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Time to End Factory Farming?

quillette.com

101–110 of 154 posts

Re: Time to End Factory Farming?

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to treat something with respect and then kill it to eat it? What exactly is the point?

I may not agree with the concept of killing animals for food outside of survival necessity, but one must recognize that all life ends in death one way or another. Things do not have less value simply because they are impermanent. The quality of an animal's life is valuable regardless of how it ends, just as ours are.

It's only valuable because you give it value. I don't.

Re: Time to End Factory Farming?

#103
post #80
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a thought experiment, let us imagine you have been sentenced to death (that still happens in the USA, right?) 5 years from now, you will be killed. Would you rather spend those 5 years jammed into a concrete cell with thousands of other inmates, unable to move, standing in your own feces, never to see the sun and only eating corn? Or would you rather have a bed, running water, proper meals, be allowed outside in t…

Sure I don't want to be treated like that, but animal well being? I don't care. This just mean I care more than my own well being compare to animal well being and I don't have problem with that.

The same logic was applied to slavery, and is still applied with racism. You believe that you are better than something or someone else. Who cares what happens to them, they are not a real living thing like me...

Re: Time to End Factory Farming?

#104
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate your reply. If I can paraphrase your first point, people eat meat because they enjoy it, and that's that. I'm curious what your source is for saying a vegetarian diet isn't optimal. Most studies I've seen (including large and long studies) claim the opposite. Here's a list: [1] I agree it's like sweatshops. I didn't want to draw the comparison to slavery because I think the ethical question stands on its…

> If I can paraphrase your first point, people eat meat because they enjoy it, and that's that. I understand your sentiment but there's a reason people enjoy eating meat, it feels pleasureable in our mouth because it is rich in nutrients and rare in nature. In nature you don't eat meat every day like we do in our current society. Just like donuts and candy tastes nice is because there's a lot of sugar and fat in them…

Is what your arguing actually backed by science though?

Re: Time to End Factory Farming?

#106
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure I don't want to be treated like that, but animal well being? I don't care. This just mean I care more than my own well being compare to animal well being and I don't have problem with that.

The same logic was applied to slavery, and is still applied with racism. You believe that you are better than something or someone else. Who cares what happens to them, they are not a real living thing like me...

Yes, but I believe there always someone who care what happen to them, its just might not be me.

Re: Time to End Factory Farming?

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consuming meat and factory farming are not directly related things. Meat can just as well be produced by better farming methods or processes like hunting. Doesn't mean that's how people end up getting their meet, but mostly people don't generate the chain of logistics they end up using, and it's not directly related to the product itself. This chain of thought also doesn't go anywhere, unless you want to end up a her…

While it's true that it's pretty much impossible to be completely ethical as a consumer, surely the meat industry (more specifically, factory farming) causes orders of magnitude more suffering than pretty much anything else. Arguing that consumers aren't responsible for the method of production seems bizarre to me. Would you knowingly take cartel money as payment without any moral qualms?

> Arguing that consumers aren't responsible for the method of production seems bizarre to me.

It seems more bizarre to hold specifically consumers responsible to me. They're generally many levels removed from the source, and, in addition to that, a lot of consumers have very low power. Nor have I heard of many successful boycotts. I didn't get the impression that consumers are terribly influential on the logistics chains they use, they're just a convenient scapegoat so we don't have to actually blame the actual creators of those chains.

There are plenty of ranges of products I've never used. They still exist. Not using certain products would have a negative influence on me, which is OK, if I felt like this also had a negative influence on the logistic chain. But it didn't, and won't. The scale is just all wrong. Politicians and businessmen are who actually have influence, or sometimes sociological effects, and one can't trivially choose to be a part of a sociological effect, and most of them are not ethics driven.

The thing that will make a difference is things like regulations.

> Would you knowingly take cartel money as payment without any moral qualms?

I'm not familiar with situations where one would take cartel money in the first place, and I'm not comfortable saying that something I bought at some point didn't, somehow, involve cartel money.

But I imagine there are groups of people who buy something of the sort, drugs, maybe, and the logistical chain is, again, not caused by them, and they should worry about other things. Like not being addicted to drugs.

Re: Time to End Factory Farming?

#108
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But do you agree that it (a utopia of happiness) might be something worth striving for?

Sure, as worthy as striving to make water not be wet anymore.

Would you please stop posting trollish and baity comments?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Time to End Factory Farming?

#109
This article is wishful thinking, with no real evidence of what the author is saying is viable or desired by many people. I'm not sure why it is here, since it is pure ideology with no real scientific backing.

Re: Time to End Factory Farming?

#110
post #31

The author has two articles, one is this one and the other makes a case for veganism. I understand that killing animals for their meat strikes some people as morally wrong but you're not going to change my mind by making me feel bad about how a cow, pig or chicken is raised and killed. This is not a moral problem for most people. We don't really care enough. We eat them because they taste good, are easily available a…

You might be surprised at how these things work, given enough time. My friends and I also used to joke about the "poor cows" (like you mention in a child comment). Then, slowly, cracks started appearing in our defenses. We realized that we do actually care about the lives of animals, strangers, and all manner of things in a way that maybe wasn't natural for our species even a few generations ago. Slowly, many of us have abandoned the meat industry. Even guys you may not expect it from.

Obviously I don't know you, and have no idea if any of that might apply to you. But I get the sense that unless a person is a sociopath, it's almost unavoidable to slowly wake up to the fact that other beings are sentient, and deserve our compassion. This happened with skin color and gender, and it seems to now extend to other species.

Cheers.

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