Zombie or not, it’s an interesting topic!
To me, it’s the cost-benefit equation, intelligence has nothing to do with it. It’s the cost to raise/kill the animal versus the yield of meat and other useful products.
I think Monaco’s saying it’s okay if we eat XT.
Yes Monaco. That is why I only drink pure spring water and only eat free-range rocks which I butcher personally.
And stuffed cabbage. I like stuffed cabbage.
This is something I’ve been struggling with for a while, going back and forth towards borderline vegetarianism. I have a hard time eating beef or pork, less so poultry, and I’m generally OK with seafood. I decided (rationalized?) that I was OK with fish because they don’t in general care for their young, while the rest of the common meat sources do. That implies a higher level of consciousness, even if it’s mostly instinct.
Then, just last night, I was watching Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, and there was a neuroscientist who claimed that fish have the capacity to feel pain and react to it, but they don’t have the connections in their brain to actually be conscious of it. I haven’t done any research to find out how true that is, but if fish can’t consciously suffer, it does seem to allow for a less guilty enjoyment for eating them.
To the OP. Besides humans no it is not wrong.
You’re not allowed to insult other posters in this forum. Please don’t do it again.
To paraphrase the stages of human evolution as stated by the late, great Douglas Adams -
What can we eat?
Why do we eat?
Where shall we have lunch?
We’ve reached a stage in human history unknown for the previous 99.9999% of it - where we have such abundance that we can have moral qualms about what we eat instead of being damn glad that dolphin washed up on shore because now the tribe can eat for a week.
People talk about starvation in the world while at the same time wondering about how far up the food chain we should go…
I am a feel guilty meat eater. I prefer not to eat any animal that I don’t consider a general prey animal. It breaks my heart to see elephants killed, gorillas, dolphins, and to some extent bears.
I believe an octopus has a very short life span inspite of having some degree of intelligence so I have no bad feeling about eating them. From what I understand if meat animals were raised humanely we couldn't afford to eat them. I am in favor of striving to improve the lives of and domestic meat producer.FTW. With the caveat for animals that are really cute, of course.
Plants have information processing systems. Do they have consciousness? No matter where we draw the line, it’s a somewhat arbitrary line on a fairly slippery slope.
I’m against suffering, more than being concerned about raising something to kill it and eat it. I stopped eating veal once I found out what was involved.
I know a guy who says he doesn’t eat anything with a soul. Admirable sentiment, but it begs an important question. Depending on what he meant by soul, humans might be edible. (Of course we’re not because we agree that we aren’t: it’s taboo, and I’m OK with that, not being a Donner party member.)
I think that’s the right way to see this. Do we want to assign a value to life based on intelligence? Do we want to extend this to humans? If the university is on fire, am I obliged to rescue the professor and not the janitor? And why intelligence rather than, say, beauty? Or height?
And what, then, makes it OK to eat plants? They act differently from us, but there’s no ‘hard and fast’ boundary that I could see that says for anything beyond this line, it’s morally permissible to eat it. It might sound strange to lump plants in with animals like that, but for many of the properties of animal life, there exist analogs in the plant world; their differences are largely characterized by the brute differences in their physical characteristics: plants are immobile, animals move around; plants have a relatively low level of energy available, compared to the calories animals can burn through. Accounting for this, plants can show many of those behaviours we would typically consider to be exclusively the domain of animals, and which have been cited as a reason not to eat them: plant roots on the search for nutrient-rich soil show the same patterns as foraging animals; plants react aversely to damaging stimuli, by for instance producing harmful chemicals, or in some cases even calling out for help, attracting their predators’ predators; hence, plants communicate, both intra- and interspecies-wide; and so on. Putting it pointedly, what separates plants from animals, other than that the latter are more easily anthropomorphized?
Most often, the argument is instead based on the capacity for suffering. And make no mistake, I think unnecessary suffering is bad. Can plants suffer in any real sense? We generally infer that animals can, from their aversion towards harmful stimuli; however, certain plants show similar reactions. Of course, suffering means more than aversive behaviour: it means that there’s a light on on the inside, there’s someone there to experience the suffering. There’s something it is like to be a suffering being, and it’s not something good. But ultimately, we don’t know that animals truly suffer, though I generally believe this to be the case—otherwise, what justification could I have to assume that other people suffer?
