Dominion is what completely turned me off of chicken. I was always on the fence about chicken meat. I never saw the appeal in chicken fillet anyway. Even the best I’ve ever tasted was barely OK. Its just not worth the way we treat those animals, and especially the way we “process” them. Allthough I miss the time our neighbors had a couple of chickens and we got fresh surplus eggs from them for free.
The reason why I overestimated the importance of meat flavor is probably due to my upbringing. When I was a kid a meal was mostly something - with meat on the side. So meat was basically half the meal. Now I’ve gotten a lot better with balancing my diet, this is also partially due to vegan friends that showed me recepies I haven’t tried before.
I think that is a fairly healthy approach to reducing your meat intake. Every new vegan meal I find that I also enjoy reduces the relative prevalence of meat in my diet. I’m at a point were I sometimes go a full week with no meat without noticing. Besides salmon trout which my dad catches on his fishing trips as a hobby, I don’t eat any fish. Its just to much work to get the bones out of smaller fish, and bigger foshbdoesnt fit on the freezer. And again the taste is “meh” at best. I can’t really speak on this topic from personal experience because I live in a country that has no access to larger bodies of water and has therefore no real fish cuisine.
My main gripe is the unnecessary cruelty at industrial farmers and butchers. I think If we could all drastically reduce our meat demands, there wouldn’t be any necessity for the cruelty in meat production. I live in a rural area with a lot of farmers. Some of them (or more precisely their sons and daughters) I even know personally. I’ve seen how well the animals are treated. Farmers usually don’t like parting with their animals as much as we don’t like to part with our pets. Thats why butchers are a profession of their own. That meat is also expensive, 40-50€ a kilo, as opposed to the 10-20€ at the supermarket. That in my opinion is OK. The animals live a fulfilled life past their prime, have top of the line medical care and are protected from all predetors and natural threats. They also have a grassing area multiple times the size of the town. Meat should be a benefit of rural areas and be priced higher or be straight up unavailable in bigger cities. That is basically how it was before industrial refrigerators and mobile refrigerators became a thing. Now you can get a burger for cheap in a city that hasn’t seen a living cow in a century.
I’ve seen how well the animals are treated. Farmers usually don’t like parting with their animals as much as we don’t like to part with our pets. Thats why butchers are a profession of their own. That meat is also expensive, 40-50€ a kilo, as opposed to the 10-20€ at the supermarket. That in my opinion is OK. The animals live a fulfilled life past their prime, have top of the line medical care and are protected from all predetors and natural threats. They also have a grassing area multiple times the size of the town
We’re breeding these animals into existence purely for economical reasons and deciding for them what a good life is and when they’ve had a “fulfilled life” and “past their prime” just so we can send them to the slaughterhouse? How is that not entitlement? I mean put yourself in the position of the victim. How would you feel if I controlled your entire existence then told you that’ve “you have a fulfilled life” and send you off to the slaughterhouse. Would you think I am being compassionate? Common man, can’t you see how fucked up that is? Even if we would do this to our pets, people would be outraged: “oh yeah, my dog is getting a few gray hairs and is not able to run so fast anymore as he used to. He is past his prime, let’s just put him down and get a new one.” People would be outraged! When we do put pets down at the vet it is because we know that the rest of their life would be miserable, not because they’re “past their prime”.
And then you tend to forget that when you’re talking about cows, that we’re also stealing their babies from them constantly. Where are all the bulls roaming around? Male calfs reach their prime at the ripe old age of 6 to 9 months and their mothers reach their prime at the ripe old age of 5 to 7 years. Cows can live up to 25 years! If you’re not going to eat chicken, you should definitely not eat beef.
And what about pigs? Where do you still see pigs roam around at all? They’re all in big barns. Pigs usually reach their prime in less than a year and never even see daylight properly.
Farmers may not hate their animals and even may delude themselves that they really care about their animals, but this all within the constraints of the economical system that they feel is immutable and the natural order of things. If you love an animal and that animal is still healthy and wants to live, you’re not going to send it to the slaughterhouse. Can you come up with a counter argument to that statement? If not, then you’ve got to conclude: farmers do not really love their animals. Farmers are part of an economical system in which animals are the products and producers. Farmers are mainly looking out for their investments.
