Karen Winter, who doesn't like her son "as a person," wrote:
>>> Aside from the personal attack on me, you are correct. Efforts
>>> should be made to decrease the number of collateral deaths in
>>> large-scale vegetable farming also. Both are a side-effect
>>> of modern technological methods in agriculture.
>
>
>> Yet "veganism" addresses only one of these so-called "problems" while
>> remaining utterly mute on the other.
>
> Not always true,

Wrong, it's generally enough true to be a universal truth. There are few
examples of vegans even acknowledging the issue of collateral deaths. I
can think of one off the top of my head -- Slick's recommendation of
hand-harvested wild rice instead of standard farmed rice.

> and irrelevant in any case.

It's relevant, Karen. In fact, "don't harm animals" is the foundation of
veganism. We know vegans continue to harm animals through either
ignorant consumption or ambivelant consumption.

> Veganism/vegetarianism addresses a specific issue: the use of
> animal products.

Veganism doesn't even address that issue. Vegans suggests they're not
harming animals by not eating them, not wearing their hides, not using
products tested on animals, and so on. That's all rhetorical -- in
practice, their consumption continues to harm animals by giving up a
fraction of an animal at a meal and instead causing many more animals to
die from crop production (pesticides, flooding, farm machinery,
predation, field-clearing fires, etc.) and by recommending
petrochemical-based synthetics in place of leather or fur.

> It is not a complete philosophy of life,

It's a sham philosophy.

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