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this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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even if farm animals were slaughtered in the most humane and painless of ways, the way they’re treated while they’re alive is still horrifyingly atrocious
This sounds like a juxtaposition to me. You cannot slaughter a healthy animal in a humane way. "Slaughter" excludes "humane". I'm not a vegan/vegetarian but it seems to me like this idea that if we just raised happy healthy animals and found a way to kill it nicely then eating meat would be ethically ok. We don't need to eat meat anymore. Any killing of an animal to make it into food is unnecessary and could be avoided. I think it is important that we meat eaters really internalize this. Every time we eat meat we caused absolutely unnecessary suffering for a quick moment of pleasure.
Culling is not cruel or even morally ambiguous. It is morally and ethically right to cull out of control populations of animals for the betterment of the whole. Culling isn't even necessarily for the sick or weak. Sometimes healthy young animals have to be put down for the betterment of the environment. Look into native American hunting practice and land conservation methodology.
Modern farming is very much none of those things though.
Honestly, culling is besides the point I am making, since the primary goal of culling is not meat production.
There are morally more ambiguous cases (than with slaughter for meat) in which killing an animal can be arguably better than to let it live. Putting down a terminally sick pet is an example. Culling might also be argued, but I would not say that it is "not cruel or even morally ambiguous".
With culling, my thoughts on it are these. When we refer to culling, we most often talk about culling in farm animal situation. As in, there is a sick animal that has to be culled so that the population doesn't become infected. Or we kill the male chicks because we cannot raise them to become egg producing hens and keeping a lot of roosters together can cause problems. The killing of farm cows that underproduce is also a form of culling. I would argue that none of these killings would be necessary in the first place if we didn't have big scale farming (or, for that matter, farming of any kind) of lifestock. My guess is that with
we agree here.
Culling of wild animals is more controversial. As far as I am aware of, hunters are being told how many animals of a certain species and sex they can kill in a hunting season and it is regardes as population control. (Whilst we ofter created conditions in which the population cannot control itself.) Or they get an order from a farmer etc. to kill a chicken ripping wolf. If you have to kill a wolf because it regularly attacks your chicken farm, then the chicken farm is the actual problem, not the wolf. Apart from that, you'll end up fucking with natural selection. Arguably not very great. But since we can't just go back to the caves and restore nature the way it was before civilization and so on, some form of culling of wild animals will probably stay necessary for human survival and artifical balance of and artificialized nature - even without farming of lifestock. I would not call this ethical or morally right, but a realistic, awful necessity.
I'm not sure about the point you're making with native americans. When I search for native american hunting practices the first thing that pops up is how they hunted bisons and nearly drove them to extinction, which is also the most prominent example I know of. This goes into the territory of the idea of the Noble Native. But I doubt you meant that as an example.
Native Americans curated bison populations for thousands of years. Idk where you're getting "almost drove the bison to extinction" from. In 1850, there were between 30 and 60 million bison on the plains. By 1870, there were less than 500 wild bison left. That's not native American hunting. That's white genocide. Don't get it confused. Some plains Indians even claim kinship with the Bison as their spiritual totem.
Look into accounts by settlers first traveling the America's. They often wonder at how the forests seem to have wild orchards of berries and fruits, or how certain woods seem to have been maintained almost as if by a forester. It's no coincidence. The plagues brought by the settlers killed 95% of my people, and those same settlers came and occupied the same space where me and mine had lived for eons. And then they had the temerity to call it divine providence. Filthy diseased savages tend to build filthy diseased societies, and here we are now.
Yep, I was totally wrong about that. I apologize. I don't know where I had that info from, I think either school or I was distracted at the point about bison when I listened to Guns Germs and Steel. Anyway, I take that back and you are absolutely right here.
And I'm very sorry about what happened to your people.
But to go back to meat eating, I'm not sure it plays a big role for today. Hunting bison without rifles while living with rather low population density in nature is not the same as farming. I'm not sure whether meat eating was necessary for survival back then, it probably was an important source of nutrients. Plus the sacred aspects, the cultural ones, the actual gratitude, the use of the whole animal... But this is not how we use livestock today at all. And most importantly: we don't need it. We have an abundance of alternatives.