In any case, ultimately, the line we draw between things it’s permissible to eat and those that are taboo is going to be arbitrary; I don’t believe that there will ever emerge a hard-and-fast criterion to make that judgment, and reasonable people can disagree about it. But at this point, I’m fairly certain it would cause more suffering to switch to vegetarianism (considering humanity as a whole) than continuing our carnivorous ways does. One point is the one Chronos raises:
As far as I know, there’s simply no way to grow crops in such a way as to sustain our population on a vegetarian diet. Furthermore, if we do convert such large swaths of land to agriculture, we’d probably destroy huge amounts of natural habitats for many species, additionally to now, instead of raising them, we’d compete with our former livestock for resources (in at least some cases; I don’t see us eating grass any time soon, but then again, all the large grasslands would probably have to be converted for agricultural use).
More than that video, Charlie, since I’ve raised, slaughtered, butchered, cooked, and eaten my own meat. Not impressed with your sad, sad, unimpressive propaganda vid. All I saw was tasty, tasty meat.
Sorry, Charlie. You ain’t good tasting tuna. But you’re probably just a single post drive-by, so you’ll probably never see this.
If God didn’t want us to eat animals, he shouldn’t have made them so delicious.
But seriously…
I think the animal species we consume are mostly a matter of tradition, dating back to time (pre-history) when the intelligence (or lack thereof) was not of the least concern. Cattle, pigs, chickens, etc. were easy to catch and keep (and they were tasty!) whereas dolphins were not. Now that we are more enlightened (or like to think of ourselves as such) most of us find the idea of eating dolphin taboo simply because its not familiar. Claiming aversion to eating it because it is smart is backward engineering and poor engineering at that. (I don’t have a cite but I remember hearing that pigs are smarter than dogs by a long shot… but pigs don’t help us round up our tasty sheep and dogs do, so how USEFUL an animal is to us as a non-food source is more of a determining factor than intelligence when it comes to will we eat it or not.)
On the face of it you might say that dolphins are not that useful to us so why aren’t they OK for food? Its a combination of unfamiliar=taboo and the fact that they provide non-tangible benefits as well (they are anthropomorphic, charming, entertaining, whatever). That combines into “we’d rather not eat dolphins” for most people.
But if bacon came from dolphins, most people wouldn’t care how smart they were…
This.
And yet, yes, I tend to act on the presumption that this IS how we want to assign value to living things. More carefully, I mean I have in mind some idea of how conscious a living thing is, how great a capacity for suffering it has, how great an outrage it would consider its own death to feed me or otherwise suit my purposes, and I weigh that against my other interests.
It’s hard to know exactly what “alive” means, and viruses arguable fall on the not-alive side of the line, and the better a job my body does of stopping them, the happier I am about it. I also like to see harmful bacteria perish in me. Ticks and mosquitos I kill without any guilt. When I was little, if I had a magnifying glass on a sunny day and happened upon an ant hill, the ants were in for a roasting, but now the appeal of that foolishness is gone and I leave them alone; but I still don’t have much compassion for them.
Mice are cute and warm and have enough intelligence to detect, but they chew through wires and stink up wall cavities when they die in there, so I trap them. I feel bad about it and am making a conscious choice that certainly has some downside.
Squirrels are even cuter and warmer and have enough intelligence for me to notice it. I mean them no harm. I hit one driving to work yesterday even though I tried hard not to, and felt really bad about it, but I choose to continue driving with that risk implicit. In this choice the stakes are higher on both sides.
It’s hard to imagine that we could do anything other than make some kind of estimate of how sad the death of a given creature would be, and weigh that against how beneficial the death would be for us. Hard to imagine we aren’t all using some personalized sliding scale to assign value.
This is an offhand opinion, and I’ve never contemplated it before, but, I actually don’t think I’d mind eating humans if their mental capacity was so reduced that they could not be outraged by the idea of their own death, and could not suffer – and if other humans and animal companions would also not feel hurt about their death. Practically, it seems pretty difficult to be confident about all these conditions, and especially difficult to eat them as part of a cultural system that automates being confident about all these conditions. And I nervously await another doper pointing out to my horror some point I’ve missed that will make me regret these words. As it stands at the moment, though, in the unlikely case these conditions are met, I don’t anticipate feeling problematic about it.
