There's some pretty horrifying YouTube videos of people torturing and eating live animals which I think we'd be better off banning. If you want to see examples just look up "eating live octopus". Incredibly disturbing.
The animal rights question has been lurking on my mind for many years, and I couldn't stand to ignore the problem any longer. I am currently reading Animal Liberation, by Peter Singer. There's a chapter on the various experiments that scientists have been doing on animals, and it's heart-wrenching (see, for instance, the documentary Unnecessary Fuss [1]).
Our treatment of animals is a moral problem that cannot be ignored.
Are we trying to make reality fit our wholesome romanced version of reality?
Not that I could stomach it myself, but I don’t really see this as much of a moral issue.
Devour to survive. So it is, so it’s always been…
I'm no vegetarian, and I like to indulge myself with some 'pulpo a la gallega', But one thing is killing an animal because we are at the top of the food chain, and another thing is killing in the name of sport or culture.
Meanwhile, humans have a huge empathy problem in regard to animals (and other types of species) - perhaps its most categorical failing, and the driver for the most pressing crises of our time, in fact.
those can only happen within the same species
But in the grand scheme of things, I don't think honoring prey is even in the top 100 issues in terms of impacts humans have on marine ecosystems. Sorry if I sound belittling, but it does sound like this whole thing is more of a symbolic gesure than a means to really resolve the issues we have caused. That's why I don't take it quite as seriously.
I so wish people would think of dog or cat meat in these supposedly difficult questions. What's the difference between killing and eating a dog for survival and doing it for fun, or because it tastes good?
Whenever people are doing too well they invent hardships for themselves. No one who is struggled find food will come up with random rules about should and shouldn't be eaten.
That tells us little on our moral obligations towards them and, for that matter, towards our fellow humans. Animals also murder other members of their own species, is murder hence ok?
I think you mean kill. Murder involves intent. Animals do not have intent. Usually murder involves malice. Animals don't have malice.
Killing can be in self-defense or self-preservation. Most animals don't simply kill other animals unless provoked or they are hungry.
Animals kill. Humans are the only beings capable of murder.
Only if you believe they're automata. Which raises the question, are humans not automata as well? If we are, then we also don't murder as we also don't have intent. But if we have intent, what's the line that separates us (other than the obvious "not the same species") from other animals that renders them mere unintentional automata and us intentional non-automata?
Also, spend a few days with any animal, you'll see they have intentions. They're just harder to discern.
> Animals don't have malice.
Likewise some do have malice. It's just harder to discern as we lack the ability to communicate with them and they lack the ability to articulate to us what their feelings are.
“If we can all have this conversation together, it’s clearly a choice for us.”
I (am not being cute when I say I) truly wish I could talk _with_ my cat. I would ask if she murdered that bug or was operating on instinct. Did she kill for sport, defense, or hunger? Was she just pissed off? I don’t know and she can’t tell me, so I can only assume she’s just doing what cats do.
Among our own species I don’t think that “benefit of the doubt” (?) is defacto transferable.
I hope this makes sense. I am enjoying this conversation in an odd kind of way. I’ve been waiting for news like this for a long time.
Though the article and UKGOV articles are from 2021?
Edit: today my main job was typos
Dogs have owners, cats have staff. :-)
But when it comes to basic things like eating, the fact that non-human omnivores eat animals is a good indicator that we should be doing the same.
Or an orca declaring "I'm Donny Rocksville and this is rock the boat!!" before him and all his friends capsize a ship off of Spain.
In Blackfish one of the most interesting attacks was against a trainer, Ken Peters, who was also a trained diver. The orca seemed to know the limits of the trainer and how long she could keep him underwater. When she brought him up she gave him time to breathe and compose himself before dunking him under again. She could have easily killed him if that was her intent but it didn't seem to be.
Most animals eat other animals in such cruel ways because they don't have better means available to them and because if they didn't use the teeth and claws they have to catch prey they'd starve. Humans don't have to be needlessly cruel in order to eat an animal. For us, it's a choice.
I'd prefer that every hamburger I eat comes from a cow who lived a long happy cow life then died suddenly and without pain. There's no section in the meat department at my grocery store for "happy cows that died painlessly" though, so I'm left with what's available. I can accept that, but there's zero reason for me to torture a live cow and excuses like "well, a lion would have ripped it apart while it was alive" wouldn't justify my actions if I did.
By all means, eat animals! They're delicious! At a minimum though, we shouldn't go out of our way to make a living thing suffer.
Yes, it's your choice, and your choice to consider it "cruel". Don't force your choices onto others.
