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French monks locked down with 2.8 tonnes of cheese pray for buyers

theguardian.com

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Re: French monks locked down with 2.8 tonnes of cheese pray for buyers

#111

Post by bluefirebrand »

seanwilson wrote: post #108
bluefirebrand wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just showing that the argument can easily be used to draw the opposite and "wrong" conclusion from the one that was intended to be reached.

You should reach a conclusion based on your beliefs. I don't see what point you prove by starting from beliefs you don't hold if that's what you mean. Do you genuinely not care if people are killing dolphins and whales and eating dogs though? I've no doubt some people exist that don't but I'm sure they're in the vast minority.

> Do you genuinely not care if people are killing dolphins and whales and eating dogs though

No, but I do genuinely not care that people are killing and eating cows and cow products though. I don't really think anything could make me care about that at this point, certainly not enough to give up meat and cheese.

So if we are making these things equivalent (which I don't believe they are), then I suppose I shouldn't care about the dolphins, whales and dogs. In order to be consistent.

Re: French monks locked down with 2.8 tonnes of cheese pray for buyers

#112

Post by seanwilson »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #111
seanwilson wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should reach a conclusion based on your beliefs. I don't see what point you prove by starting from beliefs you don't hold if that's what you mean. Do you genuinely not care if people are killing dolphins and whales and eating dogs though? I've no doubt some people exist that don't but I'm sure they're in the vast minority.

> Do you genuinely not care if people are killing dolphins and whales and eating dogs though No, but I do genuinely not care that people are killing and eating cows and cow products though. I don't really think anything could make me care about that at this point, certainly not enough to give up meat and cheese. So if we are making these things equivalent (which I don't believe they are), then I suppose I shouldn't c…

> So if we are making these things equivalent (which I don't believe they are), then I suppose I shouldn't care about the dolphins, whales and dogs. In order to be consistent.

I'm not making anything equivalent, I'm asking you about your beliefs and if they're well founded.

Why is it okay to slaughter and eat a cow and not a dog or a whale or a cat? Your beliefs can still be consistent if you've justified the difference to yourself. I don't think "because it's traditional" or "because we've been doing it for hundreds of years" are good ethical reasons (which other countries could make about dogs and whales) for example.

Re: French monks locked down with 2.8 tonnes of cheese pray for buyers

#113

Post by athms »

ahelwer wrote: post #16
HDMI_Cable wrote: post #2

> “We tried explaining to our 75 cows that they needed to produce less milk but they don’t seem to have understood,” I don't know why, but this is the funniest thing I've read in a while. I can just imagine the monk explaining COVID to these cows, and just getting a "Moo" in return.

Kind of strange, because cows don't just produce milk by nature. Much like humans they have to be impregnated & give birth, after which they produce milk for about ten months. Inquisitive people might wonder how the cow is impregnated in the first place and what happens to the calf.

Human don't need to get pregnant to produce milk. Lactation can happen with medication or stimulation, which becomes easier as women age. If a woman is not inducing lactation with hormones, she must stimulate the breasts several times a day using hand compression or a breast pump. This is how adoptive and foster mothers breastfeed their babies. Lactation can also occur in men because they have milk glands, which is the reason they too can get breast cancer.

Re: French monks locked down with 2.8 tonnes of cheese pray for buyers

#114

Post by jiofih »

seanwilson wrote: post #55
jiofih wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We kill the male calves May have been true a few decades ago, but currently the farmers will buy “sexed” sperm (selected for females). I’ve never seen a male calf being killed for that reason.

Either way, a typical female dairy cow during its lifetime is made to give birth about 4 times (they don't give milk otherwise), each time its baby is taken away so maximum milk can be harvested and then the mother is killed about 5 years into its 20 year lifespan when it stops producing as much milk. This is the reality of profitable dairy farming and people don't like to be told about it or think about it. If you t…

Also not what I’ve seen - calves are kept with the mother for obvious reasons until they are about 6 months old. They might be fed separately though.

