If everyone becomes a vegan

by Zina
(Sweden)

I became vegan a couple of days ago thanks to a few documentaries and activists.

My question is that if everyone becomes a vegan and free all the animals, doesn't that mean that they as herbivores are going to eat a lot of plants? Create Chaos because we as human beings have destroyed a lot of habitats? That they would become so many that we don't have any control of them as we did before when they were in slaughterhouses?

What do we do if they eventually die, bury them? I get that they would in the end break down thanks to decomposition and eventually become fossil fuels. But what I'm mostly concerned of is if they eat the plants that we're supposed to eat instead of their bodies, is there a point in being vegan then? Plus a lot of carnivores have become extinct and they are the ones who makes sure that there aren't so many herbivores to make the plants go extinct. In other words they make perfect balance.

I would love to have some answers.

-Zina

*Editor's Note:*
We have two other people with very similar questions here:

"I'm a vegan and I always try to educate myself about veganism so that when others ask or question my decision by turning vegan I can spread the vegan message and educate people around me what I have learned. I got a question recently that goes 'If everyone went vegan, how could plants and fruits feed 8 billion people? It wouldn't be enough and you can't plant everywhere.' I didn't now how to respond to this."
-Emmie, Sweden

"Becoming vegan is not going to stop the suffering of animals? I have been contemplating becoming vegan and have been discussing it with my friend. One of the points that he made was that humans becoming vegan is not going to stop the suffering of animals because animals themselves will always kill their prey with cruelty and savageness.

What are your thoughts/opinions and are there any counter-statements to this?"
-Gustavs, Latvia


*Editor's Response:*
These are similar questions because they are all hypothetical. In my personal perfect world, everyone stops eating vegan today. This minute, right now.

In that hypothetical scenario, pigs living on factory farms are freed to roam and eat acorns, chickens are allowed to truly free range, and cows never have to give milk to strange humans again. Realistically, many of them would likely die because they are so ill right now and could never survive without a ton of help from animal rescues. So, again, perfect world, those farms turn into rescues and compassionate people take over and allow them to live to the end of their natural lives.

Then we worry about overpopulation of those animals and the grain it takes to feed them, but that amount of grain is actually the same. Blah, blah.

It's a fun argument to play out and come up with ethical solutions and ways to make it work and I'm sure many of us have spent plenty of time working it through. But, I find this all counterproductive. It's the same as the desert island question that naysayers like to present: "if there was absolutely nothing else to eat, would you eat fish?" Who cares.

When people try to present you with questions they think will trick you into proving you're not a true vegan, a great thing to do is just to calmly let them know that it's a hypothetical question and the more important scenarios deal with what's actually happening right now. We are making progress with moving the needle towards others knowing the best diet for the environment, but it's not going to all happen tomorrow. We can hope that demand for these animals as food continues to decline and that factory farmers produce less as a result. We can hope that over time this hits zero, and by that point, there wouldn't be an overpopulation of factory farmed animals looking for food.

You can't be responsible for the entire world's actions, but you can make the right personal decisions. If everyone chose to make those same choices the world would be a better place.

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