What about the killing of insects?
Also killing and violates the First Precept. But Iâll admit thatâs a difficult one to follow for most people. In some areas if you donât do pest control on tics, fleas, roaches, termites, theyâll literally take over your home. Youâll just have to leave and give it to them. Just my opinion, but I believe that is a lesser bad kamma due to their tiny size and some reports that they donât experience pain or if they do, a very small amount compared to a larger animal.
Now, take the person who is careful in development of body, speech and mind, He has developed wisdom, he is not insignificant, he has developed himself, his life is unrestricted and he is immeasurable. For such a person, a small evil deed may be experienced here or perhaps not at all. Suppose someone throws a grain of salt into a little cup of water. That water would be undrinkable. And why? Because the amount of water is small. Now, suppose throws a grain salt in River Ganges. That water would not be undrinkable. And why? Because the amount of water is great" (Anguttara Nikaya I.249).
It appears that although negative kamma, the killing of insects would be like a salt cube in the River Ganges and not seriously lead to any significant negative results.
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When we analyze movements that have gone right, we can track back until their very beginnings and realize that it was all because one person did the first move. However, we forget all the countless actions that, in contrast, didnât result in any change whatsoever. Therefore, measuring how much our individual actions are relevant based on the ones that were in fact relevant is biased.
Moreover, our power to influence people decreases as theyâre further from us: family and friends tend to be more easily convinced. Becoming vegan, indeed, makes it more likely that a family member or a friend will do the same, but, as far as weâre concerned, our influence on the friend of the friend of our sibling is none, and the size of families is usually not enough to cause actual change.
Not only does the influence gets smaller, but it also becomes less predictable. The problematic assumption is to think that our long-distance influence will always be positive. Defending a movement isnât necessarily something that will make the movement grow exponentially. Actually, the action of joining the movement can make others not want to enter: think of how many self-righteous vegans have made others decide not to become vegans, for example. In other words, as our connection to other people gets farther, we canât predict the influence of our actions on them since there will be too many steps in-between. As far as we know, itâs as likely to be positive as it is to be negative, so the net result is neutral.
In the past, there were people who actively helped slaves to escape or gave them help and protection. This is the type of intention that IS relevant. My objection is towards the belief that just becoming vegan is expected to change something. Intense activism, in witch a person would directly act to change the situation, is capable of change. For example, buying one single chicken that would otherwise die is more powerful than changing the whole diet.
I see.
Now I feel that we reached a stumbling block since we start from different premises that canât be tested. Even though we are probably not gonna change anybodyâs mind here, it is still a nice conversation to have. Thanks for the discussion, Bhante!
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I totally agree with you on this. Killing a lobster is undeniably direct killing. Itâs both completely avoidable and bad Kamma. The same applies for hunting⌠I canât see how people find it fun
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I actually think itâs the opposite. I sometimes advice people who do buy and release of animals that if they go vegan, there wouldnât be a reason for those animals to be caught in the first place.
Buying and releasing is supporting the economy of those whose job is to capture or breed those animals. It doesnât help to solve the systemic injustice and cruelty.
All it does is to give personal satisfaction of being able to directly see which beings got saved due to oneâs action. However, statistics does count as well. Going vegan can possibly save say 1 animal per day. More if a person is used to eating different kinds of meat. Accumulate it, then it could be 36500 animals for a hundred years of veganism. Itâs a lot of passive saves.
Example of statistics mattering.
A group of people got lost in a large cave tunnel complex with flooding waters. We can have a few rescue strategies.
If we use 100 people as rescuers, the odds of dying per person is 1/1000. If we use 1000 rescuers, the odds of dying per person is 1/2000, if 10,000 person, then the odds of dying is 1/5000 per person.
For each individual, the odds of dying is lessened and thus should be more attractive to want to choose for a large rescue party for minimizing risk of personal death.
However, when we do the statistics, itâs more likely for 100 people group not to have any deaths at all, and when the group size gets large, to 10,000 person, itâs almost certain that 2 will get killed. We dunno which 2.
So that doesnât mean we just deny that itâs a worse decision to use so many people and risking almost certainly the deaths of 2 of them than to use less people. Just because we might not know which 2 might die doesnât matter.
So too, just because going vegan, we dunno which animals got saved due to our lack of demand into the meat economy doesnât mean that it doesnât make a difference. It does, we just donât see it directly. It makes a bigger difference than buying and releasing. Of course unless one buy and release massively. Or buy out an animal farm to close it down. Thatâs billionaire play. For ordinary folks, going vegan is our play. But even then billionaires who knows economics, knows that the strategy of buying and shutting down doesnât work when the underlying demand is there. Someone else will just start a new farm.
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I feel like thereâs a misunderstanding. Iâm not saying that veganism as whole doesnât change anything. Iâm saying that, whether or not I become a vegan, no additional animal will be saved. That is, the consequence of my action is null. Given this conclusion, I donât find becoming vegan specially compassionate. However, people who are vegan do believe that they can change things, so it IS compassionate for them to go vegan.
Anyways, now the discussion has gotten kinda repetitive, and we donât share a common ground (Iâm basing exclusively on Kamma while you adopt broader ideas), so I donât think weâre going to arrive at a conclusion. I hope you donât mind that I leave the discussion this way. It was a good talk. Thanks Bhante!
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In sum, go vegan. Good for the animals, good for the planet, and good for your health.
All the cool Buddhists are doing it. 
