Aren't indigenous/traditional and subsistence diets a valid counterexample?

The objection

“Inuit hunters and subsistence communities have to eat animals to survive. Doesn’t that disprove veganism?”

The answer

The premise is correct, and it disproves nothing.

People with no genuine alternative do nothing wrong by eating animals. The Inuit hunter on the sea ice, the pastoralist where crops won’t grow: where there is no real choice, there is no moral failing, and any ethic that condemned a starving person for surviving would be a bad ethic. Veganism agrees, explicitly. The Vegan Society’s definition is avoiding animal exploitation “as far as is possible and practicable.” That clause was not a loophole bolted on later. It has been the idea from the start.

Now watch what the objection actually does. It borrows the moral situation of the person with no choice to defend the person with every choice. You are not on the sea ice. You are in a supermarket, reaching past the lentils for the bacon, and the hunter’s necessity does not transfer to your trolley. The counterexample shows that necessity changes the ethics, which the vegan already fully accepts. It shows nothing about preference.

There’s a sharper point underneath, worth saying plainly. Conscripting people on the margins of survival to justify a factory-farmed sausage in a city with a dozen alternatives is its own kind of disrespect. Their hardest circumstances are being used as cover for your easiest ones.

So the argument doesn’t land where it was aimed. It lands on you. The subsistence hunter is excused by necessity. What excuses the rest of us, who face none?