Animals in the wild don't give a s** about the pain they cause to other species when they eat themselves alive, and eating a prey alive is the normal standard in nature.
This being said, I'm all for minimizing suffering of anything involved in the food chain as much as possible. I consider that avoiding wasting food is just as important as reducing the pain we cause to animals.
Not everyone deserves empathy, either.
Could you expand on that? I’m always curious to understand how other people think about these issues.
If I see people that are with causing folks around them pain, of whatever type, my usual suspicion is that they suffered some sort of massive pain or trauma themselves that they never found a healthy way to deal with.
The C-level and oligarchs of the world tends to be highly empathic, hence their politicking skills, persuasion, observational skills and general theatre, but not particularly sympathetic.
Twitter is a mix of demonstrations of high empathy/low sympathy and every other permutation
If not, then obviously the normative argument of “well, lots of animals do it...” isn’t nearly morally sufficent for human behavior.
depending on the socio/political background it is just to erase individuals who do not comply with the societys goal / judification system, speaking of death penalty or in other situations disbelievers & heretics. even in non-radical ethnocultural religious systems it is justifyable to use entities who are regarded of lesser value. or - if one belongs to the wrong political faction - it is also ok and just to strip away any so called basic human rights (just call sb a terrorist and therefor a prisoner of war, and - tadaa - it is ok to do so). guidances such as some in stone written rules are also not for the greater good, but to keep sheeps in line and not to support any outgroups. other ideological ideas/works/concepts/books are always used to support ones own position and goals. "humanism" is just another word for a moral ethical system which puts one sentinent species above other sentinent species.
in other words any moral is as good as the other. be it based on abstract concepts, words believed to be from higher entities or taken from animal kingdom. in the end the one who sits at the non-dangerous end of a gun is the one who is right.
if you want something absolute take this:
the one thing that we learn from history, is that we do not learn from history.
It seems you forget that not only humans are capable of feelings and empathy.
Why would the monkey do such thing?
Well, you see, the monkey was saving the fish from drowning. What an empathetic creature!
There is a tendency, in animal welfare discussions, to ratchet. As the conversation tips forward and back, meanings are interpreted a little more strictly each time.
Backyard chickens is a respectful way to have eggs and meat. Battery raising is disrespectful. Wasting meat is also disrespectful.
Same for crabs. So far in the last two years I've seen crabs cooked alive twice right before my eyes, once roasted and the other boiled. I tried to intervene but was laughed away or told there was no time. In the second case, the lady who boiled the crabs alive didn't want to hear about their agony while eating them later (of course I had to twist the knife in).
I thought all this is just stupidity and ignorance. All it takes is five minutes to think, five minutes to go online and ask a question of a dumb search engine, and another five seconds for the chicken and a bit longer for the crabs. How hard is it? I mean, come on.
Btw, I eat meat and I'll be vegetarian when hell freezes over but you kill an animal to eat it, at least don't torture the poor beast. Just get it over with quickly.
This I can completely agree with. Wasting food is completely disrespectful in so many ways and is mostly avoidable.
Yet, just last year we saw supply chain breakdowns that caused farmers to dump so many potatoes and so much milk among everything else while people were in queues for free food.
Towards chicken? Maybe. But chicken isn't the only variable in the equation. I agree it'd be much less wasteful to grow meat in bioreactor without even wasting energy on growing feathers, organs and whatnot. But we're not there yet, and we might have a hard time feeding people without chicken factories.
Animals will catch what they eat, and catch no more than necessary. Humans will over-fish and dump shit all over the place killing marine life and filling oceans with oil.
I could go on and on. But you know, we’re all fucked from this behavior. In the name of money we will all perish at the hands of our fellow cheek-turners.
I don't think that's true. Have seen many a cat catch mice to "play" with until they're dead and not eat even a nibble.
On the human side: the problem is the producers (of meat/dairy) hide the torturous aspects from consumers by abstracting it away. We go to the store and get some chicken breast, steaks, or pork ribs, but we don’t do ANY of the work to prepare that animal. It’s prepared by underpaid/exploited foreign labor.
In contrast, even if a wolf killed a bunch of sheep for sheer pleasure: they are doing the killing, which takes energy. And if the sheep has a herd of rams with them the wolves might come out bloody themselves.
NOTE: I’m talking about factory farms and large scale production. There are farms which follow good, holistic procedures—where the farmers do care about the well-being of the animals and the cycle of life, even when animals are slaughtered.
I definitely think there's a disconnect between the average person and their food and it allows this sort of thing to happen more easily. I'm not sure what the right way to handle it all would be until we can 3D print all our food needs, but free range farms and farming animals that require less space (such as insects) are probably the best we can do currently.
Do you seriously believe majority of people will eat that?
I dont see a difference between mother killing prey for her cubs and butcher doing it for me.
I dont see a difference between farmer raising lambs and lion protecting his territory.
Is efficiency your only qualm? The only difference it makes is amount of life, not it's quality.
What's this quality of life horseshit? So if a person has "low quality of life" then i guess murdering them will get you a lighter sentence?
