But if you do it for fun, I would keep my distance from you and stay close to a pike.
I think getting rid of them quickly outweighs germs flying off them. Regardless I don't think they are known for spreading disease.
As I understand it, C. Elegans displays a surprisingly large and complex set of behaviours given its (relatively) extremely simple nervous system. A database of thousands of these "behavioural phenotypes" has been built and provides a well-defined goal for attempts to reproduce the behaviours in simulations. Very few of these behaviours have been replicated. To solve the problem will apparently require a lot more than the connectome, which has been known for a long time. It's not enough to know that neuron A connects to neuron B, or even the full 3D structure of that connection. You need to know how that connection influences the behaviour of the connected neurons. People refer to this as "knowing the weights" but AFAIK it's still an open question whether a model based on "weights" is sufficient.
This is a recent comment from one of the researchers about progress on this over the last 10 years: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/mHqQxwKuzZS69CXX5/whole-b...
First option is possible but not productive for the discussion because then almost everything can feel pain, including some single cell organisms I think.
Second option is anthropocentric and at least at a glance looks incorrect.
The thing is the word "feel" itself is anthropocentric, basically we make analogue with our understanding of pain and project it on other living organisms.
PS: I'm not advocating for cruel behavior against animals. It's just that some questions don't have an easy clear answer at all, especially scaled to the planet level.
does one need to feel pain in the same way for it to be classified as pain. pain is pain. one of the things that unites us as humans is our ability to feel it and empathize with another.
if an animal can feel pain it doesn't matter if it is the same pain. Also I recall that Nirvana once sang "It's ok to eat fish because they don't have any feelings". For generations people thought that is true.
Some in my family call themselves Pescaterean because they for some reason don't want to inflict pain on animals (that look like us).
my point is pain is pain - the rest is just mental gymnastics that allow us to justify our own behavior.
This seems pretty arbitrary. As a vegan I draw the line at plants vs animals and while it is hard to live in industrialized society without harming animals, it’s easy for me to see how dropping a lobster in a pot will cause the animal to suffer. I’m doing just fine simply not eating them. Why do mental gymnastics to convince yourself dropping a lobster in a boiling pot doesn’t cause it to “feel” pain when you could just not do that? Lentils are so damn good.
There is no easy, or even hard answer at all for this. And won't be in the nearest future, simply due to a sheer scope of the problem, number of different kinds of organisms and numbers of reasons they are being killed today.
If we are going to kill something, the least we could do is kill it painlessly. At the beginning of COVID-19, some farm in the Midwest killed hundreds of pigs by steaming. Could you imagine the suffering?
Instructions: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/how-to-k...
Be kind. Don't be snarky.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says
Please don't post shallow dismissals
I think when you're evaluating killing methods based on how humane they are, one thing to keep in mind is that how something looks to the executioner is NOT a good metric. As an example: Consider the oft repeated anecdote about how being hanged is only "humane" if you break someones neck during the hanging. If you don't, the subject with jerk and spasm wildly. HOWEVER... I have been choked out in jiu-jitsu.... it's like going to sleep. However, I can only imagine the uncommunicateable horror of having my neck broken and then having to endure 2 minutes of consciousness before I succumb to not breathing and pass out. One looks distressing but is suffering-free. One looks great, but is probably terrifying.
For a lobster, there are a couple of metrics I'd be concerned with: - time experiencing a sense of alarm - time experiencing what is likely pain
If I take a lobster, and I suddenly plunge them into fully boiling water, full submerged, how long do you think it is before they succumb? Keep in mind, that movement isn't necessarily a good cue here, because the physical structures will move in response to heat even if consciousness is long gone. Smaller animals have a high surface area to volume ratio. The heat transfer is likely pretty fast. I have experience cooking dungeness crabs, and I can say from experience, the time between putting them in the water and when they stop moving entirely is quite quick... I'd say no more than ~5-10 seconds. The last part of that movement seems uncoordinated as well so may not represent conscious effort.
For lobsters, would you prefer they be decapitated first? There's likely some consciousness that will remain for a similar time period in the head, so you should probably behead them, AND plunge the head into boiling water. BUT... then you also have to consider the "time experiencing alarm"... Wrestling them still to behead them will undoubtedly be alarming.
As for pigs, I found the article https://theintercept.com/2020/05/29/pigs-factory-farms-venti...
That is from last year.
A lot of people in this thread seem to be suggesting that since we can’t pin down an absolute answer we should what… do nothing? If you really mean to say that deciding not to eat lobsters is easy then let’s go with that logic and stop eating all the bigger animals too. Seems an easy place to start.
