The dog has similar gray matter in its skull, just of lower complexity. The dog also loses consciousness in the form of sleeping, like a person, and shows signs of having dreams; e.g. moving its paws as if running.
If a dog were not conscious, there would be no point in distinguishing a sleeping dog from a wakeful dog; the two would have to be the same.
While I don’t disagree with your conclusion, your argument is flawed because you switch the meaning of the word “conscious” from “having thoughts and self-awareness” to “transitioning between a dormant and active state”.
Dreams are a mangled replay of conscious perception of the world.
Then he rescued another kid, then another.
Observations shown that the dog learned to push kids into the river to rescue them for reward.
Also a very human and conscious behavior.
It's not OK to cause pain and suffering to a creature capable of intelligence and emotions just because it's less intelligent than an arbitrary, conveniently chosen threshold.
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. This work is described in "Objective scoring of animal handling and stunning practices in slaughter plants"
Were they mature?
You must fundamentally have a problem with existence because nearly any creature that lives in the wild is going to have a very gruesome, painful lonely death.
If the worst thing that can happen is a chicken is protected, fed, given medicine when sick, have offspring and then eventually slaughtered in a rather human way after adulthood, I don't really see how it's so terrible.
Then imagine if they said: "it's likely that due to advancements in science, in 50 years we won't need to do this anymore because we'll have lab grown organs so we'll just leave you guys alone when we have what we need". I would double take that deal. This is likely where we are now.
The major difference with all of this discussion though is that obviously, animals are conscious, I don't believe they're capable of reasoning where they would be disturbed or troubled by such a deal. We're capable of understanding that our kids will be slaughtered for organs in 70 years from their birth. We also have strong emotions tied to this. So we'd be upset about it so I think that makes it a worse deal. Not the worst possible deal in such a theoretical circumstance, but it would be better than annihilation.
Definitely not saying this means this is ideal for anyone, animals or humans, nothing is perfect, I just don't think it's catastrophic.
Anyway, if Squid are conscious and have such high levels of thought as you describe, then they understand the game and are likely undisturbed by it. If squid went vegan, then I'd feel worse.
This is why I think hunting is a much more fair way of obtaining protein. We're playing a much fairer game, factory farming and raping the ocean with super trawlers isn't.
1. If you have the time to cook the required amount of vegetarian food (not easy from experience).
2. If you can digest legume based protein without issue.
3. If you want to participate in social or culture events where eating meat is part of having a social life.
Are you a full time vegan / vegetarian? I did it for 2 years, I actually would call it a "luxury".
I moved to a country where it's not yet "hip to be vegetarian" and it's virtually impossible to survive in that place. There is no "Whole Foods" in many parts of the world.
This line of reasoning begins with a false dichotomy.
>I don't believe they're capable of reasoning where they would be disturbed or troubled by such a deal
There are humans with significantly reduced cognition that one could also argue would not be troubled by such a deal; suddenly the rationale seems a little flimsy when we consider taking mentally disabled people and 'harvesting' them simply because they don't understand it's a raw deal for them.
I wish I could articulate it generally (newborn, low on sleep atm) but there's something here about mixing levels of consciousness when determining morality that seems flawed.
There are humans with significantly reduced cognition that one could also argue would not be troubled by such a deal;
Families would care
I don’t necessarily disagree with you, merely pointing out that ultimately every moral system rests on non-observable abstract principles. Metaphysics, in other words.
I grew up in a farm. In my experience, the people less likely to feel empathy for animals were those who actually worked with them every day. This does not mean that they were cruel, at all, but rather that they understood rising and killing animals as fundamental for their livelihood.
This reality is very remote for many urban dwellers, for whom animal products come into existence in the supermarket aisle, and who mostly only see live animals as pets.
The banality of evil. Enron executives' behaviour was also fundamental to their livelihood.
2. That's irrelevant on multiple levels
3. Cognitive abstractions aren't beings, can't have a morality to evaluate.
"As moral as Darwinian Evolution" is not a good look, particularly in regards to livelihood rather than survival.
