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.
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.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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Removed by mod
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.
Agreed, if a bear can eat a person why can’t I eat a person?!
OP will be real dangerous when he learns fish also don’t ask for consent.
They don’t? I’ve been wasting my time.
Nobody is saying that fish are moral agents that can empathise with other beings. That doesn’t man that they’re not moral subjects; the ability to understand that one is causing harm is not a prerequisite for the ability to suffer oneself. I think everyone knows this intuitively, but it does feel good to have our less moral habits be justified by memes that we would otherwise find to be illogical.
You are right, but I believe putting a cease to life is not inherently bad. If we could kill animals without letting them feel anything, that wouldn’t really be bad.
Ethical consideration has to extend to more than just painless death to be worth a damn. I can’t walk into an infant ward and painlessly murder infants in their sleep for a reason.
Yes, the reason being they are human.
Why is that a reason?
Because most people view it as morally wrong to kill another human.
This is why we should be killing pigs with nitrogen, rather than CO2. CO2 is how a mammal determines it is suffocating, meanwhile the air is mostly made up of nitrogen so we ignore it. However, it’s precisely this which makes it dangerous to humans working nearby (also the fact that CO2 is heavier than air so you can have open pits), and it’s ruled too expensive to do it humanely.
Or we could you know just not gas and kill pigs.
I like bacon. Also there’s something to be said of the simple fact that almost all life eats other life. Why is plant life lesser than animal life to you?
However, the day they start selling lab grown bacon I will gladly switch to that.
Because life is not the most important factor to me. Sentience is.
But let’s entertain the idea life was the most important factor. Raising animals to eat them kills way more plant life than just eating plants directly as you need to clear a ton of land and grow a ton of plant just to feed all these animals you’re raising. So even if that was the differentiating factor not exploiting other non human animals would be the way to go as you would preserve more life.
Liking something to me is not a solid argument to exploit another sentient being. If I was saying that I liked kicking dogs it would not make it ok to do so for example.
I didn’t say preservation of all life was the most important factor. I said almost all life eats other life.
There’s a big difference between kicking a dog and eating food.
You’ve clearly asked me why I considered plant life less than animal life which I answered. I then went further and showed that this question was actually irrelevant to the point I was making because even if I were to consider it as equal or more important I should still plants instead of animal products.
There is no difference between the two when not in a survival situation. One is done for taste buds pleasure the other might be done because you enjoy kicking dogs.
Actually I would dare say that kicking a dog is better than killing and eating them.At least I know I’d prefer getting kicked rather than killed and eaten.
We both know that’s not going to happen. If I want to have bacon, would you rather me quickly and painlessly kill the pig, or use a blunt butter knife to kill them?
Maybe we should eat you instead of the pig. I’m pretty sure the pig does not want bacon.
Thanks, now I know you’re completely clueless about even the most basic things. Pigs will happily eat bacon.
Happily? Lol
And if someone did that to you?
By eating vegetables you are doing harm anyway, they are living organisms after all.
Even if we grant that plant “pain” is 100% morally equivalent to the pain of other beings (it isn’t, and you don’t earnestly believe that), we still have to eat them as a matter of biology, since humans aren’t producers and must consume nutrients from other life. It’s the same reason we can’t pass moral judgment on a carnivore like a lion for eating a Zebra.
Morality depends on culture, what is wright in one culture is wrong in another. This is easy to see and pretty obvious, unless that you are some kind of supremacist that thinks that your beliefs are the only valid. If your problem is pain you can kill the animal with one shot in the head and it will be painless, some farmers do this in order to avoid suffering.
“Bro I really wanna eat your dog bro. Bro it’s my culture bro just let me take a little bite bro I swear it’s the most delicious thing you’ve ever tasted. Bro just let me eat your dog bro, what are you some kinda racist?”
I am curious. Do you believe that humans has always had the option to not eat animals?
What I am asking is, is there some point during the evolution of homo sapience where it shifted from being morally acceptable to being morally wrong to eat other animals?
Morality depends on culture. What appeared through evolution is culture, but no one culture or the right culture. What is right in one culture is wrong in another one.
This is why I’m a pesca-pescatarian. I only eat fish that eat other fish.
To be completely serious, thats a bad idea. Predatory fish accumulate lots of mercury and shit in their meat.
