If those things are unavoidable for society to function, then I’ll accept them. The thing is, killing animals to eat them is avoidable. Unless you can demonstrate that raising a field of corn will result in more animal deaths (animal deaths people usually care about, i.e. an insect death is usually considered less evil than the death of a mammal with a larger brain) than using the same field to raise a herd of cattle that will then be slaughtered, I will think that eating plants causes less harm to animals.
The analogy should be “I have the choice to drive my car to work on the road without squashing animals on the way, or driving the car to work while running over animals on the way. Which is better?”
I really don’t understand the distinction of whether or not the animal was raised for food. If you go shoot a deer in the wild or a cow in a field, the pain and suffering for the animal will be the same, assuming the same method of death. I don’t agree that, since the cow was raised to be eaten, that makes it better. In a way, it’s almost creepier.
And on the justification, we’ll have to agree to disagree. The “it tastes good” justification doesn’t seem to me to be any better than reasoning of the individual who will kill animals or hurt them just because “he enjoys it”.
Well, I am going to say that I am going to exit this debate after one final post.
I cannot stress enough that whether or not you enjoy eating meat, you are causing suffering to animals. It is not even clear that converting all land to a vegetarian diet will cause less animals to suffer, and some university research has indicated that converting land like that which cattle graze on to sustaining a vegetarian diet would actually result in more animal deaths. (the cite has already been presented in this thread).
We all make choices in our lives wherein the end result is that animals suffer and die, ‘intentional’ or not. If you know in your heart that animals die as a result of a loaf of bread that you bought in a grocery store, it doesn’t matter whether those animals were ‘intentionally’ killed to make that bread.
Vegetarianism has not conclusively or substantially been proven to reduce animal suffering in any meaningful way. If I ate nothing but free-range beef and poultry, wild-caught fish, hunted deer and elk and whatnot, and the regular plant foods, I’d be limiting the suffering of animals many, many times more than someone who ate an entirely vegetarian diet, by virtue of the fact that a lot of my calories would be coming from 1 animal death rather than dozens, hundreds or thousands that go into harvesting corn, wheat, or other ‘vegetarian’ foods.
There are plenty, PLENTY of good reasons to be a vegetarian and I highly advocate for people to limit their meat consumption, for health reasons, environmental reasons, sustainability reasons, and so forth. But there is no good ethical reason based on least harm principal or limiting the suffering to be a vegetarian, and you are fooling yourself if you think that there is at best, or you’re a blatant hypocrite at worst.
I obviously can’t convince you otherwise at this point, so I’m going to bow out.
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According to the two studies I posted a few pages ago, vegetarians are less likely to be obese than the general population and have a higher lifespan on average.
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So what? That has nothing to do with the fact that a vegan diet takes more careful monitoring and thought than a diet that has meat in it.
It’s probably more a function of the fact that vegans are more tightly focused on heath consciousness, represent a very small percentage of the population, tend to exercise more and are generally in better shape than the general population, but regardless, it says nothing about the fact that they have to be more careful in their monitoring and thought about their diet.
No, that is completely untrue. You do not have to carefully monitor an omnivorous diet in the same way that you have to if you are on a vegan diet. That’s simple fact, re-enforced by the fact that Americans, in general do NOT carefully monitor their diet, overwhelmingly have an omnivorous diet, and have a high life expectancy. That they generally over eat and specifically have a sedentary lifestyle are more contributing factors to health issues than the fact that they eat meat. Europeans, who are generally more active while still having omnivorous diets do much better, health wise.
[QUOTE=Arnold Winkelried]
The analogy should be “I have the choice to drive my car to work on the road without squashing animals on the way, or driving the car to work while running over animals on the way. Which is better?”
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No, this analogy doesn’t work either, because causing deaths or harm isn’t within your power to avoid. It’s going to happen, so your only choice is in limiting the harm you do. Same with eating meat or not eating meat. Animals will still be harmed, so your only real choice is how much harm your ‘footprint’ will have. It’s debatable and I think highly speculative whether more animals will be harmed if we all switched to a completely vegan diet and did not use animal products. I think more animals will be ‘harmed’, depending on ones definition of ‘harmed’…and those additional animal deaths will be of wild animals, instead of animals that are bred and raised to be food, but that’s simply my uneducated opinion so grain of salt. Regardless, animals WILL be harmed either way, as they will be by your use of every product of our modern technological world, so to me any lines drawn are arbitrary, and reflect ones willingness or unwillingness to face reality and try and justify your use of those products…or attempt to negate someone else justification.
