What’s the point?
I’ve read The Oxford Companion To The Mind front to back, and back again. Some of it was very technical and went right over my head, but I’m not entirely ignorant on the subject…and nothing I’ve read morally justifies killing other animals for anything other than survival.
What’s the point of your post? If you’ve seen and heard it all before, you know where the thread exit button is.
But your reasoning can also be applied to severely brain damaged human beings. We don’t know how they experience pain and suffering either, but it’s unlikely that they’re able to do so in the same way that we do. All it takes is one moment of carelessness and you can go from an independent, multi-tasking, facebook updating, wheeler-dealing master of the universe to a retard with an IQ of 25 for whom happiness is a warm, dry nappy. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think twice before cutting you up for meat, or that your suffering shouldn’t be part of the cost/benefit analysis.
I disagree with the standard you’re using to decide whether inflicting harm on a creature is moral. For me, the question is “Can pain be visited upon this creature?” If so, we should seek to avoid doing that unless absolutely necessary. How the creature processes pain sensations is irrelevant. What matters is that they are processed at all.
masturbation.
Actually, not everyone can thrive on a vegetarian diet. Some people need to eat meat in order to stay healthy.
Example: Those who suffer from Crohn’s disease cannot tolerate too much fiber and roughage. Meat is easier to digest and thus important to the diet. I suppose that would be true of other forms of digestive autoimmune disorders as well, but I don’t know.
We have been discussing allergies in GQ. Some people are allergic to all legumes or other proteins. My own child cannot tolerate any plant-based protein except certain grains, so we eat more meat and eggs than I would otherwise prefer.
Just throwing that out there. I would agree that hunting is more moral than factory farming, and have no problem with it. (Never done it though.)
Are you telling me dogs don’t have personalities, or shall we say, individual characteristics?
Some people have allergic reactions to over the counter drugs, or die from eating peanuts… doesn’t mean a thing, apart from you lost in the genetic lottery.
Actually, Bryan Ekers is right. Not because there is no reason to discuss this subject, but because you seem to want only those who agree with you to discuss it.
Well Cleve Baxter did a study (published within his book Primary Perception) that was along the same lines as the Mythbuster’s experiment, hooking the plant up to a polygraph, then provoking it with several types of “torture”, to which the plant responded by releasing a chemical similar to that of an animal upon experiencing pain, and it gives off a high pitched frequency varying in intensity relative to the “pain” inflicted. Fringe science, but your claim was as valid as mine. There’s no conclusive evidence beyond that plants may feel discomfort, and getting into plant consciousness is admittedly stupid, but it’s best to say “plants respond to pain as sentient animal life, but in lacking a nervous system similar to ours, we do not know how or if they experience the pain.” Until we can ask one, we’ll never really know.
And to address ivan, I thought the *opinionated *article shared some decent opinions, just as we all are. I suppose a link implies a scientific study though, sorry.
And even if I agree with the original premise, I take issue with the population control bit. We’re the ones who encroach on the habitats of other animals, and we then decide that they’re the ones who are overpopulated. The next logical, humane step? Kill them off until they’re endangered, so we can heroically step in and save the poor animals from extinction!
No, hunting is not immoral. In fact, it may be the most moral way for a human being to obtain animal protein.
What’s immoral is pulling through a burger joint drive-thru with no concept of the interaction between humans and animals that made that burger possible. Or thinking meat grows on trees in which it comes in a plastic tray wrapped in plastic wrap.
Taking a living thing’s life for your own sustenance is the natural order of things. But getting too detached from that transaction, I’d argue, has had bad consequences. A level of mindlessness about where meat comes from can lead to some of the abuses that occur on factory farms.
When people had to actually go out and hunt for what they ate, they were forced to care about the well-being of them, of their populations.
I never was much into hunting, but grew up in a small community where it’s a way of life. I’ve never known hunters to waste what they kill. Indeed, I’ve known many who donate what meat they don’t use for themselves to soup kitchens, senior centers, etc.
