I don't know, that particular one just annoys me so much, it seems so self-evidently true that if you cared about animals you wouldn't eat them, and going, "Uh, actually a lot of meat eaters are conservationists" doesn't really help much.
Any time a meat eater succeeds in preserving the species to continue hunting it they are treating that species as a resource to be exploited, and in fact saying that any individual member of that species can be destroyed for purely selfish purposes, as long as the resource as a whole is stewarded for future generations.
But you are treating it primarily as a resource to be exploited, rather than a group of beings that have some right to pursue their own goals free of interference.
I'm not saying this is bad, but again, think of how it would be if you treated a group of humans like this.
"Anybody who regularly kills and eats Frenchmen doesn't care about the French." strikes me as... just obviously true.
And I think it would be fundamentally absurd to go, "Uh, actually I only hunt and eat Frenchmen sustainably, in fact I have donated a lot of money to the Louvre and various efforts to preserve French culture, so what right do you have to say that I don't care about the French."
And vegans are arguing that the same analogy is true of animals.
If you treat people purely as a resource to be exploited for your own gain, I think it's proof that you don't care about them, even if you treat them as a resource to be stewarded and preserved rather than a resource to be destroyed in a one-time orgy of greed.
A lot of vegans feel that this logic should be extended to animals as far as is practical.
The "stewardship" model is *better* than the "destroy the resource in a short-sighted orgy of personal greed" model, I agree, but I still think there's a strong case to be made that it's not really "caring" about animals in the way that Vegans mean.
I would never eat my friend's pet cats. I would never eat them even if they had kittens and I could eat one of his cats while sustaining the population of cats that live in my friend's apartment.
Now, personally, I think that's a pretty clear indication that I care about those cats more than I care about, say, the cow who died for the burger I ate yesterday.
I think it's the defensiveness I find really sort of irritating and, honestly, a little bit perplexing.
Again, it just feels like the cannibal above getting really irritated when you claim he doesn't care about the people he eats, and explaining that he actually does a lot of cultural preservation work, and he's donated way more to museums than most non-cannibals, so how can you sit there and act like the non-cannibals care more about French people than he does?
I guess I don't understand why you want credit for caring deeply about something you'll happily destroy and eat even in cases where you really aren't required to do so.
Why not just admit that you don't care in the way vegans tend to mean?
