Utterly tragic. It's also singularly evil the devastation humans have brought to some of the hyperintelligent species on the planet.
That is, animals may kill to eat, but humans slaughter animals to get tastier/more convenient/etc., food.
Not to mention that the rest of the shark is perfectly recycled by the ecosystem.
I don't really understand how what you said relates to taste, convenience, or cruelty.
And no, if everyone ate cows that way, they would not be perfectly recycled by the ecosystem. These out of context arguments are never useful because they sideline the facts, the scale and population of humans being the relevant ones here.
If you think any animal's cruelty even remotely approaches humans' and the scale of it, then you're just intentionally ignoring reality.
Humans are the number one cause of environmental destruction and animal and plant suffering on Earth that is completely out of whack with what it takes for humans to live. All of the "hope for something better" you refer to are for humans to solve less than 1% that we have ourselves caused in the first place.
The natural world is full of unimaginable cruelty. Wolves will take down young deer and eat them alive while parents watch. Bears will pin down whatever they can catch and who cares if it is alive. On and on, the amount of bloodshed required to support an omnivore/carnivore is simply bananas. Killer whales are hyper-intelligent aquatic nightmares, imho, that thankfully have not decided to eat humans.
We, humans, made the following bargain with nature, at least until recently: We will drive away the predators that keep you in constant alert and savage your children, and in exchange we will determine how and when you die (quickly, but perhaps also fearfully).
I agree - we can carefully manage the wilderness for our own benefit, and that may take away the randomized killings. But there is _no_ version of a carnivore or meat-eating omnivore that does not involve killing and savagery and disregard for the life that has been reduced to just a link in the grass-to-meat or plankton-to-meat foodchain.
I've come to terms with that and continue to eat meat.
Maybe once in the past, or in places that still graze their animals. I don't think the average factory farm situation can be framed as mutually beneficial for the animals.
Absolute statements are not useful in this context. Vultures are obligate scavengers who eat the flesh of already dead animals as a practice. The dead animal could be due to death from natural causes (diseases, old age, injury, poisoning, starvation) or hunting by other animals. So there are some versions.
Also, as a couple of examples, the animal world is not one that has consent to sexual intercourse or empathy in killing an offspring who’s not their own. So your (or our) morals cannot be absolute for one purpose (killing an animal to eat the flesh) while being considerate for other aspects. In other words, we don’t gain much by pointing to the non-human world as a justification or excuse for our actions.
But, life on earth evolved with predators in the mix. I’d be curious to know what life would look like without the presence of predators during evolution. Or, which set of life would be more evolutionarily successful: creatures from evolution w/ predators vs. creatures evolution w/o predators. Sounds like a great topic for Primer [0].
Last, to push back, I don’t think the parent comment was using the brutality of nature as an excuse for their actions. They said it helped them understand/come to terms with their hunting behavior, of which is totally natural.
Surviving in nature is outcompeting others, regardless of how fair it seems to our current culture.
She is autistic. Her methodology included walking the chutes used to direct cattle to slaughter and working out in great detaiL mods that would reduce their stress. I've heard her interviewed a few times. She's extraordinary.
Unrelatedly, elephants are quite a bit smarter than lions and herbivorous, as are many primates!
Let an average person alone in nature and they’ll starve within a month
Why is the human naked? Does the Orca get pants?
What are we talking about?
Plant based diets are:
- more affordable
- better for the environment
- healthier
- avoid/reduce cruelty (livestock and human)
If you want to eat meat, fine, but the comment you replied to is innocuous and not "guilt-tripping" anyone.
I think if lions regularly bred into existence billions of antelope, confined and tortured them for the entirety of their existence, and then ate them, yes, a lot of people would view that as pretty evil, even while acknowledging such a creature is probably incapable of the moral calculus that (some) humans are.
If nature designed for this, then why do people feel any guilt at all?
Regular hunters != industrial-level slaughtering. There are plenty of "regular hunters" who only eat meat they kill themselves. This is like saying if I cut down a single tree on my property I should also support the clear-cutting of the rainforest.
The situation has changed completely in the modern world. We have created meat factories, forcefully torturing millions of animals daily, and have somehow agreed upon what animals to kill and not to kill.
