this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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I have never understood this logic. If a lion eats a zebra, there's nothing wrong with it, but when a human eats a cow, they're a horrible person. (also I know that not all vegans think like this)
I personally believe there's nothing inherently wrong with eating meat, and instead the problem is how we treat the animals we eat and that we eat way too much meat, taking it for granted.
We are intelligent and capable of considering the idea that an animal may not want to die, and we have it within our means to survive without meat, or with much less meat than we currently consume.
Animals who are being lead to slaughter have been observed to panic and try to flee. They do not want to die. What right do we have to take the life of an animal that wants to live as much as any other person? We are capable of considering this question. Animals are not. That's the difference.
Even as a carnivore you would not eat a freshly born baby straight out of the mother's womb, whereas any other predator would see it as an easy meal. There IS a moral implication in taking life.
We can only afford to question this because we are in a utopia of sorts compared to just a few hundred years ago. We are capable of understanding that there are philosophical, moral, and ethical dilemmas to eating meat in 2023. However, if the world went to shit and say an electrical storm wiped out all electronics on Earth, we would not even hesitate to eat meat in as little as a few months in.
People have been able to “afford to question this” since antiquity - it’s not some modern affectation. You see plenty of instances of people arguing for or outright mandating vegetarian or vegan diets dating back thousands of years. I am not sure if PETA’s specific reasoning (“you shouldn’t eat a fish because the fish would prefer you not do that”) is represented, but you definitely see scholars and rulers in the ancient world arguing for a variety of reasons that people should not kill or eat animals.
Socrates was already criticising it in 450 BCE. Also all Indian religions were championing non-violence as early as mid-1st millennium BCE. This is nothing new nor revolutionary and people were already questioning their actions when "the world was shit" as you put it.
People can strive to become better in any situation.
Necessity is obviously a factor.
Agreed. Once lab-grown/synthetic meat becomes widely available and reasonably-priced, the necessity/demand to keep large farms full of livestock for meat production will take a downturn.
I agree with your second paragraph, but the appeal to nature is not a good argument and routinely gets exposed as such in debates on the ethics of meat consumption. There are very clear differences between a lion and a human.
The very clear difference is that you discriminate against humans.
lol
Arguing that something's okay because it's a natural behaviour is the naturalistic fallacy. The difference is that other species don't have any choice over how they live or even the mental capacity to think about the morality of their actions. Humans that are well-off and don't have medical conditions that clash with veganism do.
I used to agree with the second paragraph, but watching videos of pigs/cows/chickens being slaughtered changed my mind. Imo their prior treatment doesn't really negate what happens there- and even if it did, I couldn't use ideal farm conditions as a defense when the vast majority of meat I've been eating is raised under less ideal conditions.
(This isn't calling anyone who eats a burger satan, to be clear. Just trying to say my views in good faith.)
Moralizing about eating meat is a fallacy as well. You have no qualms with killing bugs or plants. You might even support killing humans in some cases. The thresholds you describe are nothing more than your own subjective, personal comfort level. Every single life form in the universe consumes other life forms in order to survive. The way we treat our food, now that is the real issue.
The difference between killing animals and plants, which do not have a CNS and therefore almost certainly aren't sentient, has been discussed thoroughly elsewhere in this comments section. Do you believe mowing a lawn is equivalent to harming a dog?
Regarding insects, it should be emphasised that veganism is avoiding anything that causes animal suffering or exploitation as far as is practical. Necessary cases, like the unavoidable death of insects for plant agriculture, aren't morally equivalent to unnecessary cases in the same way that killing other humans can sometimes be justified by circumstances, eg. self-defence. (EDIT: And any livestock raised on feed are indirectly causing more insect death regardless.)
People can indeed have different personal comfort levels when it comes to moral debates, but we can also discuss whether those comfort levels are reasonable. Otherwise 'we have different personal comfort levels' could be used in response to any moral question. It could be within someone's 'personal comfort level' to kill and eat babies as long as they were treated well until then.
Edit: TL;DR: context matters for any moral question and I'm not a fan of total moral relativism.
There is no proof that the central nervous system is responsible for sentience. Mowing a lawn is a mass extinction event for the residents of that lawn. Does a broken grasshopper suffer less than a broken human, simply because it can't wax poetic about its experience? Veganism promotes monoculture and environmental destruction as well, it's just easier to pretend that it doesn't.
My point about personal comfort is that it's the ONLY metric by which you measure your moral code regarding consumption of other life forms to extend your own life.
While we can't be completely sure, our current understanding of sentience makes it a reasonable assumption. Even if plants are sentient, eating from higher trophic levels causes more plant deaths than eating plants directly.
Regarding the rest, I feel like I addressed all of that in the comment above. I'm a fallible human being and personal discomfort with killing animals no less cognitively complex than our pets, and sometimes toddlers, is definitely a factor, but I've been arguing based on necessity and quantity instead of that.
EDIT: And to be clear, I've never claimed veganism is environmentally perfect. It doesn't solve every problem with food production, it just helps with some, and it seems largely better for the environment (albeit with nuance around grazing certain types of land) even if we keep doing monocultures.
^ This is what reddit was like before it got big
If by that you mean both sides were civil, ty haha. I'm trying not to replicate the toxicity of the average reddit argument (which I got sucked into a lot) but I worry I still get too logic-as-my-blade, so I'm glad if my intentions still got through.
A great tip I've heard is to try to read others' comments in the most good-faith tone possible, since it's easy for that not to carry over text.
Yeah civil but also just a higher level conversation overall. And in a place like /memes. Just reminded me of old reddit. But maybe I just like logic-as-a-blade convos lol
Methods of slaughtering them are terrible and absolutely criminal.
One good thing PETA has done is raise awareness about how the meat industry treats its animals - I'll give them that, definitely.
PETA itself is an organization I place in the same category as a cult, though. Their own practices make the sincerity of their intentions almost blatantly questionable.
Agreed. Not the biggest fan of PETA; am very much a fan of animal welfare and rights being advocated for. CO2 'stunning' of pigs especially gets to me.
Peta kills more animals in their shelters than most other organizations. It was never about protecting animals. It was always about hating humans.
Please stop spreading misinformation funded by the meat industry https://www.petakillsanimalsscam.com/
Tyvm for this, though to be fair this is a PETA source; do you have anything external?
Regardless, their claims about the petakillsanimals site being run by a disinformation org seem to be true. The wikipedia article on the CCF is damning; they seem to have a general goal of opposing any environmental, public health or social justice campaigns that harm certain industries.
Or, to keep it simple: making money off of humans by exploiting their empathy?
“He kill them wi’ their love. That’s how it is, every day, all over the world.” ~John Coffey (Stephen King - The Green Mile)
the issue is that we're doing it on a massive scale semi-automatically.
keeping small amount of animals in decent-ish conditions (like on a small farm) and killing some for food/meat is fine.
keeping thouthands of animals in tiny cages where they basically can't move at all is not.