World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate | Hacker News Reader

World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

reuters.com

236 pointshhs407 comments

I used to do research at the Shedd Aquarium. After watching a particularly clever octopus defeat every attempt to prevent him leaving his enclosure at night, I am absolutely confident that, just like certain aquatic mammals such as Orca whales, that we only devalue their intelligence because they were unfortunate enough to not be in a situation where they could develop significant tool use and the cultural artifacts that said tool use and creation enables.

In previous threads on this topic I don't think I've explained deeply why I find their defeat of our team so impressive. This research group contained a multidisciplinary set of scientists. I was the only member that did not have a PhD; almost every team member had completed at least one significant postdoc as well (think Stanford, UChicago, Caltech, prestigious national labs, etc). We had applied science and engineering talents in addition to pure science, so this wasn't a case of not being able to develop realistic escape prevention mechanisms due to the team being too theoretical. The longest we were able to stop this clever guy from escaping with one of our implementations was 4 days. He usually made us look like idiots the very evening after we installed our new prevention device.

Not only this, the octopus made very clear that he had an extremely well developed memory. He clearly recalled his favorite scientist who hadn't visited in a few years when, as soon as said scientist entered the room, the octopus ignored the rest of us and followed him the entire time he would be in the room. He also became what I can only describe as depressed when that individual departed once again; this was a period of time when he stopped eating as much, moved much more lethargically, and his escape attempts were half-hearted - this was the period when he finally took more than one day to break our attempts at keeping him in.

Further, he absolutely had a sense of humour. After seeing us crack up laughing at him wearing this plastic rings we had put in his tank as jewelry (we were setting up some sort of exam that I can no longer recall the purpose of) by placing them on his tentacles, he would do so every time we entered the room. Otherwise, he ignored the rings entirely when we were not present.

I did not eat octopus prior to this but I became firmly in support of encouraging everyone to avoid eating octopus and related creatures after this experience. Not only do I think they're immensely intelligent animals, I am firmly convinced that this particular specimen was smarter than a number of humans that I have met.

Gonna go out on a limb (hah) and guess that his winning strategy 9/10 times was "squeeze through thing you didn't think he could squeeze through."

That's part of it but he had an ability to break locks and dismantle constructs with ease. I realized after a while he paid immense attention to how we installed every new addition to his habitat and then would seemingly aim to deconstruct our creations using the knowledge he picked up from our installation work. I truly am in awe of these creatures, especially after one of the long time Shedd workers told me that this particular octopus was just one of a group of very smart cephalopods they've had and that one of his relatives was even more intelligent!

That's fascinating. Would love to hear about what kinds of contraptions you made that were breakable, given I'm struggling to imagine how you couldn't conceive of a way to keep said octopus trapped. How difficult can it be?

As noted above - you leave the tiniest hole and they'll escape. Or we might be trying to confine him to a portion of the habitat for a certain purpose and he would break his way out of his "sub-domain".

This is fabulous.

It's clear from just watching video clips of them that it's not just about being able to squeeze through gaps. They evidently experience puzzles with an enthusiasm that is unusual even in puzzle-solving birds, can seemingly understand quite complex things like how to non-destructively unscrew bottle tops, and from what I can gather they are kind of obsessed with jars and containers?

As an untrained nerd I have often wondered if they have, due to the maximally prehensile nature of their bodies, a genuinely superhuman, volumetric cognition of 3D shape -- a way to "glance" with their touch senses at an object they hold and recall every detail of its shape later, a way to look at a semi-enclosed space and assess how their bodies will precisely fill it, to then look at an object and know what would feel like to cover it, etc.

The lack of trial and error when you see some of these puzzles being solved suggests they might have a much better grasp of 3D shape interaction than adult humans.

They love playing with containers and jars, absolutely. The male I have been describing especially enjoyed opening tightly sealed jars - although he displayed an aversion to all jars for a bit of time after one of the few times we put him with the octopus I'd call the "alpha female". He had handed her a large jar to play with, in what I would describe as an act of kindness. She proceeded to open it and take it back to him. He squeezed inside the jar - and then with intense rapidity, she immediately began screwing the lid back on, trapping him inside. We had to let the poor guy out after she waltzed away and seemingly had zero interest in letting him out. We never let the two of them play together unsupervised after that, worried for his safety.

Oof! A jarring misunderstanding about personal space.

>a way to "glance" with their touch senses at an object they hold and recall every detail of its shape later, a way to look at a semi-enclosed space and assess how their bodies will precisely fill it, to then look at an object and know what would feel like to cover it, etc.

Watching an Octopus effortlessly change colour, size and texture to camouflage themselves might lend to this.

> Watching an Octopus effortlessly change colour, size and texture to camouflage themselves might lend to this.

Yes -- I was thinking about this bit myself.

I don't know whether it has been demonstrated that they have any kind of conscious control over this texture control, or whether it happens as a sort of evolved feedback loop, but I did wonder.

> I did not eat octopus prior to this but I became firmly in support of encouraging everyone to avoid eating octopus and related creatures after this experience. Not only do I think they're immensely intelligent animals, I am firmly convinced that this particular specimen was smarter than a number of humans that I have met.

Where I live octopus is a very popular food, representative of our gastronomy. I love everything about eating it. But, as you said, the notion that these are highly intelligent animals has been creeping into me. I've also experienced over this last decade how much more intelligent birds are than previously thought, so I can connect the dots. Also, pigs.

Still, I might die with this moral debacle active, for much I want to respect life in general, I don't think I can give up the party surrounding octopus gastronomy. Time will tell.

I'm trying to cut meats out of my diet slowly. All seafood was easy as I was never that into it. Pig meat on the other hand... Bacon, Ham, Pork, etc. I knew that it had to go. So I started with that.

Currently I'm an opportunitarian. Chicken is the meat of choice if I can't handle the vegetarian option, otherwise beef. But pig and all seafood is gone from my diet. My hope is that plant-based or cultured meat improves to the point where I don't have these ethical dilemmas anymore. Until then I'll do my best.

I know it's not perfect but it's something. I think more people need to understand that eating and culture are hard to seperate and we need to accomodate that. Making meat a sometimes food is the first step.

In our case we have to avoid gluten, which means avoiding wheats. Most vegetarian dishes contain wheat in some form. So far I haven’t been able to create a week menu with sufficient nutrients without meat or gluten.

It would mean taking supplements. Not sure whether I can stomach the hit to enjoying food it would entail.

Maize, rice, potatoes, sweat potatoes, bananas are among the alternative sources that can provide as much starch as wheat, but without any gluten.

I do not have gluten intolerance, but I like better the sources of starch mentioned above, so there are decades since I have last eaten wheat or any of its relatives that contain gluten.

However, I eat only food that I prepare myself from raw ingredients, so I can control precisely its composition. Therefore I can easily avoid what I do not want, e.g. wheat, sugar or undesirable fat sources.

While avoiding gluten is easy, completely avoiding meat is much more difficult, because unlike some kinds of meat, e.g. turkey meat, which are almost pure protein, so you can easily make a menu with a small quantity of meat that is enough to cover your daily needs, covering the same needs with vegetable protein is difficult.

The same small quantity of protein requires either a much larger quantity of vegetables with high protein content and mixed from at least 2 different kinds with complementary amino-acid profile, which will provide much more calories than meat, so to compensate you will have to eat less of other vegetables that you might like more, or you might want to replace meat with vegetable protein extracts, but those are much more expensive than meat and I would not trust their producers to use the best extraction procedures instead of using the cheapest extraction methods.

For now, I do not have enough time and money to eat completely vegan food, so I make 2 exceptions.

My daily menus include 160 g of turkey meat and a spoon of fish oil.

Because these 2 items cover the required daily intake for everything that is hard to get from completely vegan food, I am free to choose the rest of the food from a large variety of strictly non-animal sources.

Tried to reduce the meat in my diet, to be honest even beforehand I was probably under the average. But I had hard time staying in pure veg diet. But I never managed to stay on only vegetarian diet. I am not monitoring myself but have few days of no meat a week, depending on my mood and whats in fridge.

I also only eat free range meat now, its much more ethical (in my mind at least). You still eat animals, but at least they had a safe environment to live in. I am not feeling guilty and I think its ok to just reduce amounts and experiment with veg dishes.

I at least appreciate your attempts! I'm completely plant-based, but I'm firmly with you that making meat a "sometimes" food is a great idea.

I think a lot of people nowadays seem to be completely one side or the other on a range of topics and it doesn't need to be so clear cut.

Good for you. Keep at it! I became a vegetarian a year ago, at the age of 42, when my eating habits were firmly established. I loved meat and seafood of all kinds, and was the sort of carnivore who was proud of eating the weirdest and bloodiest animal parts available. But at some point I started actually thinking about the animals and the ethics of killing for food, and I couldn’t conscience it any more. Now that you are thinking about it too, I expect your journey will end with you also ceasing to eat meat. Your other option is to tamp down those feelings and ignore what you are feeling is wrong. For good people, that is not easy.

I know you didn’t ask for advice, so apologies in advance, but a really helpful thing is to simply ensure you have plentiful vegetarian food available, so you don’t get too hungry. Eg nuts, seeds, fruit (including dried), plus stuff you can easily use to whip up tasty dishes, like rice you’ve already cooked and can fry with mushrooms or something. At this point the only things I miss are cured meats like ham and salami. But I eat very well every day and in general feel very happy with my choice.

Much respect to you and good luck!

I'm vegan, I love it when people to take this approach. I went through the same process: I eliminated red meat first, then chicken, then fish, hung out for a while as vegetarian, then dropped honey/dairy, and then (hardest step) cheese before finally making the jump to full veganism. Currently trying to reduce cocoa, though I haven't completely eliminated it yet.

Part of what I like about people taking the more gradual approach is that I think they're much less likely to hit a wall and then go back to eating everything. Instead, every step of the process starts from a position of security/safety, and it ends up looking more like a person saying, "I'm comfortable not eating X, maybe I could also be comfortable not eating Y." And I think that makes things a lot less intimidating, and I think it makes it easier to build a different palete, and I think it means that each step is something that's small and surmountable rather than forcing you to build a substitute for every single food at once.

One thing I did as even a micro-step for some categories like dairy was to allow myself to order certain food at a restaurant but not buy it at a grocery store. You could also do the opposite -- depending on where you live, going vegetarian/vegan at restaurants is a good way of figuring out what alternative foods exist and what options you have for meat/dairy replacements.

And honestly, I also think this approach lines up somewhat well with veganism's overall philosophy, which is not about being in a position of moral superiority or about being perfect, it's about reducing harm. Going vegan doesn't mean none of your consumption contributes to suffering, it just reduces that number a bit. And the gradual process (on top of being (imo) easier to do and being less likely to result in backsliding to older habits) also kind of forces the person to live for a while in an uncomfortable place where they're trying to do better and aren't necessarily happy with their efforts or where they currently are. Again opinion me, but I think that's a good emotion for people to get used to if they become vegan; it guards against some of the tendency towards self-importance or pride that gets associated with veganism sometimes. I think it's good to be in a mindset of "X causes suffering, and independent of any other factor do I personally need to do X?"

Of course I'm hoping people go further than just reducing meat consumption, and I do hope that people don't take one step and say, "that's good enough, I don't need to ever think about this again." I also encourage taking tangible steps where you completely cut a food out rather than just reduce it, because "reducing" is a really fuzzy word that is easy to backslide on, and eliminating a food from a diet is a lot more tangible. But even if someone doesn't go any further or take those more tangible steps, reducing is still better than nothing. And I just think -- start with reducing, and see what happens. If you find out you can reduce, then maybe you can stretch a bit further and full-on eliminate that specific animal product, and then maybe you can stretch a bit further again and repeat the process with something else.

You get used to just looking around creatively at your life to see if there are small improvements to your consumption habits you can make, and then afterwards looking around again to see if there are new improvements you can make. I make vegan meals and enjoy certain vegetables now that I would not have had either the knowledge to pull off or the palete to enjoy when I started reducing meat. I think back to when I was getting rid of beef/pork, and there are literally foods that I didn't like back then that are now solid meat substitutes for me.

To paraphrase Planck, ethics advances one funeral at a time. There are many historical activities which were condoned at the time but now seem abhorrent to us. Participants (or perpetrators, depending on how judgemental you are feeling) in those unethical activities probably never fully recanted, and the best thing they did was to somehow manage not to pass the desire on to the next generation.

So you're saying you're ok eating dumber animals and leave the intelligent ones alive. Interesting…

Yeah, I don't totally get equating greater intelligence with greater capacity to suffer.

Personally, if I have to eat an animal, I'd much rather focus first and foremost on eating the creature that has been killed in as painless, immediate and stressless a way as possible. If choosing between meat options that all have been relatively humanely slaughtered, then I might start to look at other factors such as intelligence or environmental impact of a particular species being raised for food.

That seems like a reasonable heuristic and I understand why someone might feel drawn to put a greater inherent value on intelligent species on an emotional level, but I just don't see the relevance of intelligence in and of itself in terms of ethics.

The problem is harming sentient, conscious creatures. No consciousness, no problem. More consciousness, more problem. Intelligence is not the same as consciousness, but they are highly correlated.

Greater intelligence allows greater introspection, prediction, rumination; allows one to build a model of self and environment not possible at lower intelligence. The suffering that is possible when you can anticipate your death, or imagine a hopeless future, turns otherwise neutral situations into hells.

This is a double edged sword: an animal that is incapable of imagining a hopeless future may also be incapable of understanding that certain terrors it faces are temporary, and thus may live in anguish much more as it has a poorer mental model of its own situation.

This is true, for example I've handled both captive and wild animals naive to humans from the same species (for conservation related research). The captive ones are a bit feisty, but the wild ones are so terrified they are basically in shock and won't move.

How do you measure that? I mean, both intelligence, emotions, etc. I think your morals are so subjective that will not matter. You should eat animals based on more objective points, like nutritional factor, availability, rather than emotional arguments.

How to measure.. capacity to suffer or intelligence? Both are a active fields of research, the former in the neurobiology, animal welfare, ethology space.

I should add though, I think the science on the nature of sentience and suffering is not quite at a point to support some of the recent proclaimations made on the subject. There's enough there though that I reckon the precautionary principle is defensible though.

Also, to be fair to the people arguing for reducing suffering, doing so can be defended in a entirely rational ethical framework, it need not be an emotional argument. I'm just not sure within that framework how defensible it is to assume intelligence and potential capacity to suffer are correlated for many of the 'higher' animals we eat.

I guess it's a question of when does your moral kicks in and makes you feel bad about the kill.

I've seen and participated both in killing of pig and chicken. Multiple pigs are always a problem that needs to be addressed as they go crazy when they hear the first one die. When you kill a chicken and bleed it out to the ground the other chickens come to pick the blood and totally incapable of realizing the same fate will come to them.

Even lower are insects like a wasp. If you cut its head it will try to eat it then when that fails it grabs it's own head and fly it to home because its second algorithm is called "gather food". I'm not even sure you can call this "intelligence".

I have serious problems killing pigs and I would never attempt one because it feels wrong. But chickens are dumb man, I don't have any problems killing and eating them whatsoever.

I am mainly a vegetarian, although I will eat ethically raised eggs and dairy products. I grew up in farm country and will also, on a very rare occasion, eat cattle raised on a proper farm/ranch - even though I absolutely love cows, who can be extremely affectionate, I believe they can be slaughtered relatively humanely.

Cephalopods, on the other hand, are extremely difficult to farm in the wild or cull. They show immense and immediate signs of stress, such as attacking others or themselves, going as far to tear off limbs or kill others/commit suicide. I've never seen a cow, when properly taken through the slaughter process (such as using processes innovated by Temple Grandin), express anywhere near that level of despondent agony prior to their death, which is thankfully nearly instantaneous when done properly. The intense response by octopi to their impending slaughter shows me a level of emotion and intelligence that is eerily close to our own.

> going as far to tear off limbs or kill others/commit suicide.

Not to distract to much from your wider point, but I was under the impression that most species of octopi are solitary and it was not uncommon for them to kill and even eat each other on encounters even when not captured for slaughter. Is that not the case?

This is absolutely true - but the immediacy and severity of these attacks when being "farmed" in the wild is brutal and very much unlike the occasional attacks in the wild, which aren't necessarily nearly as fatal nor as likely to result in loss of limb(s).

> I grew up in farm country and will also, on a very rare occasion, eat cattle raised on a proper farm/ranch - even though I absolutely love cows, who can be extremely affectionate, I believe they can be slaughtered relatively humanely.

I agree that eg Cattle can have a good life living on pastoral land eating grass and so on. Can be slaughtered humanely close to home. That meat born, raised and slaughtered all within 20-30 miles of the consumer can be relatively low impact.