I don't think this is the most generous take. I think what most people are trying to find is the underlying principles. Consider the following potential first principles:
1) Minimize suffering
2) Minimize animal death
3) Minimize charismatic mega fauna death
4) Minimize climate impacts
5) Maximize human health
6) Maximize human performance
7) Maximize human longevity (healthspan or lifespan)
Each of those can lead down different, sometimes competing tracts. Can vegan/vegetarianism be compatible with any of those? Sure. Can it optimize all of them at the same time? I'm doubtful. It's certainly possible that in the rush to do something we end up on the wrong trade-off. That's why it's import to drill down on exactly what one is claiming is ultimately important.
I don't really have a problem with vegetarians but I do struggle to understand the lines they seemingly draw at random.
Minimising harm should be a given for all but that doesn't rule out all meat eating that veganism somehow does.
So even if you take this argument seriously, the insects and field animals are better off if you grow fewer crops, which you accomplish by directly eating the crops you grow, not feeding them to livestock.
This applies to industrial meat production. Do your thoughts change in regards to hunting/fishing which doesn't (necessarily*) rely on industrial crop agriculture?
(I realize a lot of species population numbers - especially deer in the Midwest - are inflated due to the availability of crops for them to feed upon. But there are other species where this isn't necessarily the case.)
I'm not a vegan but from my perspective if minimizing harm is your goal then veganism is the only valid choice.
Any meat consumption will unquestionably increase the misery and pain the consumed animals had. Both while alive and at their final end. You're lying to yourself if you cannot admit to that.
Your argument wrt the insects and land animals is super strange too... What do you think the animals are going to eat until they're butchered? Love and good feelings?
If the focus is to reduce suffering and exploitation of animals the best action is to ban the most cruel practices by law pushing stricter ethical standards.
People will continue to eat meat everywhere they can afford it (maybe less, maybe more) veganism is not going to change that.
Figs are technically not vegan (nor vegetarian) as during the (highly complex) pollination process some fig-wasps have a wild time in the fruit, where eventually some of the wasps die and get absorbed by the fruit.
(Yes, I know tripe is not really stomach.)
I don’t really see how only eating plants is a random line. As I said in my original comment living in an industrialized society includes some amount of harming animals (for example carbon dioxide emissions harm animals).
I’m actually designing a solar powered farming robot for regenerative agriculture so we don’t have to use harmful chemicals to do farming.
But in my mind there is a clear distinction between accidentally harming insects while harvesting lentils and intentionally breeding animals in cages for slaughter.
If you think that line is arbitrary and you can’t understand it, I’m not sure I can help.
I think this is also the most likely reason because humans try to rationalize cognitive dissonance. But in the nature of the HN guidelines to try and take the strongest possible interpretation of someone's comments, I'll try to reframe it.
Suppose someone has a foundational principle that all animal life is sacred. Also suppose that person is a consequentialist. Following the first point, the life of an insect is every bit as valuable as the life of an elk*. It's easily conceivable to me that farming, in the current form that most of use get our food, kills many more animal lives per calorie than eating the elk. If one is a consequentialist, it doesn't matter if there was the specific intent to kill those thousands of insects (and fawns, and fish from runoff etc.), it only matters that my choice led to their deaths. Compare that to the hunting of the elk, where it's conceivable that only one life was lost. From that perspective, a vegetarian/vegan diet could be considered more detrimental to animal life.
(I specifically chose elk to avoid the complication of how much farming goes into livestock feed, but hopefully you understood the point)
If you're like me and don't necessarily agree with the above framework, it still highlights that most of us have unarticulated assumptions that may not hold as we go about our daily choices. E.g., even if people claim that they think all animal life is sacred, their actions display an assumption of a hierarchy to that value.
I think part of the problem is that most people in industrialized economies are extremely far removed from the food supply. I don't think it's super common, but also not unheard of for deer (especially fawns) to be killed by harvesting machinery as they bed down in fields. Considering hunting a deer may yield 60-70 lbs of meat, it might be possible to claim that reduces total animal deaths. Now I don't know how you'd arrive at a final number because most people are omnivores and still eat plants, but I don't know if I'd immediately dismiss their claim as absurd.
I see from your profile that you work in the farming machinery business so I'd be curious if there are any specific mitigations you would consider to alleviate this problem?
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10806-018-9733-8
It's complicated.
Listen, I'm no vegan, I eat meat and I don't condemn others who do the same. But "X animal can't actually feel pain" is blatant cope and I don't go for that. If you can't stomach the reality of animals feeling pain, then stop eating them.
Look, I'm just saying that a flinch isn't proof of pain. I'm not saying they don't feel pain, but if you want to prove it then you need better evidence than a flinch.
> "X animal can't actually feel pain" is blatant cope and I don't go for that. If you can't stomach the reality of animals feeling pain, then stop eating them.
My policy is to go for a quick maximally-humane kill if you're not sure. But that doesn't mean every single animal definitely feels pain.
