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Vegans cause animals to go extinct?

Have any of you people actually ever met a vegan in real life? They are not, contrary to the kinds of comments here, made of straw.
 
I rank the concerns expressed in the OP as being of the utmost importance.

Not.

'Fun' hypothetical, I suppose, but never going to come close to happening.

Never fear, we're quite busy extinguishing other species just as a matter of course.
 
Unabogie said:
Have any of you people actually ever met a vegan in real life? They are not, contrary to the kinds of comments here, made of straw.
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Yes, I have. She was the animal telepath and husbandry denier I referred to earlier. And at least her brain was made of straw, if not the rest of her.
 
arthwollipot said:
Yes, I have. She was the animal telepath and husbandry denier I referred to earlier. And at least her brain was made of straw, if not the rest of her.
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Well, then you need to meet some more of them, since your friend sounds insane. Most vegans I know (and I know a lot of them because I am one) subscribe to the belief that they are trying to do the least harm to the most living creatures. That's all. How that manifests is as widely varied as any other belief system. I don't know any vegans who want people to go extinct. We just want good food (vegans are total foodies) that fits our ethics as closely as possible. As I like to say, "it's not a religion, just a dietary choice". I don't know if cows would actually go extinct if we stopped eating them, but I would listen to any evidence that not eating them was worse than eating them. At the moment, eating them is pretty crappy and since I can easily eat other things that taste delicious, I don't think killing them for food makes any sense.

YMMV
 
Vegan perspective here:

I don't know too much about genetic strains used in animal agriculture, but I'm guessing most animals bred for slaughter do not exist in nature. Not breeding the animals would imply those particular strains come to an end, or go extinct, that much is true.

Bizarrely, people use that fact as a criticism of veganism. "Extinct" is an emotionally charged word, however I don't think the objections to hunting animals for extinction carry over to animal agriculture. How exactly do you harm something by not breeding it? Who is harmed, and in what tangible way? I'd say you do not harm anything by not breeding it, because nothing exists to harm in the first place. So not breeding food animals is wholly consistent with animal rights.
 
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How about us? Wouldn't human populations dramatically fall if we stopped eating meat? We'd need to turn a lot of pasture into crop land to sustain current populations.
 
Unabogie said:
I don't know if cows would actually go extinct if we stopped eating them, but I would listen to any evidence that not eating them was worse than eating them. At the moment, eating them is pretty crappy and since I can easily eat other things that taste delicious, I don't think killing them for food makes any sense.

YMMV
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The issue is that essentially the varieties that could survive in the wild already are extinct. The domesticated varieties require human intervention to sustain their population. If we did not receive any benefit from such animals (such as food or other products also typically shunned by vegans) then we would have no reason to sustain them.

As an example, the domesticated turkeys have been so altered to produce more meat, that their huge chests physically prevent them from mating without human intervention. If we decided to no longer eat them, then we would have no motivation to help them reproduce and they would die out within a generation.

Now, whether such a fate is better or worse than the life that domesticated turkeys currently have depends upon the morals of who is considering it. It could be argued that extinction might be better, in the same way that some people find euthanasia to be a better alternative to a lingering illness.

ETA: Dessi beat me to the morality question, so you see an example of at least one vegan who argues that extinction in this case would be more moral than mis-treating animals for food production(at least that's how I read her post)
 
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Rolfe said:
....

And just how much outback is there going to be for these feral populations? Maybe in Australia.... Certainly not here. There might be small populations on the hills.

Probably not complete extinction, but reduced to tiny populations of selected strains that wouldn't really be the animals we're familiar with.

Rolfe.
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Feral pigs are a BIG problem in the Southern US-- and especially in Texas, Florida, Hawaii--in spite of midnight hunting with "night vision" scopes, helicopters and "No bag limit" hunting...
 
Probably not extinct, but not anywhere near the numbers, and living a much worse existence. We have feral pigs, feral chickens, feral beef like animals (buffalo and the like, and animals like longhorn used to be feral, not sure that any are left), but only here and there. We just don't have the open spaces for animals like cattle anymore. Pigs are more adaptive.
 
