Since purchasing and consuming animal products both depends on and contributes to animal agriculture, and animal farming necessitates rights violations against nonhuman animals, not being vegan when you have the option is synonymous with support for injustice. I believe that as leftists who purport ourselves to strive towards a more just society, and as human beings who generally value nonviolence and compassion, we should hold ourselves to a standard that doesn’t allow for the perpetuation of mass-slaughter. Let’s discourse!
Why not just go for the more simple it’s better for the environment stance. At least in most cases. Some things need to be hunted to control populations and we should of course eat their meat instead of letting it go to waste. But in general eating meat from an animal you didn’t hunt or wasn’t hunted by someone else is bad for the environment compared to a vegetarian or vegan diet.
Hunting still purposefully kills individuals who don’t want to die. “Population control” wouldn’t be necessary if hunting organisations didn’t purposefully increase populations in order to have more to hunt. And eating their flesh is necessary in what way? Why not leave it to the wild animals then?
Not necessarily true. In Great Britain there is a huge overpopulation of deer because all their natural predators were hunted to extinction in the 1500s. And so deer population must be controlled by humans to protect forests as the deer come and eat the bark off of trees and the fauna wiping out biodiversity in forests. You couldn’t really leave the bodies for wild animals because it’s generally pretty polluting since most wild animals that eat meat generally don’t want to scavenge for food as it is much riskier to eat something that is decaying.
You could try and reintroduce the predators that were hunted instead of hunting more. And that doesn’t address the point of killing innocents for what, the environment? If environmental damage is a reason to kill someone wouldn’t humans be top of the list?
They do try and reintroduce predators like wolves into Great Britain, but there are 2 million deer in the UK and it’s not really viable to introduce enough wolves to combat that amount of deer in any kind of short time frame. As well as this, some of the most common deer species in the UK are non native so they shouldn’t be there anyway.
And your second argument is true but rather extreme since we should in general value human life over the life of other animals.