To add to this, I’ve read recommendations from public health orgs to eat no more than two portions of oily fish a week, and minimise consumption of especially high sources like tuna steaks.
Some consumption is still recommended for omega 3s, though there are algae-based supplements for EPA and DHA as well as the fish ones. Flaxseed and some nuts are great sources of ALA, but afaik its conversion to EPA and DHA isn’t great and consuming all three is a good idea.
(Disclaimer: I am not a nutritionist. Verify things yourself before making dietary changes.)
Fish eating fish doesn’t lead to ecological disturbance. Humans have put multiple species on the verge of extinction.
Humans have put multiple species on the verge of extinction.
That is a slight understatement:
We’ve had some help though, i think i read that something like 1/3 of all human caused extinctions are because we keep bringing cats with us wherever we go, and letting them roam free in ecosystems that didn’t have any equivalent predator, leading to stories like this https://www.thevintagenews.com/2019/03/25/species-extinct/
i read that something like 1/3 of all human caused extinctions are because we keep bringing cats with us
Do you have a source for that? Intuitively 1/3 of all species extinctions (keep in mind this in general includes plants and other kingdoms of life, not just animals) sounds far too high imo. Maybe you have read that number in a slightly different context, like bird deaths in urban areas, or perhaps in a more specific context similar to the one in your link? Don’t get me wrong, like your link shows, (house) cats can easily have a devastating effect on the local wildlife, in particular birds and small mammals or reptiles (wikipedia has an article on the topic, although I didn’t find anything like your numbers in it). But as far as I know the major ways in which humans have caused extinctions are historically overhunting (mostly affecting large birds and mammals), habitat loss in particular since the advent of agriculture, and more recently of course the effects of the climate crisis since the industrial revolution.
I think you’re spot on there, this was the only thing i could find that was close to what i remembered reading, and it’s speaking about extinctions of bird, mammal and reptile species, where cats are behind roughly one third of the extinctions: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/worst-invasive-predators/
Sorry for late response
sigh Came from reddit to lemmy, still see stupid af carnist memes like this. Don’t know if it’s a win or what for the fediverse
I’m sorry, but I laughed at carnist. Lighten up.
Relax, I’m a carnist/flexitarian. There’s nothing wrong with attributing a name to non-vegans/non-vegetarians. The world isn’t divided into vegans/vegetarians and so called ‘normal people’. It’s just as normal to not eat meat in some parts of the world.
Yeah, the preferred term is bloodmouth
Vegans giving us the most metal nickname possible expecting us to not like it
Other options include: corpse eater, flesh sucker, and meat mouth. :V
Bloodmouth just rolls off the tongue better than all those, please continue calling me that
Yeah it’s way better.
Pisses a lot of people off too, which is why I use it lol
You do you, soil muncher.
Well, there are others like cheese breathers, pus quaffers, bee vomit suckers, chicken period munchers and so on.
Apart from cheese breather none of those hit the same, you need to get better slurs. Cheese breather also isn’t metal enough for my tastes. Stick with bloodmouth.
IMO pus quaffer has some grind core vibes. That said, in real life, there’s nothing “metal” in animal exploitation. If your mindset is truly like “they call me bloodmouth, it’s metal, I’m a bloodmouth”, then I guess you’d be either a 12 year old or trolling. In either case, i hope you grow out of it.
That said, in real life, there’s nothing “metal” in animal exploitation.
Bro, pull up a video of a McDonald’s meat factory and tell me that shit ain’t metal as fuck
Also why are you mad that I’m not being serious this is the meme community not the philosophy community
Something needs to die for you to survive, what and how much is up to your individual tolerance for input/output ratio.
Death and suffering is a natural state of being in nature. I can reduce it, but I still need to survive.
I hate fishing. I don’t need to fish in my current station. If I did, I would fish.
Exactly. Pretty common misconception about vegan ideology. Vegans don’t think people in developing nations have a moral imperative to change their ways because they don’t have an alternative.
I don’t need to eat meat, so I don’t.
I genuinely wasn’t aware of this. Have never heard that argument made.
So their position is basically that as soon as you have a sufficiently developed supply chain to buy refrigerated lab-grown or fake meat and get it home before it smells like a rotten protein shake, that’s what you should do? But until that happens, killing animals is ok?
