Since purchasing and consuming animal products both depends on and contributes to animal agriculture, and animal farming necessitates rights violations against nonhuman animals, not being vegan when you have the option is synonymous with support for injustice. I believe that as leftists who purport ourselves to strive towards a more just society, and as human beings who generally value nonviolence and compassion, we should hold ourselves to a standard that doesn’t allow for the perpetuation of mass-slaughter. Let’s discourse!
Being shot by an experienced hunter should lead to an almost instant death. And it’s not like everyone would go out and hunt animals just so they can eat meat. You are hunting the animals to try and control population with a byproduct of meat that can be consumed.
I’m saying we shouldn’t population control humans in the name of environmental protection, because ultimately, the average human life is more valuable than the average deer life. I support going vegan, but we still need to clean up the mess we made in the past with population control, and our only feasible way to do this in most cases is by hunting, and if we have to kill an animal to protect the local environment, why wouldn’t we want the deer to be hunted by experienced and well trained hunters who can make the death of the animal almost instant, and why should we let their body go to waste if we have to kill them anyway.
You don’t have to kill them to protect the environment and what you say about hunters as efficient and precise killers is incongruent with existing statistics. “I support going vegan” - are you vegan then? Clinging to a violent status quo while refusing to even so much as acknowledge the moral worth of its victims, because you feel as though they are so beneath you that you can take their lives and their bodies at will, is not something I would expect from a leftist, or even a decent person to begin with. Bad take.
You quite literally do have to kill them to protect the environment though. Deer are highly destructive. And your only other proposals are to reintroduce wolves so they can be torn to shreds or sterilise huge swaths of deer. You can care about animals and understand that sometimes you have to kill them. It’s the only practical solution in the case of deer in GB.
My original argument was that you can go vegan for environmental reasons and that’s a significantly easier sell to most people than trying to convince them that killing animals for any reason at all is wrong. You have tried to convince me that it is wrong for experienced hunters and foresters in Great Britain to kill deer to prevent some of the destruction they cause to forests, but you can’t convince me because your moral views have no room for leeway and refuse to acknowledge that sometimes animals must die.
I never said “for any reason at all”. I said killing innocents against their will is wrong. I’m not necessarily opposed to all forms of euthanasia. A sterilisation program would not be worse than slaughtering countless individuals and neither would be reintroducing predators that you hunted to extinction.
But it’s not practical to sterilise hundreds of thousands of deer. It may be more moral to sterilise them than kill them. But you would struggle to implement that in anyway that could have an effect. The deer would reproduce faster than you could sterilise them without a cost in the billions. As well as that, reintroducing predators like wolves to a country isn’t as simple as dumping some wolves in a forest and hoping for the best, it takes decades of work to even get close to proper reintroduction of a species that was removed 500 years ago.