French monks locked down with 2.8 tonnes of cheese pray for buyers
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
https://fromageriepayssavinois.com/produit/abbaye-de-citeaux...
The guardian is 24h old as well, so they'd sold out by the time it was posted on HN. Bummer (well good thing for them).
Hopefully they'll be able to keep up the sales past this article.
This is a good story to read on the weekend :)
> all cheese regulated by the FDA (that is, all cheese that is transported across state lines) must either be made from pasteurized (heated) milk or aged at least 60 days.
Don’t know if this applies to the cheese in this article.
I imagine these products can be imported but only with significant paperwork. And if you fail a pathogen test, you've probably lost the shipment and been put on a list for "followup": https://www.fda.gov/media/99340/download
Unless you're willing to fly to Europe or Singapore (Cheese Ark) you're not getting the good stuff.
I don't know why, but this is the funniest thing I've read in a while. I can just imagine the monk explaining COVID to these cows, and just getting a "Moo" in return.
I think a few of the French animal onomatopoeia feel more correct to me than their English counterparts. For example, I can't unhear coin-coin with ducks any more than I can unsee The Moon Rabbit¹.
Which just about brings us from spring 2020 to now.
According to a quick google search, cows gestate for 9.5 months.
> then the “ideal” breeding season for spring-born calves is 9 1/2 months prior to that or beginning in April but for sure by May. [^1]
If you're planning to have baby cows in April 2020, you breed them in August 2019. By the time you find out about COVID it is already too late and you're gonna have a bunch of milk whether you want to or not.
As for what happens to the calves: they can't drink all the milk modern cows produce. Also they become big cows. Afaik we don't usually eat dairy cows because they have been selectively bred to produce ridiculous amounts of milk, but not to be tasty.
[1] https://beef-cattle.extension.org/when-exactly-is-the-beginn...
Half of them do not become big cows because male cows don't produce milk. We kill the male calves.
> Afaik we don't usually eat dairy cows
Of course we eat them. They get turned into ground and minced beef.
May have been true a few decades ago, but currently the farmers will buy “sexed” sperm (selected for females). I’ve never seen a male calf being killed for that reason.
Well they don’t turn into veal steaks by themselves do they?
If you think it's wrong that some countries kill dolphins, dogs, whales, cats, sharks, horses etc. for food or use foxes, minks, rabbits etc. for fur, you should ask yourself why cheese, milk and leather are okay.
As for fur, I'm guessing it's because a moral panic happened in the 80s and nobody really cared that much about fur, since it was a luxury item for a few, while meat, milk and leather somewhat is something that everyone pretty much still uses today worldwide.
Dogs, cats, foxes, mink and horses aren't endangered either, and the amount of meat developed countries eat is a luxury as well.
My point is, if you're offended by the way other countries treat certain animals, you should think about if your use of animal products really aligns with your core beliefs or if you're going along with what's cultural to you without really thinking about it.
I do wish we find more humane ways to industrially raise livestock. Meat is way too cheap right now and we should reduce the intensity of its production. Humans dont need to eat meat at every meal like many of us do right now.
It’s also a shame that we don’t breed dairy cows for more longevity. I’m sure they could be productive for almost all their natural lifespan if we let them.
My grandparents had a small farm mostly for family use and it wasn’t uncommon to keep a cow for 10+ years. But they were treated almost lije pets. Each cow had a name and I think they rarely had more than 10 at a time.
PS: horse burger is very tasty. I recommend trying it if you get a chance
And that's why I see no ethical issue there.
> if you're offended by the way other countries treat certain animals, you should think about if your use of animal products really aligns with your core beliefs
Being offended by something doesn't make it immoral though, it just makes it not advisable. I'm Italian and I grew up consuming rabbit meat and sometimes horse meat, my wife comes from a cultural background (Northern Thailand) where rabbit meat consumption is frowned upon, and I live in an anglophone country (Australia) where eating horse meat is taboo. So I don't consume either one of those. But I don't think it's immoral consuming them, I don't think my relatives in Italy who are still eating rabbit and horse are doing something immoral.
