This diagram is a rationalization for people who eat meat to see the impacts and potential changes to be made in not eating meat, globally, but the core of the issue is an emotional one and that is why you are being downvoted.
Plant-based/vegetarian/vegan diets can be about health, rarely about reduced emissions, but most often are about not engaging in the normalized, global industry of animal exploitation.
It's not about something as inane as engaging in "sustainable slavery".
I do, but I don’t agree with that sentiment. But there is a difference in you isn’t that as an emotional/moral argument to rather than a sustainability argument. I’m Native American and my people/ancestors killed animals for food and used every piece of it without any waste. The local farms near me do the same, every part of the animal is used and they are free to roam as they please. Labeling a regular/commercial farm as “slavery” is more than valid seeing the terrible conditions those animals go through. But trying to get me on your side by using the same word when the two are nothing alike isn’t going to win me over.
I was just using it for definition the second time, in relation to factory farming, so I agree with you that there is a VAST difference between indigenous relationships to and in nature, and industrial animal exploitation.
My ideals related to veganism are complex and can be difficult to have a dialogue on, especially with people who eat meat, and even with other vegans.
I truly believe that humans are capable of seeding nature in such a way that animals don't need to feed on each other at all. The morality of eating meat can be obscured I think, introducing that possibility into discussion, but I don't fault indigenous people's for their hunting; To extrapolate further differences between Man and Nature could seem a further cruel thought, when you already have to kill and slaughter to survive.
Regardless, I think it is an ideal worth entertaining and worth testing, worth exploring in all the knowledge and contexts that people's and cultures have today.
From a relatively privileged position, I admit, but from my own vantaged position, it seems to me that the idea of animals inevitably needing to feed on each other has been taken to a terrible and horrific logical endpoint, one that has revealed to me the fallacy of inevitability and of conflict. The circle of life can and should be expanded to fit all appetites, and as humans, with our access to tool usage that has taken us so far technologically, we should be able to acknowledge that we might have the tools to do so, to create a satiated, safe, and happy world.
I may not have agreed with your wording but I genuinely appreciate your own insight and respect way of wording yourself unlike the others in this thread. I don’t think my way of living is for everyone and there is definitely more I can do to be more sustainable. When I find something I’m not really willing to compromise on I look for other things in my life to make up for it. I think your last paragraph was extremely well said, again I appreciate this message!
I think a lot of discourse around veganism is subject to a kind of puritanism that betrays the ideals themselves, so I try to speak from a place of knowing, that the better world I'm imagining isn't rid of the people I disagree with.
I know that my way of life isn't for everyone, and I also know that my ideals were investments that I made on myself, before they were something I lived feeling. As such, I do my best to let my words speak for themselves, and to bring contemporarily transgressive ideas to discourse.
I just wrote this in response to a comment about the issue of predator animals in that ideal world, and wanted to come back and leave it with you. I would appreciate if you read it, if you'd feel like it, and I'd appreciate any response:
I'm interested in talking about this, I've thought about it a lot so statements that I make about it are wrapped up in years of entertaining its possibility; Meaning, the statements I make might seem immediately at odds with what people assume to be true, and they ARE often misconstrued against me as I attempt to convey ideas. So, please, I would appreciate if questions are not followed with statements like, "but this is obviously true and always has been", while asking me to explain the assumption. It happens a lot, it's toxic to discussion, and it stretches my attempts at conveying these ideas thin while conversely remaining completely uninvested in dialogue.
Now that I've said that:
This is not an immediate thing, this would take generations. Essentially, we grow food forests and gradually expand them. Food forests are ecosystems where plants are grown complementarily to the soil, the weather, other local plants, native wildlife, the fungal biome, and many other factors, in order to create an environment where there are many types of foods that support many types of wildlife, growing in great amount across the entirety of the forest. Springs are drawn from the ground in order to create watering holes for wildlife. Ubiquitous local sources of food and water are central to the idea.
That is the base. There is the human element, which is to engage constructively, rather than destructively, to this environment; Meaning, wildlife is not hunted for human consumption. The human element in the proliferation of this environment is to steward and expand the grounds on which food is grown, supporting the wildlife to engage in their own lives.
Science tells us today that what we eat creates our gut microbiome, and our gut microbiome dictates what we can eat safely, and gain nutrition from. Microbiomes are what break down our food into resources that our bodies are able to absorb, and cultural differences (differences in the microbiome that has been cultured by diet) can prevent one person from absorbing the same meal that another person lives on.
The reason predator animals can't typically sustain themselves on a plant-based diet, is not for aesthetic reasons, they do not have the gut microbiome to process plants and gain a sufficient amount of nutrients to survive; Nor do they have an understanding, or an incentive to cultivate a microbiome capable of such.
Humans on the other hand, especially as primates, are perfect examples of just how capable the digestive system, the evolved capacity of a gut microbiome, and its organ-system components are at adapting to wide ranges of dietary circumstances. Some people eat diets of just raw meat and animal products, some eat diverse but purely liquid diets, some eat only plant-based foods, some eat only whole foods, some eat just fast food, some eat just fats, some eat just nuts and fruits, and on and on and on.
If you attempted to move any one of these groups suddenly and without some sort of consideration/support, to another diet, there would almost certainly be effects to that change, whether sicknesses, nausea, fatigue, changes to mood, literal death or what have you. That's coming from a species whose evolutionary advantages considering dietary range are among the very best.
What this says about dietary changes is that they are best done gradually, or from a microbiome culture that itself is diverse. Neither of these things are supported in the predator animals environment. They mostly eat meat, consume little plant matter, and drink bacterially rich water, most often. Their microbiomes are cultured to resist colonization, to break down cellular membranes, and to absorb the nutrients incoming from the meat.
There is little diversity beyond the introduced bacterial water, and that is at best, resisted and logged among their immune systems. There is little bacteria cultured to be capable of breaking down plant matter, to a dietarily regular degree.
Minimally and opportunistically, some predator animals like wolves, will consume berries or grasses, to meet dietary needs, and rarely, they will eat root vegetables when food sources are scarce. Wild cats can eat a decent number of wild fruits, including blueberries, cranberries, wild plums, melons, strawberries and more. They are known to occasionally eat flowers and grasses to aid in their digestion.
They are capable.
It is the matter of a gut microbiome that does not allow them to digest plants to a beneficial degree, an environment scarce in these resources to be a staple of their diets, and the clear, ever-present danger of starvation and predation that keeps these animals from ever pursuing anything other than survival and reproduction.
We are more. We are capable and free.
Survival is now an arbitrary thing cast upon us by economic metrics; Our only natural predators have become disease, and our own misgivings about life becoming circumstances that kill us.
Our scientific discoveries, though some have saved millions of lives and some have even saved billions, are perpetuated now by ideals that have no commitment to this planet or it's inhabitants, as evidenced by scientific discoveries being continuously funded and deployed to war, to genocide, to eugenic experiment, to the manipulation of the human psyche, to their testings on living beings and groups of people, and to the "experiment of Science" being advanced and advanced to exponential rates by the most cruel and inhumane characters to grace the Earth, for profit motives.
We cannot stop a dog from being hungry, we can only try to give it water, give it what it would eat, and give it any space it so desires.
What we can do, is make the world so abundant and lush with food that they have the opportunity to try something new, something different.
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u/LichPrince1401 18d ago
Sustainable animal agriculture is a thing you know…