But you continue to use them, making a conscious choice to do so. Having a coke IS an avoidable choice, since it is purely for ones enjoyment. Yet, animals are harmed making and bringing that to you. It’s a choice you, I and everyone who drinks a soda, drives a car, uses a computer, etc etc, makes when we use those things that aren’t directly related to our survival.
As for the later, there have been several links in this thread for cites about the various animals harmed in the process of growing, harvesting and distributing crops. Whether these are animals that people ‘care’ about, well…I couldn’t say. That’s another arbitrary line being drawn, I’d say. Most people don’t ‘care’ about cows, sheep, pigs or chickens, except insofar as they provide food or products that they DO care about.
And to me, killing an animal in the wild that you don’t need to kill is creepier. Again, it’s an arbitrary line. To ME, an animal raised to be food, who’s sole existence depends completely on humans to provide it with sustenance, care, and in some cases even assistance both in breeding and birthing, gets a pretty good deal for it’s sacrifice.
Deer are a bad example, since in the US anyway there is no top predators in most cases to keep the deer or wild pig population in check. But an animal in the wild that DOES have that balance…well, I’m a bit more hinked out, personally, about humans going out and whacking those simply for the fun of whacking them and mounting their heads on a wall and maybe eating some of the meat, or maybe not. MMV, to be sure, but that’s creepier to me than animals bred and raised on a farm, given all the food they want (something all animals prize), minimal medical care (something a wild animal is unlikely in the extreme to receive), and then later killed for it’s meat…something wild animals ultimately have happen to them anyway.
Oh really? Have you seen the latest obesity stats? Look, I am not arguing against eating meat. What I am arguing against is the recklessness of the standard American diet. Whatever you choose to eat, monitor it. Just because we can eat most things doesn’t mean we should. I work with natural foods and have seen my share of unhealthy vegans, but I also see unhealthy omnys as well.
What does the difficulty of securing a healthy diet have to do with the ethics of eating one? There’s no evidence to suggest that humans will be harmed more than helped by a vegan diet, so one can look to the suffering of other species next. You’re positing something that’s impossible to argue: the average omnivorous diet is sufficient to survive, but there is no such thing in an average vegetarian diet. If a vegetarian or vegan chooses to eschew a healthy diet, that’s evidence of neglect or the impossible luxury of imposing such a diet on the population… whereas if the average omnivorous diet causes suffering in both humans and animals, one is only permitted to argue about a hypothetical situation in which all animals are pasture fed and processed meat is an anachronism.
Which regular plant foods? As far as I’m aware, it’s not possible to sustain a healthy diet without some harvested crops. Nor would it be possible for everyone to sustain such a diet (at least at the current rate of meat consumption), nor does your hypothetical have anything to do with avoiding the current meat on the marketplace. Remember, there’s no such thing as free-range beef.
When you say you “own” your dog, can you treat it as property? Can you throw it or kick it? There are laws in place that prevent you from doing such a thing because we recognize that animals have a capacity to suffer.
In other words, you do not believe that something is ethical or unethical since nature is neither of the two?
I have described my ethics as doing what others would want done to themselves. When there are huge conflicts of interest, it requires using Utilitarianism and the Least Harm Principle to demonstrate without a shadow of a doubt that we are justified in breaking the golden rule.
I am assuming you are referring to an animal that lived out its life, died of natural causes and then we ate it? I guess if that is how you get your meat then you are correct.
Do you disagree with the ADA?
If the animals see each other being killed, they will start to freak out. So essentially we agree on this fact. You just think the freaking out part is a natural response as oppose to a thought? Are you saying when a human freaks out, it is from a thought? But an animal freaking out is from a stimuli such as a machine? You’re not saying because the mechanism by which the cow freaks out is different, that fear of the cow should not be taken into account right? Your wording at points makes it seem like we are exactly on the same page and then at other points it seems like we are not. I think a good analogy is a two year old. A two year old does not understand death. None of them want to die. Or put another way, none are volunteering to die since we have evolved to attempt to stay alive. We also know that dogs and cats do not pass the mirror test and are not aware of themselves so the same concept should apply to them.