and i typed _modern people_ from cities & despite city people sometimes contributing or doing great crimes for money, i don't know if that is justifiable to use as a counter argument... as we are chatting about how a modern people, who is probably empathetic/civilized enough to realize that killing an animal is unfair/horrible when there isn't a plausible reason to do it ¶ are rural people aware the complexity of a mammalian? because i can see the love for cats and dogs and some bird species... negating pigs and cows or rats feels a specie prejudice! specially, again, when we proved already that it's more economical, ecological and if done correctly more healthy (animal protein is synthesized differently and if we were black and white, plant and fungi based are easier to swallow [but just a curiosity, as that may only build up to diabetes or cancer if one eats like an average +medium-class North American or the likes]). not long ago, like less than 8 generations, we slaved and raped people in America while building churches talking about Christ love... so i don't think we can go back "the days we eat carcass and hunt mammoths" to justify stuff if we truly want to evolve
"not eating animal products is the bare minimum you can do", actually
edit: a bunch of errors, i'm sleep deprived but do you know that even FLIES suffer from indecision? fungi have the capacity of memory (tho i think we can eat those :), ants are a pretty complex organism for the amount of neurons they have... maybe the day we stop to anthropomorphizing intelligence we'll figure out the holocaust (rolling right now)
Chimps have superhuman short-term memory, but they're not granted personhood.
A tree can be infinitely intelligent. If it doesn't do anything with that intelligence and can't communicate, and we couldn't profit from that intelligence in any way, we wouldn't care about it -- even if we somehow noticed it.
If the tree can benefit us if we don't harm it, we suddenly care.
If it can hurt us if we hurt it, we care.
If other entities which can help us will do so as long as we don't hurt the tree -- or if they will hurt us if we hurt the tree, we care. (For example, this can be other humans with respect to their pets.)
If it exhibits the specific kinds of intelligence that we care about, like talking, or if it simply moves us emotionally, we'll care.
These are all reciprocations of social contracts we're forced, by our biology and by game theory, to respond to.
That's the threshold. Power grows from the barrel of a gun, not an abstract notion of intelligence or consciousness (which, spoiler: is a religious nonsense concept) or whatever.
Man, it’s wild you think this. It’s like that old story about how a fish would be considered dumb for not being able to climb a tree, and a monkey dumb for not being able to swim under water. Are chickens dumb AF on the things we use to rate human intelligence? Sure. But they are massively in tune with their environment and adapt to changing light and temperatures in ways that are highly intelligent and beyond human capacity. Same with how attuned they are to predators and how they respond. They’re also smart enough to clearly behave in ways different enough and consistent enough as to form personalities.
I’ve got a flock of around 35 and wouldn’t label them dumb at all.
I have a lot of cats, i toss snacks in the back yard. They are about interested enough to find 80% meanwhile the birds sitting on the roof 40 meters away study the situation carefully and wait for the right configuration of cats before they fly in and snatch the remaining snacks. They see all of them, they never mis one.
Im sure they think my cats are dumb but cats in general are not.
I use to have a stray cat with a gaze powerful enough to win any stairing contest. He pulled tricks that took me years to figure out - seriously.
After fasting for 3-5 days I have crazy focus, I see and hear everything. I also have aggresive tendencies that are totally alien to my normal personality. Punching an annoying coworker all of a sudden seemed like a perfectly normal response. He is always like that, it takes no effort to ignore it.
1) there is still danger that the brain needs to be attuned to.
2) I often let the chickens out of the fenced in area when the grasshopper population gets unruly in the warm summer months, and if you watch the chickens hunt them, I think you’d find that even in the presence of being fed for ~10 months of the year, their brains are highly alert and they are quite good at killing fast moving, unpredictable things.
My grandma had a rooster that ran many circles every morning and eventually flew to a nearby tree branch. The chickens would follow one by one, the last one needed 15 minutes worth of warming up until she was finally able to fly. I dont know what the point was but it seemed important to her? They all sat there watching until she made it.
But i really do use loose heuristics like minimizing pork because pigs are smart, beef because its terribly energy inefficient and less healthy. While plant protein is good but not appetizing.
Chickens get the short end of that stick. Delicious and dumb.
I have years of weight training where I've developed mass. That said, yep it's a crock of shit to be intaking so much daily protein so I just don't do it anymore and it's not a big deal. I'm trying.
anyway, your definition of smart is more like evolutionary adaptation. What is consciousness is pretty much still unanswerable. Physics killed God; we're all just stimulus-response machines. So this discussion on spectrum of smartness is too loaded.
The chickens raised by my grandparents, with which I was playing when I was a small child, had very distinct personalities. Each one of them was easily recognizable. Some appeared to enjoy to interact with me and they were very curious, while others were shy and they would run away from any human.
They were roaming freely over a very large yard with abundant and varied vegetation and insects. They were exploring it all day long, finding various kinds of food for themselves. They received from humans only a food supplement, a shelter for the night and some nests for laying eggs.
They raised various animals, including many chickens.
I liked to play with the chickens and I succeeded to train some of them to execute some simple commands (by giving them generous recompenses of maize grains).
