Something else to think of is if not for being grown for food they wouldn’t have existed at all. Is not existing better than that life they get? It’s an interesting question.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/26669595/
That study measured fecal cortisol (indicator for stress) upon arriving at a feedlot and after fattening and the animals seem to be within normal limits the whole time.
Actually creates quite a sick motivation system if the FDA does close the loopholes. Growers would have an incentive for their animals to develop conditions requiring antibiotics, so long as it did not significantly risk the animal's health.
[1] - http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2018/12/fda-repor...
I do agree with the rest of your statements though. Beef farming is far kinder then any poultry farming
You must know some smart bugs. Birds tend to be surprisingly bright for their brain capacity.
"Research has shown that chickens have some sense of numbers. Experiments with newly hatched domestic chicks showed they can discriminate between quantities. They also have an idea about ordinality, which refers to the ability to place quantities in a series. Five-day-old domestic chicks presented with two sets of objects of different quantities disappearing behind two screens were able to successfully track which one hid the larger number by apparently performing simple arithmetic in the form of addition and subtraction.
Chickens are also able to remember the trajectory of a hidden ball for up to 180 seconds if they see the ball moving and up to one minute if the displacement of the ball is invisible to them. Their performance is similar to that of most primates under similar conditions.
The birds possess self-control when it comes to holding out for a better food reward. They are able to self-assess their position in the pecking order. These two characteristics are indicative of self-awareness.
Chicken communication is also quite complex, and consists of a large repertoire of different visual displays and at least 24 distinct vocalizations. The birds possess the complex ability of referential communication, which involves signals such as calls, displays and whistles to convey information. They may use this to sound the alarm when there is danger, for instance. This ability requires some level of self-awareness and being able to take the perspective of another animal, and is also possessed by highly intelligent and social species, including primates.
Chickens perceive time intervals and can anticipate future events. Like many other animals, they demonstrate their cognitive complexity when placed in social situations requiring them to solve problems.
The birds are able to experience a range of complex negative and positive emotions, including fear, anticipation and anxiety. They make decisions based on what is best for them. They also possess a simple form of empathy called emotional contagion. Not only do individual chickens have distinct personalities, but mother hens also show a range of individual maternal personality traits which appear to affect the behavior of their chicks. The birds can deceive one another, and they watch and learn from each other."
https://www.springer.com/gp/about-springer/media/research-ne...
>Besides having the capacity to make plans, act on the basis of object permanence, represent specific goals and solve novel problems, Portia often has to confront more than one other spider at the same time. [0]
>Our findings suggest that Portia represents 1 and 2 as discrete number categories, but categorizes 3 or more as a single category that we call ‘many’. [1]
We seem to naturally have a strong tendency to disregard the intelligence and emotional lives of animals. (which if you think about it, was probably strongly selected for at some point in the past)
[0] https://royalsociety.org.nz/news/jumping-spiders-can-count-1...
[1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsfs.201...
It makes ethics much simpler if you deny that an animal can suffer.
To a degree this also happens on conflicts between humans. It’s much easier to kill others if you deny that they may have reasons for doing what they are doing but instead just call them mindless fanatics that can’t be helped.
They also fight viciously amongst each other. You can only have up to a specific ratio of males and females if you want to avoid outright carnage.
Most debeaking is just taking the point off the top of the beak. This is so when they peck, it simultaneously jolts their jaw. They learn to stop doing that, and every time they try, they get that jab reminder. The amount removed isn't even deep enough to hit any nerves.
Maybe some farmers overdo it, but I haven't witnessed that around any farms I've been to.
However I am pretty sure that a single chicken has more awareness than a single bee or ant.
Bees are a great example of mindless creatures with no awareness. They die a horrible death when they sting someone (their internal organs ripped out of their bodies with the stinger) with no obvious awareness of what they're doing.
This kind of argument relies on the idea that human beings and animals are fundamentally different, that somehow cow suffering is unrelated to human suffering. But most of what we feel and do every day is not actually dictated by consciousness. If you were put into a tiny, roasting summer pen so tiny you couldn't even walk in circles, filled with drugs, covered in your own excrement, ravaged by hunger even though all you do is eat dirty grey hard food, I don't think you'd respond with some kind of elegant, mathematical, civilized emotion. You'd be out of your mind with terror, sadness and grief. Cows can feel all those things, and they do in factory farms. It's common sense, and I agree with those who say we will look back on this era as a disgusting, ignominious chapter in human society.
>That study measured fecal cortisol (indicator for stress) upon arriving at a feedlot and after fattening and the animals seem to be within normal limits the whole time.
It seems like your opinion is not supported by the scientific evidence that reflects stress levels.
The one paper that cites this one is also about how temperature and climate differences affect reproduction rates: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Perhaps you have a different definition of what normal means?
I don't think that's normal. I think that's trolling. & I think I'm done here.
people can be happy in pretty shite situations too.
