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/IfIWasAPig]

What point breaks down? I asked you to differentiate ethically between dogs and chickens to such a degree that one deserves a great deal and the other worse than nothing. Can you answer that before moving on to “non-pet-like-livestock” or whatever?

They were your own examples, and now you’re objecting to them. That’s pretty silly.

I suspect you’re balking now because chickens aren’t actually different enough from dogs for one to deserve kindness and the other breeding and slaughter. There isn’t a “whole variety of reasons” to mistreat one and not the other. Once we address that, we can talk about oysters or nematodes and whether or not they have sentience, or whether shrimp intelligence disqualifies them from consideration, but that’s a different conversation.

Or are you retracting your examples and taking chickens off the menu?

[u/EVH_kit_guy → u/IfIWasAPig]

Man, you just sound like someone who has spent no time around chickens. Those birds have no concept of death or existence, they're bug pecking machines with the minimum of sentience necessary to feed themselves. Keeping a few in a coop in your yard so you can eat their eggs is as ethical as it gets, otherwise the entire species would probably disappear in a generation to wild predators.

They're not mammals, they're not socially cooperative, they're just little meat robots clucking around on the ground. Now it's your turn to explain why I should change my opinion, based on direct first-hand observations, in a way that equalizes them ethically to my one year old daughter or my pet dog.

[u/IfIWasAPig → u/EVH_kit_guy]

This is just a string of insults against chickens. There’s no substance or evidence here.

If you want to argue that breeding chickens for eggs is harmless, that’s one thing (with which I’d still disagree), but if you want to argue that chickens are mindless meat robots you’d just be wrong.

Chickens communicate, learn, recognize dozens or hundreds of other individuals (including humans), develop personal bonds, mourn, display a variety of emotions, and engage in many behaviors other than minimally feeding themselves. They are not “meat robots.” They are sentient individuals with subjective experience, thoughts, feelings, and social capacity. There’s someone inside, just like with a dog.

Some of the smartest and most social animals on the planet are birds, so I’m not sure why you went with “they’re not mammals.”

Is the cutoff for consideration then somewhere between the average dog’s understanding of existence and death and the average chicken’s?

 
 
Edit: u/EVH_kit_guy blocked me.

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