But again, I don't ask anyone to quit meat all together. I don't think it is fair to ask this from individuals and attribute all of the responsibility to them. If we want to decrease meat production and consumption, we need to do this from a regulatory basis. So all I am saying is that we meat eaters should simply be aware of it. That it is neither necessary from a nutritional point of view, nor that any kind of farming and slaughtering can be seen as "humane". We cause suffering with our choice and keep promoting a system that will always be cruel. You take away babies from their mothers. You raise animals in unnatural conditions. If they are lucky, they end up at the butcher healthy enough so that their short and miserable life will be terminated untimely and with them very likely experiencing existential threat. For nothing more than us having a moment of joy, convenience, pleasure. Their carcass becomes a banality.
Step away from the emotional argument for a bit and simply consider the logistics. There is no evil in profiting from the cycle of life. Do you also believe herding to be cruel and unnatural? What about other animal product harvesting, like bee keeping or silkworm cultivation? Is it ethically dubious to mine limestone because the ancient crustaceans couldn't consent?
In my mind, the real problem is cruelty for profit. It should not be profitable to treat animals cruel, and that can only change with legislation. The system is too easy to abuse, and humans will almost always make pick the easy option over anything else.
Humanity made the Amazon rainforest. It wasn't easy. It probably wasn't even on purpose. But the existence of the Amazon Rainforest as we know it today is the direct result of millions of people working hard for generations. The difference between the tens of millions of today and those millions of before is the mindset. The modern world has forgotten respect for the ground that births us. They do not see the creatures as brothers or cousins, but as resources to put on a spreadsheet. Everyone is so focused on wealth that they forget to consider the cycles all around us. Hell, when was the last time you considered that our planet is in the middle of an ice age? We've had 10,000 years of warmth and we so easily forget. How well do you think a plant based diet is going to work on a glacier?
These are good questions. I'm not too sure about bee keeping or silk production since I don't know exactly how their products are being harvested and what happens to the insects during this. With herding, it's not the herding I have a problem with but what it is done for. I would not say we are profiting from the cycle of life if we kill a cow. The premature separation of cow and calf to gain more milk is another thing. If we just got milk by pumping a "breastfeeding" cow (as you might have guessed English is not my first language) and otherwise let it be - go for it. I wouldn't see anything wrong with that. But this isn't how it works, and you are very right that profit is to blame.
I agree with this absolutelty.
Maybe if we found a way to go back to eating meat on very rare occasions, eating mostly game that was hunted for other reasons than meat or something alike, we could find a balance with it as a product for consumption.
I mean, would you want to be reborn as a cow on a free range organic farm? Where you are still being inseminated without ever having seen a bull or knowing what's going on. Where you give birth to a baby that you still will be separated from before it's time. Where your kid will have a similar destiny as you. If it even makes it to adulthood. Most likely it will be killed and eaten while you are still being pumped. Where your life is ended by a machine and your body sold to people who toss half of you in the trash because they cooked too big of a portion. Like, yeah, maybe you get to keep your horns and see some grass once in a while and your cage is slightly bigger than the low class conventional farming cows but at the end of the day it is still a miserable life.
Fwiw, I enjoyed the paragraph that led to that sentence, it was beautifully written. Just so that there are no misunderstandings: I'm not necessarily for a plant based diet under any circumstances. There are people with metabolic diseases that might need to eat more animal products for their health. Or nomadic cultures, indigenous tribes with hunter gatherer societies, and also people on glaciers.
And this is actually exactly why I do have a guilty conscience when I personally consume meat (and again, I am a huge hypocrite, I do eat meat!). I don't need to. There is a time and place where hunting and killing and slaughtering and herding are necessary for survival, but it is not in my life. I can buy a B12 supplement that will last me a year for like 10€, probably less. I can choose from a huge variety of plant milk alternatives in every supermarket. Let's not kid ourselves, nothing I eat is "natural". It's not natural to get a huge watermelon or a cloned banana or refrigerated milk in tetra packs and avocado from the other side of the world. If I drink carbonated soda or an energy drink that tastes like gummi bears then I can also not claim that supplements are "unnatural" and not what nature intended. Nothing I do is natural. I wake up by an electricity powered alarm clock. But with all of that privilege, advancement, technology and detachment I am supposed to somehow justify cruel animal farming and killing?
