It’s not a point i would like stressing, especially as English is not my first language, but to me “exterminating” conveys the meaning of “by any and all (usually rather cruel) means, get rid of that pest” while “stop breeding” would in practice amount to “stop inseminating”, which wouldn’t add any pain to the already existing.
Well, my view may be Eurocentric (or, indeed, Scandinavia-centric!), but from what I have seen of medium-scale farming, the animals live most if not all of their lifes in very cramped conditions; they are often subjected to mutilations like dehorning or castration without pain relief; and they subsist on a very monotonous, exceedingly nutritious diet which causes them to suffer from constant diarrhea.
Note that most domesticated breeds are not separate species, but merely variants. Ceasing to breed them would not cause the extinction of a species, only a small subsection of one. In the long run vat-meat and other alternatives will probably replace most or all livestock farming, but I doubt that any species will become entirely extinct.
I kid. My late uncle used to be a rancher in south-central Kansas. I think he had about 200 head of cattle at any given time, on 2000 acres of arid Kansas grassland. And even then, he had to give them additional feed each day. But that’s not where most beef (or any other animal flesh we eat in the U.S.) comes from.
Nowadays, it comes from factory ‘farms’, with animals kept in huge barns, with their fodder entirely brought in. And whatever they’re fed, it’s grown on an industrial scale, and food for humans could be planted in those vast fields in lieu of food for cattle and pigs and chickens.
If we Americans suddenly didn’t eat meat, it wouldn’t be a matter of, say, deer grazing the same grass, because no grazing is going on. The next generation of those factory farm-raised animals simply wouldn’t exist, because there’d be no market for them. And the generation of methane by those animals would cease, and some portion of the crops raised to feed those animals would be replaced by crops to feed humans, and some portion of it would no longer get raised. The energy used to raise and transport that latter portion wouldn’t be used, resulting in less carbon being pumped into the atmosphere.
Obviously, this is strictly about how things are done in America. If people living at a subsistence level in the third world can get some additional nutrition by dint of their pigs and chickens turning their garbage into protein, then more power to them. If Europeans have goats and sheep grazing on slopes too steep for crops, then why the hell not?
But the animals raised in American factory farms, which are the vast majority of the beef and chicken and pork we Americans consume, unquestionably add to the greenhouse gases we’re putting into the atmosphere, and in both climate change and nutritional terms, we’d be way better off if those farms ceased to exist.
It’s an interesting point, but I would say that the fact that some animals may live hard lives doesn’t mean we have the right to shorten them.
It’s impossible to live in any way without causing indirect suffering. If you build a shelter, you’re going to kill an insect. If you have a child, they’re going to get sick. The question must always be “Does the good outweigh the harm?” So, with that in mind…
I’m not so enamoured with animal rights that I value their lives above the lives of people. Progress saves human lives. If we have to kill some animals to achieve that progress, so be it. Similarly, if a person has no choice but to eat meat, I wouldn’t consider them immoral for doing so. But in the West we do have a choice. A vegetarian diet is cheaper and healthier than that of the average American carnivore. Yet we eat meat anyway, because it’s fun. And in order to have our fun we subsidise industries that treat animals horribly. It’s difficult to argue that our fun is so much more important than the lives of the animals who suffer and die for it.
In the specific case of the squirrels who died to allow me to have a computer…well, the fact that I have a computer is merely an incidental byproduct the of fact that computers exist. The fact that computers exist has brought about tremendous good. What good is achieved by you killing and eating those same squirrels. You have a full belly for a few hours, but since you could have easily filled that belly with fruits and vegetables instead, I can only conclude that no good has come of it whatsoever.
By that logic, if I pay a hit man to kill somebody, I’m not directly responsible for their death. I’m no lawyer, but I think I’d have a hard time arguing that in court.
The fact is that people who buy meat from a butchers shop are directly responsible for the deaths of the animals on the butcher’s counter because they’re creating the demand for dead animals in the first place. Just because they find it more convenient to pay someone else to do the actual killing for them, doesn’t mean they’re not directly responsible for the killings themselves.
It isn’t possible to live a healthy life without electricity. How would we make antibiotics or vaccines without electricity?
The internet already exists, and is responsible for tremendous good throughout the world. I don’t see how my using it to procrastinate on the Dope actually increases harm, either directly or indirectly. I concede that creating the internet has caused some amount of harm, but now that it’s here, what difference does it make if I use it or not?