The argument that humans have any sort of ethical duty at all assumes that humans and animals are fundamentally different. Animals don't have any ethical duty to prevent their food from suffering.
EDIT: Furthermore, human suffering is categorically different from animal suffering because human suffering can be inter-generational and have very long-term consequences. Animals don't transfer their suffering and their morality between generations, and that fact does make human suffering much worse than animal suffering, because human suffering can lead to arbitrarily catastrophic consequences. A tiger biting a human can lead directly to the complete extinction of the tiger. The emotional content of the suffering my be similar, but the consequences are not.
EDIT: So as long as we strip children from their parents (like cows) and thereby ameliorate the generational connection to the parents suffering, it doesn't matter so much that we cause suffering to both the parent and the child?
I don't know what you're talking about. You said it is wrong to assume humans are different from animals, which makes this case a case of animals (humans) causing suffering in other animals (cows).
>If I were able to communicate with, say, a predator who likes torturing its live prey, I'd be happy to do my best to convince them not to do so.
If I crapped gold, I would be rich. That doesn't mean you can assume I am rich. You can't make a convincing argument by basing your assumptions in fantasy.
>So as long as we strip children from their parents (like cows) and thereby ameliorate the generational connection to the parents suffering, it doesn't matter so much that we cause suffering to both the parent and the child?
What? No. This has nothing to do with parent-child relationships, it has to do with the fact that humans teach and write and communicate ideas across long periods of time. If you take away the ability of humans to communicate and teach each other, then their suffering will be comparable to animal suffering. If you teach cows to read and write, they will stop being treated like animals.
I'm making a claim about what humans should and shouldn't do to cows, namely that we shouldn't torture them. The behavior of some kind of predator does towards its prey is not relevant.
> If I crapped gold, I would be rich. That doesn't mean you can assume I am rich. You can't make a convincing argument by basing your assumptions in fantasy.
You found a loophole in thousands of years of logical reasoning! Hypotheticals aren't real or useful in thinking and communicating, who knew!!
> What? No. This has nothing to do with parent-child relationships, it has to do with the fact that humans teach and write and communicate ideas across long periods of time. If you take away the ability of humans to communicate and teach each other, then their suffering will be comparable to animal suffering. If you teach cows to read and write, they will stop being treated like animals.
By your reasoning, then, it's actually the torture victims writing about it who are causing the reverberating suffering. If they didn't opt to communicate and teach, their suffering would be fine. Maybe after you've finished convincing everyone to torture animals you can start to shame the writing of memoirs by torture victims?
It should be. Nonhuman animals can be absolutely ghastly to each other. See for example surplus killing:
Perhaps human sensitivities are in need of adjustment, just as much as our in sensitivities.
By that logic we could grow humans in concentration camps and make them perform slave labor for their whole life. Their lives are miserable but at least they have existed.
You seem to have a very rose colored impression of how life is for most animals is on farms or feed lots. Their whole life is miserable and stressful.
Everything modern is about putting things away to enjoy benefits and ignorance.
I am hopeful that by then the concept of us eating animals will also be gone by us synthesizing all our meat instead.
At that point, everything to do with animal consumption and animal production for consumption will seem like a weird aberration; a mere blink of an eye that was part of the process of us transitioning from animals into a civilized intelligent species.
If you don't enjoy the thought of a eating a slaughtered cow patty, eating a healthier, plant-based version of a slaughtered cow patty that looks and tastes roughly the same may still not be that appealing.
But it's still regularly promoted that the best way to see to a full diet is a natural diet along with any necessary supplementation because [from my limited memory] we don't have a full grasp on the complex interactions/delivery of nutrients.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/should-you-ge...
A predisposition to a B12 deficiency runs in my family. In other family members it's more severe than others (for instance a B12 shot has been not enough to bring my mother back from near physical collapse and has required emergency blood transfusions).
I've often thought I had a handle on it—take a daily oral or sublingual tablet of 5000mcg (usually urinate most of it out pretty quickly) and added more red meat to my diet (per my doctor) but still I've noticed advancing effects occasionally. One more physically apparent one is slowly advancing Vitiligo—I'd had some spots for years but notice a new or expanding one every so often. It's a [physically] harmless symptom, mind.
Worse are some of the others I experienced in my earlier years that persisted before I was diagnosed. I still have bouts where I thought I was looking after myself and those periods of sensation loss/global pins and needles, nausea. It can be frightening, and quality of life plummets. It's no joke.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitiligo
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/vitamin-b12-deficiency-c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B12_deficiency
So solve the diet thing and I'm on board. Until then, I think it's a bit of hubris. I'm sure there are other incremental improvements we can make until then, however.
Synthetic meat (or any kind of food) in particular sounds like a really awful idea. It sounds like some kind of progressive, rational choice but it is really only an extreme of the abuses of technology that make our lives miserable and drive people to seek a "natural" way of life (which never existed).
If I may be so bold, that is not how we resolve the ethical issues of industrial meat production. It's how we turn into the Borg.