And then another thing. Don’t step into the trap of comparing these farm animals to wild animals (you didn’t, but I want to preempt this argument). They are not. First of all, there are waay too many of these farm animals. I mean, we’re killing 80 billion a year, so go figure how much artificial insemination farmers are doing. Second of all, these animals are total frankenstein monsters. You’ve got chickens who lay 300+ eggs a year (which is nearly 30 times what they used to lay). You’ve got cows that produce 10.000 liters of milk a year. Broilers chickens that can nearly not support their own weight after 50 days. Pigs that grow to 150kg in 6 months. These animals are not part of nature’s order and nature would wipe them from the face of the planet in a second if all cages would be opened. It’s an abomination.
You know, I get a little frustrated with this conversation, because at least you’re willing to be honest and present coherent arguments, but then you still don’t see how fucked up our human supremacy over animals is and want to paint rosy pictures about animals who are well cared for by farmers. Have you ever visited a pig slaughterhouse? I challenge you to it. In most places you can hear the pigs screaming even when you stand outside the gate. The pigs that are shipped there are terrified out of their mind, you can see it in their eyes. You look at a few cows in a pasture on a sunny day and think: oh, they’ve got a good life, but you’re not there when their babies are taking away from them or when they stand in the stables for 6 months during the winter time. You’re also not thinking of all the cows that never even get to be in a pasture. Did you know that 99% of animals in the US are factory famed? Maybe you should do some actual research into what you’re actually contributing to when you order that pizza pepperoni. It’s not a rosy picture. (By the way, processed meats are also classed a group one carcinogen by the WHO, which means the level of evidence that it is carcinogenic is as strong as the level of evidence that we have for asbestos, plutonium and tobacco).
And one more thing. How come it is okay for your dad to go into the wild and actually kill salmons when he totally doesn’t need to do that? What kind of a hobby is that? Fish are way more intelligent than we think and, yes damnit, they feel pain. Killing animals for sport is the summum of human entitlement.
Sorry, I would have answered sooner but my Lemmy instance was down and I took some time to look into the things you’ve mentioned.
Regarding cows and cattle. I have to admit I was wrong in my conception of a cattle cows lifespan. The cattle I was familiar with are dairy cows with the longest productive lifespan of roughly 5-6 years. Most other cattle for meat production are being culled at thr age of 2-3 (Bulls) or <1 (Calves). Which compared to their avarege natural life expectancy of 20-25 years is a lot lower. Here’s a nice Article, detailing the reasons for said culling age as well as implications of higher or lower culling age. An interesting factor is that an increase in culling age of dairy cows suggest an increase in offspring and therefore the surplus of cows being used for meat purposes and therefore being culled younger.
In an effort to find out the averege lifespan of wild cows (to make a comparison between forced culling and natural death causes like predetors and disease) I’ve stubbled oppon the fact that there are no more wild cows left in Europe. The reason being that the orignial european wild cows called Aurochs have gone extinct a couple of centuries ago. The main reason being our own expansion into their habitant and hunting. We cut down forests that they used for shelter to get wood and claimed their grassing land for our own domesticated animals and farms. Domestication efforts of Aurochs in Europe, Africa and Asia began somewhere around 9000BC and let to the cattle that we have now.
But this still didn’t answer my question about a wild cows averege life span. So I looked into a place were killing cows is considered illegal - India. Turns out their cattle is treated just as badly as you would expect from a third world country. Just as in Europe or the US, dairy cattle in India becomes unprofitable beyond 5 - 6 years of age. Afterwards they are either illegally slaughtered in secrecy or driven to slaughter houses outside of India. An Article (which I dont fully trust because it doesn’t provide any sources) mentioned the inability of cattle to survive outside of farms in the modern world, due to extensive energy requirements that simple grasing can’t provide.
All this hints at the fact that grasing animals are not compatible with inevidable human expansion outside of domestication and farming. If we were to release all our cattle it would either die due to inability to sustain itself or would become a threat to our other agricultural branches. So its either cattle at farms or no cattle at all. You said it yourself, nature would wipe those freaks out in a second.
