But what those 'vegan proselytizers' are asking you for, is to not be so selfish and make a bit of a sacrifice to spare the lives of others. But of course, you 'can't stomach' to be asked to not be selfish, and they are the ones to blame.
Maybe that's your intention, but it's a really bad way to persuade people of anything.
So you're against animal anti-cruelty laws? Are you okay with animals like dogs and cats being torture for human entertainment?
"I do not consider animal lives worth valuing or deserving of rights" is not necessarily the same as "I don't want animals to have rights". It can simply be "I don't care if animals have rights".
We can, but it seems like we often don't.
For the sake of discussion, do you have a pet? Or have loved ones that have a pet?
If you were to torture that pet would you feel anything? Would your loved ones object for any reason?
I totally get that there's a difference between the scenario you're describing and factory farms. In fact, I've posited before that those animals would never have any life if there wasn't a demand to eat them at some point.
But the statement in question reads as "I don't give a fuck what happens to any animal". My question about pets wasn't meant to be tricky, it was trying to ascertain if the statement was an absolute or a general lack of care of where his food comes from.
What exactly is wrong with that statement, though? I personally do give fucks about certain kinds of animals, but I recognize that my choices as to what animals to care about is entirely subjective and is a result of my upbringing. I have no problem with a person who draws the line at "entirely no fucks given about any animal" (though that seems kinda sad to me).
Which... is also different from caring or not caring about malicious cruelty. And I think you could make a further distinction between being a proponent of cruelty (as in "I enjoy torturing animals in my backyard") and being indifferent to it (as in "I personally think it's gross to torture animals, but don't feel it's my or the law's place to force other people not to do it").
(Before I get labeled a monster, I personally think malicious animal cruelty is likely a sign of mental illness and am fine with legislating it away. Regarding animals used as food, I think ultimately we're finding that healthy, sustainable food production often aligns pretty well with increased animal welfare, but I consider that a bonus, not a hard necessity.)
Really, your question just illustrates the fact that this debate is entirely subjective and based on emotion.
As a further thought experiment, we're obviously already working on growing human organs for the purpose of organ transplants. Would people be ok with growing individual human organs for the purpose of food? I expect most people would think that would be gross and be against it, but ethically it seems in the clear.
The argument against this has nothing to do with Eloi thoughts and feelings, and everything to do with their ability to invade the Morlock tunnels and wipe them all out, as a matter of survival. That is, it doesn't matter if the Eloi object, if they lack the means to enforce their objections. Eloi thoughts do not carry any weight in Morlock arguments.
Besides that, feeding themselves to humans by the billions as captive domesticated prey species may be the only shot those species have at reaching other planets.
I think some chicken processors will use controlled-atmosphere stunning — or “gas stunning” — which desensitizes the chickens to pain before slaughtering. (that last bit was copy/paste from another source).
There's no inherent quality that makes a cat or dog more or less deserving of humane treatment than a cow or pig. There's no inherent difference (aside from judgments around taste) that makes it acceptable to eat the meat of a cow but not of a dog (and, indeed, in some cultures, the opposite can be the case).
At the end of the day it's all just what we've been socialized from a young age to believe is acceptable or not, sometimes reinforced with religious beliefs.
I personally will never be swayed by vegetarian/vegan "the poor animals!"-type arguments (but fully respect people who choose not to eat meat for those reasons). Arguments around health, sustainability, and cost (in that order) are what I care about.
(For the record, I think torturing any animal out of malice is messed up and is probably an indicator of some sort of mental illness. However, other people simply being indifferent toward animal welfare is just not something I care about. Everyone has different emotional attachments to different things.)
We can see people on tv acussing other people of being torturers and organising harassment plans against them, whereas happily showing their "baby" toy-dog in their arms.
The same dogs selectively breeded to keep cute deformed craneus, jaw bones like an acordion, popping eyes, crossed teeth, deformed humerus and femurs, no tail, chronic fatigue, all sort of health problems. Dogs feeded with "vegan dog food" for years... and castrated of course. All for human entertainment. How this is not an extreme evil form of torture for them?
Maybe they should give example and kill those pets humanely as soon as possible to end their endless life of suffering?
Similar (at a different level) to me snapping a stick, vs snapping my kids "favourite" stick that he found. Identical actions in one respect, but the human emotional impact is very different.
Whether you agree or not, if your behavior is criminalized, the matter is settled (as a point of law at least).
To be fair, I don't know that violence against you (or others) would really convince you that these lives are valuable or not, just that you might value not being violently punished for acting on your beliefs.
So here is the kicker, exactly because vegan people see these animal lives as worth valuing, they don't consider your "agree to disagree" stance as a "peaceful solution", as it implies the death and suffering of these entities.
It's one of those subjects where you can't have an "agree to disagree" or a "live and let live", or a "to each their own" type of deal, because one side is considering that a third party is involved and hurt, while the other side doesn't consider that a third party is involved at all. i.e: sentient being vs food.
