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When you're several generations away from needing to take life yourself to eat and survive or knowing personally the person who did it for you... you lose touch with what it means to eat something which was alive, often something you cared for.

Every life ends. Clinging to, and insisting others cling to every possible moment to extend that existence seems to be the default, but people don't take the time to think this through.

I do not have a problem with a life ending to feed me instead of ending because of long lived degradation or disease. I do not have a problem with a life ended with a bad moment caused by me or someone on behalf of me. This is what it is to be alive. You either consume something which lived or you rely on others that do in some form or another.

I do have a problem with eating things which have a consciousness near my own. I do have a problem with eating things which endured a life of hardship and torture on my account. I do have a problem with torturing animals to do scientific testing, more so as consciousness reaches a level nearing my own.

My moral calculus values life and consciousness, but does not preclude me participating in the end of life to sustain myself.

I’ve been given some pretty strange looks for suggesting that if you’re going to eat meat, you should hunt for it at least once. That’s the best case scenario for an animal ending up on a plate- a normal outdoors life followed by a quick death. Stark contrast to the life behind the typical package of shrink wrapped meat in the grocery store.

Hunting takes some skill in being able to find or attract your prey and place a humane shot so considering the effort required to get to that point it is probably not realistic for most people. But further to your suggestion, what is a normal life for a prey animal often consists of a lot of uncertainty in being able to find enough food to survive on the one hand and constantly being on guard against being eaten on the other. Is that really preferable to an animal that is bred for specific traits, raised under rather stable conditions of shelter, food, outside availability, etc, and then also quickly killed in the end? I'm talking about the best condition under which such animals are raised of course - which is what we should support, if at all. Wouldn't suggesting they visit a farm and slaughterhouse be more realistic and closer to an understanding of the process of meat production that they generally consume?

The problem is that you’re likely imagining an idealistic home farm scenario. My great grandparents had a farm, a couple cows, few horses, some pigs, many chickens etc.

Those animals lived the life you describe. Pampered, taken care of, room to roam, and then swiftly killed because fear sours the meat. They’d kill maybe one cow per year, 2 or 3 pigs. Many chickens.

An 800kg cow produces ridiculous amounts of meat. They’d give it away to their entire extended family because no way they’d eat it all in a year.

But meat you buy in a supermarket comes from factories. Their living conditions are the absolute minimum you can get away with to keep the animal healthy enough to sell its meat. Ridiculous things like keeping chickens in cages then throwing them out in the sun for a week so you can get that “pasture raised” label. At that point they’re too weak to even walk around because their muscles didn’t develop enough and their genetic mutants with oversized breasts.

that shit ain’t cool and we should do what we can to get better laws

I don't think what I'm imagining is too far from what many farmers who do it for a living aim to provide for their animals as I've known them from where I grew up. Whether or not such operations can scale to meet current demands we have for meat is another question but we should certainly strive to improve the welfare of animals across the board. My main point wrt to the parent is that for animals in the wild life might be more "natural" but it's not necessarily a better experience for them just for that reason.

The parent comment is not arguing we shouldn't kill any living things, only that we shouldn't kill conscious things.

You obviously need to participate in ending life to sustain yourself, but it's not necessary to end life capable of thinking, feeling, and suffering.

There are people who won't eat plant matter which could lead to new life (seeds, tubers, eggs, etc.) as it is violence to plants. Consciousness isn't a binary feature you can sort things definitely into have and have-not, it's a spectrum. There is a spectrum of decisions to be made about harming other life to survive, and I've made my choice. I'm not telling anybody to make the same choice as me, but I think many people's choices are unreasonable and more importantly not based on reason or appreciation for life.

>Consciousness isn't a binary feature you can sort things definitely into have and have-not, it's a spectrum.

Of course. But while we can't draw an exact line where it begins, we can certainly categorize some obvious things as being on one side of it or the other.

In terms of thinking, feeling, and suffering, it's obvious that

1. pigs (for example) are certainly capable of these things, as least as much as a young human child, and

2. wheat is not meaningfully capable of these things.

So there is a moral cost to killing a pig that there isn't to killing a wheat plant.

This isn't something particularly revolutionary. It's illegal to torture and kill pigs outside of certain sanctioned contexts, so we recognize this intuitively as a society. We just choose to remain cognitively dissonant when it comes to our food sources.

Serious question: how do you feel about conscious animals in the wild killing and eating each other's?

If a leopard can't catch something, it will die. We have alternatives. And we know about them. And we can grow them.

We don't have the capability or will currently to do much about it in a way that won't devastate the food chain, and thus the environment. So while it's sad and unfortunate, there's not much we can or should do about it, on a mass scale. If I personally stumbled upon a (small, not threatening to me) predator attacking a prey animal, I would personally intervene.

This seems pretty intuitive. I think most people have roughly the same mindset.

The comment you’re responding to is about cruelty, which you don’t address at all.

Second to last paragraph doesn't cut it?

Thanks for responding. Apparently I fail at reading today!

Slaughtering your own meat isn't that big a deal. More people should do it. If nothing else, cutting up an animal is a wonderful biology lesson.

