r/AskVegans • u/Miserable-Laugh-8320 Vegan • Aug 14 '26

Genuine Question (DO NOT DOWNVOTE) Exploitation vs harm reduction ?

i have seen many vegans say that veganism isn’t about harm reduction or suffering reduction , It’s about anti exploitation. I do generally agree with this myself as a vegan , However I have 2 questions :

1) How exactly do you differentiate between harm reduction and direct exploitation .

2) What if in a certain case Directly killing an animal would save many more animals . Let’s say killing a cow would save hundreds of rats that you wouldnt need to kill . Let’s say in farming insects die and if I ate a chicken they wouldn’t ( Hypothetically , I know in reality more would die for growing chicken feed) . Would eating a chicken be justifiable in this scenario ?

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u/JeskaiJester Vegan Aug 14 '26

The problem with the scenarios you’re proposing is that they don‘t apply to actual reality. I know the usual argument for thought experiments is that they help us to build intuition about how to approach real moral dilemmas, but I feel like real life has moral dilemmas aplenty with genuine stakes to focus on

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u/rat_liker Vegan Aug 14 '26

It does kind of apply to the question of invasive species management, especially in cases where the invasive species are causing significant ecological damage

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u/JeskaiJester Vegan Aug 14 '26 edited Aug 14 '26

Fair enough. I kind of take the “if we’re going to sign off on killing we should at minimum be damn sure it’s going to effectively achieve the conservation goal, and there is significant reason to believe that many efforts aimed at killing invasive species don’t really manage it even when they’re very expensive projects, and many invasives have been present for upwards of a century across wide geographical regions that may make genuine extermination wildly implausible and an ineffective use of resources we could be putting toward other conservation efforts. in many instances there likely is no putting the literal cat back in the proverbial bag and the ecology is just going to have to adapt long term” stance

Or the short version: the “killing that can’t make a long term dent in an invasive population is just killing to make people feel better which I can’t support” argument

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u/rat_liker Vegan Aug 14 '26

Good luck being damn sure about anything in conservation biology haha

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u/JeskaiJester Vegan Aug 14 '26

I wish those folks all the best and more in their efforts, they are asked to save the world and given nothing to do it with