The tension between vegans and non-vegans is not unique or unprecedented. The only thing that's new is veganism's recent growth spurt, which has produced a lot of new converts that mainstream society is slowly learning to tolerate, and vice versa.
Abortions need supervision, paperwork, a studied persons decision. Slaughterhouse killing of often done by immigrants, unable to find any better work.
Where the embryo can potentially harm the mother, the animals we kill every day have zero possible negative impact on our lives.
So I agree there are similar cases, but all these cases are very ---very--- unique in their dynamics.
We kill them because in doing so they have a positive impact on our lives.
Although I'm not one of the other replies, I do think I'd actually disagree on this point. I used to feel the same way like GP (and still do, to some extent), but my view has definitely softened after learning more. After being presented with some ethical dilemma's, and seeing descriptions of how we actually treat animals, I found out I actually can be affected by the suffering of animals - just not to the same scale.
In other words: even though it might feel like a fundamental disagreement, I've experienced that there can still be room for your opinion to change to at least move somewhat in the other direction.
Edit: I'm not vegan because I'm lazy and love bacon cheeseburgers, etc. Beyond Meat and their ilk are helping to address the last part and I'm excited for it.
No, it's not. Do you truly think that there would be no self-proclaimed "meat purists"? Many would still enjoy real meat and would be prepared to pay a premium for it. Heck, even now, there are people who pay attention to the grade of their meat.
Pre-framing the debate in (hostile) terms of just how selfish I am gives me the inkling that you are not looking for an honest, factual, and productive discussion, and that my participation might be seen as an invitation to browbeat me with guilt and propaganda. Instead of wasting your words on convincing me that you're so prejudiced in this matter that the outcome of any discussion we might have is already predetermined, go buy an Impossible Burger--or a thousand--and let them do all the arguing for you, because their actions speak louder than your words. They'll win over my stomach with a $2.00-off coupon, while you're still trying to recover from implicitly devaluing every sacrifice I have ever made for the sake of someone else.
Your post is an exemplar of exactly the sort of vector that I can't stomach--unnecessarily hostile and loaded with assumptions.
Meat comes from the corpses of animals slaughtered on our behalf. Selfishness does not come from eating it, or from insufficiently valuing the environmental impact of it, or from getting annoyed with people that have made it a cornerstone of their personal religion.
I don't feel challenged at all by vegans, in the same sense that I am not challenged by missionaries knocking on doors or distributing flyers. When they speak, and I detect the emotional investment, I tune out, because I have learned long ago that one cannot argue with religion. I don't want a religion; you can't convert me by preaching.
So when someone tells me I am selfish, knowing little of me beyond the words in my initial post, I have exactly the same emotional reaction as with someone telling me that I will go to Hell for being atheist. It only makes sense to a believer, and I am not one. I tuned my bullshit detector with years of pointless arguments with kooks and crackpots, and no one but an expert is going to slip a rhetorical cheat past it.
If I am selfish, by definition, I wouldn't care whether other people think I am selfish. Ergo, attempting to sway someone by suggesting they might be selfish is implicitly dishonest. It would only work on someone already concerned that they might be too selfish, while not knowing of any specific reasons why that might be so. By introspection and by comparison with acquaintances, I have reached the conclusion that I am not selfish, or at least not more than one standard deviation above the median level of selfishness. I am stubborn and skeptical; sometimes it comes out looking similar. Since I know myself better than anyone else does, whenever someone comes out and says I am selfish, my bullshit detector pings, and I look for the ulterior motive.
Aha! The person making the claim has no specific interest in me or my prior claims, but is using me as a prop to preach to the more accessible listeners in the audience, and to their own choir. They are treating me exactly as I treat a piece of meat--a thing to be used to advance their own ends, rather than something of inherent value. That's hypocrisy, of a sort, and I dislike it in vegan preachers, and every other kind of preacher.
I doubt you'd see anyone arguing with you for any reason other than it benefitting them in some way, but it doesn't necessarily have to be because they are treating you "as a piece of meat". For example, I might ask you to reduce your meat consumption because in doing so you reduce your impact on the environment, even though you are a random stranger on the internet that I will likely never meet, because in doing so your actions indirectly have an effect on me.
I'd make the counter-argument that you are optimizing without profiling first, and the environmental benefit yielded from convincing me to live slightly greener is insignificant compared to spending the same amount of breath on petitioning and lobbying for environmental legislation, but it's your own time you're spending. But even then, I won't back your political effort unless it includes pollution standards for container ships, research money for aneutronic fusion, research money for efficiently storing and returning energy from inconstant sources such as wind and solar, negotiation rules for including environmental considerations in international trade agreements, externality taxes on proof-of-work cryptocurrencies, and a laundry list of other points that I feel would each be more effective than trying to push an omnivorous species towards more vegetarian by word or by force.
If a company meets the criteria from my original post, it's an immediate victory, without any arguments at all. The price of beef becomes anchored by the cost of its closest cheaper alternative, and that price determines the price of livestock, and that price determines the size of herds. The argument from the pocketbook is superior to the one from hot air or hot lead.
...Some people will argue, just because someone is wrong on the Internet.