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Comment by iratewizard | Hacker News Reader

Can you stomach eating fruits and vegetables from an industrialized farm knowing that more animals died to make your salad compared to my steak? Or are certain animals lives worth more than others?

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"crop deaths tho" is not a stable argument. Eating meat requires death. But there are ways to avoid killing animals when harvesting grains etc. And in any case, it's a very inflated view - you're still killing more animals by eating meat than you are by not.

> you're still killing more animals by eating meat than you are by not

Pure conjecture. All numbers I've seen show a higher quantity of deaths from crop farming per calorie.

I've seen this thoroughly debunked several times. What "numbers" are you alluding to? The most commonly cited number I've seen from a 2003 study is 7.3 billion crop deaths per year, which experts seem to agree is likely a large overestimate. Even if that were the case, that puts crop deaths at an order of magnitude smaller than the number of _land_ animals slaughtered every year; that number is further dwarfed if we included aquatic animals.

Additionally, the crops where some of the highest number of field deaths are encountered (such as soy and corn) are also primarily as animal feed.

So no. Vegans do not kill more animals.

Furthermore, most meat eaters additionally eat plants too, and the animals they eat also usually are eating industrially farmed plants, which really makes the crop deaths argument silly.

Farm animals are fed primarily crop byproduct that you can't digest and grass.

So what? If your argument is absolute number of deaths because of crop deaths, those crops would still be killing animals and thus it's still more than not eating meat.

Wave your hand, call it debunked and then pretend that we grow far more surplus crops to feed animals than we would need to of everyone switched to your disease riddled cult diet.

Feel free to cite something in defense of your argument.

You've already seen sources and are even able to cite estimates. Why would I waste time linking to something that will never change your opinion?

Yes, and the sources and estimates I've referenced disagreed with you. I'm completely willing to change my opinion, but you've presented nothing substantive so far.

What you bring up is an interesting topic, and you should try to increase the explicit information and reduce the hostility.

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