17 ms·

>free from cruelty. Do you mind if I ask what your requirements for this are? At the end of the day, isn't ending life cruel, no matter the means?

ZeroFries 8y ago
If the animal is free from suffering, including lacking awareness of what's happening during the killing, that's as free from cruelty as you can get. If lacking life is what's cruel, then vegetarianism doesn't really solve that problem, since the animal would never be born without farming.
- bluntfang 8y ago
  > If the animal is free from suffering, including lacking awareness of what's happening during the killing How do you measure this? How do you know for certain that what you're eating had no idea it was about to die when it did? How do you know animals don't experience existential suffering, similar to how humans experience it? Why do you believe that humans are in control of their livestock's emotional state, even when they provide the best environment for them?
  - Pfhreak 8y ago
    You can't know. You can know what acute suffering looks like and try to avoid it. You can observe animal behavior and say, "They appear not to be suffering from existential dread beyond what they would in the wild", you may be able to measure cortisol levels in the meat. But you'll never know for sure.
- delecti 8y ago
  Lacking life isn't a remotely useful metric for cruelty, or every minute decision anyone has ever made is responsible for an infinite number of states of the universe not happening.
  - lucb1e 8y ago
    They're not saying that this is a logical metric, they're saying that if that is your metric, then vegetarianism won't help you.
    - delecti 8y ago
      But they were the first one to mention anything resembling that metric. There's no reason to bring it up unless you think someone uses that metric, or alternatively as a straw man to argue against.
- PerfectElement 8y ago
  I don't think lacking life has ever been an argument vegetarians use. Once consciousness emerges, there is an innate desire to remain alive and to be free from suffering. Even if we could give animals a wonderful life in our current capitalist system, and then kill them without their awareness, we'd still need to justify (from a philosophical standpoint) why it would be immoral to do the same with a human animal.
  - lucb1e 8y ago
    > I don't think lacking life has ever been an argument vegetarians use. That would make sense, since GP said: > If lacking life is what's cruel, then vegetarianism doesn't really solve that problem. So if vegetarians used the argument that lacking life is cruel, then vegetarianism would be cruel, right? It makes perfect sense (given GP's point) that they don't use that argument. You're the third replyer that writes as if they disagree about this while making the same point. I'm wondering if I'm reading this wrong, or if GP edited their comment just before I loaded the page.
    - PerfectElement 8y ago
      The GP implied that vegetarians use the logic "ending life is cruel" as a basis for their stance.
  - ZeroFries 8y ago
    I suppose that argument could be used to justify killing some hermit unbeknownst to them. Most people, however, are connected socially, and killing them would make others suffer.
- bronson 8y ago
  > If lacking life is what's cruel Nobody's arguing this, are they? If you do believe this, then I hope you're breeding rats, rabbits, and insects as fast as possible!
  - lucb1e 8y ago
    I think you two agree. They said that if that is your definition of cruelty, then vegetarianism can't help you. Not that the lack of life is cruel. You're being cynical with someone who didn't even say one side was right and the other is wrong.
    - bronson 8y ago
      But nobody has EVER argued that, have they? I'm saying it's a pointless statement and trying to demonstrate its ridiculousness.
Pfhreak 8y ago
I'm the first one to admit that the line is fuzzy. I read this story [1] by Glenn Greenwald (of Snowden interview fame), and I realized that I was not ok with gestation crates for pigs, or the practices espoused by the industrial farming of any animal. I do not object to raising animals and eating them, but I do object to essentially keeping them in brutal, squalid conditions. Animals should have access to the outdoors, be allowed to pursue their own social connections, have enough space to stretch and exercise, have feed that's natural and high quality, and generally exist in a comfortable way. Totally acknowledge that's my own definition. It's an arbitrary line in the sand to say, "Killing an animal is ok, causing suffering to an animal before killing it is not". I just... read the article and couldn't stomach letting any of my money flow to companies that would think that sort of behavior was ok. [1] https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missing-piglets-animal-rights-glenn-greenwald/ https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missin...
- firethief 8y ago
  That theoretical distinction makes sense to me, but I don't see how it would be possible to support one kind of animal agriculture and not the other with purchasing habits. When most consumers don't distinguish provenance, demand for animal products is fungible.
  - Pfhreak 8y ago
    What I did: stop purchasing meat from the supermarket. Stop eating meat at restaurants. Find a local farmer and source a whole animal to split with your friends. Visit the farm, meet the farmer. A whole beef is a few thousand dollars, and splits nicely into 8ths. We spent, I believe, ~$6.50/lb for organic, grass fed beef. It's more time and cost up front, but now we have a freezer full of meat to draw from when we need to. If I eat meat, it's from that one animal. We don't eat meat often at home.
