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World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

reuters.com

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Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#301

Post by cheese_goddess »

ornornor wrote: post #256
hackernewds wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you're generalizing quite a bit here, perhaps driven by emotion. it's possible given the movement for compassion for animals to purchase local, free-range, cruelty-free sourced eggs at any decent grocer.

You can’t make eggs without killing male chicks, shortening hens lives, and killing them off. Free range, organic, local, or factory. The specifics of it may vary depending on the mode of production but not the reality: it enables animal exploitation and suffering.

> You can’t make eggs without killing male chicks, shortening hens lives, and killing them off.

Yes, you absolutely can. Hens lay eggs whether there's a rooster around or not.

I live in a farm (not mine, I'm a guest) and we get a few eggs each day from the hens in the coop outside my window. We don't kill the male chicks off. I don't think anyone on the farm can even tell which chicks are male befor they grow up. We occasionally slaughter a rooster when there's too many of them and they start to fight each other. We also slaughter a hen once in a while. Last year, we slaughtered four animals, altogether, one rooster and three hens.

In factory farms, male chicks are killed off, but there's no reason for that other than the industrialisation of production and consumer demand for plump birds with big breasts (at least in the US as far as I can tell). The birds in our farm are lean, their meat is dark, chewy and wiry because of all the muscle fibers and it has to be coooked for several hours before it is edible. Their bones are also hard and impossible to snap with your fingers, like you can the bones of factory chicken. The taste also doesn't compare. Real free-range chicken (not "free range" as in growing up in a factory with a 2 x 2 concrete yard outside) actually has taste and it tastes of game bird, not what supermarket chicken tastes like. Chickens and factory chickens could as well be a different species. Tasting the flesh of the farm chickens has put me off eating the supermarket birds, just because it makes me think that it can't be healthy eating something that was raised to be degenerate and fat like that.

So you're talking about factory farming but there are other kinds of farming that have very different effect on the animals farmed. Maybe you should try to learn more about that?

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#302

Post by CallMeJim »

Azek wrote: post #142
vmception wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So for you, is that something that extends to all farmed animals then? Its not possible for me to tell if thats been your stance on everything like farming chickens and salmon, or if you were one of the people that just found out Octopus' are smart and made a line there, or another group or individual with a unique opinion there are some observations and personal dietary choices I can be sympathetic towards, I just d…

If you're asking a personal question like I think you are: for me the courtesy of non-violence extends to all beings capable of suffering and with a preference to live. For a good read on the ethics of eating animals I'd recommend Peter Singer's 'Animal Liberation'

You're aware that plants fill both those criteria: (a) capable of suffering, and (b) a preference to live?

What do you eat?

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#303

Post by kuhewa »

atdrummond wrote: post #298
kuhewa wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I don't totally get equating greater intelligence with greater capacity to suffer.

Personally, if I have to eat an animal, I'd much rather focus first and foremost on eating the creature that has been killed in as painless, immediate and stressless a way as possible. If choosing between meat options that all have been relatively humanely slaughtered, then I might start to look at other factors such as intelligence or environmental impact of a particular species being raised for food.

That seems like a reasonable heuristic and I understand why someone might feel drawn to put a greater inherent value on intelligent species on an emotional level, but I just don't see the relevance of intelligence in and of itself in terms of ethics.

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#304

Post by nefitty »

tshaddox wrote: post #223
nefitty wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm definitely open to discussing the possibility when it's with someone arguing in good faith. It seems like that's where you're coming from, so thank you. I won't bury the lede further. Plants can't experience pain, at least insofar as we conceive of it, because they don't have nociceptors that signal pain. Therefore, if they do have any sort of phenomenological experience, whether it would be recognizable to us or…

If you could anesthetize animals so that they could never feel pain would that solve any moral problems with farming and eating animals?

Not necessarily. A large part of what makes killing unethical is that it's a subversion of the creatures' preferences. In my mind I imagine that sentient beings have a little sandcastle-shaped plan for the future. Killing them is like stopping on their sandcastle. It's not the only way, but it's the worst because that sandcastle can never be rebuilt.