As for Pigs, I have the same stance as with chickens. We selectively bread them to produce as much meat as possible in the shortest amount of time and the consequence is that the meat tastes horrible. Industrial pigs meat has the highest water to meat ratio to the point where its basically an inexcusable financial scam on top of an ethical atrocity. Compared to flavor rich and dense wild boar meat (which are hunted because they mutliply like bunnies, are highly invasive/territorial and an actual threat to hikers and other wildlife in europe), its sad to think that people are OK with the billions of pigs beings being inhumanly held and slaughtered to ditch out some subpar watery meat.
But on the filp side, I can understand why some find it a lot harder to sympathise with pigs, because, while they are still innocent animals and the cruelty in our treatment is unjustified, a pig would gladly eat you or your family without thinking twice if given the chance. I’ve found numerous sources that suggest that animals like Pigs have consciousness and feel pain, but none that they have a simple sense of morality - which some animals actually do.
I would like to hear your opinion on the possibility of lab grown meat. Basically just muscle and fat tissue with no consciousness or nervous system.
As for fish, I think fishing as a hobby is absolutely fine, as long as you don’t do it because you simply want to kill fish for sport. Mostly it encourages a healthier lifestyle and enviromental awareness. 99% of fishing as a hobby is research, preparation and patience, not the killing part. Here is a beautiful poetic take on that topic by somebody who is far better versed than I am.
Because recreational anglers are not doing it for profit, they also directly oppose the philosophy of industrial fisheries. There is no incentive to take more fish than you need, so every angler potetialy denies a whole family of people as customers of industrial fishieries. As far as my personal experience goes, nearly 100% of the fish caught has been consumed and none of it has gone to waste. The same can not be said about industrial fisheries.
Theres also a big diffence between fishing with a kilometer wide netting on a ship, or a hook and some bread. There’s a big lid on the damage you can do to the fish population with a fishing rod. Fishing with a rod is a matter of chance, sometimes you fish for a whole day and nothing bites and thats fine. It just means you got unlucky or haven’t fully understood your enviroment.
Furthemore, those are wild fish, they already have many predetors and humans are just one of them. This goes back to what I said earlier about us being “damn good hunters”. Fish are literally far outside of our element, naturally we do not excell at fishing to the extend that adapted aquatic predetors are. I’ve seen caught fish that have clearly been recently attacked by other predetors and saw the bread on a hook as an easy snack. We also kill them way more humanly than nature does. They often get eaten alive and slowly suffocate in a bigger fishes stomach, or have chunks bitten out of them and succumb to the infection or loss of mobility (those are both cases I personal saw). Sure, the process of reeling a fish in by a hook in its mouth is pretty gruesome, but so is fighting a predator with razor sharp fins and teeth. And once we got them we just hit them with a stick and put their lights out. And yes, just like any other being with a nervous system we can expect the fish to feel pain. But we can also expect it to make it’s own decision for survival. A lot of fish can swim by a lure and only the ones with bad instict will bite. Their natural predetors are not above using even crueler tactics.
Plus the fish has to be counted, weighed and payed for at a station. That way the population is being tracked and its ensured that the lake is not overfished. That is in my opinion by far the most humane way to get fish if you want one. I think at that point you are not asking somebody not to do something, but rather not to want something, and that’s an entirely different story.
As mentioned before I am against any form of industrial mass slaughter of animals. If a farming animals life span and quality of life is solely dependent on it’s profitability, then let meat and milk be as expensive as gold, even if it means that I never will be able to afford another steak again.
I am however not against private family owned farms and butchers. I’d rather have them take proper care of their animals all through the late stages of their life, than let yet another species go extinct, because we stopped supporting its existence. Right now the dail of meat production is turned all the way up to corporate and we have to turn it back to local to make eating meat moraly acceptable in my opinion.
I also just don’t understand the moral duality of everything on the planet being allowed to kill each other in the most cruel and brutal ways imaginable, except us humans, who must stand above everything and have a zero tolerance policy. Yes we kill tens of billions of animals a year, but what is that compared to the trillions that kill each other? It’s just biomass turnaround that has been going on for billions of years. The real issue is the loss of biodiversity in the oceans and on land. We have clear preferences of animals we want and don’t want in our surroundings, regardless of the consequences of their vanishing.
The discussion about meat consumption is mostly an environmental one. As evidence shows its far easier for people to look past the cruelty of the subject, but ignoring rising prices and temperatures isn’t. And this I believe, is what will eventually cause a global change in regard to our meat based diets. It is getting more difficult to provide food for our growing population due to climate extremes, and radical methods in animal handling are a product of that.
