ratios, but most seem to be around 3:1. So a cow eats 3 pounds to produce one pound of flesh. So if I eat 1 pound of soy or whatever and you eat one pound of cow, that cow includes another 3 pounds of soy it ate. You will always do more damage if you eat flesh.

@ArchoNils2: no I get what you are saying, it takes more plants to produce meat then if we ate plants directly. Right?

But what I'm saying is that if we were on a plant based diet. We would require more plants than just eating meat because 1 pound of plant matter doesn't = the same amount of energy as 1 pound of beef.

That's not even counting all the different plants you are required to eat to get essential vitamins and minerals.

Yep, you make some solid points there...

And I've tried being vegetarian/vegan more than once but it just gave me anxiety.

As a vegan, my issue lies with the egg, dairy and meat industries. I don't believe it's right to exploit captive animals when there are viable alternatives. It's true that these animals wouldn't exist if it weren't for us farming them, but that doesn't make it okay to continue doing so. I have no problem with animals in captivity providing they are treated well, nor do I have a problem with someone going out and hunting a wild animal, but I don't support the idea of farming as it subjects animals to such an unnatural and overly stressful life.

Oh @Byshop you big tease!