Third option: Give up milk and eggs but add fish. Overall I think fish is more ethical than most farmed eggs and milk, and also more healthy. (Dairy is fishy from a health perspective anyway. Fish are not fishy at all.)
Health Pros: Fish gives you nutritional access to muscle, skin, bones, organs...thereby bypassing most of the health drawbacks of vegetarianism. (Depending on which nutritionists you listen to.)
Moral Pros: I’m not sure if farmed fish suffer more than wild fish. They might be a bit more crowded together and have a different diet. You can choose wild caught fish. Most fish are probably way less sentient-ish than chickens and cows. Even if you don’t agree about fish not “suffering” in a humanlike-sense, all wild fish experience birth and death regardless of your actions and I doubt death via human-catch is worse than the other variants of fish death.
Are eggs and milk better than chickens and cows, from an ethical perspective? There’s the producer, plus the male chicks and calves killed as byproduct. (But I’m sure someone has done that analysis already.)
Cons: Price, Mercury, and Eco-friendliness but those can be mitigated by restriction to certain species. Conveniently, I think the eco friendly species are also lower in mercury. Those fish do tend to be smaller, though, so if you’re considering sheer kill-count this might be a problem. On the human end, another con is that a fisherman’s job is sometimes dangerous.
Third option: Give up milk and eggs but add fish. Overall I think fish is more ethical than most farmed eggs and milk, and also more healthy. (Dairy is fishy from a health perspective anyway. Fish are not fishy at all.)
Health Pros: Fish gives you nutritional access to muscle, skin, bones, organs...thereby bypassing most of the health drawbacks of vegetarianism. (Depending on which nutritionists you listen to.)
Moral Pros: I’m not sure if farmed fish suffer more than wild fish. They might be a bit more crowded together and have a different diet. You can choose wild caught fish. Most fish are probably way less sentient-ish than chickens and cows. Even if you don’t agree about fish not “suffering” in a humanlike-sense, all wild fish experience birth and death regardless of your actions and I doubt death via human-catch is worse than the other variants of fish death.
Are eggs and milk better than chickens and cows, from an ethical perspective? There’s the producer, plus the male chicks and calves killed as byproduct. (But I’m sure someone has done that analysis already.)
Cons: Price, Mercury, and Eco-friendliness but those can be mitigated by restriction to certain species. Conveniently, I think the eco friendly species are also lower in mercury. Those fish do tend to be smaller, though, so if you’re considering sheer kill-count this might be a problem. On the human end, another con is that a fisherman’s job is sometimes dangerous.