Adsl89

'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.'

There's 2 arguments here. The first is that you can feel concern about animals and respect them whilst exploiting, abusing and killing them.

The second is 'but nature though'.

Both can be addressed through the lens of speciesism. How do these track if you replace animals with children in this example?

Can one care, show interest in, and respect say, a 12 year old child and still exploit and abuse them for pleasure, the way people exploit and abuse animals for taste pleasure?

Likewise, when we talk about nature, for most of human history the age of consent was far lower than it is now and early pregnancy was natural. It's only relatively recently that consent laws have ranged from 15 (Europe) to 18 (America) in the developed world. In the UK it was 12 until well into the 1800s. So a middle aged man knocking up a 12/13 year old is by definition, natural. So is this behaviour okay? I suspect we both agree that it isn't, despite it being 'natural' for most of human history.

Likewise to say that non vegans can volunteer with animal shelters etc, that's true but that's the same logic as a pedophile volunteering to help disadvantaged kids whilst going home to abuse his own prepubescent kids - he might well have benevolent motives regarding the former but he's still harming the latter, so would people say he cares about kids if he's helping some but abusing others? It's the same logic as going to a sanctuary to help cows and going home to eat dairy (which requires sexual abuse via insemination and sexual exploitation via repeated impregnation and stealing the calf at birth)