I'd quite like to only eat meat matching that description. I'd also like to minimise my food miles overall. But honestly it's not trivial to even approach the problem when eating out. Even the supermarket makes for a long slow shopping process looking for anything fresh that hasn't been flown in.

I am simply too lazy to be good about this, so outside of weekends when I have time to go to a butcher or a farm shop... well I'm part of the problem

> The intense response by octopi to their impending slaughter shows me a level of emotion and intelligence that is eerily close to our own.

It’s almost an expression of existential dread and the realization the end is nigh.

I totally get where you are coming from, but I want to discuss one thing you mentioned.

You decided to stop eating octopus, because they're very smart animals. Which is understandable to me. But why do you decide what animals to eat, based on how intelligent they seem to us? If we turn that argument around, it's okay to eat an animal if its 'dumb'. Why is that so?

To show my perspective, I am becoming more vegetarian the more time passes, because I just can't justify anymore how we treat animals which are meant for comsumption - Forcefully impregnating them, taking their kids away, keeping them in cages yada yada yada. Which means that for me it does not matter how subjectively or objectively intelligent an animal is, same as how I don't treat humans based on their intelligence. Mostly. Of course, if I have to explain something to another human, my explanation will vary on how intelligent they seem to me. But I think you know what I mean :)

As far as I know, pigs are extremely intelligent. Maybe not on the level of an octopus, but still. So, do you eat pig?

And to end, I am not trying to accuse you of any wrongdoing or whatever, its just very interesting to me and I want to talk about it.

I eat all animals, octopus is delicious. What I do practice is compassion and respect for when I do, going out of my way to ensure it was done so in as an ethical and sustainable way as possible. Much of my protein these days I catch myself.

Seems like kind of an oxymoron to have a living being killed and subsequently eaten, then claim compassion and respect.

So you hate your food?

No, not at all. I don't claim to love and have compassion without backing it up.

An unnecessary killing is never respectful. You can attach whatever rituals and formalities to the process to ease your conscience, but at the end of the day if you kill a sentient animal for momentary pleasure, you don’t respect it in the slightest.

> compassion and respect

I hope the long-dead animal on your plate will be able to appreciate your compassion and respect ;)

> ethical and sustainable way

How would you describe ethical and sustainable meat production, or in other words, what qualifies as ethical and sustainable for you?

Maybe it’s based on the assumption that more complex organisms are more sensitive and thus the suffering that is experienced is bigger.

Could be, yes. Although I do wonder if the average octopus suffers more when being killed than the average cow. If so, then I wonder if that relates to intelligence or to other factors. Structure of nerves etc.

If an octopus wasn't able to feel anything, it would again be okay to eat it? Or if it was sedated before killing it, would that change anything?

Lots of open questions I guess, but I'm just brainstorming a bit :)

Apologies this wasn't more clear and I am sorry I didn't get back to you sooner; I have never been a consumer of octopus or cephalopods more broadly. I rarely eat meat in general - maybe once a year - and when I do, I only eat meat that has been raised on a small farm humanely and is likewise slaughtered humanely.

The closest I get to regular meat eating is consumption of eggs and dairy. I get both from small, local farms. The chickens are free range and the farmers avoid industrial egg farming mechanisms that result in unnecessary death of grown animals. The cattle are not pumped with grotesque amounts of hormones nor are they milked on factory-like rotating milk pumps that maximize output and ignore the unneeded stress placed on the animals.

Hope this makes sense, as I agree with all the concerns you raised.

If there will force to push for veganism, it won’t be PETAs approach of showing grotesque treatment of animals in factory farms. It will be death-by-a-thousand cuts from individual anecdotes of animals demonstrating human-like qualities.

To me the most important questions are, does living a farm style life cause them undue distress and harm, and will they realize they are on a farm instead of just some weird octopus community.

For example, the cows I own I can keep on my land and they are perfectly content to munch grass around the different pastures throughout the year as they are rotated, and have free clean shelter in the barn and free hay in the winter. The only thing containing them is a thin strand of wire which they can (and have) easily walked through at any point in time without even trying, usually to reach an especially tall clump of weeds on the other side. For most of their life they are under basically zero stress due to protections from the environment and predators and have no desire to leave or look for more. They don't feel trapped and keeping them contained is more of a suggestion that they don't wander off and get lost. While at the end it sucks they will be distressed when loaded up in a trailer and taken down the road to the slaughterhouse, but they aren't thinking "Oh my god they are going to kill and eat me!",they are just bewildered by the wild experience of being driven down a road in a trailer, then let out in a new place with maybe some other cows around, and are instantly KOed when they are to be slaughtered.

I would have very different feelings about it if they lived in shitty life trapped in a little cage always hoping and trying to find a way out, feared humans as they came around stealing their friends away from them at random times assuming they were being eaten. And I do feel that way about, and don't buy, a lot of factory meat for the contained caged lives they experience when there are known better, healthier, more sustainable, and more ethical ways of caring for farm animals that goes back thousands of years.

can you really compare cows to octopuses? are there even wild cows?

The wild ancestor of cows is extinct, so technically they would all be feral cows, but there are places where feral cows have ran around for a few generations alone that you might consider wild.

However their extensive past breeding still brings into question their actual intelligence and cognitive abilities compared to their wild ancestor, most animals inadvertently are bred to be significantly dumber during domestication because they are the easiest to handle and control.

there are wild goats, and the goats on a farm live pretty much the same life as cows do.

Where I am in Vanuatu in the south Pacific we have wild cows in the bush. Originally, these cows would have been domestic but escaped and they raise their young in the bush and now people hunt wild cows. Cows are usually kept by a rope around their neck tied to a tree and every couple days move the cow to a new area to let them access fresh vegetation. There are also some big plantations for coconuts and these usually have cows which if they break a fence will allow many to escape into the bush and hills.

People here use a dozen or so dogs to sniff out wild animals in the bush and chase them down until they tire enough for the hunters to catch up and spear the animal. These hunting parties can take days of hanging out and following the dogs or just one if lucky. Then carrying home giant cuts of meat is the hard part which often requires the hunting party to leave a lot of fresh meat behind.

I didn’t know Vanuatu was actually that big. It looks like just that thin strip of land on the map.

BTW, I just find it fascinating to be talking to someone from Vanuatu here. HN rocks.

I think the gaur is a legitimately "wild cow" (wild bovine anyway):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaur

I don't think it's a feral breed, coming from once domesticated animals, but I may be wrong.

Octos aren't social creatures.

It varies, several species have been found to be social.

How long do your cows live before they are sent to slaughter?

I’ve heard this called the “one bad day” approach. The animals have a good life with only one bad day. In my opinion it’s probably the most ethical way to keep animals if the intent is to slaughter them at some point.

A non-obvious issue here is that often these animals are sent to slaughter around 12-24 months when they can live happily up to 25 years.

without farming they cease to exist at all...

So 0 bad days.

NaN bad days.

One way to think about it – Imagine a superior alien civilization farming humans and killing them for food at 12-24 months. Does that feel acceptable?

a more equal comparison would be an adolescence to mature human... So 12-18 years? Food, shelter & protection provided? Blissfully unaware of my predetermined fate?

And if they don't eat me, I never exist in the first place?

I'd opt to be eaten.

Just seems like the aliens would be better off eating cows...

I’m not a vegetarian and I still really hate that “if I wasn’t farmed I wouldn’t exist at all” argument because it’s really just an excuse to be shitty to other life forms.

The fact is if you didn’t exist then you wouldn’t care either way, so it’s a moot argument. The fact that you do exist changes that, not excuses it. Or in other words: we are not doing other species a favour by eating them.

It’s also worth noting that many of the species we far isn’t the natural evolution of that animal. They’ve been bread to be fatter, or more docile etc. Many of the species suffer from health issues due to breeding that their natural cousins do not. The reason a lot of these animals seem suited to farming is because man has bread them that way. This isn’t doing these animals a favour either. It’s purely for man’s own benefit.

If farming result in the existence of happy animals then the process definitely favors them. If it results in their unhappy existence then it does not favor them.

The argument around doing them the favor of providing them existence relies on them having a nice life, until the day we eat them. It sounds like you are opposed to them coming into existence because it means they exist in existential agony.

Also that physical agony is a near certainty, by your last paragraph. But that does not seem to be the core of your objection.

When done responsibly, it's pretty clear ranch cattle are in the same or less physical agony as their counter parts. Where I live, it's not uncommon to see wild elk, antelope and sometimes even bison grazing alongside cattle. The wild ones must fend off predators and often starve during the winters. Cattle do not.

The same cannot be said for industrial scale ranching. In fact, I think the production of dairy is typically far more more inhumane than that of beef.

> It sounds like you are opposed to them coming into existence because it means they exist in existential agony.

No, I’m opposed to stupid arguments where you justify being a carnivore because you’re somehow doing these creatures a favour by farming them. You’re not. If you’re going to eat meat, and I have zero issues with being a carnivore, then you have to reconcile the fact that what you’re doing is immoral for the animals but you’re doing it for your own personal survival. At least call a spade a spade rather than creating these stupid mental paradoxes where you’re the hero for breeding docile animals and then cooking their flesh.

It’s all about taking responsibility for your actions and respecting the consequences they have.

But as I pointed out, it's not a stupid argument if the animals are provided with a nice life until they serve their delicious end. It's a win-win if they are treated with care.

>a more equal comparison would be an adolescence to mature human... So 12-18 years? Food, shelter & protection provided? Blissfully unaware of my predetermined fate?

So basically the plot of the Never Let Me Go. Except you can't really get the blissfully unaware of my predetermined fate thing if the organisms are intelligent.

Also similar to The Promised Neverland.

If they were never born, is that really so bad?

Are you ok with Cows becoming extinct?

Being farmed or being extinct are not the only two choices

Yes. If your never born, you can’t suffer.

Do they actually live 25 years in the wild on average? My understanding was that wild animals have dramatically shorter lives than the same animals in captivity, as a general rule. The exact difference varies from species to species but typically the lifespan would be around half.

source of that general rule?

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/286147

The general rule was my own synthesis from what little I know of this subject. This study is one of the main sources I used to drive my current understanding. You can also try this search term: "do wild animals die of old age?"

Whether a wolf would kill a cow before its 25 years old doesn’t affect our moral duty to not kill animals unnecessarily and prematurely.

Perhaps not under your preferred moral system. But yours is not the only moral system. It should be obvious that there are plenty of moral systems where counterfactuals do indeed affect the morality of actions (e.g. any utilitarian system or compound system with a utilitarian component).

What moral belief system posits that it is moral to do something simply because someone else would do it?

Does anyone actual subscribe to such a belief? Do you?

I think you're reading me more broadly than I meant you to. As I mentioned in my comment, at a minimum, any utilitarian system would consider an action's morality in light of what would happen in the absence of that action. Yes, people absolutely do subscribe to utilitarian systems, at least as a component of their overall moral stance.

There are also of course many moral systems that do not value the welfare of other species as highly as that of humans.

We generally don't kill animals "unnecessarily". We kill them to eat them. If we could eat them without killing them, we wouldn't kill them.

We also don't kill them "prematurely". We kill them when it's time to eat them, or else to relieve them of pain.

Also, since we're onto wolves, wolves will kill animals and not eat them (see "surplus killing" article on wikipedia). Conversely, wolves will often eat animals without killing them first. Humans at the very least kill our food before we eat it most of the time.

Is eating them 'necessary' if we can sustain ourselves without killing them?

I don't know. Is it necessary to shower if you can sustain yourself without it?

I'm asking because your comment is about the meaning of the word "necessary" but the same meaning should apply to every other human activity, not just food. But the discussion about necessity crops up about food, in particular.

Also, I understand that the comparison to showers might sound irrelevant to the discussion about the ethics of eating meat, but it turns out it is anything but. I don't want to preempt your opinion, so I'll leave it at that, but I'm not just making a glib riposte to your comment. Despite appearances, this is an important question: how necessary is it to shower?

When we say that it is unnecessary to eat animals, we mean it is unnecessary in order to survive and be healthy.

So then using that same metric to answer your question about showers, I think it’s fair to say that showers are absolutely not necessary. Nice, sure. Perhaps necessary according to social norms, probably. Required for a normal life span with average levels of health? Nah.

cheese_goddess, if I ever get you to see the validity of veganism, or at least cede a point, I’ll die a happy person. I don’t see that ever happening though. You are my HN veganism white whale.

> cheese_goddess, if I ever get you to see the validity of veganism, or at least cede a point, I’ll die a happy person. I don’t see that ever happening though. You are my HN veganism white whale.

That's creepy stalker behavior - again.

lmao you truly are insane

It’s not an issue to the animals. They aren’t made aware of their impending death and made to ponder what more of a life they could have lived. From their perspective they are alive and then suddenly, not.

I wish I could still believe that.

If you have the time and stomach I'd recommend search up slaughterhouse footage. I'll let you judge for yourself what they're feeling in those moment.

If it can be proved that it really would be just one bad day, e.g. if the animals don't figure out that their friends are disappearing one by one and the same is about to happen to them any day.

Clearly the burden of proof is not on the animals.

In a way, it applies to dogs too. I have the privilege of giving my dog a way out of pain: I can put them down. That decision rests with me, and ultimately, one day, I will have to make it. I may choose every day to feed my dog the best diet I can afford, I'll give her massages, I'll snuggle her, care for her when she's sick, but ultimately, one day, I know I will have the choice to spare her the pain of dying a painful death. In some ways, I'm jealous of that choice, as a man who has faced his own mortality before.

One of my great regrets in life so far is shirking that responsibility and selfishly allowing a dog to last too long. I’ve learned from it and since had to make that decision again and actually made a decision this time but the guilt remains. It’s a dreadful responsibility.

While I don't know you or your dog - imagine for a moment if you could talk to your dog one last time and tell them the regret you feel. Do you think they would want you to regret the end, or remember all the love before that day?

In all my experience with dogs (and animals in general), one of the many lessons they have taught me is forgiveness. Both of others and myself.

You made a decision to give that animal the best life you could.

Note the "you could" part.

You did the best you could, and you obviously learned from your mistakes. Don't be hard on yourself, that's everyone else's job and they don't need the help.

> allowing a dog to last too long

I felt this way with the first dog I raised outside of my parents house. Things were slow but fast. One day I found a boil on her neck, rushed her to the hospital only to walk out with no answers a mountain of bills. I spent months seeking more answers with new testing. She was still the same old dog, playing with my other dog constantly. She'd do silly things, demand walks and pets, and stomp/parade around the house with her toys. I begged every night that she make it to her tenth birthday. She did, then shortly after her birthday she'd struggle to eat for days at a time and was acting sleepy. On the third day I brought her to the vet and did the deed.

It still hurts remembering her sleepily lay in my lap one last time and watching the life quietly slip away. That was the life I nurtured and the life that guided me to be more of a man every day. A life that demanded evolution and growth out of me in the most compassionate way possible. The vet felt her stomach and said, "Her liver is covered in tumors. You did the right thing." Then I began to reflect; had I been selfish? When I found the boil, was that when I should've done it? What about after all the testing? What about when she'd protest her food for a day? Two? Inevitably, I decided somehow the magical number was three.

The only thing that gives me solace is that I consulted the vet constantly on when was the right time. She'd never directly answered me; that choice was mine, a choice I absolutely feared. The advice that sticks out was, "When the dog you know stops being the dog you know." I know in my life I'll have to do this again and I don't think it'll ever get any easier. There's no right answers to this intersection of life, only wrong and less wrong ones. Love is a very tricky thing, especially with a friend that can't say much.

I have had to put 2 pets down due to illness. It was hard to do, and seeing them struggling not to fall asleep was heartbreaking.

In just about every way possible that death is a world apart from what we do to most animals we eat. What we have deemed "humane" slaughter is really nothing else than an attempt to make the word humane devoid of all meaning. I stopped eating meat after seeing how a cow and some pigs from the local organic farm (held as a poster child by the meat industry in my country) were slaughtered.

They were afraid from the first second. The pigs lost consciousness while grasping for air in panic in a co2 gas chamber.

It was awful and nothing short of a disgrace.

New laws and policies promoted by the meat industry has now made inquisitions like mine impossible. All of this happens behind closed doors. I will never trust the industry to fix this. They will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into treating animals with respect.

It's such a disgrace they use CO2. The one gas that the body can detect and percieve as danger and do anything to avoid and get rid of. They use it only because it's cheap.

They could have used argon, helium, maybe even nitrogen. Anything else that can lower oxygen concentration without the body noticing bacause it doesn't detect low oxygen levels, just high CO2 levels when you suffocate.

The jury is still out which gas is the best. I hope it'll be resolved before it's my time to go.

