we can't raise the animals that folks want to eat without _also_ growing plants to feed those animals
The other factor that I don't quite get about think-of-the-animals vegans is this: What exactly do you think is going to happen to all those cows and chickens if the entire world becomes vegetarian? Are people going to keep them as pets? No -- they're simply not going to exist. Isn't it better to have free-range chicken and cattle, which have happy little animal lives, and then are quickly and painlessly killed, than to have (almost) no chicken and cattle at all?
Of course the other part makes for a pretty good ethical debate. Is it better to live a miserable life and die and early and unnatural death than it is to never be born at all? There is no right answer, but I myself feel like I wouldn't wish that kind of life on ANY conscious being. Is that a life you would want to life?
Last, none of the think-of-the-animals vegans, as you so nicely put it, would kid themselves about what were to happen to the already existing farm animals, should be stop/greatly reduce our collective meat intake. They are already doomed. They were doomed the second they were given birth to, which brings us back to the original part. Most of us think-of-the-animals vegans would prefer if we could stop doing that going forward.
I'm sorry to shake up your picture of happy little animal-life living chicken and cattle, frolicking on a green meadow, until one day they drop dead and become happy little meals. That is among the most delusional view of modern farming I can think of. Don't buy into the pictures companies put on their products. And if you say "well but I buy my meat from my local butcher..." ok cool. Most people still don't, and won't, and that's the real issue.
Right, but this goes back to my first paragraph. I would argue that most people do not have the moral effort to entirely give up meat voluntarily. There is some subset of people who are willing to make inconvenient life choices out of consideration of the lives of animals. You can convince these people to become vegans; or you can convince these people to only buy ecologically sound and minimum-suffering animal products. (For the sake of argument, let's call these "ethical" animal products, even though I know you may not agree with that label.) The more people you convince to become vegans, the fewer people are buying "ethical" animal products. The smaller the market for "ethical" animal products, the less incentive there is for people selling animal products to try to do so "ethically".
> Is that a life you would want to life?
Imagine a future where some hyper-intelligent alien species has taken over basically most habitable places in the galaxy, including the most habitable places on earth. We are unable to understand nearly any of these aliens' motivations or thought processes, much less their technology, and unable to offer them anything of value in terms of economic production: there is nothing we can do that they, or their machines, can't do better.
There are a few "reserves" for humans on earth where we're allowed to live "wild", but these are overcrowded and have no natural resources other than sunlight and (relatively poor) soil: all the minerals of value are extracted by the aliens.
But, there is one thing we can offer them: we ourselves are a delicacy, and some of the aliens at least are willing to pay a high price for the chance of consuming (whatever that means -- nobody's quite sure if it's eating or something else) a healthy 30-year-old human.
These aliens aren't ethical enough to let us spread throughout the galaxy on our own terms; but they are ethical enough not to do anything we haven't consented to.
So there's always an open offer, available between the ages of 12 and 18, to any human: to stay in one of the "human reserves", or enter the "cattle" program. If you're on the cattle program, you have freedom of movement through many places in the galaxy. Your health is taken care of, and there are lots of opportunities to socialize with other humans, to learn from them, to express art or music or whatever; but, the vast majority of you will, at the age of 30, be quickly killed and consumed by the aliens.
Particularly healthy men may be allowed to live longer for "captive breeding" programs (if they consent to do so); and many women will have the option to enter a "captive breeding" program as well, in which they bear children every two or three years until they're 40.
Children raised in the captive breeding program are also given the option, between 12 and 18, of going to the "human reserve" to live out their life there as well as they can.
So, here's the question: You're about to turn 18. Life in a human reserve is little better than stone age, since there are no natural resources upon which to build technology. Do you live out your 50 or 60 years (average life expectancy without advanced health care) in the freedom of a stone age society? Or do you travel the galaxy, having advanced technology and medical care, until you're 30?
Of course some people would chose to live in freedom; but I'm pretty sure there would be a pretty big uptake for being eaten.
I'm pretty sure cows, if they could be made to understand the proposition would be the same way. A handful would prefer to live in the wild, getting their own food, having no health care or shelter or protection from predators; but most would probably choose the life of free-range cattle, ending in death.
> The more people you convince to become vegans, the fewer people are buying "ethical" animal products.
