Hi. I am vegan for moral reasons and would like to respond to your post. I welcome this argument but if this descends into name-calling or any garbage like that then I'm just going to stop. I am aware that there will be some points I haven’t covered, I will respond to them if asked politely. Believe me, this post is long enough without trying to cover EVERY base related to this in it. But here's the view from the other side.

“Humans evolved the ability to model the thoughts of other animals, because this helped us catch, kill, and eat them (and also to some extent avoid predators, but there is no doubt we indeed evolved in order to trap animals). This same ability now causes some of us to empathize so much with animals that they refuse to eat them.”

Humans evolved the ability to map the stars, that doesn’t mean we evolved for space travel. We evolved the ability to create art, that doesn’t mean we evolved solely to paint. We simply evolved, and applied the intelligence gained through that evolution to do lots of stuff. Just because we can do it, doesn’t mean we evolved solely to do it.

"Nature is a place of kill or be killed, so to have objections to killing things is absurd. How in the world can it be immoral to do what we are designed through evolution to do? A lioness isn't immoral when it tears a living antelope to pieces."

Implied by this statement is that since humans live in "society" and not "nature", this makes it free for us to condemn murderers of other humans because we are striving for more than just nature. My question is, is New Orleans a "society" now? What is required for a "society" to exist? Are those concepts (Government? Infrastructure?) present there? I would contend that they aren't, but we still condemn the looting, rioting, rape, and murder happening in NO right now. We are seeing people in this situation react as animals act - doing what they feel they need to survive, consequences be damned.

(Note: I am NOT parlaying the racist notion that the predominately black population of NO that is taking part in what is happening down there now are a lower form of life. I am saying that when taken out of the societal comforts we have now, we react as all animals do. I would say the same thing if the people you see on the news doing the looting were white, Asian, blue, or Trekkies. Also, I realize that most everyone here doesn’t see how murder and rape are necessary for survival. I know I don’t, but Buffalo hasn’t been destroyed by anything other than the absence of industry recently, so I don’t know how I would react. I’m sure many people that say that they wouldn’t dream of doing those things also think that if they were in Germany during WWII, they would have done everything they could to prevent the Holocaust that they saw happening, but we all know that only a very small percentage of Germans did. Aside over.)

Anyway, I agree that you cannot judge animals based on the ethics of humanity, but those ethics have so many holes that we see every day (Is war moral? Is looting because you're hungry immoral? What about if you're taking a shopping cart full of designer shoes?), what is so wrong with taking ethics and extending them to the treatment of animals?

Vegans that are vegan for moral reasons aren't saying that at some point they and humans didn't eat meat out of necessity. Our contention is that given the state of the world now and knowing what we as humans have grown to know that we shouldn't lock animals in cramped battery cages where they are forced to live in filth just to be slaughtered painfully. Treating life that feels pain and the will to live this way should be unconscionable (right word?) in a moral society. Using hormonal treatment on female animals to produce dairy and eggs, slaughtering dozens of mink so ONE person can wear a coat, injecting laboratory animals with makeup and shampoo, these things are all unnecessary given the affluence and technological advancement of our society.

You said “’should people that torture animals be punished?’ And I say yes, but not because torturing animals is immoral, but because they are engaging in a behavior that is a gross waste of resourses” Gross waste of resources: Remember that it takes (from varying reports, including the USDA) 3 or more pounds of resources (water, grain, etc.) to make one pound of meat in a factory farm. Think of the hungry and thirsty people everywhere in the world. Because I cannot right now put my finger on a concrete number/source, I will simply say that many animal tests are inconclusive, another waste of resources. Also, we know animals feel pain and stress (especially mammals, which the vast majority of animal tests are performed on), so even if we get a result how are we sure that that result hasn’t been tainted in some way by the state of the animal tested upon? Also, if these animals are so close to us that we feel their results transfer to humans, how can we be morally sound in testing on them?

“Lysine and tryptophan (two amino acids we must have to live but cannot produce) are poorly represented in plants.” You said “poorly”, not “aren’t”, so they are possible to get, especially at this point in our evolution where we can analyze on a molecular level the composition of everything. Also, I have consulted with three doctors about my vegan diet (my pediatrician when I went vegan at 17, my adult doctor the next year, and another doctor when I moved) and they expressed concern about many a nutrient, but never mentioned these two. I’m not blowing this off off, but I’m not dead yet after three years, and some vegans I have met have been so for 10 or more years and they’re doing just fine (in fact, probably better than me). If one day I have blood work or whatever and it’s said “Yo, you need more lysine brah,” I will figure out what I need to do then.

Finally, on the morality of killing plants: Plants do not possess a survival instinct and they do not have a nervous system designed to respond to stimuli (read: pain). They grow in one spot and are perfectly content, unlike, say, chickens. They don’t do the same basic things humans and other animals do (you all have seen animals [and not just mammals,] breathe, sleep, use eyes to see things) therefore it is not immoral to consume them.

Sorry this was long.