There's a good cartoon clip out there somewhere that's about a preserve raised deer meeting a wild deer and talking about how their lives are so different. These animals are born on the preserves and live their whole lives there. They live 5 or 6 years in a protected environment with basically zero predators or parasites and never go hungry. They don't even fear the hunters that pay to come and hunt them. They literally have never experienced being hunted before then. Who wouldn't want to get reborn in deer heaven?
Beekeeping is especially interesting because it's the only animal husbandry I know of that has implicit concent. You can't keep bees in captivity. Not really. The hive always goes crazy and dies. We still aren't sure why. What we do know is that bees who aren't being taken care of will abandon their apiary and go wild. The trick to keeping bees is that you have to make your apiaries better than anything the bees can make themselves. Protected, maintained, and warm mainly.
Silk worms also have been selectively bred to the point that the species we use for harvesting can no longer survive without human intervention in most cases. If humans stopped harvesting the silk from these insects, they would eventually die off due to being unable to escape their coccoons naturally.
this is just a semantic game. there are human slaughter laws in most of the developed world. maybe all of it. and some in the developing world, too.
Actually my point is exactly that it isn't just semantics. If anything, semantics is used to make pretty euphemisms about what is happening. You are ending the life of a sentient being that feels pain and has feelings/emotions, that has family of one kind or another, for no benefit other than your own pleasure. Whether the death is slow or fast, painful or not, anticipated or not, is very secondary.
A bit off topic but I hate that there are discussions on whether or not it is ethical to farm organs from donor pigs. Like, this at least saves a life (or multiple), while eating meat is absolutely unnecessary nowadays but it still happens all the time.
there are reasons to eat meat besides"pleasure". like nutrients or convenience or cost, and it's unlikely that most meat eaters are killing anything.
In the abundance of products in the 21st century you can absolutely get all the nutrients you need in excess without touching animal products, let alone meat.
Not sure how cooking pea protein sausage is less convenient than cooking a pork sausage. There are tons of vegan/vegetarian convenience products in the fridge aisle. Even if there was indeed some very minor convenience to cooking meat (which I am really in the dark about), are you really arguing your minimally bigger convenience is a good enough reason to kill a living being?
In some way I agree with you here, meat is heavily subsidized while vegetables aren't (at least where I live) and it is a shame. Chicken wings can be cheaper per kg than some kind of vegetables. That's a systemic problem and needs to be taken care of not by the consumer, but government regulations. But a) you know it is bad quality meat that is on the cheaper side, b) most people aren't in a position where you have such financial pressure (food stamps etc) where you have to weigh calories per cent, c) vegan/vegetarian diets can still be cheap af as long as you don't try to do instagrammable kale quinoa brokkoli sprouts smoothies with avocado and chia seed granola or some crap like that. Potato wedges with sour cream are a vegetarian dish. Beans with rice. Noodles and tomato sauce. It doesn't have to get expensive or complicated.
if you're cooking it's probably roughly the same. but if you're out and about, whether at a drive through or a neighborhood cookout, the meat might just be more convenient.
That's one not on you though. There are what I think is called food deserts where there just aren't a lot of vegetarian options around. But I think that's changing. Even McDonald's has a decent vegan/vegetarian menu by now.
so to be clear, sometimes meat is a better choice based on convenience.
Let's say yes. I mean I think it would be healthier and just as convenient to just get an apple and a bun than a burger to be honest. The question is how much of a pro argument this is. It's about as good as "wearing fur looks pretty so we should keep killing tigers for it".
at no point have i proposed that the production is desirable, only the consumption.
i am barely middle class, but i still shop on calories per penny.
i never suggested you couldn't get nutrients other places. but meat is one option for nutrients.
you might mean "all of humanity" or "all meat eaters" caused suffering, but, in fact only the individuals who cause suffering have done so, and eating meat does not, in and of itself, cause any suffering at all. if there is any suffering involved, it happens before the meat-eating, and thus cannot be caused by the meat-eating, since an event in the future cannot cause an event in the past.