Sorry for using murdering as examples, I just dont have a better way to make the point.
Well sorry, not sorry for trying to enjoy the only life that I have.
Meat animals exist to be killed.
Please explain ketchup
> Murdering people is bad not because of some abstract causing of pain
Let’s just say it’s not, pain and suffering are still bad things youd want to minimize
You could say that the bad thing about death isn’t pain itself but the lost of life (otherwise an instant death would not be bad), based on the axiom that life is a good thing. You could also make your own axiom that only human lives are good.
> murder begets murder, making existence of organized society very hard and inefficient
So massacring uncivilized tribals that are not part of your organized society, like in the colonial days, is OK?
Do you eat ketchup without anything? It has little value on its own.
> So massacring uncivilized tribals that are not part of your organized society, like in the colonial days, is OK?
Am I back to country side? Why is there so much straw here?
Says one meatbag to another...
They're not constrained by thought or conservation, they're constrained by environmental limits.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8372727/Thousands-p...
We can't control what orcas do in the oceans, but we can at least try to not be complete monsters to the animals we raise.
An instinct that humans have is to project their own kind of consciousness into animals. We imagine the world through their eyes, but from a human perspective. So some animals are wicked, others show love. But it is really unfair to project human expectations onto animals.
Bears love salmon brains. In boom years, bears will pull salmon after salmon out of the water, bite the head, and discard the rest. They're basically nature's dynamite fishers. Stray dogs will eat anything they can -- and they can and do kill themselves by overeating.
Nope:
> Surplus killing, also known as excessive killing, henhouse syndrome,[1][2] or overkill,[3] is a common behavior exhibited by predators, in which they kill more prey than they can immediately eat and then they either cache or abandon the remainder. The term was invented by Dutch biologist Hans Kruuk after studying spotted hyenas in Africa[4] and red foxes in England.[5][6] Some of the other animals which have been observed engaging in surplus killing include orcas, zooplankton, humans, damselfly naiads, predaceous mites, martens, weasels, honey badgers, jaguar, leopards, lions, spiders, brown bears,[7] american black bears, polar bears, coyotes, lynxes, minks, raccoons and dogs.[citation needed]
I'm not saying your point isn't valid, just that the passage quoted is too broad to be a strong support of your argument.
At any rate, there are always outliers, no? When someone makes a generally true statement, is it really that useful to reply with a rude "Nope" and point to outliers?
I took the parents' comment to mean that it is a general truth, not an absolute truth.
What is my argument? You're making some assumption there that I'm not privy to.
The OP says "Animals will catch what they eat, and catch no more than necessary". That's a very broad statement that obviously ignores surplus killing even for the purpose of storing more food for later (which is often also abandoned when the animals move away or find something better to eat). Anyway, killing more than you can eat right now and storing it "for later" is exactly what humans do, that the OP is trying to say animals don't do.
Hence, "nope".
I agree my reply is rude. I apologise to the OP, but it's frustrating to see how popular opinions seem to be shaped by the behaviour of Disney animals, and yet are expressed with great certainty. It's very frustrating.
>Anyway, killing more than you can eat right now and storing it "for later" is exactly what humans do, that the OP is trying to say animals don't do.
The OP was referring to hunting for sport (and other similar excesses)[0]. That is, they were making a moral argument. "Saving things for later" is a weird thing to be hung up on and has nothing to do with the article or this thread.
[0] Yes I know some animals have been known to do this, but they are the exception.
See: "Nope".
> The OP was referring to hunting for sport (and other similar excesses)[0].
You are putting way too much interpretation on what the OP actually wrote: "Animals will catch what they eat, and catch no more than necessary".
That's not true: many animals will "catch" (really, savagely kill) more than necessary, much much more. In case you consider food stored for later "necessary", that also doesn't work: animals will kill much more than they can ever eat in an entire lifetime, much more than can be expected to stay in the ground without rotting away. Not to mention, many animals will just kill, without any attempt at storing or returning to the kill.
The OP also said nothing at all about hunting. They talked about over-fishing:
> Humans will over-fish and dump shit all over the place killing marine life and filling oceans with oil.
And also about ripping "mother cows from its children to mass produce milk and beef" and other things like that. Nothing to do with hunting, for sport or not.
> "Saving things for later" is a weird thing to be hung up on and has nothing to do with the article or this thread.
I don't understand what you mean. Can you explain?
The OP talked about overfishing. You said they were referring to hunting for sport. Overfishing is relevant to commercial fishing, wich is practiced not for sport, but for food.
So it really doesn't look like the OP and you were talking about the same thing and I can't see that you should expect me to automatically understand what you meant when the OP said "over-fishing" and you said "hunting for sport". If you meant "hunting under water for sport" you should have said that more clearly, because it's not the first thing that springs to mind when someone speaks of "over-fishing".
Edit: here's the relevant quotes from earlier comments.
OP: "Humans will over-fish and dump shit all over the place killing marine life and filling oceans with oil."
You: "The OP was referring to hunting for sport (and other similar excesses)[0]."