So again, it's complicated. For example, naked mole rats famously don't feel many kinds of pain, and those are mammals!
This isn't a moral argument for me, it's simply giving a fair comparison as to what the likely choices are for these animals. The choices are not pain from humans or some pain-free experience in nature.
I will say that being boiled alive is likely one of the worst ways to go though - luckily there are nearly painless alternatives to killing lobster that many people employ.
It is not nice to the kind of colture that inflict pain on an indutrial scale and we can empathise with the torture that is mutilation and being boiled alive, does not need to be about what an octupus feels during slaughter, it can be about how to approach the act itself.
I believe that buddhism teaches to pay respect or thank the lifes that died to become your food (plant of animal); in this context the question on my mind would be whether you can honestly pay your respects to something you boiled alive because it would have tasted worse cooked another way.
It feels disrespectful to the food.
Slaughter is natural, we should find a way to be ok with how we do it.
* I like to offer egotistical arguments for altruism, just my perspective
There's no time for it to be a factor for lobster, which is going to be alive or frozen until right before you cook it.
Let’s broaden it further. Human’s system for producing meat has an insane amount of harmful externalities. The polar bear fits into an ecosystem that generally find balance.
Not to mention, straw man. You can’t sidestep the question as to whether it is moral to kill an animal a certain way by making a weak argument as to how they might have had it worse.
I would suggest for most all animals being raised with constant supply of food and having your health maintained by intelligent actors is far better a life than the brutality found in nature. Caveats apply I'm sure, but in general a farm animal is raised intentionally to eat as much as it can with as little stress as possible. I'd be curious what criteria you could give that would rank animals in nature as suffering less than animals specifically raised in captivity with a specific goal of reducing stressors.
> Human’s system for producing meat has an insane amount of harmful externalities. The polar bear fits into an ecosystem that generally find balance.
harmful to what? to the world ecosystem? You mean the ecosystem that we generally believe has had 5 mass extinction events prior to humans ranging from 75 to 95% of species being wiped out in each of those events? Is that what you call "balance"?
> Not to mention, straw man. You can’t sidestep the question as to whether it is moral to kill an animal a certain way by making a weak argument as to how they might have had it worse.
Well this isn't a strawman at all. I'm not building up some weak argument as you suggest. It's a documented and understood that most animals have predators and of prey species, predation is the most common way to die. Have you ever seen an animal kill another animal gracefully? It does exist, but it is not common.
also, yes I can bypass the moral question and I will do so gladly - completely subjective arguments are pointless, I feel very comfortable in accepting a different moral code than you and I'm fine with your moral code being different than mine.
Animals in factory farms are not free and grow up suffering and the slaughter isn't humane at all.
So taking your mode of thinking, which one would you choose:
A) Mostly a free life out in nature with a potential painful death
B) Miserable life in factory farms where you go crazy with a painful death
Also, if there wouldn't be this insane level of demand for animal meat, we wouldn't have to breed animals.
And we are worse than the polar bear. Animals are being abused, mutilated tortured on a regular basis. Plus all the other damage our meat addiction causes, i.e. destruction of our biosphere and degrading working conditions for people having to work in those factory farms or slaughter houses.
"your withdrawal from a hot kettle is a different pain from the pain that you then contemplate. In the first case, the pain from withdrawal from a kettle, there is no qualia, no meta-representation."
From his framework, to truly "experience" pain, there needs to be a sense of self. You need higher levels of cognition for the "meta-representation" that causes suffering in our human conceptualization of the term. (There's some interesting brain lesion studies about people who lack this sense of self. They can witness their own body interacting with the environment but have no actual "experience" of the action; it's as if they are watching someone else perform it.) Everything more primitive to that higher cognitive function is just stimulus-response. For example, Gerald Engelman draws the line at lobsters in terms of what "experiences" pain and suffering. The implication being anything below that from a neural perspective would be cruelty-free to consume.
More broadly the issue here is that crabs and lobsters (and in East Asia often fish and all seafood) are sold alive because of freshness and quality considerations.
So, IMHO the only way to enforce a ban on boiling lobsters alive is to ban selling lobsters alive and to create a whole raft of requirements similar to the slaughter of animals. In the article that's the proposal:
"It recommends against ... the sale of live decapod crustaceans to untrained, non-expert handlers"
Interestingly, and maybe I'm wrong, I don't think that the sale of live animals to random people is currently banned in the UK (i.e. I can buy a live sheep if I want to, as far as I know). It's the slaughter that is controlled. If so this proposal goes further.
Practically speaking, most people buying a lobster for home cooking treat it as "ready to cook" the same as they would a mutton steak from that same grocer. So I think the different treatment makes sense.
I find “This is water” to be especially poignant.