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Pop wrote

I wonder really how much any person's withholding from buying animal products actually affects how much stock companies put on their shelves

And if it makes sense to understand this cumulatively, like all vegans as a whole make a difference

For example, if you're the only vegan in your village, I would guess that it has zero effect on how much stock of meat the local supermarket keeps

And so being vegan in situations like that possibly reduces nothing, not even any suffering?

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ziq wrote

I've never understood the logic behind this. The less demand there is for a product, the less stock the shop will order. No one is going to purposely buy more stock than they need just to watch it rot.

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Pop wrote (edited )

That on its own makes sense, but what I'm saying is that the demand for the product is not actually less (in the relevant ways) in many circumstances - because there'll (often?) be a threshold before the reduction in purchases becomes significant enough for any shop bothers to change their order

To make an example, Tom is not vegan, and nobody else in his village is. Tom eats a T-bone steak every 2 weeks or so, along with other types of meats etc.

The local supermarket gets an order of 100 T-Bone steaks (along with other types of meats) every monday
Every once in a while, they revise how many steaks they'll order, but demand mostly just rises, and there's actually just a limit to how much stock fits in the shop
They are also generally wasteful and used to throwing shit out when its not selling and only revising purchases when something is really not selling.

Tom decides to go vegan. among all the things Tom eats less now, is 1 less T-bone steak every two weeks

The difference for the shop is negligible. They don't even notice that someone's not buying that product twice a month. They don't order 99 steaks each second week now, they still just order 100. The meat either sells anyway, or gets tossed out / used some other way.
and the harm is still done to the animal, and the suppliers still get paid to keep it up

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edmund_the_destroyer wrote

That's the opposite of a slippery slope argument, isn't it? "If I act, and nobody else acts with me, there will be no progress." What if Tom's village has ten or twenty people who thought about going vegan but decide it's not worthwhile for the same reason he does? Then progress could have been made but is not.

I also think there's a chance of some social impact. If I'm a vegan others might notice that I'm eating reasonable meals without resorting to meat, dairy, and eggs. They might be more inclined to be vegan, or at least try a few vegan foods and eat meat less often. Maybe the world will trend to vegan over a few generations - that's worse than changing everything all at once, but better than no change at all.

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raindropq wrote

i feel like really fighting and caring for children is potentially a more effective harm-reduction tactic than some lazy, selfish, moral-construct that would negate Earth's ongoing, life-project

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