A lion will kill anything that moves (as long as it is not poisonous), are you willing to kill (and eat) any animal under the sky?
What about pets? Do you think they suffer any kind of pain and suffering ? If yes, that's the same way any other animal you eat (regardless of intelligence) feels when being slaughtered.
One more question to think about: A young child (in a modern urban world) will be more comfortable plucking and eating fruits from a tree ? OR killing a pig -> draining blood -> cutting it into pieces -> cooking it to eat it ?
I say this without commenting in favor of either side of this debate which I am undecided on and reading with interest.
But I think it's important not to shy away from the reality that cruelty and the desire to kill are very much a part of human nature from the beginning. And that applies no matter where or how we are brought up.
What you mention is a typical destructive behavior noticed in kids and a tendency of violence/killing which even adults have. Key point here is: will they also eat the bird after killing it? Is the killing done here for the sake of eating ? or for the sake of enjoyment/destruction (whatever other reason).
recently our neighbors slaughtered a goat that my kids had seen alive just before, and we all ate it. we also eat the chicken from the kids grandparents village home that they saw being slaughtered there.
kids killing animals for no reason are an exception, as are kids refusing to eat animals that they saw alive.
if they weren't we'd all have become vegetarians centuries or even millennia ago.
(slightly related: it bothers me that some people think kids should be protected from experiencing how meat is produced. if you eat it, you should know where it came from)
That’s a common self-indulgence. Many predators in fact couldn’t care less if prey is still twitching or whining, as long as it doesn’t run away.
lions aren't consciously deciding against a rationally plausible alternative, they are eating what is available.
similarly human cannibalization stories generally center around the concept that the people driven to such actions are given no sensible alternatives (airplane crash in a snow mountain comes to mind) -- so we don't presume they were evil, we presume they were desperate.
lions lack the intelligence and forethought to see the consequences of long term decisions. We as humans have gauged and measured the effects of ranching on our environment, the effects of meat consumption on our physiology, etc.
so, to answer your question : If the lion was able to empathize and relate to the suffering of the prey, if the lion was able to relate its' actions to the destruction of its' environment, if the lion had sensible alternatives that avoided long term consequences while still satiating hunger, if the lion could accurately forecast the future and STILL decide upon the destructive course of action...
...yes, an argument could be made that that lion might be evil.
That said, you personally don’t add much to this global effing mess that the life is by eating some low mass meat per year. You also don’t subtract much by avoiding it. One predator out-eats you 20-50x easily on meat. And many humans can’t or barely can afford meat.
The ethical problem has systemic and economic roots and doesn’t relate to personal ideology. Being vegan but doing nothing systemic is pretty useless imo. The whole privilege of going vegan bases on living in a society that does all that to animals as a consequence and a requirement of its function.
Usually the same ones who argue that we're separate from nature when it's about building motorways and single family homes to park two SUVs, are also the ones explaining that we should be more like lions in a savannah. Seems inconsistent, at best.
you're saying this typing on a _computer_ - how does that fit into human evolution?
IMO humans evolve in an ethical standpoint as well and tend to want to cause the least amount of suffering possible as we evolve. That is why we have medicine, don't usually own slaves, don't hit children, and don't abuse animals.
To most people, killing an animal for food is not a problem conceptually. Causing undue and unnecessary suffering is a problem for pretty much everyone with a functioning moral system.
But given that mass farming will not be stopping tomorrow, would you rather the animals suffer more? Or is less suffering better? Should we actively torture the animals on the way to slaughter or maybe not?
All that aside, if we stopped farming tomorrow, a billion or two people would have to stop eating. So we do the least worst thing and give the cow a pat on the head before we grind it up.
That said, most people would probably prefer if no animals were killed at all. Once cultured meat starts producing at the required scale, industry farming will probably end very quickly.
Well put argument though!
This is wrong, the majority of humans may think that way because they don't have to kill any animal personally, they are disconnected from the "killing" part of the whole equation. Let's see how many people eat and kill animals (i.e. hunting) once we remove meat factories.
Another counterargument is: pets. Somehow all meat eaters gasp on the idea of eating their pet, so they are not morally okay to eat an animal (as you claimed).
