It seems short-sighted to deem yourself more important than celery. We're both a tiny blip, an eddy in the outflow of energy from a star where we momentarily reverse the flow of entropy in the universe.
If you're not survival-driven, you will eventually be out-competed by something that is. If we don't survive, everything else is pointless.
The activity of caring can be either actuality-based or feeling-based.
A lot of caring from the vegan community is feeling-based. What this means is that one _feels_ that one cares about living species while not _actually_ caring about them. Furthermore, when one strongly feels in this manner they tend to hold strong beliefs as well. Much like religion, this results in people fighting over their cherished feelings and beliefs.
In the end, nobody seems to _actually_ care about the animals.
Think about it.
It would all be hilarious were it not for the suffering people instigate in order to defend their beliefs.
[dead]
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. We're trying to avoid that here.
I guess if you only care about the most primitive, baseline definition of "alive". I would think we had evolved beyond believing killing is killing no matter the circumstance. Do we not wish to distinguish ourselves from primal, purely survival-driven animals?