New Rules Against Animal Cruelty Raise the Stake for India's Beef Wars | Hacker News Reader

New Rules Against Animal Cruelty Raise the Stake for India's Beef Wars

npr.org

39 pointsMz32 comments

I find it laughable that rules against animal slaughter in India are being made based on cruelty. This is in a country where cows (though supposedly holy) are treated horribly. Cows in every part of that country can be found:

* Grazing on garbage heaps

* Tied up on short ropes through their noses on hot days

* Malnourished, covered in sores

* Deformed

* Dripping snot

And so on.

India has plenty of human beings who live like that. It doesn't mean they shouldn't be legally recognized as being entitled to decent treatment though.

Sure! But if you're going to make animal cruelty laws, at least make it illegal to be cruel to animals. I'd rather be butchered and eaten than spend my entire life in the hot sun, tied to a post through my nose, eating garbage.

All of which arise from poverty, the same reason affecting humans as well.

Could someone counter this morality argument?

If the world stopped eating meat, animals would no longer be bred for this purpose.

Since animals are bred for meat, I'm not bothered by eating them. Their treatment is generally poor, but again their purpose is to be food. They wouldn't have existed otherwise.

This is a genuine good-faith question, so hopefully the replies will be similar.

Is it a matter of opinion, or is there something closer to an objective truth to be found in this?

> Their treatment is generally poor, but again their purpose is to be food.

That smells like a non-sequitar to me: their purpose is indeed to be food, but that neither justifies poor treatment or cruelty, nor does poor treatment necessarily follow simply because animals are bred as food.

I am not overly familiar with the subject but I do know that there are rules and regulations both at the national and EU level to protect animals from mistreatment.

I don't know, that's kind of like saying we shouldn't be bothered by slavery if the slaves in question were "bred" for that purpose and wouldn't have existed otherwise. Of course, the fact that line of reasoning is analogous to a line of reasoning with an intuitively repugnant conclusion doesn't necessary help us understand the original line, where our intuitions are generated, or if they're appropriate in the original example.

You might be interested in Parfit's Nonidentity Problem [0].

"The nonidentity problem focuses on the obligations we think we have in respect of people who, by our own acts, are caused both to exist and to have existences that are, though worth having, unavoidably flawed – existences, that is, that are flawed if those people are ever to have them at all. "

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nonidentity-problem/

The measure of a society is how it treats those lesser than them. That includes animals who are beasts of burden or food.

Quite simply, just because they are meant to be food does not mean they should suffer during their existence.

I agree. I also think that not only are the animals living a horrific existence as sentient beings but so are the humans whose job it is to deal with them. And as such every human is a little bit fractured because of our negligence of a minimum amount of respect for ourselves, who's ignorance accepts the convienance, and life.

One could argue that the national forests and parks can be a new home for these animals if we stop messing with them. So the argument that they won't survive is a non-starter. Can these many animals survive? Probably not, but the species will. For ex., no one eats squirrels or mice but there are quite a lot of them around. In India, some stray animals (dogs, cats, cow, rats) just gaze out in the wild and live on their own. So it is totally possible.

If we really take any logical argument against meat eating to its root, we will be left with nothing to eat. Unless we manufacture artificial meat, we won't be able to live without killing/hurting some living being. Even if we can, one can then argue about lives of bacteria and we will be back to square one. When we don't have a strong moral argument against eating meat, there is no point forcing an entire society to follow some rules. What Indian govt is trying to do is going to hurt that society a lot in the long run.

> If we really take any logical argument against meat eating to its root, we will be left with nothing to eat.

I would argue that this is [edited out: Reductio ad absurdum] a straw man argument. One of the best 'logical' reasons for not eating meat, as opposed to ethical arguments, is the reduction of greenhouse gases and other negative outputs the lower an individual eats on the foodchain. This argument doesn't suggest that an individual starve or die, but instead pushes that individual towards more careful use of the resources available to humanity.

In addition, an ethical argument could be made for not causing pain. Since the vast majority of life on the planet is incapable of experiencing pain, it leaves the vast majority of food that humans eat available for consumption.

So there exist logical arguments against eating meat that do not leave a person with nothing to eat.

Edited because Reductio ad absurdum is not a fallacy, but a straw man is a fallacy brought about by faulty application of Reductia ad absurdum.