I stopped eating any animal products after that ordeal and realized I don't need to. There are so many problems with the meat industry anyway, so I am pretty much relieved to not have to think about it.

Even still, your cows live a fraction of their natural lifespans. A few years as opposed to 10+

I know you mean lifespan if left to die of natural causes, but To be honest the “natural lifespan” of a cow is 0 years and the average life of a cow is a picnic compared to the hardships faced by a comparable natural animal in the wild.

Edit: clarified distinction in understood meaning.

We will look back with astonishment at the sheer madness of killing animals and eating them.

Doesn't it make you want to go back in time to the moment that humans invented the concept of eating animal flesh and putting a stop to it?

No. Because our brains would never have evolved to their current state without meat, and the early animal meat was probably scavenged not hunted. At least wait until agriculture developed to start the ethical debate.

Humans didn't "invent" the concept of eating other animals. We evolved to do so, just like all the other carnivores & omnivores

As another poster has already said, becoming predators was an absolutely necessary stage for humans to become as intelligent as they are now, so we cannot regret it or wish that it has not happened.

Even many of the people who abhor the most to see the death of other animals cannot abstain to admire the beauty of the actions of top predators like tigers/jaguars or octopuses.

Nevertheless, now we are approaching quickly the moment when killing other animals in order to use their body for food or for producing various useful substances is no longer needed, so we should stop this as soon as it becomes possible.

Unfortunately we still need some technological developments for this to become feasible everywhere.

I would like to be completely vegan, but for now there still exist 2 food ingredients of animal origin that I consume, because any equivalent vegan alternatives for them are much more expensive than I can afford.

However, the bulk of the food, which provides most of the energy, can already be restricted to non-animal origins, for everyone, everywhere.

No, we definitely won't.

But we did finally realize that other races aren't inferior. And that women are equals. So I have hope, that some day we would stop taking their lives just for having a good time. Killing them isn't essential for our survival, or even health.

Who are you speaking on behalf of when you say "our"?

The species, obviously

Not to be overly argumentative, but what a small world view you seem to have. The world certainly doesn't realize that other races aren't inferior and that women are equals. Sorry =[

Why not? We'll move on to better things and eating corpses will be just gross.

It would be too gross even today for many people if there weren't any people with stronger stomachs around to prepare and partition corpses for them.

There is not a single area in food production that future us won't look back with astonishment at the sheer madness. The amount of destruction and suffering that regular farming does with pesticides, herbicide, fertilizers, deforestation, water and air pollution is on a planet scale. It insane how much destruction we do just so a few people has the luxury to eat a few culturally selected fresh vegetables year round while still living in cities (and also throwing away most of the food). Most of the worlds biodiversity in insects are gone, as well as most of the world fresh water supplies and forests. Complete oceans, like the Baltic ocean, have been turned into a death trap for animals as a result of fertilizers, slowly killing fish and other animals through suffocation or starvation.

Here is hope that the future realize that the only ethical way to produce food is through methods that neither require land, fertilizers or fresh water. This is also the only way forward if the worlds populations will continue to increase.

Is it really ‘free clean shelter’ and ‘free hay’ if, in exchange, their flesh is being harvested at some point? I applaud your efforts for humane animal consumption and I’m shamefully nowhere near your commitment. But I just took issue with the small problem in the mental model.

"Free clean shelter and hay" are the mental model of the cow.

Does that work for, for example, veal or lamb?

Don't they mind having their kids taken away from them though?

That is one of the saddest parts, and one that a lot of people ignore.

> does living a farm style life cause them undue distress and harm, and will they realize they are on a farm instead of just some weird octopus community.

Why even take the chance then, other than to show greed and a lack of empathy?

Once head transplant works we will have this dilemma for human clones as shown in “Island” movie.

I've had several people in my life tell me after more intense studies of octopi they refuse to eat them.

While I've seen a couple of documentaries on the subject, I won't profess to know as much, but the essential argument has been that they're extremely intelligent, emotional animals. It's akin to eating a dog or cat (which might be acceptable in some parts of the world, but pretty shunned in the west).

It's convincing enough for me, I also stopped eating octopus.

A soft start if you want to research, Netflix currently has "My Octopus Teacher" streaming.

Even cows are extremely intelligent and emotional animals. Did you stop eating them?

Pigs and chickens too.

I'm not joining in on the ethics of meat eating debate at all, but as someone who's lived around chickens a good chunk of life, calling them extremely intelligent would be...a stretch.

Pigs though, definitely. Highly underrated animal.

That's surprising. I have no first hand experience, but I have been told by people who keep them as pets that chickens and cows are pretty much in the same league. Both can have distinct personalities.

Distinct personalities and intelligence are quite different things!

Talk to a grower and they'll tell you that plants have personalities (this one doesn't like the shade, this one sulks after being repotted, etc).

Really dumb animals can have distinct personalities, which is why I think what gets inferred from some of the quirky behaviours octopus display in terms of intelligence gets a bit overrated.

I don't know about cows, but there's chickens in the farm where I live and they're the dumbest animal I've ever seen. They also don't seem to care when one of them is taken by a predator (something took one of our roosters two nights ago and the other chickens didn't make a sound, although he certainly did).

Pigs are intelligent and sensitive and they have compassion for their kind and other animals. A lady I know worked in a lab that made experiments with pigs and with dogs and she saw pigs taking food on their snouts and giving it to the dogs, who were intentionally left without food, through the bars of their cells. And pigs know when you come to take one of them for the slaughter and will raise hell and try to get in the way and defend their kin. It is a heartbreaking thing killing a pig. It is very unfortunate that pigs don't produce milk or eggs or wool and we just want them for their meat becaus there's no other reason to keep them around than to kill and eat them, unlike cows or goats, sheep, chickens, ducks, horses, donkeys, dogs, cats etc etc...

(I mean, we kill those other animals too, to eat them, but we also keep some of them alive for their other products or work)

Thanks for that data point. It makes me feel quite a bit better about eating chickens, and makes me redouble my efforts to wean myself off bacon. I already don't eat pork in any other form, but it's really hard to pass on a strip of bacon at a breakfast buffet.

Chickens are amazingly stupid, disloyal, impulsive animals. Not anywhere close to pigs, and far away from octopi. (I grew up on a farm with both chickens and pigs).

This is what I don't quite get. Perhaps eating octopi seems gratuitous since they are expensive and not integrated into everyday customs/life. But hard to imagine an octopus is on a higher status than a pig or a cow which are fairly close to us evolutionarily.

Cows (actually their genes) have been evolutionarily successful by paradoxically allowing themselves to be slaughtered and eaten by humans.

"Allow" implies some sort of consent. I understand that you mean in an evolutionary sense, but it's clear that most living beings are averse to dying, even when possessing the most biologically primitive nervous systems. I prefer to head off any arguments in bad faith, "well, why don't all the cows just run away?" Some people are very comfortable resorting to satirical absurdity when discussing suffering, as evidenced by ridiculous arguments like "plants feel pain, why do you eat plants?"

Genuine question and not an attempt to bait you, but curious why the latter is a ridiculous argument? I’ve not heard that argument, but I have seen the occasional piece of research pop up to suggest there’s more complicated communication or social structures in plants. Particularly fungi. I’ve no idea how true any of it is and what why more may learn about that in the coming decades. So while I personally don’t have evidence or believe it to be true, I couldn’t with absolute conviction rule it out either.

I'm definitely open to discussing the possibility when it's with someone arguing in good faith. It seems like that's where you're coming from, so thank you.

I won't bury the lede further. Plants can't experience pain, at least insofar as we conceive of it, because they don't have nociceptors that signal pain. Therefore, if they do have any sort of phenomenological experience, whether it would be recognizable to us or not, there is no sense in describing anything they experience as "pain".

There may be simple damage-avoidance reflexes, but comparing that with what it feels like to break a bone would be like saying that pedestrians and vehicles should share the road. The difference in quality is so significant that it makes better sense to categorize those reflexes as not pain at all although in service of the same tissue-protecting goal. My legs are not a vehicle I don't think.

A final point on the deficit of nociception, is that the experience of pain is so central to our lived experience that it's difficult to conceive of what that would be like. It's like the alpha channel in rgba... Without that signal for opacity, there's no color at all.

If the above is not enough to convince, there's some recent research that sought to systematize the analysis of sentience. Here's the 8 points used:

  1) possession of nociceptors;
  2) possession of integrative brain regions;
  3) connections between nociceptors and integrative brain regions;
  4) responses affected by potential local anaesthetics or analgesics;
  5) motivational trade-offs that show a balancing of threat against opportunity for reward;
  6) flexible self-protective behaviours in response to injury and threat;
  7) associative learning that goes beyond habituation and sensitisation;
  8) behaviour that shows the animal values local anaesthetics or analgesics when injured

As you can see, plants are immediately out of the running on the most fundamental point. As you continue down, it becomes more and more absurd to say that plants feel. There's no mechanism by which that would be possible.

I hope that helps!

If you could anesthetize animals so that they could never feel pain would that solve any moral problems with farming and eating animals?

Not necessarily. A large part of what makes killing unethical is that it's a subversion of the creatures' preferences. In my mind I imagine that sentient beings have a little sandcastle-shaped plan for the future. Killing them is like stopping on their sandcastle. It's not the only way, but it's the worst because that sandcastle can never be rebuilt.

I think you're misplacing the reasoning for the pain argument as "they can't feel pain the same way mammals do" whereas the contending logical argument is actually "we should avoid eating plants for the same reason we should animals - that is, it would be against their desires". The plant reflex is an indication of the latter.

Else you could easily ethically qualify meat eating that is limited to the consumption animals killed while blinded and under the influence of anaesthetics.

I see what you mean. I took it for granted that it's clear that sentience is a prerequisite to the capability of having desires. If someone did argue that plants have desires then I would question what they mean: either they're implying conscious preference of future states, desire predicated on sentience or they mean some metaphysical teleological conception of desire. The first two are mistakes, the last is not really the type of argument that I find fascinating beyond its relevance to social ritual or linguistic games.

I'm writing the arguments and questions below in good faith. I'm legitimately conflicted over this, and I admit that I haven't engaged in any research on this subject.

From what I can tell, the moral argument that you're presenting seems to boils down to the fact that we arbitrarily value animal life more than other kinds of life. I'm not saying that this is somehow "wrong" -- I'm bothered by the fact that the it's often presented in a way that makes it seem like it's some kind of universal truth, based on some criteria of the subject itself (e.g. presence of certain biological structures or phenomena), rather than specifics about the human experience.

> Plants can't experience pain, at least insofar as we conceive of it, because they don't have nociceptors that signal pain. Therefore, if they do have any sort of phenomenological experience, whether it would be recognizable to us or not, there is no sense in describing anything they experience as "pain".

So, they lack the biological machinery to feel (let's call it) animal-like pain. Is the argument that it's our moral obligation to reduce the phenomenological experience of animal-like pain in this universe? And by extension, that other kinds of "pain" (for lack of a better word) are less important? If so, isn't it more to-the-point to simply say "we shouldn't hurt things that are like us"? (This simple perspective is obviously problematic in its own ways -- I'm not necessarily advocating for it -- I'm just trying to clarify the essence of what I'll call the "nociceptor argument").

> A final point on the deficit of nociception, is that the experience of pain is so central to our lived experience that it's difficult to conceive of what that would be like. It's like the alpha channel in rgba... Without that signal for opacity, there's no color at all.

The argument here seems to be something like: "it's incomprehensible to humans, so therefore it doesn't exist." Again, it seems more straightforward to simply say that the fundamental criteria is whether or not the thing experiencing "pain" is sufficiently "like us".

I think basically what I'm trying to say is this: the "nociceptor argument" feels like a way of skirting around the fact that morality regarding animal rights boils down to human-specific feelings we have about animals -- and that those feelings are rooted in the fact that they're like us, and some quirk of our psychology causes (most of) us to feel pain when we see or imagine something like us in pain.

I personally don't believe that reality has hard boundaries of the kind that the "nociceptor argument" presupposes. Humans conceived those boundaries because they're useful to us as a part of how we model reality. From your response to another commenter ("...the last is not really the type of argument that I find fascinating beyond its relevance to social ritual or linguistic games"), I imagine you might find these arguments to be too metaphysical for your taste, but in my opinion, it's important for people to realize that these moral frameworks are rooted in human culture and psychology, not some biological reality independent of our species.

I'd be very happy to hear your thoughts or rebuttals, if you care to share them.

(Not the OP). In summary I think you mean that animal rights activists anthropomorphize non-human animals and they want us to treat them like we treat humans. They don't anthropomorphize plants so they don't care what happens to plants. Is that right?

If that's your point, I agree and I think that goes a long way to explain why there are very fewer objections to eating insects, or why many vegetarians are fine eating fish, but not cows.

Yes, this captures the essence of what I'm saying.

I would just add for clarity that I don't think that it's "wrong" for us to elevate life that's more like us, and so I don't think it's "wrong" for animal rights activists to behave in the way that you're describing. I only take issue with justifying that behavior by pointing to specific biological features, when to me, it feels closer to the truth to say that we behave this way because it feels right, and it feels right because of something inherent to the human experience. I believe this is an important distinction because it helps us realize that human experience is context-dependent, and so our sense of morality will be, too. (E.g. one could argue that it's less moral to eat meat now than it was 500 years ago.)

I see where you're coming from. It's a failure on my part that I didn't make it clear that one of my ideals is continual expansion of our moral intuitions. It's also partly a choice to leave it out because it can become so unintuitive that it affects the basis of the entire argument.

Since you expressed openness to this dialogue, I'll share. When I really, really stretch my moral imagination to the point it decouples from practical logic, I find myself feeling spiritually reverent for the things that the mental abstraction "complexity" points at. I arrive at this by synthesizing a particular metaphor from Alan Watts with Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi's ideas on complexity.

In the same way an apple tree apples, the universe peoples. It also dogs, and weathers and softwares and cows. Of it emerge these beautiful structures, including plants. If I was capable of surviving the endeavor, cherishing and protecting every single one of those things that the universe expresses would be my ultimate ethical goal. I don't know if there's farther expansive rings of morality. I imagine I might be able to peek at some with the help of deep, deep meditative practice or other tools.

The thing that re-embodies me is the Buddhist idea of bodhisattvas. They are beings who have reached enlightenment, but then rejected paradise in honor of the work still left to do on this plane of existence.

That's basically the outline of my metaphysical beliefs.

Finally, specifically regarding pain and plants, I agree that we bend our intuitions to the experiences that make sense to us. My argument is that the word "pain" and what we understand pain to be, is predicated on a specific biological structure, nociceptors. To speak of pain without nociception is like saying the water in my hand isn't wet. They're enmeshed, dependent properties. So, if plants do experience something that increments the universe's suffering counter, which I leave as a possibility, we would have to imagine some other form of communication. Language and thought extrudes from the human body. As a consequence of that fact, there are just some things it can't capture, and attempting to do so places us closer to the choice: bodhisattva or buddha.

You've understood me perfectly. No counter-arguments from me; what follows are just some thoughts that your comment inspired.

> In the same way an apple tree apples, the universe peoples. It also dogs, and weathers and softwares and cows. Of it emerge these beautiful structures, including plants.

I love this framing.

> If I was capable of surviving the endeavor, cherishing and protecting every single one of those things that the universe expresses would be my ultimate ethical goal.

Whenever this thought comes to my mind, I can't help but think about the Christian idea the human beings are inherently sinful (I may not be getting this exactly right -- I'm not a Christian). As you point out: we're forced to "destroy" expressions of the universe in order to survive. Maybe this is OK, and their destruction is part of that expression -- or maybe we're inherently sinful, and the best we can do is damage control.

> The thing that re-embodies me is the Buddhist idea of bodhisattvas. They are beings who have reached enlightenment, but then rejected paradise in honor of the work still left to do on this plane of existence.

This is fascinating. I'll be doing some reading on this.

> So, if plants do experience something that increments the universe's suffering counter, which I leave as a possibility, we would have to imagine some other form of communication. Language and thought extrudes from the human body.

Fully agreed. Something I was trying to express in my first comment is that I find this conclusion perfectly acceptable (i.e. that we exclude plants from our moral framework, because of their incomprehensibility), but that it's important to recognize that it's grounded in our own ability to comprehend the experience of others (as opposed to something inherent to the "other" itself).

> social structures in plants. Particularly fungi.

FYI, fungi aren't plants, they are part of their own eukaryotic kingdom, and are more closely related to animals than plants.

We also usually only eat the fruit of the fungi, which we call mushrooms. The main part of the fungi lives under ground and is called the mycelium.

I understand what you are saying about implied agency, but it really must have worked like this on some level. Cow (physiology and behaviour) had to allow domestication. People tried to domesticate cheetahs, they didn't breed in captivity.

