Veganism, as a whole, requires us to stop using animals for entertainment, food, pharmaceutical testing, and clothing. If it were to become universal, factory farming and animal testing would end, which would be excellent news for all the animals that we capture or raise for these purposes. But it would accomplish next to nothing for free-roaming wild animals except to stop hunting, which is the least of their problems.
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Purely arable farmers accidentally kill insects, snails, small mammals, and other animals with farm machinery, and they intentionally kill these animals with pesticides that often unintentionally go on to harm wildlife through drift and secondary poisonings. Farmers also allow hunters onto their land to reduce the populations of deer and other ‘pest’ species that might eat their crops. Redirecting water for irrigation kills fish, as does spill-off from fertiliser and pesticides. We run over animals with our cars. We destroy animal habitats to build our cities, and we extract resources from areas that then become either uninhabitable or dangerous. The ‘wild land’ that we do leave untouched is often fragmented into little bits that don’t give animals the space they need to make homes and roam for food, and so cannot sustain them.
