I don't understand the argument that opting out of using animal products is avoiding responsibility. Isn't that equivalent to saying that by boycotting sweatshop products we aren't taking responsibility? Are you arguing that we should work within the system?
> Vegans will be looked down on the same as meat eaters, because they are not taking responsibility for animal welfare either.
Vegans aren't interested in animal welfare in the way we usually think of it, i.e. in terms of bigger cages, access to fresh air, etc. Vegans are interested in animal rights as in not using animals at all. It might not be possible to product food without hurting some animals, but there's a moral difference between accidentally and intentionally hurting someone.
Vegetable farming kills animals outright and displaces others. It's often a smaller number than the animals killed and displaced for animal products, but not always. Veganism is about keeping your body "pure", it's not actually about doing a real accounting of your relationship with the animals in the ecology that feeds you. At best it's a rough heuristic for "low animal cruelty", but it's rough enough that e.g. many hunters have lower animal impacts than the standard vegan diet, despite outright murdering animals.
How many fieldmice do you have to maim for it to be considered equivalent to a quick death for a deer, after a happy, wild life, in a region where that animal was effectively torturing other animals through overgrazing? How many rivers can you dam, destroying entire ecologies, before it's equivalent to someone taking care of a pig like it's their own child for a year and then bopping them on the head and slitting their throat before the pig knows what's happening?
Certain vegan products constitute outright animal torture. Palm oil from burning orangutan habitat is the classic example. How is torturing orangutans to get palm oil better than killing a deer who is torturing other deer?
Veganism is appealing to people who want to pretend that violence doesn't happen. But violence is an inevitable part of ecologies functioning. Consuming calories is violence, despite what it might feel like in the supermarket. The best we can do is deliberate respectful violence in place of unnecessary violence (torture).
> Vegans will be looked down on the same as meat eaters, because they are not taking responsibility for animal welfare either.
Vegans aren't interested in animal welfare in the way we usually think of it, i.e. in terms of bigger cages, access to fresh air, etc. Vegans are interested in animal rights as in not using animals at all. It might not be possible to product food without hurting some animals, but there's a moral difference between accidentally and intentionally hurting someone.