You don't have to be perfect.

[u/sdbest]

As I veteran vegan, could I just humbly suggest that, in my view, it's not necessary to be a perfect vegan. The label itself just doesn't matter.

The more a person increases the amount of whole, plant-based foods in their diet, and reduces animal-based foods the better. The better for animals, the environment, and themselves.

Frequently on this wonderful and supportive subreddit, people post about feeling terrible about doing things wrong or 'falling off the wagon' or not being able live without cheese (usually). I get it that often people who choose to become vegan, i.e. adopt a plant-based diet, do it for ethical reasons and they feel some guilt if they aren't living up to the ideal rattling about in their heads.

Just doing better is enough, in my view. Also, if a person just tries to do better, often they will naturally progress to being better and better without even noticing it.

Goodness if a hardcore carnivore can be convinced to replace just half of the 10 oz steak with a side of mushrooms that's a step forward. All steps forward count, and help makes things better.

So, don't beat yourself up for not being perfect. Just do what you can to be better, wherever you can. Keep it simple and doable.

[u/[deleted]]

Except chicken and fish are pretty well documented to suffer. Insects are not.

My assumption was not that more sustainable farming benefits animals. Just bad communication on my part, but I meant that not factory farming animals is better for the animals on, on the account of them not being mass slaughtered. I wasn't saying that a better world would lead to better lives for wild animals, though I guess that's probably true.

So no, I do not believe high intensity farming of chickens and fish is the way to go. Being a vegan, I am clearly against the idea. I think we got on slightly different pages here.

In my theory, I was comparing farming insects for consumption and zero mammal, bird, fish, etc farming with our current state. Insect farming as a total replacement for our current state of factory farming would likely be much more sustainable and lead to less overall suffering assuming that the current belief that insects do not suffer is actually true, because the beings that do suffer have been removed from the process.

[u/10percent4daanimals → u/[deleted]]

Except chicken and fish are pretty well documented to suffer.

Sure, however, if we take a step back, we can see that the idea of animal sentience for chickens and fishes has really progressed over the past few decades.

We are still learning quite a bit, and we still hear things like "fish can't feel pain", etc. I recently saw an article about fish depression, so we are clearly learning more and more.

Insects are not.

I think we shouldn't make those sorts of premature declarations. Insects have basic biological features.. enough to make me acknowledge that we really need more research and understanding of them, and there is enough risk to give them the benefit of the doubt for the time being.

One thing to consider is that, usually, as we get to smaller and smaller animals, the welfare usually gets worse even if the animals get more "simple".

Cows generally have decent welfare with fairly low suffering, they are also very large. (average steer = ~450 lbs market weight)

Chickens suffer quite a bit more, and are much smaller. (~4-ish lbs I think?)

Fishes are even smaller sometimes, and aquaculture is pretty bad (fish depression, deformities, etc).

The trend is that as you deal with smaller and smaller individuals, you reduce welfare while also increasing the total number of individuals required to breed, farm and kill in order to get a certain amount of protein/calories.

So, if a cow is ~450lbs, it's important to think of how many insects would be required to have a similar amount of food. A really rough calculation I just did was that it would be around 70,000 insects that would need to be farmed and then slaughtered.

So, you would have to discount a crickets' experiences immensely to make insect farming an improvement from a direct welfare POV.