> Or is less suffering better?
Ask yourself, how would you like to die? After listening to music you love? getting massages? OR being hurled up a thousand other humans in a small room? The fact is you are dying, your neck will be cut off, and it doesn't matter what you did before it, how is listening to peaceful music before dying less of a suffering?
It is like saying that concentration camps should have been more "humane", they should have cared more for prisoners before killing them to reduce their suffering. Death matters the most for any living creature, all of us (humans + animals) are primed to avoid it. So, we need to take a path where we are reducing overall deaths, not a path where we are reducing pre-death suffering.
What you can say is, "I don't care about suffering; I just need meat." That would be a more logically correct statement than claiming that you care about reducing their suffering.
You seem to think humans are rational if-this-then-that machines but we're perfectly irrational enough to hold two dissenting views at the same time very closely. It doesn't prove much that people like their pets, serial killers also like their own families.
So pointing out the fact about pets is to force meat eaters to consider their irrationality face to face.
We have done this throughout our evolution. Some people notice the irrational things in our behavior and try to reason with other humans why doing these irrational things is wrong and should be stopped (slavery, racism, etc).
That's what I am doing, and anyone should do. Just accepting the fact that humans are irrational is just accepting the status quo.
I care about suffering so I minimize it, maximize well being, and eat meat because it tastes delicious and is calorically and nutritionally dense. I also eat more vegetables than the average person, many of which come out of the garden I work.
I have been afforded a much less idyllic life than is sustainable but I still hope for a quick, inexpensive death for myself.
until a century or two ago this was simply not true. everyone grew up with animals around them and for sure watched them being slaughtered.
people being bothered by that have always been the exception.
Most people can only afford cheap food, which means after the novelty period, regular meat will be something reserved for only the very wealthy.
That said, most people would probably prefer if no animals were killed at all.
Yeah I guess that at least skips the murky philosophical waters and has some actual impact rather than patting everyone and everything involved on various parts of an upper body.
> One person stops eating meat, it just reduces the demand and there’s one less cow that suffers, but not in a sense that it becomes happy now. It just stops existing (best case). Is that a win?
If humans were to stop eating meat, certain species of animal would go extinct.
We’d be better off not making animal slaughter the core of the American diet.
The irony: The farm was run by vegetarians and as the only meat eater it became my responsibility to oversee any time an animal was taken to slaughter. This simultaneously put me off meat eating and vegetarians.
So instead of letting the mother cow nurse her calf for the first few months and then start taking her milk for our use, the more "modern" practice is to separate the calf immediately.
Which means if you are drinking milk, you are drinking it from seriously depressed cows.
I wonder how this contributes to our culture's growing mood of depression?
see i.e. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/29/mums-ask...
or just google dairy cows separate from calves
My guess is that we are seeing something along the lines of EVs. Instead of making these healthier alternatives mainstream, they are being sold as a status symbol for the rich and making them unaffordable to the common man.
Here waiting for my chinese oat milk.
Not enough scale because little demand compared to regular milk.
Here in Singapore, where soy milk has been around for decades, soy milk in both fresh and UHT forms tend to be much cheaper than dairy.
Also, soy milk's been around for decades in the US too! I drank a lot as a kid. My mom would keep these little single-serving cartons in her purse for us, like juicebox-sized.
Plantmilks are firstorder product.
This means that clinate impact of most plantmilks are higher than milks, excepting oat and ryemilk.
On a cost note - : making oat milk is literally just blending some oats and let them soak a day or 2, filter the water and done, perhaps do that if cost is an issue?
On a sidenote, if you drink soy, almond or worse ricemilk you're actually doing something worse for the climate/environment
If milk is a byproduct of producing meat that can be sold for money, this means milk subsidizes the price of meat. Even if the effect is small, this is almost certainly enough to make it worse for the environment than e.g. soy milk, as the difference between raising cattle and growing soy is orders of magnitudes.
You already got the oat. Got a blender? Grind those little flakes with water and a spoon of your favorite oil. Et voilà !
Pro tips:
- filter for extra smoothness but no need if you intent to mix with whole oat flakes
- 1h in the fridge and mix again for double extra smoothness
- pinch of salt or cinnamon or cacao… yummi
- bored of oat? Check your supermarket shelf for other ideas. (Soy need to be cooked then blend then filter).
