Thank you for this honest, thoughtful response to knee-jerk, simplistic, hateful thinking and behavior — this time not by Trumpian goons, but by people ostensibly on “our” side (that is, the side of people who love our planet, revere all life as sacred, and cultivate compassion). I’m sorry you suffered from having one of these knee-jerkers call you “violent” for the supposed offense of raising livestock. And you are entirely right on this: life and death are in a perpetual dance, throughout the biosphere. Life feeds on life, whether the “fed-upon” happen to be microbial, fungal, botanical, or animate. And the domestication of other life for this purpose is not unique to humans either — Ants do the same thing with aphids, for example, and plants, fungi, and microbes feed on each other or domesticate each other for their own purposes all the time — whether parasitically, commensally, or symbiotically. Understanding the interdependence of life and death is an integral part of true reverence for life.