Ok, good. In my mind, it goes no killing > ethical killing > unethical killing. I would try to maximize the amount in the no killing camp. I think I know what you're getting at overall, but I feel like this is in very speculative territory. I doubt that more people going vegan actually increases the amount of unethical killing, but I have nothing to back that up. I don't think you have anything to back it up either, which is why I think this won't lead anywhere. You have a hypothesis, I have a different one. I can only say that from experience, most people "move up" in the camps I defined above. I know I had no trouble destroying a few cheeseburgers just a few years back. At some point I started reflecting, and figured well it's best to buy from a butcher. It took a few years until I was no longer able to rationalize that either. I know pretty much only eat meat if I'm at my grandma's :) That is just to show I'm not religiously vegan, and I'm not trying to make people feel bad for the choices and rationalizations they make.
Regarding your short story: I appreciate the amount of effort you stuck into it, but I'm afraid you lost me throughout. There is just too much presupposing going on, which makes it a little difficult to apply to our ethical dilemma. For one, it completely disregards that we grew these animals in such a way that they're for the most part not able any longer to survive in the wild. I want to believe that the meat you buy comes from cows that had a life equivalent of us having traveled the galaxy and have expressed art and music throughout. But to me this reads like you yourself want to believe that the animals that had to die for your dishes had lives so good that given the choice, they would do it all over again.
This is simply not the case for 90%+ of all meat that finds its way onto a plate. And I will go one step further and say that this short story has not convinced me that the other <10% would choose to.
Is this based on your own experience with pasture-raised farm animals, or reading in your own feelings into it?
My great aunt raised sheep for a while, and I spent a couple of summers as a farmhand. From what I can tell, those sheep lived reasonably happy sheep lives. Ewes had babies that grew up with them in the flock. They all hung out together in a big flock; they were rotated around a number of different fields on a regular basis, fed hay and other feed as supplements, given a shelter to stay and regular medical care. The rams were kept separate from the ewes most of the time so that births happened in a predictable fashion; but other than that, the sheep were given what sheep need.
Where I live now I'm a short drive from free-range cows and chickens too; the cows seem about as happy wandering round fields eating grass as the sheep did.
I've certainly seen depictions of factory farming that make me sick; I'd be happy to have those kinds of practices banned. But I don't see what my great aunt did as unethical at all: if anything, I think the lives of those sheep did have value, and the world was a better place because of their little sheepy lives than it would have been entirely without them.
Same thing with cows and goats in other parts of the world, where they (somehow) do OK munching on plants that grow where the stuff we'd eat will not (similar concerns about overgrazing, shit production and soil damage).
It's also true of small-scale poultry production, though my impression is that you need pretty high quality soil conditions and plants to grow chickens without supplementary food.
That's a far cry from anything we have now, and tends to imply a reduction in meat consumption on a level that I don't think many Americans (and perhaps quite a few Europeans) would currently endorse.
Before the expansion of animal farming (60-100 years ago), meat was usually Sunday-lunch material in most of the world.
Herbivorous ruminants like cows would never eat you, and would generally never harm you unless provoked. Breeding intelligent lifeforms in a bespoke way to murder them for cash — whatever the reason or creature involved — is diabolically evil. If you do this for a living, you’re a merchant of death in my book.
I am asking the fundamental question. I will agree completely that large scale food production has some real problems with animal treatment. I'm not defending or commenting on that. I'm just trying to understand the moral judgements associated with consuming another animal, as is done at just about all levels of the food chain in the natural world. Our digestive systems, our teeth, our nutritional requirements are all tuned to omnivorous consumption. Why is it wrong to exercise our natural nutritional choices, plant and animal, that have resulted from millions of years of evolution?
--
I think you missed the entire point of the comment you're replying to. It specifically mentions breeding and slaughtering animals, this has nothing to do with wolves or hunters
> Is the wolf diabolically evil?
Do wolves have a sense of good and evil ?
Do wolves talk about the ethical and moral implications of breeding and slaughtering millions of animals every single day ?
> Our digestive systems, our teeth, our nutritional requirements are all tuned to omnivorous consumption. Why is it wrong to exercise our natural nutritional choices, plant and animal, that have resulted from millions of years of evolution?