I don't understand where people come up with this nonsense. Do you just generalize your experience to everyone else? 68% of the world population is lactose intolerant: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28690131/
Are you definitely replying to the correct comment? I'm not advocating anything. I'm purely stating a fact that just because 68% of humanity is lactose intolerant doesn't mean 68% of humanity does not consume milk. I just said lactose free milk exists(because it does), lactose-digestion enzyme pills exist(because they do) and people with lactose intolerance can usually eat a little without suffering any bad effects(because most people can). Is stating facts propaganda now?
>> unless you had some agenda of pushing dairy
Yes you're absolutely right, my check from big milk industry will surely arrive any day now. You looked right through me.
Or maybe....you're the one with some kind of agenda here? Because I can't believe anyone would read into my comments as hard as you do. Or I don't know, do you take those simple facts as some kind of personal attack?
There is really no reason to get offended over that reality. I don't really know why those people consume milk and I was never rude enough to ask. It is their diet. But, they in fact eat it even in situations where they don't have to and go out of their way to get sorts of milk they can consume.
Can you take any guesses as to why? Do you think it might have anything to do with the colonialist attitude of "of course, everybody drinks milk!" displayed in the parent comment? Are your acquaintances in the US? Do you think it has anything to do with the $500 million spent over 20 years on "Got Milk?" propaganda?
You know that simply wanting something to be true doesn't make it so, right?
There is even a handy map.
Interestingly, they note that milk consumption is higher amongst older people. Possibly due to the crazy amount of milk propaganda historically.
I know this isn't directly related to your comment, but it was getting heated so I wanted to derail that.
* https://milkgenomics.org/article/milk-consumption-around-the...
Plus all the rest others written.
(I am lactose intolerant, and I realize the level of discomfort that people experience varies)
"Lactose malabsorption (lactase non-persistence) is not equivalent or synonymous to lactose intolerance. Lactose malabsorption in many cases will not come to clinical attention."[1]
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/how-can-you-eat-dair...
>In modern Mongolia, for example, traditional herders get more than a third of their calories from dairy products. They milk seven kinds of mammals, yielding diverse cheeses, yogurts, and other fermented milk products, including alcohol made from mare’s milk. “If you can milk it, they do in Mongolia,” Warinner says. And yet 95% of those people are lactose intolerant.
>Modern Mongolians digest dairy by using bacteria to digest lactose for them, turning milk into yogurt and cheese, along with a rich suite of dairy products unknown in the Western diet. Ancient pastoralists may have adopted similar strategies. “Control and manipulation of microbes is core to this whole transformation,” Warinner says. “There’s an intense control of microbes inside and outside their bodies that enables them to have a dairying culture.”
>That disconnect between dairy and DNA isn’t limited to Mongolia. Jessica Hendy, a co-author of the PNAS paper, recently found milk proteins on pots at Çatalhöyük in Turkey, which at 9000 years old dates to the beginnings of domestication, 4 millennia before lactase persistence appears. “There seem to be milk proteins popping up all over the place, and the wonderful cultural evolution we expected to see isn’t happening,” Collins says.
This might be uncommon, but my brother is lactose intolerant and still eats the milk products he wants, he simply doesn't mind the diarrhea that follows.
I saw this sad interaction a lot in the wild when someone at lunch at work orders a vegetarian option and someone else leaves them in absolute tatters by responding “good, I’m going to order extra meat ;)” as if anyone else feels responsible for his choices.
It was a joke my friend.
It's a website like this one, but you'll find more similar conversation to what you are looking for there.
Can you explain the joke? What was the set up? What's the punchline?
Do you genuinely not care if people are killing dolphins and whales and eating dogs though? I've no doubt some people exist that don't but I'm sure they're in the vast minority.
No, but I do genuinely not care that people are killing and eating cows and cow products though. I don't really think anything could make me care about that at this point, certainly not enough to give up meat and cheese.