Jarred Diamond makes a point of this in "Guns, Germs and Steel". I don't have a copy at hand but, from memory, he argues that we domesticated horses but not, say, zebras or onagers because they don't have a disposition that is amenable to domestication. Cheetahs are another famous example, like you say (and I wish we could have domesticated them because then there would be more of them around).

It works the other way also. Humans have the kind of disposition that allows us to domesticate animals. We find it easy to care for other animals. By contrast, lions or wolves would never be able to domesticate sheep because their natural tendency is to kill prey animals on sight, basically. Human's aren't obligate carnivores and despite what some people in certain communities will claim, we are not a predator species and we have no instincts to kill everything that may be food. Check out how little kittens play for example, and how human children play, how many small animals kittens kill and how many small animals human children kill. We have an instinct to nurture and care for other animals and we used it to domesticate our farm animals.

We are not violent, bloodthirsty lions or wolves. We are curious and inquisitive apes and we like to learn new things and figure out how things work. We used this trait to understand how to breed farm animals and how to take care of them and how to use their natural tendencies to our own ends.

And just to be perfectly clear: I don't think that's morally wrong, not in any way, shape, or form and not to any degree at all. It is our compassion and intelligence that has made us farmers of other animals, not our cruelty and greed, like the meat-is-murder people claim. But it is cruelty and greed that is responsible for factory farming and its horrors are something that should rightfully concern us all.

Which is why it makes sense to simply not eat any of them. It seems to be the healthiest option too, as long as you have access to enough healthy calories from plants.

That's not right. You need much more than calories from food. You can take all the calories you need by eating sugar for example, or dietary fat. If you don't eat meat, or cut out any major food groups, you need to be vary careful to supplement your diet with the nutrients that are now missing from it and since we don't really understand nutrition and our needs for nutrients very well, there is a risk of messing up and making yourself unhealthy in the process.

That is why I specified “enough healthy calories”. What I meant was that as long as you have access to enough produce. Basically some people need to eat meat because it’s the only way to get enough nutrition. But if you live in California near a well stocked grocery store for example, then you just need to learn what a healthy vegan diet is and most people will do better on a vegan diet. At least according to NutritionFacts.org. A vegan diet has incredible health benefits including significantly reduced risk of heart disease and cancer.

I was not attempting to say all calories are the same. You definitely have to learn what foods are right to eat. But I think meat is only necessary for people that live in remote areas without enough access to healthy produce.

OK, thanks for explaining what you meant, I didn't understand you at first.

To be honest, I don't know what NutritionFacts.org is, exactly. I agree that most Californians, like most Americans (North and South) would do well to cut down on their meat consumption a bit, because it certainly looks like they eat way too much. But I don't think that needs to mean going vegan.

Traditional diets from places like the Mediterrannean or South-East Asia go a long way towards keeping people well-fed without excessive meat consumption, and there's no reason to not adopt, say, a vegetable- and pulses-heavy mediterrannean diet, rather than going vegan, if a healthy diet is the point. In fact, if that's the point, it's probably easier to eat healthy when _not_ going vegan, because of the missing nutrients that must be supplemented.

I grew up on a plant-based diet. Not "vegan" or "vegetarian" but "plant-based", meaning that most food I ate was made of plants: rice, pasta, potatoes, beans, chickpeas and lentils, green beans, okra and peas, tomatoes, aubergines and zucchini, tons of olive oil everywhere, garlic, onions, celery and carrots as the base of sauces and soups, liberal amounts of good cheese and yogurt, plenty of fish in the summer, and some meat once or twice a week as I was growing up, primarily chicken and pork (I don't like beef). I don't think there's anyone that can fault this way of eating for being either excessive or unhealthy and I still cook and eat that way today, the way my grandmothers cooked.

You’re right that the American diet has gone way too far to meat, and eating a more Mediterranean or South-East Asian diet would be a big health improvement.

NutritionFacts.org is a non profit run by Dr. Michael Gregor, who runs a YouTube channel full of health advice. He looks at the latest scientific data and shares it on his channel. Based on his interpretation of the best available data a fully vegan diet seems to have a lot of health benefits. I became vegan for moral reasons so I haven’t researched what a more mixed diet would be like, but I’m glad my choice is a healthy one.

Here’s one of his full talks: https://youtu.be/7rNY7xKyGCQ

And here’s his channel: https://youtube.com/c/NutritionfactsOrgMD

Thank you for pointing those out. I'll have a look when I can. I have to say, given that I grew up on a Mediterrannean diet and I still eat this way I don't have a strong motivation to cut down on the amount of animal products I consume. I think this may be a nuance that is ofetn lost in discussions about eating meat between people from different cultures.

> I think this may be a nuance that is often lost in discussions about eating meat between people from different cultures.

Definitely. USA meat culture is so gross I have rejected it all. And I really like the vegan diet! I really direct my criticism at my own country and culture, and generally don't have much to say about other cultures.

For me, the answer was yes. I stopped eating pigs first, and then cows and other mammals, and then octopi (octopodes?). I've been cutting back further on chicken and fish, too, though I eat a lot of eggs and some dairy still.

I don't know that it's morally right or something, but it doesn't cost much and the potential upside seems high enough to do it.

It helps the planet, is good for my health, reduces deaths of sentient beings to feed me, has greater trophic efficiency... and the big thing is that vegetarian food and vegan food tastes good. I still eat meat periodically, but I feel much better and happier since I've reduced my meat consumption greatly.

At some stage my son was wilfully damaging plants.

As part of the discipline to make him stop I showed him videos of plants sped up.

It becomes a bit harder to deny that they aren’t the inanimate objects we perceive them to be because they are slow when you see them react to stimuli and they show what seems to be intent.

Although it certainly isn’t a consensus opinion there is a real possibility that (given that the nervous system specialises what normal tissues can also do) plants are considerably more “conscious” than we give them credit for.

They have been proven to be able to communicate.

There are even suggestions that they could “see” without specialised eyes.

I’m not sure where this would leave moral vegans.

Besides attempting a diet of fruit - we clearly need to kill to survive.

PS: To clarify my own positioning on this - I eat meat. I occasionally go vegetarian for health or spiritual reasons. I do believe we can and should strive to minimise cruelty, waste and environmental damage and impacts.

The lives of some livestock are significantly better than that of many wild creatures and it can be a humane choice given that they would not exist without our intervention.

That said I don’t think that we are currently near the level of responsibility that we could be. Our levels of cruelty, waste and environmental impact are unacceptably high and will seem barbaric to our descendants.

This is a lot of very commonly repeated speculative talking point soup when people are trying to rile up vegans. I'm not a vegan, and I'm not saying you're being disingenuous here, but if you use these lines to try and engage vegans at some point and don't get the level of engagement you're looking for, it's because this kind of both-sides moral equivalence between meat eating and plant eating is pretty common in the needling-vegans scene :)

That said, if we think there's a continuum with humans, dolphins, apes, and maybe octopuses on one side, and fungi & prokaryotes or something on the other, then plants (and maybe shellfish?) are certainly 'better' to kill and eat than cats, eg.

What logic makes plants better to kill than cows, better than octopi, better than cats? because vegans might the argument uncomfortable doesn't render it invalid either

If I gave you a live chicken, a head of broccoli, what would happen when you tried to cut up each one with a carving knife?

You instinctively know what fear and pain are, and minimising those things is the point of veganism.

If plants feel their fear and pain far slower, then much less of it is happening.

It's also entirely implausible, from an evolutionary perspective, that plants should have developed the capacity to feel pain on a scale similar to other organisms given that they haven't developed the ability to move away from situations that might cause them pain (pain being a proxy for survival risk).

Keep in mind that instead of fight or flight plants have a range of internal chemical responses available to minimise damage and that this does make pain plausible:

Videos of plants calcium signalling response to damage:

https://news.wisc.edu/blazes-of-light-reveal-how-plants-sign...

Plants responding to sounds of herbivore (dare we say “predator”) insects:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00442-014-2995-6

Even plant “vision” is becoming more plausible:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/veggies-with-visi...

You can find a lot more material in this vein. My point is that we are “animalists” and not very well predisposed to recognising the true nature of plants given how different they are to us.

That's interesting, thanks for the links.

if I starve you for a week, what would you do then?

ethics are always the privilege of the well to do

I like the continuum idea.

Given that we cannot not kill something to live yet, the current local minimum would be to live by eating some kind of cultured microorganism?

Something like cultured algae or a genetically engineered organisms that expressed suitable proteins.

Fruit might be an acceptable minimal choice given that it’s “voluntarily given” to some point of views.

Strangely the thought of engineering an animal to make a meat fruit seems repugnant - imagine an animal modified to grow flesh that could be removed with little pain and no injury.

Vat grown meat is an interesting thought - if we can pull it off.

Ultimately only something like molecular nanotechnology could free us from killing to live.

Alternatively modified human beings.

> Although it certainly isn’t a consensus opinion there is a real possibility that (given that the nervous system specialises what normal tissues can also do) plants are considerably more “conscious” than we give them credit for.

Yes, that is a possibility, but it's also an entirely ridiculous argument to make to argue against veganism. If you want to argue that the nervous system is just a more specialized version of other tissue and consciousness could therefore, in principal, arise in any kind of organic matter, or inorganic matter even, then one obviously can't prove that statement wrong, but it also seems to entirely miss the point given our current scientific understanding. Obviously humans cannot live in a way that completely avoids any (theoretical) harm to our environment, but veganism is by far the dietary choice that minimizes suffering in this world (though there do exist differences in the kind of vegan diet with regards to its environmental impact).

one could argue the need to displace grazing landmass, that could support free-range animals, with endless fields of low-throughput vegetables that need more land and water per capita-calorie/nutrient is far more damaging to the planet.

https://www.paesta.psu.edu/podcast/how-much-water-does-it-re...

What do the humans eat in the first world?

To be clear: I’m not arguing against veganism.

It’s a choice I respect even if I do not choose it myself.

It’s a ecologically sound choice and does clearly minimise “suffering” according to some measures (given the choices available today).

I’m personally not fully convinced that it is a healthy choice for humans over their whole lifespan, but I realise that this is something that can be debated.

I’m genuinely interested in the idea that we don’t “get” plants yet.

I’m curious as to the personal response of vegans if plants we’re to be shown more aware than we give them credit for.

I’ve also hounded my “moral” vegetarian friends (i.e. those who choose it as a moral stance) with questions about what they would do if vat-grown meat where to become viable.

People are fascinating: I know someone who is against eating “wild animals”. For some reason, to her, farmed crocodile and ostrich are still wild animals.

> though I eat a lot of eggs and some dairy still.

See, I feel like this just erodes from your argument. There’s not necessarily any trauma at all to the chickens or the cows involved in the production of eggs or milk. Trying to group that with the consumption of meat feels just very irrational.

Do you believe that there’s no trauma involved in the dairy and egg industry? Spend a few minutes watching this about dairy. https://youtu.be/roIWg4ntj9k

Earthling Ed also has videos about egg industry, but the gist is make chicks are crushed in a meat grinder alive.

That’s greed enabled by modern capitalism and general “don’t ask don’t tell” apathy. That’s not how milk and eggs were produced for the majority of mankind’s existence after the transition from hunter/gatherer to farming.

Yes there is.

Egg farms grind male chicks alive. They burn off the tip of the hens beak without anesthesia (which we know is high in nerves) so they don’t fight each other in captivity; which they don’t do nearly as much in nature because surprise surprise they’re not as stressed. Hens laying eggs every single day of their lives (because they’re taken away daily) live much much shorter lives and develop physiological issues more often. When they’re finally exhausted after a few short years and stop producing as much, they’re turned into chicken nuggets or broth cubes.

Cows producing milk are constantly inseminated. Maybe they don’t care or maybe it’s a form of rape. Nevertheless, their calves are taken away from them shortly after they’re born (so they don’t eat the milk instead of the factory) and slaughtered. Cows call for their missing baby for several days. Dairy cows are also living much much shorter lives (imagine how long a human that does nothing but give birth would live) and are turned into hamburgers afterwards.

Not to mention cheese which need casein to be made and that can’t be obtained without killing cows as it’s the acid in their stomach, basically.

So, yes, eating milk or eggs doesn’t directly require the animal to die. But it’s so close and it enables such a cruel, abhorrent, and revolting meat industry that it’s impossible in my opinion to ethically justify eating eggs and milk (let alone meat or fish)

you're generalizing quite a bit here, perhaps driven by emotion. it's possible given the movement for compassion for animals to purchase local, free-range, cruelty-free sourced eggs at any decent grocer.

You can’t make eggs without killing male chicks, shortening hens lives, and killing them off. Free range, organic, local, or factory. The specifics of it may vary depending on the mode of production but not the reality: it enables animal exploitation and suffering.

You (kind of) can by now. Killing male chickens after hatching is outlawed in Germany since the beginning of this year. From [1] it reads like Germany subsised research into preselecting female eggs and only hatching these ones. This is still killing male chickens in some way, but arguably less gruesome than how the industry has dealt with male chickens before.

[1] https://www-bmel-de.translate.goog/DE/themen/tiere/tierschut...

> You can’t make eggs without killing male chicks, shortening hens lives, and killing them off.

Yes, you absolutely can. Hens lay eggs whether there's a rooster around or not.

I live in a farm (not mine, I'm a guest) and we get a few eggs each day from the hens in the coop outside my window. We don't kill the male chicks off. I don't think anyone on the farm can even tell which chicks are male befor they grow up. We occasionally slaughter a rooster when there's too many of them and they start to fight each other. We also slaughter a hen once in a while. Last year, we slaughtered four animals, altogether, one rooster and three hens.

In factory farms, male chicks are killed off, but there's no reason for that other than the industrialisation of production and consumer demand for plump birds with big breasts (at least in the US as far as I can tell). The birds in our farm are lean, their meat is dark, chewy and wiry because of all the muscle fibers and it has to be coooked for several hours before it is edible. Their bones are also hard and impossible to snap with your fingers, like you can the bones of factory chicken. The taste also doesn't compare. Real free-range chicken (not "free range" as in growing up in a factory with a 2 x 2 concrete yard outside) actually has taste and it tastes of game bird, not what supermarket chicken tastes like. Chickens and factory chickens could as well be a different species. Tasting the flesh of the farm chickens has put me off eating the supermarket birds, just because it makes me think that it can't be healthy eating something that was raised to be degenerate and fat like that.

So you're talking about factory farming but there are other kinds of farming that have very different effect on the animals farmed. Maybe you should try to learn more about that?

My point of view is that exploiting animals for food is wrong. No brand of “ethical” farming can change that fact for me. Raising animals to kill them for food before the end of their natural life is something I refuse to partake in.

Male chicks aren’t ground at birth in your farm, that’s better in my book. But they’re still raised to be eaten. I’d still argue that hens laying eggs every day shortens their lifespan because it puts strain on their system. As far as I know, hens don’t naturally lay eggs every day, all year. They lay an egg and keep it around for a while to see if it’s growing or not. After a while they eat it and start over. They also don’t produce eggs all year but only part of it. But because farm hens are there for their eggs and later their meat, we take their egg every day and they have to lay another the next day. Some farms also use lights and heaters to trick the hens into thinking the season never ends and have then lay all year long.

I don't know what hens do what you say. The hens we have here, when we leave the eggs in their nest, the next day they've laid a few more. Once they have laid around ten eggs they'll incubate them until they hatch. That's how we end up with new hens. Some eggs we take and eat, some we let them hatch into chicks. I've never seen a hen eat an egg. What they do eat is the egg shells when the eggs have hatched. Appparently it helps them replenish the calcium needed to make new eggs. Is that what you have in mind, perhaps?

I don't think laying eggs puts strain on hens' system. Far as I can tell, that's what hens are made to do.

> Raising animals to kill them for food before the end of their natural life is something I refuse to partake in.

That's fine by me. Nobody's forcing you to partake in anything. I don't agree that raising animals for food is wrong or exploitative.

Edit: sorry for the Fisking. I wanted to address this too:

> But they’re still raised to be eaten.

Yes, absolutely! That's why we raise farm animals. We raise them for food. We breed them, we tend to them, we keep them safe from predators and disease, we feed them, we care for them and then we kill them and eat them. That's the deal.

> Not to mention cheese which need casein to be made and that can’t be obtained without killing cows as it’s the acid in their stomach, basically.

Casein is not the acid in animals' stomachs. Caseins are one group of proteins in milk, and the main component of cheese.

You're probably thinking of rennet, the enzymes in animals' stomachs that help them digest their milk.

Rennet is used to coagulate milk to make cheese, but in modern cheesmaking practice the vast majority of it is produced by bacterial or fungal fermentation. Rennet taken from the stomachs of young ruminants is used only by a minority of "artisanal" or traditional producers.