It’s difficult to find something immoral in that.
Oh? Then why do doctors who tell you to eat right include meat in their analysis of “right” eating? Have scientists been wrong for centuries? Or is it a conspiracy?
You are asserting a simple stimulus/response. That may be true for a sea cucumber or jellyfish. However, it flatly ignores what we know of higher order animals. A dog or a bear are mammals. Their brains look remarkably a lot like ours. Add in experience. If you’ve ever had a dog you cannot avoid recognizing that it is a conscious, thinking creature.
To assert that my dog whining pitifully in the vet’s office after an injury is merely a programmed response and not experiencing pain is just willful ignorance.
The reviews on Amazon make it look very interesting, so thanks for the inadvertent recommendation. Still, let me try to convince you. You say that nothing you’ve read so far morally justifies killing other animals for trivial reasons. Let me ask you, what would justify such a thing? Perhaps if it was established with some certainty that animals don’t feel pain?
I would be the bastard that says let the irreparably damaged vegetable man die and be rearranged. Maybe not as dinner, but as nutrients for the soil. However. there is a difference between not suffering and suffering in an inarticulate dim-witted way. A man of IQ 25 still suffers, because he has the faculties available to him. This is different from a sea cucumber because I think it just is not possible for a sea cucumber to be conscious of any pain with the neural circuits it has.
My god, do you really not recognize this as the non sequitur that it is? Every individual dog has ‘personalities’, because every individual dog has a unique brain and therefore responds in a unique way to different stimuli (to put it very simply). This has nothing to do with them being physiologically capable of feeling pain.
You may be surprised to what extent even we are in effect very complicated “stimulus/response” machines. You are right that mammals share brain characteristics. I am also sure that dogs are capable of cognition, but you have to recognize that this is a totally separate issue from consciousness. You are conflating the two, and I am saying that while the two often go together in humans, other animals without some crucial brain circuits may have one (cognition or “thinking”) without the other (conscious experience). See my ‘reading’ example above for one.
But we’re here. Our being here has led to the loss of populations of predators that kept certain animal populations at a sustainable level. It’s put pressure on the habitats that these remaining animals are pushed into.
Given that we’ve created this situation, biology-based population control is appropriate. In my former home state where deer-hunting is big, the decision on how many hunting tags to permit for a season, and how many doe permits, was made by biologists studying the populations and their habitat on a continual basis.
Deer herds starving to death in a bad winter is probably a worse way for them to go, or no worse way for them to go, than a 12-gauge slug doing them in.
Whether it’s immoral for us to be living in the populations we are, where we are, is another debate to be sure.
No it is not.
The hunter is hunting for pleasure. Intentionally inflicting pain and suffering on another creature for their own amusement. That they eat it later does not change this calculation. They have access to markets to get meat from farm raised animals.
I have been to a slaughterhouse precisely to understand where my burger comes from. The cows are killed instantly. The entire cow is used for something. I mean all of it gets used…blood and hooves and everything else.
Unless you have no access to a market to get meat making hunting a necessity it is hard to see it as a moral act.
Yeah, those hunter/gatherers were such a smart, ethical and thoughtful bunch.
This is hocus pocus smoke and mirrors.
Because animals are unable to verbally communicate their experience in words you are free to assume anything you like about what it is to “be” a dog.
Again this flatly denies our experiences with these animals. A dog displays a full range of emotion that are readily identifiable to any human. Sadness, anger, happiness and so on. The dog clearly has a memory. The dog can learn complex tasks.
In all ways what they do is a mirror of our own actions. Suffering is a base order experience. It is not necessary to have a high functioning brain for it. If not you would suppose that profoundly retarded humans would be incapable of suffering and this is not the case.
You wouldn’t be tarring all hunters with the brush of the bad actors, would you?
By the way, why is the presumption being allowed that killing an animal for the purposes of eating it is in some way immoral.
Based upon what?