So if we are making these things equivalent (which I don't believe they are), then I suppose I shouldn't care about the dolphins, whales and dogs. In order to be consistent.
I'm not making anything equivalent, I'm asking you about your beliefs and if they're well founded.
Why is it okay to slaughter and eat a cow and not a dog or a whale or a cat? Your beliefs can still be consistent if you've justified the difference to yourself. I don't think "because it's traditional" or "because we've been doing it for hundreds of years" are good ethical reasons (which other countries could make about dogs and whales) for example.
Ok you say that, but your question
> Why is it okay to slaughter and eat a cow and not a dog or a whale or a cat?
implies equivalence. Without that equivalence the answer is obvious: Because they are different. It's ok to treat different things differently.
But ok, so let's talk about equivalence. Obviously cows and whales are both mammals. Maybe that's why I should treat them the same.
So is it ok to eat non-mammals? Snakes and lizards and fish? Why? They're still animals.
So let's say it's not ok to eat animals. So we should eat plants.
Why is that ok? They're still alive. They still die when you harvest them.
Okay so it's not ok to kill and eat anything. So we starve.
Obviously this is silly and reductive and does not represent reality. We have to eat. May as well eat cow.
Why not stop at killing things that have a nervous system that clearly react with pain? Even if you want to argue plants feel pain, eating plants only is causing the least pain because animal farming requires more plants to die.
Why not? Why the fact that something stood the test of time has no value? I've seen this argument often repeated but never explained in logical terms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy
You can use this fallacy to justify lots of awful things humans used to do are fine.
I’m comfortable with nature. Life is cyclic and you can’t survive without other living beings.
Sold as veal I'd have guessed?
edit: wow, what a surprise, downvoted to the bottom. I know it's deeply ingrained in our culture to participate in this and that makes it feel safe and normal. Scoffers and deniers, I dare you to go watch Cowspiracy or Dominion and then still stand by this practice.
When milking time came, they'd all be crowded up near the gate waiting for him to open it so they could walk to the milking building. They didn't need to be coaxed.
He said the saddest thing was the practice of de-horning calves at a certain age. Prior to that, a group of calves would be friendly, unafraid, almost like pets. But afterwards (my dad wasn't personally there for the actual de-horning) they would all crowd together at the opposite end of the yard in fear when he approached. He said it was heartbreaking...
As far as I know, not all farmers practice de-horning.
Edit: I have no idea whether they used pain killers, but given the calves' response my guess is no.
To me as well, and yet you and I are in a small minority.
Also: farming involves actions up to a year in advance of consequences, so change is slow and rare.
I challenge you to define “free will” in a way which is simultaneously testable, and also something humans have and other animals lack. I have yet to hear a single definition which is all three at the same time, despite my A-level in philosophy — every testable definition I’ve encountered has either been something animals and humans both have, or both lack; and more commonly the attempted definition turns out to be internally incoherent.
(Intellect is also notoriously difficult to define, but at least in this case humans and cows are obviously dissimilar).
every animal, except humans, lack the neurological structures to process the concept of "free will" which is entirely a human construct.
If they had free will, they would fight for it or at least some of them would.
One could argue that we still don't know the human brain, so how can we exclude that animals haven't what it takes to understand free will?
But it's the same thing of saying that God exists because we can't disprove it.
And if we assume that cows understand it, why exclude other animals, like fish, or some plant or fungi?
We assume they don't have it because they never showed to care about it.
Cattle can be incredibly aggressive too.
it is proven that regardless of age and environmental conditions, some individuals remain more aggressive than others. Aggression in cattle can arise from both genetic and environmental factors.
Aggression between cows is worse than that between bulls. Bulls with horns will bunt (push or strike with the horns) in which can cause more damage overall
interesting read from Dennet
https://lafavephilosophy.x10host.com/dennett_anim_csness.htm...
they respond to food, loud noises, other physical stimuli, but not to philosophy.
Also, if you open the gates of a farm, cows don't run.
