Man I had to rephrase this a dozen times and I still don't have a good way to communicate what I'm trying to say.
The goal of this kind of callout is to make vegetarians, people who already value animal welfare, aware that they may still be contributing towards animal cruelty. For example, I was a vegetarian for years and then got rocked by the realization that, "oh wait, vegans aren't just crazies that I can blow off, it was me who was ignorant the whole time."
So I anecdotally assume that a huge percentage of vegans are vegetarians who went from thinking "vegetarians and vegans are basically the same, besides vegans taking the idea too far" to "oh wait there's a huge important difference between the two." On vegan spaces, people often joke that "bullying worked on me lol" because the gentle approaches are easily ignored, but the really blunt "your actions don't align with your stated ethics" is really difficult to brush off.
I get you, but I also think there's value in considering how these kinds of conversations affect people who are neither vegetarian nor vegan.
If you create a permission structure for 10 meat eaters to write off the whole group as extremist crazies, while you're trying to bully 1 vegetarian, who might be, maybe, bullied into veganism, that's still a net loss of a whole lot of animals.
Also, this isn't a veg friendly space. Having conversations like this among other veg*ns is entirely a different affair than doing it in an environment where the average response is just "hell no, I love my meat"
Your comment is disingenuous because you asked if one would prefer if others were carnivorous or vegetarian. This is nonsense because you don't get to chose what other peoples eating habits.
When you make food for people you ask them what they eat before you serve them something they cannot or don't want to eat.
Sure, but that's like saying "I don't shoot dogs, I just kick them." Like, sure, I guess that's better, but when you say you do it because you "care about dogs," that doesn't make sense.
Not sure why this needs to go off piste. It's like saying I don't shoot and eat [animal] for sustenance, I milk [animal] for sustenance. It's up to individuals to decide if that is conscionable or not, maybe impacted by whether you think they're inconsistent and maybe not.
I think this is where the disconnect is. It's not just milking an animal. It's getting her pregnant, taking her child away from her shortly after birth and killing it. It's keeping her trapped in a tiny pen for her whole life, barely able to move. Then, when she can no longer produce milk, kill her, 6 years into her 20-year lifespan.
A lot factory farming is absolutely cruel yes, but production of plenty of animal based products doesn't necessarily have to be. I've raised chickens before, eggs generally tasted better and the chickens were treated like pets (they weren't meant for their meat). It's a spectrum, the goal as a vegetarian is to reduce harm.
I'm not the person you responded to, but I'm another crazy chicken person. I have three ladies and one boy chicken. They have a half acre to run around on typically, but right now I have them in the plot where we grow vegetables so they can break up and fertilize the ground.
Having a rooster for free range chickens is, in my opinion, 100% necessary. My roo does a good job of herding the ladies into the coop when he sees a hawk or anything else he thinks is dangerous. He also makes sure all three hens get food, instead of one of them eating everything. When the sun goes down, he rounds up the girls and they head into the coop to sleep. Here is a pic of my roo, he's quite the gentleman.