I guess it just seemed like the direction the conversation was going in was painting a picture of vegans as crazy extremists, when the reality is that most are moderates who think it's perfectly acceptable to eat animals under a lot of circumstances, and are just opposed to doing it given current circumstances. For example, the Inuit, who live in the arctic, where edible plants don't grow, live entirely off of meat, they have no choice. The animals they hunt got to live their whole lives free, they do stand a good chance of escaping the hunter, unlike ranched livestock, and the hunters actually stand a good chance of dying. I have a hard time imagining any vegan seriously arguing that the Inuit should quit eating meat. By contrast, farming, does kill animals at much greater rates than hunting, make no mistake. It necessitates the destruction of habitat and the extermination of competitors (pests.) Before industrialization, most farming cultures also relied on the domestication of packing animals. Ranching is definitely more destructive, requires more farming to feed livestock, and forces more inhumane conditions on the animals being kept. Given the fact that our population has gotten too dense for us to survive as hunter gatherers, it is totally understandable why someone would argue that industrialized cultures should stop eating meat and dairy. But given the fact that our culture does produce those things, in excess, a person is harming fewer animals by eating meat out of a dumpster than they are by buying vegetables from a store, and I think that almost all vegans recognize that. The decision not to has more to do with personal levels of disgust than ethics. There are many examples of extreme starvation situations where people have resorted to eating their own dead. While we're all probably disgusted by the idea of cannibalism, the reality is that in that circumstance, we'd all probably do the same thing. If my dead body was capable of saving the lives of my loved ones, I'd hope they would make use of it. That doesn't mean that I think we should be eating all our dead instead of wasting all that perfectly good human meat by burying or cremating it. It's just situational.