In Switzerland, it's now illegal to boil a live lobster

At least for the lobster, we're not really sure how they interpret pain. They don't have a brain in the same way the humans do. As a vegetarian, I personally would go back to meat if I just knew my meal had a good life and did not suffer needlessly in order for me to eat it. But for the prisoner, this seems like the worst combination: internalized suffering and externalized indifference... So minimize the the deturrence to crime while maximizing the suffering in society. Isn't this the opposite of how it should be?

If your Tolstoy quote is accurate, it seems fairly sloppy reasoning to me. Animal protein is an essential component of nourishing billions of people. Calling sustenance “appetite” is a rhetorical flourish which undermines the argument.

I think what would be immoral is telling billions of people they can’t eat meat.

There are many ways one could prescribe humans should act to minimize their impact on the flora and fauna of our world. But at the same time, humans are entitled to a certain degree of leeway in this regard. Sustainably eating the plants and animals beneath us on the food chain is one of those areas.

All this reminds me of Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by Ernst F. Schumacher - a great read.

However, not everyone is like you. Some people develop deficiencies when they exclude meat from their diet. I have witnessed an ex-vegan health/nutritional professional advise a vegetarian to start eating some meat due to chronic health issues and lab-tested nutritional deficiencies.

It was an hard journey for both of them.

I'm glad it works for you right now while providing a sense of moral superiority, but not everyone is the same.

For the rest, if we aren't eating them, something else is going to eat them. It's not a question of "taking an animal life"—the animal's life is going to get taken, in a messy, bloody, terrifying way.

It is considered by some to be an increase in marginal global utility, when a human eats an animal that would otherwise have been eaten by something else. Because we cause less suffering in the process of (killing and) eating the animal, than anything else would have.

(I don't personally know how I feel about this argument, but I feel like I should put it out here, because it's not very well-known and usually causes more interesting discussion than the usual responses.)

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Also, as a bonus argument: if you're a positive utilitarian, then we increase global utility by a lot simply by raising livestock to eat them that would otherwise have never existed at all. (If you're a negative utilitarian, then all the good humanity has ever done is probably wiped out by the suffering of the great number of chickens we keep.)

Either way, though, it's indisputable that the life of e.g. a sheep kept by a shepherd, has higher total QALY than the life of a wild sheep. For some species, we're giving them a virtual garden-of-Eden to live in until they just, one day, die at our hands.

There's actually a part of the Effective Altruism movement that wants to reduce wild animal suffering—i.e. interject ourselves into nature in order to make more animal lives like that of the tended sheep (with or without the eventual culling.) I think they hope to use synthetic meat to solve the "how do you keep both the fox and the hen happy" problem.

Most studies I read found that vegetarians were more healthy and lived longer than heavy meat eaters, but the once-in-a-while meat eaters were healthier. One of the reasons I stick with the last group.

Selfish?

Yes. But not only for appetite.

Besides, without predators, you probably would not have much forests ... and much more dessert.

I don't think there currently is a sustainable way to live without killing animals. Humanity is not going to live off pure gathering.

They sure are fun!

Yes. Read reports of torture victims. They frequently request death over continued pain.

In some cases, certainly.

I'd also say that it being voluntary, and knowing that there is an end (and can be brought to an end by you), makes for a very different experience.

I actually didn't express that very well. I kind of meant that if you were to erase the mental illness, you've effectively erased the whole experience. Horrible torture isn't something you just leave behind you the day after. The influence it has is almost necessarily mental illness in some form or fashion.

If anyone did go through horrible torture voluntarily, I would expect they would do it to know what it was like. And mental illness is part of what it's like.

There are people afraid of bugs, dogs, cats, birds, balls etc... There are also people who experience anxiety for unknown reasons due to anxiety disorder. Moreover, there is no, quoting you, "large chance to die in the end" in roller coasters. I don't think any part of your argument makes sense, sorry.

The point of tooth removal in dentistry is to end pain, not to cause it.

