TL;DR -- Animal rights are human rights, because humans are animals. Equality across the board means that we respect all animals' natural diets, and that includes humans.

As someone who believes in equality across all species (and thus cares about animals), I find this offensive.

If you care about animals, you must understand that all animals have natural needs and diets. Some animals only eat plant matter to survive. Some animals need to eat other animals to survive. Some are omnivores that need to eat both plants and animals to survive. Trying to force them into a diet that isn't natural and doesn't meet their needs is only forcing your own agenda on someone else, and is cruel.

If you believe in equality, that also extends to humans. We are omnivores. And no, protein substitutes are not good enough, nor are they healthier or better for the environment.

All in all, if you choose to go vegan, that's totally your right and no one has any right to judge you. But neither do you have the right to judge anyone who continues to eat a natural and healthy, balanced diet.

As long as animals are treated humanely (only buy free-range meats to encourage humane treatment of animals), and killed humanely, and every part of the animal is used so nothing is wasted, it's perfectly fine to be human.

You can still care about animals and not be vegan, to say otherwise is offensive as many people literally can't be vegan

• The definition of care is (as a verb) "feel concern or interest; attach importance to something." you can still feel a concern or interest to animals and respect them and not be vegan, its the natural circle of life (what isn't natural is the huge scale, mass production, intensive farming and over-farming of them in often inhumane conditions)
• Humans are omnivores, eating meat is natural (although the frequency we do so at is not)
• Many people care about animals, love animals and even volunteer/campaign/support animal shelters or animals rights etc... and still aren't vegan
• Many people literally can't be vegan (or it is much much much harder) whether due to health conditions (eg, people on dialysis, intolerances or allergies(eg. soy), some people with eating disorders etc...).
• Many people also don't have the resources to be vegan for example low income people who live with food insecurity, people living in food deserts, people in areas of famine or food shortages, but that doesn't mean they can't still care about animals
• The classification 'Animals' (Animalia) also encompasses a large array of different species and types of animals. People care about different types of animals in different ways and to varying amounts (eg. many people may care more about domestic animals that are typically pets eg. cats and dogs more than animals such as chickens)

I don't personally like to sacrifice literal lives for a few moments of culinary satisfaction, but it doesn't mean you don't care at all for animals if you eat them, especially given the larger systems of food and belief we are entrenched in.

• You can definitely still care about animals and eat meat or meat products, especially if that's actually all you have to survive. I agree that the opinion is a strong statement, and I love Jen's point about humans being animals, too.

• However, if I interpret this opinion a little less strongly, and not think so much about "pretending to care" about animals (which wording is kind of extreme), I do personally agree a bit with it. If, instead, we focus on the notion of eating animals generally as a habit, a few things seem to emerge:

• Eating meat is and has been a natural part of our diets for just about ever, and it's also a part of our food system. People eat meat, in large part, because it's the way things continue to work around us in our systems of food and even beliefs.

• But I do think these systems of meat consumption could change, though. If eating meat became a less popular thing to do, I think large-scale beliefs we hold about the naturalness and necessity of the act could start to shift. And we live in a world now where we don't have to eat meat at all, and we will still make it along just fine. In fact, I think it would be incredibly good to start building a world that can sustain itself without meat products anyway.

• I could also get behind the notion of a fundamental shift in human morality---one that enables us to dispense with our "naturalistic" tendencies, such as eating meat. I think this very well could happen (even more than it already is) at some point, too.

• Additionally, I care very deeply about animals and their rights to life, especially when held against our own own current capacities to not eat meat. Eating meat and realizing that I am in a lot of ways choosing my own culinary satisfaction over their literal lives is something I don't really ever want to do and try very hard to avoid. I would, though, never more than perhaps just very superficially judge anyone for eating meat, or say that non-vegans or non-vegetarians could only pretend to care about animals if they still eat them, because they very well could care about them, and quite often do. It's a lot down to the food systems, again, that we live within, or things like that, so it's not my place to judge.

• But I personally can't totally stomach the notion of literally taking an animal's life just so that I could eat meat. (Even if it were the most delicious thing in the world to me---meat happens to not be, for me, but even if it were I'd like to think I still wouldn't want to sacrifice an animal's life just for me to engage in a few moments of pleasure.)

• Again, though, this is just personal, and I don't have anything against anyone who doesn't feel this strongly about eating animals. Not only is it the system we live in, but it's also a personal choice, and it is a natural part of our makeup as animals, at least for now.

You can care about animals and not be vegan, but you are almost definitely a hypocrite. Or perhaps just ignorant about the meat and dairy industry.

If you think it is wrong for people to kill dogs for fun, but you think its okay to kill billions of farm animals a year for taste pleasure, you are a hypocrite.

How can you care about animals, while funding an industry that kills 70 billion of them a year?

Let's be honest, you don't eat meat because you need to. You like how it tastes, and you are set in your ways. You think it's sad when a puppy is abandoned, or an octopus is eaten alive on YouTube, yet you are willing to fund an industry that forcibly impregnates cows, removes them from their crying young, steals their milk to sell, then sends the mother to slaughter when she is "spent". What?!

The truth is veganism is an option for nearly everyone in the West (new Oxford study has shown it is a third cheaper in these countries). We have the option not to fund the needless killing of animals, so why do it?

Obviously people do not want to admit they are hypocrites, which explains the results, but be honest with yourself and think rationally. Is it really consistent to care about something, and also demand it to be exploited, perhaps even tortured and killed, for your pleasure?