What you mentioned does probably play a role as well, with much more $/revenue being spent on marketing for non-animal milk than cow milk. None of the big milk players are trying to present themselves as a hip startup like Oatly is. Wouldn't be surprised if the latter was even VC backed.
But again, good ole' communist subsidies are the number one cause.
There’s a ton of mushrooms and fabaceae, very cheap nutritious and as much delicious if you learn to cook them well (like meat). My favorite is Tempeh which combine both! And quite cheap if you make it yourself.
They usually prep it in advance, so it’s rare to find one that has an actually vegan dish they don’t custom make even if it says tofu.
There's many "educational farms" to show kids live farms animals and sometimes pick the eggs and milk a cow. I'm very confused about them: it's good to let urban kids see-smell-touch real farms animals. However they have nothing in common with modern farming, even the not-inhumane ones.
BUT telling a 6yo toddler "look that cute cow, this is where your morning milk is from" will engrave it deep in the way they see farming. One day or another they will learn about factory farming but what you learn at 16yo doesn't "engrave" as easy and deep as at 6. I mean yes you quickly understand that education farms are not the reality but it require a big mental shift to overcome the feeling that the milk you drink in the morning is from an inhumane famr, especially when everyone around keeps doing it (I don't blame them, it's cheap, easy, convenient, traditional, delicious, practical...).
Some schools or parents brings their child in real farms which is a bit better, but it still doesn't depict the reality for 99% of consumption (think gelatin candies, croissants, cakes, ice creams...).
For the courageous -- DONT SHOW THAT TO YOUR TODDLER (yet) -- 8 hours of pigs in a typical/normal gas chamber that probably will end up in soap/jelly/bacon. : https://www.farmtransparency.org/videos?id=hg8cyu393v
You also get to see how the wild world works, and most fish would prefer to be taken by a skilled spear fisherman than have their face mauled off by a squid, at least as far as I could tell.
Unfortunately we live in a world with 9 billion people on it, which means we don't have the room to grow and harvest all our own food. In my opinion, that's the issue. Sourcing all our food "ethically" is basically not possible.
I'd much prefer to be producing and hunting my own food.
Maybe you see a normal farm and get to know the animals then see an actual factory where it is industrialized...
You could go vegan.
Same with eggs, they don’t exist in a vacuum. To get eggs you have to have chickens, and to have chickens you must grind male chicks alive as they hatch because they don’t produce eggs. And hens aren’t supposed make eggs year round but we make them anyway with artificial lights etc, which drastically shortens their lifespan.
I kept a flock of 25-30 hens on my property for a few years. Other than moulting they produce eggs ease round. The production slows drastically in the dark winter months for the older hens (1 for 3 days, say) but some continue to produce nearly daily (I think the cycle is something like 26-28 hours). The only time we had artificial light for them was on days when it was so cold we kept their coop door shut and turned on the interior light.
They’re not gonna feed the milk that their mothers are producing for them, because that would mean less milk to sell and less milk for people to consume.
And so why keep the calves in the milking side of the facility when you can move them to the fattening side for meat/leather or to get them to age so you can forcibly impregnate them every year for their milk, depending on their gender.
I only turned vegan a couple of years ago as something clicked and I was able to make the connection between the food I was eating and the animals who were being killed, almost certainly unnecessarily, for that food. But before then I disliked vegans a lot, and was completely fine with vegetarians. I’m honestly unable to reconcile my thinking.
It’s kind of like how I don’t understand how I strongly believed in god before I lost faith. Now the idea that I ever could, or ever did, believe in a personal god seems unbelievable to me.
Human psychology is ridiculously interesting.
Though I do have a vegan friend that always brings her own food to gatherings, and it does make things far easier.
definitely more restrictive but i think the dairy/cheese thing is the big one
people also feel that vegans are judging them morally and people are very defensive about their eating habit, hence the dislike
Margarine burns more easily but this hasn't been a problem for me, so I imagine you are talking mostly about flavor difference or?