I can imagine another bizarre one: suppose a circle of close friends try various adventures and new experiences together all the time, and one of them loses a leg but is in surprisingly happy condition right afterwards, and he says “Gang, let’s try cannibalizing my leg. It’s my treat.” And suppose some doctors say, well, your flesh is healthy, and some lawyers say, well, there’s no law against it. Now, eating human flesh causes zero suffering. How about it?
^^^ placenta consumption is legal an not uncommon.
I question this, since meat as a food source takes far more crops than if crops were used directly in our diets. If we didn’t raise food animals, we’d have far more land available for human-edible crops.
Admittedly that doesn’t address the point that there are places where only sparse crops grow, where you need an animal to concentrate the nutrients. However, I bet the latter accounts for a tiny fraction of all human food.
Regarding eating humans, I’m not worried about that line being crossed, even if I might find it ethical – popular culture would never stand for it. Remember Soylent Green? I don’t have an ethical objection since to me, the awareness and consciousness is what counts; the rest is hardware. But we draw lines for practical and emotional purposes, and I have no problem with drawing the line at humans, regardless of their mental state. (Of course, as mentioned above, eating humans is ill-adviced for epidemiological reasons.)
Part of me would wonder how it would taste, but another part of me would be far too squicked out, and I’m not ashamed to say it.
You people are all mixed up. The criteria we use to feel bad about eating certain animals, includes: cute, smart, big and pets. Let’s explore each in detail:
Cute: Cows, pigs, lambs, ostriches, alligators, catfish and dogs are all cute. We can use selective breeding to solve the problem: make them ugly. Breed them to have crooked noses, hump backs (except for the camels and humpback whales), beady eyes (except for the pigs and shrews), buck-teeth and pimply skin. I’d have no problem shooting something with those features, especially if it were walking toward me in a dark alley.
Smart: Porpoises, pigs, apes, octopuses, parrots, cats, dogs, pickled herring and elephants are all pretty smart. Selective breeding, once again, comes to the rescue: breed them all to be as dumb as a stump. Problem solved. Actually, we could extend this to solve two problems. Someone upthread mentioned, something about how it’s not the eating that’s unethical, it’s the killing. Solution: breed nine-tenths of the population of each breed to be dumb, and one-tenth to be smart and psychopathic. Teach the smart, psychopathic ones to kill the dumb ones and fetch them to us, much like cats do when they drop fresh-killed mice at our feet. Have the killer pigs, et al, drag the dead dumb pigs to the meat processing plant. Clean packaged meat with no blood on our hands.
** Big**: This one makes the least amount of sense to me. People just have a problem killing animals that are big. I don’t know how many times a day I hear someone whine, “ooooooooh, you can’t kill that poor sperm whale and eat him…he’s tooooo big and adorable.” I’m quite confident that if chimpanzees were the size of ants, none of you would hesitate to step on whole mounds of them at a time. You’d probably roast a few under your magnifying glass, too, just to be mean—admit it! Well, for you “big” sympathizers, why don’t you breed little quarter-pounder cows? Yeah, one cow per burger. Would that make you happy? McDonald’s new slogan: 247 Billion Cows Eaten. Isn’t it more ethical to kill as few animals possible? We could do this by breeding cows the size of blue whales. One blue whale-size cow can make 1.6-million quarter pounder with cheeses. That’s a lot of food for a little killing.
Pets: The hesitancy about eating pets is unethical. While alive, our pets lead very enjoyable, pampered lives. Why should they get to live the life of Riley AND live to a ripe old age? That’s not fair to the slaughterhouse animals who not only have to live somewhat depressing lives, but also have to die young. The ethical thing to do is let the miserable animals at least live to middle age, and let our pets do the “James Dean”: die young, live fast and leave a good looking corpse. It gives them dignity. And, it’s a win-win for all concerned, really. This way you no longer have to live with grumpy old cats and dogs, just get a steady steam of cute puppies and kittens.
Can I guess how many times? What do I win if I’m right?
A whole lotta sperm. Go for it.
But people and cattle don’t eat the same crops; grass is comparatively hardy and grows in places were full-out farming might not be feasible. The cattle is then just an efficient way to convert human-inaccessible to accessible nutrients. But I haven’t really done any comprehensive research on the issue, so I’d be happy for anybody to run the numbers and show me wrong.