    - EliRivers 8y ago
      Apropos of just shootin' the breeze, could you have also met the animal? I wonder if that would make a further difference. I eat meat, but I put my hand up and say that if I ordered a steak in a restaurant and they brought out the cow and gave me a rock, and I had to beat the cow to death with the rock myself, I think I'd change my order. I'm not trying to make any points here; just freewheeling in conversation with what I know about myself.
elhudy 8y ago
Not sure what OPs requirements are, but mine are along these lines: "If animals like free-range cows have lives that are not worth living, almost all wild animals could plausibly be thought to also have lives that are worse than non-existence. Nature is often romanticised as a well-balanced idyll, so this may seem counter-intuitive. But extreme forms of suffering like starvation, dehydration, or being eaten alive by a predator are much more common in wild animals than farm animals. Crocodiles and hyenas disembowel their prey before killing them[1]. In birds, diseases like avian salmonellosis produce excruciating symptoms in the final days of life, such as depression, shivering, loss of appetite, and just before death, blindness, incoordination, staggering, tremor and convulsions.[2] While a farmed animal like a free-range cow has to endure some confinement and a premature and potentially painful death (stunning sometimes fails), a wild animal may suffer comparable experiences, such as surviving a cold winter or having to fear predators, while additionally undergoing the aforementioned extreme suffering[3]." -Thomas Sittler. "How Should Vegetarians Actually Live?"
- meowface 8y ago
  His point about wild animals is very accurate, but that's not considering that animals bred in captivity ("free"-range or otherwise) would not have been if not for meat demand. It's debatable whether non-existence is preferable to being raised and then killed, but the dichotomy isn't between wild animals vs. free-range animals. I think this is more an argument for an eventual plan to deal with wild animal suffering (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_animal_suffering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_animal_suffering), not an argument that whatever we do to free-range animals is acceptable because it's no worse than the suffering wild animals experience. Of course it's not very pragmatic for humanity to make a dent in that problem in the near future, especially without causing externalities, but just because it's hard doesn't mean the alternative is to say "they all have shit lives anyway, who cares what we do with them?"
  - elhudy 8y ago
    >His point about wild animals is very accurate, but that's not considering that animals bred in captivity ("free"-range or otherwise) would not have been if not for meat demand. It's debatable whether non-existence is preferable to being raised and then killed, but the dichotomy isn't between wild animals vs. free-range animals The idea is is as follows. Might be worth just reading the article: "If ethical vegetarians believed animals have lives that are unpleasant but still better than non-existence, they would focus on reducing harm to these animals without reducing their numbers, for instance by supporting humane slaughter or buying meat from free-range cows. I will argue that if vegetarians were to apply this principle consistently, wild animal suffering would dominate their concerns, and may lead them to be stringent anti-environmentalists." http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2016/03/oxford-uehiro-prize-in-practical-ethics-how-should-vegetarians-actually-live-a-reply-to-xavier-cohen-written-by-thomas-sittler/ http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2016/03/oxford-uehiro-p...
WhompingWindows 8y ago
Ending life is not necessarily cruel...how about for veterinarians utilizing euthanasia? Let's say you have an animal that's 95% going to die sometime within 12-24 hours. If your client can pay $5000, which they can't usually, the chances improve to 50% chance of living. In most cases, for money or for suffering, euthanasia is the least cruel option, as it's vastly more affordable and a painless, harmless process.
- ppseafield 8y ago
  Euthanasia and factory farming are apples and oranges. Cows can live up to 20 years, but are often killed at 18-24 months. They aren't killed with euthanasia, but panicked and terrified, with bolts to the skull and slit throats, right after seeing several other cows killed that way. Their lives before that are often miserable to keep costs down. Is that the least cruel option?
  - virtuallynathan 8y ago
    Cows aren't panicked and terrified, the hormone release from that would result in poor quality meat that has to be discarded. The slaughterhouses are humanely designed thanks to people like Temple Grandin. The cows are calm until the end.
    - goldenkey 8y ago
      "This is fine!" https://i.imgur.com/c4jt321.png https://i.imgur.com/c4jt321.png
- Falling3 8y ago
  I don't think anyone is saying ending life is necessarily cruel. We're saying unnecessarily ending life is cruel.
wickoff 8y ago
It's not like the animal is going to live forever if you don't kill it. In nature animals are often eaten alive by predators, die from disease, starvation and get horribly injured in competition for mates. A free range animal that's being humanely put down by a farmer has a much more pleasant life. If you go down this rabbit hole deep enough you can begin to question whether life itself should exist.
