Life’s Too Short For Trolls

Pathless Pilgrim
4 min readMar 16, 2022
Life’s Too Short For Trolls
Photo by Mark König on Unsplash

I recently received some flak for blocking someone on Medium. I was accused of being a hypocrite and a ‘typical ignorant vegan’ (whatever that means) because I’d blocked someone who’d responded to one of my posts.

To be fair, the respondent hadn’t been particularly disrespectful towards me personally. Their comments weren’t what you might typically think of as trolling, at least not in an overtly aggressive or abusive way, but I’d originally been posting about how, as a vegan, there is no need to concern ourselves with protein deficiency and that we can be perfectly healthy on a diet that doesn’t include any animal abuse.

In response, they had first asserted that ‘most’ plant foods did not contain all the essential amino acids required to make them ‘complete’ proteins in the way that animal flesh is ‘complete’. I had replied that this isn’t an issue, since vegans do not eat just one type of food — no-one eats just carrots, for example, or just wheat.

They’d then gone on to talk about their milk-drinking habits and how milk had never done them any harm, etc. etc.

They seemed to be missing my point entirely, which was that if we can choose to be healthy without hurting animals, why wouldn’t we? It’s been shown time and time again, not only through multitudes of peer-reviewed scientific studies but also through people like myself, who have been walking our talk for decades and showing by example, that you can thrive on a diet free from animal products.

Much of what I do online is aimed at helping those who care about the suffering and exploitation of other animals to move away from a lifestyle dependant on animal abuse and towards veganism.

I’m not really interested in discussing whether or not there are any benefits to be gained from eating animals.

I understand people’s genuine concerns about whether veganism is healthy and sustainable, but beyond that, discussing the minutiae of whether certain nutrients are more easily absorbed, or whatever, is a little bit like discussing whether human meat is better for us nutritionally than chicken, for example, or Quorn for that matter.

It’s a moot point, as far as I’m concerned, because if we can thrive without eating each other (and we clearly can) then we…

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Pathless Pilgrim

Veteran Vegan. Bad Buddhist. Mature law student. Many things to many people... A complete enigma to myself