A lot of people in the west eat meat two or three times a day, sometimes from multiple animals during the same meal, we didn't evolve to do that at all. We didn't evolve to sit all day in front of a computer, but here I am. We didn't evolve to use cars but we almost all do. Using evolution as an argument for anything usually is a very poor choice....
I personally have no issue with the idea of killing to eat, the problem is everything else in the process. We don't have to treat amimals like we do, we don't have to eat so much meat every single day
Humans give themselves incredible characteristics compared to other animals, it's like they are miles ahead of every animal when it comes to self awareness, emotion, rational thought, it's like evolution in their case made a giant leap and not an incremental step like it is for everyone.
Why are then humans comparing themselves to obligate carnivores like lions, tigers to justify their actions? Why are they looking at their natural bodies to justify the actions? How come when it comes to taking a life of another animal for sustenance, sustenance that can be achieved without the kill, they do not want to lift themselves up and draw a line between nature and themselves?
There are many things that come naturally yet we do not want to mimic that.
Didn't that leap in evolution come from being able to control our food supply to the point where we were able to consume energy at such an efficient rate that we evolved emotion, rational thought, society, etc?
It could be argued that now we've achieved that we should be looking at the next stage of evolution, which may be mulch made into fake meat loaded with salt and preservatives, or even growing laboratory meat; but surely the reason we're here and having this discussion at all is because of our domestication and consumption of animals. It seems a circular argument to say that's immoral.
Are we really evolved enough to move past that? We are certainly domesticating ourselves as every generation goes by, we see that from the massive decline in human-to-human violence over many millennia, and so a reduction in violence toward animals could also be seen in that evolutionary sense. I'm not convinced we're at a point where we're ready to 100% wean ourselves off animals for food. It certainly comes with its own set of problems.
As much as I respect the intelligence of those animals, what a remarkably low bar to measure ourselves against. May as well justify manslaughter and rape as while we're at it. Drawing a line that arbitrarily suits certain primal desires and justifying it by pointing at animals is how we move backward, not forward.
Also, it's a hell of a difference between the wolf, who has to kill in order to survive, and the man, who just has to choose something else to eat in the supermarket or restaurant. Justifying ones choice by comparing oneself to a wolf is incredibly flawed. No one here would bat an eye if, for whatever reason, people have to hunt and kill in order to sustain themselves, like some tribes probably still do. We wouldn't call them evil for it. What can be called evil on the other hand, is the systematic raising, torturing, and killing of billions of animals every year. Because it's needless. We could easily survive without it, but we choose not to, because bacon. I get it, it's delicious. But at some point it becomes very questionable, and I'm even setting aside the sustainability aspect.
It's cheesy, but the with great power comes great responsibility quote kind of holds up the way I see it. We pretty much dominate every other species, but we shouldn't pick and choose traits of other species in order to win arguments. We aren't wolves, we aren't dolphins. We have the capabilities to make the choice and don't kill and still survive. All it takes is changing ones habits a bit. We also have the capabilities to understand and decide that rape is wrong, and most people don't do it. Can you imagine what it would sound like if an accused rapist would point to dolphins as defense?
I'm not trying to set a standard for you. All I want to say is that pointing at other animals to justify our behavior is flawed and something we should be above as a species as a whole.
I think looking at how things in the animal kingdom work and using that as a justification for our actions is a very low bar. We have the cognitive and emotional ability to understand that things like murder/rape/etc. are wrong do we not? If you just take a small step from that and recognize the sentience of animals, it doesn't seem too unreasonable to afford them the same respect.
PS: I think the idea of good/evil is pretty reductionist to begin with, but I understand it's a common way of looking at things
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/evil
We wrote these things down so that we describe them to each other. The concepts already existed. We didn't invent evil, we defined it but it was already there. We've also used arguments like this to separate ourselves from what consider be lesser, to distance us from our actions. This is mental gymnastics though.
Whatever you have to do to feel ok about eating a chicken is fine but pretending we have some better sense of self than anything else feels like hubris. If our position in the world is truly better because we can articulate out feelings and we're smarter, why don't we eat dogs and mutes and the mentally handicapped?
> why don't we eat dogs and mutes and the mentally handicapped?
