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World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

reuters.com

361–370 of 420 posts

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like some freshman "free thinker" stuff. Your thoughts aren't anything original. Everything you think is a result of the input you've accepted. One day you'll grow up and cringe about this goofy hill you've chosen to die on. Or you'll continue aging and mock people for being "stupid enough" to read books and not getting in touch with their chakras. Besides, why should I let my opinion be swayed by an inte…

> Besides, why should I let my opinion be swayed by an internet comment? Yikes, well I tried to avoid this type of emotionally charged ad hominem remarks, it seems you took great offence, as if my opinions caused you to perceive it as an attack on you personally and you were swayed by it Well that is quite some hill to die on, have at it!

"Hill to die on" would imply some effective attacks targeting said hill...

So far all you've done is dig.

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#362
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was always possible for me to perceive sentience, feelings and emotions from a variety of beings My mom has always had this ability. We had some horses in a pasture behind our house, and one day we noticed most of the horses had been removed and only one remained. My mom could instantly tell that the one remaining horse, named Pete, was sad to be alone. "Pete is so sad, she's all alone" my mom observed while we…

I think this is the point you're making, but this isn't "perceiving sentience" (whatever that means), it's literally just projects your thoughts and emotions onto an anthropomorphized version of whatever animal you're looking at. Which is the same thing the GP was/is doing, but they haven't "matured" enough cognitively to realize it yet.

let's elaborate on your standard here:

I'm GP and I never mapped human emotions to other species. Amongst many species I see this with, I looked at cephalopods and can see sentience. This was unrelated to me consuming them, they taste yummy and there are plenty of them.

So with your standard, I was wrong and my inferior brain was anthropomorphizing, until a greater consensus was suddenly reached from researchers and governments that makes me right? I mean its not something I was advocating for, its just surprising to me how many weren't perceiving this at all. Like when you find out that some people don't have visual dreams, or find out that you're the person that doesn't have visual dreams and everyone else wasn't speaking in hyperbole and actually have a different experience.

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like kind of an oxymoron to have a living being killed and subsequently eaten, then claim compassion and respect.

So you hate your food?

No, not at all. I don't claim to love and have compassion without backing it up.

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

My mother tongue isn’t English and I indeed mixed up rennet and casein because they sound completely different in my language. Natural rennet cheese may be “artisanal” in your corner of the world, it’s 99% of cheese where I live —just in case, 99% might not be totally accurate, it’s an exaggeration to mean “the vast majority”

My mother tongue isn't English either and I live in a corner of the world that has many traditional cheesemakers and a proud cheesemaking culture that goes back centuries if not millenia. Most cheese where I live as in the rest of the world is made with microbial rennet simply because it's cheaper, more available and easier to store and handle.

I'm sorry but I don't believe that 99% (or "the vast majority") of cheese where you live is made with animal rennet. If that's true, please let me know how you know this.

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Where did I dismiss any of "his valid points"? I asked if they thought they might want to re-examine where their information comes from. How is that a dismissal of any point, valid or not?

> I detect a hint of bias might be present on your side from your username also...

What bias do you mean? I make cheese so I know a couple of things about how it's done.

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

My point of view is that exploiting animals for food is wrong. No brand of “ethical” farming can change that fact for me. Raising animals to kill them for food before the end of their natural life is something I refuse to partake in. Male chicks aren’t ground at birth in your farm, that’s better in my book. But they’re still raised to be eaten. I’d still argue that hens laying eggs every day shortens their lifespan b…

I don't know what hens do what you say. The hens we have here, when we leave the eggs in their nest, the next day they've laid a few more. Once they have laid around ten eggs they'll incubate them until they hatch. That's how we end up with new hens. Some eggs we take and eat, some we let them hatch into chicks. I've never seen a hen eat an egg. What they do eat is the egg shells when the eggs have hatched. Appparently it helps them replenish the calcium needed to make new eggs. Is that what you have in mind, perhaps?

I don't think laying eggs puts strain on hens' system. Far as I can tell, that's what hens are made to do.

> Raising animals to kill them for food before the end of their natural life is something I refuse to partake in.

That's fine by me. Nobody's forcing you to partake in anything. I don't agree that raising animals for food is wrong or exploitative.

Edit: sorry for the Fisking. I wanted to address this too:

> But they’re still raised to be eaten.

Yes, absolutely! That's why we raise farm animals. We raise them for food. We breed them, we tend to them, we keep them safe from predators and disease, we feed them, we care for them and then we kill them and eat them. That's the deal.

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#367
post #275

I watched an Anthony Bourdaine episode where he visited Japan and saw the live octopus that would later be slaughtered for his dinner. He was very excited by it. I looked at the same octopus and not once did the thought, "food" enter my mind. It's the same when I look at cows and chicken.. I don't think of them as food when I see them roaming about. On the other hand, when I see a fish, I do sometimes think, "food!".…

The more you know, the less likely you are to think about animals as food, i reckon.

I find the opposite is true. Knowing a lot of hunters (and being one myself), I can say that they are intensely interested in their prey's thoughts, behavior, and feelings, certainly more so than the average person.

I increasingly see a world where meat eaters want to not just know where their meat comes from, but know exactly what animal it is they're eating and exactly how it lived and taking personal responsibility for its death. You see more people doing things like buying shares of a cow (and even visiting the cow in person to see how it's doing), or raising chickens in their backyard, etc. in my country.

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#369
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's such a disgrace they use CO2. The one gas that the body can detect and percieve as danger and do anything to avoid and get rid of. They use it only because it's cheap. They could have used argon, helium, maybe even nitrogen. Anything else that can lower oxygen concentration without the body noticing bacause it doesn't detect low oxygen levels, just high CO2 levels when you suffocate. The jury is still out which…

I stopped eating any animal products after that ordeal and realized I don't need to. There are so many problems with the meat industry anyway, so I am pretty much relieved to not have to think about it.

Re: World’s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We as a society seem to have no problem killing millions of insects to make it easier to grow plants though. No matter what you eat, things are dying to supply your food. If you want to minimize the number of animals being killed, it’s probably best to eat the largest ones you have.

> it’s probably best to eat the largest ones you have. This fails at scale. Feeding our population on large animals requires significantly more plant mass than if we eat plants. Large animals are terribly inefficient at converting plant matter into food. We will harm fewer sentient creatures if we simply eat plants directly.

If you are eating grains directly or feed grains to (say) chickens you have to plow the land, clear other vegetation, cause erosion, probably use fertilizers and pesticides.

At a certain scale though you can graze animals on grass sustainably, building soil structure instead of destroying it.

The environmental movement has a beef with beef but the more I look at it chicken is the problem.

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