+Imina Bubble: "BTW, my chowing down on deep fried chicken goodness has zero impact on your life."
Hmm... It's actually not accurate to say that your eating animals has no effect on my (or others') lives, +Imina Bubble.
By analogy, pretend for a moment that I'm having a conversation with a serial rapist. For him, he argues, the act of "romancing" women is just about how good it makes him feel -- it's just about the sex. I might argue that it's about power and control, and that he doesn't need to do this, so it's a choice he's engaging in which hurts others. He might then retort that since I'm a guy, I don't need to worry -- his rapes have zero impact on my life.
To be clear, I am not calling those who eat animals rapists but am merely using this as an example of a similar logical fallacy.
As far as needlessly killing and eating animals goes, your doing this has direct and indirect effects on me personally. Your choice to do so is destroying the environment I live in. Your choice to do so is effecting the cost (and quality) of health care I get to enjoy because of the unnecessary burden you're placing on the system. In a very personal way, I empathize with the chicken, seeing it as an individual that exists for it's own purposes -- just as I see you as an individual who exists for your own purposes -- and when he or she is killed, it is a sad and mournful event.
Withal, can you see how your decisions actually do have a direct and negative impact on others, +Imina Bubble?
+Imina Bubble: "Eating animals has zero effect on health care costs. You are citing belief not facts. I am not harming the environment and in some cases I am helping through population control."
Respectfully, +Imina Bubble, I am not exaggerating on this one; people who do things which harm their health are less healthy. =o)
As for population control, this seems like a strange justification to offer. After all, agribusiness tightly controls the number of animals produced, and they do so via artificial insemination (google "rape rack" for more info on this). We're not eating 20 billion odd animals a year because we're fighting to keep the population down; rather, the market currently requires these numbers of deaths, and suppliers are meeting that demand. So, while more and more people are living by their values each year and not eating animals, this is a gradual process, and as demand deceases, the production managers are correspondingly decreasing supply.
Regarding the environment, I think you have some reading to do on this one. It's widely known and well demonstration how severe the environmental impact is from agribusiness. This spans from issues such as core environmental concerns (e.g. water pollution, soil pollution, etc.), to medical issues (e.g. antibiotics use creating "super bugs", etc.), to a slew of other concerns. From an environmental perspective, eating animals is utterly indefensible, I'm afraid.
—☆—★—☆—★—☆—★—☆—★—☆—★—☆—★—
This post is one in a series in which excerpts of discussions on veganism from other threads are reposted (or paraphrased) for the sake of expanding the conversation. As always, your thoughts and questions are welcome. See the full collection via the #spommveganchats hash (or perhaps with a more robust search, such as goo.gl/JoxZC).
(for anyone requiring/desiring more context, the original conversation can be found at goo.gl/A6RFrx)
#vegan #environment #population #healthcare #logicalfallacy