This is exactly the kind of point you would have to bite the bullet on if you were to be logically consistent and made arguments for meat eating being ok because you believe animals are intellectually/morally inferior. If you believe a cow is ok to eat because they are not as smart then you would have to be ok (being logically consistent) with eating anything that is not as smart as you such as the mentally handicapped.
[1]: generalizing obviously
Speak for yourself. When I hear vegans try to act like I'm a horrible person on par with people that murder humans like someone did elsewhere in this thread, I don't feel guilty. I simply thing its a ridiculous thing for them to say.
I'm going to leave it at that because unlike that person I don't feel the need to say inflammatory things to someone that has made different choices about what they want to eat.
I'm all for ensuring that animals are treated as well as possible and for regulating the industry to ensure that happens. When I hear about people doing abusive things to livestock I get as mad as any vegan. It should be severely punished.
I can also get behind the idea that we should eat less meat. Its healthier and I can easily see the point that eating a large amount of meat for every single meal like a lot of Americans do it needlessly gratuitous.
Some of my favorite meals are vegetarian meals, but I mean like chickpea or lentil curry and stuff like that. Fake/simulated/lab grown/artificial food is going to be a hard pass for me until it gets good enough to be indistinguishable from the real thing.
And even today, most people in the world likely still participate occasionally in the slaughter of animals, as this is still routine in all rural areas of the world, even in the US and Europe.
It often takes several attempts to kill the cow, even with a bullet to the head. Their throats are often slit while they are alive. There is pleeenty of footage of exactly this in Dominion. I suggest you watch it.
A statement like:
"Have you thought of eating meat one day less per week?"
"benefits the climate because..."
"Have you thought of buying your meat from <insert local farm with good animal welfare>"
"benefits the animal because..."
"you're the same as a murderer"
The circle of life is far more complicated than herbivores/carnivores and many animals will happily grab a meaty snack if opportunity arises.
The scary part is that droughts are getting more common.
If we could offer them a better life as well, as we once did, I would have 0 moral qualms about our meat eating.
> Unlike most great apes today, whose diet is primarily plant based, we can thank the incredible nutrient density in meat and our incredible hunting and tool creating ability for prefrontal cortex development.
Complete and utter speculation.
> We were pack hunters, forging tools and strategies capable of taking down mammoths. Call it 'diabolicaly evil' if you want, but this is simply nature and survival.
Subsistence hunting amongst early human tribes is not comparable to modern day factory farming in any conceivable way.
B12 doesn’t come from eating plants OR animals: it comes from bacteria, and ironically that bacteria is in such short supply on factory farms that the animals need to be injected with synthetic B12.
> I don't personally believe highly processed plant alternatives such as Beyond meat are a long term option if you're even vaguely interested in your own health.
I eat raw soybeans, legumes, grains, nuts and seeds. I’d recommend watching the documentary Forks Over Knives [1] if you care about your personal health, and the documentary Dominion [2], if you’d like to see what really happens on factory farms.
[2] B12 sources up until it was possible to synthesize in the 60s were exclusively from animal products. Also, if you're even vaguely predisposed to anemia, you will likely struggle getting enough hema-available iron from plant sources without supplementation.
Glad you are able to live off of entirely soybeans, legumes, grains, nuts and seeds. For a lot of people, this isn't sustainable. Would love to see your bloods, discuss athletic performance and energy.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/diet-and-primate-....
[2] https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminB12-HealthProfessio....
> prefrontal cortex development
I think hunting might be one of the most ethical ways consume meat.
I have a problem with factory farming because I feel like the amount of suffering involved is disproportionately high compared to other methods.
I also have a problem with the negative environmental externalities of big agriculture.
You can find YouTube videos of cows eating chickens.
I think there are two parts to this: we can't raise the animals that folks want to eat without _also_ growing plants to feed those animals, so from my perspective it seems that we can apply most or all points about the negatives of cropping to the cropping that is done to support animal agriculture. So if cropping is bad, it's still bad when we do it for the animals we intend to eat.
Secondly, and this is argument I don't make often because its _really_ not popular (but you seem like a great person so I'm happy to share!), I just don't think animals exist to provide or serve us. They are their own beings, and we are ours. Personally, I don't care if someone treats their animals like absolute royalty. If we kill them, or we forcibly impregnate them and remove their children so we can have their milk, it's wrong to me. But again, this is not an argument many people are swayed by, so I don't generally mention it.