- bluntfang 8y ago
  What we do know for sure is that the animal would not have lived the same life if it weren't captive. >A free range animal that's being humanely put down by a farmer has a much more pleasant life. I don't think we can objectively say this. We have no idea what these animals want. Our humanity for these animals lives is nothing short of projection, purely because we have no idea what they want.
  - 0x54D5 8y ago
    What they want is pretty obvious if you've ever actually been around any of these animals. They want what you want: food, sex, comfort, entertainment - in that order.
  - pembrook 8y ago
    We can 100% objectively say this. Animals like chickens lack self awareness and the ability for future planning. They operate on instinct. We can prove this. Thus, they also don't know what they want--outside of the immediate satisfaction of an instinctual urge. They do feel pain and hunger however. In the wild, these animals suffer more pain and hunger. In free range "captivity" they suffer less. It's as simple as that. I swear most of the arguments against proper free range farming are grounded in either: a) A fallacious appeal to nature, ie. the false presumption that just because something is "natural" it is automatically better or b) Projection of human awareness and emotional intelligence onto other species Are factory farms more cruel to animals than proper free range farming? Yes. Is nature more cruel to animals than proper free range farming? Yes.
    - 8y ago
DamnYuppie 8y ago
I guess this is a good place for a rant for some down votes. The concept that death is cruel is ridiculous to me. EVRYTHING DIES, every animal in nature either dies of starvation, freezing to death, dies in a conflict with their own species for breeding rights, or gets to be attacked and eaten alive by a predator. The entirety of nature revolves around life and death struggles. Dying isn't cruel, to think so is a rejection of nature itself. That being said there are quicker and better ways of taking an animals life, the quicker and less painful the better. I will categorically state that for me how they live is more important than how they die. I don't agree with many of the practices in the production of chicken, pigs, cows, and yes even farmed fish and generally try to avoid them.
- geofft 8y ago
  Some further thoughts in two different directions (I don't personally have a settled opinion here): 1. Not only does everything die, many things naturally die as food. Being a victim of carnivores is a perfectly normal thing in nature. So even if you don't feel comfortable justifying killing animals in general with "everything dies," it should certainly justify killing animals for food. (BTW, my understanding is that halal- or kosher-certified meats are slaughtered very humanely/painlessly, so if you're worried about suffering and not death, sticking to those isn't a bad choice.) 2. Although things happen in nature, that doesn't mean they're not cruel, and as humans, we have the option of being more humane than nature. While many early humans would also have starved, frozen to death, or been eaten alive, we think it's pretty not great for modern-day humans to be subject to such a fate and we often think it's a moral obligation for society to prevent that from happening. So why should we not also save animals from their fate in nature instead of perpetuating it?
- infruset 8y ago
  How does your argument not apply to eating human beings, say those who would objectively have had a painful life, by first giving them a quality life before slaughtering them?
  - goldenkey 8y ago
    Seems pretty fair. Imagine you are in the Matrix and eventually when you die, it wasn't actually your real death, it was the harvesting of your meat in the real universe above. They gave you a pretty decent ride, eh? At some point we all have to admit we don't have full control of the universe - and we hope the universe will treat us kindly. Unfortunately, the universe itself, and the powerful within it, can become muddled - when men determines fate of others, as if they are Gods, then one must question their allegiance to `going with the flow.` It seems like most of us are only happy going with the flow of the all-powerful universe, not his second rate stooges... Pretty sure most vegetarian philosophy comes down to - if you want to act like a God when it comes to determining other's fates, be the God you'd want for yourself.
telesilla 8y ago
There is a distinct difference between being born naturally, or living a kind life free range, and suffering for a short period, than being bred for industrial purposes. Industrial breeding usually means male and females of the species are separated and artificially inseminated, the mothers are separated from their offspring, male animals are routinely killed or used for young meat, female animals are forced into often crowded conditions and given antibiotics and hormones to grow faster. This is not the pleasant life, it is slavery from the beginning with a most cruel end.
- cageface 8y ago
  Not to mention that the breeds we raise for mass production are now Frankenstein creations that could never survive in the wild. A lot of broiler chickens can’t even walk because they’re so top heavy.
megablast 8y ago
Do you drive? If so you are partly responsible for over 2 million world wide deaths a year. Many times that in number of animals cruely killed.