Quoting Dennet
Let us return to our vultures. Consider the hypothesis that for all I could ever know, rotting chicken carcass smells to a turkey vulture exactly the way roast turkey smells to me. Can science shed any light, pro or con, on this hypothesis? Yes, it can almost effortlessly refute it: since how roast turkey tastes to me is composed (and exhausted) by the huge set of reactive dispositions, memory effects, and so on, and so forth, that are detectable in principle in my brain and behavior, and since many of these are utterly beyond the machinery of any vulture's brain, it is flat impossible that anything could smell to a vulture the way roast turkey smells to me.
but let's suppose cows have some sort of free will concept.
if they can't explain it to us, how will we ever understand it? (because it's impossible they have the same free will concept we have)
and if we project our roast turkey smell (free will) concept to cows, how can we be sure that it's what they need or want, if they can't even communicate a yes/no to us?
All our philosophical concepts are based on millennia of history that's been transmitted to future generations that built new concepts on the old ones
They are not "natural"
if you take a child to a remote location and abandon him/her there they wouldn't even know about death or illness, let alone laws or rules or free will. Because nobody thaught them.
We are basically still stuck in a Solaris situation.
but the question still stands, so I propose another one: how do we know that dogs want to live in our homes?
modern neuroscience can explain a lot of things that philosophy still consider questions.
What would that look like? Running away? Because that behaviour pops up in news often enough.
Conversely, there’s learned helplessness — discovered by animal research and yet also demonstrated in humans. Do humans demonstrating this lack free will?
> One could argue that we still don't know the human brain, so how can we exclude that animals haven't what it takes to understand free will?
I’m not asking if animals understand free will, but if they have it — humans don’t seem to understand it even though we can talk about it (judging by the difficulty of nailing down a definition) so I would actually be very surprised if it turned out any non-human animal understood it.
I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make about bovine aggression?
Exactly.
As I've said if they can't explain to us what they are doing and why, it is completely useless to try to frame or define it.
it would simply be what we think it is, but not the real thing
> Conversely, there’s learned helplessness — discovered by animal research and yet also demonstrated in humans. Do humans demonstrating this lack free will?
difference being humans can explain why they ran and we can rationalize post facto and learn from each other
children don't run if they see a gun
do they lack free will, chose to not move, or lack the ability (and the knowledge) to process that information?
free will probably does not even exists as consciousness, they are poor terms to describe what we already don't have a solid explanation for
but since we are able to process context, something cows are not capable of, I understood that OP meant the most common meaning of free will: acting in a non predetermined way (however bad or inexact as a definition it is)
cows don't
because we have selected them in centuries and only kept the most docile, so it is expected that they won't run or act in expectedly, we literally engineered them to be what they are, we can rake it for granted, the same way we can be sure that a car with an empty tank won't start
asking for a satisfying definition of free will in this context completely misses the point
yes they could still have free will in the sense that they chose to walk or eat orm ove their tail, of course
but in that sense a plant chose to grow towards the light or not?
I actually believe free will does not exists and everything is pre-determined.
We are born and have to die, don't get to chose our parents, how we look, where we are born, our gender etc. etc.
We can however micromanage the time in between being born and dying, as every other living creature in the World, but we have far more sophisticated micro managing tools
we also have vastly superior tools in general, we are the only animal on the planet that can control fire and have an opposable thumb thus we are the only animal on the planet that could evolve to the level we have reached
which also gave us the ability to entertain ourselves with intellectual riddles such as free will
> I'm not asking if animals understand free will, but if they have it
as I've said I don't believe free will exists, but a cow lack the machinery to process the concept of free will, which also involves guilt, morality, responsibility and deliberation AKA being able to determine the consequences of different courses of actions.
If cows have it, it's not like ours, it must be something far simpler.
the point about aggression is that cows still have their own personalities, but that doesn't qualify as freedom of choice
many people see cows behaving differently and assume they chose to act that way, but it's not like that.
it's simply the result of some random combination of DNA and environment
You’ve not said why it’s useless though. Or what “free will” is. I can make a chat bot which will insist that it has free will, but I doubt it would be saying anything correct about its mind; and I have every expectation that someone whose language I do not speak would pass and fail exactly the same tests as me if there was a test that didn’t depend on language.
