> “These animals are capable of much more than we ask of them.”
I fear part of that capacity is to understand the horrors they're frequently subject to in industrial feed lots.
I still eat meat, but I'm increasingly uncomfortable with that fact.
I fear part of that capacity is to understand the horrors they're frequently subject to in industrial feed lots.
I still eat meat, but I'm increasingly uncomfortable with that fact.
One of the things it did to me was totally transform my perception of animals, humans as animals, our relationships, and cause to me to realize I have no way to verify that animals don’t experience life in a way that’s as meaningful or as sentient as mine. I can’t even properly define those things. I do know that I share a LOT with mammals especially and they appear to possess a lot of the faculties required to feel good, suffer, have temporal awareness, relationships with other animals, etc. That’s not what was taught to me as a child.
I like to go spear fishing and that’s a very changed experience. I learned how to originally so I could be more selective about food and where I harvest it, reduce bycatch, etc. So I cared before to some degree. Now shooting a fish involves this internal struggle of deciding if it’s necessary, if it makes sense, what it means about me, what the experience will be like for the fish. It feels a lot more like killing someone rather than something. I guess that sounds silly.
It’s a rabbit hole. You can go down so far and maybe not turn up much that’s very useful. I think animals aren’t very discernible from human animals in the big picture though. I’m basically a murderer, but the legally sanctioned kind. I bought the license.
I strongly prefer to eat the food I murdered myself now. I occasionally eat farmed meat, but it’s rare and comes from local farms with unscalable high standards. I’m fortunate that I can do that. I mostly do it to appease my family - they feel weird when I skip dishes at special meals.
Anyway I wanted to share that because this thought experiment about the experience of animals in farms means a lot to me lately, and I find it all fascinating but important as well. Like you, I’m increasingly uncomfortable with it.
No it does not. Animals and fish are sentient beings with their own set of perceptions, feelings, thoughts, desires, and more.
I do not think there is a defensible way to consume animals if you're living on above-poverty wages in a developed country and don't have some extremely rare health problem.
Killing is problematic (ending a life prematurely), but worse yet is the experience animals have on factory farms.
In your case of hunting your own fish seems less morally problematic than most animal consumption, but I understand the sentiment of "do I really need to eat that when there are plenty of non-sentient alternatives". Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
Also, it's clearer to us (since we're animals) what sorts of events count as ending another animal's life. Elsewhere it's trickier (Is a field of grass one life, or is a blade of grass one life? How should mycelial networks be counted? etc).
For these reasons, I think it's that applying different logic to different kingdoms is a fairly defensible move.
Many plants have evolved specifically around being eaten by other animals.
No, that would be different organisms.
There are also several fungi and protozoans who migrate between the digestive tracts of animals that eat each other (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii for instance).
I'm not enough of a biologist to defend the point especially well, but doesn't it make sense that one would use different types of reasoning to manage relationships with different types of life?
Right, but that's not the plant, that's the fruit. If you eat the plant itself, it's dead. Same as a cow.
I'll grant that no plants come to mind that have a niche that requires them to be wholly eaten, but I still think that deciding whether to eat a plant requires totally different logic than deciding whether to eat an animal.
So what's your position? Are you here to suggest that "we shouldn't eat animals" is absurd by equating it to "we shouldn't eat plants?"
Or are you a vegan looking to take it a step further by not eating plants that have to die in order for you to eat them? Because I'd like to hear more about somebody who sincerely held that belief.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruitarianism
I just don't understand how you can have a moral outrage to killing one thing but not another. People seem to do a little dance about plants being not as alive as animals to justify it, but it doesn't make sense to me.
There are parasites for which being eaten is a part of their life cycle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leucochloridium_paradoxum
Black widow spiders are so named because the females eat their mates. Some spider mothers become food for their own children.
Not to mention that (while not exactly what you asked for, but I think it's important to recognize) carnivores kill other species as a means of survival, and even their own species at times. Wild wolves cannot feed their pups without killing other animals. Death is common in nature.
The spider thing is interesting though. It would seem that being eaten by her children is an adaptation, not just an unfortunate consequence of harsh reality. The strategy appears to be: give my nutrients to my offspring, for they carry a part of me, and the survival of that part is more important than the rest.
