Based on the thread title, I thought this was going a different direction. Equating omnivore humans with slavery doesn’t make any sense to me.
I like me some dead cow. Quite tasty.
But the amount of grain needed raise a calf until butchering is enormous. If humans just ate the grain, we could feed every man woman child on the planet. Yes we might need vitamin supplements. And I’m not proposing forced vegetarianism. But eating less animals would probably be better for the environment.
Eating smaller animals – pigs and chickens rather than cows – offers some of the advantages of both ideals.
Also, fake meats are getting better and better! This weekend, I mean to try a Beyond Burger, just to see what it’s like.
Pigs are pretty large…
Also, the suffering of a single large animal produces a lot more human gustatory pleasure than the suffering of a small animal. And it seems unlikely that a cow suffers vastly more than a rabbit, given similar animal husbandry practices (modified to apply to each animal, of course.)
That doesn’t follow at all. There’s a gray area between short and tall, but that doesn’t entail that every example exists in the gray area. A 7 ft tall guy is tall, and a chimp almost certainly feels physical pain the same as a human.
I think it’s a dodge to start talking about fish at this point, when there is data to both imply they feel subjective pain just as we do, and data to suggest the opposite. It’s more relevant to the OP to talk about the clearer examples of mammals.
I cited examples upthread. Battery farmed chickens for example have a substantially reduced lifespan and the majority are subject to cruel practices like forced moulting (which involves starvation).
So it’s not about assuming, it’s about citing the science journals that publish this data.
And that’s before we start talking about meat like veal and foie gras where cruelty is basically baked in.
As I said upthread; if animals raised for meat or dairy were allowed to roam fairly freely, live to a mature age, and killed quickly and painlessly, I would have no issue at all with eating that meat.
Sadly, that’s far from the reality.
Well said. Some intensive farming practices for some species are simply economically convenient industrialized mass-scale animal torture. Exactly how much and where is the stuff of argument. But IMO only a hard core ideologue with eyes screwed shut would argue it’s zero today in actual US practice.
I’m curious what you think is the significance of “live to a mature age”?
Right now most meat animals are slaughtered at somewhere between their toddler and teenaged years in human terms. We want to enable that high-growth era of life, then promptly collect it.
I’m no animal expert, but I believe food animals have no particular awareness of time and live mostly (entirely) in the now. I’m even more confident food animals have no conscious idea of what a “normal” life entails or how long it lasts. They’re not thinking “Someday when I grow up I’ll make babies then work for years dragging a plow then I can retire to that hillside over there with the better grass until I’m old and eventually die”.
ISTM that whether the animal is killed as a toddler, a tween, or a teen simply doesn’t matter to the animal. If it’s having a “good” life by its standards up until the moment we end that life, we’ve fulfilled our moral duty. Having it hang around into its middle age or dotage before we harvest it helps neither man nor beast. IMO.
Your thoughts?
Well this is definitely something Im far from having my mind made up on.
I don’t like the idea of an advanced organism only experiencing fear and confusion and then being dead but it’s hard to articulate why that’s necessarily worse than having positive experiences first followed by that same fear and then death.
Also, while most large mammals have family or pack structures and appear to grieve the loss of a juvenile or young adult, I’m not sure if that’s worse than grieving the loss of a senior member of the group. Perhaps the latter is worse?
Though of course it’s inevitable that older members of the group will die.
So yeah on the issue of what is the best age for animals to be killed, I’m only tentatively leaning one way.
I don’t think either of these are true. I think that the US practice of confining veal calves to individual pens is unduly cruel, and I don’t eat veal in the US. But in a lot of the world, veal is just the meat of calves who had normal lives but were slaughtered young. I have no problem with that.
Similarly, while there’s a lot of cruelty baked into some of the European foie gras production, most of the US-produced foie gras comes from ducks and geese who live pretty decent lives by “US food animal” standards. They are certainly better off than most battery laying hens. Yes, they are force-fed. But their eating apparatus is very different from ours, and independent observers who’ve watched the operations say that part doesn’t seem to bother the birds too much. They are more concerned with the amount of space and fresh air the birds get.
Yeah. While I would disagree with your last bit (I think it’s nice for the animal to live to a ripe old age) I don’t think it’s morally worse to kill a toddler-lamb than a teenager-lamb than an adult-mutton.
That’s largely conceding the point though, since the EU produces around 90% of the world’s foie gras (and indeed the methods have been considered cruel by a systematic EU review (PDF)) versus the US producing less than 1%.