Isn’t this the fight that advocates for veganism are actually fighting? It’s not about getting every last person to never touch meat again, but rather to get corporations to dip into red numbers long enough to have them do a 180 on meat. The same thing is happening now with car manufacturers and electric vehicles. Before they were industrialized, combustion engines where a luxury item and once the industry moves on, they will become one once again. I hope that the same thing will happen to the meat industry. Thats where my full support lies.
Very nice research into cows. Yes, nature would wipe the freaks out. And that would in my opinion be much preferable, because breeding them into existence just to kill them for their meat isn’t ethical at all. If we really want to save this particular species, we should do so in animal sanctuaries where animals are treated with respect. But these are essentially domesticated animals, so we’d have to keep taking care of them ad infinitum just for the love of these individuals.
Indeed the way cows are treated in India is super hypocritical. The cow is revered and treated as shit at the same time. In some Hindu ceremonies they revere the cow by pouring milk over a cow statue. Milk that of course was obtained by stealing baby calves from their mothers and shipping them off to the milk or meat industry. Doh!
We agree on pigs, but whether pigs will gladly eat me or not has no bearing on whether we should be justified in killing them or not. We also don’t go around killing lions and sharks. Perhaps only if they form an acute danger to humans, but otherwise we just leave them alone. Pigs aren’t lions though.
My opinion on lab grown meat is simple: I am all for it. We don’t need everybody to go vegan, but just a large enough minority for there to be massive systemic changes. Different figures have been thrown out there: 10%, 15% or 25% of the population needs to change in order for the majority to change. Lab grown meat will likely play an important role in getting us to that tipping point. It’ll take a while, but eventually we’ll look back in disgust at how we used to treat animals.
On fishing: a fish is an animal, an individual and I believe all animals/individuals should be treated with some form of respect. We shouldn’t just kill them for the fun of it. Yeah, but you say: “We do it to eat them. We use every part! And the way we kill it is better than if it would be caught by a predator” I understand, but you don’t need to eat them. You can easily eat something else. You’ve got an abundance of choice, but instead you decide to be a dick to an animal. And it’s not either you kill it now or another predator kills it. No it’s either you kill it or you don’t and it gets to live for however much longer that may be. Even other animals don’t tend to just go around killing for fun. Lions typically don’t go killing other animals just because they like it. They do it because they have to. However, we do it because it’s fun. The fun of the hunt, the fun of the taste pleasure. It’s not a survival situation. We are not carnivore predators neither are we in a survival situation. It comes down to fun. And fun isn’t good enough of a reason to kill an animal. Care to disagree?
The real reason why we fish is because we used to have to. But now we don’t have to anymore and we’re either too ignorant and/or too unempathetic to reflect on the situation anew and draw the conclusion that it doesn’t make any sense anymore. We’re just slow to adapt to the times, just like we were with racism, slavery, gay rights, women’s rights, separating church from state, quitting tobacco, etc. It’s societal intertia.
And just because the world is a brutal place and lots of animals are killing lots of other animals, doesn’t mean we are justified in doing the same or worse. I mean, even if I would be a vegan all my life, but kill one 6 month old pig for fun just one time in my life, I still wouldn’t be able to justify that. A bad thing doesn’t become a good thing, just because it isn’t as bad as something else. Killing a pig when I absolutely don’t have to is a bad thing, wouldn’t you say? Even if people are ordering pepperoni pizza’s as if there are no victims involved. I can’t just justify it by saying that other people or other animals do worse.
Look, there is lots of debate about morality and lots of different moral system. I am utilitarian myself, but regardless of your stance: I believe we can all agree that killing is universally considered to not be a good thing to do to sentient beings right? So whether I kill my victim locally on a farm while playing some Bach music in the background and right after a massage and a nice prayer of respect. It doesn’t make it a good thing. The victim doesn’t give two cents that you kill it on a local farm or in a slaughterhouse with a bolt gun to the brain. It’s an individual that doesn’t want to die.
If it would be environmental issue then we could also just reduce our meat intake and feel that we’re doing a good thing. But we’re not doing a good thing when we’re needlessly killing innocent sentient beings. Therefore it is fundamentally an ethical issue, because as of yet I have not yet heard anyone make any good ethical argument for the killing of animals when we don’t need to. You can also check out this debate wiki.