Given that most of the cells in a human body are passengers, and not cells with human DNA in their nucleus (if they have nuclei at all), it seems pretty likely that something, somewhere, is making the same kind of sacrifice, and using a hungry human as the vehicle. And I think that ending a life on those terms falls in a different domain--both from an ethics perspective, and from a "how adversarial of an environment do you want to create for yourself"-perspective, than mere predation.
Strategies of that sort are more popular outside of the animal kingdom than in it (I think), which I think justifies a "different rules for different things" approach.
Ultimately, many grazing animals have their property. If their numbers grow too large from lack of predators, they'll consume all available food and then starve en-masse.
I don't have any reason to suspect that they don't.
With animals there's a clear connection: they have brains and brains is clearly the part that enables us humans to have conscious experiences.
The burden of proof of the claim "plants are conscious" is on you.
I didn't claim that plants were conscious, and we have no idea what causes the conscious experience. I personally wouldn't say that all humans actually experience consciousness. So no, no clear connection, and no burden either.
I would also add though that if you want to minimize plant death, the best course of action is to stop eating meat and animal products and aim for a plant-based diet, since (by thermodynamics!) the number of plants needed to feed these animals vastly outstrips what would deliver the same amount of nutrients to a human eating them directly.
Else I might kill myself, except it is not allowed by my animal programming, which is out of my control, so I go back to that hoping phase.
I also wonder what’s the problem with killing sentient animals while we also kill fellow humans when “necessary”. We kill for our little ego, so let’s just keep fingers crossed that the sacrifices we force are worth something.
Maybe this is a bit Buddhism centric but it takes off my mental loads a bit.
It doesn't require it at all.
It's a lossy conversion.
There are still inherent issues with dairy, such as forced impregnation and abduction and murder of the offspring, so it isn't great no matter how you slice it. But if we're to compare dairy operations, this one was pretty good I guess.
When the cows stopped producing much milk, they had some way of pasturing them for around 2 years before they'd then slaughter them for meat. In total the cows had quite long and low pressure lives. The dairy and meat was very expensive, though. I think that's the realistic outcome of treating animals more morally. It isn't cheap.
That’s the issue with vegetarianism. It’s not really about “the animals”, it’s about things that happen to resemble human beings. The more similar to a human, the more “sentience” it has. Isn’t that an odd coincidence? Or perhaps plants are just as sentient as humans but are a different form of life too distant from humans for us to empathize with.
The whole thing is a massive exercise in human myopia.
The burden of proof is on you. Humans are animals. We have evolution linking us together at a more-recent junction than we do when compared to plants. Humans and animals have brains; brains is the seat of sentience.
Finally; even if you are right that plants are sentient, are you then claiming that there is no difference in the amount of sentience between humans, bees, and plants? If so, should we be indifferent whether I kill you or burn a dandelion?
But even if it were just about not wanting to kill things that resemble us--it still doesn't have to be a false elevation of human sentience.
If there are fungi that make decisions, I'd expect them to look out for their fungus-buddies more than they look out for me. If Jupiter's red spot can be asked, I'd expect that it cares more for the weird hexagon on the poles of Saturn than anything going on on earth. Seeking kinship with similar things and being indifferent to alien things is common in biology, and it gets along just fine without sentience in the mix.
I think vegetarianism makes a ton of sense from an environmental and ecological point of view, but this has nothing to do with the moral one.
No defense needed, all animals are ultimately consumed and to imagine an alternative is to indulge in fantasy.
We can debate the timing and manner of consumption, but not the idea of consumption.
We are animals too you know. If all animals are "ultimately consumed", so perhaps there is no problem if I kill and eat some close friend of yours?
When people start defending their meat consumption, they seem to make all sorts of bizarre claims. Could you explain yours?
So if an animal dies of a disease, is it "consumed"? Could you explain your claim?
These considerations are originally critical to what it meant to be hunter. Hunters are shepherds to their prey, just from a distance. You can't kill with reckless abandon because of realities like supply and spoilage. Livestock can be seen as a practice of a hunter bringing their prey closer to home so as to protect them from harvest by other hunters.
Anybody claiming that highly-processed things like this will have anything close to the same health impact and taste as, say, pasture-raised chickens (like I raise on my farm, https://mulligan.farm) is falling into the same trap that my parents fell into when they became convinced that hydrogenated factory-produced oils were healthier than butter.
