Hehe, I'll admit I think vegans are quite extreme myself. I can understand it's a moral point of view where you think it's immoral to end lives of other creatures. I don't agree with you though, like I don't think it's immoral for a lion to kill an antilope, I don't think it's immoral for me to go out and fish or catch crabs to eat, a couple of things I like to do in summer on occasion. Not living off animals seems a little unnatural considering how important it's been for our own evolution. I understand that now we don't
have to so it's a kind of luxury, but I still think animals killing animals is perfectly natural.
However, I do get a lot of the other arguments, particularly the one that you can feed so much more people with plants than you can with animals. I applaud the work you do, something like that has the potential to help a lot of people
I'm also against needless animal cruelty which you have a lot of in the meat industry. I do try to be an aware consumer in regards to where my meat comes from.
I'm fortunate to live in Norway. Here, there's a lot of land which is not suitable for agriculture, but which is suitable for keeping animals like cattle or sheep. Also, a pig has many more rights than I do and I think standards for many animals are relatively high here. All grazers get a lot of time out by law and once I even visited this very cool cow barn where the cows milked themselves
They were lying on mattresses, could get free scrubs from these rotating brushes, could go out if they wanted and whenever the udders started aching, they could walk into this milking machine that attached automatically. Surprisingly, they claimed the production was higher than in a "normal" barn too.
There's very few vegetarians here as a result, I think, but I do know quite a few from Svalbard where there are a lot of international students. I think it's often an interesting discussion and some of the people up there who are vegetarians in their home country home would even eat meat that had been hunted up there on the basis that hunted animals have lived a natural life up until the moment where they were shot.
Anyways, these days it's just a matter of time (okay, maybe quite a bit of time) before advances in stem cell technology makes it so we can start growing steaks out of petri dishes. I guess that should help with some of the moral concerns!
edit :
Ohh and about the mites, they are sturdy little fellas, that's true. Some of the springtails also have very interesting cold/drought adaptations ..
Onychiurus arcticus has a water permeable cuticula and when it gets cold and ice starts forming, water leaves it's body to join the surrounding ice particles. This dries the animals out, making the concentrations of solubles like salts, sugars and so on higher and higher the colder it gets. The result is the animal shrivels up and can survive extremely low temperatures in this dehydrated state for years.
So yeah, there are many tough little creatures up there ..