You’re citing *vegetarians*, not *vegans*. Do you have any examples of high IQ vegans? Also, if those men had been raised as vegan from early childhood do you think they would have been as smart? Regardless, your argument makes no sense. Everyone agrees factory farming is bad, but that doesn’t make eating meat and animal byproducts bad. You can make conscious choices about where you source your food from. Arguing that eating meat is bad because factory farming is bad is like saying “owning dogs is bad because puppy mills are bad”, or “using wood is bad because clear-cutting is bad”, or “using electricity is bad because coal is bad”, or “wearing clothes is bad because fast fashion is bad”… or, to bring it back to food, “eating vegetables is bad because monoculture farming is bad”. You are conflating the method of production with the thing itself. From another perspective, what about meat that you hunt yourself? I grew up eating venison. If you don’t kill a shitload of deer every year, they get overpopulated and get diseases. They also fuck up local ecology and cause all sorts of problems you might not expect (e.g. increased erosion, which destroys habitats of other animals and has huge ripple effects). Hunting helps manage deer population and also provides meat for hunters to eat. Is it bad to hunt and eat what you kill, while respecting the animal and using every part of it you can?