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Thoughts on Veganism?

About 5 years ago, I thought Vegans were utterly insane I didn't understand why you would cut out Animal products, it seemed unnatural too me.

I watched a couple documentaries and read into it, it did shock me that animal agriculture produced some of the highest greenhouse gases and it was generally an inefficient way of feeding the population as a whole because of the amount of water and grains an animal requires. The whole way Animals are slaughtered and cows have rods of bull semen forcefully pushed into them seems quite barbaric. For a while I kind of made that link and felt conscious of the meat I was eating and eventually cut it out pretty slowly, my main concern health wise was protein while meat/eggs/diary are convenient sources of protein, it is easy enough if you plan your diet to get it from beans, nuts, legumes, tofu and other sources. I haven't struggled with a protein deficiency but initially I was just not eating well and felt hungry constantly until I started tracking protein intake. I do think a lot of vegans who just don't bother with trying to get protein in really make it easier for people criticising veganism to use them as examples.

In general I feel like we are too entitled like we feel because we are the superior or dominant species, it's okay to kill Animals. They are proven to be sentient, I understand a lot of people will argue they don't posses the complexity of our type of sentience but it just doesn't seem like a good excuse. People dissociate as well from food they eat, most people wouldn't want to kill a cow to then hack up and cook then eat.

It is very odd to think how much my thinking has changed in the past few years to be honest.

What are your thoughts on Veganism? If you disagree what are your arguments against?
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SatanBurger · 36-40, F
Well see I was trying to be vegan but failed for a lot of reasons, so I'll argue my old points on this one from my point of view about what I researched and why I'm not vegan necessarily:

https://sustainablefoodtrust.org/articles/claims-against-meat-fail-to-see-bigger-picture/

[quote]I’ve lost count of the number of food campaigners who’ve told me that all we need to do to make food production sustainable is to stop eating meat. Really? What about the environmental impact of palm oil, soya bean oil, rape oil and even sunflower oil production; the over-enrichment of the environment from nitrogen fertiliser; the decline in pollinating insects; the use of pesticides with known harmful impacts that would have been banned years ago were it not for the fact that intensive crop and vegetable growers can’t produce food without them?

What also about the growing problem of soil degradation, not just in the countries from which we import food, but right here in the UK? Environment Secretary Michael Gove himself has warned that we are 30-40 years away from running out of soil fertility on large parts of our arable land. With only minor exceptions, soil degradation is not a problem on UK grasslands.

Contrary to popular belief, continuous crop production is not sustainable. That’s the mistake made by the Sumerians 5,000 years ago in what is now Iraq, and the Romans in North Africa 2,000 years ago, and in both cases the soils have never recovered. Far from abandoning livestock farming on UK grassland, we actually need to reintroduce grass and grazing animals into arable crop rotations. Despite the drop in demand for red meat in the UK (beef consumption down 4% and lamb consumption down more than 30% since 2000), at least one leading conventional farmer has now publicly recognised the agronomic need for grazed grass breaks. Even before there has been any encouragement in policy, I am aware that some arable farmers are already being forced to re-introduce grass and livestock because they can no longer control arable weeds like blackgrass, sterile brome and couch (twitch), which have become resistant to the in-crop herbicides repeatedly applied to them in all-arable rotations.[/quote]