When you take all benefits into account and teach people what those benefits are, I think most people will certainly make the switch. I like
Interesting example What about beer, bread, yogurt, cheese, or wine? All involved processing ingredients from natural sources. Cultured meat would be the same as meat but produced without all of the devestating effects.
What about future cultured organs? http://www.ted.com/talks/anthony_atala_growing_organs_engineering_tissue.html
What about tissue engineered wound healing?
Please point out where I say animals want to be treated how I want to be treated. When I say animals want to do things different from us such as dust bathe, root, etc. this is ignored or seen as common sense somehow. But when I say they experience pain just like us, then I am projecting my own feelings onto them somehow.
Please point out where I said all non-plant life is equivalent to human life. I certainly said that all beings that are aware of the world should be equally considered if that is what you mean.
You seem to admit that animals feel pain. If they can feel pain and have the capacity to suffer, why should their interests not be taking into account? You say I have not proven that the golden rule should apply to them but how do you get much clearer than this? They can suffer. So why should we ignore that suffering?
I am not saying they are self-aware if that is what you thought I meant. I realize that farm animals (and dogs/cats/babies) are not self aware. I am not sure what the lack of being self aware has to do with the ethics of killing a dog/cat/baby/farm animal though. I don’t think you are, but if you were claiming that someone can be killed ethically because they are not self aware then obviously this criteria applies to human children under a year and a half old.
As you know, free range is a term that can be abused since it does not specify the amount of time outdoors or the size of the outdoor area so I will assume you mean more than just the label. Free range also does not take into account antibiotics that are used in chickens that make them so large that many of their legs break underneath them. This assumes that castration, tail docking, tooth-clipping, de-tusking, disk-or septum nose rings, and debeaking are not used. It also assumes that weaning the animals from their mothers is done at an appropriate age. It assumes that the industry would not give the male dairy calves for veal. Currently, livestock production uses over 30% of the world’s land surface so this assumes that even with the exponential increase in demand for meat coming, we will have plenty of land to clear for more room to give the animals. In other words, we have a long way to go and a lot of land to clear to get to this being an option.
This is related to the topic. If we do not look at our history, we are destined to repeat it. Slavery was seen as common place just as our consumption of meat is. Every defense given for meat consumption has already been given for why we should have slavery.
I reject any argument that has a premise based on essentially, ‘it could be worse’.
Just because there will always be suffering, it does not mean that we should not do everything we can to prevent it. You make many logical fallacies. Slavery was ‘normal’. You make the naturalistic fallacy. Meat is generally not regarded as healthy (see ADA quote about preventing certain diseases with a vegetarian/vegan lifestyle earlier). I agree that torturing the animals needs to be changed.
I would like to try to find solutions for these issues. Even if you think it is a lost cause in the long run.
You are really stuck on this luxury thing. Something being a luxury means it is simply not needed to live. You then make the assumption that I am saying luxury=bad, non-luxury=good when I never said anything remotely like that.
So because I am trying to limit that suffering and I fully admit that I am being unethical, I am somehow the hypocrite?
I have said this many times, but just because we cause some suffering, it does not justify causing even more suffering. I have addressed the Davis study in my earlier posts.
Please cite this and explain your logic. We have three main scenarios people have proposed:
We continue on with our current system where we kill over 10 billion land animals in the U.S. alone every year. Other countries demand for meat is expected to rise quickly. We continue to have to create seven pounds of crops to create one pound of meat, effectively, indirectly killing seven times the amount of various animals in the harvest.
We switch to a cultured meat / vegetarian / vegan society. No longer do we need to artificially inseminate billions of animals and there is no longer a need to kill billions of animals or exploit them in our food system at all. Since we do not need to feed them massive amounts of crops, those crops will now go to feed the humans that need it. It also indirectly kills around 1/7th the amount of various animals in the harvest compared to conventional food production.
We switch to a grass-fed pasture raised society. We indirectly kill about three times the number of animals (once we take into account the amount of food produced comparing growing crops to killing the animals directly). We still have to worry about all of the animal welfare issues. We still have to worry about the environment issues. Currently over 30% of the earth’s land surface is covered with livestock production. Would people give up other meat? Would people pay more for their meat? Is switching to this model feasible, let alone a good option?
