One may be tempted to use these findings as a justification for (indirectly) killing sentient mammals. Add studies showing that even plants and fungi have senses and try to avoid harm, and you might as well consider that there should be no ethical considerations around various diets. Since everything living can feel pain for a generous definition of the term and since you kill plants and indirectly insects even on a plant based diet, there is little difference.
Unsurprisingly this is a very common argument against veganism.
But if you truly care about the feelings of insects or plants you should switch to a plant based diet as you'll probably indirectly kill at least an order of magnitude fewer plants and insects, the majority of which are consumed by practices related to industrial farming (large scale deforestation, waterway pollution, feedstock).
"Crop fields do indeed disrupt the habitats of wild animals, and wild animals are also killed when harvesting plants. However, this point makes the case for a plant-based diet and not against it, since many more plants are required to produce a measure of animal flesh for food (often as high as 12:1) than are required to produce an equal measure of plants for food (which is obviously 1:1). Because of this, a plant-based diet causes less suffering and death than one that includes animals."
Could a diet where you only eat the meat from one slaughtered cow be the ideal vegan diet? One consciousness killed.
This approach would require purchasing a half from a local farmer who raises 100% grass fed animals and makes his own hay.
The hay definitely kills some animals when harvested though. It would be interesting to quantify the death impact (calories of beef produced per bale of hay) of a hay harvest and compare that to the death impact for some staple vegan foods, and see how things stack up.
Edit: The need for hay is a climate based one. There are places where cattle can graze for more or less days in a year. Hay is used a winter feed in places where winter forage is unavailable.
While the notion of consuming only one cow's meat appears to reduce number of deaths, we must confront the environmental repercussions of livestock farming.
The resource intensive nature of animal agriculture causes more harm than it's immediately apparent (deforestation, biodiversity loss, eutrophication ...).
> Since everything living can feel pain for a generous definition of the term and since you kill plants and indirectly insects even on a plant based diet, there is little difference
There certainly is if you take quantity into account. To quote the page linked to by unfairly-downvoted sibling comment:
> Regardless, each pound of animal flesh requires between four and thirteen pounds of plant matter to produce, depending upon species and conditions. Given that amount of plant death, a belief in the sentience of plants makes a strong pro-vegan argument.
Do you know of any arguments around what makes something a thing to avoid harming? I see many arguments against pain, and many arguments around intelligence, but why do most people take it as a given that pain is the worst thing possible and causing or experiencing pain is terrible?
But if you truly care about the feelings of insects or plants you should switch to a plant based diet as you'll probably indirectly kill at least an order of magnitude fewer plants and insects, the majority of which are consumed by practices related to industrial farming (large scale deforestation, waterway pollution, feedstock).