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Originally Posted by Mnemosyne  If you're vegan because you're concerned about killing animals, then should you not also be concerned about the plant life you kill? And where do you draw the line? What about the animals that were inadvertantly killed because they don't have anywhere to live or anything to eat because their natural habitat has been paved over for that new shopping center? |
I think humans will always cause some damage to the environment no matter how hard we try to reduce it, simply because we can't live "within" nature as other animals do. We're a bit too advanced for that. But there's certainly quite a bit of room for damage reduction, and we're already trying to reverse damage we've done as a species (protecting endangered animals, reducing deforestation, reducing pollution).
As far as plants go though, I don't see any problem with eating them. Plants don't have a nervous system, they don't feel pain. They also live in a symbiotic relationship with animals -- animals provide plants with food by exhaling carbon dioxide, and animal waste is fertilizer for plants. Plants provide animals with food and oxygen. They can't live without us, and we can't live without them.
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Originally Posted by elainevdw There's a book -- the name of which I can't remember -- that argues that vegetarians kill more animals that meat-eaters do, simply because mass farming practices anhillilate hundreds of thousands of rodents and birds that live in the fields. |
Ok, so mass harvesting kills animals. That sucks, I agree. But how about we take into consideration that most of the harvest goes toward feeding farm animals? Escapee posted that "more than 90% of all agricultural land in Britain is used to feed animals." Extrapolating that data, if people didn't eat animals, then there'd be 90% less field animals killed because we'd be harvesting 90% less plants. That book's argument only makes sense if farm animals were raised solely on naturally growing fields with no livestock feed harvesting by humans. That's simply impossible because of how much livestock is being raised.