The taste and nutritive quality of meat has many, many factors going into it, and the genes are only one tiny part. For example, the amount of omega-3s in pasture-raised chicken, and their ratio to omega-6s is far better in pasture-raised chickens than in chickens subjected to confined animal feeding operations (https://apppa.org/The-Nutrition-of-Pasture-Raised-Chicken-an...).
My chickens are of the same genetics as gross grocery store chickens, but grow more slowly, get more exercise, require zero antibiotics, have vastly different flavour and nutritive quality, than those exact same genetics raised in factory farms.
The experience an animal has walking the earth--what kind of activities they engage in, what they eat, what they breath, what pharmaceuticals they're injected with--all have impact on the value of the meat.
What does "lab grown" even mean in this context? Sure, it's genetically identical, but what "lab environment" produces something like grain-finished meat? Which produces 100% grassfed beef?
It seems insanely simplistic to say that "we can grow this phenotype in the lab, so it'll be exactly the same as one raised in a barn or on a pasture."
Why would it be exactly the same? We can probably make it better. Perfect marbling on every steak.
If you're right, that would maybe be cool (but then we'd have to consider the inputs to the factories, which'd probably be GMO soybeans and corn, which means we're harming other animals in the process of producing them), but I believe your statement is full of hubris.
And then you have all of the seasoning, for example KFC’s “secret” herbs and spices are from basically all over the planet.
Wild nature doesn't provide very much that is edible by humans, and certainly not enough to sustain a civilization of humans rather than small bands of roving nomads.
Nature doesn't care about us, it won't help us, if left to its own devices it would eventually wipe humanity out entirely. We're well, well past the point where we can rely on nature to care for itself or for us. If we don't all take the initiative to intervene and engineer nature for its and our benefit, then only those with hubris will do so.
Regarding the hubris of believing that a lab-grown steak could be better than the real thing, physics doesn't change just because it's inside of an animal, so there's no reason to think that we won't eventually be able to engineer muscle tissues that are indistinguishable from real grass-fed beef, given the time and money to do so.
While I can easily believe most specific individual humans could (with skill and training) get a good meal after a few hours spent foraging if considered separately, that is very different from saying that all of the population can be fed that way at the same time.
The carrying capacity of the planet if we’re “in tune with nature” is the pre-farming population, because even neolithic farms were very unnatural things.
Edit: None of this will replicate the romantic imagery of raising animals with love on a beautiful farm. There will likely always be a market for that to some extent, but that is realistically not what most of our meat consumption looks like today either.
Well, maybe we can. But, for instance, a cow that is finished entirely on pasture--a good deal of its nutritive quality comes from the grasses it eats. Where does that nutrition come from in lab-grown meats? Do we have a source for the exact same nutrients as are provided by air, water, and sunlight and grow easily and freely all over many otherwise unusable bits of land?
Where are the inputs to the lab coming from?
It seems kind of like the lab-grown meat maximalists are thinking that Dow Chemical and its brethren can synthesize all the nutrients that are required and known in, say, beef, and just break out the beakers and Breaking Bad them into existence.
As a long-time software engineer who has a deep respect for complex systems, this is totally insane to me. That the lab-grown meat maximalists think we can supplant this incredibly complex system, from sun to leaf to calf to beef, in some Dow Chemical-inputs and a factory, is absolutely insane.
Remember, from Black Swan by Taleb: Up until the 60s, scientists didn't think that fiber was a useful part of our diet. This lead to the notion that fruit juice was equivalent to whole fruit, from a dietary perspective. This contributed in some part to the obesity epidemic.
The idea that we already do know exactly what makes meat so tasty and healthy is suspect, the idea that we can replicate this exactly like burning CD-ROMs in a meat CD-Burner is just off the wall.
> It seems insanely simplistic to say that "we can grow this phenotype in the lab, so it'll be exactly the same as one raised in a barn or on a pasture."
It seems insanely unimaginative to think we can not.
No, "lab grown" does not mean an Impossible Burger. You've confused the definition with something else.
This reads like a person that is afraid technical advancement will make them obsolete. Your bias is probably too strong to make clear and meaningful arguments.
I am not in the slightest bit afraid of factory/lab-grown meat supplanting my little farm. Regardless of what highly-processed stuff large agribusinesses can or will produce, there will always be a great market for humanely-raised, carefully processed animal protein.
If anything, it's the Tyson and Smithfield Foods of the world that should be worried. Somehow, I don't think any of us are.
Congrats!
