> Many are also passionate about it because there are other benefits that come with it - no longer needing to kill sentient beings (you probably wouldn't eat your dog, so why eat a pig who is of equal awareness and intelligence?)
Plenty of "sentient beings" are killed for crop farming. I am not even sure meat eaters cause more deaths than most vegans, specially if they are not pbd.
Do you realize that /more/ animals die from crop harvesting for feeding animals? Because if you aren't raising animals for food, you don't need to harvest crops for them. The net amount of crop deaths goes down.
Further, it's the fallacy of perfection - we can't stop all deaths, but we can do our best to get as many as possible unnecessary deaths to end.
Veganism is about what is practicable - i.e. what can be done in practice, not perfection.
One death for hundreds if not thousands of meals. That or seafood if you don’t consider shrimp sentient.
What's further, you're wildly under estimating how much food the death of one cow would give you.
These are all super common arguments against veganism and easily disproven
Wait, so just because you consider that it is not a requirement, it is ok? The reality is another and veganism could be ending the world and you would be defending a best case scenario that doesn't exist?
> Statistically it is not significant
Have you ever worked in fields? I haven't spent significant amount of time there, but I have spend weeks in a farm owned by relatives. I don't know what you call significant, but the meat processing that happens there is not "not significant". Rodents, snakes, even foxes. And all that without counting insects.
> These are all super common arguments against veganism and easily disproven
I don't think so. You are just using some higher moral ground to defend your position: "I don't want deaths; yes they happen but they are not a necessity for my beliefs".
All that without considering the damage we could be making to the human race. We don't know the impact of large scale veganism on long term health.
Rats and rabbits are killed all the time on farms, it’s just how it is.
> That is, while crop deaths may happen, it is not a requirement that it does.
I don’t understand how ignorance that your diet kills sentient beings is an excuse.
> We could in fact engineer machines that don't kill animals while harvesting crops
That’s not the case now though
What if the best way to decrease (unnecessary) deaths is to consume animals?
For what it's worth, I probably wouldn't eat my dog, but I'd eat a dog with no reservations.
You wouldn't much like the taste, or the act of it?
As an analogue, I might have a car I like. The car could be worth more to me than its fair market value because of an emotional attachment, and that may mean I prefer not to sell it. If I'm in dire need of money, however, I'd probably sell it anyway.
So again, we can work on more than one issue, but why there is strong passion behind diet is that it's a very direct action and comes with other positives.