Although it sounds like an impassioned plea for mice, Australian ecologist Mike Archer’s 2011 “blood on your hands” argument against veganism is really just an uncritical defence of the status quo, rightly pointing out some relevant problems but completely ignoring others.
1. First and most important of all: The animals killed for cultivating land do matter, enormously. The remedy for that is humane herbiculture, which is definitely possible, and practiced, but rarely, because of the preference for factory agriculture, which is cheaper.
2. The picture drawn by Archer is of Australia, where it is claimed that 98% of beef (and all kangaroo meat) still comes from natural range-feeding animals. This is not at all true elsewhere in the world, where a lot of arable land is used to produce livestock-feed instead of food for humans. Australia, where wildlife habitat encroachment has not yet gone nearly as far as in Europe and America, is not representative of the rest of the world.
3. The free grazing argument, such as it is, applies only to cattle (and kangaroos), not to pigs and chickens, which require agriculture to grow their feed.
4. The calculation in terms of protein percentage is greatly skewed by the fact that we eat far more protein than necessary for survival and health.
Conclusion.
A. Leave the free-grazing animals for last. Phase out all the other meat-eating that is not even implicated by the herbicultural collateral-damage argument.
B. Reform herbiculture to make it as humane as possible.
C. From the fact that animals graze freely it does not follow that we need to kill and eat them, let alone purpose breed them.
D. Worry more about wildlife habitat encroachment.
E. Not only do humans not need to eat nearly as much protein as they do, but they need not reproduce as profligately as they do, increasing exponentially the mouths to fill, the land to encroach, and the innocent victims to kill and eat, needlessly.
(George Monbiot has done a few flip-flops on this topic too…)
See also:
Bruers, S. (2015). The Core Argument for Veganism. Philosophia, 43(2), 271-290.
Matheny, G. (2003). Least harm: A defense of vegetarianism from Steven Davis’s omnivorous proposal. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 16(5), 505-511.