Arguments used against vegans

[TylerDurden]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-5624979/How-vegan-lifestyle-isnt-cruelty-free-people-think.html

[dariorpl]

The radical militant vegans fail to recognize that pushing veganism for everybody is the most cruel lifestyle, because they're being cruel towards humans who cannot be healthy without consuming animal products.

The only way to claim that such is not the case is by equating animal suffering with human suffering. But even that argument would fail because you cannot be truly compassionate toward others if in doing so you are being cruel towards yourself.

[TylerDurden]

The radical militant vegans fail to recognize that pushing veganism for everybody is the most cruel lifestyle, because they're being cruel towards humans who cannot be healthy without consuming animal products.

The only way to claim that such is not the case is by equating animal suffering with human suffering. But even that argument would fail because you cannot be truly compassionate toward others if in doing so you are being cruel towards yourself.

That all depends on one's definition. For example, filling the landscape with unnatural concrete might help mankind one way in the short-term, but in other ways ruins mankind in the long-term via polluting the environment etc.. Point being that often opposites attract. For example, I have a village-idiot Liberal as a relative who prattles on endlessly about human kindness and how we must help the poor indigenous tribes in the amazon and whatever nonsense, but, in her real life, she has inevitably cruelly harmed her own family as a direct  result of her odious beliefs - sort of like Mrs Jellyby of Borioboola-Gha, a character created by Charles Dickens, who would constantly exhort people to give to the  poor deprived natives of Borio-Boola-Gha in Africa, while treating her own family like dirt. Nature, since it is natural, by its own very definition, must include all aspects of existence, whether kindness or cruelty, charity or selfishness, it all depends on the circumstances. Those who exploit nature for their own ends, whether for a vegan agenda or otherwise, will always eventually end up extinct if they carry out their unnatural notions to the full. Mother Nature is always good at erasing her mistakes in the end....

[dariorpl]

And yet the technology that all that concrete has enabled is making it possible to examine and plan to revive most of the essential living standards that made paleo life superior, and which largely haven't been seen for most humans for thousands of years.

And even the megaurban areas we see today are largely a result of government action.

[TylerDurden]

Wrong. Obesity-rates/ill-health-rates are rising inexorably, sources of genuine raw wild game are becoming increasingly rarer etc. The only hope would be a mass nuclear wipe-out of any country with more than a 2.1 birth-rate level. One only has to look at Czernobyl to see how wildlife swiftly expands as long as the human population in the same region dwindles to near-zero levels.

[dariorpl]

LOL I will ignore your psycho tendencies.

Yes, health is worse now than ever before.

But knowledge of how to reverse the trend in declining health is increasing quickly, albeit only in a small section of the population, but when the rest wake up, the know-how will be there for them.

And as we always disagree on this, an increase in the population is not a problem. People have been using that argument to predict economic catastrophes at least since the days of Thomas Malthus, Circa 1800 AD. And arguably, since the beginning of time. The decline in health has nothing to do with so-called "overpopulation". At least not in a direct causal relationship.

If your particular interest is in wild game, fewer and fewer people are interested in such delicacies, and a result, access to them is more widely available now than at any other point since the beginning of mankind. Yes, there is much less wild life in the planet, but you have so little competition for it, that you can't complain about there not being enough.

What you seem to be complaining about is not that there is no wild game left for you to hunt, but that nobody seems willing to hunt and sell it to you (or it's been made illegal). I definitely share your concerns, but what could possibly be the reasoning behind blaming *that* on overpopulation?

(I will add a caveat, when it comes to fish and other marine animal lifeforms, it's true that there is much less available worldwide, and there is plenty of competition for it, however, modern technology has allowed us to fish in a vast portion of the oceans that were never available before, and to the extent that the catch is not frozen or sprayed with chemicals before you buy them, they're arguably also more available today than at previous times, although they're likely to become more and more expensive as time goes by --- with river and lake fish, the situation is even worse, as these are often so contaminated that it's not worth it to eat them anymore, however wild they might be)

[TylerDurden]

You are contradicting yourself. On the one hand, you are claiming that scientific evidence will make the billions  believe in aRVAF diet, on the other hand you claim that the tiny minority that we are will ensure access to raw wild game. Given over-pollution, over-population, and, more importantly, the increasing capacity of humans to wipe out the environment, such as destroying insect/bee populations etc., your ideas are laughable. In a few more generations, the anthropocene will anyway have wiped out any wildlife not present in zoos, and we will be next....

[dariorpl]

There's no contradiction. If and when the billions become interested in wild foods, of course there will be very little wild food around, and it will be a luxury few will be able to afford. For now, there is plenty of wild food around, if you're willing to go out there and hunt it yourself.

Btw, have you heard of Svalbard? If you can handle the cold, it's one of the best places in the world to hunt such delicacies as reindeer, seals, walruses, artic foxes and even polar bears, all perfectly legal. Plus, taxes are some of the lowest in the world and you don't need a visa to stay for as long as you want if you're a citizen of one of many countries that signed the nordic sovereign treaty (includes Austria and the UK).

[TylerDurden]

I don't have the cash to go around hunting all the time. Anyway, Austria has plenty of raw wild game, even available in supermarkets.Just not raw organs thereof. There is even a small grassfed meat industry. The point is, however, that such sources will dry up sooner or later. So what if a tiny elite has access to fresh, unpolluted air and lots of raw wild game - it would just end like in The Machine Stops story.

[dariorpl]

You can actually save money if you move (permanently or temporarily) somewhere where most of your food comes from animals you hunt yourself. Paleolithic humans didn't have any money

I agree with you that commercial sources are likely to dry up or become illegal, but for the foreseeable future, there will always be plenty of other sources that are far too removed from urban areas to attract massive hunting.

If your complaint is that where you happen to live, there isn't much wild game around, that's more a matter of your location (and with most heavily populated areas, that is the case), but you shouldn't extrapolate that to the whole planet.