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It's amazing to me that people can make the argument that it's not right to eat something based on intelligence. We should give extra care to less intelligent feeling beings, not less.

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as the article points out with intelligence usually comes complex social behaviour, which makes it much more stressful for those animals to be kept in captivity and under mass farming conditions.

The same doesn't necessarily apply to less intelligent animals which might be perfectly fine with their captive conditions and don't requrie as much attention, so I think the argument is perfectly defensible.

I don't think we should farm them due to their intelligence, but I do eat wild octopi because of their intelligence. Octopi are serious dicks, so for every one eat, I'm saving hundreds or thousands of other animals from their abuse.

I’ve always found the intelligence criteria for eating for not eating animals stupid (because I never thought of intelligence having relevance to ability to suffer) but the social metric is an interesting way of looking at it. I don’t think you can call socialness of a species something so related to the intelligence though, there are highly solitary species that are still very intelligent. Being kept in captivity would still be suffering for them, just for different reasons. I think the suffering of all animals matters but if I had to say between animals which one’s matters more I’m not sure I would differentiate by more than lifespan.

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