[addendum to people answering "bees don't produce for bears either" or "plants don't produce food for humans either" : that's a strawman, I merely commented the term "naturally produced honey and eggs"]
BTW, vegetable farming, be it organic or conventional (especially conventionnel) isn’t exactly non-human animal friendly.
But still, veganism isn’t as clearcut as it would first seem.
Are chickens not the most wide spread birds? Sheep and cows the most widespread 'large' animals.
Even rats are doing as well as they are because of humans.
Yes I suppose you can reduce the meaning of life to successfully creating the next generation, that applies equally to humans and amoeba, but I would contend its too reductive.
Almost all that you are eating are plants, taken from the wilderness tens of thousands of years ago, and genetically selected over hundreds of generations.
If you went back to eating the plants in the state they exist naturally in the wilderness, you would have a very hard time feeding yourself.
I don’t really agree, but it’s a reasonable stance.
Most vegans I've spoken to believe that hunting is okay. If you have the callousness of killing a baby dear, then you 'deserve' to eat it. The problem comes from how modern meat is produced - in massive factories which provide just enough conditions for the 'meat' to get produced. Animal wellbeing is nowhere near the list of priorities.
Mark my words. Two hundred years from now, if there will anything left of this planet, we will be seen as retarded barbarians for what we are doing now to the animals and environment.
Most the control comes from killing the bad and reproducing from the good (and then hoping the queen finds good drones, avoids birds and finds her way home).
https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/1436-honeydew-ecos...
What is it that makes the "natural order of things" better? Aside from our fantasies about not being animals, aren't humans part of the natural order, by definition? It seems like a deforested barren world would be more moral under this sort of reasoning?
The plant "doesn't want" to be eaten (except for fertilization purposes) any more than any animal who can become prey.
I would argue that to the extent plants want anything at all, it’s just that. Animals too, for that matter.
The poet Percy Shelley wrote most idealistically but also intelligently about vegetarianism, this small section of a poem contrasts a human caretakers attention to the behavior of wild animals:
She lifted their heads with her tender hands,
And sustained them with rods and osier-bands;
If the flowers had been her own infants, she
Could never have nursed them more tenderly.
And all killing insects and gnawing worms,
And things of obscene and unlovely forms,
She bore, in a basket of Indian woof,
Into the rough woods far aloof,--
In a basket, of grasses and wild-flowers full,
The freshest her gentle hands could pull
For the poor banished insects, whose intent,
Although they did ill, was innocent.