What about Kosher slaughterhouses? Not that they’d be killing a pig there but the questions remains.
Oh you would be surprised. Aplysia californica, a mollusk, is studied by neuroscientists to learn about fear and memory at the simplest level. Specifically they study its gill withdrawal reflex when it is lightly touched. This reflex is capable of several different kinds of ‘learning’, from habituation to sensitization to associative learning. Without getting too deep into it, yes, very simple neural circuits are actually at the heart of the kind of learning and fear conditioning you see in all animals. The very same circuits and behaviors are at work in our own brains, in the amygdala and other places. Of course it’s orders of magnitude more complicated, but the basics are simple.
Eric Kandel at Columbia University won the Nobel Prize in 2000 for this exact kind of research.
I’m saying the meat providing industry tends to ‘prettify’ what it does, and the vast majority of meat eaters choose to remain ignorant of how their food ends up on its plate. But if it was really as natural to butcher animals as some would have us believe, we’d be besieged by cooking programmes where the cow was killed live on screen to prove its freshness and diy shows on how to cut and prepare a carcass.
Between the gun and the permits and the car mounts and the camo and the fuel, it’d probably be cheaper to just buy a freezer’s worth of meat if that’s the concern. I don’t think a measurable amount of people hunt for the meat, they hunt to hunt, and the meat is just a bonus.
And my above post is kind of specific to cultures like ours where everything is plentiful. Naturally, if you live in the bush somewhere, the situation is different. The fact that veganism is even an option is such a luxury that thousands of years worth of ancestors wouldn’t even be able to consider the possibility. Also, video games and sneakers with lights in them.
Good grief…
This line of argument leads nowhere. However,
I will try to help you understand the distinction, specifically between cognition and consciousness. This is essentially the difference between responding to pain behaviorally and *feeling *pain. The fact that cognition can occur without consciousness is almost self evident: (how many times do I have to use this stupid example) think of when you are reading something, very narrowly involved in that one thing consciously, and somebody calls your name. Your attention will immediately shift to it, which brings up the question–how? The fact is any sensory input triggers lower level circuits in the brain, but it is only when those inputs are carried into working memory that they are consciously experienced and synthesized. So lower level cognition is always going on about countless inputs, and when one is deemed important enough, your working memory (attention) is directed to it. Therefore you do not need to always be aware of every sound that touches your eardrums. This shows a separation between cognition and consciousness. Hell, think of when you reach out to catch a ball. You do not consciously direct every muscle. That happens at a lower level. From what little I know of the brain, I think that animals like dogs operate almost entirely on this level.
Mojo Pin:
I am curious if you have ever been around injured animals? If not go to a veterinary emergency care center and sit in the waiting room for a few hours. It’d take a scarily detached mindset for a person to witness the obvious suffering of the animals being brought in and think they are not really experiencing pain.
ETA: If you had a beloved pet that was dying from (say) cancer and the animal clearly was exhibiting that it was in pain would you refuse to euthanize your pet figuring it is not actually suffering and, since you like having it around, you’ll just let the pet motor along till it drops dead of its own accord?
That’s not really what I was talking about, so if that’s all you meant, I don’t disagree to that extent. But to me this is a distinction without a difference: both of these levels are purely mechanistic stimulus-response cycles whose operation is completely determined by chemical processes. Neither level has any objective value.
My argument is that to operate as human beings, we have to consistently anthropomorphize each other, since the processes going on in other brains, however beautifully complex they may be, don’t have any direct value or meaning to us. As individuals we give the suffering of other creatures meaning, and this meaning doesn’t come from the intrinsic nature of their brains but from the responses that exist in ours.
I’m not trying to say that your way of viewing the suffering of animals (to wit, by concluding that it doesn’t exist) is inherently invalid. That would be massively hypocritical of me, since my whole point rests on the subjective nature of meaning and value. I’m just pointing out that it seems to me that you’re arguing as though there is some kind of objective way of saying that animals do not suffer which cannot be equally applied to human beings. I think that this is either a flawed line of reasoning, or else it leads to a definition of “suffering” which is not meaningful to most people.
Honestly, I feel like I’m banging my head against a wall. If you think that vastly simplified wishy washy nonspeak that you quoted really is in any way a rebuttal to what I’ve said, I hardly know what else to say.
Full disclosure, I f’ing love animals, yes I even raised two dogs through puppyhood (both are at my grandma’s now) and my grandma’s half wild housecat just had babies under her roof and I spent all of last weekend dangerously close to cute overdose. Seeing my grandma interact with her cat, I know that it is possible for humans to even experience real love for an animal. However, I think that there is another kind of scientific enjoyment to be had in recognizing the beautiful biological machinery in their little heads, and understanding to some tiny degree how they work. I know that there is plenty of subjective human joy and sadness to be found in interacting with animals, but I’m not inclined to anthropomorphizing them to any degree. Now I would not enjoy seeing an animal “suffer” very much because such displays so effectively evoke empathy from me, but if I were pressed, I would still come down on the side of them not really suffering subjectively.
