Even as a meat eater I’m pretty shocked that this recognises them as sentient and yet does not ban their slaughter (aside from boiling them alive etc). Maybe I’ve read too much science fiction, but eating sentient beings seems Bad.
2) Make an appeal to some emotion to politically limit their harvest (acceptability).
3) Expand this program to the next least popular animal (behavior), repeat, etc.
4) Congrats, you’ve changed public opinion on what animal to eat (behavior) is moral and ethical. This is the formula of progressivism.
The process seems identical to majoritarianism.
1] https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
Right. And the Spartans weren't Greek but Spartan and spoke a different dialect of Greek, the Laconic dialect. And the Athenians weren't Greek but Athenian and spoke a different dialect of Greek, the Attic dialect. And so on.
But I wonder, which is the one true Greek language that all those dialects were dialects of? And who were the true Greeks who spoke it?
Or should I ask, is every bit of information in the article just as dodgy as the bit I quote above?
I agree that it's a reasonable extrapolation though :)
The only reason why we know it own pain exist is, well, because it hurts :)
(But once again, I think the theory that other people and animals also feel pain is reasonable and probably the truth)
The old practice of cooking crab and lobsters was to subject them to pain for a needlessly lengthy period of time which I think is what the statuses is meant to curb. On the other hand, pesticide use is probably painful, albeit necessary. Seems rather arbitrary not to consider insects sentient, because they exhibit the same things. Intelligence is necessary for suffering, however. We're not good at measuring this capacity for suffering, we just know that certain animals exhibit it and for that reason we (should) take care to avoid it. Are there different levels of it? I would intuit that a bee slaughtered by a wasp suffers, but is that a level of suffering that should matter to us?
No easy answer but in the end I understand playing it safe in broadstrokes fashion
I'm not so sure about this. To feel pain requires consciousness. Behavior is not consciousness. It often indicates it in animals like humans with complex nervous systems. But it's very unclear when we get to something with a few thousand neurons. They likely won't any of the neural correlates of consciousness that we do. If insects or crustaceans are conscious of anything, it's not the kind of consciousness we have.
First, it is a unconditional limb/muscle reaction that is hard-coded. It’s uncomfortable but doesn’t constitute “suffering”. Then there is a sensation: burning, broken, cold, etc that makes you do something in the range of acting to reduce the damage to screaming (message danger to others and maybe get help) and kicking erratically (to counteract a predator). It’s more close to “suffer”, but short episodes don’t really add up to long-term or intensive “anguish”. Some people have high pain tolerance, but it doesn’t mean they don’t feel it, they simply don’t change their state of minds so much. And then may come the understanding that you’re going to unfair die or become disabled for life, and these feelings and thoughts may be comparable to a situation of no physical pain at all, e.g. if you end up with an unfair life sentence. So basically my idea is that dying in pain is just a very negative sum of these negative components, but consciousness is not the key. It only helps to see your fate, whatever it is.
Which parts of “pain” we are trying to reduce by these laws is unclear.
Cattle and sheep are usually treated well because cortisol reduces weight gain. Pigs not so much...
[0] https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore?country=81&product=und...
According to NOAA, in regards to US totals[1]:
"Overall, the highest value U.S. commercial species were salmon ($688 million), crabs ($610 million), lobsters ($594 million), shrimp ($531 million), scallops ($512 million), and Alaska pollock ($413 million)."
[1]https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/american-seafood-industry...
Sentient is not the same as sapient. You probably eat a lot of sentient animals, after all.
So long as they aren’t in physical pain during their life, I don’t think animals really care or even understand their situation. For instance, a bunch of cattle don’t wonder about how their lives would be better if they were free range. They just live in the moment with no concept of “a better life” or “freedom”. We project our feelings on them which they don’t have the ability to reason about.
Physically hurting them during their short lives is wrong because they do feel physical pain. We shouldn’t scare them. But they wouldn’t even exist if they weren’t made for food.
We don’t need these animals to survive. Human beings can live long, happy, healthy lives without meat and cheese. Literally all nutrients we need to live and be healthy can be found in plants, or manufactured and added to foods (which is how livestock end up with B12, actually)
So, with that in mind, really any amount of harm or violence done to these animals is unnecessary, and done for pleasure (taste) only.
People who disagree tend to think that we somehow need to consume animals, but that has been debunked many times. Or, folks often convince themselves that violence and suffering of a sentient being for the reason of pleasure is somehow not simply evil.
That’s generally the viewpoint of folks who oppose eating and hurting animals.
Even the “one bad day” argument doesn’t hold up well, because folks would still raise hell if I painlessly killed my dog as soon as it became inconvenient to have one, no? Or they’d still raise hell if someone was unknowingly molested in their sleep.
There is more to deciding if we are treating a sentient being well beyond simply “did I treat it okay before I killed it?”, and the only reason that’s hard to see is because most people on this planet grow up being told that for some reason, some animals are different. For some reason, we can bludgeon a pig to death with a hammer (thumping), or boil a living lobster alive, but we can’t do the same to a dog or a cat.
We have been lied to. Doing any of these things to animals is wrong because we don’t need to eat them, except in very rare cases.
If you’re ever on a desert island, we can have a different conversation.
But it's my culture to consume them. My people have lived this way for thousands of years and I intend on continuing it and teaching my children our traditions. It connects me to our shared history and it connects me to the Earth. I am a natural being on this planet and part of the lifecycle. Consumption of meat is a part of that. Cooking meat over open fire with smoke and the aromas filling my lungs means something to me.
I don't want to change my culture to another way of living that I am disconnected from. I understand there are many cultures that don't eat meat and I respect that and wouldn't try and change them to eat meat. But it isn't mine and I intend on living the way I believe that god, or the universe, intended me to live.
Culture is important, but we can just as easily establish cultural practices that condemn violence and harm, rather than support them.
So you’ll still minimize the number of crop deaths by going vegan.
Even if you believe that plants are just as sentient as animals (which some people have argued to me…) then going vegan still reduces that suffering the most.
Livestock raised for commercial meat and dairy consumption live horrible lives. Watch Dominion for free on youtube if you don’t believe me.
We should stop breeding these animals into existence.
That said, I don't particularly think we need to stop besides for environmental reasons. The ideal solution will be when we can grow "test tube" meat of comparable quality to existing meat.
This is easily refuted by the myriad instances of animals escaping their captors, strategizing, and even empathizing. For academic writing on exactly that, I suggest reading "Animal Resistance in the Global Capitalist Era" by Sarat Colling.
We have this meat industry that gides away all the nasty bits and we just get ouece of meat iwrapped in plastic. I have. No accusations against farmers doing what they have to do, but in the first world cities we have one grand hypocrisy
Not quite - if you've never done it, but you defend eating meat, you dont know what you are talking about and shouls not be taken seriously
We don't need to gerrymander the tree of life into edible and non-edible animals and pretend we have rational for the delineations if we just stop eating animals. Folks in developed countries don't need to eat animals to survive, so why bother? In the best case it allows us to eat some foods that taste unique and different, worst case it propagates unbelievable suffering amongst those we choose to eat.
The common scifi definition of "sentient" isn't the dictionary definition.
Yet you're a meat eater? I can't quite bridge the gap there.