Since you got this one completely wrong, is there a chance that the rest of the information in your comment is also slightly off, do you think? Would you find it very hard to re-examine the source of what you know about animal agriculture and try to find out how much of it is really true?

im sorry, but you cant dismiss the rest of his valid points purely because he got 1 out of many incorrect. I detect a hint of bias might be present on your side from your username also...

Thank you

Where did I dismiss any of "his valid points"? I asked if they thought they might want to re-examine where their information comes from. How is that a dismissal of any point, valid or not?

> I detect a hint of bias might be present on your side from your username also...

What bias do you mean? I make cheese so I know a couple of things about how it's done.

My mother tongue isn’t English and I indeed mixed up rennet and casein because they sound completely different in my language.

Natural rennet cheese may be “artisanal” in your corner of the world, it’s 99% of cheese where I live —just in case, 99% might not be totally accurate, it’s an exaggeration to mean “the vast majority”

My mother tongue isn't English either and I live in a corner of the world that has many traditional cheesemakers and a proud cheesemaking culture that goes back centuries if not millenia. Most cheese where I live as in the rest of the world is made with microbial rennet simply because it's cheaper, more available and easier to store and handle.

I'm sorry but I don't believe that 99% (or "the vast majority") of cheese where you live is made with animal rennet. If that's true, please let me know how you know this.

> how you know this

https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empr%C3%A9surage

“ En France, l'utilisation de présure d'origine animale est une des conditions des cahiers des charges pour prétendre aux dénominations de protections fromage fermier, appellation d'origine contrôlée et la marque de l'Union européenne, Label rouge.”

Loosely translated, it means that for a French to cheese to have one of the protected names (Roquefort, Brie de Meaux, Camembert de Normandie, etc) they must use animal rennet. Since farms making these want the protected names because they sell so much better, they use animal rennet.

In the supermarket you can also buy industrial cheese which doesn’t have to use animal rennet. But at the fromagerie they mostly (only?) sell artisanal cheeses, all using animal rennet.

Yes, that agrees with what I said above: supermarket cheese is the vast majority of cheese that's produced and consumed worldwide, quite unfortunately I might add. PDO cheeses are a minority of all cheeses and only produced in the EU. French PDO cheeses are a minority within a minority, and only produced in France.

Even in EU and even in France, most cheese made and eaten is not PDO and PDO cheeses are made by few and small producers. Camembert de Normandie fermier is famously made by a handful of farmers (five, I think?) and regulators are constantly pressured by the dairy industry to loosen the standards of the PDO, for example to allow pasteurised milk to be used and to allow the "Camembert de Normandie" label to be applied to cheese made in Normandy but with cows other than the race Normande that the traditional producers make it with.

Even in the rest of the EU, outside France, there are bsically two kinds of PDO cheese. There's the kind that are made by few producers in limited amounts and have more stringent requirements like the use of animal rennet, or the use of traditional wooden implements to preserve artisanal bacterial cultures, and that sort of thing, like Camembert de Normandie and Mozzarella di Buffalla Campagna. Or they are made at a larger scale with modern equipment and materials allowed (but not required), of which bacterial rennet is one example, like Manchego or Feta.

The kind of PDO cheeses that must be made with traditional methods, materials and equipments and for which modern alternatives are not allowed are basically artisanal products and again very unfortunately, few and far between, because they tend to be the best cheeses one can have.

This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine because I recognise the supermarket cheese that most people eat as inferior quality, and I'm really worried that most people have forgotten what cheese should really be like.

Great job arguing something I already agree about and similarly abhor while also completely missing the point: I specifically said “necessarily.”

We have family friends that provide eggs and milk from their free range chickens and cows and that’s certainly not how they do it. Your fight is with greed enabled by capitalism leading to these animal abuses, not people who want to eat/drink their eggs or dairy.

There isn't necessarily, but there is in practice nearly 100% of the time - enough so that it doesn't matter.

Yeah, this is why I'm a vegetarian. I met a cow.

Even vegetarianism supports unreal violence against cows. You should make the leap to veganism if you’re interested in to avoid unnecessary cruelty to animals.

Yes and pigs. It’s surprisingly easy now, fake meat is good enough

Yes. I did.

Extremely intelligent? Have you worked with cattle before?

I have. Extremely intelligent might be a stretch, but a little. Certainly curious, emotional and social. Id rate them at the level of cats, dogs and pigs. My cat is dumb as fuck, no way she could outsmart a cow.

Dogs and pigs can be trained.

Cats can, to a certain degree.

Cows? Not so much. I wouldn't rate them at the same level as cats, dogs and pigs (source: farming background).

If you're a utilitarian part-vegetarian then you'd preferentially eat cow over smaller intelligent animals.

If we assume small animals and large animals experience the same amount of sentient pain during the slaughter, we can minimize the amount of pain per pound of meat produced. This means that beef is likely the best choice of meat for consumption. Unless we somehow developed whale farms someday.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-10-09

I don't have the slightest bit of guilt eating meat products, including octopus, but it seems pretty self-evident that "pain per pound of meat" is a ridiculous standard. Pain doesn't exist in measurable units, the entire idea of trying to quantify it in relation to food production, much of which happens with little to no pain at all, seems pretty silly.

If we draw on human comparisons, it's generally agreed that more deaths are worse than fewer, and I posit that the weight of a person doesn't factor into that calculus. If we assume that a given quantity of meat will be produced and that animal deaths are undesirable for analogous reasons to human deaths then it's perfectly natural to attempt to minimize deaths per pound.

Maybe (I would argue feeding more people is better), but the GP is referring to pain, not death. Cows can be killed pretty quickly - perhaps not painlessly but pretty close to it. Lobsters not so much.

You're not comparing humans to humans. You're comparing cows to (say) chickens. The underlying assumption then is that chickens and cows share the same experience of pain. That's not proven, seems unlikely to be the case, and is, in any case, currently unmeasurable.

Agreed, but battery farming conditions sometimes makes it a easy call to make.

The “quality of life” (hard as it is to measure) of battery chickens is clearly not good.

We’ve kept some pet bantam chickens and I was surprised by what intelligent, curious and communicative creatures they where.

why is the experience of pain the standard? would anaesthetics present an ethical conundrum

No because beef is delicious-er

> It's akin to eating a dog or cat (which might be acceptable in some parts of the world, but pretty shunned in the west).

Why the tangent on eating dogs/cats when pigs are just as smart but widely consumed throught the western world?

It’s not a tangent, you’re making the same point. Cultural norms skew what we will eat. If you think about it logically though the rationale for not eating cats & dogs applies equally to octopuses… and pigs. I don’t think OP was intending to give an exhaustive list.

Here's a quicker soft start, a woman is best friends with an octopus (about 4 minutes) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1twqEn8iHsk

FYI "My octopus teacher" is a work of fiction and heavily edited together. Not to say they're not intelligent, but there are better examples

I don't think pig is any less intelligent than a dog. It's just more meaty.

Dogs and cats are companion animals, incidentally and intentionally selected to have behavioural phenotypes that make them amenable to that role. A wild octopus isn't quite the same. I've had quite a few marine animals in captivity and while octopus are intelligent, I think a bit too much is being made of some of these anecdotes relative to that. For example, small freshwater crayfish which I don't think anyone would argue have the intelligence of a pig or octopus still display the interindividual difference in personalities, preferences etc in a tank.

It was always possible for me to perceive sentience, feelings and emotions from a variety of beings, I don't understand why grown adults are just reaching a cognitive maturity to notice that and making that a line in the sand on whether they will farm/consume a being based on that.

These seem to be two separate things to me? Can someone shed light on both:

a) why these are related concepts

b) your journey to cognitive maturity to notice at all

I really can't be the only one confused by this trend, this has got to be cultural as well

It wasn't until someone mentioned that many animals (and all mammals) talk to their babies just like we do that it rung home for me.

Its unclear to me. Some variants of hinduism have embraced this for ages.

The underlying belief of vegetarianism in this culture is that animals are kin and eaten only when survival is on the line. When there is choice (and there almost always is) you choose not to eat meat.

The part that I've found newly confounding is the 'thinking' of plants. Can't square that one. Thankfully there are a few studies debunking anything along the lines of sentience:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28875517/

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00709-020-01579-w

The "thinking" aspect of plants might be reclaimed in respect of the overall foundations of mother nature's connected biodiversity.

As the maker of the octopus doco put it, the "giant biological mind". This interview is cued up at the point he mentions that: https://youtu.be/oyBqZ-_5B_8?t=587

I think he makes a good point, it's a good reminder.

It's a distraction when the argument becomes "plants can't think like humans". But why should plants need to think like us to be protected or respected? The point is, humans are crushing those precious ecosystems, all because individual plants can't think and fish have no feelings.

I'm often confused by this as well, it's always been fairly obvious to me that other animals are sentient just like us (why wouldn't they be, their physiology is similar, they're descended from common ancestors).

Modern factory farming doesn't sit well with me, but I still fairly comfortably eat higher welfare (free range, from reputable brands) or self-caught/hunted meat.

It bewilders me that someone would eat meat their whole life without ever thinking about this, and then one day suddenly go "ohhh, maybe this is bad".

Predators eat their whole life without wondering where it came from or what it implies about the world. It seems like the base state for every living individual, and is the most natural thing in the world. I think this is an important distinction to make, because if you don't make it you end up expressing contempt for those who don't think more widely rather than admiration for those that do.

Operative word being predator. People eat meat and most can’t stand the sight of animals being slaughtered in the method they currently are.

Predators also put themselves at risk often, fail often, etc.

Factory livestock is very much removed from this.

You have to keep in mind that having easy access to meat without hunting is a recent thing relative to history.

I think the 'is meat ethical' conversation is a different conversation from 'is the meat industry ethical'. I'd like to think that even if every slaughterhouse in the land closed up shop people would still be nuanced enough to realise that hunting and fishing are in a different league altogether.

>I'm often confused by this as well, it's always been fairly obvious to me that other animals are sentient just like us (why wouldn't they be, their physiology is similar, they're descended from common ancestors).

Exactly, I'm not sure how anyone who's spent any time around animals could come to a different conclusion. I definitely think people who aren't willing to do the slaughtering themselves have no business eating meat too for that matter. My first ever job was on a meat and fish counter and the amount of people who couldn't stomach seeing a fish get gutted or a steak cut off a sirloin joint because 'it looks too much like an animal' was really shocking. I'm a meat-eater myself, but to deny the inherent violence in a carnivorous diet as those people do is just objectively incorrect in my opinion.

One perspective: The universe is indifferent to your ethics and whether they are self-consistent or inconsistent. Choices "matter" insofar as they have observable effects that somebody cares about, but ultimately all morality is constructed.

And so, why not a draw a line here, or over there, or instead way out there?

It's similar to a lot of the ideological absurdities being unleashed by the political establishment in the West. Some of which are supported wholeheartedly by companies supported by YC so rather than risk getting banned for holding "dangerous" ideologies that run counter to that side of the spectrum, I will just chalk this under ephemeral arguments that will go nowhere

edit: as suspected it seems I am no longer able to comment freely on HN ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ after posting this, really bizarre experience

It's not a novel idea. Isn't it just a fatalistic coloring of ethical relativism? I personally subscribe to the idea that moral truths can be discovered from principals we can derive on inspecting our own preferences and experiences. We can than radiate that practice out to uncover more, and it historically happens by dint of physical/genetic proximity, eg prioritizing the wellbeing of family and friends and so on.

An interesting aspect of the internet is that it makes the determinant lines fuzzier and clearly arbitrary. Objectively, why would the life of a child in one country matter more or less than one from the other side of the planet? It's completely arbitrary, but the entrenched human social structures have been built around physical proximity and so we end up donating money to feed a relatively healthy child instead of donating to the distant one on the verge of dying from malnutrition.

> Isn't it just a fatalistic coloring of ethical relativism?

To me, "the universe is indifferent" is ethical relativism but not at all fatalistic. If there is no deliberate outside guidance, then we are free to construct an ethics by "inspecting our own preferences and experiences", as you put it. Isn't that liberating and wonderful? Doesn't it allow for creativity and constant rejuvenation?

However, I distrust your labeling of those discoveries as "moral truths". Is there one objectively correct philosophy of octopus farming?

I agree in regards to the universe's indifference! Cradling that understanding had a big part in my conclusion of moral objectivity. The freedom I gained from that is what allowed me to discover what I know now.

My basic formula for moral truth is: starting from a non-maladaptive state of mind, would I prefer to have or recoil from 'X' experience? With that in mind, could I reasonably conclude that sentient others around me would arrive at the same conclusion as me? How about strangers? Other animals? An extraterrestrial? A synthetic being? Humans in a million years?

If my chain of reasoning doesn't break at any point as I expand the set of sentient beings to check against, then it is likely that I now have clear guidance on engaging in actions that produce experience 'X'.

Here is an example: Should I break my friend's arm against his will? I would not want that to happen to me. Most people I know prefer not to have their arms broken. My dog would not want that. A cow would not want that. A fish would not want his tail snapped off. People in the future won't want their arms broken if it feels how I imagine it feels. I don't imagine that a sentient robot would like its gripping mechanism broken. Whatever sorts of appendages extraterrestrials have, they probably don't want to lose the ability to use them.

I can then extract the generalizable term from "I shouldn't break my friend's arm against his will" to, "I shouldn't hurt sentient beings when it's counter to their overriding preferences."

It now follows that if I were able to poll every sentient creature through all time (sentient according to a rubric), I would expect the majority to share the uncovered preference or aversion in question. I now have a positive statement about morality that is universalizable, apparently akin to Kantian philosophy, which I have some bare surface knowledge of.

The exercise seems pretty robust to me insofar as language and idea-derived conclusions hold up. For example, culturally dependent preferences, idiosyncrasies, aesthetic preferences, etc, fail the test easily.

Thanks, I thoroughly enjoyed your reasoned example!

> starting from a non-maladaptive state of mind

This stage-setting phrase seems to be doing a lot of heavy lifting. Because of course "I should not break the arm of X" is situational: under certain circumstances, such as defending yourself or something you care about, you absolutely should break the arm of an adversary if necessary.

Fully exploring the space of possible situations to find a "truth" is at least difficult and maybe impossible. I speculate that the theoretical limit you could approach is the scientific approximation described by Karl Popper, and explored by Thomas Kuhn in _Structure of Scientific Revolutions_, which means that you're never completely certain and your model is still subject to paradigm shifts. But because ethics is squishier than falsifiable scientific propositions, it will be hard to asymptotically approach that limit.

This is why a lot of the discussion about octopus farming has left me cold: many ethical propositions are being presented as absolute truths, but are almost certainly situationally incomplete. (What is sentience? What is pain? To what degree can we practically spare sentient creatures from pain? Under what circumstances does minimizing pain backfire and increase it in the end? And so on.)

I was talking about three letter acronyms being taught in American schools that many of the people in this industry support (obviously not all) to align with their political biases to put downward pressure on wages but I will be honest here and say

I have no fucking clue what you are talking about.

Another perspective: people are not indifferent to the set of ethics their community subscribes to. Ethics help form a common understanding about what it means to be a part of a community. Sure, morality is constructed and observable choices matter more. But morality is an aspect that separates humans from "beasts". Ditch morality and some get that much closer to considering atrocities -- e.g. enslavement of weaker groups, authoritarianism over entire populations -- because after all, "the universe is indifferent to your ethics [...]".

> why not a draw a line here, or over there, or instead way out there?

Do people who are sensitive to/ take into consideration the pains of weaker beings sound/feel like a pleasant group to be a part of? And yes, there are trade-offs.

> But morality is an aspect that separates humans from "beasts".

Over the course of human history, claims of moral superiority habitually accompany great atrocities. Give me a humble ethics which seeks to change that which can be observed, while not claiming absolute righteousness.

This type of moral relativism is what leads to world wars, at which point people come back to their senses and proceed to behave, until the next generation comes along to repeat the same mistakes.

I hold the opposite perspective: world wars are brought about by those who are convinced that there is only one correct moral system — theirs — and who therefore have no compunction about inflicting it on others.

The belief that the no moral system is objectively correct, and yet choices matter because they have tangible effects, inoculates against dehumanizing those who do not share your ethics.

Logical fallacies are why I dislike talking to people. The point of view you expressed is not opposite from mine, as you can have multiple moral systems that can live side by side without issues. My original idea is that some moral systems are bad (in regards to those "tangible effects" you mentioned), and your assertion induces the idea that all moral systems are more or less the same.

> Logical fallacies are why I dislike talking to people.

Well, I admit I'm finding the exchange increasingly unpleasant as well. I'd like to think that if we were speaking in person with the benefit of tone of voice and body language it would feel less combative.