I’m glad we’re sort of on the same page now. Still, the anthropomorphizing of other humans jives with my understanding of reality, while the same for animals does not. So my entire purpose these past few hours has been to try and convince anyone anthropomorphizing animals based on their behavior that such thinking may be flawed. If I succeed in doing so one less human will feel too much needless pain over animals that themselves aren’t feeling pain (imo).
e: I just now thought of what this part really said “I’m just pointing out that it seems to me that you’re arguing as though there is some kind of objective way of saying that animals do not suffer which cannot be equally applied to human beings. I think that this is either a flawed line of reasoning, or else it leads to a definition of “suffering” which is not meaningful to most people.” My proposed standard of determining whether animals suffer, whether they have the same neural circuits with which humans are currently understood to consciously suffer, is I think a clear enough standard and does not by definition also apply to people.
No, it’s still cheaper to hunt. You’re also wrong about their not being a measurable number of people who hunt for meat. I grew up in rural Montana, and a significant number of hunters I knew did it for the food and not, as you would say, for the hunt.
Honestly what you have provided so far is some sort of philosophical babble with little to no grounding in reality. I’ve seen your type before. Since the topic is pretty much unprovable one way or the other you feel safe in making assertions with a pseudo understanding of science to make it all look good. You may have noted you are pretty much alone in your assessment here and while that may not “prove” you are wrong this board has some pretty sharp people. No one but you is buying it which in my experience with these folk is a strong indictment to your premise.
Your response here is a classic dodge. If the stuff was wishy washy then take it to task and point out its shortcomings. Do you deny that animals exhibit the same behavioral patterns as humans when they are in pain (beyond reacting to avoid the pain but the same behavioral reactions afterwards)? If you do not deny it how do you explain it?
Why aren’t babies lumped in with this? Retarded people? Their mental capacity is far below that of a grown/normal human and arguably below that of a dog in some cases.
FTR: If people are in an area where they cannot get meat at a market (or are too poor or otherwise unable to buy food) then hunting for your own subsistence is fine. To me it is no different than a wolf running down a deer for its dinner.
Actually, mine was a valid question. Writing a Witnessing-style OP (with witnessing-style follow-up posts) and tacking on a “discuss” is a tad disingenuous.
Well, I’ve actually been fucking discussing shit! What have you done, except take three content free dumps into the thread and try to derail the conversation? Bellend.
Really I’m just a little deflated that all my efforts for the past however many hours have had no persuasive effect.
e: if this post is you ‘calling me out’ or something, I have to admit I’m frustrated, but I have no real desire to take you up on it.
Ah, but what if I then feel pain because there is now one less human being feeling compassion for the suffering of animals which I regard as being very real? 
I guess my whole point is that to me, “suffering” isn’t just about having the mental capacity to reflectively contemplate unfulfilled desire. Merely the behavior of expressing a distressed condition and attempting to move away from it is sufficient, and the more nuanced the responses are, the easier I find it to anthropomorphize. I agree that this has no objective basis in the structure of the brains involved, but then I don’t think that the complexity of my brain makes my experiences (suffering included) any more real than any other interpretation of other physical phenomena.
In other words, higher-level consciousness isn’t a necessary part of the package: I can imagine the existence of non-introspective pain, and I would still desire to alleviate it whenever it seemed evident to me. So a dog whimpering because of an injury is “suffering” in my book, and for that matter so is a baby crying because it is hungry, or separated from its mother, or what have you.
Immoral? No. Animals are a renewable resource that should be carefully husbanded. No less, no more. If you choose to believe otherwise, run with it. I enjoy hunting. I enjoy the hunt, the kill, and the eating. Despite that, I doubt you’ll find anybody, even my ex-wives, who would characterize me as immoral. Bryan Ekers has the right of it. This is just witnessing.
This is pissing me off. How exactly are you people defining ‘witnessing’?
Capitulation?
I asked you to respond to the bits in the article and explain them away. Apparently you are unwilling to do so.
Your stance on this topic argues for a decidedly amoral approach to animals. Do with them as we please. Since they cannot suffer by definition you would think setting your cat on fire is just fine. Your cat, it cannot suffer, what is the big deal?
It is an offensive notion.
Evolution built pain receptors into us and for a good reason and experiencing pain is a fundamental trait. Yet you seem to think evolution treated humans specially on this count and only gave them the ability to suffer.
We cannot put ourselves in a dog’s mind to know one way or another. All we have are observations. Those observations indicate that a dog responds to pain largely in the same fashion that a human does. Yet to you this is meaningless. Or it is the dog being a robot and merely mimicking human pain responses, they do not actually experience it. That is a remarkable claim and frankly weird. Why would evolution do it that way?
Those who have been calling hunting immoral might better use your word: offensive. The notion offends you that I take pleasure in hunting, killing, and eating animals. What is offensive and what is immoral are not always the same thing. This thread began as witnessing that what offends the OP must be immoral.