Even if morality is only about answering the question, "how should I conduct myself", and not directly about how anyone else should conduct themselves, if one of my values is alleviating the suffering of others, I will need to recognize when other feeling things are being hurt. If you're the one causing the hurt, I suppose you could say that I'm not making a "moral judgment" about your actions (but rather some other kind of assessment), but regardless I will feel a duty to intervene.
TBH I just see it as false platitudes since there's it's very likely the burger I'm eating wasn't some ethically raised and slaughtered cow. Sure, I didn't do it, so clearly I'm absolved of all fault there.
When I have the option of choosing meat from a cow raised and slaughtered ethically I'll take that one every time, but usually I have no idea of the provenance of a particular hamburger patty and that likely does wonders for my peace of mind.
Kobe and Wagyu beef are raised happily and slaughtered ethically in order to be the quality that they are, in theory.
I believe economics certainly plays a role here.
A pound of Wagyu Chuck costs $160 at a nearby grocery store but I can get Prime Chuck from the local big chain grocery store for just $12 (a 13x price difference).
I find most "happy" beef is nothing more than an illusion for lazy rich people to pretend they're not doing a bad thing, but why not AT THE LEAST choose to eat that or not eat meat?
Don't forget the thousands/millions of bugs, small mammals, birds, and reptiles that are killed as part of vegetable and fruit agriculture.
For a long time I’ve wrestled with a deep-seated but welcome, albeit persistent, unease with food.
As a species we have and continue to inflict dramatic suffering and harm upon the non-human species on our planet. We do this variably to our own enrichment, or sometimes entertainment, but a lot of it is also to our own long-term detriment.
Even making the “good choice” comes with “bad points”. I tend not to go to seafood restaurants because I don’t want to give them money. I accept an invitation to Red Lobster because a family member wants to get a bite. I order a salad, horrified by my surroundings, and find it has shrimp in it.
I love the taste of shrimp, but I no longer eat it because I don’t know how it was handled. Humanely? Did the shrimp this shrimp came from suffer eyestalk ablation? I don’t know.
So I could pick it off to the side and waste it, or I could eat it so it didn’t die in vein.
'Man at top of heap says situation basically acceptable'
Don't mistake this for moralizing, I just think your position is weak.
Err some of us.
At least at reputable institutes and companies, it's for a clear goal, that could not be achieved otherwise, and governed by a review board. It's trading animal harm for human harm. Furthermore, it's few animals for much good.
Simply killing an animal to eat it seems far less ethical: there are other things we can eat, and animal deaths must scale linearly with human population.
IMHO, one shouldn't eat meat unless one can look into a live animal's eyes and murder it. I eat meat, and I feel bad about it -- but we should all be honest about what it means, even if it shows up in colorfully-wrapped, no-blood, sanitized-of-sentience form.
... And at the bottom of the ethical gradient is just killing an animal without any purpose, for which I hope there's a special place in hell.
I did not know (maybe I didn't want to) the ineffable amount of suffering we subject animals in vastly useless "scientific" experiments (see Singer, Animal Liberation, Chapter 2: Tools for research).
This is an excellent article on the subject, written by somebody who worked in a testing lab.
https://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-1676-5-horrifyi...
But we spend worm lives so that we can spare fly lives. And we spend fly lives so that we can spare rodent lives. And we spend rodent lives so that we can spare rabbit lives. And we spend rabbit lives so that we can spare pig lives. And we spend pig lives so that we can spare primate lives. And we spend primate lives so that we can spare human lives.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Rs_(animal_research)
The only thing worse than deliberately infecting or genetically engineering animal models... is allowing disease to rampage unsolved, when you might have done something.
The world we live in is built on a mountain of rodent skulls, and while I'm uncomfortable with that, I'm more comfortable than if it were built atop a mountain of human skulls.
Experimentation on animals should quite simply not happen. When you torture something that you have absolute power over, this is ethically similar to torturing a child in my opinion. They have the same amount of proximate agency, and are similarly helpless.
Often, the people making the video placed the animal in very dangerous or painful situations/positions, and then "help" the animal for the views... and of course all the comments are about how great the person is for being kind hearted and helping - it's really sick.
These people glue things onto animals then rip them off, mutilate appendages, etc. Those videos of people "freeing" animals stuck in bear traps... how do you think they got into the trap?
So while lab testing on animals can be inhumane, it's not being done just for funsies like these videos are. The people making these videos are on an entirely different level of cruel.
I don’t know what is worse, living a somewhat free life in the Savannah and then one day being cruelly and viciously eaten alive by a predator or to live your life on a farm in a small pen with no freedom and then blinking out of existence at the hands of a sledgehammer to the head.