Dominion is what completely turned me off of chicken. I was always on the fence about chicken meat. I never saw the appeal in chicken fillet anyway. Even the best I’ve ever tasted was barely OK. Its just not worth the way we treat those animals, and especially the way we “process” them. Allthough I miss the time our neighbors had a couple of chickens and we got fresh surplus eggs from them for free.
The reason why I overestimated the importance of meat flavor is probably due to my upbringing. When I was a kid a meal was mostly something - with meat on the side. So meat was basically half the meal. Now I’ve gotten a lot better with balancing my diet, this is also partially due to vegan friends that showed me recepies I haven’t tried before.
I think that is a fairly healthy approach to reducing your meat intake. Every new vegan meal I find that I also enjoy reduces the relative prevalence of meat in my diet. I’m at a point were I sometimes go a full week with no meat without noticing. Besides salmon trout which my dad catches on his fishing trips as a hobby, I don’t eat any fish. Its just to much work to get the bones out of smaller fish, and bigger foshbdoesnt fit on the freezer. And again the taste is “meh” at best. I can’t really speak on this topic from personal experience because I live in a country that has no access to larger bodies of water and has therefore no real fish cuisine.
My main gripe is the unnecessary cruelty at industrial farmers and butchers. I think If we could all drastically reduce our meat demands, there wouldn’t be any necessity for the cruelty in meat production. I live in a rural area with a lot of farmers. Some of them (or more precisely their sons and daughters) I even know personally. I’ve seen how well the animals are treated. Farmers usually don’t like parting with their animals as much as we don’t like to part with our pets. Thats why butchers are a profession of their own. That meat is also expensive, 40-50€ a kilo, as opposed to the 10-20€ at the supermarket. That in my opinion is OK. The animals live a fulfilled life past their prime, have top of the line medical care and are protected from all predetors and natural threats. They also have a grassing area multiple times the size of the town. Meat should be a benefit of rural areas and be priced higher or be straight up unavailable in bigger cities. That is basically how it was before industrial refrigerators and mobile refrigerators became a thing. Now you can get a burger for cheap in a city that hasn’t seen a living cow in a century.
We’re breeding these animals into existence purely for economical reasons and deciding for them what a good life is and when they’ve had a “fulfilled life” and “past their prime” just so we can send them to the slaughterhouse? How is that not entitlement? I mean put yourself in the position of the victim. How would you feel if I controlled your entire existence then told you that’ve “you have a fulfilled life” and send you off to the slaughterhouse. Would you think I am being compassionate? Common man, can’t you see how fucked up that is? Even if we would do this to our pets, people would be outraged: “oh yeah, my dog is getting a few gray hairs and is not able to run so fast anymore as he used to. He is past his prime, let’s just put him down and get a new one.” People would be outraged! When we do put pets down at the vet it is because we know that the rest of their life would be miserable, not because they’re “past their prime”.
And then you tend to forget that when you’re talking about cows, that we’re also stealing their babies from them constantly. Where are all the bulls roaming around? Male calfs reach their prime at the ripe old age of 6 to 9 months and their mothers reach their prime at the ripe old age of 5 to 7 years. Cows can live up to 25 years! If you’re not going to eat chicken, you should definitely not eat beef.
And what about pigs? Where do you still see pigs roam around at all? They’re all in big barns. Pigs usually reach their prime in less than a year and never even see daylight properly.
Farmers may not hate their animals and even may delude themselves that they really care about their animals, but this all within the constraints of the economical system that they feel is immutable and the natural order of things. If you love an animal and that animal is still healthy and wants to live, you’re not going to send it to the slaughterhouse. Can you come up with a counter argument to that statement? If not, then you’ve got to conclude: farmers do not really love their animals. Farmers are part of an economical system in which animals are the products and producers. Farmers are mainly looking out for their investments.