There does seem to be significant overlap in how we both allow for multiple moral systems. We appear to differ on what leads to world wars.

In case it wasn't obvious the studies and this article is being written by people in the West who do not consume octopus. These articles almost always seem to derive to us-vs-them narrative, the idea that the West is somehow the forefront of moral novelty and the rest of the world is behind.

When the irony is that the same random argument applied towards Octopus can be done on just about any sentient beings like cow and pigs. As a german, my understanding of Western narratives are almost always aimed at patting themselves on the back.

I still remember Western media going in to overdrive to condemn masks during the onset of the pandemic, deriding Asian countries practice of wearing masks when you are sick as some sort of a backward psuedoscience.

Let's just call this article what it is: To reassure non-octopus eaters on their superior moral creed and a license to preach this narrative to people who consume octopus, namely Asian and European countries.

Already the comments on reddit are poking fun at Asian countries for eating octopus when in fact its Western Europe that consumes the largest amount. Octopus isn't just that delicious as a sashimi in large amounts.

The growth in octopus consumption is being driven largely by the USA. It's super healthy so I see more middle / upper class Americans eating it. Years ago it was a rare delicacy, now I can walk into most poke bowl restaurants in SF and get octopus. Tapas restaurants have become trendy as well.

I think the only time I've had octopus was when I tried Takoyaki a few times in Japan & Thailand. But honestly I found the diced octopus meat chewy and boring. Not very interested in it. As for health benefits? I doubt it.

It probably depends on what you compare it to. Same caloric amount of 80/20 ground beef? Octopus is almost certainly healthier. Vegetables? Unlikely unless you're really in need of some omega-3s or something.

Octopus is a pretty great cooked food, not as a sashimi. In Korean cuisine, at least, you find it stir fried, with noodles, in rice bowls, in soups...all sorts of things. There's several different kinds commonly eaten, from very small bite-sized to ones where a tentacle has to be cut into several bite sized pieces. It's often kept live until cooked, a practice that ensures both freshness and offended Western sensibilities at the same time.

All that being said, Octopus is also often found cuisines of Western countries that are coastal and some of the best I've ever had was in Greece and Mexico. I've also had it in Japan on a stick as a street food, fried in the Bahamas, grilled over a campfire in Italy, and a few other places.

In the U.S. I've only ever encountered it either at ethnic Asian or Greek places, or at high-end western dining experiences where the palettes are assumed to be more "adventurous". It's almost complete unknown as a food to most people and considered quite exotic and scary. But Americans are largely people who consider seafood to start and stop at canned tuna so...

> But Americans are largely people who consider seafood to start and stop at canned tuna so...

That isn’t very accurate. Coastal Americans have had plenty of seafood to choose from, consider when they would serve lobsters to prisoners. Alaska is full of seafood to the point that it is a staple (and considering many of the Inuit communities who have been on that diet for thousands of years). Just because the customs are different from other coastal communities in other countries doesn’t make America’s any less sophisticated.

Yeah, I'm being reductive. But my impression as an American is that you don't have to get very far from a coastal area for seafood to pretty quickly diminish on the plates of the average person...and there's a lot of the U.S. that is very far from any coastal area. In other words, it's not unusual at all to hear people say "I don't really like seafood" or will eat it very minimally like in fried fish sticks and tuna salad only.

And you can’t go very much anywhere in Greece or Japan and be away from the coast. What do you think they are eating deep inland in Russia, China, and Kazakhstan?

That’s not even getting into range. You won’t find lobster or octopus on the west coast unless it’s imported from a far away place. Better luck on the gulf coast, but you would have to be used to Cajun food (which is distinctly American with French influence) or Caribbean (ditto). Never try and Google Cajun and octopus together.

I've lived in the Midwest US for years and this doesn't track with anyone I've ever met.

Meet more people?

The gross statistics back it up. The average American eats about as much seafood as the average Russian, which is surprising considering one has ample fisheries and coastal areas and the other doesn't. Both countries are about mid-line per capita globally at something like 20-30 lbs (9-13 kg) per person per year (vs 60-80 pounds (27-36 kg) for countries like Korea, Japan, etc.)

More detail, if you look by locale in the U.S. the average Midwesterner eats something like under 1/4th the seafood of their coastal countrymates. That's not 1/4, that's again less than 1/4th so we're talking from zero to 7.5 pounds per capita.

Since population distribution in the U.S. is heavily skewed towards the coasts, you can estimate that for example, the average of 20lbs per person per year is representative of the average coastal person. This means that the average Midwesterner eats less than 5 pounds of all types of seafood per person per year or about something like less than 1 small shrimp per day.

The thing is, modern logistics make it possible to eat fresh Sushi in the middle of Kansas. Being away from the coasts isn't really an excuse as the availability is or can be approximately the same.

*sources: something something forgot to copy paste use the google or DDG it's like 2 minutes of searching plus some math

> The thing is, modern logistics make it possible to eat fresh Sushi in the middle of Kansas. Being away from the coasts isn't really an excuse as the availability is or can be approximately the same.

Flash freezing is relatively new technology (I assume that’s what you mean by “fresh”). It is not surprising midwesterners go all out on sushi (the real kind, not Californian roles) just because the logistics are easier now. Food is local because it has been that way for the last hundred or so years.

Nah, by fresh I mean caught, loaded from a boat onto a truck with ice and driven to its destination.

The miracle of the National Highway System makes Boston to San Diego a 50 hour possibility. Surely the people of Springfield Missouri would be fine with iced, fresh, 20 hour old fish caught off the coast of Connecticut! You can get an entire boat of fish from the Gulf Coast to Kansas City same day by road.

Delaware to Louisville is what 8 hours? But why bother, fresh mussels from Lake Erie don't even have to leave the state, can by caught in the morning after breakfast and eaten for lunch a couple hours later.

The Highway System is almost a century old. That's a few generations time to change preferences.

Flash freezing is required by the FDA for eaten raw seafood no matter how fresh it is. It has been since the 90s I think. Flash freezing is used throughout the world on most seafood these days sans a few old school Japanese institutions.

Because everything undergoes flash freezing in the boat anyways, 8 hours or 8 days isn’t going to matter much.

Remove shrimp and canned tuna and the Americans are not even close anymore

When you mention a quintessential US state I wouldn't arrive at Alaska or New Orleans

America is a huge country. Europe is huge as well, it’s not surprising that there are regional differences in our diet, and trying to generalize is always going to tick someone off.

> Just because the customs are different from other coastal communities in other countries doesn’t make America’s any less sophisticated.

On average it is less sophisticated though. Most coastal Americans (US) only consume a subset of the breadth of diversity of seafood available to them relative to many other regions of the world.

80% of America's seafood is imported, so it is not like Americans are producing. a lot of seafood along their coasts. The frozen tilapia we ate last night I think was from Chile. See: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/national/aquaculture/us-aquac...

Thats true, partially because of economics, but also because Americans' seafood palette involves farmed salmon, farmed tilapia and swai (not coastal seafood btw), etc. doesn't mean more diversity isn't available.

From your comment one might be inclined to picture that Koreans add it into everything which they do no more or less than other countries that consume it.

You would have to specifically ask for this ingredient at a restaurant and it is only kept alive if it is prepared in a seafood restaurant specifically which they keep them alive and fresh to be consumed usually raw since its a bad idea to consume already dead raw fishes.

I guess what you wrote does a really great job of illustrating the subtle passive aggressive tones often used by journalists in the West to mock or bring their personal stereotype views of the world while virtue signaling, constantly thinking and telling others what a great, upright, outstanding set of moral upbringing you've had, will have as a result of the perceived quality of life you might be experiencing.

Following such mindset I can see why somebody in the West might be construed as uppity and condescending, they are not able to see at all the bubble that they've constructed not through actually perceiving things as they are but how it makes you FEEL informed, intelligent, morally superior being that you believe yourself you are.

Which really leaves to little debate as to what the PURPOSE of these articles are: They are specifically brought to light to make the reader believe they are morally upright descent human beings that the rest of the world simply isn't.

THE question to ask here is why is the population constantly subject to such reminders through mass media and why is there so much deliberate and urgency that can't be found in other parts of the world?

Does it strike you that what we lack is probably what we are taught to believe as it would not fit with the reality that has been constructed in this country?

I think it's interesting that there are comments even here that say something along the lines of "once I learned that the octopus is capable of thinking I stopped eating them (even though I eat other animals much higher up the evolutionary ladder)".

What it says to me is that some people stopped eating them because it was surprising that octopuses have a complex sensory response system, because they never thought about it. But it's not surprising that a cow does so they keep eating them.

> once I learned that the octopus is capable of thinking I stopped eating them (even though I eat other animals much higher up the evolutionary ladder)"

Yes and this is exactly the issue here, that people in the world are increasingly incapable of being grounded in principle, its whatever in that moment is trendy to believe, do etc., through group thinking. Social media does a great job of trust in large numbers.

And going back to the original parent comment, this is largely cultural is it not? We are simply using the ideas that arise from one culture to impose it on the other only to be disappointed.

> What it says to me is that some people stopped eating them because it was surprising that octopuses have a complex sensory response system, because they never thought about it. But it's not surprising that a cow does so they keep eating them.

It is insane to me that the people arguing octopus lives matter essentially, are not seeing the irony of their reaction, that they would continue to tolerate the farming of foods that they regularly consume (beef, chicken) but not under the same amount of vigor and without the same level of virtue signaling attached with such dangerous thought exercise.

The craziest take away is that literally people will stop doing a behavior that is inconsistent with their own values, as long as they are made to FEEL informed. If the documentary was mostly powerpoint slides it is NOT possible to FEEL because it does not try to pander or manipulate the emotions of the audience.

The sad matter of the fact is that being informed with facts that you have to weigh yourself and reach your own conclusion is too difficult, (boring even!) that the individual living in the so called "First World" CANNOT/MUST NOT be burdened with because they are too busy with whatever ephemeral activities they are engaged in at any given time.

Remember! Original Parent noted eating octopus NEVER bothered him UNTIL he saw a Netflix documentary. Or one can reduce this to an outsider: Individuals in the West are increasingly growing dependent on for-profit motivated organizations to think and judge for them. The more obfuscated and difficult it is to follow the cui bono chain, the increasingly emotional and tribal they become. ex) If YC startup selling imitation crustacean meat was behind the Octopus Lives Matter, one would immediately deduce there are biases and conflict of interest and such narrative would lose credibility. However, if the distance between whoever benefits and the narrative is wide and uncertain (multiple beneficiaries) it becomes increasingly credible (must be of good non-profit social cause) and resilient against Truths that challenge it. Often explanations that deviate from the narrative are labelled with hostility and written off as conspiracy...

and on HN, such contrary views are quickly downvoted and censored outright.

We’ve felt morally superior for ages over the whole whaling issue.

As a European, I think you're wrong on several levels.

> When the irony is that the same random argument applied towards Octopus can be done on just about any sentient beings like cow and pigs.

Or like humans! It doesn't take a PhD to figure out that animals are biologically very similar to us and that they're likely sentient and intelligent. As far as I'm concerned, the burden of proof is on anyone claiming otherwise. We share so much biology with animals (this is proven, not conjectured) but you're trying to tell me that somehow it's just humans who are sentient and feel pain? Then prove it.

> Let's just call this article what it is: To reassure non-octopus eaters on their superior moral creed and a license to preach this narrative to people who consume octopus

Doesn't mean they're wrong.

> These articles almost always seem to derive to us-vs-them narrative, the idea that the West is somehow the forefront of moral novelty and the rest of the world is behind.

That may be the case sometimes, and their patronising tone irks me as well, but that doesn't mean they're wrong about this topic. Also, they're not the first ones to voice this idea, not by a longshot. So feel free to decouple your annoyance at "the West" (by which I assume you mean the Anglosphere) from what we can assume to be true until proven otherwise (animal sentience).

Do you actually believe that you would be able to enjoy the same level of human relationships with an octopus? How about a cow? Or a coackroach? You can attach romantic feelings towards anything since if you were so traumatized by having destroyed an sentient thing for your own benefit you would simply not allow yourself to exist.

I did not engage with your comment further since it signaled the same amount of moral depth like someone who will claim that homeless meth addicts are humans too and they will invite them to a warm dinner with your family.

I seriously somehow doubt that octopus is a hill that animal activists will die on seeing they failed to stop the whaling industry or a certain anti-oil virtue signaling girl with parents who work for the EGR industry who successfully convinced a bunch of people buy EVs.

I'm willing to bet that YC is probably going fund a company that will be able to produce imitations of Crustacean meat once the narrative Octopus Lives Matter have disseminated into coastal cities.

> Do you actually believe that you would be able to enjoy the same level of human relationships with an octopus? How about a cow? Or a coackroach?

My enjoyment levels have nothing to do with the discussion. You're essentially using the same "we're superior to X" argument that has been regularly used for the entirety of human history to try justify what is morally unjustifiable.

> I did not engage with your comment further since it signaled the same amount of moral depth like someone who will claim that homeless meth addicts are humans too and they will invite them to a warm dinner with your family.

To me it seems you alternate between the "might is right" approach and "everything is the same, nothing matters" pseudo-nihilism. Funny you should talk about moral depth. I'm not trying to offend you but come on.

> I seriously somehow doubt that octopus is a hill that animal activists will die on seeing they failed to stop the whaling industry

Well, I'm sure in that particular instance there were also many people like you who at best mocked the entire effort and at worst did everything to oppose it for no good reason.

> My enjoyment levels have nothing to do with the discussion.

When plants are usually cut, it emits a certain chemical as a warning stressor to communicate to other plants, who on a very slow time frame are just as capable of perceiving stressors and able to adjust their exposure to nutrients and sunlight in a matter very similar to animals.

Yet because it is difficult to attach anthropomorphic qualities to it you are free to farm, destroy and eat, whom by all definition just as sentient as the mammals you describe.

> To me it seems you alternate between the "might is right" approach and "everything is the same, nothing matters" pseudo-nihilism. Funny you should talk about moral depth. I'm not trying to offend you but come on.

As I suspected there's nothing really to be gained here, if you do not understand the spirit of what is meant, that you were simply trying to bate me into an endless argument in an endless circle.

Poignantly r/european I might add

> When plants are usually cut, it emits a certain chemical as a warning stressor to communicate to other plants, who on a very slow time frame are just as capable of perceiving stressors and able to adjust their exposure to nutrients and sunlight in a matter very similar to animals.

> Yet because it is difficult to attach anthropomorphic qualities to it you are free to farm, destroy and eat, whom by all definition just as sentient as the mammals you describe.

The existence of an adaptive mechanism in an organism doesn't mean that any organisms that have such mechanisms are sentient to similar degrees. You're actually completely contradicting yourself here by first arguing that other animals are "less" sentient than humans (presumably because of the neurological complexity of our brains compared to those of other species) and then continue by claiming that plants are similarly sentient to mammals.

> The existence of an adaptive mechanism in an organism doesn't mean that any organisms that have such mechanisms are sentient to similar degrees.

If there is an intelligence behind such mechanism, it still would not fit your definition of sentiency correct?

How are you so certain that there isn't an intelligence to all living things, plant, trees, insects and animals? How can such intelligence not adapt to its environment and instruct its physical medium to change its behavior or rearrange itself spatial temporally to maximize survivability?

Is that not the definition of a lifeform? the drive to survive?

really bizarre you would limit your horizon here, is it to double down on your original argument that is in alignment with what the article is proposing and the rest of us are commenting at the irony of deciding what is ethically edible or not in a country where industrial scale farming of all things sentient?

I'm sorry dude, but you're the only one here talking about us-vs-them and about Asia, the West or whatever.

The article is about a farm in Spain in a region well known for it's octopus dishes. Not everything has to be about geopolitical ideologies.

Humans project a lot of sentience when it isn't there, so I don't think it's so simple. There's certainly a cultural component too.

Money. Acknowledging that beings have feelings, a sense of self, and a will to live can complicate things. It gets in the way of making money. People in general tend to prioritize profits over people. Not always, but much of the time.

That's why the love of money is the root of all evil.

I think it would less a question of maturity and more of acceptance of societal values.

Fundamentally eating meat is a behavior our societies want to preserve; setting exceptions gives some leeway and carve safe spaces, while also making the rule more powerful.

For instance settings pets as off limit make it clearer that non-pets are for consumption. Farmers can spend time and develop attachment to their cows, understand they're not inherently different from dogs or ferrets in intelligence or conscience, but we've made it clear it's ok if they end on our plates. Wherever the line is drawn (conscience ? cuteness ? % of DNA close to us ?) doesn't really matter I think, as long as the impact is not critical to our economy or society.