This is about the logic of "bullets kill people, not guns"
no, it's not. bullets fired from guns kill people, but there is no similar causal system at play that can traverse time and kill animals in the past
Come on, you're better than that. I don't buy that you actually think this is a valid argument.
This logic would apply if you ate the leftovers of game that was culled for specific reasons like keeping the population of deer or whatever at bay. The meat is already there.
But as long as the meat is produced and the animal killed for the purpose of consumption your argument goes down the drain. While supply and demand economics might not be exactly as we were taught in school, you can't deny that a demand for meat influences the scale of meat production. Everyone in the production and consumption chain has blood on their hands.
All I am asking for is for people to be aware of that. You can eat meat. But be aware that there is no good reason to.
"influences" is so weak that i am going to say that you meant "causes". is this a strawman? maybe. but if you're argument relies on the ambiguity of "influence" as opposed to the much stronger "cause" then you're not really saying anything of substance anyway.
so does the decision to eat meat cause meat production in the future? no. a thousand times no. first, and this should be all that needs to be said, farmers and abottoir workers are agents with free will, so their decisions cannot in any meaningful sense be said to be caused by anything except their own will. that should be the beginning and end of it, but consider this additional hypothetical:
if there are three blue pigs in the world, and i kill all three and send them to the butcher shop, when someone buys that pork or bacon or ham, how do we kill more blue pigs? it's impossible. so we can see that even if people lack free will and there is some economic theory that actually showed some causal link where consumption causes production (which is impossible), then we can see that consumption still can't actually cause later production in even this one case, but probably many others.
If everyone stopped eating meat, would there still be slaughter houses in 5 years?
this sounds like a good experiment. please let me know the results!
At this point I really am unsure whether you are just trolling since this is not rocket science.
"Directly impacts" or "contributes to" would be more fitting but weren't you the one talking about semantics?
This is an absolutely unfitting hypothetical because you just rotted out that animal. Have you seen Futurama? The episode about popplers would be more fitting. But ok, I'll roll with the pigs.
You discovered an island with 10 grown blue pigs. You killed two and brought the meat home. You are trying to sell it. Three things can happen.
So far, two animals have died. In which of the three scenarios do you think more animals will be killed in the future?
this is an appeal to ridicule. youre right that it's not rocket science though: that is provable.
it's not an analogy. it's a hypothetical. and in my hypothetical you can see that your proposed causation falls apart. even in your amended version, when do i lose free will?
How does any of this have to do with free will?
so long as i can still choose my own actions, i can't say that other people's reactions caused me to act in any way.
Ok, listen, don't get it the wrong way, but I think we should stop this back and forth. I'm completely lost in what you are trying to argue here and what your actual point is. No offense, I just think we completely miss each other in our logic. Because I am sure you are a smart person but I don't see how any of this is connected to my first comment, any of my theses, and to me we are just arguing over some semantics and who's right over a question that doesn't exist. So I call it quits here. I'm on vacation as of today and this is getting exhausting for no good reason or goal.
I don't feel that I ever ask you to respond at all. I feel I've been right this whole time and you just don't understand the topic well enough to discuss it. enjoy your vacation.
And even if they were treated well during their lifetime, the way we've bred them to produce enormous quantities of eggs, milk and meat would still result in short, horrific lives. It's atrocious any way you look at it.
We've lost so many heirloom breeds of plants and animals to industrial farming. Pigs used to be raised for their lard, but the anti-fat movement - which was caused by the food lobby - they bred them to be almost completely lean. Now they can't live outside anymore because they don't have fat or thick hair. And their meat is dry and flavorless. The pigs are less happy, and diners are less happy.
Same goes for grocery store vegetables, which aren't bred for flavor or texture but for shipping durability. Grocery store tomatoes, for example. And this must contribute to the fact that lots of people don't like vegetables.
Grocery store tomatoes are the worst. They were bred to not be completely squashed by the harvesting equipment resulting in hard, flavorless tomatoes.