> difference being humans can explain why they ran and we can rationalize post facto and learn from each other
Humans demonstrably make up any old rubbish to justify their actions after the fact — that much is testable. And animals copy each other, so it’s not like non-humans in general can’t learn from each other, though I don’t know about bovines in particular.
> but since we are able to process context, something cows are not capable of,
You recon? Given how much context current vision AI can get, and that current vision AI is about the level of an insect brain, I absolutely expect cows to get context.
> I understood that OP meant the most common meaning of free will: acting in a non predetermined way (however bad or inexact as a definition it is)
> cows don't
Quick internet search of teaching cows tricks says they can act in a non-predetermined way… unless you want to dismiss all behaviour as skinnier boxes and operant conditioning, which would leave humans open to the same criticism.
They are relatively docile, but there were loads in and around Cambridge when I lived there, and no, they were definitely not like cars with no petrol.
> asking for a satisfying definition of free will in this context completely misses the point
I take exception to this. I started by saying “I agree this looks like slavery and torture”, the reply said the concepts didn’t apply because they didn’t have free will. I’m rejecting that, and you’re definitely still describing a situation that sounds like multigenerational slavery to me.
> as I've said I don't believe free will exists
You don’t? That wasn’t clear, but sure — as I said, every testable definition I’ve encountered has either been something animals and humans both have, or both lack.
If you weren’t even trying to change my mind, congratulations on merely confusing me about your intention. :)
> free will, which also involves guilt, morality, responsibility and deliberation AKA being able to determine the consequences of different courses of actions.
Why would it involve those things, and why do you believe cows can’t forecast the consequences of actions? If they couldn’t predict actions having consequences, they’d get stuck as often as hard-coded robots. Given the live in muddy fields, this would make them self-destructively useless as livestock.
(And also, current insect-complexity neural nets can do that, so it would be really surprising if a mammal can’t).
> it's simply the result of some random combination of DNA and environment
Yeah, and that’s true for us, too.
But, as you say, you don’t believe in free will, so that’s fine. :)
I did
poor terms to describe what we already don't have a solid explanation for
> whose language I do not speak would pass and fail exactly the same tests as me if there was a test that didn’t depend on language.
it doesn't matter, cows lack the tools to explain themselves, we don't
namely, in this case, a language (any language!)
> Quick internet search of teaching cows tricks says they can act in a non-predetermined way
can you prove it? :)
And how do you know it won't end up like the Libet experiment?
> And animals copy each other, so it’s not like non-humans in general can’t learn from each other, though I don’t know about bovines in particular
They don't have history books though, and schools and teachers
DNA does not help much if the knowledge dies with its creator
> If you weren’t even trying to change my mind, congratulations
I don't believe in free will the philosophical tool
I think we have machinery that we still do not understand that make us what we are and most of what we are is due superior processing power
It doesn't matter to me ifnI chose to move my arm, when I am driving and see an obstacle I don't have to think to use the brakes and I am thankful that training built up new neuro-paths to react that way
> Why would it involve those things, and why do you believe cows can’t forecast the consequences of actions?
because to forecast the consequences of every action you need to be able to judge the consequences
if you don't have a framework to judge the consequences, you can't forecast them or at best you can simply forecast an action-reaction scenario: this happens and then this happens, but if you cannot give them a score, all scenarios are equal
I assert verbal self-narrative is not necessary for free will. You assert otherwise? Why?
> can you prove it? :)
In principle, sure: Watch them demonstrate a learned skill. I have no reason to believe the videos are faked, but if they are, in principle I could observe IRL.
> And how do you know it won't end up like the Libet experiment?
The experiment which showed a human brain reaches a decision before conscious awareness of that decision? It’s evidence that humans don’t have free will, FSVO “free will”, so I’m expecting the same result, including the meta-result of people arguing about the result.
