United States Department of Agriculture. PSD Online. Available at: https://apps.fas.usda.gov/psdonline/app/index.html#/app/advQuery.{/ref}

The majority (77%) of the world’s soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production. 7% is fed directly to animals as soybeans, but the remainder is first processed into soybean ‘cake’.{ref}Soybean cake (sometimes referred to as soybean meal) is a high-protein feed made from the pressurization, heat treatment, and extraction processing of soybeans. The oil is extracted from the soybeans to leave a protein-rich product.

Per the source above, although it’s fair if you missed it because it’s in the footnotes

I understand the core of your argument: “animals can eat parts of the plant that humans can’t, so it’s most efficient to use those as animal feed instead of wasting them.” But this is not really engaging with the source I posted above, showing that, indeed, farmed animals are directly fed only 7% of all raw soybeans produced in the world, but 69% of all soybeans are specifically produced to be turned into high-protein processed animal feed, for a total of 76%.

From your previous comments though, it doesn’t really seem like you’re engaging in good faith. Feel free to have the last word, have a great day

Cmon let’s be real, again this is a very simple trophic levels thing. If you truly care about the suffering of all the field mice and bugs and whatever being killed in soybean monocultures, and their other various environmental harms, then surely you would be vegan, because 75% of all soybeans grown globally are used as animal feed. (Source)

That’s ok, totally understandable. Just read the comment again

Let’s suppose that you actually genuinely care about reducing the amount of plant suffering in the world. If this is the case, surely you would be vegan, because 3/4 of our total agricultural land is used to grow plants to support animal agriculture. (Since grass feels pain just like soybeans do, this includes pasture land.) So far fewer plants would be killed if everyone was vegan.

Of course, you don’t actually live your life in a manner consistent with believing plants feel pain. I don’t think anyone would think twice about swerving into some flowers to avoid a dog in the street for fear of causing suffering to the flowers.

I mean I think bees are harmed in the production of honey, it’s just that most people don’t care about bee welfare. Commercially they’re bred by crushing the male to extract semen, and any operation above hobby scale will clip the wings of the queen so that the hive can’t escape.

Then you necessarily need to replace their ideal food source with something that is nutritionally much worse for them (basically sugar water), and then hope that they survive on that long enough to make more honey for us to take.

Imo “backyard eggs” are really small potatoes, especially when like 98% of eggs globally come from factory farms. But even in that case, egg-laying hens are basically bred to suffer. They lay an egg every 1-2 days, compared to like once a month in the wild, which takes a huge amount of energy and nutrients. And we’ve bred them to produce eggs too big for their bodies, so that even when they’re treated really well, the vast majority of hens have bone fractures.

That’s why animal sanctuaries will usually either feed the eggs back to the hens, or give them medication to stop them from laying at all.

Of course, this is on top of the fact that 100% of egg-laying hen breeders, everywhere, kill the males shortly after birth because they can’t lay eggs. See this for more information.

Yes. No animal was intentionally harmed or killed to be turned into oil. This puts it in the same category as foraged deer antlers or cicada wings, or I guess compost where you found a squirrel carcass and added it to the pile.

You could argue that animals are harmed by the process of extracting and burning fossil fuels, and thus it’s not vegan. But this isn’t very convincing to me, since that’s a secondary effect and not necessary to the process of consuming fossil fuels. (Or at least not necessary in the same way that killing chickens is necessary in order to make chicken sandwiches, for example.) And if you start worrying about a big web of consequences of your actions, then it seems like you’re mostly just adding stress to your life without actually making the world a better place.