211–220 of 261 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I had to kill animals to eat meat, I would have zero problem doing so. You’re free to make your own choices, but you’re not going to change anyone’s stance on eating meat with your arguments. Get off your high horse.
the key word is "had". I would eat any animal any day if I "had" to and had no other food source.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't find the comment to be without substance. It's a concise and concrete critique.
It's dismissive without substance. The point is discussing if the whale feels grief. A blanket dismissal of all animals feeling anything "just because" is not a critique. If there is some reason science should dismiss everything like this as valueless and not worth even considering then I don't know it yet and a comment talking about that would be constructive.
The idea that animals feel human emotions (much less "grief") is based only on the fact that orcas look pretty to the human eye.
Would you be willing to entertain "grieving" ants? (Ants are the only animals beside humans to have successfully built a civilization. Can't say they are unintelligent.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
yeah, the funny thing about the anthropomorphism debate is that supposedly the thing that makes humans different from (other) animals is our "advanced" brain, i.e. language, civilization, etc. in other words, all the ways we have to manage emotions, and all of our "non-emotional" functioning. So we have somehow evolved to be able to better manage emotions. Ok, so if we grant all of that, then haven't we just said tha…
Not really common to 'animals' in general, for example reptiles only have the very basic instincts of eat, reproduce, fight. Insects don't have emotions, they barely have hyper specialized sensors as brains. However, emotions efficiently direct behaviours in mammals. They enact immediate and persistent responses. We can say without much doubt that emotions in mammals are similar to our own emotions. The big unknowns…
Yes, it made me think about animals panicking so much before slaughter that they often have heart attacks. And dairy cows who have their babies slaughtered who cry for weeks. Maybe these are apocryphal stories, but we are very much trained to believe we shouldn’t anthropomorphise animals. I hope that we are able to grow meat in a way without suffering as soon as possible.
https://www.google.com/search?q=rat+not+eating+after+death+o... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277240852... . I've kept rats for a long time, I don't know why, but I do know they change behaviour for a period of time once one dies.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/video/eavesdrop-on-ultras...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Milk is a byproduct of producing meat, and its a fallacy to see it in isolation. Plantmilks are firstorder product. This means that clinate impact of most plantmilks are higher than milks, excepting oat and ryemilk. On a cost note - : making oat milk is literally just blending some oats and let them soak a day or 2, filter the water and done, perhaps do that if cost is an issue? On a sidenote, if you drink soy, almon…
This is what drives me crazy about oat milk. Oats grow everywhere. Almonds, on the other hand, take a gallon of water per almond to make[1]. Despite this, at my store anyway, almond milk is about $2.89/half gallon while oat milk is at least $4/half gallon. What in our economy makes this feasible? [1] https://bastyr.edu/about/news/ugly-truth-about-almonds
What do you mean "feasible"? It's profitable to sell something for more than it costs to make. If the only companies that offer Oat milk for sale price it at $4 a gallon, that's the price you have to pay to get it.
Meanwhile there are laws around the pricing of Milk, and in my neck of the woods that includes a MINIMUM price.
People wave their hands like "the market" is magic. As long as some consumers are willing to pay $4 a gallon for oat milk, companies will not reduce the price, and plenty of people are willing to pay MORE for oat milk than for cow milk.
If you wonder why nobody starts a company that undercuts the $4 oat milk, the simple answer is that the second you are done spending $1 million on a factory to make cheap oat milk, the producers already in the market drop their price and your business fails. This is why Google Fiber for example struggled. There is no technical reason prices are high. There's just no competition because the current producers are so massive and have such giant war chests that they can just kill your brand new competitive business, and soon your business will be dead and they can slowly ratchet up prices again.
There's also the fact that homemade oat milk is trivial to produce, results in a great product, and is cheaper than even that mythical competitive industry would produce.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How so? What do you think breeders who sell hens do with male chicks?
Some places sex the eggs. Germany, France, Switzerland and many other places completely do without so it is hardly mandatory. Other places use male chickens for meat, despite them being sub-optimal. I think the grinding of male chicks is an interesting case because it's actually pretty low on the suffering and distress spectrum, but high on the visceral reaction scale
And nothing requires they be ground alive versus e.g. introduced into a nitrogen atmosphere and then minced. (Or simply neutered, raised and sold as capon.)
> Tahlequah is using much of her energy to cling to the dead calf, which weighs about 300 pounds, and she is unable to forage for food, scientists said during a news briefing on Thursday. They said that her closely knit pod was supporting her. Other female orcas, especially her sister, have been observed to be consistently at her side. Utterly tragic. It's also singularly evil the devastation humans have brought to s…
I always have mixed feelings about this. It's sad. But how is her pod supporting her exactly? Are they bringing her food? If so is that food the dead offspring of other animals? I feel these kinds of stories often have a kind of selective empathy for the focused animal. Ultimately nature is extraordinarily cruel absent humans; imo humans are the only hope for something better, if such a thing even makes sense.
I think it's because I've felt discriminated against myself and thinking about ways in which I myself discriminate against certain animals such as cows, pigs and chickens helps me to put it into perspective.
That said, my moral framework is consistent because it's based on intelligence. I will not eat dolphin or killer whale.
Among humans, I often find myself tolerating intelligent jerks, for the same reason.
I started penalizing for evil more strongly in recent years though. Before that, I subconsciously assumed that there was an inverse correlation between intelligence and evil, but it has come to my awareness that it's not the case. Reality is that, as intelligence goes up, evil, if present, gets better at hiding.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Ah, so you want to be a lion? But I bet you don't want to be treated like an animal. So which is it? Are you an animal or are you human?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humans aren't always rational and that's okay, we're all human after all :)
It’s considered not okay if we replace vegetarian with skin tone.
If you can't see the difference between those two scenarios, that's a huge problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who has worked on farms i can verify that such things happen. I personally witnessed sheep behaving exactly as decided in The Silence of the Lambs. Our sheep were famously noisy and certainly were used to being moved around in lorries but when the abattoir lorry turned up you could almost smell their fear. I also witnessed a cow storm through four fences in order to be reunited with her calf. The irony: Th…
It’s ironic how accepted vegetarians, who have a dietary preference, are in society, and how hated vegans, who have an ethical argument against unnecessary killing of sentient animals, are in society. I only turned vegan a couple of years ago as something clicked and I was able to make the connection between the food I was eating and the animals who were being killed, almost certainly unnecessarily, for that food. Bu…
But vegans of European descent are, from my anecdotal experience, the most likely to moralize towards me on the atrocities I am committing by eating meat.
(I have worked with a many many people who are vegans due to their religion. I have never had ANY of them try to lecture me on this subject.)