Look, I get why people go vegan. I really do. Factory farming is awful, no argument there. But let me give you a real scenario. My grandfather raises a dozen cows on his farm in Vermont. They graze on grass all summer, get hay in winter, and live a pretty good life by any standard. When one of them gets slaughtered, it's quick and done right there on the farm. That cow had a better life than most wild animals, honestly. Now, is eating that cow really morally wrong? I don't think so. The utilitarian calculus doesn't add up — the cow had a good life and a painless death, and my family gets nutrition from it. From a virtue ethics standpoint, there's nothing cruel about respecting an animal's life while also using it for food. It's part of nature. The problem isn't meat eating itself. It's industrial farming. So let's fix that instead of pretending all meat is the same.

So that farm cow — it had a good life, sure. But here's the thing: that cow didn't need to die at all. Even a painless death is still a death, and we're taking a life that wanted to keep living. From a deontological perspective, that's using a sentient being as a means to an end, not respecting it as an end in itself. You're right that industrial farming is the bigger disaster. But arguing that we should fix that instead of going vegan misses the point. The two aren't mutually exclusive — you can push for better farming AND cut out meat. Most people can't source from your grandpa's farm. They're buying factory-farmed stuff. Going vegan is the only way most of us can actually avoid that system. And honestly, even if we fixed farming entirely, we'd still be killing animals who don't want to die. That's the core issue.

I think you're getting too hung up on the idea that death is always a bad thing. That cow on your grandpa's farm wouldn't exist at all if we didn't raise them for food. So it's not like we're taking a life that was just hanging out in the wild. We created that life, gave it a good one, and then ended it humanely. That's not using it as a means—that's a mutual relationship. And your deontological point falls apart when you consider that plants also have to die for you to eat. I'm not saying they're sentient like cows, but you're still taking life to survive. The difference is, my cow had a life worth living. Look, I agree factory farming is a nightmare. But pretending that all meat eating is the same moral violation just isn't realistic. It's about how we treat them, not whether we eat them.