[sebsito]

It depends on your moral values which can be different.

If you skip the simplification vegans are using to justify eating plants (they don't scream and run away when we're trying to eat them) you hardly can eat anything ethically.

[jamil7]

Plants lack nerves or a central nervous system or the ability to directly react to their circumstances, at somepoint you have to draw a line somewhere and most draw the line there. Regardless, if you really believe that plants feel pain, you're killing a lot more of them by raising animals for dairy and meat.

[ad_hominem]

Industrial plant agriculture kills and displaces untold numbers of small ground mammals. Thus the urban vegan doesn't get to pretend they have clean hands.

A pasture-fed cow kills approximately zero of the same.

Assuming your ethics give equal treatment to all mammals, the rural hobby farmer comes out far, far ahead of the urban vegan.

[igetspam]

Cite your sources. This is a statement made by many without evidence.

Sure, if we all had a cow and two acres and lived in a temperature environment where the animals could graze all year, we could have milk after the cow has had a calf. But who impregnated her? And what are you doing with the calf because it needs two acres of grazing pasture too. And then who impregnates her next year and what do you do with that calf? Another two acres? What about the harsh winter or summer? You're going to need to supplement with extra hay. Off to the agricultural supply who... ah crap, they farm. Farming kills fuzzy animals! Now we're terrible again!

Cows, like all mammals, aren't unending milk supply systems. They dry up because they lactate for a reason. Your imaginary hobby farm is an unsustainable system.

Source: I have a grazing pasture and grazing animals.

[j2bax]

Is rural hobby farming a massively scalable lifestyle? Would it still be less detrimental to the environment if everyone was doing it? I can’t imagine how much land, forests, wild animals that would displace.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Apologies for giving both your posts the snip, but:

>> Plants lack nerves or a central nervous system or the ability to directly react to their circumstances

Is the same as:

>> they don't scream and run away when we're trying to eat them

[ancarda]

If we were to raise genetically modified cows that do not feel pain, would it be ok to eat them?

[sebsito]

That's a great point! The pain rule seems a little arbitrary to me. Pain evolved only in some life forms for which it was beneficiary. It doesn't seem to make killing them more problematic than life forms which can't feel pain. It's only our emotions which react to pain and thus it seems worse.

[liaukovv]

Most draw the line somewhere around dogs