Philosophical Vegan Forum

I've been confronted with the opinion quite a bit that vegans care more about other animals than we do other humans. Ive seen this kind of reasoning even on tv shows. I recently saw an episode of a tv show called "Brickleberry" in which PETA and vegans were portrayed as fanatical people who care so much about animals that they would be willing to kill humans. Im no fan of PETA, but where are people coming up with this crap? Do people think that if you care for farmed animals you are incapable of caring for other humans?

What are your thoughts?

It's not like compassion is something you have a limited amount of, extending your compassion to animals does not take it away from other humans. Besides, humans suffer under the consumption of animals greatly; look at diabetes, Alzheimer's, cancer or heart disease. Anyone who cares about other humans should advocate veganism like they should advocate not to smoke, even if they don't give a damn about other animals.

It's just an baseless assumption that arises when vegans mostly talk about this particular issue, and not on human issues. We know that this is because it needs attention, which other issues generally already get, but they can see it as putting your energy at the wrong place.

Then there is the problem that some vegans are very judgmental towards other persons, feeding the idea that vegans don't care about our fellow humans. Together with the rejection some vegans make that we have generally less moral responsibility towards some animals than we do towards humans may awaken some questions. I think it's mostly an image that people have grown into accepting (humans like to stereotype groups).

Brickleberry sucks. No but seriously, I've seen this stereotype in a lot of shows, like South Park, etc etc. I don't really understand what causes them to think that. We love animals. We love our fellow human beings (However some of them not so much) . Every animal is sentient, and has feelings, and can feel pain. Humans, cows, pigs, chickens etc.

Perception of caring about things is relative.

You can counter with the claim that Christians care more about Jesus than other living human beings who are suffering. It's true. Does that mean that they don't care about other people though? No. Some of them, yes. But for the most part, they just care inordinately much about Jesus.

However, it is true that they care less for other human beings by comparison to their concern for Jesus, relative to the same ratio of concern you might see in a secular humanist.

By comparison to the whole of things they care about, if you see it as a pie chart, human beings make up a much larger slice of the pie for a secular humanist, and a much smaller slice for a Christian.

Likewise, human beings usually make up a smaller slice of the pie for vegans compared to carnists who are basically apathetic to animal suffering (or just pretend to care about it when convenient).

However, all of this makes a single faulty assumption: That the total size of all pies are equal.
Some pies are bigger than others. Some people simply care more about everything than other people. Some people barely care about anything (many carnists).

So, how big the slice appears to be is kind of irrelevant- what matters is the size of the pie in addition to the size of the slice of said pie. A small slice of a very big pie is bigger than a big slice of a very small pie.

my shameless copy paste response
"part of the many reasons we choose to be vegan is because the western diet of animal products only exists because we buy up food in LDC's to subsidize our privileged diet. Essentially we can feed more people, we cause less damage to the environment, and we don't harm as many animals. It is the simplest way to meet the interests of all sentient life."