I don't see how the expected lifespan of a single individual is a determining factor in the moral calculus of what humans should or shouldn't kill.
Why isn't it morally equivalent to kill 10 pigs who could have collectively lived to be 200 years old for bacon and killing one whale who could have lived to be 200?
There are subtle differences between pigs' and whales' situations: most pigs that are slaughtered are bred as farm animals, not wild ones. So getting another pig of similar characteristics is trivial in effort (time, money, work). You are also not really endangering the species.
All whales that are hunted are wild. Getting another individual with the same characteristics as the one you just killed takes a prohibitive amount of anything so nobody is doing it. Their numbers are also dwindling.
Yes, we tend to assign greater value to older things. Which is why it's slightly more out of reach to chop down Sequoioideae compared to say your average bamboo trees. Both being plants to which we assign no intelligence or actual affection. It's purely down to replaceability in terms of the most costly resource, in this case time.
Why kill other sentient beings at all when it's not necessary anymore for our survival?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-whispering...
What if survival depends on suffering to some degree?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level#Biomass_transfer...
I should have phrased the question slightly differently.
It's more around whether animals (e.g. vertebrates) can suffer and experience pain like we do.
The answer is yes - that's why we use animals in pain research and that's why a pig or cow screams when it's cut with a knife for example.
Even fish feel pain [0].
Plants react to stimuli - but plants don't have a nervous system, they don't have nociceptors (neurons responding to life threatening signals) to experience and feel pain, they don't have any means to 'escape pain', e.g. running away from danger.
[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/fish-feel-pain...
For instance, you make a point of specifying you're considering whether things can suffer and experience pain like we do.
Why is that the delineating factor here? We don't really understand intelligence of consciousness and we've been basing our measures of both on the only instance where we're relatively confident exists. We think, therefore we are.
But what if we're wrong. What if our way isn't the only way to be intelligent, to be sentient. Why must they experience pain the way we do in order to be afforded protection? If we're just privileging our type of sentience over others, we're just drawing a different line. And always when someone draws a line, I ask, why there?
From there on it's a tough one though...
These are hard questions, I don't expect anyone to have the answers.
Everything kills everything else. Living things are merely temporary storage for genetic information. The genetic information that increase's its number of redundant backups faster then the number of instance failures wins.
However, if you're of the opinion that is unethical to cause more suffering and that killing other beings just to ensure your own survival then plants having sentience is a pickle.
Something has to give. You have to give in to the circle of life and acknowledge that your survival will bring in some measure of suffering to other beings. Or sacrifice yourself since there is no way to eat ethically by your standards.
Obviously, the vast majority of people will choose survival. But now they have to draw a line. What's friend and what's food? And once you draw that line, you have to defend that choice. You can't just say "because it's X", you have to explain why it is so.
I mean, learning all of this has just made me more of a "speciesist". I don't believe there is any way to resolve the conflict.
But I think we need to go on what we know so far, i.e. look at evidence from the scientific community and use our own observations.
You probably thought I put too much emphasis on 'experience pain like we do'.
What I meant was that - I'm borrowing words from C. Sagan - "They (animals) are too much like us". I didn't mean that they exactly experience pain like we do - maybe they do, maybe they don't. But I'm certain animals trapped in the large scale meat industry do suffer.
There have been numerous studies that show that animals feel pain, they think & feel.
And then there are our own observations - if you were growing up with pets - you'll know that animals have their own personality and do whimper and scream out when they are hurt and they do avoid any sources of pain if they can. Same for farm animals.
I think your questions already contains an answer. The line you're talking about or the circle of protection is growing.
There was a time were we exploited and caused enormous suffering towards other human beings on a large scale. We don't do that anymore and have laws that protect against that. We also think that cruetly towards animals is bad and have laws against that. Just those laws don't extend torwards farm animals - I'm sure that time will also come - more and more people are waking up and agree that the way we treat farm animals is just perverted and sick (see Earthlings https://vimeo.com/209647801).
And if we find evidence in the future that there are other ways to be sentient like you hinted at, we will also expand our circle of protection (compassion) to those life-forms.
Edit: typos
Such as?
Overpopulation. If the species is too successful, it may overgraze its environment and cause its food species to crash, leading to mass starvation of both the subject species and any other species that eat the same things, or anything the subject species begins to eat because its preferred food is scarce. This is the usual reason why deer herd management issues extra doe tags for a hunting season.
Basically every animal domesticated for food is a separate species from it's wild counterpart. In some cases (aurochs) the wild predecessor is deceased. These species survival 'strategy' is to be useful to humans as food, as much as it is a lions to hunt things. If we suddenly stopped breeding these animals then they would probably die out.
Focus instead on how they live. When we put pigs cages and separate them from their families are we doing it to preserve the species? What is the point of a life of suffering?
When a species dies out the world loses something. We should focus on keeping as many as possible. "What is the point of a life of suffering?" All life has suffering, I think that animals in captivity have a great deal less suffering than many wild animals do. Old animals don't have the luxury of a quick relatively painless death, but get old and starve or killed [1].
No we're not keeping animals (except in good zoos) for the sake of keeping a species going. But it is a side effect that has kept some species going.
[1] This is a great story of a pride of lions that lived very brutal lives. https://steemit.com/writing/@ollie7/band-of-brothers-the-leg...
