If by that you mean both sides were civil, ty haha. I'm trying not to replicate the toxicity of the average reddit argument (which I got sucked into a lot) but I worry I still get too logic-as-my-blade, so I'm glad if my intentions still got through.
A great tip I've heard is to try to read others' comments in the most good-faith tone possible, since it's easy for that not to carry over text.
Agreed. Not the biggest fan of PETA; am very much a fan of animal welfare and rights being advocated for. CO2 'stunning' of pigs especially gets to me.
While we can't be completely sure, our current understanding of sentience makes it a reasonable assumption. Even if plants are sentient, eating from higher trophic levels causes more plant deaths than eating plants directly.
Regarding the rest, I feel like I addressed all of that in the comment above. I'm a fallible human being and personal discomfort with killing animals no less cognitively complex than our pets, and sometimes toddlers, is definitely a factor, but I've been arguing based on necessity and quantity instead of that.
EDIT: And to be clear, I've never claimed veganism is environmentally perfect. It doesn't solve every problem with food production, it just helps with some, and it seems largely better for the environment (albeit with nuance around grazing certain types of land) even if we keep doing monocultures.
The difference between killing animals and plants, which do not have a CNS and therefore almost certainly aren't sentient, has been discussed thoroughly elsewhere in this comments section. Do you believe mowing a lawn is equivalent to harming a dog?
Regarding insects, it should be emphasised that veganism is avoiding anything that causes animal suffering or exploitation as far as is practical. Necessary cases, like the unavoidable death of insects for plant agriculture, aren't morally equivalent to unnecessary cases in the same way that killing other humans can sometimes be justified by circumstances, eg. self-defence. (EDIT: And any livestock raised on feed are indirectly causing more insect death regardless.)
People can indeed have different personal comfort levels when it comes to moral debates, but we can also discuss whether those comfort levels are reasonable. Otherwise 'we have different personal comfort levels' could be used in response to any moral question. It could be within someone's 'personal comfort level' to kill and eat babies as long as they were treated well until then.
Edit: TL;DR: context matters for any moral question and I'm not a fan of total moral relativism.
Arguing that something's okay because it's a natural behaviour is the naturalistic fallacy. The difference is that other species don't have any choice over how they live or even the mental capacity to think about the morality of their actions. Humans that are well-off and don't have medical conditions that clash with veganism do.
I used to agree with the second paragraph, but watching videos of pigs/cows/chickens being slaughtered changed my mind. Imo their prior treatment doesn't really negate what happens there- and even if it did, I couldn't use ideal farm conditions as a defense when the vast majority of meat I've been eating is raised under less ideal conditions.
(This isn't calling anyone who eats a burger satan, to be clear. Just trying to say my views in good faith.)
Dangit, I had no idea goodreads was owned by amazon. Definitely checking out bookwyrm for that alone, let alone everything else.
Tyvm for this, though to be fair this is a PETA source; do you have anything external?
Regardless, their claims about the petakillsanimals site being run by a disinformation org seem to be true. The wikipedia article on the CCF is damning; they seem to have a general goal of opposing any environmental, public health or social justice campaigns that harm certain industries.