:vegan-edge: :vegan-liberation-rad: :vegan-seitan: :vegan-tofu: :vegan-v:
This is the place where you can chat, debate, and ask questions of your local lefty vegans.
Vegan diet why's and how's
- Health and safety: A well-planned vegan diet is healthy at every life stage, including pregnancy and infancy, and may provide health benefits for the prevention and treatment of certain diseases
- Worried about protein, calcium, B12, or other nutrients? Here's an evidence-based intro to vegan nutrition
- Environmental impact and climate change: What you eat matters more than where it comes from
- Do it for the animals, not for you: Being an ethical vegan may help you stay vegan longer
Documentaries:
- Dominion (CW)
- Earthlings (CW)
Owning a pet you care for and do not exploit is pretty low on the priority list of eliminating suffering of sentient beings.
Ultimately it's wrong to take a species that requires miles of range and keep them in an enclosure only a few hundred square feet like a home.
I do agree that the amount of suffering you're giving your pet is, if all goes well, very low compared to what animals have to endure in other places. That's incontestable. So all in all I would say the conversation is lower-stakes than other parts of being vegan. I'm not convinced that bringing more pets into the world is a good idea, and outside of taking care of strays I find it very hard to empathize with people on the subject.
It's also a very hard way to win people over, similar to the argument about outdoor cats.
People love their pets FAR more than they love eating meat. And being told that them owning an animal makes them a bad person is a very good way to make people absolutely hate you.
There's also a good argument for when people are close to non-human animals, their empathy for them grows. I've converted a lot of people just by making the "you wouldn't exploit your dog for milk, or kill your cat for meat" argument on an appeal to pathos.