And then another thing. Don’t step into the trap of comparing these farm animals to wild animals (you didn’t, but I want to preempt this argument). They are not. First of all, there are waay too many of these farm animals. I mean, we’re killing 80 billion a year, so go figure how much artificial insemination farmers are doing. Second of all, these animals are total frankenstein monsters. You’ve got chickens who lay 300+ eggs a year (which is nearly 30 times what they used to lay). You’ve got cows that produce 10.000 liters of milk a year. Broilers chickens that can nearly not support their own weight after 50 days. Pigs that grow to 150kg in 6 months. These animals are not part of nature’s order and nature would wipe them from the face of the planet in a second if all cages would be opened. It’s an abomination.
You know, I get a little frustrated with this conversation, because at least you’re willing to be honest and present coherent arguments, but then you still don’t see how fucked up our human supremacy over animals is and want to paint rosy pictures about animals who are well cared for by farmers. Have you ever visited a pig slaughterhouse? I challenge you to it. In most places you can hear the pigs screaming even when you stand outside the gate. The pigs that are shipped there are terrified out of their mind, you can see it in their eyes. You look at a few cows in a pasture on a sunny day and think: oh, they’ve got a good life, but you’re not there when their babies are taking away from them or when they stand in the stables for 6 months during the winter time. You’re also not thinking of all the cows that never even get to be in a pasture. Did you know that 99% of animals in the US are factory famed? Maybe you should do some actual research into what you’re actually contributing to when you order that pizza pepperoni. It’s not a rosy picture. (By the way, processed meats are also classed a group one carcinogen by the WHO, which means the level of evidence that it is carcinogenic is as strong as the level of evidence that we have for asbestos, plutonium and tobacco).
And one more thing. How come it is okay for your dad to go into the wild and actually kill salmons when he totally doesn’t need to do that? What kind of a hobby is that? Fish are way more intelligent than we think and, yes damnit, they feel pain. Killing animals for sport is the summum of human entitlement.
Sorry, I would have answered sooner but my Lemmy instance was down and I took some time to look into the things you’ve mentioned.
Regarding cows and cattle. I have to admit I was wrong in my conception of a cattle cows lifespan. The cattle I was familiar with are dairy cows with the longest productive lifespan of roughly 5-6 years. Most other cattle for meat production are being culled at thr age of 2-3 (Bulls) or <1 (Calves). Which compared to their avarege natural life expectancy of 20-25 years is a lot lower. Here’s a nice Article, detailing the reasons for said culling age as well as implications of higher or lower culling age. An interesting factor is that an increase in culling age of dairy cows suggest an increase in offspring and therefore the surplus of cows being used for meat purposes and therefore being culled younger.
In an effort to find out the averege lifespan of wild cows (to make a comparison between forced culling and natural death causes like predetors and disease) I’ve stubbled oppon the fact that there are no more wild cows left in Europe. The reason being that the orignial european wild cows called Aurochs have gone extinct a couple of centuries ago. The main reason being our own expansion into their habitant and hunting. We cut down forests that they used for shelter to get wood and claimed their grassing land for our own domesticated animals and farms. Domestication efforts of Aurochs in Europe, Africa and Asia began somewhere around 9000BC and let to the cattle that we have now.
But this still didn’t answer my question about a wild cows averege life span. So I looked into a place were killing cows is considered illegal - India. Turns out their cattle is treated just as badly as you would expect from a third world country. Just as in Europe or the US, dairy cattle in India becomes unprofitable beyond 5 - 6 years of age. Afterwards they are either illegally slaughtered in secrecy or driven to slaughter houses outside of India. An Article (which I dont fully trust because it doesn’t provide any sources) mentioned the inability of cattle to survive outside of farms in the modern world, due to extensive energy requirements that simple grasing can’t provide.
All this hints at the fact that grasing animals are not compatible with inevidable human expansion outside of domestication and farming. If we were to release all our cattle it would either die due to inability to sustain itself or would become a threat to our other agricultural branches. So its either cattle at farms or no cattle at all. You said it yourself, nature would wipe those freaks out in a second.
As for Pigs, I have the same stance as with chickens. We selectively bread them to produce as much meat as possible in the shortest amount of time and the consequence is that the meat tastes horrible. Industrial pigs meat has the highest water to meat ratio to the point where its basically an inexcusable financial scam on top of an ethical atrocity. Compared to flavor rich and dense wild boar meat (which are hunted because they mutliply like bunnies, are highly invasive/territorial and an actual threat to hikers and other wildlife in europe), its sad to think that people are OK with the billions of pigs beings being inhumanly held and slaughtered to ditch out some subpar watery meat. But on the filp side, I can understand why some find it a lot harder to sympathise with pigs, because, while they are still innocent animals and the cruelty in our treatment is unjustified, a pig would gladly eat you or your family without thinking twice if given the chance. I’ve found numerous sources that suggest that animals like Pigs have consciousness and feel pain, but none that they have a simple sense of morality - which some animals actually do.