To go to darker places, it's the same kind of logic used centuries ago between christians and "pagans" ("they have no soul", it's ok to kill/enslave them)

I don't know if there's a word for it besides the adjacent "speciesm" but the clumsy word "desentientize" popped up in my head as an ethical corollary to "dehumanization".

My take is that they're related because a being's ability to experience sentience, and especially suffering are ethical grounds to not breed them and inflict unnecessary suffering through harsh captivity and slaughter.

So for you, is that something that extends to all farmed animals then?

Its not possible for me to tell if thats been your stance on everything like farming chickens and salmon, or if you were one of the people that just found out Octopus' are smart and made a line there, or another group or individual with a unique opinion

there are some observations and personal dietary choices I can be sympathetic towards, I just don't know which one I'm hearing at the time and when it comes to Octopus or the animal-of-the-month I find people not being able to articulate their new opinion at all, but being shocked that the listener (me) isn't automatically on board or making a line at sentience.

If you're asking a personal question like I think you are: for me the courtesy of non-violence extends to all beings capable of suffering and with a preference to live. For a good read on the ethics of eating animals I'd recommend Peter Singer's 'Animal Liberation'

You're aware that plants fill both those criteria: (a) capable of suffering, and (b) a preference to live?

What do you eat?

Interesting, could you share your sources showing plants are capable of suffering and can indicate preference?

I eat many things, but nothing from animals :)

It's definitely a cultural reaction but I think it has to do with our place in history, being so far removed from the means of production of so many goods we rely on that we can only think of them in abstract terms of how they came to be.

People always say "If you knew where that burger came from, you wouldn't be eating meat." Yet here we are eating meat, having been knowing exactly where it came from and in fact doing it personally ourselves for millions of years of hominoid evolution right up until we developed our modern grocery model. It seems its really like, if you initially don't know where the burger came from, but are then are told where it came from having no firsthand experience previously, then you might not be eating meat anymore.

> It was always possible for me to perceive sentience, feelings and emotions from a variety of beings

My mom has always had this ability. We had some horses in a pasture behind our house, and one day we noticed most of the horses had been removed and only one remained. My mom could instantly tell that the one remaining horse, named Pete, was sad to be alone. "Pete is so sad, she's all alone" my mom observed while we were looking out the window. Literally, not 5 seconds later, a couple of horses came walking out from behind a shed in the pasture. I laughed and teased my mom. I guess Pete wasn't as sad and alone as she thought.

In other words, how do you know you're perceiving the feelings of animals correctly?

I think this is the point you're making, but this isn't "perceiving sentience" (whatever that means), it's literally just projects your thoughts and emotions onto an anthropomorphized version of whatever animal you're looking at. Which is the same thing the GP was/is doing, but they haven't "matured" enough cognitively to realize it yet.

let's elaborate on your standard here:

I'm GP and I never mapped human emotions to other species. Amongst many species I see this with, I looked at cephalopods and can see sentience. This was unrelated to me consuming them, they taste yummy and there are plenty of them.

So with your standard, I was wrong and my inferior brain was anthropomorphizing, until a greater consensus was suddenly reached from researchers and governments that makes me right? I mean its not something I was advocating for, its just surprising to me how many weren't perceiving this at all. Like when you find out that some people don't have visual dreams, or find out that you're the person that doesn't have visual dreams and everyone else wasn't speaking in hyperbole and actually have a different experience.

this reminds me of a small fish that used to visit me during my dives, it would take me to things he found, bottles, coins, shells.

was not the first time it happened because the same fish with the same markings (im quite sure of it) would visit me.

so im thinking what is going on here? how is it that a fish is able to recognize me in my gear and comes to me in the same vicinity?

it appears to be communicating too by leading me to stuff he finds. it lets me even pet it which it seems to enjoy.

again i dont know what its thinking but from these actions one might strongly conclude that there is some sort of sentient mutual awareness and that its able to engage in both recognition, my presence and subtle communication (by showing me treasures he find)

I guess my point is perceiving feelings is not limited between two humans only (obviously super tough with text alone, it is something else.

> making that a line in the sand on whether they will farm/consume a being based on that.

But everyone is drawing that line somewhere, mostly unconsciously. Surely nobody minds eating bacteria and fungi (else you couldn't live), but most people wouldn't eat a dog - so there is a line. But where? (in this case, the somewhat arbitrary definition of sentience, I guess)

It is interesting that Octopi die after laying their eggs - a 1-1.5 year lifespan in most, a little more in the large ones. I makes me curious if octopi went through a period of overpopulation(for their niche) that lead to many starvation - abundance - starvation cycles until gene smarts capped their life span - else we be up to our gunwales with long lived octopi they breed very prolifically... a die young cycle.

You'd think being able to lay eggs twice would be a massive advantage for a individual set of genes.

Yes, octopi are smart as well as prolific, with multi seasonal reproduction they would suffer extinction through over population. Even 2 seasons is a lot of new larvae in the seas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus#:~:text=Octopuses%20ha....

I swear I've read articles with this exact same title several times over the years, but I can't seem to find any on Google.

> Last year, researchers at the London School of Economics concluded from a review of 300 scientific studies that octopus were sentient beings capable of experiencing distress and happiness, and that high-welfare farming would be impossible.

I don't understand how someone can decide to ignore that in an effort to make money. I fear that if we don't more quickly move the Overton window on the suffering of sentient creatures, we may suddenly find ourselves with synthetic sentient life devoid of protection under the law.

Is it not clear that cows experience distress? And we farm and eat those.

Or is this conclusion that octopuses experience distress and other animals are p-zombies which only react in a way that looks like distress but might be emotionally neutral inside?

I mean specifically octopods, considering this is the first farm. It means someone really went out of their way to get past historical momentum to be the first to create this process.

The worst part is that it will be easily replicable. That's really sad. I feel sympathy for these poor creatures.

I think the point is to start somewhere and nip this one in the bud.

Yes, Temple Grandin’s work to reduce animal distress is very important.

Grandin also developed an objective, numerical scoring system for assessing animal welfare at slaughtering plants. The use of this scoring system resulted in significant improvements in animal stunning and handling during slaughter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Grandin

Edit for quote format

That is some absolutely twisted shit.

It's also true and important (at least in the context of this whole HN discussion).

Sure, I agree

the same would apply to pretty much all animals no? and dare I say plants too?

Animals yes. Plants? I eat them without guilt. I wouldn't eat insects, not only because of my conditioned disgust, but now even moreso because crustaceans were found to be capable of suffering based on an 8-point scale. Bugs and crabs don't seem so far off to one another in my mind.

We as a society seem to have no problem killing millions of insects to make it easier to grow plants though. No matter what you eat, things are dying to supply your food.

If you want to minimize the number of animals being killed, it’s probably best to eat the largest ones you have.

Sentience is a matter of degree. That's why people can compare the intelligence of a chimpanzee to the intelligence of a three year old human. Or why it's intuitive to prefer saving the life of a human to saving the life of a fish. That does not diminish the capability of suffering that the fish has, but merely comparing the objective complexity of a human's preferences vs a fish's.

How do you think we grow those bigger animals though? We grow plants to feed them and convert those plant calories to animal calories at a mind bogglingly inefficient rate.

If you want to reduce death and suffering overall, sticking to plants only is the best route.

We also grow plants to burn in F150s. OTOH you also cannot convert all the pastoral land into agricultural land. In fact its probably pastoral land in the first place because the land is not that possible to farm on otherwise (e.g. hilly/narrow/rock laden pastures which are quite common across hilly areas like appalachia).

The fact is there are good ways to grow animals and plants, and bad ways, and we should just focus on eliminating the bad ways and allowing the market to set prices on what the good practices are. It honestly wound't be too expensive; grassfed pastured beef isn't too much of a premium, neither is soybean that came from an ohio field instead of a Brazilian rainforest. If subsidizes were eliminated for the mass market operations that damage the environment, and introduced for these sustainable operations, you'd see a lot of self correction in the market to fit these more sustainable practices.

Kurzgesagt has a great video explaining how grass fed beef isn’t really very viable at all. I suggest you watch it. It came out a couple months ago and talks about this at length. Give it a google.

If its something like its too costly then that's fine too. Let mcDonalds become bean burgers if their pricepoint with the cost of proper grassfed beef doesn't make any sense anymore.

> it’s probably best to eat the largest ones you have.

This fails at scale. Feeding our population on large animals requires significantly more plant mass than if we eat plants. Large animals are terribly inefficient at converting plant matter into food.

We will harm fewer sentient creatures if we simply eat plants directly.

If you are eating grains directly or feed grains to (say) chickens you have to plow the land, clear other vegetation, cause erosion, probably use fertilizers and pesticides.

At a certain scale though you can graze animals on grass sustainably, building soil structure instead of destroying it.

The environmental movement has a beef with beef but the more I look at it chicken is the problem.

So are you saying since all flora and fauna might also apply, that we do nothing?

This is the all or nothing fallacy mentioned up thread.

I can't read their mind but I don't know if that's what they're trying to say. The common anti-veg(an)itarian argument is that if you apply standards evenly it would result in an absurdity, thus leading you to question the premise.

I think we can do something, I think these research are good, and we can try and reduce harm. Personally I just try and reduce food wastage, I've kept a journal and boy do I waste a lot...

So we all just starve now because we can't eat plants? I don't like your plan.

I don't think their "plan" is anything, it looks like an (common) anti-veg(an)itarian argument that tries to say that if standards were applied evenly it would result in an absurdity.

> and dare I say plants too?

I mean, if we also can't eat plants... there's not gonna be much left to eat.

by the way love the lab food concept due to this, don't really trust big Ag/Pharma would leave us alone though; there're profits to be made damnit.

Your comment is a series of logical mistakes.

1. Plants don't have a central nervous system. They're not sentient and don't feel pain.

2. The fact that something "applies to all animals" doesn't somehow make an action morally justifiable. You're suggesting inaction because perfection can't be achieved.

In our understanding you need nervous system and brain. That doesn't conclude that plants don't feel pain. Pain is how we know about our injury or whatever. That doesn't mean plants will feel that way too. We excrete through our butthole but plants excrete through different way or process. They may feel pain in the way we don't understand yet. Like we now know they are sensitive to light, food, host etc. They emit electrical signals when their body parts are cut. The answer will always be maybe yes or no. We don't even know properly about ourselves, forgot plants and animals.

suggest exposing yourself to some Wittgenstein and lion? It's merely some conjecture, nowhere did I suggest inaction too

I'm calling BS on the happy octopus study.

I watched an Anthony Bourdaine episode where he visited Japan and saw the live octopus that would later be slaughtered for his dinner. He was very excited by it.

I looked at the same octopus and not once did the thought, "food" enter my mind. It's the same when I look at cows and chicken.. I don't think of them as food when I see them roaming about. On the other hand, when I see a fish, I do sometimes think, "food!".

I think this would make for a good test when deciding whether or not you should eat a particular animal. When you look at it alive and roaming about, do you think "oh, thats food!". If not, then maybe you shouldn't eat it.

The more you know, the less likely you are to think about animals as food, i reckon.

I find the opposite is true. Knowing a lot of hunters (and being one myself), I can say that they are intensely interested in their prey's thoughts, behavior, and feelings, certainly more so than the average person.

I increasingly see a world where meat eaters want to not just know where their meat comes from, but know exactly what animal it is they're eating and exactly how it lived and taking personal responsibility for its death. You see more people doing things like buying shares of a cow (and even visiting the cow in person to see how it's doing), or raising chickens in their backyard, etc. in my country.

On a very lateral note, pulpo a la gallega is made with boiled, not seared, octopus

I shall instruct my octopodal mates to avoid hot baths and go for the incineration option instead.

This is a tricky one. Where do you draw the line as an omnivore?

Somewhere before primates.

Times you wish you could double up vote :)

Anything tasty that won't make me sick

If its been distributed here, prepped, and offered for sale, I might as well eat it since its there anyhow. Better conditions for animals will come from legislation and not consumer choices.

You don’t think individuals collective buying habits influence macro trends in supply?

I do. I would like to know what you think. My understanding of the mechanism is probably oversimplified.

I think when it comes to meat its more of a tragedy of the commons issue, and the most effective way to get something done is to encourage my representatives to support legislation that helps these animals versus holding my breath and waiting for the world to wake up and choose logic. Keep in mind this is a society that have many who, when shown that smoking causes lung cancer, continues to smoke. After COVID and seeing the worldwide idiot brigade come out of the woodwork from that, I'm even more cynical, and more certain that there are just too many idiots on this planet to just expect consumers to one day wise up and start doing things differently.

But we can do both: personally abstain to inform the market of changing preferences, and lobby the government to introduce new laws and reorganize subsidies.

It’s not one or the other. There is no reason to wait to stop eating animals unnecessarily

Yep. And this oil has been refined already, might as well burn it now. That plane will fly with or without me in it. /s

Except the providers actually adjust to demand. If the products are not sold, they will make less of them.

I can't remember the name of this particular fallacy.

If you’re going to the Big Island, there is a little place where they let you play with octopuses. They’re figuring out how to farm that species there.

You can feed them and stuff and you can play with them and they’ll touch you with their tentacles.

Anyway, I found the whole operation quite interesting. They were trying to farm them to prevent them from being over fished in the wild. Interesting objective.

I don't eat octopus and I minimize my pork intake as much as possible. I know it's such an arbitrary barrier that pigs are my limit for how intelligent an animal can be before I decline to eat them, but I guess it helps reduce suffering a little at least.

This isn't the first octopus farm. A farm in Southern California called OctoPets farmed octopuses 20 years ago, though only as pets, not for food. They shipped bimaculoides octopuses throughout the US, and you could buy one for $60 if memory serves.

The lines as to which animals are ok to eat seem somewhat arbitrary and ever changing to me.

Either accepting it as a fact of life or not eating any at all seem like the only sound stances that don’t change with the way the wind blows

By all accounts octopus intelligence is extremely overblown. And "sentience" is an extremely low bar.

Compare the intelligence of a cow or pig or similar mammal to an octopus and the mammal will DESTROY the octopus. We tolerate farming these animals. Much to our own detriment in terms of health, and nutrition, and environmental impact, land usage, and water usage. Plus there is the problem of breeding MRSA. Plus they are horrible for our gut bacteria. Also they are sentient, intelligent creatures we subject to horrific environments. Keep in mind, I say this as someone who is NOT a vegan. But I digress...

Not to say octopus are not charming animals, and you should support eating and farming them. I just think it is a bit hypocritical to allow the farming of other sentient creatures.

Why not just go vegan if you believe all that?

It's possible to point out contradictions of beliefs without having those beliefs yourself.

Sure, but what’s stopping you from holding that belief then?

Apathy? Lack of motivation to take personal action?

You should try it. I started out without giving two shits about animals. Now it’s the thing I feel most strongly about, and it has given my life much deeper meaning and direction.

Maybe you’ll feel the same!

> Compare the intelligence of a cow or pig or similar mammal to an octopus and the mammal will DESTROY the octopus

What studies do you have in mind?

> Compare the intelligence of a cow or pig or similar mammal to an octopus and the mammal will DESTROY the octopus.

Octopuses are incredible because we've found the opposite. Octopuses are solving pretty complicated puzzles oftentimes for fun the same way people do. Cows don't. Cows do have social bonds closer to humans, though.

How do you know cows dont have fun too or engage in complex problem solving? Pigs seem quite intelligent also and capable of solving puzzles as do crows. Seems like having fun is a natural part of all sentient beings as boredom is inevitable.

Could it be that the novelty of discovering that octopus, a crustacean after thought, could suddenly be as intelligent if not more than the pig (thought to be more intelligent than a canine), prevent you from consuming it? Is the irony of people shouting Octopus Lives Matter protesting against its farming but not the massive industrial scale beef/pork production capacities not clear?

Why even stop there? What if tomorrow you learn plants were able to perform puzzles and solve problems, would you view your veggies differently?

An awful criteria for determining what is morally sound to consume as food, can humans also be consumed if they are unable to solve a simple Rubrik's cube? What if they are inside a box where your perception of whether the subject is having fun or not determines their life or death, upon the latter, you are morally safe and sound in partaking in cannibalism?

Are there study's to back up the lack of octopus intelligence? Because if we are comparing octopus to other farm animals, most farm animals are dumb as a box of rocks compared to wild cousins or ancestors. We bred most farm animals to be dumb in process of domestication in order to keep them contained, the smart ones can escape, while the dumb ones get easily bred. Ive never seen anything to make me believe my cows are even remotely as intelligent as a wild animal and consider them the extremely dull mutant cousins of their ancestors.

I would argue you need set a bar for intelligence and then prove a creature meets or exceeds it. Trying to come at it from the other end leaves you in impossible situations where extremes like, "trees are connected and therefore are sentient," become an acceptable motivation.

