Agreed. I chimed in on an earlier article supporting eating meat- but higher mammals are a special case.

Dolphins/Whales should be in the same category as Elephants and Apes. They are beings with complex social structures and individual personalities. They are not prey or husbandry animals, but apex animals.

David Brin's Uplift novels make this point very well- these are our fellow travelers on the road to sentience. We just go there first. Eating these animals is brushing right up against cannibalism to me.

Why are elephants higher on the hierarchy than eg pigs?

They're a keystone species, have culture and language (probably older than any human one), they mourn their dead, and on and on...

Pigs are smart too. I don't know about on the same scale as elephants though. Elephants are also very social and long lived.

I try to cut pig products out of my diet because I can't kick this comment someone said to me once, "Pigs. As close to eating humans as you'll get".

I know many humans who are not very social. Is "very social" a prerequisite for right to live?

No, it's a proxy for intelligence and higher forms of conscious awareness. There's no such thing as right to live for non-humans - if the world stops eating pigs, how many do you think would be alive? That applies in nature too where survival comes down to fitness and luck. But the higher the life form, the more human-like it is and the more humanely we should treat them. Ants get different dispensation from cows, and cows from dogs. Dolphins and elephants should get better treatment still, but this is not currently the case.

Pigs are pretty cool too though.

Pigs are cheap and no one cares if you kill them.

Not seeing how pigs are different from dolphins

Have you tried Dolphin Bacon?

Apologies for being a bit pedantic, but I had never heard of the phrase 'keystone species' and went on to look it up. While an elephant could be (and perhaps is) a keystone species, I don't find that the status of being such a species is relevant for discussions on consciousness of animals because of what this term actually means and includes. Starfish, for example, could be considered a keystone species.

Not trying to be a jerk or anything (I'm also a vegetarian) but just wanted to bring this up in case anybody else was a bit curious about what the term meant or had maybe heard of the term before and was confused as to why it was included here. I'm also clearly open to a arguments discussing why a keystone species is inherently conscious.

Good catch. Keystone-ness has nothing to do with consciousness, of course. I was making a pile of reasons not to murder elephants.

To be clear my comment was intended to question killing pigs, not "not killing elephants".

And orca are not really whales. They are big dolphins. The name "killer whale" means "killer of whales", whale killer ... blame the french for that swap.

I downloaded a bbc show called "wild wales" expecting an epic doc about the sea. What i got was two guys in a camo tent feeding peanuts to squirrels. Language is hard.

Orcas, porpoises, and dolphins are toothed whales. I don't know what you mean by "real whale" if the definition does not include them.

Whatever it is, if your definition includes pilot whales and sperm whales, it probably has to include the dolphin family, too.

I don't follow the logic of why intelligence should be the decider of "its ok to kill" over sentience.

Octopuses are incredibly smart but eaten by most Japanese, sometimes even alive.

> Octopuses are incredibly smart

They are, but their lives are so short they'll never develop language, culture, or any other kind of memetic structure for their species.

Agreed. As should Norway and Iceland.

Last time i checked, Norway and Iceland enforce strict regulations to make sure the population is sustainable.

That Japan allows boats to roam to far waters without punishment is very different.

I feel the same way about horses. They serve horse steaks in Iceland (and probably other places) which I find equally as barbaric.

The difference for me is that horses can be (and are) domesticated and raised for their meat. Nor are they necessarily endangered. If you find horsemeat barbaric, what about beef or chicken or pork? What about deer?

Americans have a cultural attachment to horses that is probably related to them being used the modal means of transportation for hundreds of years in a country that is very sparsely developed, where most points of interest are separated by a great deal of distance.

Horses are like cars that can be happy to take you somewhere. And you don't disrespect an American's automobile. We'd eat sausages made from horses that died normally, but slaughtering one for meat is like burning a car just to get warm on a chilly evening.

There's also the potential problem of former racehorses, pumped full of performance-enhancing drugs, contaminating the food supply with their pharmaceutically tainted meat.

It definitely isn't because horses are smart. It may be because some of them are movie and television stars, a few are star athletes, some are considered pets or companion animals, and many are considered tools or co-workers. They don't have great brains, but they do have personality, even if much of that has been supplied by popular culture rather than actual contact with the animals.

Americans don't eat their dogs and cats, either. Some of them are dumber than a sackful of hammers, but you just don't eat family.

Beef? Cows won't fit in the house. Bulls are dangerous.

Pork? Most pigs turn into big fat jerks when they hit maturity, then they grow heavy enough to be dangerous. Also, they dig up everything they can smell, and are not overly averse to offal and excrement.

Chicken? Chickens are non-mammals, so it's harder to project our mammalian attachment behaviors onto them.

Deer? If they wanted mercy from me, they would have stayed out of all the gardens I have ever planted. But I also know people who won't eat venison because of Bambi.