> They don't have history books though, and schools and teachers
> DNA does not help much if the knowledge dies with its creator
True for most of humanity, except for “teachers”, but cows can mentor each other too. So… we agree humans and non human animals pass and fail the same tests?
> because to forecast the consequences of every action you need to be able to judge the consequences
You can do that with any positive-negative reinforcement mechanism, doesn’t need morality etc.
Why don't you?
If higher cognitive functions are not necessary, than a virus can have free will.
bovines don't lack self narrative, they lack the ability to create complex communication systems.
> Watch them demonstrate a learned skill
and how do you know it's not merely imitation?
btw, insects can learn too
> The experiment which showed a human brain reaches a decision before conscious awareness of that decision?
the experiment that showed a lag between cerebral activity and actual action that was labeled as "brain takes a decision before we do" even though Libet never said it, but has been disproved 40 years later (the effect exists, but it doesn't show lack of free will at all)
> we agree humans and non human animals pass and fail the same tests?
not until their mentoring will include notions of ancient past civilazations that are long dead but transmitted their knowledge
also, not until they will be able to reconstruct their past history and of the entire universe by observing and studying remains, without any prior knowledge of what they are
see, if you look from afar a soapbox car and a real car look very similar
but if you look them closer, they are nothing alike
> You can do that with any positive-negative reinforcement mechanism, doesn’t need morality etc.
where's the freedom if the reactions have been engineered through training?
You are alternating between both of these problems, sometimes with references to higher cognitive function (itself poorly defined) other times by suggesting things where human and non human animals are passing and failing the same tests.
In particular:
> Why don't you?
Language seems neither necessary nor sufficient. If it was sufficient, computers would have it. If it was necessary, it would be denied to anyone who grew up alone in the wild, which happens occasionally.
For extra weirdness, given that language is notoriously difficult to pick up as an adult (both for such Wildermensch and for everyone else) if language learning structures was the test of free will, adults would necessarily have less free will than children.
> If higher cognitive functions are not necessary, than a virus can have free will.
There are many layers of cognition between these two things. Cognition is not Boolean.
> and how do you know it's not merely imitation? btw, insects can learn too
This demonstrates my point. All learned behaviour does. In fact, I would go further and say that the ability to copy another entity implies a mind has a model of itself as a separate entity within the world, and of the same category of entity as whatever it is copying. Certainly a limited model, and yet, again, this is no different from humans as we do not have perfect models of each other or ourselves.
> (the effect exists, but it doesn't show lack of free will at all)
Because the concept is too poorly defined to be testable, perchance? Because people keep trying to go “Well actually humans are special so that’s not what I meant” after the tests are done?
> also, not until they will be able to reconstruct their past history and of the entire universe by observing and studying remains, without any prior knowledge of what they are
Any single human would fail this test. Humanity collectively only just about passes, except for all the gaps in our history and the fact QM and GR are inconsistent with each other.
> where's the freedom if the reactions have been engineered through training?
Identical to humans. We have demonstrable biases towards the society — nation, religion, sports teams, languages, political parties, laws, cultural norms — that we grow up with. We have school precisely because we don’t spontaneously invent everything from scratch, and our instincts can be bad and need to be trained out. We are incapable of overriding other things, e.g. sexuality, and we don’t really even understand when and how sexuality becomes concrete.
If we were to entertain such an idea that you can still lack "free will" despite possessing a mammalian brain then we don't even know whether all humans have free will. There would be two factors, either genetics or education. There are obvious historic reasons for why basing the existence of free will on genetics is bad. Basing the existence of free will on education is even worse because education is completely arbitrary and you could teach animals free will to some extent.
Going by the education criteria: If you could get human slaves and let them give birth then the child would lack the necessary education and we can enslave the child as well.
> That's funny to you?
It happens every year to wild cows too that are impregnated by males because that's what bovines do.
they don't plan on parenting
Also calf mortality is correlated with the body weight of the mother when they are born, domesticates cows have almost zero calf mortality rate, contrary to what happens to wild cows.