Fair enough. There is a difference between never eating meat and being responsible in eating it. The argument here is about not eating meat at all which makes the logical argument around greenhouse gases not applicable. With respect to ethical arguments, unless you really end up manufacturing food that meets nutritional needs of humans, do you also account for the pain that a human has to suffer for eating inferior food lacking essential nutrients?

> the pain that a human has to suffer for eating inferior food lacking essential nutrients

That's only the half of it! What would happen to our national dishes if meat, fish and frutti de mare were to be banished from the table?! Barbaric!

> the lower an individual eats on the foodchain

Why are you privileging organisms higher up the food chain? There should ethically be no difference in how we treat living things based on where they are in the food chain, except for qualitative reaons (bacteria vs a cow), so you are making the distinction on purely practical reasons.

> is the reduction of greenhouse gases and other negative outputs the lower an individual eats on the foodchain

That is at best a practical argument, and one that can be made only because technology to scrub greenhouse gases is not yet in use.

> Since the vast majority of life on the planet is incapable of experiencing pain

Counting by species or by total population? Insects may not feel pain (AFAIK) but most species (animals and plants) experience pain or stress.

> exist logical arguments

Not sure why you keep saying logical arguments. As opposed to what? Non-rational ones?

There are strong ethical arguments to be made for not causing pain/stress when killing animals (and plants) and not killing life unnecessarily. But against eating meat? Its in our very nature to eat it, indeed meat is part of a healthy and balanced diet.

Eating lower on the foodchain is a strategy to reduce the suffering caused by one's own survival - a cow shares much of our physiology, so reasonably we can assume it suffers from things which would cause us to suffer; a crustacean, less so, and a cucumber, not at all, at least by any mechanism we understand.

Simply kill the animal humanely and it will not suffer. Make sure that grazing animals have adequate space and aren't fed shit, offal and pumped full of antibiotics to save money and con the consumer.

In other words, treat the animals, and the people who will eat their meat, with some dignity.

> Unless we manufacture artificial meat, we won't be able to live without killing/hurting some living being.

Look up ahimsa -- nonviolence, the Jain philosophy of life -- as it applies to diet. Specifically: fruiting bodies of plants are meant to be eaten and possibly have the seed planted; you're not ending a life by eating cucumbers or avocados. (Ahimsa traditionally included allowing milk and eggs -- at least unfertilized eggs? -- although modern Jains are more skeptical; it could probably extend to honey, too.)

> One could argue that the national forests and parks can be a new home for these animals if we stop messing with them.

I should certainly hope not. It would be a very poor decision to introduce a bunch of invasive species into wilderness that we preserve.

Generally speaking, life is worth having even if it contains suffering, but there are limits. I like being alive, despite the bad times, but given the prospect of a lifetime spent locked in a cage, I'd rather be dead, and that, or something closely approximating it, is the fate of many farm animals nowadays.

Why is the fact that they wouldn't have existed if not for our desire to eat meat a justification for their continued mistreatment?

In a natural world, these animals would have the choice to reproduce (or not). You're forcing them to reproduce and then saying, "Well, it's OK, because they wouldn't exist otherwise." If these animals truly wanted to reproduce in this environment, we wouldn't need to artificially inseminate them.

There are many species that stop reproducing depending on their environment. In zoos, this can be a big problem.

If it were humans in this situation, would you feel the same way? Is your treatment of them excused because you "allowed them to live"? Why is it OK to do this to a pig but not, say, a dog? Or a gorilla?

> In a natural world, these animals would have the choice to reproduce (or not)

In a natural world these animals wouldn't exist. There's no such thing as a cow in nature. There are things that are almost like a cow, but they're not cows.

Most of the plants and animals we breed for food are not represented in nature nature.

> Why is it OK to do this to a pig but not, say, a dog?

Dogs are bred for food in some parts of the world.

Dogs are bred for food in some parts of the world.

And elsewhere, dogs have been bred for their appearance at the expense of their health or functional traits, on the whims of people running competitions.

See, for example: https://www.amazon.com/Dog-Wars-Border-Battled-American/dp/0...

Just to add a bit.

