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.
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.