Sentience is more akin to the preference to avoid pain. Intelligence plays a role in the expression of sentience, but it is ultimately more akin to an ability rather than a preference trait as sentience is.

They would eat you if they could/wanted.

> "For now aquaculture is the only available option."

Wrong.

I've stopped eating octopus. Of course, we can't stop eating every animal, even many that obviously feel distress and emotions, but we really need to draw a line on reducing and making sure that we raise or naturally hunt animals in a humane as possible way. Octopus is one I've taken a line on. Others still weigh on me.

"Aquaculture" is being billed as the solution to ocean food and even as "green" and "sustainable", but it's going to be just like or worse than the Green Revolution, which continues to strip land of diversity and nutrients.

Humans are hell bent on destroying this planet. Why do humans have a complete lack of an ability to say "stop, we're not going to do this anymore". Instead, we somehow view continuous growth and consumption as the only available option. It makes no sense.

I commend you for your decision.

I want to add that framing my ideas about animal suffering in an elastic way makes it easier for me to make incremental changes. An animal is either alive or dead. Maybe eating vegetarian once a week will save a life down the line.

I urge everyone to resist the all-or-nothing approach, especially on such an important aspect of our ethical choices. No one's perfect, not even the vegan straight edge kids on Instagram who sneak a chicken nugget when no one's looking.

The point of reducing your consumption is that the demand for animals is lower, so they aren't born in to lives of non-stop suffering.

> I urge everyone to resist the all-or-nothing approach

There is no other moral stance where someone could reasonably say this. Veganism is a moral stance the same way as "racism is bad" and "abusing my spouse is bad" is a moral stance. No one would ever say "I'm trying to limit kicking dogs to just Tuesday-Sunday".

> vegan straight edge kids on Instagram who sneak a chicken nugget when no one's looking.

You're projecting. Veganism is _not_ a diet.

> There is no other moral stance where someone could reasonably say this. Veganism is a moral stance the same way as "racism is bad" and "abusing my spouse is bad" is a moral stance. No one would ever say "I'm trying to limit kicking dogs to just Tuesday-Sunday".

I agree that this holds from an ethical standpoint, but from an environmental one reduction is perfectly reasonable and needs to be part of the conversation.

The big difference is that racism and abuse invoke a social consensus. Veganism does not - the vast majority of society does not agree that veganism is a necessary, absolute moral stance. In fact, many would probably take offense at putting it on the same level of moral imperative as something like racism.

We also routinely deal with non-absolutes on these types of subjects. It's extremely common for people to disagree with the appropriate level of anti-racism, or the appropriate level of respect with which to treat one's spouse.

> You're projecting. Veganism is _not_ a diet.

It's more than a diet, for sure. But I do know many, many people who aspire to veganism and who at times make concessions. I don't think less of them for doing so.

I disagree and your comparisons aren't accurate. A more accurate comparison would he to say its like "I'm going to ride my bike to work once a week" or "I'll pick up trash at the local park once a week".

I don't have to view eating meat or driving my car an inherently immoral in order to recognize the objective negative ecological impact that those actions have, and to therefore want to engage in some form of harm reduction from time to time.

Yes, excellently stated. That's precisely my original point. I intended to preemptively disarm the conversational decay that absolutes cause.

I think there is a place for that, for example art or activism, but when speaking directly to another human, absolutes seem to place a lot of people on their back foot in defense of their current established decisions.

At risk of getting tedious here, the even-more accurate comparison would be "I'm gonna limit paying someone else to kick a dog from Tuesday to Sunday".

Since there actually exists real-life animal abuse in the case of paying for meat or any animal product ( including dairy ).

I would think that's still not as accurate as the above examples. That implies a form of intended malice and wish to do harm at no personal gain. If the factory in which my car is manufactured happens to employ children that doesn't mean I'm paying for child labor - I'm paying for a car regardless of how it's produced. The attempt to shift the blame to the consumer here fallacious.

I understand where you're coming from. I assume you believe one bad thing is preferable to two bad things. It's the trap I was warning against. Degrees instead of absolutes.

Personally, I am vegetarian due to ethical concerns, not dietary or nutritional ones. In my decade+ of being vegetarian, I have discerned the pattern that moral proselytizing is generally offensive to people. I think most intelligent non-vegetarians are more amenable to talking about clearly objective impacts (number of dead animals, environmental impact, nutrition, etc).

I prefer to be able to have a rational conversation when I talk about the topic with someone. Righteous indignation is more usually a thought extinguishing reaction to all involved. And then no one comes away with anything at all.

Are you okay with male chicks being grinded alive to enjoy your eggs, female cows being artificially inseminated by humans and their babies taken away and murdered just so you can enjoy your milk?

> Of course, we can't stop eating every animal

Why? There are plenty of people who do.

Because most governments aren't going to use violence to stop you from eating meat. Until then people will eat meat.

I can’t tell how true that is. I’ve certainly heard that a lot of people who claim to be vegan aren’t 100%. Are there any reliable studies on this topic?

Not eating animals does not immediately get you to vegan. Human body is not designed for a vegan diet. However, eating animal products that don't kill the said animal, (milk, cheese, yogurt, eggs etc) is sustainable and feasible. Of course factory farms, which encourages over consumption, are not the way to go.. Not everything needs to be eaten daily. Also, things like 4 egg omlet with a mountain of cheese etc are an abomination. Consume in moderation and the production won't be a burden on the planet.

The human body also isn't designed for vaccines, going to space, or doing math. Somehow, when we need the human body to do something, we find a way to make it happen.

I appreciate the point you are making. Humans have ingenuity, for sure. But I have to disagree on a finer point. We do not know what the long term effect of vegan diet is. Supplements may work to an extent but may not be complete. To contrast with your examples, vaccines work with the body's natural defences and even there long term testing is needed to uncover unexpected side effects. Going to space is risky and even after controlling for all we can think of disasters happen. Not sure all of human race should embark on a risky mission of vegan diet without fully understanding the long term consequences. Morally I am ok with animals like cows and chicken bred for milk and egg. Your threshold is different and I get that too.

It is not always possible to get all the nutrients you need without animal products, either because they are not available or because the price is too high.

Rice and lentils.

There are definitely people in situations where the burden of a vegan or vegetarian diet would cause much more harm to them personally than the harm an omnivore diet would cause. I don't blame people for the uncontrollable, and I don't know that anyone who holds a well-thought out position on animal suffering would either. Suffering is the superset of all suffering. My ethical heuristic is to make choices with an eye toward reducing that set.

The burden of a violent diet (nmeat and diary) is much higher that a plant based one to any sane human.

Okay, then if that point is ceded, would you agree then that we ought to only eat the fewest animal products necessary to get those nutrients in safe levels?

People always argue against veganism by saying “Ah well, can’t get all my B12 from plants so I guess eating this McDonalds quarter pounder is justified!”. Why not remove everything else that is an animal product lacking the nutrients you need, and only eat what animal products you absolutely need?

For the record, it’s the consensus of every major nutrition and dietetic institute globally that a plant based diet is suffix for all stages of life, so even granting the point that veganism disallows access to a full nutritional profile is generous.

>Okay, then if that point is ceded, would you agree then that we ought to only eat the fewest animal products necessary to get those nutrients in safe levels?

Yes

But we also need to reduce the numbers of our pets. Especially free strolling cats are a massive hit to the ecosystem.

Agreed

Ignoring the price issue.

If I were to consume my daily protein via plant sources, it would come with an INSANE amount of carbs.

Absolute nonsense. There are over 80 million fit and healthy vegans worldwide.

Processed food weather it is vegan or carnist is always more expensive but fruit, vegetables, lentils, beans, nuts, seeds, grains etc are all actually very very cheap compared to meat and diary in a western diet.

Maybe you should leave your bubble, there are parts of the world where food is still hunted and vegetables are more expensive

https://www.indy100.com/news/inuit-hunting-vegan-arctic-indi...

There are plenty of people who strive for some kind of vegetarian or vegan diet, but they aren't not eating animals unless they are inspecting every food item they consume for all the microscopic animals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro-animal

I think it's well understood that when vegans or vegetarians say they don't eat "animals" they are generally talking about, at minimum, macrobiota and not tardigrades, etc.

Well then they aren't not eating any animal. It's pretty simple. I'm not attacking them for the oversight just pointing it out. It should be forgivable for swallowing a fly but vegan and vegetarian food production still harms animals(example: insects are animals) and they still eat some animals accidentally. It's an improvement but it's not perfect.

I’m genuinely not sure what you think matters about this fact.

I'm just defending the statement "Of course, we can't stop eating every animal".

Why are you here?

> Why do humans have a complete lack of an ability to say "stop, we're not going to do this anymore".

Because not doing things leaves you with a distinct lack of capital. Not dragging on capitalism, just being descriptive: those who act collect the resources to act more

I also think humans are curious. We want new things, new experiences to discover, etc.

But also agree we should put the brakes on octopus farms. It's like a puppy mill for food.

Wait until you learn about hog farms then.

But what's the point? What's the actual need to continue to acquire more? Why can't we say enough is enough? You're just describing a mechanism. Oh, I know someone will respond with "who gets to decide what's enough?", but why is their answer to that, "well just let anybody do whatever they want"?

The reason is the human condition for power and greed knows no bounds, and multi-millionaires and billionaires who like to play Sim City get to decide things for the rest of us. We're apes with technology and economics.

I mean we still have orcas in nothing more than shallow swimming pools. Orcas are the size of school buses, can weigh up to 10 tons, are likely the greatest predator ever to be on Earth, one of the most intelligent and emotional animals, and we've kept one of them in a single tank, alone, for over three decades and has been in captivity for over five decades. Her name is Lolita and her last pool partner was in the 1980s, where he committed suicide by ramming his head over and over into the side of the concrete pool. Those two are just two examples.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita_(killer_whale)

And even in that situation, we can't say to ourselves to stop. Humans are still keeping, capturing, and breeding orcas for nothing more than shallow entertainment. It's really sickening at times.

I agree with you re: apes with electronics. I have a personal theory about human evolution I call "restless ape theory"

other apes might feed themselves, gain some territory, and call it a day, but not us. Some gene flipped a million years ago so that we will never be satisfied. Our ape ancestors hid from the weather and thought, this will not do.

I was not making a moral judgement about those who gain capital, just explaining why they're the ones that get to decide. It might not be the best way to make collective decisions, but on the whole its better than violence, which is the alternative for those who can offer no incentive to act one way or another. I guess religion works too, but the anti-capitalists seem to dislike that as well.

The point is, no one gets to tell anyone else what the point is. We are in competiton to persuade or have power over the unpersuadable.

Yeah, i've not eaten much Octapus previously, but I had it occasionally in sushi or civeche that came with it. But I really can't continue to eat it even in that capacity in good conscience.

Was something that I had thought about previously, but wasn't until I actually saw one while diving that I decided I couldn't continue eating.

I've eaten Octopus in the past but didn't knew how intelligent those creature were until a couple of years ago. Since I saw multiple documentaries about them and read about them, I would now feel like a cannibal for eating them.

> Of course, we can't stop eating every animal...

...

> Why do humans have a complete lack of an ability to say "stop, we're not going to do this anymore".

I'm trying to understand how these two statements were separated by only a couple sentences.

Unless you can invent life that doesn't require the consumption of other life, we're stuck with what we have. As far as I understand, humans have always eaten meat, including before fire was discovered. There's a certain biological component for being omnivores.

Second, I am human too, you know. I'm made up of the same bullshit everyone else is. However, at least I try to question what I do and try and stop things, and I'm not hell bent on actively trying to make other humans' or animals' lives miserable. I'm still ashamed at the amount of waste and suffering I've brought by eating certain things or using certain products.

Part of my point is that there are people in key moments that can say "enough is enough" but they don't. Usually because they know someone else won't say that and will just do it themselves. And so it goes.

So my question, the second one you quoted, is somewhat rhetorical. We humans don't really possess the ability to be okay with enough. If we did, things would have been a lot different a long time ago. I'm a little curious about the reason why we don't though. There's something off about us. I think this is what you get when you give apes enough intelligence to build technology and societies but not enough emotional capacity and development to handle the consequences.

Sliding into this subthread, this explanation you just gave of where you are is why I commended you upthread. I recognize your embrace of your own self-awareness and moral openness. I like people like that.

The original comment was in reference to animals specifically, not just life, so saying we need to eat life to survive and therefor must eat animals is incoherent.

Also, for how long humans have eaten meat is totally irrelevant: doing something for a long time does not justify it.

Human beings don’t require animal products to thrive, period, so those that eat them anyway engage in unnecessary cruelty against other sentient animals. The unnecessary part is the most crucial.

> Human beings don’t require animal products to thrive, period

As much as I am in favor of reducing meat consumption of all kinds, is this an accepted fact?

For some measure of "accepted fact", yes: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19562864/

> It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases.

Eating quite minimal animal products is the norm in societies with the best longevity. A "good" vegan diet is very very healthy and cheap, only requiring supplementation with B12. This specific need for supplementation is more an artifact of modern farming practices -- we clean vegetables of the bacteria that produce B12, because we use fertilizers that must be washed away or else risk disease. Animal products contain B12 because those animals still eat enough bacteria produced B12 -- all animals get B12 from bacteria or from eating animals that get it from bacteria.

There are parts of the world where environment or culture doesn't allow for a "good" vegan diet. If you're in a developed nation and not in a food desert, the environmental aspect doesn't apply.

Actually cows do produce some levels of B12 in their bodies, but we still supplement them with the raw ingredients for that B12 so at the end of the day, basically every person living in the developed world is getting their B12 from supplements, one way or another.

Also, it’s not only the American Dietetic Association that believes veganism is healthy for all stages of, it’s the opinion of all the largest ones around the world!

Aquaculture is really a hedge against terrestrial crop failures, and you will be glad we developed this industry today come 50 years of climate change from now.

Honestly we need to quit pretending that we, as humans, are something special as compared to other omnivorous or carnivorous mammals. OK we have more gray matter comparatively but really that means nothing.

Some cultures eat octopus, some eat dogs, some eat cats, some eat cows, and of course some eat humans. And some eat vegetation. Do you honestly think those cultures sit back and question what they are doing and if it is ok in order to survive?!

I'm laughing at the responses to this post - sentience, history of eating octopi, god told me, etc.. as an excuse for why humans shouldn't eat octopus. Who really fucking cares.

I can ramble on and debate all this until I'm blue. My goal is not necessarily to argue, but to light a spark.

Is your point that the majority of people don't consider their own actions as moral agents so we shouldn't either? If you're browsing this website from a phone or computer you are beyond the clamber of mere survival. You have time for ethical reflection.

I think his claims is more like:

a) eating animals is justified because we are omnivorous/carnivorous by nature, and,

b) who fucking cares anyway.

I don’t think it is “we don’t need ethics out there” as some might frame it.

I’d say we all have this collective naive ethics that killing sentient animals leaves bad tastes in the mouth, and I’d love not having to feel or think about it, but that cannot immediately mean it is, like, can be proven logically wrong.

So just because we're omnivorous and capable of eating animals, that justifies it?

Most humans are also fully capable and arguably evolved to do things like steal and murder each other, are those also justified simply because we're capable? And on the second point, the existence of OPs article and the comments around this one indicate that some people do care.

The killing and eating of animals are not acts which belong to the category of acts needing justification. Stealing and murdering other people affects human society, so those require justification by the justice system. But many acts are not part of the human society, in that the acts don’t affect it. For example, if I sit backwards on a chair, that not a threat to human society, so it does not need justification. Some people like to imagine that such unconventional acts, which they deem “transgressions”, are somehow eroding society, and would like them to be abolished. The current trend in free societies is, however, to be more liberal in what they allow.

Kicking my dog would also not affect human society, does that mean I can kick my dog without justification? For fun?

My point here to be more clear is that we simply don't need to consume animals, and that the taste pleasure of eating them doesn't justify their death. Humans are animals too, and the success of our species doesn't require intense suffering of another.

> Kicking my dog would also not affect human society,

But it would. At least we have, as a society, decided that it would. But this is rather flexible, since in older times, as well as in some cultures, wanton animal cruelty is accepted. I guess that the argument for prohibiting cruelty to animals is that it is good to prohibit behavior which we believe to be detrimental to the person doing it. I.e. it’s not prohibited to protect the dog, it’s prohibited to protect you from becoming a cruel bastard and turning around and being toxic in human society. Whether this actually is a valid argument is, of course, subjective and debatable, which is why cultures differ on this point.

> but to light a spark.

Indeed it was a spark, but it vanished in an instant.

> Who really fucking cares.

I care, and if you don't, good riddance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com