[maskedmelon]

My issue is that rather than accepting responsibility for one's nature and be thankful of the sacrifices necessary to sustain it, people adopt these sorts of practices as a method of placating conscience. If everyone adopted vegan diets and enforced them upon all other creatures, animal populations would explode and become unsustainable in very short order.

As food supplies for prey animals dwindled, they would begin to starve and suffer. Predator populations would follow suit as their food supplies (prey animals) diminished.

The alternative of course would be selective culling to maintain sustainable populations, but if nobody eats meat then the animals' deaths are less purposeful because their essence is discarded. Being eaten sustains a predator's life while sparing fellow prey lives from starvation due to over population. It is dual purposed.

One day we might possess the technology to be able to manage the population of small species in labs, denying natural reproduction by sterilizing all animals, but until that day, vegans may only practice veganism because others eat animals.

That is the issue that I have with it. Yes, killing animals is sad and I couldn't kill most, unless maybe they attacked me, but would still have a hard time. But that doesn't make denying ones role in an system that's developed over millions of years any more virtuous. We are supposed to eat animals.

It is a delusion in the sense that one is doing something virtuous because if everyone were equally 'virtuous' all would suffer catastrophe.