This documentary is not about being vegan, is about give the animals a decent live and improve the way we treat them. Also talks about speciesism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciesism comparing it to racism.
The documentary shows crude images, but this is how it is. Closing the eyes to the reality won't make it better.
Change is hard, but if you're genuinely confused, simply follow what the great mindhacker Gautama Buddha taught: compassion for all and without judgement.
We are biologically hardcoded to eat both meat and vegetables. The problem is not what our diet is: rather how we go about fulfilling such a massive demand due to our inability to curb our breeding habits.
Becoming a vegan only partially solves the problem (partially = swathes of the Amazon forest being chopped down for vegetable farming). The other solution is only purchasing home range (which I always do unless it's absolutely not available) - but that had the problem of where the animals would be farmed (probably the Amazon too).
Cut down enough of the Amazon and guess what happens, not only do you stress the wildlife as you displace them but you also rapidly cause extinctions.
The problem is lack of self control, not our diet.
At for environmental impact, a meat diet is generally more environmentally expensive than a vegetable diet. Animals either directly eat vegetables or indirectly (eating other animals that eat other animals that eat vegetables, etc.). Through the life of the animal it's burning the calories from the vegetables. Eat the vegetable calories directly and you're not eating them through an animal conduit that consumed much of them while existing.
Reminder: We have curbed our breeding habits. Industrialized societies now generally face more pressing underpopulation problems than overpopulation problems, and the global population is now predicted to peak within this century, then start going back down.
You may wish they had been curbed at a lower number, you may still be concerned that we may still pass a carrying capacity before we quite peak, but a fashionably misanthropic "woe, woe, we just keep breeding forever" is not currently a valid concern based on facts.
That's a nonstarter for me and makes me want to avoid this film.
Speciesism is a perfectly reasonable position. Assigning the exact same values and rights to cockroaches/jellyfish/ants as we do to humans is ludicrous. Any number of moral thought experiments should immediately demonstrate how absurd that would be (e.g. would you refuse to sacrifice 2 ants to save 1 human?).
You've misunderstood anti-speciesism. Anti-speciesism means that "moral worth" is not determined at all by species. It doesn't mean that all individuals have the same "moral worth". In other words, if we find a new species which is pretty much identical to humans in terms of age, intelligence etc., they should be roughly equal in moral worth to humans even if they're from a different species.
Another key point in non-speciesism is the argument that "it's just an animal". Species shouldn't be used in ethical arguments. Anti-speciesism doesn't mean that intelligence, ability to feel pain, average lifespan and so on have no place in moral discussions. Of course they do. I would sacrifice two ants to save one human if that increase utility (because I happen to be anti-speciesist person who belives in something close to utiliarianism).
Another thought experiment would be comparing a severely mentally disabled child and a chimpanzee of equal intelligence and predicted lifespan. I think it would be as evil to kill and eat the chimpanzee as it would be to kill and eat the child.
Ahh, but don't stop there. Make such though experiments with humans (Would you sacrifice one 80 year old to save two 40 year olds? Would you sacrifice 3 illiterate children to save one wunderkind? Is a person you know worth 1.3 or rather 2.7 people you don't know?) quickly shows that those are equally absurd, so the absurdity in one case proves nothing.
Just because you've chosen silly numbers doesn't mean those are absurd. Moral thought experiments are useful for understanding what value people tend to place on human life.
See, even with your trolling questions, most people would have a queasy feeling in their stomach when considering sacrificing a human being.
But when I ask you to compare the value of ant life to human life, there's no comparison. You wouldn't hesitate. They aren't equal at all.
The point of non-speciesism is that it's not automatically ethical to eat animals even if they're not in horrendous factory farms. You're still treating non-humans in a separate ethical category.
An additional point to make is that even if something appears ethical, it often is not. Usually hobby farm chickens are sourced from unethical places, for example. Of course there's no point in talking about this particular hobby chicken farm because nobody else knows anything about it.
Primitive hunters seem to have respected their prey... just because they killed and ate them didn't mean they considered themselves above them. And from such hybris results shameful behaviour.
Any source for the claim that "primitive hunters didn't considered themselves above animals"?
As for written history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_status_of_animals_in_the_... might be a start
You can read and understand, right?
A non-speciesist who kills other animals to eat them would be a priori okay with killing humans to eating them.
But regardless, eating humans is unhealthy and thus contrary to evolution. Its the same reason why animals that live for a long time (~100) rarely have many enemies, especially if they are omnivores. Evolutionary, it is better to eat meat that do not had years to build up on heavy metals and toxins.
So to put it to a simple point, regardless of the morality with cannibalism, humans would still not eat other humans. There is no -ism needed to explain why we do not eat sulfur, or drink mercury.
As humans, we have the ability (through not uniquely) to consider the acts we do in a third-party perspective. We can think about the consequences of our actions, and how our actions will effect nature. We can think rational about fishing, hunting, and even keeping a healthy sized population of farm animals. One can respect animals while at the same time making sure that a population of fast breeding animals are kept to a size which is healthy.
It can be. If a person assigns different values depending on the species, that person is speciesist. And obviously that person's diet is affected by speciesism or lack of it.
Wikipedia: "Speciesism involves the assignment of different values, rights, or special consideration to individuals solely on the basis of their species membership."