The slaughter of farmed animals is a footnote compared to the immense suffering they undergo during their lives. It’s possible to to find farm animals who live more comfortable lives, but only through some effort. If you are eating random meat from a store or restaurant, you’re eating tortured animals.

While I don't eat meat, I don't immediately say it's for whale-hugging reasons at the top of the list because most people are callous and unmoved by animal abuse that they condone with their silence and continued addiction to an unsustainable food source.

It's difficult to get a man to stop eating meat when his enjoyment depends on his not understanding its consequences. - adapted from Upton Sinclair

In case you were wondering, the following list of reasons speaks more to people's self-preservation than their empathy (which they lack):

1. Pandemic risk to people from zoonotic evolution of viruses, bacteria and fungi by having tens of thousands of animals crammed next to each other and people getting in and cleaning up after them. Like a college dorm, diseases spread rapidly in factory farms.

2. Antibiotic resistance evolution. Animals are given antibiotics to grow faster, and like overprescribing, they become less effective on the animals and on people too.

3. About 1/3 of human-caused CO2 and methane emissions (GHG). Eating meat is playing very delayed Russian roulette.

4. Factory farms pollute air, water and soil widely around, downstream and into the oceans. Hog farms have lakes of liquid shit that is sprayed into the air.

Distant 5. Animal cruelty.

Most people are not unmoved by animal abuse, they're unmoved by perceived pretentiousness when people try to attack something they assume is necessary to survive.

Of course in some cases it sounds like the pretentiousness is not just perceived, but quite real...

Like when you try to go on a screed about how no one but you has empathy.

In the West we have done a very good job hiding most animal cruelty out of sight so people feel better. I have had a few discussions with people who were outraged about animal treatment in the third world. They didn’t want to accept that we do the same thing on a very large scale with the only difference that we are doing it behind closed doors.

I find it nice society can make advances without needing everyone to agree about everything first.

As for why food will probably be one of the last things fixed: no animal ever needed to kick a puppy to make it to the next day yet the vast majority have needed to kill something to do the same. Having too much food is a relatively recent problem (if a problem at all) for society and for those that do it's relatively far removed while the "closer to home" issues you've mentioned get sight daily. Sad, probably - so is most of existence when you really think about it - but it's not exactly a great conundrum why it has been treated differently.

It's more likely artificial meat becomes cheaper/better quicker than society fixes enough problems for this to make it to the spotlight of top issues.

I believe it has a lot to do with how visible the suffering is. If it's happening right in front of you and you can see it, hear it, etc. then it triggers a much stronger empathetic response than if it's separated by multiple layers of abstraction, like our food is.

At the end of the day, we'll always find ways to distance ourselves from hypocrisy when it's too inconvenient to confront it, while championing idiosyncratic causes as beacons of morality to outshine the sea of suffering.

Hi, I 1000% agree with you. I was a vegetarian for a long time and only started eating meat again for health reasons. But it was a reluctant decision and one that I hope to go back on one day.

Anyways, have you ever thought about how that problem could be solved? Because you're right when you talk to people they don't give a s* about the animals we eat as food. I don't think people even make the connection between an animal and meat the vast majority of the time. It's just a product.

Yet as you know a lot of animals are suffering. Silently. Conscious beings are living out horrific nightmares for our benefit. It really really pisses me off that most people can't understand this.

But I'm kind of a hypocrite. Solving this problem won't get you the kudos that you would get for solving a problem that humans have. But it's an insanely huge problem. You might not get rewarded financially but you could end so much suffering. Have you ever thought about ways to attack this problem? I have but I've never come up with anything good.

Yes lab grown meat is on the way. But I don't think that's going to be the complete solution.

Animals do have to eat other animals sometimes. That's true for at least for some humans. So it's an inescapable reality. But how could we make existence less torturous for these helpless little animals?

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lololol case in point. Someone downvoted both of my comments in this thread. There aren't too many things that make me want to fight someone on the internet anymore but people who hate the idea of not factory farming animals need to get the s* kicked out of them and I would be very happy to do it.

I've often thought of a few theoretical solutions for fun:

- End all factory farm animal life on the planet, to end the cycle of suffering once and for all, and force the development of lab-grown meat

- Remove government subsidies that make meat absurdly cheap

- Regulate animal suffering

But honestly, I don't see any of these taking effect. We can only hope that lab grown meat is cheap enough and successful enough to wean most people off of suffering-based meat.

Lab grown meat cannot come quickly enough.

Yeah but we'll still owe a debt that maybe we'll never be able to repay.

But many animals eat other animals. Is it better because they don't have the mental facilities to process the morality? Is morality really objective to begin with, or is it just another human thing?

It's not that there's nothing wrong with the food industry, but to say killing to eat is morally wrong without going into the murky details is a bit dishonest imo. I think it's fair to put humans on a higher standard, but literally nobody knows what the long term consequences, across many generations and demographics, of switching off of meat entirely, would do. The default option is to just keep doing what we know works. Meat works, again ignoring the issues with the food industry unrelated to the underlying morality question.

This hypocrisy absolutely exists, and society does not seem likely to resolve it. But I think that most people would rather accept animal cruelty as okay, than to give up eating meat (if they were hypothetically forced to make a choice).

In other words, most people would resolve the contradiction in the opposite way that you are hoping for.