Uh, I only eat fake meat once every few weeks and that’s just for fun. I can live off of beans and rice just fine and it’s literally cheaper than meat lol
Not sure if rice and beans ticks all nutrients. Add potatoes and you’re safe.
Oh yeah definitely! Also wheat, oats, nuts, vegetables, mushrooms, etc. I’m just saying, fake meat is a treat and not really necessary at all.
Nah, you don’t necessarily need lab grown or fake meat to have a healthy delicious varied vegan diet. Legumes like chickpeas, different kinds of beans and lentils as well as soy products can provide enough protein and variety if you put some effort into your cooking. You do need B12 supplements on a vegan diet though, as well as some specific nuts and seeds to cover omega 3. So those can be a problem if there’s not a lot of variety in the stores near you and you can’t order it online for whatever reason.
I don’t understand why milk is avoided. You are not necessarily harming the animal.
I will happily drink any woman’s milk if she’s offering, but it’s actually extremely weird that y’all steal cow milk.
I think it’s extremely weird that you would happily drink any woman’s milk.
But it is MUCH less weird than drinking bovine lactate and somatic cells.
Maybe not necessarily the dairy cow herself, but she needs to be pregnant about once per year so she doesn’t stop producing milk. That means that the calves inevitably need to be slaughtered (as well as older dairy cows) or else the herd would keep growing year after year.
Never mind the practices that go into ensuring that they become pregnant.
The difference is that the fish needs to eat the other fish. We don’t need ANY animal products. So every killed animal suffered and lost their life for 10min of taste for us that we didn’t need. Being vegan is so easy in 2023.
taste
what about vitamins? proteins and other nutrients
like omega 3 fatty acid majorly found in fishes
There are plenty of plant sources of Omega 3. Flax seeds, walnuts, soybeans, and canola oil all have decent amounts of omega 3 in them. As for protein, legumes generally have a bunch.
Really, the only thing a vegan needs to supplement is B12, but even that gets added to a bunch of stuff like breakfast cereals and plant milks if you consume those.
How does one milk a plant?
You can make your own plant milk usually by soaking/boiling nuts/seeds in water and then blending that together. Some people use juicers for this, and then some people run the blended liquid through a filter to remove any bits. Cashew milk is lovely if homemade!
But why call in Milk then? Shouldnt it be called Nut juice or Seed juice?
I do it to piss off dairy farmers specifically. They hate it that I get to call it plant milk and that’s really funny to me.
Flax seeds, walnuts, soybeans, and canola oil all have decent amounts of omega 3 in them
They also take an enormous amount of resources to cultivate and process at industrial scale.
Wait until you learn what cattle gets fed. Spoiler: it is soy
Wait until you learn that industrial 'murica isn’t the entirety of the planet.
I am not american and I dont want to be one. The feed for animals raised for their meat in the EU and a lot of other countries that have industrial animal farms is comprised out of several plants and nutrient supplements, and a big part of that feed is soy and corn, both things that are grown mostly to feed animals.
Whataboutism
Actual proteins you need supplements for if you go vegan
No you don’t. Literally every plant contains EVERY amino acid in varying amounts. You don’t need to supplement protein as a vegan.
Would you believe that I don’t want to eat just plants and pills for each meal? Would you also believe that I disagree with the industrialization of farming and the animal abuse that is so commonly paired with it.
There are humane ways to eat meat, and while they’re difficult to find, it’s a lot easier than eating what most people would consider disgusting everyday.
Yes you don’t want to just eat plants, hence you are eating animals for taste pleasure.
Why do you think it’s okay to kill someone for pleasure? What’s humane about that?
Animals other than humans aren’t people, that’s why it’s okay. You should be the first law enforcement official that prosecutes predatorial non-human animals
Ploughing fields for plants kills animals too
Literally every plant contains EVERY amino acid in varying amounts.
Guess we can all survive on grass then. Agriculture and societies were a mistake, let’s just become cattle and chill all day /s
Or you can just eat plants that you can actually digest but that wouldn’t make for a snarky comment huh?
“Whataboutism” was invented by the british to say whenever the irish talked about oppression. It was invented to oppress. It is not a fallacy, saying “Whataboutism” is.
