If ey had actually gone into a discussion of glial cells versus neurons, labelled line vs across fiber organizations, etc. then ey might have a valid argument.

There is something about calling Zach Weiner any 'ey' that just strikes me as offensive. He puts hard work into conveying overtly puerile masculine humor and to attribute him a non-existent gender is disrespectful to him as an artist.

The comic both strawmans all vegetarians as ones who do it for ethical reasons, and assumes that those ethical reasons are because they don't like killing "conscious" animals

It doesn't. Saying "I am an X because Y" doesn't mean "all X are such because Y".

Even if the character did use the latter formulation, it would be a bit of exaggeration to interpret it as strawmanning. Characters in a joke aren't usually supposed to voice the author's opinions.

As a vegetarian (which I define as anyone whose utility function contains a negative term for eating meat), neither of those are true for me.

Just to clarify, do you assign negative utility to just you personally eating meat, to the total amount of meat being eaten by every human, to all animals killed by the activities required to feed the human species, or maybe to something else? Or maybe some weighted average of all of those?

But the author commits illusion of transparency when ey assumes that animals that move slowly and are slothful are the "stupidest".

I agree, this comic would be rejected by a peer-reviewed journal.