Are animals killed in the process of farming vegetarian foods?

Even while I was weeding I found a great many newts under every large weed, many ants nests, many spiders etc etc. It occurred to me I was destroying their environment.

Unfortunately, for any amount of terrain we claim from the wild for agriculture, for each tree we convert into furniture or tools, for each house we build, for each baby we raise and nurture, an animal or several will have to die. Habitat loss is the number one, the most destructive, the primary threat to the survival of animals. In other words, just our mere existence and survival is a death warrant for animals. So, vegans and veggies, you too have animal's blood on your hands.

Please take this into account when reading other answers. 70% of US grain production is fed to livestock. Meat consumption is still the main reason for the high number of animal deaths through grain production.

Vegetarian means avoiding just meat but still consuming dairy and eggs. Animals are killed in both the dairy AND egg industry in huge numbers. Dairy - dairy calves which are male are not of use in the dairy industry and only female calves are raised to produce more milk. The male calves are either shot after a day or so, raised for veal or raised for cheap beef. They are basically by-products. Eggs - again, male chicks are hatched as 'by products' of producing more female egg laying chickens to support the egg industry. The male chicks are killed within a day or so either by being gassed or ground up alive. In terms of plant based foods you cannot guarantee animals were not harmed as rodents, insects etc will be killed in the harvesting process however by becoming vegan you would be reducing your animal killing by a HUGE amount. A lot of agricultural land is farmed to produce animal feed. If you are vegan you do not take part in this whole section of agriculture, plus you don't directly kill any animals from the meat, dairy and egg industries Also a huge amount of deforestation is carried out for land for cattle ranching. Deforestation causes huge amounts of animal deaths and reduction in biodiversity, whilst also contributing to climate change and altering ecosystems worldwide. I would say the best diet to reduce animal deaths would be a palm oil  avoiding vegan using cruelty free beauty products and also avoiding the amount of plastic you buy as plastic is another environmental problem especially for marine life. Palm oil is well documented as a huge driver of deforestation too. Growing your own vegetables would reduce animal deaths further if you have time and space.

Followers of a religion called Jainism come closest to not killing any animals to eat. To the point where they don't cook at night because bugs are attracted to the open flames and kill themselves. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism

Yes, insects and some small animals are killed.. But, vegan foods are still much less harmful to animals than slaughterhouses, in which an animal spends their entire life in living hell. Vegan foods are also much better for your health, and the environment.Despite my bio ("100% vegan"), no one can really ensure that no small animals were killed in the process of farming. So, anyone who buys from a supermarket is really only 99.9% vegan, if you count the deaths of small animals who happened to be in the way of the machinery. But this is much better than not being vegan at all. Better for your health, better for the environment, better for world hunger, and is still better for animals.

Intensive farming practices such as wheat cropping introduced to natural environments kills far more than just animals it destroys entire ecosystems. Many species of plant and animal life are wiped out or displaced as the cropping practice begins. This new environment is then usually favourable to a much smaller number and less diverse number of species. So animals such as rodents attempt to colonise the changed environment but are then killed through human control methods or inadvertently through the growth and harvest practices employed through human activity upon the crop.

Yes, animals get killed when you grow crops. Other answers have mentioned running animals over when plowing and mowing, but if you just think about the fact you are converting a natural environment into cropland you soon realize that a lot of animals just lost their homes. So not only does crop production kill animals, it often kills all the succeeding generations of animals on that land.To illustrate the idea think about american bison and barbed wire. Before the farmers got to the prairies there were herds of buffalo so large they could take days to pass through a location. Wherever they went they ate the grass and trampled what they didn't eat. As soon as the first plow made it through the Cumberland gap and onto the prairies the buffalo was doomed. If the market hunters had not shot the buffalo into near extinction the farmers with their plows and wire fencing would have sealed their fate because the fencing to protect the crops would have meant no migration of the buffalo to fresh pasture and certain starvation for them.You can also look up the fate of the prairie chicken and the black footed ferret. These were also destroyed by wheat farming.Many farms were created by draining wetlands. This means loss of habitat for animals like beaver, muskrats, ducks, geese, frogs, etc.It does not really matter if the farmers are large agribusiness or if the are small farm holders. The result is the same.

Yes. Although not as many as in other country which I interpreted from answers  above. But some insects and small rodents are killed for sure in India. In India, mostly there are not big farms and not very sophisticated  machinery is used. Small fields are ploughed using either Tracktor or Bulls. These both means do not cause much harm to animals. Small insects are uncovered and Birds eat them. Hardly any snake or rabbit is killed. They run away after hearing the noise. Although insects are killed because of pesticides which is necessary otherwise they will destroy all the crop. Otherwise people in India avoid killing any animal until and unless its creating too much trouble.