ZeroFries 8y ago

If the animal is free from suffering, including lacking awareness of what's happening during the killing, that's as free from cruelty as you can get. If lacking life is what's cruel, then vegetarianism doesn't really solve that problem, since the animal would never be born without farming.

bluntfang 8y ago
> If the animal is free from suffering, including lacking awareness of what's happening during the killing How do you measure this? How do you know for certain that what you're eating had no idea it was about to die when it did? How do you know animals don't experience existential suffering, similar to how humans experience it? Why do you believe that humans are in control of their livestock's emotional state, even when they provide the best environment for them?
- Pfhreak 8y ago
  You can't know. You can know what acute suffering looks like and try to avoid it. You can observe animal behavior and say, "They appear not to be suffering from existential dread beyond what they would in the wild", you may be able to measure cortisol levels in the meat. But you'll never know for sure.
delecti 8y ago
Lacking life isn't a remotely useful metric for cruelty, or every minute decision anyone has ever made is responsible for an infinite number of states of the universe not happening.
- lucb1e 8y ago
  They're not saying that this is a logical metric, they're saying that if that is your metric, then vegetarianism won't help you.
  - delecti 8y ago
    But they were the first one to mention anything resembling that metric. There's no reason to bring it up unless you think someone uses that metric, or alternatively as a straw man to argue against.
PerfectElement 8y ago
I don't think lacking life has ever been an argument vegetarians use. Once consciousness emerges, there is an innate desire to remain alive and to be free from suffering. Even if we could give animals a wonderful life in our current capitalist system, and then kill them without their awareness, we'd still need to justify (from a philosophical standpoint) why it would be immoral to do the same with a human animal.
- lucb1e 8y ago
  > I don't think lacking life has ever been an argument vegetarians use. That would make sense, since GP said: > If lacking life is what's cruel, then vegetarianism doesn't really solve that problem. So if vegetarians used the argument that lacking life is cruel, then vegetarianism would be cruel, right? It makes perfect sense (given GP's point) that they don't use that argument. You're the third replyer that writes as if they disagree about this while making the same point. I'm wondering if I'm reading this wrong, or if GP edited their comment just before I loaded the page.
  - PerfectElement 8y ago
    The GP implied that vegetarians use the logic "ending life is cruel" as a basis for their stance.
- ZeroFries 8y ago
  I suppose that argument could be used to justify killing some hermit unbeknownst to them. Most people, however, are connected socially, and killing them would make others suffer.
bronson 8y ago
> If lacking life is what's cruel Nobody's arguing this, are they? If you do believe this, then I hope you're breeding rats, rabbits, and insects as fast as possible!
- lucb1e 8y ago
  I think you two agree. They said that if that is your definition of cruelty, then vegetarianism can't help you. Not that the lack of life is cruel. You're being cynical with someone who didn't even say one side was right and the other is wrong.
  - bronson 8y ago
    But nobody has EVER argued that, have they? I'm saying it's a pointless statement and trying to demonstrate its ridiculousness.