Do you have any sources that back up this claim?
So do you really think that pigs in factory farms (not 'happy' farms you see in childrens books) for example have a better life than their free wild counter parts?
Please read the description below of what that factory farm life is [0]. Pigs are very smart and they literally go insane in factory farms.
How does us breeding these various farm animals in the millions with mutuation (bigger muscles for more meat etc) which couldn't survive in the wild add to a diversity of animals?
Furthermore factory farming is destroying our environment based on a study by the UN [1].
There is no good reason to breed and kill Billions of farm animals anymore for food, when we have better alternatives that are less destructive on so many levels (environment, human and animal).
[0] Pigs used for pork
The majority of breeding sows spend nearly the entirety of each pregnancy confined to a gestation crate, which is only slightly larger than their body, making it impossible for them to lie down comfortably or even turn around.
Gestation crate floors are usually made of slats, which allow manure to fall through, meaning that sows live directly above their own waste. This design exposes sows to high levels of ammonia, and respiratory disease is common in confined sows.
Standing on the hard, unnatural slatted flooring of a gestation crate takes a toll on pigs’ feet, causing excessive foot injuries, damage to joints, and even lameness.
The intense boredom and frustration pigs suffer in gestation crates have been blamed by researchers for abnormal, neurotic behaviors confined pigs sometimes exhibit, like repetitively biting at the bars of the gestation crate or chewing with an empty mouth. These behaviors can lead to additional suffering by causing sores and mouth damage.
Source: https://www.farmsanctuary.org/learn/factory-farming/pigs-use...
[1] http://www.unep.fr/shared/publications/pdf/dtix1262xpa-prior...
I was thinking about the actual death of the animal. I think a quick slit of the throat and bleed out is probably better than starving to death or being literally ripped to pieces.
" (not 'happy' farms you see in childrens books) " I would also like to point out that these don't just exist in children's books, but are the common way of rearing animals in many parts of the world (I grew up in a agricultural area with cows, deer and sheep, in the UK and aside for in winter they had a large area of grassy fields to live in. So I can't speak about pig farms, but I'm fairly sure that the conditions you describe are illegal here and in the rest of Europe) Horrific conditions do not have to be a norm.
And yes I know the happy farms do exist, i.e. farms where the farmer truly cares about the animals and where the animal has to only suffer at the end. But those farms are rare and meat from those farms are expensive and we can't feed the world with this.
The reality is when you need to breed Billions of animals a year - you just don't have time for animal welfare for most of those animals.
I think in the UK alone 8Billion animals are killed each year - according to Viva [0]. I can't even comprehend that number.
There are factory farms in the EU too - and compassionate world farming is trying to campaign for better treatment for these animals [1]
Baby steps...
[0]https://www.viva.org.uk/what-we-do/slaughter/slaughter-farme.... [1]https://www.ciwf.org.uk/
Edit: typos
Q. Why kill other sentient beings at all A. Because in many cases it is necessary for the survival of the species.
i.e. offering "help them survive" as a reason to kill them.
ps Some of the other descendant comments are very troubling, and remind me of what I heard a young female environmentalist say at a political meeting once, that "individual animals don't matter, only species matter." (i.e. the loss/death/killing of 1 animal meant nothing, but the extinction of a species meant a lot) Which was one of the most horrific things I'd ever heard, maybe because coming from an environmentalist, who are supposed to be the good guys. I guess it was the "animals only have value as things exploitable by humans" element to what she said, of which she seemed unaware. As if humans are the only life form with any value! Human, all too human.
You can absolutely be an environmentalist and not think that the lives of individual animals matters. I'm reminded of nature documentaries that will sit and watch an animal starve, because that's the natural thing and they are not there the interfere. I don't think this viewpoint is horrific.
"maybe because coming from an environmentalist, who are supposed to be the good guys" I think you should look at why you think these people are the "good guys". By the sounds of it, sorry if i'm wrong, but your thoughts on environmentalism comes from a place of empathy. You look at individual animals and empathise with there suffering. And by the sounds of it, you expect everyone else who considers themselves an environmentalist (which I also would say I was), to also come from this place of empathy. However not everyone does, and this isn't horrific, people just have different priorities.
I don't know about what else she said, but "animals only have value as things exploitable by humans" doesn't necessarily follow from: 'species matter individual animals don't'. Personally I think animals have a value completely apart from people and are even more valuable when they have no interaction with humans at all.
There are small select herds of wild bison in protected areas, and I imagine that would be the case even without ranching. But these bison herds are often carefully managed, as else wise the herd population would start to conflict with ranchers and farmers surrounding the protected areas. (This is the case with the Yellowstone bison herd for instance -- https://www.hcn.org/articles/the-science-behind-yellowstones... )
The bison population has grown from near extinction in the early 20th century to roughly half a million today. About 96% of these half a million bison are bred for consumption by humans. ( http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/five-things/the-great-a... )
Sorry, but I don't see how the expected lifespan of a single individual is a determining factor in the moral calculus of what humans should or shouldn't kill.
I never said we should kill pigs rather than whales.
Any accounts in particular?
Intuition aside, I find it hard to imagine anybody has a reliable measure of the intelligence of whales.
So, while the intuition line was a poor choice of embellishment, I still don't buy the assertion, and would love to see it backed up.