> Regardless of what highly-processed stuff large agribusinesses can or will produce, there will always be a great market for humanely-raised, carefully processed animal protein.
Yep!
> If anything, it's the Tyson and Smithfield Foods of the world that should be worried. Somehow, I don't think any of us are.
Great!
This entire post didn't really negate mine though. Your post ignored huge percentages of (most of?) the categories of meat and food that would/could be replaced by lab grown food. It's like saying "My mercedes is wondeful, nobody would ever want an _electric car!_." There will always be a place for luxury items. People that eat at McDonald's aren't getting luxury items. Low wage workers that eat 4 dollar per pound chicken from Safeway aren't eating luxury items. If lab grown food can (more) ethically service lower income people with a reduced environmental impact, we should go all-in on that advancement. Your farm can and should exist as a commodity for those that want to pay for it.
Our regulatory environment encourages a small handful of very powerful and wealthy agribusinesses, with all the attendant horrors from absentee landlordism and contract farming and insanely-scaled slaughtering facilities. It could just as well encourage a distribution of small family farms (this is the case in much of the non-western world).
Part of the way we're encouraging this outcome is building a platform to help small farmers directly market to customers, capturing vastly more of the value of their product.
In any case, I thought your example was interesting with cars. Right now, we sell the equivalent of the Tesla Roadster version of chicken. High-end, pricey, targeted toward an upper-middle class customer. As we gain some small amount of scale, and as we encourage more competitors and build co-operative abattoirs, the prices will come down, and we'll never be cheaper than Tyson or whoever, but we might become not so expensive that it's a real reach.
I've let go of feeling like I have to fix it, because solving these institutional issues is ultimately not my job and that sense of worry will never be relieved in my lifetime, because once again I have no personal agency to affect institutional change. Us peasants in history exists to live and die as units of labor beholden to a course charted by people ordained since birth to command that ship, and its a fallacy to ever imagine that we might ourselves take the helm and steer ourselves to logically rational utopian waters free of emotional biases. Instead of fighting upstream fruitlessly until you die restless, chase personal hedonism within your lifetime and means as much as possible.
Really I think your appeal to heodinism is just a value system like everyone else. Some people choose vegetables over nihilism.
These are the realities of the modern world. You can either spend every second of your life stressing out about how it continually gets worse, and promises made decades ago by leaders are always broken in time, or you could try to block it out and take a more stoic approach to it all, and who knows maybe you might actually luck out and fool your brain into feeling legitimately good about things.
I'm not against making animals work for us, but I think they need to be treated with a level of dignity that their lives deserve.
Currently find myself in-between meat eating and vegan camps so I don't make a lot of friends with this haha
edit: PDF of the book: https://bc.instructure.com/courses/1745066/files/115253047?m...
Bio-reactors are pretty stupid.
https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/piers-anthony/47321-in_the_b...
I assure you, they are not anything like you described. And across breeds, they have wildly different cognitive capacities, so a broad-stroke description like this is inherently inaccurate.
Vs. prejudice and bigotry.
Whistling in the wind!!
However! They're identifiably, understandably stupid, like a tiny human with terrifically poor planning, observing, memorization, predicting, social, and emoting skills. It's not an alien kind of stupidity like that of a fish, insect, plant, or rock (or computer program). I can say with great confidence that chickens are quite low on the emotion/intelligence spectrum, but in saying that I'm quite confident that they're on it.
If your criteria for animal cruelty is achieving a particular level or capability on the sapience/sentience spectrum, you can feel pretty safe eating chicken. If your criteria is that they not posses intelligence or experience emotions at all, you'd better go pescatarian. Or eat mutton: if sheep have any intelligence at all it's completely undetectable to me.
https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Ameglian_Major_Cow
Here's a clip with the cow from the BBC's H2G2 TV series:
It started as a lockdown thing, but the way it seems to have helped weight loss was a big incentive to continue.
I have been fully aware of the intelligence the whole time, and have just found the prior scientific consensus to be silly
and now I keep running into people that say something like "ah ! they are intelligent! I lost my appetite"
like... what? how or why is that related, to you. how is that the line in the sand.
feel like I took acid and got stuck in this weird mostly similar dimension.
Alternative question around a similar idea: does picking asparagus or cutting down a tree give similar feelings as gutting an animal for meat?
We can catch diseases by eating other animals, but with human flesh, the contagion would face much lower hurdle to get across.
