whyvegan, I think you’re missing the concept of scale here as well.
For instance, I’m pretty sure the number of animal deaths caused by harvesting crops is lower than that caused by directly killing animals. We don’t cause ZERO animal suffering by being vegan, but we cause less and that’s a good thing. We’d all love to totally clear of it but that’s not realistic. So we just try the best we can. If we live in the city, we probably can’t grow enough food for ourselves alone. If we live in a rural area, then we probably kill more insects and maybe a few frogs or larger animals that we may accidentally hit. I hit a deer once, by accident, though it survived.
Any of us would be deluded to think that we don’t cause suffering in our lives. What we’re after is minimizing it. That’s not hypocritical.
Now, you mention insects. Not all vegans agree with me on this one – some seem to think all animal life is equally important – but I don’t have nearly as much of a problem with the death of insects than I do with pigs, cows and chickens. For everyone, there’s a line that they draw in terms of how much suffering they will tolerate. But we can be fairly sure that insects are much lower on the list of how much consciousness they have, and how much suffering they experience.
To say that I might as well eat pigs, cows and chickens because my car kills a few bugs is absurd, and shows a misunderstanding of what we actually think about this. It’s not as bad to kill a pig as it is to kill a human, in my opinion, and it’s not as bad to kill a mosquito as it is to kill a pig.
We’re not sitting here thinking we’re better than everyone else, and that we don’t cause suffering. We’re just doing a little more to try and reduce the suffering we cause. Even “half-arsed” veganism is better than being a meat-eater. Because we can’t be perfect vegans so easily, we ought to give up and just kill, kill, kill? Why is apparent hypocrisy worse than causing more suffering?
Do you give up on everything that you can’t achieve 100%?
Some of your criticisms are fair… there certainly are self-righteous vegans out there who think they’re better than everyone else. But that’s not all of us, and don’t judge everyone based on that. I can only speak for myself, but while I’m happy to encourage others to try veganism and promote it in a friendly fashion, I’m not the in-your-face judgemental person you’re probably imagining.
(I don’t really care for PETA, either. PETA kills an alarming number of animals for an animal rights group.)