Argument

Vegans have a profound misunderstanding of the circle of life. Animals eat other animals, you can’t change that. We are just animals ourselves, it’s natural.

Rebuttal

Quick Response

Animals do eat other animals, but animals are not who we look to for examples of moral behaviour. We wouldn’t say it’s okay to kill members of our own species because animals do it. Or rape one another because animals do it. Just because something is ‘natural’ does not make it right.

Detail - Analytic

This is a classic example of the Appeal to Nature Fallacy

[The Appeal to Nature Fallacy] is the belief that what is natural must be good […] and that which is unnatural must be bad […]. - Logically Fallacious - Bo Bennet - 2012

Earthquakes are natural, pain is natural, our own death is natural, but just because they are natural does not mean that they are good. Cars are ‘unnatural’, pain relief is unnatural, food standards and sanitation are unnatural, but that does not mean they are bad.

Detail - Emotive

Tied up in this argument is often the idea that vegans are ‘disconnected from the harsh realities of the world’ or ‘too weak to do what’s necessary’. The actual fact is that veganism stems from a very real understanding of what it means to eat meat. Vegan documentaries are full of footage from slaughterhouses and factory farms, places that people who eat meat typically never see let alone visit.

It is hard to imagine anything more ‘disconnected from the harsh realities of the world’ than taking a plastic package of meat and consuming it without ever having even thought of the animal which it came from.

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