Even cows are extremely intelligent and emotional animals. Did you stop eating them?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
ethics are always the privilege of the well to do
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.
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).
https://www.paesta.psu.edu/podcast/how-much-water-does-it-re...
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.
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.
Earthling Ed also has videos about egg industry, but the gist is make chicks are crushed in a meat grinder alive.
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)
[1] https://www-bmel-de.translate.goog/DE/themen/tiere/tierschut...
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?
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 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.
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?
> 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.
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”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I hope that helps!
Else you could easily ethically qualify meat eating that is limited to the consumption animals killed while blinded and under the influence of anaesthetics.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Pigs though, definitely. Highly underrated animal.
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).
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)
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).