I utterly reject the notion that vegans are somehow morally superior or being vegan means that one is automatically more intelligent than everyone else.
I think it would be necessary for someone to have first proposed that notion in order for your rejection to be relevant to the discussion. It seems to me that the opposite has been stated and agreed to, by people on different ends of the omnivore/herbivore continuum.
The 'opposite' you are referring to being that vegans are morally reprehensible and stupid?
I didn't see that either being stated or universally agreed to on this thread myself nor do I think it. Do you?
FWIW, I took Dude's post as defense of the veg*ns and not as a means of calling us morally reprehensible nor stupid. I believe that he was stating the none of the veg*ns has claimed moral superiority nor greater intellect.
What's about milk cows?
Milk cows seem perfectly content to *be* milk cows.
At least, the milk cows I've encountered.
They're well fed and cared for.
At the risk of being preachy here
, my ethical motivation for not eating dairy is as follows:
Cows, like all mammals, lactate only when they have given birth. As such, they need to be impregnated to give milk and the baby cows are generally removed from their mothers so the milk can be utilized for human consumption. We have a dairy farm about a mile from my house or less. It has, on the perimeter, a large field of dog igloos that are used to house the male calves as they cannot be turned back into the dairy herd to be milk cows themselves. These male calves never leave the igloos in which they live and are slaughtered as veal fairly early in their lives. I believe that they are kept in small confined areas so that they do not develop significant muscle tissue and their flesh remains soft.
Actually, I tend to think that the cows who are destined to be meat have better lives from what I see of them locally. They have a good amount of pasture space and fairly good lives and the calves are not taken from the moms. They live among the herd. Until they head to the feed lots, which are about 40 mins from my house, their lives look pretty decent and certainly better than that of the local dairy cows.
