I’m a vegan and I actually partially agree with your sentiment about “quick death + no pain = maybe not too unethical”, and that’s actually the justification I used for a while to defend why I wasn’t vegan.

Just know that this view is not inherently incompatible with veganism. Go vegan because of the way the animals are treated while they’re alive. Also, most animals are not killed without suffer.

Cows for meat are possibly the only animal we eat that actually sometimes get decent treatment, if they’re pasture raised with no growth hormones. But non vegans act like this is significant. Only about 3% of cows get to live their entire lives on a pasture. I would commend someone if they actually held a strict rule that they only ate pasture raised beef, but I’ve never met anyone like that. That would mean you could never order beef from a restaurant, you could never eat beef your friends made, etc. unless you’re 100% sure it was pasture raised. Because just about every other cow had to live it’s entire life in a space so small it can’t even turn it’s head and doesn’t get to see outside.

That being said, virtually every other animal product does not have that going for them. Chicken is never pasture raised (too expensive), their lives are absolutely atrocious and the vast majority of the time they are killed by being hung on an assembly line upside down.

I’m not going to go into all the details but just know that, even if you do hold the belief that it’s okay for an animal to die if it is quick and painless, that you can still recognize that veganism is correct.

Please don’t let your experience with vegans push you away from it. There’s plenty of reasonable, kind, and understanding vegans.

Also btw, rescuing a shelter animal = vegan, buying a bred animal = not vegan.

Him hitting you out of nowhere with a passive aggressive “are you vegan?” was not the move, but you have to recognize a bigger picture here.

When animal abuse happens, and people see it, they are disgusted by it. It makes you feel awful inside, it makes you empathize with the animal.

But when animal abuse happens and you don’t see it, people don’t seem to care. I mean, what this fellow did to his dog is absolutely atrocious, but frankly it’s mild compared to the 25 million chickens killed daily (USA alone), who are often hung upside down in assembly lines for hours, not to mention the atrocious living conditions they had beforehand. And that’s just the surface.

Rather than passive-aggressively questioning your ethics like the other user here, I instead urge you to explore these feelings you have about animal cruelty, and think about what happens even when you don’t see it.

I mean, most vegans would still commend your effort to reduce animal product consumption.

But from a moral standpoint, simply eating less animal products really doesn’t have much value. Imagine using your argument for other moral dilemmas.

“Racism is wrong, so I reduced the amount of racial slurs I use to only 1/3”
“Rape is wrong, so I only rape on Mondays now” (in reference to meatless Mondays)

I hate to be so militant about it, but you either think animal abuse is acceptable or you don’t.

Now, what I do think could be a moral standpoint, if you really want to still be able to eat meat, is to only eat “humane” meat. I put “humane” in quotes because even farmers with the best intentions are still killing animals young. I don’t personally believe any animal product can be humane, but even then I can recognize that any animal that was raised on a pasture and ate real food is more ethical to eat than one in a factory.

So if you genuinely only ate pasture raised beef and chicken (and you were sure about it), then I would say that is quite honorable.