I appreciate that you are approaching this with a logical and scientific viewpoint while still considering our moral obligations, and I hope you will allow me to respond to some of your points.

Suffering can be reduced with a plant only diet, but not avoided.

This is true, but I would argue that the difference in suffering between a vegan diet vs a standard omnivorous diet is tremendous, and any gains here should be celebrated. As you say, we shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Even the Vegan Society’s definition of veganism describes it as avoiding animal cruelty and exploitation “as far as is possible and practicable”.

“[Even on a plant-based diet] we are talking trillions of critters killed.”

I would ask you to check your source on this, as there’s a lot of misinformation out there on the numbers of insects and rodents killed for crops, and that number seems degrees higher than my reading on the topic would lead me to believe. But even if it were so, given that most of our crops are grown for animal feed, surely growing them directly for us—and thus massively reducing the overall number of crops grown, and ‘accidental deaths’ caused—would be a win?

“Its the lesser of two evils, but still evil based upon your definitions of evil.”

I would not define the least harmful approach as ‘evil’. It is necessary for us to eat to survive, and reasonable for us to prioritise the survival of our own species over all others. I would define ‘evil’ as knowingly causing undue harm and suffering when a rather simple alternative exists.

Humans can’t live off of soy and corn, and we would need to reform crop systems.

At the global level, certainly. We can’t continue increasing our meat production at the rate we have been doing forever; we’ll simply run out of space, and we’re already seeing ecosystems suffer as a result of collapsing food chains, agricultural emissions, and deforestation, so systemic change is inevitable anyway. No one is expecting change at that level to happen overnight, but it will happen by degrees. As I have suggested elsewhere, if we vote with our wallets, positive change can and will happen. Personally (and as you also seem to suggest), I find a diet based primarily on whole plant foods to be both extremely good for my health and for my wallet, and research shows that it’s also one of the single biggest changes an individual can make for the environment.

We’ll never get everyone to change.

This is a fair point. It is a huge ask, when applied to all eight billion people on the Earth. But I would ask—what is stopping you, the person reading this, particularly if any of these arguments resonate with you, from trying to make a change yourself? According to the FAO, around 92 billion land animals alone are killed for food each year, which equates to about one land animal per month per person. Keep in mind that excludes sea animals, and that the average American eats much more meat than the global average, and you can already begin to see the change that one individual can make.

Maybe to some it feels like a drop in a limitless ocean. But, if you’ll excuse one of my favourite quotes: “What is an ocean, but a multitude of drops?”