My grandparents and all their neighbors were amazed by this feat, because they believed that chickens are too dumb to be trained like a dog, despite having decades of experience in raising chickens.
So I believe that when you do not look for evidence of intelligence, you do not find it.
I expect I’ll eat a lot less chicken in the future.
Personality is any person's collection of interrelated behavioral, cognitive and emotional patterns that comprise a person’s unique adjustment to life.
Now, let's define 'cognitive'. For that we'll rely on Merriam-Webster. Their definition[1] says:
of, relating to, being, or involving conscious intellectual activity (such as thinking, reasoning, or remembering)
So, at a minimum I think a being needs to be capable of reasoning to have a personality.
The shorter answer is I think a personality can be a combination of innate behavioral traits, but it also has to be things like temperament, likes, dislikes, to some extent skills, and similar things shaped in part by environment.
In this case though we have decades of research into chicken cognition and nothing to indicate they have self-awareness or an ability to reason.
The simplest answer is not that chickens have personalities, but that some humans anthropomorphize chickens.
Can you support your stance with research rather than anecdotal observations?
Animals eat other animals, they don't roam around being upset about it. When I hunt, I don't feel upset about it either.
What I am upset about is the the lack of respect we've shown other animals by ruining their whole ecosystem via ecological destruction and locking them in factory farms. Little chickens born never get to see their parents, they're just thrown into a grinder, like what the fuck?
I spearfish mostly, and I've seen a mother fish proudly cruising around with 3 of her juveniles, do I take that fish? No, I respect her, and her time she is spending with the young ones. By the same time, I've seen fish have their face gnawed off by a squid, this is the reality for most wild animals, a gruesome death. Living a semi-long life and being taken by a skilled hunter is probably the most human way an animal can die. Being thrown into a grinder at 2 days old because you're a rooster and can't lay eggs? Disgusting. Drowning in a trawling net? Horrific.
Basically it feels like something to be a chicken, there’s a subjective chicken conscious experience.
When you say vegan stuff like that, you should be more precise: people do not need to eat meat to survive. Survival and good health are on the opposite end of the spectrum.
Honestly no idea what you’re talking about, here.
> When you say vegan stuff like that, you should be more precise: people do not need to eat meat to survive. Survival and good health are on the opposite end of the spectrum.
I needn’t be more precise. Meat is not required for survival or for good health. Exception being if one’s situation demands eating meat. For somebody reading/commenting on HN, eating meat is almost certainly a decision, not a requirement of any sort.
You need supplementation on a vegan diet for a reason. Entirely plant-based diets are not nutritionally complete. Even with proper supplementation, bioavailability is extremely low in plants compared to animal foods.
https://www.diagnosisdiet.com/full-article/meat
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnut.2022.80656...
https://aleph-2020.blogspot.com/2019/05/animal-source-foods-...
It is okay to be a vegan for your own moral reasons, but to push it on others as it being an intelligence choice (it is not) is to be inconsiderate of one's fellow human beings and their long-term health.
Your sources don’t even refute this. Yes, supplementation for things like B12 and omegas are required. We eat a variety of fortified foods in the modern age anyway and supplementation is trivial. Yes, you need to eat a diverse range of foods to obtain a balance of essential nutrients. That doesn’t mean you cannot maintain long term health on a vegan diet.
The sources do refute your point; I can tell that you have not read them, as you ignored addressing the part of my comment about bioavailability (which two of these sources mention).
Edit: Hopefully you read this after this edit, if not can address as a followup. Here is a page on the NHS specifically referencing how all nutrients can be obtained on a vegan diet: https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/how-to-eat-a-balanced-....
From your second source:
> Carefully constructed vegan diets could provide adequate amounts of all six priority micronutrients for the general population, except vitamin B12, which would need to be consumed through fortified foods or supplements.
Further, the opening paragraph of your third link undermines your entire argument as well
> Diets that limit the consumption of animal source food to very low levels require careful fortification or supplementation, and the inclusion of specific nutrient-dense plants. If these cautionary measures are neglected, vegetarian and, especially, vegan populations risk to suffer from deficiencies in some key animal source food-associated nutrients."
It specifically says that vegan populations risk deficiencies when not including nutrient-dense foods and fortification/supplementation. It specifically does not say that full nutrition is impossible without animal products.
Event the title implicitly supports my argument: "Not all (micro)nutrients are easily obtained from plants." Emphasis on "easily."
The word "cannot" only appears alongside B12. The phrase "does not" doesn't appear alongside any nutrients intake. And the word "impossible" doesn't show up at all.
Are you sure that you read the articles you're claiming that I did not read?