We just won't eat foods that have the wrong narrative. Horses have Mr. Ed, Trigger, Silver, Satan II, Secretariat, Flicka, that one you rode at summer camp that one time, Epona, mounted police horses, the Budweiser Clydesdales, etc., etc., etc. There's even a literary trope where the named horse character has more "common sense" than its rider.

Horses are huge animals and often have to be put down for injuries to their legs. It's a shame to let meat go to waste. I don't know about killing horses in their prime though if that's what they do.

Animals that have to be euthenised for one reason or another cannot, and nor should they enter the food chain for humans, cats, dog, or otherwise. Firstly, there are the drugs they use to humanely put down the patient which would be toxic to down stream consumers of the meat products, and secondly there maybe concerns about zoonosis.

If they choose to put down a horse and decide to used for human consumption, then they will certainly use a different method ( shot, hammer, etc ).

No, the problem is that there are other drugs that might have been administered therapeutically, so animals that are in the food chain have to be managed differently than ones that are for companionship or racing. For example Bute is commonly used in horses, but is toxic for humans.

This in part was why the horse meat scandle was such a problem in the UK.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21455419

You honestly think that most horse meat steaks are from animals that were put down due to a leg injury?

No, OP said that it would be a waste to not use the meat from such animals. To the child of that person's comment, there is a presumption that a non-poisonous method was used such as hammer or bolt-gun.

That won't happen.

If the horse has to be euthanized, unless it happens far from vet care (say on a distant trail ride), it's going to be given a lethal dose of sedative. If it does happen far from care, then it'll be most likely shot in the head and the carcass burned or left for predators if it's not possible to dig a pit for it.

Source: live on a horse farm and have had to deal with weak or dead horses.

No, I don't have a problem with those other types of meat. I've spent a lot of time around all those different kinds of animals (well, not deer) and none of them are on the same level of intelligence as horses. Horses are smart like dolphins. Cattle and chickens are just stupid.

Why is this any more barbaric than eating cows or pigs or chickens? We raise them, we eat them, and they're delicious. I hope for humane slaughter but beyond that, bring on the Sauerbraten!

Do you feel the same way about pork or beef?

Nope. I've spent a ton of time around all these different animals and cattle and pigs (and especially chickens) are just stupid. Horses aren't stupid.

I am sure that your prolonged exposure to these farm animals has given you valuable insights into the nature of these animals. But I think you'd agree that informal observation has serious epistemological shortcomings. (I presume from what you wrote you did not engage in rigorous scientific observation of these animals.)

Personally, I've spent essentially no time around farm animals, but from what I understand about the scientific work in the area it seems likely that many farm animals have quite sophisticated minds. One review of experimental findings in pig intelligence[1] claims that "pigs possess complex ethological traits similar, but not identical, to dogs and chimpanzees".

[1]: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8sx4s79c

Well once you're down that path, why eat any animal?

You can buy horse meat at the supermarket in Switzerland and I think in Italy also if I'm not mistaking.

I generally agree with you, I'm not sure I agree with your framing. I more agree with you when you say whales are not something most Japanese would eat, so it doesn't make sense to put this on Japan as a country to move forward and stop killing whales. There are some unsavory people and practices in all countries and amongst all groups, and by that logic we all need to be better people.

That said, that tax payer money might finance a new whaling ship might be closer to something you can pin on the government, so that's a valid concern I think.

> Whales are intelligent. They should not be killed by humans who mask the activities as scientific research.

Okay, so killing intelligent animals is not okay.

We need an international agreement that every whale has to undergo a little test before being harpooned.

A whale has to be a bit stupid or retarded - then killing is morally justifiable.

>The difference is whales are not sustenance and are not something most Japanese would eat or enjoy to eat.

Wow this is presumptuous, whale meat has a long history in Japan and whales have been used for sustenance for a long time. That they should not be sustenance is your opinion.

Pigs are intelligent too. Unfortunately eating animals in general is fraught with moral quandary. Please stop making blanket statements about other peoples' cultures.

Intelligence aside, I see a difference between actively depleting a population and farming animals as a resource.

I'd have been ok with the parent post if it was about that, or if it was just stating an opinion and fairly treated the moral dilemma of eating intelligent meat. Instead it was like "I'm clearly not Japanese but I fancy its culture and its good good people don't want to eat whale meat" yeah, no.

I'm not sure why you reacted so strongly to what is a statement of hard truth. Whale meat was used for sustenance for a few decades following WW2, because that's all there was. With the availability of other meat, demand has fallen radically. It's not a hugely integral part of their culture, nobody is surviving off of it anymore, and it is in fact the case that most people, including Japanese, don't find it especially palatable.

Whale products are no longer used as sustenance, they are a delicacy. Stopping the hunting of whales would not cause anyone (except those who sell whale meat) to suffer or go hungry.