[strainer]

Vegan ethics are not based on the innate ethics of animals. It aspires to make the most of our human judgement and adaptability/invention, which few if any animals posses similar power to recognize and realize ideas and effects.

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.

[1] https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-sensitive-plant/