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World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

reuters.com

241–250 of 420 posts

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#241
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I urge everyone to resist the all-or-nothing approach There is no other moral stance where someone could reasonably say this. Veganism is a moral stance the same way as "racism is bad" and "abusing my spouse is bad" is a moral stance. No one would ever say "I'm trying to limit kicking dogs to just Tuesday-Sunday". > vegan straight edge kids on Instagram who sneak a chicken nugget when no one's looking. You're proje…

I understand where you're coming from. I assume you believe one bad thing is preferable to two bad things. It's the trap I was warning against. Degrees instead of absolutes. Personally, I am vegetarian due to ethical concerns, not dietary or nutritional ones. In my decade+ of being vegetarian, I have discerned the pattern that moral proselytizing is generally offensive to people. I think most intelligent non-vegetari…

Are you okay with male chicks being grinded alive to enjoy your eggs, female cows being artificially inseminated by humans and their babies taken away and murdered just so you can enjoy your milk?

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#242
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve heard this called the “one bad day” approach. The animals have a good life with only one bad day. In my opinion it’s probably the most ethical way to keep animals if the intent is to slaughter them at some point.

In a way, it applies to dogs too. I have the privilege of giving my dog a way out of pain: I can put them down. That decision rests with me, and ultimately, one day, I will have to make it. I may choose every day to feed my dog the best diet I can afford, I'll give her massages, I'll snuggle her, care for her when she's sick, but ultimately, one day, I know I will have the choice to spare her the pain of dying a pain…

I have had to put 2 pets down due to illness. It was hard to do, and seeing them struggling not to fall asleep was heartbreaking.

In just about every way possible that death is a world apart from what we do to most animals we eat. What we have deemed "humane" slaughter is really nothing else than an attempt to make the word humane devoid of all meaning. I stopped eating meat after seeing how a cow and some pigs from the local organic farm (held as a poster child by the meat industry in my country) were slaughtered.

They were afraid from the first second. The pigs lost consciousness while grasping for air in panic in a co2 gas chamber.

It was awful and nothing short of a disgrace.

New laws and policies promoted by the meat industry has now made inquisitions like mine impossible. All of this happens behind closed doors. I will never trust the industry to fix this. They will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into treating animals with respect.

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#243
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the same would apply to pretty much all animals no? and dare I say plants too?

Your comment is a series of logical mistakes. 1. Plants don't have a central nervous system. They're not sentient and don't feel pain. 2. The fact that something "applies to all animals" doesn't somehow make an action morally justifiable. You're suggesting inaction because perfection can't be achieved.

In our understanding you need nervous system and brain. That doesn't conclude that plants don't feel pain. Pain is how we know about our injury or whatever. That doesn't mean plants will feel that way too. We excrete through our butthole but plants excrete through different way or process. They may feel pain in the way we don't understand yet. Like we now know they are sensitive to light, food, host etc. They emit electrical signals when their body parts are cut. The answer will always be maybe yes or no. We don't even know properly about ourselves, forgot plants and animals.

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#244

Honestly we need to quit pretending that we, as humans, are something special as compared to other omnivorous or carnivorous mammals. OK we have more gray matter comparatively but really that means nothing. Some cultures eat octopus, some eat dogs, some eat cats, some eat cows, and of course some eat humans. And some eat vegetation. Do you honestly think those cultures sit back and question what they are doing and if…

> but to light a spark.

Indeed it was a spark, but it vanished in an instant.

> Who really fucking cares.

I care, and if you don't, good riddance.

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gonna go out on a limb (hah) and guess that his winning strategy 9/10 times was "squeeze through thing you didn't think he could squeeze through."

That's part of it but he had an ability to break locks and dismantle constructs with ease. I realized after a while he paid immense attention to how we installed every new addition to his habitat and then would seemingly aim to deconstruct our creations using the knowledge he picked up from our installation work. I truly am in awe of these creatures, especially after one of the long time Shedd workers told me that th…

That's fascinating. Would love to hear about what kinds of contraptions you made that were breakable, given I'm struggling to imagine how you couldn't conceive of a way to keep said octopus trapped. How difficult can it be?

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#246
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course, we can't stop eating every animal Why? There are plenty of people who do.

It is not always possible to get all the nutrients you need without animal products, either because they are not available or because the price is too high.

Absolute nonsense. There are over 80 million fit and healthy vegans worldwide.

Processed food weather it is vegan or carnist is always more expensive but fruit, vegetables, lentils, beans, nuts, seeds, grains etc are all actually very very cheap compared to meat and diary in a western diet.

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#247

I've had several people in my life tell me after more intense studies of octopi they refuse to eat them. While I've seen a couple of documentaries on the subject, I won't profess to know as much, but the essential argument has been that they're extremely intelligent, emotional animals. It's akin to eating a dog or cat (which might be acceptable in some parts of the world, but pretty shunned in the west). It's convinc…

FYI "My octopus teacher" is a work of fiction and heavily edited together. Not to say they're not intelligent, but there are better examples

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#248
post #14

I've had several people in my life tell me after more intense studies of octopi they refuse to eat them. While I've seen a couple of documentaries on the subject, I won't profess to know as much, but the essential argument has been that they're extremely intelligent, emotional animals. It's akin to eating a dog or cat (which might be acceptable in some parts of the world, but pretty shunned in the west). It's convinc…

Even cows are extremely intelligent and emotional animals. Did you stop eating them?

No because beef is delicious-er

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#249
post #93
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not always possible to get all the nutrients you need without animal products, either because they are not available or because the price is too high.

There are definitely people in situations where the burden of a vegan or vegetarian diet would cause much more harm to them personally than the harm an omnivore diet would cause. I don't blame people for the uncontrollable, and I don't know that anyone who holds a well-thought out position on animal suffering would either. Suffering is the superset of all suffering. My ethical heuristic is to make choices with an eye…

The burden of a violent diet (nmeat and diary) is much higher that a plant based one to any sane human.

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some stage my son was wilfully damaging plants. As part of the discipline to make him stop I showed him videos of plants sped up. It becomes a bit harder to deny that they aren’t the inanimate objects we perceive them to be because they are slow when you see them react to stimuli and they show what seems to be intent. Although it certainly isn’t a consensus opinion there is a real possibility that (given that the…

This is a lot of very commonly repeated speculative talking point soup when people are trying to rile up vegans. I'm not a vegan, and I'm not saying you're being disingenuous here, but if you use these lines to try and engage vegans at some point and don't get the level of engagement you're looking for, it's because this kind of both-sides moral equivalence between meat eating and plant eating is pretty common in the…

What logic makes plants better to kill than cows, better than octopi, better than cats? because vegans might the argument uncomfortable doesn't render it invalid either
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