They will also die due to predators, weaknesses, attacked by a bull or older males or for other natural causes, that they don't encounter when living in a farm
It's perfectly natural for a cow to see her calves die, it's part of their biological destiny.
Animals in nature inevitably die violent or painful deaths, often being eaten alive by other animals while they slowly starve. They often live lives of subsistence, with periodic times where they are near starvation or freezing and barely survive. They are often in ruthless competition for food and mates with their own species. They will sometimes eat their own young when conditions are especially bad, or eat the young of others to improve their own chance at reproduction.
If we're talking in pre-industrial times, if I had to choose between the life of a Buffalo or a domestic cow, I would take my chances as the cow.
Now, industrial practices like factory farming are truly horrifying and on that side I agree that they should be stopped, despite the increase in cost that will represent to animal products.
If a cat is born in the wild and ends up dying of a curable disease then it sucks for it but that's life. If you have a cat as a pet and when it gets sick you decide to abandon it to fend for itself and die in the wild then you're a bad person. Same outcome, very different ethical implications.
>So as long as you make sure to get your milk and meat from traditional farming
That's another gotcha that I really dislike. Every time the problem of animal suffering comes up there's always this opposition between "those crazy vegoons" vs. "the pop and mom farm who love their animals and take good care of them".
If that were the case, I agree that the situation would be very different. It's not though, you can't just ignore the woes of industrial farming when that's the vast majority of the meat products that surround us. These animals are for the most part born into horrible living conditions. In that sense I suppose that killing them early when they stop producing enough might be one of the least worse things that happens to them.
It would be like responding to somebody lamenting the deforestation of the Amazonia by bringing up the story of a poor farmer tending to his two acres of land in order to sustain his family. That's a best missing the point, at worse a truly disingenuous argument.
Reducing animal product consumption is important. But there is no reason to reduce it to 0, that is my main point. And note that you don't have to be extremely loving and caring with farm animals to be better than how nature treats them - it's not a high bar.
And purely from an argument point of view, the arguments against the extreme cruelty of industrial farming are far different from the arguments you presented, which would apply just as much to traditional farming as well (which, to be fair, is not always without its own horrors, especially where delicacies like foie Gras are concerned).
> If a cat is born in the wild and ends up dying of a curable disease then it sucks for it but that's life. If you have a cat as a pet and when it gets sick you decide to abandon it to fend for itself and die in the wild then you're a bad person. Same outcome, very different ethical implications.
To some extent that is true, but just as we don't judge the bear for killing salmon, I don't think it's right to judge a human for killing a cow to eat its flesh. The fact that we are farming it and not hunting it doesn't affect the morality of the situation in any way from my point of view. The cat example is immoral from a purely human and internal point of view: the human in question had entered into a caring relationship with a pet, so abandoning it in its hour of need is immoral.
The difference is you, as a human, have a choice. You are capable of living a healthy, full life w/o eating the flesh or excretions of animals. The bear (or lion or tiger) has no such ability to choose.
However, the larger point is that the idea that it is immoral to kill to sustain yourself goes so far against the way nature is organized that I find it ridiculous. While it's true that morality often means going against natural tendencies, in this particular case I find it exceedingly opposed to the regular order.
So, I personally reject the very premise that it is in any way immoral to end the life of anything except members of your own species, as long as you don't do it out of cruelty or greed, and as long as you do not eradicate the entire species through your actions.
This is an appeal to nature.
> ... as long as you don't do it out of... greed
How does "I like the taste of cows and milk" not meet your definition of greed?
A moral system that would consider the vast majority of natural life to be immoral is dubious to me. It's not simply an appeal to nature, it is a particular choice for the way I think a moral system should be evaluated.
> How does "I like the taste of cows and milk" not meet your definition of greed?
Greed always refers to excessive consumption. If you go on an all-beef-and-milk diet, and slaughter hundreds of animals a year just to feed yourself, you are probably being greedy. But eating well-raised beef, in quantities that do not encourage others to find the most efficient ways of raising as many cows as possible in as little space, doesn't fall under my idea of greed.
