- I see. I might have presumed it then. Sorry about it.
- The question you have raised is quite common. In fact, I had published a series of blogs about 6-7 years back. I'll link you if I can find them (however, I ain't quite active in this ecosystem now and don't know of available tools to search old blogs). But you can also search Google or YT to find the reasoning along with elaborate reports to support it. Ofc I did cover it from various perspectives. But to answer you in short, the farmed animals consume a lot more plants than what a vegan diet would need. Consuming energy from primary source is much more efficient than deriving it from a secondary source, lower down the food chain. E.g. a rough (or hypothetical) data is like 50kg of plant consumption will produce only one kg of beef. So by eating animals, we kill more plants than what we would if we eat them directly. Also, produce like fruits & leafy greens need not kill plants altogether. And most grain crops have an annual lifecycle anyways.
The goal is to minimise the killing as much as we can. It doesn't imply plants ain't living entities and those lives shouldn't be respected.
Btw, I haven't yet read the article you linked here but would like to. In fact, I've also published a blog post on this topic (around the same time like 6-7 yrs back) where I argued that plants do feel pain. But even this doesn't justify animal farming tbh.
Hope you can find a lot of resources on these topics if you're really interested to know.
ATB!