Please see the quote from the ADA earlier about how vegetarianism/veganism is fine for all stages of life. You make a good point about it being difficult to be vegan.
If there is suffering we are causing, we should do what we can to stop it? Fair statement?
Are you equating wanting to stop suffering with religion? Natural fallacy. While I agree that slavery is not a “universal law”, we can agree that it is wrong. I think we can agree at the very least that something needs to change with our current system of meat production.
You are missing my point. My point is not to judge what you are doing to stop suffering. My point is that we need to first admit that we are causing suffering. If we simply make up rationalizations and claim that we are being ethical, then we will never make any steps to change the current system.
Correct. If someone has the capacity to suffer, we should take their lives into account.
If it were possible to separate exploitation and suffering, then you might have a point.
Please define the gradations comparing human awareness at different ages. When you show me the measures you are looking for, I will relate it to other beings. I have laid out simple gradations such as how insects do not feel pain, animals feel pain, humans feel pain. Animals experience various emotions similar to humans, etc. While this is enough to make high level calls (should we put animals through factory farms for instance), you seem to want me to type up a book describing every possible scenario of every possible species. Until then you have a way out of admitting the simply fact that what we are doing is wrong.
Carnivores are not capable of making ethical choices. Humans are.
You are able to defend yourself up to and including killing others.
i’ve reached the point where this conversation is just asinine and ludicrous.
in some ways, i thought i saw both sides–but something snapped.
gauging the “acceptable amount” of animal suffering is patently impossible, so any distinction a vegan makes is straight up bullshit. it’s completely made-up.
it’s just a self-centered foma one tells themselves to alleviate some of the (apparent) guilt you carry. which is fine–for you. but **ONLY **you.
what i can’t understand is why you want to make people who don’t feel guilt feel guilty.
just like with religion, it’s cool for you, just…maybe stay out of the other people’s faces about it…?
but here’s where things get stupid:
as i pointed out, a vegan cannot advocate having pets. least-harm would actually mean elimination of domesticated companion animals. you could feed them as a vegan without breaking your own rules.
and we needed dogs just as much as we needed livestock to overcome that leap out of hunter-gatherer. dogs fulfill the animal role we bred them for, as do livestock animals. all these creatures are fulfilling their roll, the same as in nature. if it’s not a matter of ethics when a frog lays eggs to have tadpoles to hatch to feed fish to feed bears, then ethics shouldn’t factor in when the same rolls are fulfilled to meet human needs.
but it gets stupider: since there’s no scientific measure for the “too much suffering” line, how does one judge such things? can you ride a horse, at all? or can you for an hour a day but no more? or as much as you want? where’s the line?
because, without animals, society would not be nearly as civilized as we are. it took domestication of livestock and beasts of burden in order to advance into the civilized age.
vegans cannot, if you all represent their mentality, advocate riding or using a horse—so by extension, no westward expansion would have occurred in america. no real progress would have been made if we had left it up to vegans.
travel would have been greatly limited.
we would have never made the leap from hunter/gather to agriculture if we couldn’t use plow animals…the ones we bred into existence…for exactly that purpose.
if you take away our dominance and utilization of and over fauna of the world, progress would be severely limited to a bygone era i can’t even imagine. literally Amish would be more advanced than a idealistic vegan society.
if you want to say “that’s the way it had to be then–but it doesn’t have to be that way now,” then my rebuttal is: apparently, it does still have to be that way. otherwise it simply wouldn’t.
this proposal of “animals as meat is obsolete” is premature.
when it’s obsolete, it’ll actually be…obsolete. we’ll have moved on, and that will be that. that day may never come–but it’s sure not here now.
animals and man have a symbiotic relationship which has yielded amazing progress. quality of life is tremendously better because of animals. we have medicines and various health sciences because of lab work done on animals.
you want to talk about limiting suffering? if you take away the ability to test medicines and treatments on animals, and extrapolate that backwards, what do you get…? a plagued society with diseases we could never otherwise control.
we would. be. doomed. sick. diseased. miserable. dead.
human suffering would know no limits.
this artificial law of ethics you try to apply is just that–artificial. it’s a mechanism to feel less guilty about your impact on the world, which, if you need that–more power to you. but stop trying to apply it universally. that’s religion. and we all know that won’t work.
a vegan’s utopia society would have never transcended the dark ages. so stop reaping the benefit of centuries of proper and fair animal usage/consumption and pretending like now you transcend it. you’re just being a goody-two shoes…one who doesn’t farm their own food, one who doesn’t eschew the progress animals have given you up to this point.