You can take them as supplements. It’s the same for your body. Oh and you are already doing that, because they give supplements to the animals they raise and kill, we are just eliminating the middleman.
very natural
Worth noting that many non-vegans are vitamin deficient and some medical authorities, including the UK’s, even recommend that everyone take vitamin D supplements. Also, please reconsider using your Internet connection, that isn’t very natural either.
as I said to the other guy, I’m not saying not natural is bad. But what op is implying is that getting the same stuff from natural sources is bad. That I just don’t agree with. It’s just the natural order of things. I have other options, yes, but I don’t consider the default natural source of things to be bad, so I don’t feel the need to switch. Animals eat animals all the time. And they don’t do it “humanely” either.
Those factory farmed animals are further away from “natural” than a smartphone
Cyanide occurs naturally. Water can be made in a lab by mixing Hydrogen and Oxygen and applying heat.
Is Cyanide good for you when occurring naturally and water bad for you when artificially synthesized?
no. But it is also not the case that nature intended for us to consume artificially synthesized anything
Are you a nudist?
Buy a man eat fish, he day, teach fish man, to a lifetime
Build a man a campfire and he’s warm for the night; set a man on fire and he’s warm for the rest of his life
As far as value goes, I don’t particularly value my own life or that of a fish. I do value the suffering of both while living though, as in I want to minimise that as much as possible.
… wait, so you’re saying is if someone painlessly murdered you in your sleep it’d be okay?
I’d be placing a thank you letter in advance.
Don’t get me wrong, in general I’m not a cynical person and have most things one would wish for. I just don’t think life is worth anything in itself and being alive is just a chance of experiencing or producing needless suffering. The (incredible) good feelings don’t make up for all the bad ones that exist.
If someone where to kill me, I’d be glad it’s over. While being alive I’d feel bad for my loved ones of course, but if I’m dead I wouldn’t be able to feel that. I know that is kind of selfish, so I would try not not to kill myself as I have too much responsibilities, but if I’m just being honest, one can dream.
I’ll take two
… should have seen that coming lol
You consider humans superior in intellect and ability compared to all other animals yet can’t grasp the fact that some humans have chosen to use said superior intellect and ability to avoid killing other animals?
Anyone who grew up in the 90s knows that fish don’t have any feelings anyway.
I’m not on either side of the argument, but would guess a good argument would be that fish need to eat other fish in order to survive as it’s their only source of food. We don’t. Provenly.
A person does not need to eat meat.
People absolutely do need to eat meat, specifically cooked meat in order to be intelligent. It’s what made cavemen smarter than other animals. Also the recent rise in average height and IQ from good nutrition is in part directly related to cheap meat from factory farming.
We needed to eat meat to get to this point. We can stop now.
Except in most cases we can’t. You may be able to, in which case, good job, but meat is much cheaper per quantity and quality of nutrients, not to mention people like me, whose only real source of dietary iron is meat.
Unless you’re a hunter there’s no way meat is cheaper, wtf are you talking about?
1kg of chicken breast meat costs me less than 5 USD and covers multiple days of meals. To get equivalent nutrients out of plants would cost me way more than that.
wtf you can? Where I am chicken breast is USD $11.64 per kg!
Compare that to beans. Where I live I can get a kg of dried pinto beans for $3.50, and with 67% as much protein per serving as chicken it would cost $5.25 to get the same amount of protein as a kg of chicken breast.
What’s the price of 1kg of dried beans where you live? That’d be a more apt comparison.
Depends a lot on brand and quality, but I’d guess the average is somewhat close to yours, at $3.00 US. Beans are a major source of protein for most people, where I live. Doesn’t help me, though - I don’t much mind the flavor, but they make me incredibly nauseous.
Iron is just a mineral, where do you think the cows get it? Plenty of plants have iron. Meat is also typically a lot more expensive than rice and beans. Like you want to eat meat, that’s cool, just stop acting like it’s for your health when meat is literally a carcinogen.
Nails have iron, try eating one of those! The air is mostly Nitrogen, why do plants even need N2 in the soil?
It’s basic fucking science that nutrients take different forms which can be absorbed differently.
Again: where do you think the cows get it, lol. Not from nails.
You are absolutely 100% wrong on this. And so wrong that it’s hilarious. Please don’t reproduce.
Nice argument, you sure showed him! Oh, wait, you didn’t - there was no substance to your reply. I suggest actually choosing a point of contention and explaining your perspective next time.
Oh, the irony.
There’s no irony, as my point of contention is your inability to discuss things like an adult despite, presumably, being one.
