4 ms·

All goes around in circles. The more suffering we cause, the more suffering we feel. I wish people would understand this, when regarding eating animals.

cageface 9y ago
Exactly. This is something I've only started to appreciate since I stopped eating meat. We're as much a cog in the machine of the industrial agriculture as the animals we eat are. It's has everything to do with maximizing profits and nothing to do with the health and welfare of any of the animals in the system, including us.
- inDigiNeous 9y ago
  Agreed. This thinking spreads, if we do this to another lifeform, we sure as heck are ready to do it to our fellow humans, the abstraction is just a bit different.
pessimizer 9y ago
What will you eat when we find out that plants feel pain, they just don't look as much like us when they feel it as a pig does?
- cageface 9y ago
  Even if that were true it takes about 7kg of plants to make 1kg of meat, so eating plants is still causing a lot less suffering.
- inDigiNeous 9y ago
  Ok this is the most oldest argument people throw around. Let's just agree to look at this argument for a while and dissect couple of things: a plant doesn't run away when you catch it. A pig does. A plant has a nature of giving, radiating, making oxygen and providing for it's environment. A pig is a gatherer and hunter, and one of the more intelligent animals out there. When you try to catch a pig, it runs away, it squeals for it's life. Anyway it's not about this fact even though it's important, more what's fucked up in our current system is the systematic enslavement of feeling, thinking animals from their birth, in these huge killing camps they call farms these days. If it was even natural, like it used to be more, that the animals lived a life that they could enjoy. How would you feel being bred just for kept in a cage and then systematically killed, with no feeling, no warmness in your life ever ?
  - supreme_sublime 9y ago
    Plants aren't capable of running away. I really don't see this as much of an argument. Then again, I don't know if I agree that "plants feel pain" either. I'm not necessarily a huge fan of factory farming, but if people want to be able to buy meat at any time, I don't really know much of a way around it. Though ranching still exists, there are plenty of ranches with heads of cattle that graze freely and eventually are taken to slaughterhouses. If we did end factory farming, it wouldn't be as simple as just releasing these animals into the wild either. If we did they would very likely die of starvation. So we're talking about a generation of cattle/chickens that would basically need to be killed off so we didn't mess up the environment with a massive population explosion it couldn't handle. On top of all of that, you are acting as if these animals are capable of the kind of thought that you and I are. They can think about their future, what their eventual fate is. This is fallacious. While animals may show signs of intelligence, there is no evidence of any kind of consciousness similar to ours. This can even be evidenced through humans. People used to think that deaf people were mentally retarded in some way. Hence "deaf and dumb", however a lot of them were simply missing language. Language is extremely important as it not only allows for group cohesion, it also makes inner dialogue possible. While animals may have some basic kind of communicative capabilities, it is nothing on the level of humans. So without some kind of language, even if they're theoretically capable of cognitive thought, they can't have the same kind of existence as us. https://www.verywell.com/deaf-history-deaf-not-retarded-1046548 https://www.verywell.com/deaf-history-deaf-not-retarded-1046... Edit: Another link https://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/21/life-without-language/ https://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/21/life-without-langua...
    - inDigiNeous 9y ago
      Have you ever watched an animal in the eyes? Can you not see consciousness there ? This is the same as thinking that animals don't have feelings. What about dogs, have you not seen dogs doing kind things ? Killing an generation of animals for food is much better than raising hundreds or thousands of generations in captivity for the times to come.

cageface 9y ago

Exactly. This is something I've only started to appreciate since I stopped eating meat. We're as much a cog in the machine of the industrial agriculture as the animals we eat are. It's has everything to do with maximizing profits and nothing to do with the health and welfare of any of the animals in the system, including us.

inDigiNeous 9y ago
Agreed. This thinking spreads, if we do this to another lifeform, we sure as heck are ready to do it to our fellow humans, the abstraction is just a bit different.

pessimizer 9y ago

What will you eat when we find out that plants feel pain, they just don't look as much like us when they feel it as a pig does?

cageface 9y ago
Even if that were true it takes about 7kg of plants to make 1kg of meat, so eating plants is still causing a lot less suffering.
inDigiNeous 9y ago
Ok this is the most oldest argument people throw around. Let's just agree to look at this argument for a while and dissect couple of things: a plant doesn't run away when you catch it. A pig does. A plant has a nature of giving, radiating, making oxygen and providing for it's environment. A pig is a gatherer and hunter, and one of the more intelligent animals out there. When you try to catch a pig, it runs away, it squeals for it's life. Anyway it's not about this fact even though it's important, more what's fucked up in our current system is the systematic enslavement of feeling, thinking animals from their birth, in these huge killing camps they call farms these days. If it was even natural, like it used to be more, that the animals lived a life that they could enjoy. How would you feel being bred just for kept in a cage and then systematically killed, with no feeling, no warmness in your life ever ?
- supreme_sublime 9y ago
  Plants aren't capable of running away. I really don't see this as much of an argument. Then again, I don't know if I agree that "plants feel pain" either. I'm not necessarily a huge fan of factory farming, but if people want to be able to buy meat at any time, I don't really know much of a way around it. Though ranching still exists, there are plenty of ranches with heads of cattle that graze freely and eventually are taken to slaughterhouses. If we did end factory farming, it wouldn't be as simple as just releasing these animals into the wild either. If we did they would very likely die of starvation. So we're talking about a generation of cattle/chickens that would basically need to be killed off so we didn't mess up the environment with a massive population explosion it couldn't handle. On top of all of that, you are acting as if these animals are capable of the kind of thought that you and I are. They can think about their future, what their eventual fate is. This is fallacious. While animals may show signs of intelligence, there is no evidence of any kind of consciousness similar to ours. This can even be evidenced through humans. People used to think that deaf people were mentally retarded in some way. Hence "deaf and dumb", however a lot of them were simply missing language. Language is extremely important as it not only allows for group cohesion, it also makes inner dialogue possible. While animals may have some basic kind of communicative capabilities, it is nothing on the level of humans. So without some kind of language, even if they're theoretically capable of cognitive thought, they can't have the same kind of existence as us. https://www.verywell.com/deaf-history-deaf-not-retarded-1046548 https://www.verywell.com/deaf-history-deaf-not-retarded-1046... Edit: Another link https://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/21/life-without-language/ https://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/21/life-without-langua...
  - inDigiNeous 9y ago
    Have you ever watched an animal in the eyes? Can you not see consciousness there ? This is the same as thinking that animals don't have feelings. What about dogs, have you not seen dogs doing kind things ? Killing an generation of animals for food is much better than raising hundreds or thousands of generations in captivity for the times to come.