Ah, the "crop deaths" argument is their new fancy, fangled "gotcha" that was popularized by losers like Piers Morgan and Joe Rogan. I've heard it a billion times.

They also love to bring up grass-fed cattle if you mention the fact that most crops are actually eaten by livestock, but grass-fed cattle still eat more than just the grass on the pasture land, especially during dry seasons and winter time, and you still have to account for so many other things like the bugs they trample, the fact that the cattle are sprayed with pesticides as a protective measure, the immense extra deforestation that raising grass-fed cattle requires, ocean dead zones, predators that get shot to protect the cattle, zoonotic diseases, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Even if the stuff about grass-fed cattle were true, it would be totally unsustainable for the world's population to survive off of grass-fed cattle alone, as that requires way more resources. It's also nutritionally inadequate.

If we lived in a vegan world and had vegan farmers, we could just switch to veganic farming systems that ensure minimal to no animal deaths in the process of crop production.

I literally told a friend of mine this morning that there seems to be this "law" in arguing with carnists: "Every dragged-out conversation with an ignorant non-vegan will involve them bringing up crop deaths at one point or another."

I said this to her because she was going back-and-forth with this carnist on social media who exhausted every other argument like "lions tho," "it's legal tho," and "we've been doing it for thousands of years tho." Once she shot all of that down, of course, he had to resort to this awful -type argument that they use every 5 seconds nowadays.

It's also entirely disingenuous because, even if plant-based diets caused literally zero deaths, these people still wouldn't go vegan, so it's just a cheap-ass tu quoque that they think should yield them a free pass to exploit animals.