Sideroxylon said:
How about us? Wouldn't human populations dramatically fall if we stopped eating meat? We'd need to turn a lot of pasture into crop land to sustain current populations.
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No, human populations would not fall.

In fact, human rights activists and environmentalists often support vegetarianism because it reduces the use of pasture land and pollution (see here). Around 50% of soy and corn crops go to feed animals, around 8% of useable water is given to food animals, and at least here in Nebraska I observe huge amounts of pasture used to sustain grazing cattle. Animals are remarkably inefficient machines for converting grains into meat, see here for the amount of grain goes into each kg of edible meat. Why is all that food being fed to animals when 1/3rd of the planet is undernourished?

From a resource usage point of view, I don't think you can really make an argument for animal agriculture.
 
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I do suspect that in the utterly hypothetical case of the whole of humanity going vegan, dairy cattle would need to be made extinct, a number of chicken species would need to go and other animals would go the way of the horse following the appearance of the automobile. Pets of a few rich hobbyists.
 
Dessi said:
No, human populations would not fall.

In fact, human rights activists and environmentalists often support vegetarianism because it reduces the use of pasture land and pollution (see here). Around 50% of soy and corn crops go to feed animals, around 8% of useable water is given to food animals. Animals are remarkably inefficient machines for converting grains into meat, see here for the amount of grain goes into each kg of edible meat. Why is all that food being fed to animals when 1/3rd of the planet is undernourished?

From a resource usage point of view, I don't think you can really make an argument for animal agriculture.
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I actually agree with the vegans on this. It appeals to the rationalist in me.

Unfortunately, it does not hold a candle in my internal debate to the emotional 'meat and dairy is yummy' argument.
 
Dessi said:
No, human populations would not fall.

In fact, human rights activists and environmentalists often support vegetarianism because it reduces the use of pasture land and pollution (see here). Around 50% of soy and corn crops go to feed animals, around 8% of useable water is given to food animals. Animals are remarkably inefficient machines for converting grains into meat, see here for the amount of grain goes into each kg of edible meat.
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Yes, that seems to be true for a lot of beef cattle and sheep. I wonder if pigs might be a different story though. Could they be sustained by commercial and domestic food waste?
 
Dessi said:
No, human populations would not fall.

In fact, human rights activists and environmentalists often support vegetarianism because it reduces the use of pasture land and pollution (see here). Around 50% of soy and corn crops go to feed animals, around 8% of useable water is given to food animals, and at least here in Nebraska I observe huge amounts of pasture used to sustain grazing cattle. Animals are remarkably inefficient machines for converting grains into meat, see here for the amount of grain goes into each kg of edible meat. Why is all that food being fed to animals when 1/3rd of the planet is undernourished?

From a resource usage point of view, I don't think you can really make an argument for animal agriculture.
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I heard an argument for the use of alligator meat because alligators don't have to consume as much to produce a pound of meat, since they eat chickens instead of plants.

Of course, that leaves the question of what they feed the chickens...
 
Sideroxylon said:
Yes, that seems to be true for a lot of beef cattle and sheep. I wonder if pigs might be a different story though. Could they be sustained by commercial and domestic food waste?
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My God, I hope not.

I'm a bit hazy about what would happen to all the hill land that's used for beef and lamb production, which isn't suitable for growing crops.

Rolfe.
 
Cleon said:
The basic issue is that we've spent thousands of years breeding animals to our purposes, to the point where they're simply incapable of surviving on their own in the wild. Dairy cows, for example, will get sick and die if a human being isn't there to regularly milk them.
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arthwollipot said:
I once went to a seminar with an animal telepath who denied this.
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You don't need to be a telepath to deny this. A cow that doesn't get milked regularly will dry up and quit producing milk. The udder will be painful for a while, but it shouldn't cause death if everything else is OK with the cow.
 
AmandaM said:
I keep seeing a statement like this in comments on Mother Jones articles: if we switch to an all vegetarian diet, our former food animals will go extinct.

What's the logic behind this?

I can almost see it being true for larger land animals like cows, but we don't eat horses and they aren't extinct. For the most part we don't eat dogs or cats and they aren't extinct.

???
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Vegans dont hunt and kill Deer, deer populations rise, and coorespondingly so does starvation and disease, so yes, they do.
 
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