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Comment by vegetablepotpie | Hacker News Reader

As a vegan this is an argument that I’ve made before unsuccessfully. When I start talking about trophic levels people’s eyes gloss over and they behave confused and disinterested. I think the reason for this is that most people don’t remember high school biology.

Now if you were to talk about ethics THAT gets a strong reaction simply because it’s much more intuitive and relatable. People’s responses can be receptive, antagonist, dismissive etc. but they certainly won’t be falling asleep in front of you.

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As a non-vegan* that has in the past greatly enjoyed calimari (and octopus), I've long felt that it presents me with an ethical dilemma because of how intelligent octopus, and to a lesser degree, squid, are. However, birds have incredibly dense brain matter compared to most other land animals, so if I start worrying too much about ethics in eating meat, I know I'd have to cut out far more than just the intelligent molluscs, and the whole thing is awkward.

Most people don't like that awkwardness, so it's not surprising that you get pushback.

You sound a lot like me before I went vegetarian a few years back. I was always aware of the cognitive dissonance, knowing that I couldn't reconcile eating meat with my other values.

>I know I'd have to cut out far more than just the intelligent molluscs, and the whole thing is awkward.

I ended up just cutting out farmed meat in the end. As far as meat goes, I can eat what I kill. Apart from if someone has already got me food and didn't know, as to turn that down seems both a waste and kind of rude.

> I ended up just cutting out farmed meat in the end. As far as meat goes, I can eat what I kill. Apart from if someone has already got me food and didn't know, as to turn that down seems both a waste and kind of rude.

Pretty common rule for mendicant Buddhists, as I understand it. No meat is the general rule, but if you go a-begging and someone gives you meat, and you don't have reason to believe they killed something (or had someone else kill something) specifically for you, then you're good to eat it (or even obligated to).

To expand on your point, Theravada Buddhism allows monks to consume meat with those caveats.

There's an old joke: "How do you know if someone is vegan? Don't worry, he'll tell you."

My eyes would be glossing over in both cases. I've been confronted with this information many times in the past; often against my wishes despite the social cues I'm giving. It's not that you're wrong, or I don't care, or I don't get it. In the moment, I might even be interested. But the evangelists have burnt me out.

Getting a rise out of people for short-term gratification is usually not the best way to convince others to actually change their behavior, especially on loaded topics.

Given the choice between bored disinterest and confrontation I would say confrontation is the better tactic, at least it's memorable. Now maybe it's not the ideal method, but of the two presented here it seems the more reasonable.

Was your argument about biomagnification or energy? Because the latter is a less convincing argument: Plants are inefficient energy converters already.

There is nothing less convincing about that. It takes a lot of plants to get some meat. So a little 'inefficient energy converters' are better than a ton of them.

Efficiency of solar conversion is only important in so far as where solar energy is a limiting factor. In our case, it is not. There is plenty solar energy that reaches the earth and that we are not using.

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