Two citations have been offered concerning the notion
of criminal culpability due to being an accessory to a
crime:

http://law.anu.edu.au/criminet/tcmplicty.html
http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_..._Law.html#s165


Both of these make clear that knowledge of what will
take place, or what is foreseeable as likely to take
place, establish the criminal liability of the
accessory before the fact.

"vegans" very clearly have knowledge that the killing
of animals almost certainly will take place in the
course of producing the foods they eat. In order to
try to get around this, they try to draw a distinction
between the deliberate killing of animals for meat,
which they say is necessary in order to obtain the
meat, and the collateral killing of animals in the
course of vegetable farming, which killing they claim
to be "unnecessary". The distinction is false, as we
shall see, in terms of establishing complicity. It
omits the fact that some killing of animals in the
coures of growing, harvesting, and distributing
vegetables is deliberate.

The alleged lack of necessity of collateral deaths is
not a defense. One especially ham-handed and inept
pseudo-"vegan" who haunts these groups (he is not
really "vegan"; not even vegetarian) claims that he
doesn't "buy" the deaths; he only pays the farmer for
the produce.

The law on complicity clearly does not allow this as a
means of escaping responsibility. An accessory before
the fact to a bank robbery in which an innocent person
is killed cannot claim that he only wanted the money
and didn't "order" the killing. While the accessory
may not be punished as harshly as the person who
actually committed the killing, it is very clear that
the punishment of the accessory will be substantially
harsher than it would have been in the absence of the
killing. This is because the laws regarding complicity
make the accessory both morally and legally responsible
for ALL the forbidden acts that take place in the
course of committing the intended forbidden act.

While aiding and abetting the collateral and deliberate
killing of animals in agriculture is not a crime, the
moral similarlities are striking. The "vegan" has full
knowledge that the actions of the farmers and
distributors, with whom he willingly trades, are
virtually certain to result in death to animals. If
the "vegan" truly feels that such death is wrong, due
to violating some alleged "rights" of animals, then the
"vegan" is fully complicit, morally if not criminally,
in the deaths of the animals. That the deaths may be
collateral rather than deliberate is not a defense; it
is the KNOWLEDGE and the WILLINGNESS TO PARTICIPATE
that establish, beyond doubt, the moral culpability of
the "vegan".