Links - 26th June 2019 (3) (Vegetarianism/Veganism)

Are avocados and almonds vegan? Here's why some say no - "The video asks which of avocados, almonds, melon, kiwi or butternut squash are suitable for vegans. The answer, at least according to QI, is none of them. Commercial farming of those vegetables, at least in some parts of the world, often involves migratory beekeeping"
Nothing is vegan. Vegans need to kill themselves, since in nature bees etc are needed to pollinate plants"

Internet Goes After Vegans Who Challenge Carnivores To Eat Their Meat Raw - "If you think eating vegetables is natural, pluck them ot of the ground with your bare hands and eat them RAW."
"The only reason people can survive today on a purely vegetarian or vegan diet, is because of the abundance of food which is available for us {mainly due to our step from hunter gatherers, to farming and agriculture around 10,000 years ago)... if anything eating meat (and indeed cooking it) is more "natural" than living on a purely vegetarian diet; a feat only made possible by our modern lifestyle"

Your vegan diet is not cruelty free : TumblrInAction
Vegan logic: it's okay to be cruel to humans, but not animals (excluding the animals killed indirectly by a vegan diet)

Yes, eating meat affects the environment, but cows are not killing the climate - "A key claim underlying these arguments holds that globally, meat production generates more greenhouse gases than the entire transportation sector. However, this claim is demonstrably wrong, as I will show. And its persistence has led to false assumptions about the linkage between meat and climate change... For livestock, they considered every factor associated with producing meat. This included emissions from fertilizer production, converting land from forests to pastures, growing feed, and direct emissions from animals (belching and manure) from birth to death.However, when they looked at transportation’s carbon footprint, they ignored impacts on the climate from manufacturing vehicle materials and parts, assembling vehicles and maintaining roads, bridges and airports. Instead, they only considered the exhaust emitted by finished cars, trucks, trains and planes. As a result, the FAO’s comparison of greenhouse gas emissions from livestock to those from transportation was greatly distorted... In its most recent assessment report, the FAO estimated that livestock produces 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions from human activities. There is no comparable full life-cycle assessment for transportation. However, as Steinfeld has pointed out, direct emissions from transportation versus livestock can be compared and amount to 14 versus 5 percent, respectively. Many people continue to think avoiding meat as infrequently as once a week will make a significant difference to the climate. But according to one recent study, even if Americans eliminated all animal protein from their diets, they would reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by only 2.6 percent... Removing animals from U.S. agriculture would lower national greenhouse gas emissions to a small degree, but it would also make it harder to meet nutritional requirements... the energy in plants that livestock consume is most often contained in cellulose, which is indigestible for humans and many other mammals. But cows, sheep and other ruminant animals can break cellulose down and release the solar energy contained in this vast resource. According to the FAO, as much as 70 percent of all agricultural land globally is range land that can only be utilized as grazing land for ruminant livestock."
Since up to 70% of agricultural land cannot grow plants, claims that we will save a lot of land and resources by going vegan are false

Let Them Eat Meat : Veganism is Not the Lifestyle of Least Harm, and “Intent” Does Nothing For Animals - "In 2003, Steven Davis wrote a paper called, “The Least Harm Principle May Require That Humans Consume a Diet Containing Large Herbivores, Not a Vegan Diet.”...
'“The predominant feeling among wildlife ecologists is that no-till agriculture will have broadly positive effects on mammalian wildlife” populations (Wooley et al., 1984). Pasture-forage production, with herbivores harvesting the forage, would be the ultimate in ‘no-till’ agriculture. Because of the low numbers of times that equipment would be needed to grow and harvest pasture forages it would be reasonable to estimate that the pasture-forage model may reduce animal deaths by 50% or more. In other words, only 7.5 animals of the field per ha would die to produce pasture forages as compared to the intensive cropping system (15/ha) used to produce a vegan diet.'... Davis wasn’t savvy enough to say that the ruminant animals should be raised only on marginal land not suited for crop growth... Matheny... assumes that plant and animal protein quality are equivalent, even though it is widely accepted that plant protein is not as digestible as animal protein. In her entry “Tryptophan, Milk and Depression,” The Vegan RD Ginny Messina writes: “Since protein from plant foods is slightly less digestible than animal protein, vegan protein and amino acid needs are about 10% higher than for omnivores.”... plant products often have fiber, polysaccharides and phytic acid interfering with absorption of nutrients. Also important: Matheny forgot that dead animals aren’t used only for food. Animal byproducts end up in all sorts of things, and the fact that people are wearing animal skins in Davis’ world means less cotton and synthetic fibers that need to be created, another way to reduce our impact on animals... A recent study shows that bees have the same demonstratable emotions that dogs, rats and starlings do. If insect lives count (and vegans who say they don’t will often be at odds with their own ethics), it doesn’t make sense to only consider mammals in a calculation of the harm industrial agriculture causes. We should also consider the grasshoppers [and other insects]... it’s a little inconsistent for vegans to be nonplussed by the disappearance of animals into a farm machine vortex of death yet be outraged when baby male chicks meet pretty much the exact same end as a byproduct of egg production. Why is instant death fine if you’re a mouse and horrible if you are a baby chick?... The life and death of a farm animal doesn’t have to be that bad, and in fact is arguably better than most of the animals who live in freedom and are constantly fighting for life. Even Matheny agrees that the life of an animal on a farm is probably no worse than never having come into existence... a vegan diet is not the diet of least possible harm. How could it be? Veganism is a rigid avoidance of animal products no matter what – it doesn’t allow for adaptation. In a scenario where it is clearly less harmful to eat animals than to eat plants, veganism demands that you nevertheless eat the plants. And it is easy to think of cases where eating animal products would cause less harm to animals than growing crops. Eating dumpstered meat, road kill, and our companion animals and our relatives when they die, for instance... How many more animals would have to die in the growth, production and processing of crops to achieve the equivalent amount of nutrition and energy that a single blue whale provides?... as Matheny himself accidentally suggests, a lifestyle that includes hunting invasive species leads to less harm overall than a vegan diet... It is inconsistent to say that we must give up animal products because farming animals releases more greenhouse gases than plant farming, but then not also say that we must give up all activities that release more greenhouse gases than other possibilities. Why do we have to be vegan, but are still allowed to drive, fly, eat more than we must to survive, buy computers and televisions, eat rice, drink coffee and wine, and maintain a civilization? If veganism is not a subsistence lifestyle, it is disingenuous to single out the main thing it dislikes – animal use – and object to that and only that on subsistence lifestyle grounds... Furthermore, if our goal is to reduce methane emissions as much as possible, this means that not raising animals doesn’t go far enough. We should also kill all the wild animals that we can, since they too release methane"
So maybe the vegan solution is to kill food animals painlessly