Besides, what I personally do doesn’t really matter, does it? I mean, I could be the biggest hypocrite imaginable; I could be sitting here in snakeskin shoes and leather pants wearing a fleece made out of hamster skins and shovelling Siberian tiger steaks in my mouth with one hand while punching kittens in the face with the other, and it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference to my actual argument. All it would prove is that I wasn’t living up to it. That’s an indictment of me, certainly, but not my argument itself.
And now a few questions for you:
How would you feel if I were to open a wildly successful restaurant that only served blue whale, white rhino burgers, and bald eagle fritters?
How do you feel about traditional Chinese medicine? As you know, there’s high demand in China for medicine made from the parts of numerous endangered species. You and I both know this “medicine” is a load of bollocks. The customers, however, genuinely believe that they’re essential for their health. Do you think the Chinese medicine industry is morally superior or inferior to the American fast food industry? Or do you think there’s no difference?
When it comes to what is and what isn’t acceptable to eat, where do you draw the line? For example, if I really wanted to eat somebody, how would you dissuade me? What if the person I wanted to eat had no friends or family? What if they were so brain damaged they were less intelligent than the average pig?
If aliens invaded Earth and started eating people, how would you convince them not to? If, after listening to your arguments, they just said “We don’t care. You taste good.” how would you respond? And would you consider them immoral?
Meat is unethical as is, but I’m too selfish and lazy to change. I am hoping in vitro meat hits the market ASAP so I can switch to that for the reasons given (more sustainable, more humane/less suffering, less impact on climate, etc)
We certainly would; if beef-cattle or dairy-cattle ever were anywhere close to extinction, they would be maintained in zoos and preserves. We do that (or try to) with many other animal species of far less immediate interest to our own species.
We saved the Californian Condor from extinction; we certainly would do it for cows, sheep, pigs, and chickens.
Jennifer Lopez and Gloria Estefan were both considered for the role. Hollywood hadn’t yet caught on to the idea of casting ethnically-appropriate actors yet, though.
Madonna is of (half) Italian ancestry, which is very accurate considering it is the largest or second largest ancestry group in Argentina. Latino/Hispanic isn’t a homogeneous group except for the language that they speak. Census data is hard to come by, but Argentina might even be whiter than Canada. I’d think more people had a problem with the fact that she’s Madonna.
Sure, but in the meantime many went to the knackers due to the sharp drop in demand/commercial value. You can’t expect most farmers to keep feeding, housing, caring for beasts that bring nothing in return. This shit is expensive and exhausting.
In fact, millions of horses – the vast majority of those living in the U.S. at the time – were slaughtered in the space of a few years. The horses now living, mostly pets and toys rather than work or transportation animals, descend from the lucky few who were spared (or escaped because they were already feral mustangs).
I recall a made-for-TV movie, set not long before or after WWI, about some U.S. Army officers who are ordered to machine-gun a vast herd of now-obsolete cavalry mounts, and balk at it on the grounds that the horses are their comrades in arms (I forget how it ends).
It is the nature of being an animal that we have to kill other life to survive. In some sense, the only truly moral way to live is to survive on fruit, which is produced to be eaten. Eating a root or a leaf or a seed it killing, just as eating meat and eggs is.
I am pretty sure that cows are capable of more suffering than insects are. I am not sure how to compare either to an ivy vine, or a carrot. It is not obvious that plants “behave” because they do so very slowly from the perspective of an animal, but plants pull away from things that hurt them, warn other plants of dangers, call certain animals to their aid, and otherwise act as if they suffer pain. I assume that some plants are more capable of suffering than other plants, but I honestly have no clue which ones are more of less capable of suffering. (Half Man Half Wit went into more detail on this.)
I do believe that we should try to minimize the suffering we cause. But careful slaughtering does not cause all that much suffering. I try to eat meat that was humanely reared and slaughtered quickly. And, as a practical matter, I don’t worry too much about how much my plant-foods suffered, because I don’t know which of my choices even matter. But I know that I am a lot happier when I can eat meat. I could probably live without it, but I could probably live with uncomfortable clothes in a dark hut, too. And as much as we should avoid causing suffering, we should also try to create joy.
All species are programmed by evolution to pass on their genes. That’s why they’re still here. Domesticated animals bred by humans for food are very successful at doing so.
So are cats. For reasons only known to themselves…
Those domesticated animal farts would not be replaced with wild animal farts if we slaughtered all those factory farmed animals and shut down the factory. There would simply be fewer living things on the planet. That life is artificially sustained by the efforts of humans that want to eat meat.
Why is it morally impossible to make a moral case for eating meat? How much moral significance are you attaching to a cow, a chicken or a fish anyway? Doesn’t it all depend on how much moral significance you attach to meat animals?