Guess I’ll start at the top…

“We all eat. We eat, we take lives, and at some point our own lives will be taken and animals will eat us. There is no moral concepts or philosophizing that can change these simple facts, but as humans we like to play around with the concepts of ideals, ethics, laws, and morals in order to justify our behaviors. Animals in the wild have no such compunctions.”

Also known as the “circle of life tho” and “food chain tho” fallacies. We are not wild animals ( or on a deserted island ) and we exploit animals in captivity. Just because we have the ability to do something, doesn’t mean that we should do it. For the wild animals, its a matter of survival, not for us. We have the choice whereas they don’t.

“If you only knew the body count a field of barley produces.”

A claim without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. It is thus dismissed. But for the sake of the argument, such “body count” can be avoided as was proven with the much more efficient and practically automated vertical farming* practices versus antiquated, auto-destructive and highly inefficient ( relatively speaking ) “traditional” soil based agriculture.

*Among other means in regard to the basis of economic systems which I won’t go into here as it would deviate too much from the main subject. In short, we have the technical means to eliminate most if not all of the suffering involved in farming. See “resource based economy”.

Next:

“We lie to ourselves, day in and day out, about the bloodthirsty nature of our food lust. We want to eat what we want to eat. We want to believe that we are causing the smallest amount of harm possible, very little pain, minimal deaths. But it’s not true. Everything we eat causes a certain amount of harm, pain, and death.”

Here we see an appeal to emotions and then an outright false analogy tinged with a begging the question fallacy undertone. Addressing the former is pointless so I’ll go to the later. What you’re really saying with this undertone is: “We want to do the minimal amount of harm, but since everything we do involves harm, its pointless to try to minimize it so we might just as well enjoy ourselves and bask in the glory of unfettered pleasure, to hell with the harmful consequences.”

Its like an heterosexual saying: “Well since even if I try to minimize the harm by making sure my partners have provided consent, there will still be pain and suffering involved in the process, so I might just as well rape whoever I want whenever I want.”

Next:

“Others decide to dispense with the animal products altogether. Vegetarians and Vegans like to point out that it takes more water and grain to feed an animal to produce a pound of meat then if we just ate a pound of the grain itself. That is true. They also like to point out that we don’t have to eat animals. That is also true. And yet, we also don’t have to eat cashews or chocolate or coffee either. They say that plants don’t have feelings. I say there are plenty of animals involved in the production of cashews, chocolate, and coffee, including underpaid and overworked humans.”

This one is just as disingenuous as the last one. Addressing the same concern and committing the same fallacy: Resource efficiency and minimizing the suffering of everyone involved by choosing to involve the least amount of suffering animals ( be they homo sapiens or otherwise ) as possible when choosing one option over the other. Why care? Its pointless! I’m starting to see a nihilistic trend here…

Next:

“But there is no truth — the fact is that there is no truth about living or dying.”

Yes, just disregard all the evidence found through the scientific method about nutrition and health. There may be no truth, but there are relative realities and they can be measured and compared, which makes them far from irrelevant.

Next:

“We don’t want to acknowledge the murder and mayhem that proliferates in the undergrowth of the forest, we want to sanitize the action of wild animals and turn their lives into the technicolor platitudes of a Disney movie.”

Whether we acknowledge it or not is completely beside the point. Its a guilty by association logical fallacy: Our condition is not of a wild animal in a forest that needs to kill to survive. We can do without all the killing.

Next:

“What is cruel is to not honor the lives of all of those creatures that die so that we can continue.”

Here we can see a widespread form of denial of reality. It presupposes 2 things:

-We need to kill to survive
-Tens of billions of animals would be born and die each year without us breeding them.

Other things to consider:

-Finding a use for a corpse does not justify taking the life in the first place. Taking into consideration that it is avoidable in the first place makes it doubly unjustifiable. It would only make sense if you exclusively ate carcasses and roadkill that you happened to come across.

-Without demand, there would be no offer of dead corpses in the first place, so there would be no need to “honor” any deaths whatsoever.

Which leads to an appeal to nature logical fallacy in the next few paragraphs and the conclusion.

The rest of it is simply repeating what was already said and was debunked earlier except for perhaps one thing:

“The story I believe in is that respect is the key to eating well.”

Respect has never been correlated, much less proven as being a causation factor to eating well. This is a pure product of belief and considering that it is possibly used to justify the avoidable genocide of tens of billions of sentient beings each year, it could also be hypothesized that it is counterproductive: what we believe in is totally irrelevant to this discussion. Altho we are entitled to our opinions about our distorted perceptions of reality, and that I do respect our right to opinion, in the end, it is still irrelevant.

On the other hand, what we now know, as per a scientific method consilience based standpoint, is that many different fields of studies all converge into a simple relative reality; genetic researchers, surgeons, doctors, microbiota researchers, gastroenterologists, neurologists all arrive to the same conclusions independently from each other that synergistically reinforce each other: veganism is simply the relatively healthiest way for a human to eat, so the best way to eat well. Ignoring this ever mounting evidence is like ignoring the consilience of many different fields that led to the theory of evolution and/or the theory about the history of the universe at the time when these theories were being confirmed by experimentation and peer-review.

Eventually the lights of rationality will flood with photons even the darkest areas of belief, but in the meantime, I suggest to everyone who read this article to take it with a giant grain of salt.

Have nice day folks!