I'm all for human survival and well-being, but this is more like convenience: it tastes good, easy to get and cheap. We can at least change to make it not cheap and easy anymore. Values in our economy are artificial anyway. It's not like we have much else to innovate for the next centuries, besides making more internet apps and going to Mars.
There is no concrete evidence of this. A lot of sea creatures, including fish, have skin cells that can create polarized light and some seem to have developed communication systems with pulses of polarized light.
Just the other day it was found that some fish can pass the mirror test, didn't you see that?
The prevailing theory is that ratio of brain mass to body mass is more telling than the absolute size of the brain. Fish may fare worse on this metric but I suspect it's just an area where we have very little understanding yet.
Being vegetarian or vegan is not so hard. It is one of many fundamental changes that society should pursue to avert the current ecological crisis and mitigate species loss.
A bit weird nitpicking when you yourself make an insubstantial claim about some "prevailing" theory. I think we can both agree that reducing meat consumption is the right thing to do, it's just sometimes to convince people you need to show some leeway.
Btw I never made any comment about fish's brain size, I said they're generally less intelligent than farm animals, which wikipedia agrees with, fits the brain ratio theory too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_intelligence#Brain
Thanks for derailing the conversation anyway, at the end, there is no such thing as a fish
Does there have to be one answer, to such a strong degree, that this mode of survival needs to be treated like a science-fiction oddity?
I’ve seen this question asked time and time again, and it makes no sense to me. People commit suicide out of (often transient) emotional pain, and less frequently out of physical pain. If we who have the capability to envision a better future decide to opt out of suffering via death, why do you imagine that a chronically-suffering animal’s life is better than not facing that suffering in the first place?
I don't think most farm animals are suffering through their entire life. They seem pretty all right to me. Factory chicken farms should be banned but not all meat.
Small farms are a different story and a mixed bag.
Yes, without question.
> Often, pea, soy and potato crops don’t resemble natural ecosystems — they are vast monocultures that rely on large machinery, intensive processing and global distribution, just like the industrial system that produces meat on a large scale.
So yes, let’s end factory farming, and start with the factory farming of animals. Let’s also not pretend that large-scale monocular farming of plants is a silver bullet.
Regenerative farming is the thing to aim for at the moment. That will reduce both awful conditions for animals and the harm to our ecosystems. It affects animal factory farms to a greater extent. Fighting for a globally plant-based food source can be done in parallel, just don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.