Can you see why it's not immediately obvious why you think you're talking about the same thing as the OP?
Also, can you see why these discussions get derailed so easily? The OP said one thing and then you joined the conversation to explain what you thought the OP meant. But how could you know what the OP meant any better than me, when neither of us is the OP? If there are different interpretations to what the OP said, then your guess of what they really meant is as good as mine. So when you insist that, no, your interpretation is correct, and here's what they really meant, even if they used different words (words that may be stretched to mean what you want to say they meant "literally", like "fishing = hunting undewater") there is inevitable confusion and the discussion is derailed.
Why not just let the OP respond to my comment, if they think they should? And what exactly do you think we have both achieved here, with all this back-and-forth about exactly how much animals or humans kill and why? We have just both wasted each other's time. You're happy with that?
You chose to ignore that. In doing so, interpreted my comment uncharitably.
>Why not just let the OP respond to my comment, if they think they should?
When did I stop the OP from commenting? What a bizarre thing to suggest.
>And what exactly do you think we have both achieved here, with all this back-and-forth about exactly how much animals or humans kill and why? We have just both wasted each other's time. You're happy with that?
No, I'm not. That's why I attempted to disengage.
It was you who started this particular chain off by being combative and rude (by your own admission). Then you refused to accept the basic principle around the idea of generalizations. It was you who has been combative and have failed to interpret other users' comments charitably. Both the OP's comments and mine.
Remember likening the OP's statement to a child who gets their understanding of the animal world from Disney movies? You did that right after you "apologized" to the OP for being rude. See the problem?
That says a lot about how much you have observed animals so far. Predators have an instinct to kill more than they have a will to eat.
Are you kidding? How do you suppose one can feel pain without a nervous system? Magic?
Plants are immobile. The only mechanism they have for moving about is relatively slow and lacks agency. They can grow in a particular direction, send out a clone,or use reproduction. A hormonal reaction to external stimuli could trigger that kind of behaviour. But what advantage would there be in having a consciousness? A chicken on the other had can run away. It can hide. It can learn to avoid damaging itself. Pain has an advantage.
No, it's the opposite. Plants clearly don't have the reactive aspect, but we have no idea whether they have the experience aspect, because we have no idea what causes experience or how it works.
We also don't know that consciousness provides an advantage to animals. We associate consciousness with intelligent response. But it may well be possible to have intelligent response without consciousness (e.g. like computers, although technically we can't be sure that they don't have consciousness either)
We can speculate that the full human experience of pain may exist in the absence of a brain. And we can estimate the probability of that being the case in plants. Do you really think that probability is high?
Also, plants can and do react to damage and even touch.
Er... why not? They seem fairly reasonable to me.
> ... boil them alive is one of the cruelest forms of torture I've seen.
eating food without causing pain
The OP doesn't say this is what should be done. OP says that we should respect our food and talks about the living conditions of animals we eat and how they are killed. OP doesn't say or imply that we should eat food without causing pain.
https://www.theessayexperiencefall2013.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/...
Why tie your hands with this kind of black and white thinking?
We can say that insects don't have the brain capacity to be conscious. I'm pretty sure we might say the same about many fish species.
Think about how useless our intuitions proved to be when it comes to other phenomena like gravity or electromagnetism. It took a while to (kind of) figure these out despite them being easier to measure than consciousness.
W.r.t. fish: they act in a way you'd expect a creature to act if they felt pain. If they had vocal cords and thus the ability to scream, would you agree that they feel pain? Same applies to insects.
I guess it also applies at some level to animals and insects - we can assume they feel some of the basic things as us, but their "understanding" of it might be quite different.
> This is all disgraceful, and if we can't at least respect the animals we eat, we probably don't deserve to eat them.
This will sound completely bananas to someone who doesn't live by the same principles as you do.
In times or places where this abundance is not as shockingly unnatural, the feeling of the food we consume takes less importance. And, as others said, it's not just animal. Killing a plant, often in way more atrocious manners, is just as bad.
We'll probably have to murder and massacre our food for a bit longer. Live with it and work on synthetic food, this will resolve the problem you have with life-sourced food. Well except we'll probably still have to kill millions of animal and plants for population control. Heh.
You know we also kill, without asking their opinion or respecting them much, other more exotic life-forms, like virii or bacterias, that are as innocent as the rabbit you had in your last civet. All they did was follow their instincts, and they didn't have a choice contaminating you; but you had a choice killing them.
Is that just guesswork?
The truth is humans are wired to gauge the level of environmental danger by looking for personably relatable aggression events. And there is a practical limit how low we should go. Also with living more dense, humans are gotten way better at handling various aggressive stimuli, like noise, air pollution, constant close interaction. We have stopped treating them as aggression, but it still is for the rest of life on this rock.
The difference is like us touching a hot stove and pulling away as an automatic response, versus the various forms of torture we've invented.
That doesn't mean it's right, just that there is a difference and we'll all draw a line somewhere. A bit like how people see eating cats and dogs as somehow different from chickens and cows.
This is all disgraceful, and if we can't at least respect the animals we eat, we probably don't deserve to eat them.