Tomatoes were a small yellow berry. Europeans thought they were poisonous for a while because they are nightshades.[1]

Milk and beef cattle are most likely descended from Aurochs.[2]

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomato

[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs

The natural world you talk about is goone ( what a nice, woody sort of word)and wont come back. Extrapolating from what was as a template for future behaviour is always a way towards certain disaster.

If you're interested in this area of morality you should absolutely read Peter Singer. I'm not putting him forward as the authority or saying he'e obviously right, but for me and I think for most people that read him it will have the effect of exposing you to a host of unusual and unexpected arguments and conclusions.

As a Thomist (Catholic Aristotelian), I winced when I read "their purpose is to be food". So, here's one possible counter-argument:

Aristotle describes all things and beings as having four causes: matter (what it's made of), form (how it's organized), first cause (where it came from), and final cause (what it's meant to do).

In this model, the final cause of an elephant is to live the life of a happy, well-adjusted elephant; it is not piano keys. I'm not sure what the final cause of a square is (maybe Aristotle's model only applies to that which has both matter and form), but the final cause of a living being is to live the best and most fulfilled form of that living being's life.

This means that an animal's purpose can never be said to be food. Predation interferes with other beings' final causes, so it's always a material evil. Is it always a moral evil? Non-conscious beings are never moral actors, so nothing can be called morally good or morally evil for them (although it's fine to suspect that the Devil had more of a role than God in shaping the evolution of the giant roundworm); for conscious beings, when and whether predation is morally evil depends on the nature of the universe -- on which theology/cosmology is true.

Catholicism, for example, teaches that humans have immortal souls and animals probably don't (although it doesn't rule out the existence of non-human intelligent life, so seared bottlenose dolphin and elephant cutlet are probably not wise meal choices); so raising animals for meat is potentially defensible -- although cruelty is bad for the human soul, and cruelty or callousness towards animals as well as towards people must be atoned for at some point.

Hinduism teaches that humans, animals, and all other beings share fragments of a single immortal soul; so killing an animal for meat is pretty much the same as killing a human for meat. Jainism -- which might be the original source of Hindu and Buddhist cosmology -- takes this a step further, and similarly condemns killing plants, recommending that one should live on products that can be gathered without killing their source. Classically, this meant milk, eggs, and fruiting bodies; modern Jainism is increasingly skeptical of the idea that one can keep animals and birds without violence, and prefers eating only nonviolently-gathered products of plants. This is an unfamiliar diet -- ahimsa diets are in general -- but I doubt it would be as restrictive as it sounds; and if it's the only diet that isn't literally homicide, it would be particularly well worth following.

In this model, the final cause of an elephant is to live the life of a happy, well-adjusted elephant

If that's the case, why do these animals have (non-human) predators? In fact, unlike humans, some animals actually need to eat meat to live. Doesn't that demonstrate that some animals are meant to be food?

"Final cause" doesn't imply a designer; it's just the way the species happens to exist. (Aristotle was a deist, roughly speaking.) There's no guarantee that a species' final cause doesn't involve messing with other species'.

There's also no guarantee that a species' final cause isn't self-defeating. Introduce a pair of rabbits to an island with no natural predators of rabbits, and in about ten years the rabbits will eat all the vegetation of the island and then starve to death...

A purpose of every living thing (and many nonliving things) is to be eaten...

I could breed a human baby for meat, and it, too, would exist to fulfill its purpose by dying. There are two major differences:

1) You probably place value on the baby's life and its ability to suffer, whereas that seems not to be the case for farm animals.

2) The government also places value on the baby's life, and disagrees with my assessment that its purpose for existing is to feed me. This at least serves to prove that different observers can disagree about a being's purpose, and opens the door to the fact that the animals, at least, do not agree with you about what their purpose is. (They won't say so, but the government has nothing to declare about the baby's purpose either, only that I may not kill it.)

The argument is based on the idea that farm animals exist to be useful to us, and since that isn't objectively true, I don't see that the argument reveals any objective truth.

> "I see a monitoring and surveillance system on farmers and traders," says Ramdas. "It's very Orwellian, our Animal Farm."

Mr. Ramdas may be confusing his Orwell stories a bit :) Although I gave it a shot, it's difficult to draw many parallels between the Soviet allegory of Animal Farm and post-independence India.

(I'm commenting on this inconsequential line because I don't have much to say about the larger article beyond "religious extremism sucks")

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