Pfhreak 8y ago

I'm the first one to admit that the line is fuzzy. I read this story [1] by Glenn Greenwald (of Snowden interview fame), and I realized that I was not ok with gestation crates for pigs, or the practices espoused by the industrial farming of any animal. I do not object to raising animals and eating them, but I do object to essentially keeping them in brutal, squalid conditions. Animals should have access to the outdoors, be allowed to pursue their own social connections, have enough space to stretch and exercise, have feed that's natural and high quality, and generally exist in a comfortable way. Totally acknowledge that's my own definition. It's an arbitrary line in the sand to say, "Killing an animal is ok, causing suffering to an animal before killing it is not". I just... read the article and couldn't stomach letting any of my money flow to companies that would think that sort of behavior was ok. [1] https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missing-piglets-animal-rights-glenn-greenwald/ https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missin...

firethief 8y ago
That theoretical distinction makes sense to me, but I don't see how it would be possible to support one kind of animal agriculture and not the other with purchasing habits. When most consumers don't distinguish provenance, demand for animal products is fungible.
- Pfhreak 8y ago
  What I did: stop purchasing meat from the supermarket. Stop eating meat at restaurants. Find a local farmer and source a whole animal to split with your friends. Visit the farm, meet the farmer. A whole beef is a few thousand dollars, and splits nicely into 8ths. We spent, I believe, ~$6.50/lb for organic, grass fed beef. It's more time and cost up front, but now we have a freezer full of meat to draw from when we need to. If I eat meat, it's from that one animal. We don't eat meat often at home.
  - EliRivers 8y ago
    Apropos of just shootin' the breeze, could you have also met the animal? I wonder if that would make a further difference. I eat meat, but I put my hand up and say that if I ordered a steak in a restaurant and they brought out the cow and gave me a rock, and I had to beat the cow to death with the rock myself, I think I'd change my order. I'm not trying to make any points here; just freewheeling in conversation with what I know about myself.

elhudy 8y ago

Not sure what OPs requirements are, but mine are along these lines: "If animals like free-range cows have lives that are not worth living, almost all wild animals could plausibly be thought to also have lives that are worse than non-existence. Nature is often romanticised as a well-balanced idyll, so this may seem counter-intuitive. But extreme forms of suffering like starvation, dehydration, or being eaten alive by a predator are much more common in wild animals than farm animals. Crocodiles and hyenas disembowel their prey before killing them[1]. In birds, diseases like avian salmonellosis produce excruciating symptoms in the final days of life, such as depression, shivering, loss of appetite, and just before death, blindness, incoordination, staggering, tremor and convulsions.[2] While a farmed animal like a free-range cow has to endure some confinement and a premature and potentially painful death (stunning sometimes fails), a wild animal may suffer comparable experiences, such as surviving a cold winter or having to fear predators, while additionally undergoing the aforementioned extreme suffering[3]." -Thomas Sittler. "How Should Vegetarians Actually Live?"

meowface 8y ago
His point about wild animals is very accurate, but that's not considering that animals bred in captivity ("free"-range or otherwise) would not have been if not for meat demand. It's debatable whether non-existence is preferable to being raised and then killed, but the dichotomy isn't between wild animals vs. free-range animals. I think this is more an argument for an eventual plan to deal with wild animal suffering (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_animal_suffering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_animal_suffering), not an argument that whatever we do to free-range animals is acceptable because it's no worse than the suffering wild animals experience. Of course it's not very pragmatic for humanity to make a dent in that problem in the near future, especially without causing externalities, but just because it's hard doesn't mean the alternative is to say "they all have shit lives anyway, who cares what we do with them?"
- elhudy 8y ago
  >His point about wild animals is very accurate, but that's not considering that animals bred in captivity ("free"-range or otherwise) would not have been if not for meat demand. It's debatable whether non-existence is preferable to being raised and then killed, but the dichotomy isn't between wild animals vs. free-range animals The idea is is as follows. Might be worth just reading the article: "If ethical vegetarians believed animals have lives that are unpleasant but still better than non-existence, they would focus on reducing harm to these animals without reducing their numbers, for instance by supporting humane slaughter or buying meat from free-range cows. I will argue that if vegetarians were to apply this principle consistently, wild animal suffering would dominate their concerns, and may lead them to be stringent anti-environmentalists." http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2016/03/oxford-uehiro-prize-in-practical-ethics-how-should-vegetarians-actually-live-a-reply-to-xavier-cohen-written-by-thomas-sittler/ http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2016/03/oxford-uehiro-p...

