The sooner we get to true lab grown meat the better Meat is nice but would be better if we can skip the whole suffering thing
In the mean time you could stop eating it
New farm bill would condemn pigs to a lifetime in gestation crates
191–200 of 236 posts
Re: New farm bill would condemn pigs to a lifetime in gestation crates
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
As unethical as purposefully murdering animals? I don’t think you can call it a compassion when you own an animal with sole purpose of efficiently growing it and then killing it so its body can be dismembered and sold off. This is treating animals as property, that produces profit.
not any more unethical than any other animal that "murders" to eat
Do other animals have moral agency?
Re: New farm bill would condemn pigs to a lifetime in gestation crates
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a false dichotomy. The choice is not lab grown or suffering. Farmed animals could live happy, healthy lives and then be culled in a humane way. The problem is that it costs slightly more and our society is more concerned with cost than animal suffering.
> Farmed animals could live happy, healthy lives and then be culled in a humane way. Breeding animals _specifically for killing them_, no matter how they are killed, is not what I'd consider humane. If we take 'humane' literally, it means to be treated as you would treat a human. I doubt we'd do this to humans. So the only way to be okay with this is adhering to a form of specieism.
> specieism
Wait, do we not agree that people are inherently more valuable than pigs?
Re: New farm bill would condemn pigs to a lifetime in gestation crates
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Farmed animals could live happy, healthy lives and then be culled in a humane way. Breeding animals _specifically for killing them_, no matter how they are killed, is not what I'd consider humane. If we take 'humane' literally, it means to be treated as you would treat a human. I doubt we'd do this to humans. So the only way to be okay with this is adhering to a form of specieism.
> specieism Wait, do we not agree that people are inherently more valuable than pigs?
Should we?
Leaving aside pigs being intelligent creatures almost akin to humans for medical purposes, pigs fetch a lot more per kilo than humans do.
I'm not sure there's even much of an open market for human meat.
Unless you mean some nebulous human centic notion of "valuable" that takes no account of the pigs PoV.
Re: New farm bill would condemn pigs to a lifetime in gestation crates
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many, many people disagree with you. It is not at all a logical, ethical, or emotional contradiction to say that we should have humanely-raised livestock whose purpose is to be slaughtered for meat. We can ensure that they are kept in healthy, safe, and humane ways during their lifetimes, and are killed as quickly, cleanly, and painlessly as we can reasonably manage. And, um, the meaning of "humane" is only loosely r…
As unethical as purposefully murdering animals? I don’t think you can call it a compassion when you own an animal with sole purpose of efficiently growing it and then killing it so its body can be dismembered and sold off. This is treating animals as property, that produces profit.
Which is more unethical:
Raising animals compassionately, slaughtering them for meat as painlessly as possible after a healthy, happy life
OR
Letting people who require meat in their diet to live (there are a number of reasons this may be the case) die slow, painful deaths as their bodies fail around them?
It's real easy to say that "no one should ever kill an animal to live" when you ignore the disabilities and chronic conditions that make surviving on plants alone impossible, or prohibitively expensive.
Re: New farm bill would condemn pigs to a lifetime in gestation crates
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I doubt we'd do this to humans. So the only way to be okay with this is adhering to a form of specieism. The obvious historical pointer to the Holocaust as a well covered example of people being treated like that - and a fact often swept under the rug: people are being treated essentially like that in North Korea, today. An older interview but still good to watch https://youtu.be/ZGJm4bjRaaE?is=E2hFWYi-ynPnWGfm
Ok, I should maybe have said “I doubt we’d think it’s Okay to do this to humans”.
Yeah, but it seems we do think it's okay, after all North Korea has been doing that for decades and people don't care whatsoever. NK contractors continue to be employed all over the world.
Instead people are outraged about the dictators in the middle east etc.
Whatever you wanna say about the Gaza atrocities - it applies 100x to North Korea. And yet, nobody cares.
I think that's the real thing you can take away from these issues: nobody cares unless there is a politically motivated party that wants to achieve their goals and thus shapes the public narrative enough to get it's will through
Re: New farm bill would condemn pigs to a lifetime in gestation crates
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Farmed animals could live happy, healthy lives and then be culled in a humane way. Breeding animals _specifically for killing them_, no matter how they are killed, is not what I'd consider humane. If we take 'humane' literally, it means to be treated as you would treat a human. I doubt we'd do this to humans. So the only way to be okay with this is adhering to a form of specieism.
> specieism Wait, do we not agree that people are inherently more valuable than pigs?
If so, by how much? 1.5 billion pigs are slaughtered each year, is that too few to matter?
It's so normalized to think of animals as worthless that I don't blame anyone for not having thought about it, but the moral calculus is really easy. Most people wouldn't be comfortable with killing a dog, and yet, every three days, we have two more Holocaust-worths of a smarter animal (namely, pigs).
Re: New farm bill would condemn pigs to a lifetime in gestation crates
#198Re: New farm bill would condemn pigs to a lifetime in gestation crates
#199I just raised, slaughtered, and butchered five pigs myself.
My pigs took longer to raise because it is winter here and I gave them lots of room to run. The pigs had a good life right up until their kill time.
The reason pork is so cheap is that overseas meat providers can break all of these humane rules we have in the USA. We badly need high tariffs so businesses don't just go around all of our environmental and labor protection laws by importing products from overseas.
Re: New farm bill would condemn pigs to a lifetime in gestation crates
#200Sounds like veal, which I won’t eat.