We admit that we are being unethical in our current system of exploitation
We do what we can to prevent that suffering
I relate number 2) to tithing. Some people give what is in their pocket. Some people give ten percent to their favorite charity. Some people reverse tithe because they have more than enough in this life. Some people give just about everything they have. The important part is that we admit there is an issue and we then give what we think is right. Cheerful giving. We do not judge others for what they are doing.
Likewise, we might try to give up some meat, all meat, or become a weekday veg. We might not give up meat at all but give money to causes that are preventing the worst abuses. We might educate people on the abuses. We might give money or time to come up with alternatives. The important part is that we admit there is an issue and do what we think is right to help it.
Until we admit that we are being unethical, we will never change anything.
oh well. then problem solved. i don’t punch, kick or kill animals. i try not to kill bugs or spiders if i can relocate them without destroying them. i rescued a dog and give it a wonderful, happy life.
i don’t hunt.
looky there. i’m ethical. and i still get to eat the daylights out of steak. but according to this new broad-stroke you’ve allowed, almost everyone is ethical to whatever degree we feel there’s a problem.
almost everyone on the planet is, save for some heartless monsters.
How about any distinction made about animal fighting rings, or abuse of animals, or laws prohibiting bestiality? I actually support repealing all of the legislation banning them. I’m not interested in committing any of those offences, nor do I own a pet, but I think that human pleasure should usually come before the rights of other animals, legally.
Let’s take a personal example since it is hard not to come across as judging on a forum. I eat cheese. At first I had no idea this was unethical, but now that I understand what happens, this is 100% unethical. If I increase the demand for cheese, I am directly responsible for causing suffering to them. I am unethical because I do this. I am doing many things to try to replace and prevent that suffering, but I am still being unethical. Until we find alternatives for this, I will always be unethical in that situation. I could care less about judging what you do. What I do care about is that we stop making up rationalizations and admit what it truly is. A huge source of injustice that needs to stop.
i read that three times and i cannot figure out what your point is. to me, it reads like “what about these awful other things? i support laws against them, but i think we should have the right to do those things.”
how can you both support laws against them and say you think human pleasure should trump animal rights…?
i’m fairly certain what you just said doesn’t make any sense.
i’m fairly certain you are using that term wrong.
you’re so caught up on fallacy phrases you’ve sacrificed your ability to actually say anything.
if you are trying to get at the point “a vegan society wouldn’t necessarily be stuck in the dark ages,” you can posit that stance–but you as well cannot propose any means as to how they would have progressed beyond it. every technology and advancement you can potentially conceived in your imagination will have, at some point, owed its genesis to some kind of animal usage.
if you can rebut what i’m saying with some alternatives and lay out the groundwork for society to have advanced without the use of animals, feel free.
if you want to keep playing high school debate club, keep on keepin’ on–but at least brush up on your fallacies and use the correct ones.
but here’s where you are messing up: you are saying it’s intrinsically unethical.
i have a friend who runs a farm. she makes her own cheese from a cow she’s named and calls her friend. in fact, all her animals are tended to as pets. i make fun of her because it’s a lot less of a farm than a petting zoo for a grown woman.
she doesn’t partake in any of the unethical mass-production animal exploitation methods that you keep defining as unethical.
she makes boutique cheeses for local eateries with the left over milk. she sells her eggs as true free-range/small farm bred to local restaurants as well.
her goat sleeps in bed with her.
i don’t think anyone here’s going to argue that the way we consume way, way too much meat in america and the production scale we’ve had to adapt is the best way. but to extrapolate that to “all meat is unethical, all animal products are unethical” is ludicrous.
i think you need to adjust your argument to “eating meat CAN be unethical if you are doing it in an abusive way…but it’s not entirely, by it’s nature, wrong.”
What about beer, bread, yogurt, cheese, or wine? All involved processing ingredients from natural sources. Cultured meat would be the same as meat but produced without all of the devestating effects.