I really love sharks, but I think it’s cognitive dissonance to pretend factory farming does less harm. Even if per animal it doesn’t get as bad, the scale is incomparable.
There’s an obvious practical difference, exactly because of the scale. Shark finning is a gratuitously cruel luxury, and so (relatively) easy to stop. Whereas most people like meat and don’t want it to be twice as expensive. As long as that’s true, ending factory farming will be an extremely heavy lift.
Personally I think we should stop doing bad stuff where we can, without worrying too much about whether the order makes logical sense. Progress is hard enough already.
The concern arises when people take a whole shark, then cut the fin and dispose of it --only for the fin.
Imagine if Tigers only ate the tails or ear flops of their prey and then ran off after that.
We can also recognize that prisons today are tortuous and should be improved (much like the farming/slaughter industry), and the death penalty is hard for many to justify as well, but paralyzing a human and throwing them in a hole to rot while still alive—even if they were a major criminal—would probably outrage nearly everyone.
It's like those golden tomahawk steaks. There's no point in covering a steak with gold, yet we spend effort digging a hole in the ground to do it.
It’s possible now to generate those B vitamins, but saying humans don’t need to consume animals is like saying we don’t need to walk to be healthy. Technically true, but most of us have two legs that we evolved to live a human lifestyle and getting around that requires a bunch of atypical lifestyle changes that are massively difficult and unnatural for most people.
If they did they wouldn't need to eat the amount they do.
With shark finning, the product (fin) is worth less than the shark even by the most conservative estimate.
Not exactly the same, but orcas literally follow baby belugas until they are too tired to swim any further and drown. Then the orcas eat the lower jaw (most delicate part I guess) and leave the rest of the beluga to go to waste.
Point being, probably better to not point to the practices of other animals to determine whether or not what we’re doing is ethical.
There is a large difference between killing animals as swiftly as possible to use as much as possible and knicking off a small bit they need to live and leaving them to a slow painful death.
Baseless projection.
> I think it’s cognitive dissonance to pretend factory farming does less harm. Even if per animal it doesn’t get as bad, the scale is incomparable.
This would be more persuasive with reliable numbers qua comparable harm rather than conjecture. What constitutes inhumane treatment is also at a much different threshold for activists than it is the average person (e.g. captivity).
Case in point: the number of sharks maimed and killed every year for their fins "range from 10 million a year (United Nations) to more than 100 million (various sources)" - https://saveourseas.com/how-many-sharks-are-caught-each-year.... In commercial agriculture, are there enough farmers going out of their way to cause harm in excess of what is done to those sharks to at least 10 million chickens per year, out of the billions? The only way this is possibly true is if you construe the entire commercial agriculture system as equally harmful. Chicken slaughter is pretty fast.
If your argument instead is that any percentage of possible abuse invalidates farming, that's your call.
Go meet a farmer, buy from a local field if your diet needs meat.
Is that true? I know people who have raised cows for slaughter and I've not seen any "torturing" going on? Many people probably care for their livestock, I don't think it's an easy life honestly.
My friend is a veterinarian, who is a vegetarian, she's pretty honest about the meat industry and she told me that cows (at least in Australia) are almost never indoors or in factories during their life for various reasons, mostly just practical reasons and more often then not are left to roam around eating grass and feed. They don't have especially bad lives at all.
Yes in the end the animal is slaughtered for food, this sucks. On the other hand I've spent enough time fishing and hunting to realize that the "natural world" isn't very kind either.
Ever seen a a live fish have it's face slowly chewed off by a squid or octopus until it dies? A wounded animal get torn apart by a pack of wild dogs? A lamb dropped from the sky by an eagle so it dies after having it's bones shattered? It's super confronting.
I won't try to argue the savage aspect of nature means humans can do whatever we want, but to say that animals are being "tortured", I'm not quite sure about that.
Alan Watts gave a great talk on this subject and makes the argument that really, killing plants and fungus is also killing something or ruining another organisms home and morally questionable in it's own right, his argument is the best thing we can do is make the most of whatever we eat by cooking it beautifully and enjoying our meal giving it proper attention / appreciating it. I think he makes a pretty good point.
Take a read of this: https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/31/magazine/power-steer.html
I doubt it's too much different down under.
> Ever seen...
Sure, nature is cruel and can be horrific. We are part of nature, true, but we're also (perhaps striving to be) reasoning moral beings, and so we can draw a line on where our tolerance for acceptable suffering of another animal stops. Doesn't mean everybody needs to be a vegan by any means, but IMO meat eaters should consider an honest look at what goes into producing their food and figure out what they're most comfortable with (that may be, e.g., fully locally raised meat, which is more expensive to pay for the luxury of animals having happier lives.)
> morally questionable in it's own right
It's been a while since I read Watts, but I'm pretty confident he would be appalled by what industrial meat production has grown into.
Not a very good refutation there sorry.
Also being a vegan is a luxury as far as I'm concerned. I've tried being a vegetarian and ultimately I just ate a bunch of cheese, eggs and whey protein so I stopped feeling hungry. I'm also a naughty boy for eating eggs, cheese and whey according to most vegans.