I don’t think jainism can be applied without changing your life altogether and removing many thinks you used to.
is there some extreme amount of suffering that goes into the production of root vegetables because afaik that’s the only distinction between jainism and veganism?
2. You are still essentially using another living being for resources. Why keep the chickens in the first place? They are only going to waste because you bought the chickens in the first place, probably also from an industrial breeder, essentially subsidizing the industry.
3. If your way of producing eggs is more ethical, you could sell your backyard eggs to displace the (pretty awful) commercial producers rather than eating them yourself.
I agree that the case against exclusively consuming your own backyard eggs is weaker, but I also don’t think we are describing a considerable proportion of actual egg consumers in the West.
2. chickens are the ultimate garbage disposal. you can feed them any excess food from your household and they turn it into fresh eggs.
3. see 1. the volume of eggs gets out of control fast, but not quite on the scale that it’s viable for random people to build an FDA compliant business out of it. it’s hard to get rid of all of them, even for free.
2 -> I think the subsidy point still stands.
3 -> Totally agreed but I think your point about giving away eggs applies just as much, any eggs you eat rather than give away are just going to be an additional egg from the chicken CAFOs or at best case a fractional additional egg from the CAFOs.
But I certainly agree that this is among the instances where the case is weaker.
It is an interesting philosophical bit and it combines pretty standard modern morality with a pointed concept of not discriminating by species and instead trying to use the ability to suffer as when you decide if you should exploit something. In this paradigm the reasons not to rape or enslave people are the same as the reasons not to rape or enslave other animals.
This still has plenty of inconsistencies and weird bits, both theoretically and practically. Silly questions like eating braindead people stymie both sides until you get into the weeds about stuff like dignity. Would the theoretical cows in the hitchhikers guide that WANT to be eaten be ok to eat? Is it ok to have second hand animal products, especially if they are high quality and will prevent additional exploitation/consumption?
One of the most sticky conundrums I personally chew on is if this means we should actively try to prevent suffering, not just choose to personally try to avoid causing it. If the former, that means trying to make other people change their beliefs and behave in a way that is pretty objectively worse for them in society, which starts to edge toward causing suffering if you squint. It is easy to fall into trying to reason about which suffering is worse which is a terrible minefield where everybody loses. It's easy to SAY I value something no longer being tortured over my taste preference but is there a logical framework for that that can ever be objective and applied to harder problems? If it is only subjective then what makes it better than any other decision - people decide to eat pigs but not dogs every day but there is no more OR LESS reason behind that than the claim above. There might be answers but I haven't found them to be easy to pin down which is especially interesting because of how strongly I feel that not caring any hurting things is bad.
tl;dr being vegan sucks
An analogy that I like to illustrate this is: going shopping for clothes vs going shopping for food. Both tend to have ethics attached to them, e.g. with child labor for production of clothing, and slaughtering of animals for production of food. If you walk into a store to buy new clothes, and there are 2 sections of the store, 1 for clothes that were produced using child labor, and 1 for clothes that weren't, and both sections had clothes of the same price and quality, the decision of which section to shop in is very logical. This is how I see going shopping for food- you have sections for food that were produced using factory farming, and sections for food that weren't. Both sources of food are the same price and quality. So the decision to make about which source of food to buy is, again, a logical one. It's also a decision that most people in the developed world have to make every week, at least people who live in cities and do their shopping at grocery stores.
While we unfortunately don't have visibility into whether our clothing is produced with child labor, many of us do know if our food comes from factory farms. In the US, the estimate is that over 95% of meat sold in grocery stores is factory-farmed. Why make the decision to buy that if you could easily avoid it?
I think it's interesting how easy it is to criticize veganism as extreme when, to me (and in many anecdotes here and in the rest of the world) it is actually the result of trying to reconcile all my actions behind the same non-controversial principles.
Maybe "rigid" vs loose/flexible would be a better description but that isn't how it feels to people; vegans just existing conjures feelings of disdain and dismissals of extremism (I felt that way before as well, just like some other commenters on here).
In a general sense, people absolutely hate being told to change or that they have been wrong about something. It puts our backs up immediately and it fires up an emotional storm to start invalidating what they imply about us.
We're fascinating as humans.
