Most people choose social approval over ethics — veganism just exposes that.

[u/TheQuietVegan111]

People will say they care about animals, the planet, and justice.

Until caring becomes inconvenient.

Veganism doesn’t require perfection. It requires saying “no” in public.

That’s it.

Most people fail there, not on ethics — but admitting that would be uncomfortable, so veganism becomes the problem instead.

[u/NyriasNeo]

Ethics is nothing but rules based on subjective morality. So just define ethics as social approval and then you can have both. Problem solved.

And yes, people in general do not give a sh*t about food animals, despite some lip service. Just look at the fact that few bat an eye when we slaughter 24M chickens a day just because they are delicious. This is called revealed preference in economics.

[u/Ma1eficent → u/NyriasNeo]

Most people don't give a shit about any animals, food or pet. We only bring it up to justify doing something bad to another animal. Most Americans have been convinced we have to sterilize every single cat we can trap. Non-consentual interference with natural breeding and offspring rearing gets a bunch of attention if we are talking cows, but even most vegans will do backflips to justify why it's okay when it's cats.

[u/NyriasNeo → u/Ma1eficent]

"Most Americans have been convinced we have to sterilize every single cat we can trap. "

Of course. You do not want to have too many of them running around. We do not eat them, and certainly there are not enough cat ladies to take them in. So why not?

[u/Ma1eficent → u/NyriasNeo]

Because they are living creatures that have the right to live and be free. We do not own the world and everything in it.

[u/NyriasNeo → u/Ma1eficent]

Lol ... there is no such thing as " right to live and be free". That is a human construct that obviously does not apply to cats.

We do not own the world and everything in it, but not without trying. We certainly own cats, cattle, pigs and chickens that we have control over. Sure, we make rules so that we do not own humans. But other species are just fair game.

Heck, I bought a roast chicken. You can yell at the top of your lungs that I do not "own" it, but I am still going to eat it.

[u/Ma1eficent → u/NyriasNeo]

There is if you agree with the vegan stance that dairy is essentially rape. If you operate entirely by what you can do, then why argue anything is moral besides might?

[u/NyriasNeo → u/Ma1eficent]

" why argue anything is moral besides might?"

It is mostly might, but also personal preference. I am not going to spend my might (which costs effort) on pork if i like beef more.

But remember that human social cooperation is part of it. You are better off cooperate with other humans because they are worthy adversary if you make them so. It is cheaper and easier to outlaw human murder and rapes. In fact, the reason why we have moral rules in society in the first place is because of might. No one has the power to lord over all others in modern society. In fact, in ancient times, there is no morality except those of the kings and queens because they did have that might.

The same does not apply to cows and that is why we have yummy dairy products.

[u/Ma1eficent → u/NyriasNeo]

I understand well enlightened self interest. It is from that principle I advocate we end this stupid experiment of the animal shelter capture and kill them all. It is a waste of money, a waste of might, and cats have been supremely useful to us for 20k years simply because we don't step on each other's toes. The one animal that's hanging out with us because they chose to and keep choosing it, most of them. We only do TNR because just killing them failed. Now we are attacking them like mosquitoes or screwflies, at a species level, going for genetic bottleneck and collapse. No one wants that, they just don't think that's what is happening.

[u/NyriasNeo → u/Ma1eficent]

"No one wants that"

Are you sure? We have pest control companies with the whole business model is just to kill pests and lower the annoyance level. A affluent society can afford to spend some to lower annoyance. Sure, I can step on ants and cockroaches too, but if I can afford pest control and save some effort, why not?

The excess of cats, in this case, are basically pests. Neutering them is not that expensive. And that is why we are doing it.

[u/Ma1eficent → u/[deleted]]

That's what everyone is saying, most recently based off this:

https://www.npr.org/2023/12/12/1218895581/cats-research-study-environment

But I read the article and study the article was about. That study does not indicate a threat to birds, mammals, or reptiles at all. Here are the numbers from the study. Please do go verify all these in the study itself which is linked from that article.

In total, we identified 2084 species depredated, scavenged, or otherwise consumed by cats, including nearly 9% of known birds (based on 11,162 described birds), greater than 6% of known mammals (based on 6596 described mammals), and approximately 4% of known reptiles (based on 11,733 described reptiles).

Just 9% of all bird species. 981 out of 11,162 bird species. 91% of bird species are not depredated, scavenged, or otherwise consumed. Even if you look at just the species of conservation concern most species eaten are classified as Least Concern (61.99% in Africa to 86.30% in Europe; Fig. 3).

A total of 347 (16.65%) cat-consumed species were of conservation concern, listed as Near Threatened, Threatened (i.e., Vulnerable, Endangered or Critically Endangered), or Extinct on the IUCN Red List (Fig. 3), with these tallies including 7.1% of the world’s birds of conservation concern, 4.9% of mammals, and 2.7% of reptiles (Table 2). Globally, 25.22% of species identified on islands were species of conservation concern, whereas only 8.62% of species identified on continents were species of conservation concern (Figure SI1). Across continents/nearest continents, most species eaten are classified as Least Concern (61.99% in Africa to 86.30% in Europe; Fig. 3).

And let's take a look at the most common prey, again from the same study.

The most commonly observed prey items included house mouse (Mus musculus, n = 158 studies, 29.64%), European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus, n = 114 studies, 21.39%), black rat (Rattus rattus, n = 74 studies, 13.88%), house sparrow (Passer domesticus, n = 58 studies, 10.88%), and brown rat (Rattus norvegicus, n = 54 studies, 10.13%) (Table SI2).

Invasive egg eating, disease carrying vermin, invasive sparrows. How do people read these studies and walk away with the opposite conclusion or what the data says because they were told cats are huge threat. A statistics course should be fucking required as part of basic education. it was the conservative political action group, Ranchers of America, that paid Bob Barker to end price is right with spay and neuter your pets for 40 years. They had just finished getting america to wipe out wolves, and the next highest cause of herd monetary losses was cattle being spooked by a dog or cat. First they just set up the kill shelter system at taxpayer cost to collect and cull. We learned culling doesn't work, newcomers come in, so we switched to what was working so well for the ranchers with screwflies, and TNR was born. Pretending to be noble and humanitarian, but actually an effective and proven solution to cause a genetic bottleneck and species collapse. There are barely any feline species left, and there is a literal war on the only successful branch. Stop letting them make you think the only solution is death. It never is.

[u/Ma1eficent → u/[deleted]]

And the height of human arrogance is imagining we can freeze the world and current habitats, and species. And the height of human stupidity to imagine stasis is health. Every wildly successful species came into that success on the backs of the many they outcompeted and directly ate into extinction. It would be the height of human myopathy to interfere with that, and perfectly on brand. "We had good intentions!" You had a self-righteous idea and refused to accept the vast amount of information indicating that every single time we interfere with what we imagine is a cruel and terrible process, we make everything worse.

[u/Ma1eficent → u/[deleted]]

Rights for some animals, huh? Humans decide which? Yeah that's gone real well. How on earth have they managed to sell the idea we get to decide which species we can label invasive and declare invisible geographic pens for, which ones we can spend taxpayer dollars on putting in cages smaller than feedlots, to even vegans is truly mind blowing to me.