A single dairy cow, if well raised, can give enough milk for a family of 2 or 3. With two cows, one can have a constant supply of milk by essentially having each cow produce a calve each year. The calves can be raised for a while and then sold on to a bigger herd or slaughtered for food. When the animal is slaughtered, as much of its entire body should be used, not just a few of its muscles. The cows would be kept well fed, warm over the winter, clean and free of diseases. In the warm months, every day they would be taken out to pasture and returned home.
Of course, this means that cow meat would be something that people should expect to eat a few times a year, not daily or weekly. The same would apply to most or all other farm animals. Overall, adding some extra efficiency from larger herds as well, meat could probably be consumed something like once a month, while still raising animals in good conditions. Milk and eggs can be consumed almost daily without forcing others to keep animals in inhumane conditions.
And if we compare industrial practices, then I would agree with the GP, the life of a cow in a factory farm is unusually cruel if we compare it to the potential life of a hypothetical 'wild cow'. But if we look at the life of a cow in a traditional farm, I think the opposite becomes true.
Yup! Cows only exist so we may exploit them. Giving animals a "good life" while we exploit (or before we murder) them is not a preferential alternative to simple non-existence in the first place.
So, by the only universal standard of value among living beings, cows are one of the most successful vertebrates in history - they have managed to breed to almost unprecedented numbers for vertebrates in general, nevermind for mammals.
Even if the only possible way of life for them was the physical suffering of cows in industrial farms, it would not outweighg this basic drive. To suggest that the imagined human concept of 'being exploited' would outweigh the value of existing and breeding is one of the most bizarre takes I've ever heard.
Even humans, who do feel the psychological damages of exploitation and being owned, in the worse conditions of slavery, have never chosen mass extinction over the simple drive of continued life.
Edit: I'd also add that if you value the abstract evil of 'being exploited' as worse than any concrete qualities of the life lead under exploitation, to the extent that non-existence is preferable to this, then you have no choice but to apply this same logic to all agricultural grown plants, especially those that cant even reproduce without our care like bananas or wheat, and to the many kinds of Bacteria we use to produce drugs. They are just as much the victims of exploitation as cows living on nice farms are.
We breed cows so we can exploit them. There is no air quotes around exploit, that's exactly what cows are to us. Resources for our enrichment.
Of course reproduction is the quintessential drive of all life. But cows are not reproducing in the wild so that point isn't even relevant. They're artificially inseminated to keep them lactating (in the case of dairy cows).
As to your edit, we're not talking about bacteria or plants which lack the physical ability for suffering as we know it. We're talking about bovines, huge mammals w/ a brain and central nervous system.
Agreed, but it does not follow that the cows 'feel exploited'.
> Of course reproduction is the quintessential drive of all life. But cows are not reproducing in the wild so that point isn't even relevant. They're artificially inseminated to keep them lactating (in the case of dairy cows).
The fact that they reproduce at all in any conditions is the only value that truly matters in nature. Cows are dependent on humans for reproduction, just as most wild plants are dependant on pollinators.
> As to your edit, we're not talking about bacteria or plants which lack the physical ability for suffering as we know it. We're talking about bovines, huge mammals w/ a brain and central nervous system.
But you claimed the living conditions are irrelevant, as long as the animal is used as a resource it is immoral to keep it alive. That would mean you don't care what the animal actually feels, so the fact that it feels things at all is irrelevant. Hence, the same argument should apply to living things that don't feel anything either, such as bacteria or plants (or, the argument should not be applied at all).
Did it sound strange to you?
Farming and crafts are a core part of many monasteries, and many famous foods and drinks have been invented or refined by monks. Everything from Champagne and Buckfast. They have to do something simple to earn money and keep busy. And they’re usually in the countryside so have farm land by default.
What do the monasteries near you do to trade for income?
They need Ein from Cowboy Bebop. See specifically episode/session seventeen, "Mushroom Samba".
Funny because it's impossible to imagine that situation without the monk looking like Anthony Fauci in a robe? That exact same situation must have happened just about everywhere...