For the think you feel absurds:
- honey is usually done by placing queen in a room she can’t escape. Also the honey is stolen of the bees. They didn’t choose to be here and they don’t work in the purpose of human eating it. Live it in the nest and they won’t make so much honey. Less bees will die of exhaust also. I got a neighbor that participate in « honey in the village » program. She’s not vegan or vegetarian in any way. Once she saw what’s happening she decided to not harvest. It’s still a delicious product with many nutritious benefits and the bees doesn’t suffer as much as other livestocks so many vegans choose to eat it (again veganism is not about perfection or absolutism)
- I don’t know what eggs production you consider ethical. In my country, the best quality eggs you can fin in the supermarkets comes from chickens that were born in the exact same factory farms as factory chickens In the case of personal backyard poultry it really depends what’s your ethical stance. I often see people that have them in a cage not so big, with no grass (chickens destroy the grass!), no trees, etc… that’s better that a factory but it’s still a miserable cage life. When I go in a farmers market and see someone selling "fallibly farms backyard eggs" I have no way to asses how they live.
We shouldn't anthropomorphize animals. Instead, the point here is that emotions are not anthropic; humans do not have a monopoly on emotions.
Which is to say, we should be sure not to think that "grief" means the same thing for an orca that it means to a human; yet naturally animals do grieve in their own ways. (Heck, "grief" doesn't even mean the same thing for all humans!)
in other words, all the ways we have to manage emotions, and all of our "non-emotional" functioning.
So we have somehow evolved to be able to better manage emotions.
Ok, so if we grant all of that, then haven't we just said that emotions are common to animals? So then how is it anthropomorphising to say that animals have the traits which we've just said define animals, whereas what makes humans special is that we have 'risen above' mere emotion?
Insects don't have emotions, they barely have hyper specialized sensors as brains.
However, emotions efficiently direct behaviours in mammals. They enact immediate and persistent responses.
We can say without much doubt that emotions in mammals are similar to our own emotions.
The big unknowns are animals further away from us, which are demonstrably intelligent, like birds and octopuses.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277240852....
I've kept rats for a long time, I don't know why, but I do know they change behaviour for a period of time once one dies.
A skilled hunter can choose an adult animal without kids and take it fairly humanely.
Sadly, we all have to die somehow.
Hunters and fisherman generally have great respect for nature and the environment, which is important.
If you have kids, bills, a job, listen to crap from politicians all day, where do you find the time to be this empathetic.
My kids school gives them milk as part of lunch, my kid likes milk now. You have to live in a very special world to get around this.
I was a vegetarian for a while, I was mostly starving hungry and I had to spend hours a day cooking and eating to feel full. It's a shit situation but yeah, it's the way it is for many people.
The messaging should be to reduce your meat consumption. By reported national averages, I eat 25% of the meat eaten by the average Australian. And I don’t feel that I’m missing out.
This part I recently decided I will stop doing. It will not be easy and I may fail, but I think my mood requires it.
Because in reality there is nothing you can do.
You can't have a shot of vodka with Putin and ask him to stop war.
You can't stop Twitter and Elon from raging, nor can you can't Isreal.
What you can stop is giving these puppets headspace time and hold compassion to those who are involved in the conflicts.
Anything else? I'm sure I will be told by my peers.
What? Vegetarian doesn't necessarily mean you lose all sources of animal protein, there's no real reason to be starving on the diet.
In our family, we eat vegetarian every second night. Basically vegan 3/4 nights a week. However I do find myself running to the fridge for cheese or a whey protein shake for desert quite often.
Tl;Dr combine a grain with a legume at least once a day to obtain a full protein. Beans and rice is a good staple, for example (but to reduce exposure to arsenic you should parboil the rice[1] as well as rotate through some other staples). Put peanut butter or peanut protein powder in stir fries, put hummus in your sandwiches, eat eggs, etc. And, I know it sounds obvious, but it's a reminder I needed, do actually eat vegetables.
It's not difficult but if you've eaten meat your whole life you may need to change some habits, because you have more room to get away with a poor diet if you're eating meat.
[1] https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-say-this-rice-cookin...
Swap those two.
Stop listening to politicians. It's not empathy you require, it's compassion. Empathy is very tiring.