But others just seemed pointless. For example, in the novels, the Envoys are not dissidents, but rather enforcers for the Protectorate. Quell was a dissident, and Takeshi did quote her frequently, but she died centuries before he was born. The Quell character in the video is actually Virginia Vidura, who was his trainer in the Envoys. And Reilieen was not his sister.

Also, the virtual torture sequence in the novel is far more extreme than depicted in the video. I doubt that it could be shown, even on Netflix.

The law is very plainly there to prevent guinea pigs from being abused. It is not there to extend the government's power.

What an extremely odd thing to argue.

But in this case the Swiss direct democracy is working exactly as expected by the people of the country. They voted decades ago that the government must be in charge and enforce the protection of the dignity and well-being of animals as well as update the law based on new findings. The new rules (which include the lobster stuff) going into effect are just the current iteration.

For example, from the first of March all devices that automatically punish dogs for barking will be outlawed. This is an intrusion in personal liberty, but the Swiss as a whole seem quite fine with valuing the well being of the animals higher than their owners liberty to use those devices on them.

If the Swiss are unhappy with the decisions made by the government here, we have the referendum as an quite often used instrument to stop it. You would need 55'000 signatures within 100 days if I remember correctly to trigger a vote on the national level.

My thinking is: I don't want to risk my own or my wife or a guests personal health, and so I "deal" with them. Am I wrong?

I'd summarize my position as: 1) animal interests for their own sake are not a legitimate end of government coercion, and 2) the moral character of the people is a legitimate end, but we should be very hesitant to use coercion for social engineering.

So we recoil at killing animals, because pets are like family, and most of our experience with animals are with pets. Thus, we see animals as much more human than our ancestors.

What then, does this say about the ethical status of animals. Certainly, it seems like our lack of exposure to butchering is why we now care much more about animals. The issue would be much clearer if things had happened the other way around. That is, things would be clearer if we stopped all butchering animals because we thought animals had rights.

That is not to say this means animals have no rights, it might well be that by no longer killing animals as a manner of habit we realized their ethical standing. However, this is less evident than most other cases where we (the caucasian west) have given other groups more ethical standing.

With slavery, we first realized it was wrong, and then stopped having slaves. The counter point might be that in this analogy we are still before the point of abolishment.

I think all I can conclude is that 'not being able to kill animals' is not a sufficient arguments for animals having more ethical standing. In the end though, it might boil down to ethics not being absolute but instead being relative to culture.

I mean, I get that you think your position is kinder to animals, and there's a certain intuitive value to that position. But ceasing consumption of livestock would, in effect, amount to genocide.

I saw a video (which I won't link to you, as I'm certain you don't want to see it) of a phenomenal on-site butcher, he was incredibly precise, fast, etc.

Anyway, the video starts with a live cow, which is killed instantly with a small firearm and a well-placed bullet to the brain.

I butcher animals sometimes (I hunt and have a small homestead) and I would not dream to use any method which involved a death even as slow as bleeding out.

Many animals will start to eat others without bothering to kill them; non-carnivorous birds will peck each other (not particularly quickly) to death, dolphins do gang rape for fun while having the ability to understand what it means, they also kill things like porpoises for fun (they can't eat porpoises and they're neither a threat nor competition to dolphins); predators in good conditions do "surplus kill" i.e. kill just for practice/fun without attempting to eat the victim, apes have been observed to eat parts of other apes while they're still alive, etc, etc.

The main difference between animals is that while less intelligent animals will sometimes simply kill things "just because" even if they don't need to and the suffering will be an accidental side effect, the more intelligent animals will sometimes intentionally hurt/torture others. Morality is orthogonal to intelligence. Romanticizing nature as something pure, "taking only what they need" and beyond evil is ridiculous idealism that doesn't reflect reality.

Not always. Weasels and their relatives engage in surplus killing. Cats regularly play with their prey, clawing them and batting them around for fun, many times without even eating the dead prey animal.

Dolphins are known to devour a shark's liver and leave the rest of the animal to sink, dying a slow death.

Humans are animals. There's almost nothing we do that other predators don't. The difference is that we use technology as a force multiplier of overwhelming magnitude. There isn't much difference in kind, however.