I’m comfortable with nature. Life is cyclic and you can’t survive without other living beings.

Re: French monks locked down with 2.8 tonnes of cheese pray for buyers

#115

Post by woobar »

sedachv wrote: post #83
novok wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of them are not farmed in a sustainable cycle that prevents those animals from become endangered species? Or they think of the animals as pet animals. As for fur, I'm guessing it's because a moral panic happened in the 80s and nobody really cared that much about fur, since it was a luxury item for a few, while meat, milk and leather somewhat is something that everyone pretty much still uses today worldwide.

> milk… is something that everyone pretty much still uses today worldwide I don't understand where people come up with this nonsense. Do you just generalize your experience to everyone else? 68% of the world population is lactose intolerant: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28690131/

This article states that 68% is the global prevalence estimate of lactose malabsorption.

"Lactose malabsorption (lactase non-persistence) is not equivalent or synonymous to lactose intolerance. Lactose malabsorption in many cases will not come to clinical attention."[1]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4040760/

Re: French monks locked down with 2.8 tonnes of cheese pray for buyers

#116

Post by ben_w »

africanboy wrote: post #110
ben_w wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As I've said if they can't explain to us what they are doing and why, it is completely useless to try to frame or define it. You’ve not said why it’s useless though. Or what “free will” is. I can make a chat bot which will insist that it has free will, but I doubt it would be saying anything correct about its mind; and I have every expectation that someone whose language I do not speak would pass and fail exactly t…

> Or what “free will” is. I did poor terms to describe what we already don't have a solid explanation for > whose language I do not speak would pass and fail exactly the same tests as me if there was a test that didn’t depend on language. it doesn't matter, cows lack the tools to explain themselves, we don't namely, in this case, a language (any language!) > Quick internet search of teaching cows tricks says they can…

> namely, in this case, a language (any language!)

I assert verbal self-narrative is not necessary for free will. You assert otherwise? Why?

> can you prove it? :)

In principle, sure: Watch them demonstrate a learned skill. I have no reason to believe the videos are faked, but if they are, in principle I could observe IRL.

> And how do you know it won't end up like the Libet experiment?

The experiment which showed a human brain reaches a decision before conscious awareness of that decision? It’s evidence that humans don’t have free will, FSVO “free will”, so I’m expecting the same result, including the meta-result of people arguing about the result.

> They don't have history books though, and schools and teachers

> DNA does not help much if the knowledge dies with its creator

True for most of humanity, except for “teachers”, but cows can mentor each other too. So… we agree humans and non human animals pass and fail the same tests?

> because to forecast the consequences of every action you need to be able to judge the consequences

You can do that with any positive-negative reinforcement mechanism, doesn’t need morality etc.

Re: French monks locked down with 2.8 tonnes of cheese pray for buyers

#117

Post by ficklepickle »

sedachv wrote: post #100
watwut wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lactose intolerant people I knew all do drink de-lactozed milk or non-cow milk. They also eat it with cereals. Practically, somewhat lactose intolerant people eat food with milk inside (whether in sauce or cheese) and avoid only quantities that cause them troubles. There is really no reason to get offended over that reality. I don't really know why those people consume milk and I was never rude enough to ask. It…

> I don't really know why those people consume milk and I was never rude enough to ask. Can you take any guesses as to why? Do you think it might have anything to do with the colonialist attitude of "of course, everybody drinks milk!" displayed in the parent comment? Are your acquaintances in the US? Do you think it has anything to do with the $500 million spent over 20 years on "Got Milk?" propaganda?

Here* is a link to a quantitative assessment of milk consumption around the world.

There is even a handy map.

Interestingly, they note that milk consumption is higher amongst older people. Possibly due to the crazy amount of milk propaganda historically.

I know this isn't directly related to your comment, but it was getting heated so I wanted to derail that.

* https://milkgenomics.org/article/milk-consumption-around-the...

