Now, this is something for us really to think about.
It’s silly to suggest that vegans are to blame, of course. It’s all of us ‘consumers’ who think only about our palates and our health. We need to expand who counts as ‘us’ — and this needs to go beyond our fellow humans.
That last claim may strike some people as wrong or radical or radically wrong. But even the most anthropocentric among us have to begin to realize that we humans are so connected with the rest of the world’s inhabitants, that our habits so affect them and their habitats, that we can continue to ignore these connections only at our own peril.
Unless! Unless — and this is the best answer, I think, to such calls for increased awareness of our connectedness to everything else — unless technology advances so much that it no longer matters! I still think that this best answer fails for moral reasons. But is it possible to make that case without begging the question?