I would like to hear your opinion on the possibility of lab grown meat. Basically just muscle and fat tissue with no consciousness or nervous system.
As for fish, I think fishing as a hobby is absolutely fine, as long as you don’t do it because you simply want to kill fish for sport. Mostly it encourages a healthier lifestyle and enviromental awareness. 99% of fishing as a hobby is research, preparation and patience, not the killing part. Here is a beautiful poetic take on that topic by somebody who is far better versed than I am.
Because recreational anglers are not doing it for profit, they also directly oppose the philosophy of industrial fisheries. There is no incentive to take more fish than you need, so every angler potetialy denies a whole family of people as customers of industrial fishieries. As far as my personal experience goes, nearly 100% of the fish caught has been consumed and none of it has gone to waste. The same can not be said about industrial fisheries.
Theres also a big diffence between fishing with a kilometer wide netting on a ship, or a hook and some bread. There’s a big lid on the damage you can do to the fish population with a fishing rod. Fishing with a rod is a matter of chance, sometimes you fish for a whole day and nothing bites and thats fine. It just means you got unlucky or haven’t fully understood your enviroment.
Furthemore, those are wild fish, they already have many predetors and humans are just one of them. This goes back to what I said earlier about us being “damn good hunters”. Fish are literally far outside of our element, naturally we do not excell at fishing to the extend that adapted aquatic predetors are. I’ve seen caught fish that have clearly been recently attacked by other predetors and saw the bread on a hook as an easy snack. We also kill them way more humanly than nature does. They often get eaten alive and slowly suffocate in a bigger fishes stomach, or have chunks bitten out of them and succumb to the infection or loss of mobility (those are both cases I personal saw). Sure, the process of reeling a fish in by a hook in its mouth is pretty gruesome, but so is fighting a predator with razor sharp fins and teeth. And once we got them we just hit them with a stick and put their lights out. And yes, just like any other being with a nervous system we can expect the fish to feel pain. But we can also expect it to make it’s own decision for survival. A lot of fish can swim by a lure and only the ones with bad instict will bite. Their natural predetors are not above using even crueler tactics.
Plus the fish has to be counted, weighed and payed for at a station. That way the population is being tracked and its ensured that the lake is not overfished. That is in my opinion by far the most humane way to get fish if you want one. I think at that point you are not asking somebody not to do something, but rather not to want something, and that’s an entirely different story.
As mentioned before I am against any form of industrial mass slaughter of animals. If a farming animals life span and quality of life is solely dependent on it’s profitability, then let meat and milk be as expensive as gold, even if it means that I never will be able to afford another steak again.
I am however not against private family owned farms and butchers. I’d rather have them take proper care of their animals all through the late stages of their life, than let yet another species go extinct, because we stopped supporting its existence. Right now the dail of meat production is turned all the way up to corporate and we have to turn it back to local to make eating meat moraly acceptable in my opinion.
I also just don’t understand the moral duality of everything on the planet being allowed to kill each other in the most cruel and brutal ways imaginable, except us humans, who must stand above everything and have a zero tolerance policy. Yes we kill tens of billions of animals a year, but what is that compared to the trillions that kill each other? It’s just biomass turnaround that has been going on for billions of years. The real issue is the loss of biodiversity in the oceans and on land. We have clear preferences of animals we want and don’t want in our surroundings, regardless of the consequences of their vanishing.
The discussion about meat consumption is mostly an environmental one. As evidence shows its far easier for people to look past the cruelty of the subject, but ignoring rising prices and temperatures isn’t. And this I believe, is what will eventually cause a global change in regard to our meat based diets. It is getting more difficult to provide food for our growing population due to climate extremes, and radical methods in animal handling are a product of that.