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I guess that there is a bigger picture here too? The meat industry is responsible for looking after many vegans (herbivores), such as cows and sheep, even if it does cut their lives short for itâs own ends. It has also decimated many predatory omnivores and carnivores such as wolves, so there is a reduction in killing of animals through predation there too. At the same time, it does use animal feed and those crops are protected by killing herbivores and omnivores. I guess itâs very complex. When we say that going vegan is good for animals, I guess we might say that it is good for some animals some of the time.
âlooking afterâ is doing a lot of work in this argumentâŚ
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Veganism would also mean less dogs and cats in the world, since you wouldnât be able to feed them properly.
I wonder if you could expand on what you mean by this?
Is it not true that domesticated farm animals bred for food do require âlooking afterâ, or need âbeing cared forâ by humans between birth and slaughter whereas their wild counterparts do not?
My argument was only really that it becomes even more complex if we view across more than one realm. Iâm guessing that we all agree (to put it very simply) that less killing is good and more killing is bad. But do we really know whatâs happening as a result of our actions here?
For example, somewhere above it was (maybe) suggested that there is a reduction of killing in slaughterhouses because veganism had gone from 1% to 5% (in the human population) in someoneâs lifetime. But actually what we find is the opposite - the amount of animals killed in slaughterhouses has also gone up in that sort of timeframe. Now, this would probably be because the human population has gone up also, so a smaller percentage - 95% of meat eaters of a bigger population rather than 99% of a smaller population, will still require a bigger number of kills to satisfy increase in meat eaters. But then we have to understand where these omnivorous humans come from, and of course some of them will have been predators (maybe carnivores) in the animal world in their last birth. Maybe enough to actually reduce the amount of net killing if we were to count outside of slaughterhouses too? Who knows? We just havenât got stats for this, so what is happening here is that we are missing some bigger picture understanding, and making claims based on a small part of the system. I find it interesting that we have many more humans and domesticated (for food) farm animals now and correspondingly much fewer predatory wild animals. Alternatively, of course, it could just be that the remaining meat eaters are eating a lot more meat, or that we are a lot more wasteful with meat, or that we are counting different things now. But I donât know. Itâs complex and we donât have all the stats to work this out as far as I can see. The big one being that thereâs loads of realms and we donât track movements between them . What is correct though, is that the number of vegans has gone up and at the same time the number of slaughterhouse kills has also gone up.
Yes. It all becomes very complicated here doesnât it. I love dogs, and cats are sort of neat (but not as good as dogs ). But cats, of course, are (disappointingly) surplus killers (kill for fun rather than just for food), so a reduction in their numbers would be a positive thing for the amount of killing going on I guess? Or maybe thereâs a knock-on effect that I canât see? Most probably.
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Is it not true that domesticated farm animals bred for food do require âlooking afterâ, or need âbeing cared forâ by humans between birth and slaughter whereas their wild counterparts do not?
When the term looking after is used in everyday speech, It can often have the connotation of caring, taking care of. When I think of me âtaking careâ of a dog or a cat, I am providing for them to live and nurturing them in the sense of helping them grow, live and be happy.
But factory farms do not âlook afterâ animals like this, they are just machines to them to make meat, they are objects, widgets. This is not a life, this is hell for these beings who have been objectified into factory machine parts.
So, no, I donât think that factory farms look after or care for animals at all and I donât think this is a good reason to keep them open. Iâm honestly baffled that this would even be an argument.
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This is my reaction to this entire thread 
Seeing all the usual bad-faith rationalizations coming from Buddhists (plus religious bonus rationalizations: âthe Buddha ate meatâ and cosmological speculative fiction) is especially disappointing.
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Iâm not sure Iâd go as far as saying its in bad faith, but it is confusing to me
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Itâs interesting to see how craving for various types of food and lifestyles makes the mind twist in these ways.
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Itâs not an argument that Iâve made. You are attacking a straw man. Iâve not once suggested that factory farms should be kept open or that they do a good job of animal welfare. You have misread what Iâve said. Sorry that I wasnât clear enough. It might be a misunderstanding because we are using different local variations of English.
As Buddhists shouldnât we take into account that the founder of our religion both ate meat and never preached vegetarianism or veganism? He could have done that. The Jains did, but he didnât.
Many people who read the Pali suttas today are disappointed that the Buddha did not fully condemn various practices which are now considered to be unacceptable.
For instance he did not fully condemn slavery.
â He provides his children, his wife, his slaves , servants, and assistants with pleasure and satisfaction, and maintains that pleasure rightly," says Buddha. [Adiya Sutta, Anguttara]
But that does not mean they are ok.
At the end of the day, itâs really up to each individual to figure out the best ethical and compassionate course of action for themselves.
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He also declared killing and dealing in living beings wrong livelihood, as well as inciting others to kill on oneâs behalf. Meat-eating was a matter of pragmatism since animal husbandry wasnât always optional as it is now for the majority of the worldâs population. The compassionate thing to do now would be not to have others kill on oneâs behalf instead of buying meat and rationalizing it away thinking âoh, I didnât point out specifically which pig that overworked, underpaid immigrant worker should kill for me, just as it literally says in my holy book, so no bad kamma for me and screw everything elseâ. Context mattered to the Buddha, context should matter to us. Not everything that was correct in iron-age India is correct now.
But Iâve had this talk too many times, and rarely did anything good come of it. Some people will do anything to defend their cravings. Iâll leave the discussion to more inspired contributors now and do something productive instead.
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I donât think pain should be taken into account, from a Dhamma point of view. Regardless, my point was that in order for everyone to be vegan you have to intentionally kill millions (if not more) of insects.