During my time as a vegetarian I ended up insanely depressed and had a lot of digestion issues, for the first time in my life, I don't know why but once I started consuming animal protein again, I felt like I had more energy and happier.
In the end I just realized this isn't my problem alone to solve. I didn't ask to be a person who really (IMO) needs to eat some meat to survive and be happy, nor did I ask to be born into a planet with 7+ billion people, who want to eat meat so factory farming was born.
The only way I can feel ok about eating meat is hunting it myself, or fishing however, I live in a country where having guns is naughty, and rivers are polluted near me so fishing is also dangerous.
I obviously tried to be a vegan because I want to be a more moral person but it didn't work out for me, I can't feel guilty for it anymore. So I just try to do the best with the energy I receive from eating meat, try to cook it and enjoy it as best I can, for now that's all I can do.
I think being be a v*<whatever> works for a slim segment of the population, and Californians (because it's one of the only places I know of where it's pretty easy to be a vegan, if you're rich) unfortunately.
Honestly, people who care about animals would be better off to lobby for livestock to have nicer lives rather than just telling people to stop eating meat, because it's not going away anytime soon.
I'm guessing Australia and if so I'd amend that to mention that you're living in country where guns are regulated and licenced, where 12 year olds can join a pistol club, where a firing system capable of 1 million rounds per minute was invented [1], and where my next neighbour shoots 24x24 inch targets at 5,000 yards (five thousand yards) [2].
Guns don't shoot people, naughty people shoot people (and thus should be treated as drunk drivers are treated and prevented from operating a gun or a vehicle).
Pigs are truly awful: https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missin...
I have zero objections to eating meat, but factory meat is absolutely complicit in industrial suffering.
Are factory farmed animals stuffed with antibiotics, force fed obscene amounts of food, and shoved into crowded environments? Yes to all of those.
But they aren't mutilated while still alive and left helpless, unable to move, while they slowly die over the course of hours or days with nearly all of their meat is left unused in favor of a single bodypart. Further add that many of these shark species are endangered and their diminishing populations endanger thousands of other species. Sorry, but that's worse than factory farming.
Not saying that factory farming is good. There's plenty of improvement to be made there and plenty of horrors to talk about. But as bad as it is, its no where near as bad as shark finning. At least factory farming are killed humanely and their meat is put to good use.
Once factory farming starts taking cows, chopping their legs off to harvest the hooves and then leaving the cows alive in a field while they bleed out slowly, unable to move, eat, drink where they die several days later after days of suffering. Once that happens, then you can start comparing factory farming to shark finning.
Both finning and factory farming are horrific. We don’t need to compare them.
Granted it can be good to raise awareness when someone expresses a moral judgment of atrocities which might reach further than their stated objections. But it can be done without making assumptions about their position on those further reaches.
Essentially I've come to the conclusion that we shouldn't kill animals at all. You can say all sorts of things about how well they're treated, and what end they'd meet of we didn't kill them, but in the end they don't want to die and they never consented to this deal where we feed them and keep them warm in exchange for their meat.
Of course I'm the biggest hypocrite in the world when it comes to living by it, but at least I can see it's wrong.
Just remember, we can talk about one thing without bring up other things. Multiple things can be bad while some are more bad than others, despite all being bad. If you actually care about these chickens as you are so saying, then your goal should be to convince people to help you change the industry, not shame them. Shaming is just picking a fight and going to make people ignore you instead of listening. Even though it feels good, this is a terrible strategy for pursing your goals.
Is it?
I’d say it’s mostly better, nothing more, nothing less.
By definition, yes. I mean if it isn't "mostly better" then that's a different argument, but by definition, yes, that's what those words mean.
But I think you also missed the main point of my argument for a small portion. Don't miss the forest for the trees.
No, I am not vegan.
My interpretation is that if we are going to do something on the shark fin industry, it makes complete sense to also take a look at factory farming.
Shark finning should be banned but we should also be able to look at the inhumane things we ourselves are perpetuating instead of only those that don’t affect us.
I hope that we can all celebrate this win, without getting mad at each other for celebrating it.
1. No human has time infinite time to champion every single cause we care about. Even the busiest, most proactive activist in your community deeply cares about things they have no time to do anything about.
2. People can (and should!) use language to disavow things. It is a low effort way of generating social contracts, which is a good thing!
3. If we disavow things that do not directly impact our day to day lives, it's a form of empathy.
4. Finally, people can disavow shark finning while still approve of factory farms. Count your blessings if you find any overlap at all with another person's values because then at least some change is possible.
Saying: “ There's no excuse for that level of inhumanity.” when people excuse factory farming every day is hypocritical.
It’s easy to disavow this because it doesn’t affect you.
If you don’t like it, downvote and move on.
Sharks are persona non gratia at the best of times. They are not something you can farm without a lot of cruelty.
You don't love sharks - that's mad. No one loves sharks: one on one a shark will kill you. You might love diversity and that's fine.
One on one a lot of humans could kill me, I still love people.