Isn’t this the fight that advocates for veganism are actually fighting? It’s not about getting every last person to never touch meat again, but rather to get corporations to dip into red numbers long enough to have them do a 180 on meat. The same thing is happening now with car manufacturers and electric vehicles. Before they were industrialized, combustion engines where a luxury item and once the industry moves on, they will become one once again. I hope that the same thing will happen to the meat industry. Thats where my full support lies.
Very nice research into cows. Yes, nature would wipe the freaks out. And that would in my opinion be much preferable, because breeding them into existence just to kill them for their meat isn’t ethical at all. If we really want to save this particular species, we should do so in animal sanctuaries where animals are treated with respect. But these are essentially domesticated animals, so we’d have to keep taking care of them ad infinitum just for the love of these individuals.
Indeed the way cows are treated in India is super hypocritical. The cow is revered and treated as shit at the same time. In some Hindu ceremonies they revere the cow by pouring milk over a cow statue. Milk that of course was obtained by stealing baby calves from their mothers and shipping them off to the milk or meat industry. Doh!
We agree on pigs, but whether pigs will gladly eat me or not has no bearing on whether we should be justified in killing them or not. We also don’t go around killing lions and sharks. Perhaps only if they form an acute danger to humans, but otherwise we just leave them alone. Pigs aren’t lions though.
My opinion on lab grown meat is simple: I am all for it. We don’t need everybody to go vegan, but just a large enough minority for there to be massive systemic changes. Different figures have been thrown out there: 10%, 15% or 25% of the population needs to change in order for the majority to change. Lab grown meat will likely play an important role in getting us to that tipping point. It’ll take a while, but eventually we’ll look back in disgust at how we used to treat animals.
On fishing: a fish is an animal, an individual and I believe all animals/individuals should be treated with some form of respect. We shouldn’t just kill them for the fun of it. Yeah, but you say: “We do it to eat them. We use every part! And the way we kill it is better than if it would be caught by a predator” I understand, but you don’t need to eat them. You can easily eat something else. You’ve got an abundance of choice, but instead you decide to be a dick to an animal. And it’s not either you kill it now or another predator kills it. No it’s either you kill it or you don’t and it gets to live for however much longer that may be. Even other animals don’t tend to just go around killing for fun. Lions typically don’t go killing other animals just because they like it. They do it because they have to. However, we do it because it’s fun. The fun of the hunt, the fun of the taste pleasure. It’s not a survival situation. We are not carnivore predators neither are we in a survival situation. It comes down to fun. And fun isn’t good enough of a reason to kill an animal. Care to disagree?
The real reason why we fish is because we used to have to. But now we don’t have to anymore and we’re either too ignorant and/or too unempathetic to reflect on the situation anew and draw the conclusion that it doesn’t make any sense anymore. We’re just slow to adapt to the times, just like we were with racism, slavery, gay rights, women’s rights, separating church from state, quitting tobacco, etc. It’s societal intertia.
And just because the world is a brutal place and lots of animals are killing lots of other animals, doesn’t mean we are justified in doing the same or worse. I mean, even if I would be a vegan all my life, but kill one 6 month old pig for fun just one time in my life, I still wouldn’t be able to justify that. A bad thing doesn’t become a good thing, just because it isn’t as bad as something else. Killing a pig when I absolutely don’t have to is a bad thing, wouldn’t you say? Even if people are ordering pepperoni pizza’s as if there are no victims involved. I can’t just justify it by saying that other people or other animals do worse.
Look, there is lots of debate about morality and lots of different moral system. I am utilitarian myself, but regardless of your stance: I believe we can all agree that killing is universally considered to not be a good thing to do to sentient beings right? So whether I kill my victim locally on a farm while playing some Bach music in the background and right after a massage and a nice prayer of respect. It doesn’t make it a good thing. The victim doesn’t give two cents that you kill it on a local farm or in a slaughterhouse with a bolt gun to the brain. It’s an individual that doesn’t want to die.
If you want to do a deep dive into the philosophy of animal ethics I can recommend the book Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. Or if you’d like to watch an interesting video I can recommend this talk by Gary l. Francione.
If it would be environmental issue then we could also just reduce our meat intake and feel that we’re doing a good thing. But we’re not doing a good thing when we’re needlessly killing innocent sentient beings. Therefore it is fundamentally an ethical issue, because as of yet I have not yet heard anyone make any good ethical argument for the killing of animals when we don’t need to. You can also check out this debate wiki.