Human meat is not one.
That is the extent of my logic and mine personally has not included hypotheticals.
I have the same questions for others actually, because I don’t understand the logic path: if it was shown in the future that “asparagus and trees” and even their separated fruit had bundles of nerves, conditional logic, feelings, intelligence, does that also exclude them from diets now?
Essentially you seem to have said that what you consider to be ok to eat is what you have already ate or what has been accepted to be eaten by those around you.
I find that conclusion lacking, as it gives no room for future food discovery (unless you are ok with being passive and just eating whatever others tell you is ok to eat).
But back to your question.
> if it was shown in the future that “asparagus and trees” and even their separated fruit had bundles of nerves, conditional logic, feelings, intelligence, does that also exclude them from diets now?
If it is believed that “asparagus and trees” have the ability to feel joy, feel pain, feel compassion, live some definition of a fulfilling life, and that harvesting them effectively killed all of that. Then yes, I think it would certainly bring into question the morality of mass farming, killing, and eating them.
Of course, if it turns out that everything has this capability, from the smallest nanobes to the largest mammals, and we haven't worked out how to produce nutrients at scale, then maybe we just need to throw our hands up and say "whelp, survival of the fittest".
Shmaybe? It seems pretty reasonable view for me, and my adherence to it would probably depend on availability of alternative food sources. Or perhaps people would dig deeper to identify the discriminating factors that would determine whether or not something can be eaten with clean conscience.
> That is the extent of my logic and mine personally has not included hypotheticals.
My feeling is that it's not the logic path you're having trouble with, but with internalizing the concept of updating your moral framework based on independet reasoning.
Human sense of morality comes partially built-in, and is partially supplied by the groups you live in. That second part is mostly your local culture, i.e. the assumptions and patterns of behavior in the background. Most people tend to keep to those two sources - independent reasoning about morality, while a well-known concept since the times of ancient philosophers, doesn't seem all that common. Perhaps it's because it's difficult - it often hurts thinking about it (i.e. you probably wouldn't be wondering about some chain of reasoning having moral implications if you knew you're in the clear with respect to those implications).
Culture changes pretty slowly - on the order of decades. That humans and animals are the same thing, that animals aren't as dumb as they look, that animals can feel - those are relatively recent scientific insights. What you see as a minority of people using this knowledge and logic to stop eating meat, is the process of our culture slowly updating itself to catch up with the last 200 years of science. It'll take a few more generations, but climate or not, I'd expect that in 100 years people would be mostly vegetarian by cultural pressure. Right now, it's mostly independent reasoners (ok, and some virtue signallers too).
It seems that I have already accepted the probability that most organisms have the things that people are just discovering.
“Well I eat this because it doesn’t have central nervous systems and cant feel pain”
Narrator: it can feel pain and other consumers already assumed that
That's easy to believe if you were taught like I was as a very young boy that it's OK to catch a fish with a fishhook and cut it up to eat because fish are not sufficiently intelligent to feel pain, be hurt, be scared, or suffer. It's easy to generalize that incapability of suffering to extend to all animals when you eventually learn that the same kind of big-eyed cow that says moo is what we eat as beef or hamburgers. Supermarkets make the default behavior to take home shrink-wrapped cuts of meat without ever getting the chance to gauge for yourself whether a cow can suffer; humans are shockingly good at not re-evaluating their priors.
How do you rationalize it? There are lots of ways, you've ruled out that they not intelligent, which is a common one. But are they intelligent but not suffering? Is non-human suffering not wrong? Does the wrongness of causing suffering require the victim to have an undetectable soul, which only humans posses? Is "wrongness" scalar, contingent on need, or mitigated by intelligence, or by an intensity of suffering, or by some other factor not considered? Is tradition and the natural order relevant? Is justice preserved by karmic retribution in an afterlife or reincarnation? Are chickens just really evil and deserving of suffering? Are we actually villains in a global horror story?
Once you push/force them to realize that the difference between a cow and your dog or even a toddler is not that big, they start seeing cows in a completely different light and possibly loose appetite.
A few decades ago, this was less of a problem, as people were close to the animals they were eating later on and it was always a fact that those animals would be eaten at some point. In our times, though, people can live for quite some time without seeing the intermediate steps in meat production or even interact with a cow for extended period of times. Therefore, this realization might come as quite a shock.