No defense needed, all animals are ultimately consumed and to imagine an alternative is to indulge in fantasy.
We can debate the timing and manner of consumption, but not the idea of consumption.
We are animals too you know. If all animals are "ultimately consumed", so perhaps there is no problem if I kill and eat some close friend of yours?
When people start defending their meat consumption, they seem to make all sorts of bizarre claims. Could you explain yours?
So if an animal dies of a disease, is it "consumed"? Could you explain your claim?
I would also add though that if you want to minimize plant death, the best course of action is to stop eating meat and animal products and aim for a plant-based diet, since (by thermodynamics!) the number of plants needed to feed these animals vastly outstrips what would deliver the same amount of nutrients to a human eating them directly.
I don't have any reason to suspect that they don't.
With animals there's a clear connection: they have brains and brains is clearly the part that enables us humans to have conscious experiences.
The burden of proof of the claim "plants are conscious" is on you.
I didn't claim that plants were conscious, and we have no idea what causes the conscious experience. I personally wouldn't say that all humans actually experience consciousness. So no, no clear connection, and no burden either.
Also, it's clearer to us (since we're animals) what sorts of events count as ending another animal's life. Elsewhere it's trickier (Is a field of grass one life, or is a blade of grass one life? How should mycelial networks be counted? etc).
For these reasons, I think it's that applying different logic to different kingdoms is a fairly defensible move.
There are parasites for which being eaten is a part of their life cycle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leucochloridium_paradoxum
Black widow spiders are so named because the females eat their mates. Some spider mothers become food for their own children.
Not to mention that (while not exactly what you asked for, but I think it's important to recognize) carnivores kill other species as a means of survival, and even their own species at times. Wild wolves cannot feed their pups without killing other animals. Death is common in nature.
The spider thing is interesting though. It would seem that being eaten by her children is an adaptation, not just an unfortunate consequence of harsh reality. The strategy appears to be: give my nutrients to my offspring, for they carry a part of me, and the survival of that part is more important than the rest.
Given that most of the cells in a human body are passengers, and not cells with human DNA in their nucleus (if they have nuclei at all), it seems pretty likely that something, somewhere, is making the same kind of sacrifice, and using a hungry human as the vehicle. And I think that ending a life on those terms falls in a different domain--both from an ethics perspective, and from a "how adversarial of an environment do you want to create for yourself"-perspective, than mere predation.
Strategies of that sort are more popular outside of the animal kingdom than in it (I think), which I think justifies a "different rules for different things" approach.
Ultimately, many grazing animals have their property. If their numbers grow too large from lack of predators, they'll consume all available food and then starve en-masse.
There are also several fungi and protozoans who migrate between the digestive tracts of animals that eat each other (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii for instance).
I'm not enough of a biologist to defend the point especially well, but doesn't it make sense that one would use different types of reasoning to manage relationships with different types of life?
Right, but that's not the plant, that's the fruit. If you eat the plant itself, it's dead. Same as a cow.
I'll grant that no plants come to mind that have a niche that requires them to be wholly eaten, but I still think that deciding whether to eat a plant requires totally different logic than deciding whether to eat an animal.
So what's your position? Are you here to suggest that "we shouldn't eat animals" is absurd by equating it to "we shouldn't eat plants?"
Or are you a vegan looking to take it a step further by not eating plants that have to die in order for you to eat them? Because I'd like to hear more about somebody who sincerely held that belief.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruitarianism
I just don't understand how you can have a moral outrage to killing one thing but not another. People seem to do a little dance about plants being not as alive as animals to justify it, but it doesn't make sense to me.
Many plants have evolved specifically around being eaten by other animals.
No, that would be different organisms.
Else I might kill myself, except it is not allowed by my animal programming, which is out of my control, so I go back to that hoping phase.
I also wonder what’s the problem with killing sentient animals while we also kill fellow humans when “necessary”. We kill for our little ego, so let’s just keep fingers crossed that the sacrifices we force are worth something.
Maybe this is a bit Buddhism centric but it takes off my mental loads a bit.
It doesn't require it at all.
It's a lossy conversion.
There are still inherent issues with dairy, such as forced impregnation and abduction and murder of the offspring, so it isn't great no matter how you slice it. But if we're to compare dairy operations, this one was pretty good I guess.
When the cows stopped producing much milk, they had some way of pasturing them for around 2 years before they'd then slaughter them for meat. In total the cows had quite long and low pressure lives. The dairy and meat was very expensive, though. I think that's the realistic outcome of treating animals more morally. It isn't cheap.
That’s the issue with vegetarianism. It’s not really about “the animals”, it’s about things that happen to resemble human beings. The more similar to a human, the more “sentience” it has. Isn’t that an odd coincidence? Or perhaps plants are just as sentient as humans but are a different form of life too distant from humans for us to empathize with.
The whole thing is a massive exercise in human myopia.
The burden of proof is on you. Humans are animals. We have evolution linking us together at a more-recent junction than we do when compared to plants. Humans and animals have brains; brains is the seat of sentience.
Finally; even if you are right that plants are sentient, are you then claiming that there is no difference in the amount of sentience between humans, bees, and plants? If so, should we be indifferent whether I kill you or burn a dandelion?
But even if it were just about not wanting to kill things that resemble us--it still doesn't have to be a false elevation of human sentience.
If there are fungi that make decisions, I'd expect them to look out for their fungus-buddies more than they look out for me. If Jupiter's red spot can be asked, I'd expect that it cares more for the weird hexagon on the poles of Saturn than anything going on on earth. Seeking kinship with similar things and being indifferent to alien things is common in biology, and it gets along just fine without sentience in the mix.
I think vegetarianism makes a ton of sense from an environmental and ecological point of view, but this has nothing to do with the moral one.
No it does not. Animals and fish are sentient beings with their own set of perceptions, feelings, thoughts, desires, and more.
I do not think there is a defensible way to consume animals if you're living on above-poverty wages in a developed country and don't have some extremely rare health problem.
Killing is problematic (ending a life prematurely), but worse yet is the experience animals have on factory farms.
In your case of hunting your own fish seems less morally problematic than most animal consumption, but I understand the sentiment of "do I really need to eat that when there are plenty of non-sentient alternatives". Thank you for sharing your thoughts!