Re: French monks locked down with 2.8 tonnes of cheese pray for buyers

#118

Post by causasui »

tsimionescu wrote: post #68
uppe wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe don't impregnate them then. Cows don't magically produce milk, they are mammals and lactate because they had babies. They actually forcibly impregnate them and kill their babies if it's a male (veal) and keeps the loop going until the mother can't produce more babies and thus becomes unprofitable. That's funny to you? Sounds like torture and slavery to me. edit: wow, what a surprise, downvoted to the bottom. I…

With the exception of industrial farming, everything that humans normally do to animals is much nicer than the way wild animals live and end their lives. So as long as you make sure to get your milk and meat from traditional farming, you're supporting practices that are much kinder to the animals then nature would be. Animals in nature inevitably die violent or painful deaths, often being eaten alive by other animals…

This argument makes zero sense. If we didn't breed cows, they wouldn't exist. There are no wild cows.

Re: French monks locked down with 2.8 tonnes of cheese pray for buyers

#119

Post by tsimionescu »

simias wrote: post #99
tsimionescu wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the exception of industrial farming, everything that humans normally do to animals is much nicer than the way wild animals live and end their lives. So as long as you make sure to get your milk and meat from traditional farming, you're supporting practices that are much kinder to the animals then nature would be. Animals in nature inevitably die violent or painful deaths, often being eaten alive by other animals…

I don't think it's a good ethical argument. We decide to birth these animals for our own well being, ergo we are responsible for their suffering. If we only rescued lost cows from the wilderness, giving them shelter and a good life until we decided to quickly end their life to get their meat you might have a point (and even then, I still think it would be a bit shaky IMO) but that's not how it's done. If a cat is bor…

> It's not though, you can't just ignore the woes of industrial farming when that's the vast majority of the meat products that surround us. These animals are for the most part born into horrible living conditions.

Reducing animal product consumption is important. But there is no reason to reduce it to 0, that is my main point. And note that you don't have to be extremely loving and caring with farm animals to be better than how nature treats them - it's not a high bar.

And purely from an argument point of view, the arguments against the extreme cruelty of industrial farming are far different from the arguments you presented, which would apply just as much to traditional farming as well (which, to be fair, is not always without its own horrors, especially where delicacies like foie Gras are concerned).

> If a cat is born in the wild and ends up dying of a curable disease then it sucks for it but that's life. If you have a cat as a pet and when it gets sick you decide to abandon it to fend for itself and die in the wild then you're a bad person. Same outcome, very different ethical implications.

To some extent that is true, but just as we don't judge the bear for killing salmon, I don't think it's right to judge a human for killing a cow to eat its flesh. The fact that we are farming it and not hunting it doesn't affect the morality of the situation in any way from my point of view. The cat example is immoral from a purely human and internal point of view: the human in question had entered into a caring relationship with a pet, so abandoning it in its hour of need is immoral.

Re: French monks locked down with 2.8 tonnes of cheese pray for buyers

#120

Post by tsimionescu »

causasui wrote: post #118
tsimionescu wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the exception of industrial farming, everything that humans normally do to animals is much nicer than the way wild animals live and end their lives. So as long as you make sure to get your milk and meat from traditional farming, you're supporting practices that are much kinder to the animals then nature would be. Animals in nature inevitably die violent or painful deaths, often being eaten alive by other animals…

This argument makes zero sense. If we didn't breed cows, they wouldn't exist. There are no wild cows.

Either you believe the only moral thing would be to treat cows like cats or dogs, you believe that eradicating the species would be preferable to the current situation, or you must accept that we should compare the condition of cows with similar wild animals in order to decide whether our practices are uniquely cruel. Cows are not so unique among mammals that comparisons with other wild animals to get a feel for what their life could be like if we somehow let the free make no sense.

And if we compare industrial practices, then I would agree with the GP, the life of a cow in a factory farm is unusually cruel if we compare it to the potential life of a hypothetical 'wild cow'. But if we look at the life of a cow in a traditional farm, I think the opposite becomes true.

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