It sounds like you mean well, but I’ll try to break down the problems with your reasoning here.

You’ve moved from simple reasonable steps to wanting an overnight lifestyle change.

Not necessarily. What I condone is progress. If somebody says, “I can’t go vegan yet, but I’m going to go a few days a week without eating meat”, or maybe, “I think I need to start by going vegetarian,” then those are things I support. They demonstrate an active reduction in the quantity of animal products consumed, as well as the intent for further reductions in the future. Ideally this hypothetical person would have a fully animal-product free lifestyle as their goal.

Local farms with local butchers are leaps and bounds better than factory farming. If we can agree on that, what is the problem with someone moving to utilizing those services if that is as far as they are willing to go at the start?

I’ve been trying to think of an appropriate analogy, and I think I’ve got one. Rightwing Libertarians like to claim they support environmentalism, but if you look into the particulars of their platform, what they support is an overall expansion of fossil infrastructure, claiming that building new systems and upgrading old ones improves efficiency, and therefore these investments are good for the environment.

But it should be needless to say at this point that we have to get off of fossil fuel dependence, and make a real renewables transition. The former ultimately just deepens dependence on unsustainable systems and reinforces old habits.

It is the same pattern with so-called “happy farms.” To begin with, whenever these farms are actually investigated - abuses are still very much rampant. You can see an example of this in the documentary, Pignorant, by the well-known Youtuber Joey Carbstrong. Even if you’re not vegan, I highly recommend watching it cause it’s a great documentary and a riveting example of independent, undercover gonzo-style journalism.

I would also recommend watching the documentary Cowspiracy, because that one goes into depth on how the so-called “regenerative pasture farms”, which tend to overlap with happy farms, are actually not only completely infeasible in terms of scalability, but are probably overall worse for the environment due to the sheer land use that would be needed for them in a world where animal ag land use is already insane and unsustainable.

What needs to be understood here is that in actuality there is nothing extreme about being vegan. It’s not a purity thing. It is a moral baseline. It’s not “unbalanced”. It’s not any more at risk of nutritional deficiencies as any other diet if you do it right (in a nutshell, legumes, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables in equal measure, plus a b12 supplement is a solid foundation for the majority of people, and customizations can be made for other needs. The Daily Dozen is also a good foundation).

The hard part is just overcoming old habits, and breaking out of the sheer societal pressure and gaslighting to think you need to eat animal products. Once a plant-based lifestyle is firmly established, it doesn’t feel hard at all. In fact it makes a lot of things easier and feels outright liberating. For one simple example - not having to deal with raw mutilated body parts contaminating literally everything they touch anymore. I would go so far as to say plant-based cooking is easier and more convenient overall.

When you put everything together into the bigger picture - the moral horror that is inherent to treating other sentient beings and their secretions as commodities, the utterly devastating and unsustainable environmental impacts that result from it, the continuous and unavoidable pandemics that result from it, and even the impacts on personal health which include most of the western world’s biggest killers - it is not at all extreme to be vegan; it’s the dependence on animal agriculture that is truly extreme in the highest. It only requires removing the source of your conflict of interest to make that fact obvious.

The vegan life is the dietary and lifestyle equivalent of the energy transition. It needs to happen, and it is only the steps that lead in that direction that should be celebrated.