The Straight Dope is largely an American audience but even so, it’s hardly a guarantee that anyone reading this would only buy American, also not eat any such products while travelling and also not buy any products like pate which may contain externally sourced foie gras.
However, if we were to talk about US production specifically though, I’m not sure what the differences are that would make it less cruel than the review I cited above.
For example an undercover video of foie gras production at Hudson Valley, New York State certainly doesn’t look pleasant. And you’ll note that the reponse of Hudson Valley to this video has been to claim that the video shows things out of context not say that any of the claims are false or any of the video was staged.
I don’t think it’s immoral.
If however, they came up with substitutes that were just as healthy, similarly priced, less problematic to the environment and indistinguishable from the real thing, I’d certainly go for it. I just don’t see a lab-grown New York Strip happening any time soon. Ground beef will probably be there in my lifetime though. The problem is, I don’t know that just having suitable ground beef will make much of a difference because there will still likely always be equal demand for the rest of the cow.
For what reason would you “go for it”? Do you mean at least once to see what it’s like or switch over?
Humans are omnivores , it is believed that Humans didn’t gain intelligence until they started eating meat which led to the present brainsize .
Yes you CAN get most of the vitamins you need from a Vegan diet …if you can be bothered to go through all of the rigmarole of eating various items in large amounts , rather than eating a slice of meat or eggs , whatever .Which I suspect many Vegans don’t do .
That’s all probably true but none of it works as a moral defense of eating meat.
The history of humans being omnivores…so what? We don’t owe anything to our past.
Many of the ways we live in the modern world are completely contrary to the way humans have lived through most of our existence.
The difficulty of getting all essential vitamins from a vegan diet…sure, but it’s pretty difficult to get them all even within a meat diet. I know I already take multivitamins and other supplements.
And anyway, if inconvenience worked as a defense, then any action is defensible. If I am making a good living using slaves, in a place/time where that’s legal, it’s really inconvenient for me to become an abolitionist.
I’ve been vegetarian for over half my life. I don’t miss eating meat. I’m happier without it.
I don’t put forth moral arguments on the subject. I figure people are capable of figuring it out for themselves without my input. The trend against eating animals is already visibly underway, and I predict that plant-based foods will be approaching predominance in a matter of years.
Of course we are tied to our past biologically, physiologically, and socially. We can’t just choose to shift our digestive tracts to that of a gorilla to become entirely herbivorous, nor can we decide to become cold-blooded to save on the amount of calories we need to burn. Can you give examples of how humans now live completely contrary to how we used to? I have a feeling most of the ways you might think aren’t as different as they seem.
Nope; following an omnivorous diet is so simple and effective at delivering the essential vitamins that literally even illiterate cavemen with no clue about diet requirements did it for hundreds of thousands of years. Yes a given percentage of people all along lacked certain components, but that was generally related to overall food shortages rather than the diet lacking nutrition. Multivitamins and other supplements are not a requirement unless you are being overly restrictive with your diet.
We aren’t omnivores because it is stylish or because we were raised in The First Church of Omnivoria . We are omnivores because our bodies are built the way the are built.
Who was talking about “style”?
The point is, saying that some aspect of our physiology was built for X tells us nothing about morality unless potentially we couldn’t survive without X.
The point has already been conceded that we obviously can survive just fine without meat, so in terms of morality, talking about our evolutionary past is utterly irrelevant.
I’ll reply to mmmiiikkkeee tomorrow. It’s late here, and I just don’t know where to start.
The number of things that people do for social or moral reasons that contravene the way our bodies are built are numerous - were humans built to wear clothes for modesty reasons? Were humans built to be monogamous? Were humans built with birth control or abortion in mind? Just because our biology sets us down a certain path doesn’t mean it’s the right one, otherwise the “biology” argument could be used to defend patriarchal societies since those evolved out of the way humans are built.
Overall this thread has given me a lot to think about and I am glad about all the contributions so far.
Sure, if you very carefully design your diet(and can afford to do so) you might be able to approximate the nutritional value of meat…but it would be like saying the fish don’t need to be in the water if you kept them in special carefully maintained tanks filled with super-humidified air.
But eating vegetarian isn’t particularly difficult; you make it sound like it’s a supreme sacrifice. Lots of people, including entire religious groups, are vegetarian.
But none is needed, as there is no moral cause against eating meat.
Sure it causes suffering but so does eating vegetables. In fact zillions of animals are killed in the growing, harvesting and eating of veggies.