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Veganism
As I see it, veganism is about minimizing the amount consciousness that dies for the survival of our own consiousness.
A fly probebly has less consiousness than a cow. I flower probebly has less consiousness than a bee. Great apes probebly have just a smidge less consiousnes than we do. We probebly shouldn't go around eating apes right? The death of an ape consiousness probebly "costs more" than the death of say 20 rabits? So what follows is that we should try to survive off of the least amount of consiousness as possible. Eating things that have less consiousness than others. If we could eat rocks, we would.
There's also the existence of say tomatoes; vegetables that have evolved to thrive upon being eaten. They've literally evolved to turn red as a communication method of saying "I'm ready to be eaten! Eat me so I can get seeds further away from myself!" The amount of consiousness you kill when you eat a tamoto is probebly pretty small. We eat plants that have evolved naturaly to provide us with food, in return they get to spred their population via our poop. Now we have kinda hijaked this system but I think it still kind works. It could get into the dangerous place of a "slave speices"; a spieces which is entierely dependent upon the actions of another spieces. I think some sheep are dangerously in that teritory. We have artificialy selected them to grow a bunch of wool, to the point where its unhealthy for them to not get sheared. We can have independance from them, but they cannot have independece from us. This is obviously a grey area. It also seams to disguard the beuty of coevolution, which i think is unfare. Though, it better actually be codependent evolution.
I mean, just as a rule of thumb, i think the idea of killing the least of consiousness for the survival of your own, makes sense. We obviously can't go into the teritory of saying that if killing a cow is the only option for food, then we shouldn't do it. That just leads to the self descruction of our own species. Makes no sence. In extream emergency situations, even canibalism is fine (in my opinion, watch the movie Society of the Snow). But the goal should be to get out of that emergency situation as fast as possible.
What factory farming has done is make the killing of consiousness faster and easier. The goal should be to stop using factory farming as fast as possible. Many parts of the world are not in need of meat from cows, we can substitute it with plants, and in the case of B12, we can sythesize it.
So yeah. Minimize the amount of hurt you do to consiousness. In a way... Always respect what ever consiousness died for the continuation of you own. Thank the plants. Thank the animal. Respect it. The last thing we should do is ignore pain that we are causing.