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#305

Post by kuhewa »

nefitty wrote: post #120
hashimotonomora wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cows (actually their genes) have been evolutionarily successful by paradoxically allowing themselves to be slaughtered and eaten by humans.

"Allow" implies some sort of consent. I understand that you mean in an evolutionary sense, but it's clear that most living beings are averse to dying, even when possessing the most biologically primitive nervous systems. I prefer to head off any arguments in bad faith, "well, why don't all the cows just run away?" Some people are very comfortable resorting to satirical absurdity when discussing suffering, as evidence…

I understand what you are saying about implied agency, but it really must have worked like this on some level. Cow (physiology and behaviour) had to allow domestication. People tried to domesticate cheetahs, they didn't breed in captivity.

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#306

Post by kuhewa »

lisper wrote: post #100
silisili wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not joining in on the ethics of meat eating debate at all, but as someone who's lived around chickens a good chunk of life, calling them extremely intelligent would be...a stretch. Pigs though, definitely. Highly underrated animal.

That's surprising. I have no first hand experience, but I have been told by people who keep them as pets that chickens and cows are pretty much in the same league. Both can have distinct personalities.

Really dumb animals can have distinct personalities, which is why I think what gets inferred from some of the quirky behaviours octopus display in terms of intelligence gets a bit overrated.

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#307

Post by kuhewa »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #123
bane wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Octopus is a pretty great cooked food, not as a sashimi. In Korean cuisine, at least, you find it stir fried, with noodles, in rice bowls, in soups...all sorts of things. There's several different kinds commonly eaten, from very small bite-sized to ones where a tentacle has to be cut into several bite sized pieces. It's often kept live until cooked, a practice that ensures both freshness and offended Western sensibil…

> But Americans are largely people who consider seafood to start and stop at canned tuna so... That isn’t very accurate. Coastal Americans have had plenty of seafood to choose from, consider when they would serve lobsters to prisoners. Alaska is full of seafood to the point that it is a staple (and considering many of the Inuit communities who have been on that diet for thousands of years). Just because the customs a…

> Just because the customs are different from other coastal communities in other countries doesn’t make America’s any less sophisticated.

On average it is less sophisticated though. Most coastal Americans (US) only consume a subset of the breadth of diversity of seafood available to them relative to many other regions of the world.

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#308

Post by marliechiller »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #219
Azek wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A non-obvious issue here is that often these animals are sent to slaughter around 12-24 months when they can live happily up to 25 years.

Do they actually live 25 years in the wild on average? My understanding was that wild animals have dramatically shorter lives than the same animals in captivity, as a general rule. The exact difference varies from species to species but typically the lifespan would be around half.

source of that general rule?

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#309

Post by kuhewa »

nefitty wrote: post #5

> Last year, researchers at the London School of Economics concluded from a review of 300 scientific studies that octopus were sentient beings capable of experiencing distress and happiness, and that high-welfare farming would be impossible. I don't understand how someone can decide to ignore that in an effort to make money. I fear that if we don't more quickly move the Overton window on the suffering of sentient cre…

I'm calling BS on the happy octopus study.

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#310

Post by marliechiller »

cheese_goddess wrote: post #291
ornornor wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes there is. Egg farms grind male chicks alive. They burn off the tip of the hens beak without anesthesia (which we know is high in nerves) so they don’t fight each other in captivity; which they don’t do nearly as much in nature because surprise surprise they’re not as stressed. Hens laying eggs every single day of their lives (because they’re taken away daily) live much much shorter lives and develop physiological…

> Not to mention cheese which need casein to be made and that can’t be obtained without killing cows as it’s the acid in their stomach, basically. Casein is not the acid in animals' stomachs. Caseins are one group of proteins in milk, and the main component of cheese. You're probably thinking of rennet, the enzymes in animals' stomachs that help them digest their milk. Rennet is used to coagulate milk to make cheese,…

im sorry, but you cant dismiss the rest of his valid points purely because he got 1 out of many incorrect. I detect a hint of bias might be present on your side from your username also...
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