Oh goody! A talk about veganism! I have so many opinions on veganism that I am going to take this as an excuse to share!
Not sure if anybody knows this about me but... I'm pretty big on animals! (Yes, I'm sure this comes as a shock. I hide it very well.) And I think that cruelty to animals is a bad thing and I think that people who hurt animals are bad and smelly, and I think it would be nice if everyone was nice to animals and they all had nice, happy lives.
Now, a lot of people who are really, REALLY into animals are vegan. Like, they think that if you REALLY care about animals then you shouldn't eat animal meat, therefore being indirectly responsible for their deaths... And... That's cool. It makes sense and, even if it didn't, people can eat what they want. I don't give a shit... Where the problem comes in is that, for most vegans, in an attempt to make the world a better place for animals to live in, their solution is to try to convince more people to become vegan... And... This I think is bad.
Now, I don't think that convincing other people to become vegans on it's own is a bad thing. The problem is that it seems to be their ONLY solution... That and protesting outside places that sell meat and animal fur and shit like that. This, I think is a really bad idea for 2 reasons.
1. It's not going to work. The majority of people are not going to stop eating meat just because you said so. Animals are delicious.
2. And this is the important one... Even if it did work, everybody in the world becoming vegan would NOT make the world a better place for animals.
Why? Well, I watched a David Attenborough documentary recently and I learned something really interesting. Wild mammals only make up 4% of the world's biomass of mammals. That is every mammal on the face of the earth from mice to whales. 4%. That's pretty messed up. But what's even more messed up... Humans make up 36% of mammal biomass. And the other 60% of the mammal biomass... Livestock. Fucking 60% of the world's mammal biomass exists solely so that we can eat it.
Now, let's say that one day, everybody in the world becomes vegan. What happens to that 60% of the world's biomass of mammals that we use for livestock? That's approximately 1.5 billion cows, 1.2 billion sheep and 778 million pigs. Not to mention the 26.5 billion chickens and other poultry that we eat. What happens to them when people decide that they're not going to eat meat anymore?
I'll tell you what happens! They get put down. I mean, the farmers aren't going to make a profit selling them anymore. They won't be able to afford to feed them, and why the hell would they feed them if they're not making a profit. You couldn't release them into the wild. Imagine all those billions of animals being set loose on the world. It would cause mayhem and most of them wouldn't be able to survive in the wild anyway, so... Yeah, they'd just be put down. So, veganism would ultimately end up being responsible for the mass genocide of billions of animals over the world.
Now, one thing that I do think would help to make the world a better place for animals to live in would be a massive support for free range meat/animal products. Now, the animals will ultimately be killed for their meat, but they would live a relatively happy and comfortable life before they died... And I'm okay with that.
The way I see it is, animals kill animals too. Gazelles will live a generally happy life, wondering around, grazing, mating, having babies, and every now and then a lion shows up and they have to run away and if the lion catches them, they die. That's okay. That's a normal gazelle life... But, those gazelles are not being born in factory farms where they are immediately separated from their mothers so that their mothers milk can be used to feed other animals, then forced to spend their brief lives confined in a tie stall where they can barely move, with their tails cut off just for convenience and their hooves become horrifically overgrown because they're not walking on the right kind of terrain to trim them.
Now, if people refused to eat factory farmed animals and only ate free range animals, the lives of livestock would improve significantly. Free range farmers would make a massive profit and non-free range farmers would make a loss, meaning they would either need to sell their livestock to free range farmers or become free range themselves. And it's not like anybody is going to turn their nose up at free range meat because they think that factory farmed meat tastes better. The only reason people don't buy free range products is because they're more expensive.
Now, if the vegans who are all trying to convince everybody not to eat meat instead focused their attention on trying to get everybody to go free-range, that could make a lot of difference! You'd have special "Free Range" cafes popping up. You'd get restaurants adding "Free Range" options to their menus. Hopefully, the demand for free range products would eventually make free range the norm, which would mean the price difference between free range and non free range products would even out and then everybody would be eating free range because... Why buy non free range products if the free range stuff is the same price?
But, of course, that would never happen because, from what I've seen, most vegans don't become vegan because they actually care about animals. They do it because they like feeling superior to other people... Rant over! ^_^
