it can be icky without being immoral.

is there anything a human could do to an animal which you would classify as “rape”?

i doubt it.

you think all humans have rights

i think rights are a fiction. i don’t believe they exist at all.

ok? that doesn’t change the effectiveness of being vegan.

and if done to cattle, it’s a veterinary procedure

they stop producing meat.

meat production increases every year

i’m saying i know how linear time works, so i know that buying meat on a shelf can’t have caused the animal it came from to be killed.

there is not any way to prove such a claim, as you cannot prove a counterfactual.

the person doing the killing is usually paid by someone but most people are neither killing nor paying the killers. they are both paid long before someone walks into a grocery store.

It reduces demand for meat, lowering production

production increases every year.

being vegan doesn’t do anything about those

I didn’t say anything about a medical condition

And paying someone to kill someone/something for you is still killing.

most people don’t do that, either

no, they’re not

artificial insemination is a veterinary procedure. it’s not rape

no one is raping animals

you don’t know what they need. and I seriously doubt they are killing for entertainment. I doubt they kill anything at all.

I don’t know anything more disturbingly capitalist than to perceive intelligent living beings as commodities.

intelligent is a relative term. but i can certainly show you something more disturbingly capitalist: exploiting people for profit.

Growing less profitable is not a natural cause of death.

no, and it’s also not the cause of death for any of the animals we eat or otherwise exploit.

There’s nothing natural about being slaughtered against your will.

this assumes non-human animals have a will to live. this would require an understanding that they, themselves, might die. we have no proof of understanding personal mortality in non-human animals (though, if you have a study that shows otherwise, i would be very interested to see it). therefore, we have no reason to believe nonhuman animals have a will to live.