Argument:
“Eating vegetables isn’t cruelty free because humans are exploited and animals are killed even in vegan food production”
Refutation 1:
The argument: because one solution isn’t perfect (being 100% cruelty free) it is not valuable, is a fallacy.
Nirvana fallacy:
By creating a false dichotomy that presents one option which is obviously advantageous—while at the same time being completely implausible—a person using the nirvana fallacy can attack any opposing idea because it is imperfect. Under this fallacy, the choice is not between real world solutions; it is, rather, a choice between one realistic achievable possibility and another unrealistic solution that could in some way be “better”.
What is the point of having drug laws? People are still using drugs…
Of course when vegan food refers to itself as “cruelty free” it’s impossible to guarantee that no cruelty was involved in the process of making it. The same way you can’t say flying is perfectly save. What they can guarantee is no animals were intentionally harmed, which is what vegans are going for.
Refutation 2:
Being directly responsible for unethical behavior (you are paying money to eat an animal’s corpse.) Is very different than incidental deaths caused by generally normal behavior. Here is an example: Let’s say you pay someone $2,000 to run your boss over with their car. Obviously this is not acceptable, this is a crime, you are at least partially responsible for which resulted in a death. On the other hand, let’s say you ordered a (vegan) pizza and the delivery driver accidentally hit a pedestrian. In this case you are obviously not responsible.
Of course vegans don’t wish for animals to die during agriculture and we don’t want children to be exploited. These are separate issues we should fight as well.
Refutation 3:
Animals eat more food than humans.
Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University and author of “Food Politics,” writes via email that all in all, “the ratio seems to be on the order of 6 pounds of grain to 1 pound of meat.”
So no matter how you slice it, meat eaters cause much more cruelty than vegans. Directly when they pay money specifically for an animal to be killed, and indirectly when the animal they are eating had to eat times more plant matter to product the same weight in food.
Bonus:
Slaughterhouse workers in America often work in horrible conditions.
The workers, most often immigrants and resettled refugees, slaughter and process hundreds of animals an hour, forced to work at high speeds in cold conditions, doing thousands of the same repetitions over and over, with few breaks.
Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) 2014 data that showed repetitive motion injuries among beef and pork processing workers were nearly seven times that of other private industries. And 76 percent of workers in a Maryland plant had abnormal nerve conditions in at least one hand, according to a 2015 report by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
So when you eat meat you are funding the agriculture industry allegedly forces many enslaved children to labor in the soy/corn/wheat/rice fields to make food for the animals, then you are funding the slaughterhouse and animal-ag industry which exploits it’s workers, and on top of that you are directly paying for the enslavement, torture and murder of countless sentient beings all for the sake of your delicious bacon. You are telling me that is justified?