The focus is on killing because we understand that the brain is the organ which generates sensation and presence. Plants completely lack the machinery to integrate information on the level of even a ringworm. Once you get to the size of the animals we commonly eat for food, there is an immense amount of complexity, much more similar to ourselves than different. The ethics of veganism if very coherent. The brain generates subjective experience, the feeling of being something. To deprive one of that experience is wrong- most people would report preferring to be than not. Of course, to your point about subordinates, vegans should also treat humans with respect. Actually, veganism provides a framework that tells us WHY we should treat other humans with respect- because they feel, just like I do. So, if we can practically avoid causing suffering to those with brains, as most people on this website can easily do, it is best to do so.
Most plants worldwide are grown to feed to animals, by the way, so even if plants suffered, we should prefer a plant-based world which minimizes this suffering. this would also minimize the human exploitation in the food industry and reduce our reliance on the monoculture which broadly produces the bevy of animal feed grown to feed the insatiable global appetite for animal flesh.
One more comment on your alpine animals comment- those animals were slaughtered for their flesh. Could you "humanely" kill a human selectively bred to grow to the size of an adult in two years? How would you do it? Would the average person be ok if you painlessly killed them after two years of roaming through the mountains? I don't think so.
The moral justification comes from the understanding that the brain is an organ which integrates information to form this profound feeling of presence that you and I share. There is zero evidence to suggest that we don't share this feeling with animals. This is a scientific argument. I'm a professional neuroscientist working in brain simulation, and even the complexity of a ringworm is out of the grasp of the field. The complexity of the brain is unrivaled anywhere else in nature, and it has this wonderful emergent property that I feel like something. Animals feel like something. It feels like something to be a cow, a chicken, and a pig. They understand and relate to the world. That is why it is wrong to kill them unless you have to.
The main difference is that fish have a subjective experience of living, so if you have the option to not kill them, you should take that option. Fish experience living in a meaningful sense, forming social relationships and relating to and understanding the world around them. That makes unnecessarily killing them wrong.
This is orthogonal to the main point which is that just because we are capable of eating something doesn't provide a moral justification for eating something. It is extremely clear from data and example that it's possible and actually easy to live a happy life on a plant-based diet. This means that eating meat is a choice, and many would say it is an overwhelmingly cruel choice.
You could find the time to figure out what to eat on a plant-based diet in the space of a single Youtube video. The science that eating plant-based isn't just fine for you but also better for you is extremely solid. Just because we evolved to do something doesn't make it moral, and needlessly killing animals is clearly not moral. Humans did not evolve with the terrifyingly industrial scale farming we do now providing the unprecedented amount of meat global humans now consume.
Just because you evolved to do something doesn't provide a moral justification to do that thing. Whether you evolved to or not, animals suffer extraordinarily in the farms of torture we've made for them. It is well accepted that you can eat healthily on a vegan diet, and it would only really take a couple articles to figure out how to have a healthy plant-based diet. You could do it at Walmart.
I think that it is a health tax, as many things are. For what it's worth, it costs me 50 cents a day. I'm not sure what semantics about it not being a "true" algae has to do with anything, though. If it's a protist or an algae, I'm not sure what that information does other than muddy the waters for people forming an opinion on non-animal based omegas.
Abstaining from killing animals is about the sober realization that we can have perfectly healthy and happy lives without killing animals, who have feelings and a sense of perspective and experience, just like us. Living with my values and actions as one give me a strong sense of life, and I love cooking every day. Plants taste great when cooked well!
I think it's easy to take algal-based omega-3 supplements. They've gotten pretty good in the last couple years with gummies with a high dose and no algae test. And no fish killed!
It would be currently impossible for desalination to meet the immense water demands of the midwest. Water is not the only variable we should consider, either. That land used to constitute an immense, rich ecosystem, and now it consumes water, emits more carbon than the entire transportation sector, and kills billions of animals in the most cruel ways imaginable. Cheese is cruel and wasteful and we kid ourselves if we put our vanity above the needs of our planet and its nonhuman inhabitants
This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You, me, and everybody else can stop consuming animal products right now, at this minute. Water use is only a small part of the argument- these animals emit tons of carbon, and more than anything else, they use just as much land as there are forests remaining on the planet. I wish we could focus on visualizing the amount of habitat destruction wrought by animal agriculture. 80% of all agricultural land is for animals and the food they eat.
"Marginal" land for agriculture used to be America's Serengeti and now it's a vast, dead monoculture. And let's not forget- these animals feel, and they have a perspective with which they relate to and understand the world, just like we do. If we have a choice, we should choose to not consume products of cruelty which destroy our planet. It's easy.
You would think so, but this is actually completely wrong. Prawns and fish use the most freshwater per calorie of any food https://ourworldindata.org/water-use-stress. My point about cows reinforces the point on inequality of impact- the Colorado River is vulnerable and arid, yet we waste this water on cows.
We have a tremendous opportunity to use our food choices to push towards a more water-abundant world. 70% of all freshwater withdrawals go to agriculture, and 80% of agricultural land on Earth is used to feed animals. Animal-based foods are ENORMOUSLY less water efficient than plant foods, accounting for equivalent nutrition. 3oz of cheese is like leaving your shower on full blast for 30 minutes. Nearly half (46%) of all water diverted from the Colorado River is used to feed cows and the food they eat. We could cut down dramatically by eating plants directly.
https://ourworldindata.org/water-use-stresshttps://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milkshttps://www.npr.org/2024/09/09/nx-s1-5002090/colorado-river-...
EM Connectomics (and nanoscale connectomics in general) has really started to hit an exciting time with the release of two full-brain wiring diagrams. The future looks really promising for circuit-level understanding of the brain!
Unfortunately this pithy comment is inconsistent with the science. https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
Most of the emissions from beef comes from negative land-use change, that is the loss of carbon-sequestering life that existed in the land for both the cows and the tons of agricultural food they eat, and methane, which is released directly to our atmosphere and is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Fortunately, if we were to phase out cattle, this methane has a half-life much shorter than CO2 and would provide important early gains in restabilizing our climate.