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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Every single mouse, snake and gopher in the field is killed by plowing, spraying, cultivating and harvesting. By the millions per section. The ground under the shade of a field of corn is essentially sterile. Enough denial; its absolutely disastrous to animal life to farm vegetables and grains.

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Okay, but it's even more disastrous to animal life to farm animals. Over 150 billion animals are bred and killed on purpose. A billion is a thousand times more than a million, by the way. Using the argument that some animals are inadvertently killed as a byproduct of crop production, especially when the overwhelming majority of those crops are grown for livestock, is just logically fallacious and dishonest.

Hey a section is one square mile. So Iowa has over 50,000 sections. 90% under cultivation. Most for grain, not for animals. So in Iowa alone, we've about met that number. Add in California, Illinois, Nebraska and so on and we zoom past that number.

Of course we do. There are thousands of rodents for every cow. This is a silly discussion. Its a pity it makes Vegans seem responsible for billions of deaths, but there it is.

And I seriously doubt that 15 farm animals are killed for every man, woman and child on the planet. That's gotta be fiction.

Both everything I and you have said can easily be verified with simple Google searches. You are being dishonest if you think more animals are killed by vegans than meat, dairy and egg eaters, or just trying to start a flame war. Either way, I think you've learned some interesting things through our discussion and I hope you'll consider it with less personal bias in the future.

I hope you've learned something too. That nothing comes free; that just because you don't see the killing doesn't mean you're innocent. That the entire subject has no easy answers.

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