I think most arguments I see about not becoming vegan are cope and rationalization by people who can't really be bothered to be vegan even though it obviously feels morally wrong on closer examination. The fact is that it just doesn't really matter to the monkey brain inside us and it's more convenient not to be vegan in most of the world. Same reasons why people fail to boycott stuff like Homophobic Chicken ChikFilA or literal death squad owner Coca Cola. Heck, even the genocide sponsor Starbucks boycott basically completely failed. Alcohol consumption is a whole other beast too, since we literally all know it directly harms us. It just takes a lot of conscious effort and real organizational power to make that kind of behavioral change on a large scale. Our brains aren't programmed to care that much or put that much effort into things like that without a major internal paradigm shift or enormous social pressure.
So in that sense, it's good to advocate for it if you truly care about it. People won't change without stimulus, after all. But I think you need a much more compelling argument than "animals are hurt and killed" to really get people to so drastically change the way they live, including me.
But here's my cope and pseudo intellectual rant anyway: I just don't think I can genuinely say that I care enough about animal suffering. You could force me to have to personally slaughter every animal I eat from now on and I would still eat meat, though less since it'd be a pain in the ass.
Like, I just straight up don't think animal suffering matters. The experience of suffering is, fundamentally, just a mechanism that tells a creature to get away from the situation it's currently in somehow. It's just a complex survival mechanism (there's some commentary here about how this also applies to humans, but that's too much of a tangent and I don't want really deal with that unless it seems important to address to someone reading this). That this behavior in animals activates our empathy when we see it is just a byproduct of our ability to empathize with each other for social cohesion. So I see no moral obligation to care about animal suffering.
Fundamentally, I think it's a silly notion that we should care about animal suffering. I mean heck, we barely care about human suffering. Moral veganism just screams virtue signaling to me. Someone deliberately being cruel to animals for no reason is obviously still a good indicator that they're probably not a very empathetic person and likely to do bad things to people too. Doesn't mean the suffering of that animal really matters on its own. And of course I still care about the well being of my pets or any animals I'm emotionally attached to. Doesn't mean I believe they should have rights.
Environmental veganism is another matter, I suppose. It's true that meat production in most developed countries is essentially an incredibly wasteful luxury industry. We might be omnivores, but we don't fundamentally need to eat meat to survive or thrive like cats or dogs (looking at you, vegans who kill their animal trying to force an unnatural diet on them). And it's indisputable that every pound of meat is drastically more costly to produce than every pound of plant matter. It's a different story if the meat is raised from pastoral grazing, converting unused land into food, but that's not what industrial scale cattle raising does. And it's not like we can't make good food without animal products,
But the fact is, environmental responsibility and sustainability wouldn't require a complete abandonment of meat, milk, and eggs to begin with. I agree that the meat industry should be a lot more ethical, but that's a far cry from wanting to stop all animal product consumption. And if it's the environment that concerns me, I can't say it's very compelling to my psyche, even though it matters to me intellectually. I mean, I don't particularly mind my personal water, electricity, or gas consumption either, so why would I bother with my animal product consumption, which has similarly miniscule impact?
Basically, why would I bother making my own life significantly worse to make no real impact while massive corporations delete entire lakes and forests for profit? Give me a dozen, a hundred, or any arbitrarily large number of people that I can realistically influence, make it my job to convince them to be more mindful of their consumption, and I'll earnestly do my best. Point me to a well organized and actually impactful protest and I'll happily go on a march or at least donate money. If you give me the means I will gladly go and personally strangle every CEO in the meat industry to death until drastic reforms are made. But I'm not gonna half heartedly boycott animal products just to hand the money I was going to give to the meat industry to the profiteering from vegans industry instead.
