I've heard it said that veganism is an ideology that is "anti-nature," one that ignores the natural processes of life. And this may surprise people who know me to hear me say this, but I actually agree with that... to a certain extent. (Vegetarians, please don't get excited, just hear me out for a moment...) For one thing, perfect ahimsa is quite literally impossible; there is no way to completely avoid causing harm. And sometimes killing is not only unavoidable, but necessary. Just by drinking a glass of water or taking a breath of air you can inadvertently kill thousands if not millions of microorganisms. Your immune system's primary task is to kill invasive organisms. There's no way around it. Plus, human beings were meant to be omnivorous, meaning we evolved to be able to eat a wide variety of foods, including plant foods as well as insects and small-to-moderate amounts of flesh.
BUT, even during our hunter-gatherer heyday (it would be more accurate to call them gatherer-hunters instead), our ancestors primarily relied on the gathering aspect, with meat generally providing approximately 10-15% of their diet, or less. And evolution hasn't changed us all that much in the last ten thousand years. Chances are, we weren't meant to be eating 32 oz sirloin steaks or six pieces of deep fat fried chicken products in a single sitting. (The standard American diet, so appropriately abbreviated as SAD, is horribly lopsided in the amount of animal products consumed.) Also, one must take into consideration the difference between the factory-farm meat you purchase at your butcher shop and what our ancestors ate in the "wild." Pork chops, for example, are about 51% fat; by contrast, wild deer meat is about 19%. Furthermore, there is a more favorable balance of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids in wild game. Same goes with the fatty acid composition of free-rage versus battery eggs (not to mention an increased amount of beta-carotene and other vitamins). I'm not even going to touch the milk issue... at least not today.
AND, I would argue that totalitarian agriculture, and in particularly factory farming, is a far more abhorrent denial of the natural processes of life than vegetarianism or veganism ever could be.
Hunting in open fields and wild forests with bows and arrows does not compare with intensive factory farming where cattle, pigs, chickens, turkeys, or other animals are packed in as closely as possible (minimize space while maximizing profit), subjected to inhumane practices such as debeaking and dehorning, with no room to move, often lying in their own filth, being fed hormone- and antibiotic-laden feed that often contains feces and the offal of other animals.
(Sidenote: cattle were meant to be herbivorous, and we have no business feeding them other cows, or the ground-up carcasses of any other animal; how the hell do you think the "Mad Cow" thing got started?)
Fishing on the open ocean or in a free-flowing river or stream is a far cry from drag nets that capture dolphins, sharks, otters, other "throwaway" animals along with the intended catch, or farming fish in intensive cage aquaculture (which often pollutes surrounding waters, and genetically engineered fish invariably escape into the wild and breed with native populations).
On that note, any form of genetic engineering is inherently unnatural, and the practice is quite prevalent in "conventional" animal agriculture today. (Yes, it's also quite prevalent in plant agriculture as well, but that's a whole other soapbox for me.)
Ideally, we'd get back into the pattern of nature by listening to the pattens of nature and not going out of our way to exploit life (animals and plants alike)... killing only what is needed, and respecting the lives we take. Vegetarianism and veganism at their best are a way of saying NO to many atrocities committed by "modern" totalitarian agribusiness. Not the perfect act of defiance, to be sure. But in the meantime, it can be a good starting point.
