The animals don't like it. The environment does not like it. Eating animals is not a "live and let live" situation because you are denying others the right to live.
The PeTA argument of kindness rarely works because most people are meat addicts and fine with unkindness so long as they don't have to see it.
Also, rational self-preservation doesn't work because it's not a freight train about to run them over and most people don't make decisions rationally. There are plenty of existential risks involved in meat ag:
1. Pandemic evolution through a combination of antibiotic resistances (to speed meat production), wildlife-domestic animal interactions, animal crowding (Petri dish like dorm overcrowding spreading meningococcal meningitis), and human-animal interactions.
2. Climate change - 12% of anthropogenic GHGs and growing. Already at 417 ppm CO2 and climbing.
3. Irreparable rainforest loses due to clear-cutting for CAFOs and feed grain farms affecting the local climate of other equatorial ecosystems.
Accelerating intensity of storms, variability of weather, and rising sea levels will lead to famines, resource wars, and retrofitting vs. relocation of major coastal cities. But because something hasn't happened yet, it's "crying wolf."
They will bicker, complain, take potshots, and rationalize kicking-and-screaming until told they can't have it anymore because they're addicts. The sooner there are sustainable alternatives, widespread lifestyle changes, and externality luxury taxes, the better.
there are plenty of nervous-system-like responses from plants that are undergoing destruction, why not just admit that the reason behind these complaints is a selfish human-empowering reason rather than the emotional appeal of "what about the animals?" ?
Won't anyone think of the plants?
"...you are denying others the right to live."
Isn't this basically just a condition of humanity? If it isn't a base principal can you point to a human that doesn't live that way?
There are plenty of animals that don't nurse their young. That's a peculiarity of mammals.
And the scientific evidence suggests that plants do likely feel something akin to what could be called pain.
Their inability to scream with sounds detectable by human ears isn't evidence they don't feel anything.
It's not absurd. It's what science tells us -- that plants emit chemicals to communicate to other plants about infestations of insects so they can take action to protect themselves and when injured they may give off a "pulse", aka a type of scream.
If you are concerned about the plants, you will be happy to learn that a plant-based diet kills far fewer plants than a meat eating diet. It takes a lot of plants to grow animals, and we only get a fraction of the total calories the animal consumes.
