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Comment by ethbro | Hacker News Reader

As a, for lack of a better term, total vegetarian, do you have any moral thoughts on different types of animals? Was the herbavore vs omnivore vs carnivore thing a consideration? Did you debate mammal protein vs fish?

Curious how people arrive at "their" vegetarianism.

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Speaking for myself on a very subjective issue:

I do. My gradual elimination of meats was done on a roughly sliding scale of animal awareness - pigs seem more aware than turkeys seem more aware than chickens, and most fish come in below that. I based this mainly on my understanding of there general awareness of the world, which is hardly a strict scientific method, but I was trying to acknowledge the concept you're describing, figuring that while it was all bad, if I wasn't going to immediately do totally right, I should choose to do it in the least bad manner.

Insects are actually a point of confusion for me. My general rule of thumb for whether I think I should kill something to eat it (or have someone else kill it for me to eat) is based on my instinctive empathy: If I saw the animal injured, would I feel bad for it? land-based animals - Yes. Fish - Yes. Eggs? No. (lots of issues in the egg industry, but the base concept didn't bother me). Bacteria? No. But this leaves insects in a weird place. I will kill an insect that is a pest to me without much concern. Mosquitos are dead if I get a chance, houseflies are welcome to leave, but if they don't, I can swat them without guilt. Ants, while an absolutely favorite creature of mine, also fall prey to my self-centeredness. BUT - the idea of hundreds/thousands of insects getting ground up DOES bother me. I _think_ that's because I don't empathize with the bugs the way I do with animals, but I don't like what it says about us to kill in such numbers even if I don't empathize directly, Regardless, while I don't have a solid answer, it was easy enough to give up the few foods involved. (Pretty much Junior Mints, in my case)

Flirted with stints of vegetarianism. Still eat far less meat than "average" and can go many days without meat.

I am okay eating animals, they are tasty. They think, they die, they go to my tummy. I try to eat grass fed and "humane" local stuff these days precisely to avoid issues that occur at mass produced meat factories (antibiotic needs, etc.). This makes meat cost more, which makes me eat less.

The central reason for me comes down to sustainability. Eggs and milk are still not the most humane things to me, but they are sustainable and quite a bit better than killing the animals they come from. They cost way less to produce and eggs/cheese/dairy make a lot of tasty stuff I am less willing to give up than meat.

We can probably sustain the planet if everyone eats a light to moderate amount of dairy/eggs, but based on what I have read we really can't do that with the amount of meat consumption in America (and other places that are meat heavy in their culture.)

Not only that but Americans are used to cheap meats and are very very slowly becoming used to paying for meat at prices where it can be raised more healthily (legitimate free range, zero antibiotics due to much lower animal density, etc.)

tl;dr save the planet, and maybe because I occasionally feel bad animals die for me to live a more convenient life.

edit: also, regarding the fish only "vegans"...honestly... it is hard enough to safely define one thinking meat from another. I think people do a lot of mental twists and turns and narrative building to convince themselves that something like say, fish, are "lesser" thinking meats. Insects? Fungi? Bacteria? How do you define your thinking meat? The philosophy of this is actually fiendishly difficult if you take it seriously and don't just stop when your brain has convinced you that you have it figured out. I also don't think it is even subjective, even though it is a very passionate subject. At some level if you eat animals you have to accept the consequence and can't just rationalize away you are eating the muscles and fats of an animal that had its own thing going on. I just never felt strongly convinced by the whole strict vegan argument given the amount of energy required to live that way (it is actually hard and difficult to be a really strict Vegan, in my opinion that time can be better spent reducing misery of actual humans in a lot of cases)

> I also don't think it is even subjective, even though it is a very passionate subject.

I'll agree to that. If you have a definition of "thinking/self-aware/conscious/sapient/concept of choice", any given creature either IS or ISN'T. But we can't agree on a definition, and we have no real means to test. So it's a non-subjective fact that we (currently) have only subjective means to determine, and subjective arguments over what we're even talking about.

On the topic of sustainability, I recently learned just how much of the global corn crop goes to feed animals: so much that when people talk about the industry of growing corn, they just talk about animal feed. Corn for human consumption is such a tiny slice of the market it only comes up if you zoom in on certain parts.

I think the scale slides the other way too. So just because plants looks different than us, it seems kind of arbitrary to relegate them as "not thinking" and subject to whatever we want to do with them. I mean, I'm sure grass isn't thrilled about having its new growth trimmed repeatedly.

Not making an argument one way or the other, just have been thinking about it for myself. So I suppose my only point to the above would be that "there's always a subjective line that needs to be drawn somewhere, rather than an objective one."

Agreed. Main thing is, I like being alive and have to eat, at least, plants to stay alive. So it does bring you to an interesting point of, so... if I can't safely say that even plants aren't really thinking food... I should just not try to formulate an argument about which things are "thinking", but not everything is relative. Using the facts we have now I will only go so far on the whole whole relativism angle. Cows are way more like me than a black bean, for example. So it is pretty easy to at least roughly group things. Anyway, we agree here, but ultimately we shaped the world in a certain way (our ancestors) so we just have to accept that we can't change certain things easily or at all (what we eat, that we have to cut grass, etc). So that line of thinking about "should I eat thing X?" just seems trickier because I have so many biases rattling around in my brain and we always construct our internal narrative to fit facts.

What isn't hard is the sustainability argument. That is super simple arithmetic. And that is the one that pretty much seals it for me.

I think a lot of people start from the sustainability angle and then convince themselves of a lot of things that are murky or they themselves didn't really personally decide this, it is just something a lot of other people are doing / have decided and it fits their narrative of "meat is not sustainable". That said I do think there are well reasoned actors out there that have "done the work" to decide eating meat is not for them, but don't dress it up as a philosophical choice until you /have/ done the work and thought it through. It starts and ends with a lot of Why? :)

* Americans are used to cheap meats and are very very slowly becoming used to paying for meat at prices where it can be raised more healthily*

This may be true, but I wonder how much of the cost of meat is the inability to buy direct.

My family buys all our beef (and considering pork this year) from a local farmer by pre-ordering a quarter steer. The total price I pay is far less than the supermarket price for beef and the only explanation I can come up with is that we're cutting out the middlemen.

Likewise, the bison farmers around here are advertising prices well below the cost of bison at the few stores that carry it.

The term you're looking for is lacto-ovo vegetarian.

That's the term, but most people that don't deal with vegetarians don't know it. (I've also seen a number of vegetarians & pescatarians that don't know it, which is somewhat surprising to me). But yes, I'm an ovo-lacto vegetarian.

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