231–240 of 447 posts
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Some would, but I'm sure this is something about which reasonable people can disagree.
Slaves used to be sub-human. Women were property. Eventually, if we as a civilization survive long enough, our current treatment of animals will be universally felt to be immoral.
It isn't as if slavery doesn't exist anymore. It is not as if women aren't considered property in some parts of the world. Racism. Etc.
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I made a website to help visualize American meat consumption in terms of animals slaughtered per second. It’s pretty insane and I think does something to help communicate just how large such industrial operations truly are. https://zach.ws/meat/
What a fucking atrocity.
We usually don't consider a person being born a tragedy almost regardless of what life this person had.
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Value is sentiment; you cannot refute a value statement without relying on it.
Value is more than one thing, arguably. You kind of have to go back to first philosophical principles to unpick this. Which I guess is my point - if one's goal is the expansion and longevity of human civilization (which I think is reasonable) then it's not clear at all where the rest of organic life (which we compete with) fits into this picture. If the best reason to preserve it is "it's pretty to look at" and "mayb…
The reason to persevere organic forms around us (plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, etc.) is rational self-interest.
Bacteria are necessary for our bodies' healthy operation. Organics generate the oxygen we need to breathe.
The sad thing is that 100 years ago humans and livestock accounted for around 5% of the biomass (all zoomass, not land mammals only), 95% being the wildlife. Now the numbers are reversed. We've stolen the land from the wildlife and dedicated it to a few species we consider edible (agriland is more than forests now, and 75% of it for animal agriculture). Is anybody surprised that we're living in the anthropocene, defi…
> otherwise we'll lose them So what? What value are these species? What are they for ? I'm sure we'll be able to advance medicine in other ways. I'm much more concerned about the longevity of our civilization than the other organics we happen to have coevolved with. If we have to pave over the whole planet then so be it. Organic life is common and therefore expendable. If we all die off, new life will almost certainl…
The reason to persevere organic forms around us (plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, etc.) is rational self-interest.
Bacteria are necessary for our bodies' healthy operation. Organics generate the oxygen we need to breathe.
Let me guess... the solution is to eat ze bugs.
What's wrong with shrimp and lobster?
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/22/1130725551/what-the-cancellat...
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Ha that’s great! Hopefully we continue to see these numbers as increase as a leading indicator of a wealthy and well fed society.
No, hopefully we can see these numbers stabilize at some long-term sustainable level , whatever that is. They aren't at that level at the moment, with large parts of modern agriculture more similar to a kind of mining - resources are extracted, with insufficient replenishment. The thing with mines is that they are eventually exhausted, and stop producing.
Going off on a tangent, but the scale of production is very hard to grasp. I'm probably not the first person to observe this, but I once did some napkin math about steel production, and what I realized kind of blew me away. About 1.9 billion tonnes in 2020. Like with billions of dollars, I have no intuition for such numbers. Context is needed. Global steel production just before WW I was about 70 million tonnes. So p…
I made a website to help visualize American meat consumption in terms of animals slaughtered per second. It’s pretty insane and I think does something to help communicate just how large such industrial operations truly are. https://zach.ws/meat/
I would add that (my maybe incorrect napkin math) shows that 5 Americans die per minute to give it scale.
My understanding is also that we destroy an absolutely phenomenal amount of chicks in an entirely gruesome way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling
I have trouble handling that.
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What a fucking atrocity.
You might consider the other side that equal amount of animals get to be born every minute and live some lives. We usually don't consider a person being born a tragedy almost regardless of what life this person had.
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No, hopefully we can see these numbers stabilize at some long-term sustainable level , whatever that is. They aren't at that level at the moment, with large parts of modern agriculture more similar to a kind of mining - resources are extracted, with insufficient replenishment. The thing with mines is that they are eventually exhausted, and stop producing.
We can also invent and engineer new tech that makes more production sustainable.
We're not at that point right now, and we're not really prioritizing it.
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I do not equate animal lives to human lives. I am fine with the death of billions of animals to keep humans fed. This is their job. This is the way of nature. We’ve just streamlined it a bit
I also do not value animal lives as much as human lives. But there is an important assumption built into the argument that it is ok to eat this many animals: that it is possible to raise and slaughter this number of animals without deleterious effects on humans. I believe that assumption is incorrect, and that the environmental and health consequences of the current level of meat consumption will cause immense suffer…