Vegan moral arguments almost entirely rely on empathy. "The animal suffers therefore it's wrong".
And they miss the mark almost every time because they're literally thinking emotionally instead of logically. Human suffering has actual consequences and we're basically always worse of if we don't reduce it. Where that isn't true such as in times of war we happy promote it.
Those arguments are far weaker than you would expect because empathy doesn't actually weigh as heavily as you would expect on real social level decision making. Instead, practicality always wins and animal products are far far more valuable than the nearly non-existent harms of animal suffering.
This isn't an appeal to empathy, it's a rational argument based on the mental capacity of the animal and our existing standards for ethics. An empathetic appeal would be to say, "when the octopus suffers, you feel sad, therefore because you feel sad you shouldn't cause it harm". That's not the vegan moral case. Your feelings don't matter. Speciesism is illogical and requires empathy or lack thereof. You don't feel bad when you cause the octopus harm instead of a human, therefore the octopus doesn't matter. Logically, the vegan is on perfectly solid ground.
You have it the exact wrong way around. In social decisions empathy weighs very highly and logic counts for very little, which is why tribalism is such a huge driver of human behavior, even when it causes many more living beings harm than it helps, as it does during war.
Placing suffering as the absolute centerpiece of morality and then basing all your conclusions on that.
Or an argument to "common sense" in that most people will tell you causing suffering is bad. Therefore it's bad.
I don't see either of these as being great arguments.
> In fact speciesism is illogical
Why? Most of it is perfectly logical. Pigs aren't humans. It's not illogical to treat them differently from humans in very substantial ways.
Also basically nobody says "we can kill pigs because I don't feel bad when I kill them". It's almost always "I do it for the meat".
And if you watch how we treat animals we largely differentiate them based on their functional differences. Even where you get weird cultural things like India not wanting to eat meat - that originated from the need for milk, fertilizer, etc.
The only weirdness you'll see is if you challenge people on it from an empathetic standpoint. People are socially wired to say there "good people who never would made an animal suffer" so you're running into social norms more than anything there.
That is specifically NOT what speciesism is. Speciesism is about making moral decisions based SOLELY on a morally irrelevant (and arbitrary) category, species. This is very similar to sexism: Noone would claim men and women are literally identical, but we are against making moral distinction solely based on sex.
> Also basically nobody says "we can kill pigs because I don't feel bad when I kill them". It's almost always "I do it for the meat".
And most people say you can't kill dogs for meat. And the dog fight leader also only does it "to survive". Just because you can make up a justification does not make it morally valid or relevant.
Finally, to appeal to how "we've always done it" in a moral context is just obviously wrong.
To make it more practical: - do you genuinely think that animals cannot suffer? - Yes, then I hope you are morally ok with ANY and ALL things done to ANY animal, including dogs and cats. Things like bestiality - No, then the practical question for 99.9% of people reading this is whether temporary taste pleasure is morally more important than that suffering - Yes, then we come back around to dog fighting rings, and legal bestiality etc. Anything and everything that causes comparable suffering must be considered moral by you
Looking at land animals btw, the fewest are carnivores (e.g. look at predator vs herbivores rates) - they evolved to fill a niche, and they lack the body and intelligence (while they have a lot) to develop tools and reflect on ethics and moral that would allow them to do differently. How can one argue with animals eating other animals in comparison to our great "master species" /s at all?
They don't have an even remotely similar conception of being to you.
Some of these videos especially with small animals like hamsters have millions of views, so I guess there is a monetary incentive for them to keep such videos.
Well, that is: there's two different ways a video like this might be horrifying. There's a kind of visceral horror: blood, guts, and also a kind of instinctive empathy for the suffering that the creature getting killed might be going through (great time to point out that octopuses are much more intelligent than mice and, depending on how you feel about a bunch of tricky philosophical questions, there's probably more "there there" to be suffering). Like I said, I think most people would be pretty horrified, in this sense, by a video like that.
The other kind of horror is a moral horror. And in that case...well, a cat is a cat, not a human, I don't expect them to act humanely. So in that particular moral sense the "cat eats mouse" video isn't horrifying. Whereas: I do have a moral expectations that humans should act humanely, which a Youtube video featuring people eating a live octopus violates, triggering moral horror.
Watch some wildlife videos (also plenty on YouTube) and you'll see animals being eaten alive by other animals.
Those with "animal rights" fetishes never made any sense to me, and the discussion here is just more of the same nonsense.
Anything with a spine is sentient by this law. Can you rephrase your answer while keeping that in mind?
Humans absolutely know. There is no excuse for that kind of cruelty.