WhompingWindows 8y ago

Ending life is not necessarily cruel...how about for veterinarians utilizing euthanasia? Let's say you have an animal that's 95% going to die sometime within 12-24 hours. If your client can pay $5000, which they can't usually, the chances improve to 50% chance of living. In most cases, for money or for suffering, euthanasia is the least cruel option, as it's vastly more affordable and a painless, harmless process.

ppseafield 8y ago
Euthanasia and factory farming are apples and oranges. Cows can live up to 20 years, but are often killed at 18-24 months. They aren't killed with euthanasia, but panicked and terrified, with bolts to the skull and slit throats, right after seeing several other cows killed that way. Their lives before that are often miserable to keep costs down. Is that the least cruel option?
- virtuallynathan 8y ago
  Cows aren't panicked and terrified, the hormone release from that would result in poor quality meat that has to be discarded. The slaughterhouses are humanely designed thanks to people like Temple Grandin. The cows are calm until the end.
  - goldenkey 8y ago
    "This is fine!" https://i.imgur.com/c4jt321.png https://i.imgur.com/c4jt321.png
Falling3 8y ago
I don't think anyone is saying ending life is necessarily cruel. We're saying unnecessarily ending life is cruel.

wickoff 8y ago

It's not like the animal is going to live forever if you don't kill it. In nature animals are often eaten alive by predators, die from disease, starvation and get horribly injured in competition for mates. A free range animal that's being humanely put down by a farmer has a much more pleasant life. If you go down this rabbit hole deep enough you can begin to question whether life itself should exist.

bluntfang 8y ago
What we do know for sure is that the animal would not have lived the same life if it weren't captive. >A free range animal that's being humanely put down by a farmer has a much more pleasant life. I don't think we can objectively say this. We have no idea what these animals want. Our humanity for these animals lives is nothing short of projection, purely because we have no idea what they want.
- 0x54D5 8y ago
  What they want is pretty obvious if you've ever actually been around any of these animals. They want what you want: food, sex, comfort, entertainment - in that order.
- pembrook 8y ago
  We can 100% objectively say this. Animals like chickens lack self awareness and the ability for future planning. They operate on instinct. We can prove this. Thus, they also don't know what they want--outside of the immediate satisfaction of an instinctual urge. They do feel pain and hunger however. In the wild, these animals suffer more pain and hunger. In free range "captivity" they suffer less. It's as simple as that. I swear most of the arguments against proper free range farming are grounded in either: a) A fallacious appeal to nature, ie. the false presumption that just because something is "natural" it is automatically better or b) Projection of human awareness and emotional intelligence onto other species Are factory farms more cruel to animals than proper free range farming? Yes. Is nature more cruel to animals than proper free range farming? Yes.
  - 8y ago

DamnYuppie 8y ago

I guess this is a good place for a rant for some down votes. The concept that death is cruel is ridiculous to me. EVRYTHING DIES, every animal in nature either dies of starvation, freezing to death, dies in a conflict with their own species for breeding rights, or gets to be attacked and eaten alive by a predator. The entirety of nature revolves around life and death struggles. Dying isn't cruel, to think so is a rejection of nature itself. That being said there are quicker and better ways of taking an animals life, the quicker and less painful the better. I will categorically state that for me how they live is more important than how they die. I don't agree with many of the practices in the production of chicken, pigs, cows, and yes even farmed fish and generally try to avoid them.

geofft 8y ago
Some further thoughts in two different directions (I don't personally have a settled opinion here): 1. Not only does everything die, many things naturally die as food. Being a victim of carnivores is a perfectly normal thing in nature. So even if you don't feel comfortable justifying killing animals in general with "everything dies," it should certainly justify killing animals for food. (BTW, my understanding is that halal- or kosher-certified meats are slaughtered very humanely/painlessly, so if you're worried about suffering and not death, sticking to those isn't a bad choice.) 2. Although things happen in nature, that doesn't mean they're not cruel, and as humans, we have the option of being more humane than nature. While many early humans would also have starved, frozen to death, or been eaten alive, we think it's pretty not great for modern-day humans to be subject to such a fate and we often think it's a moral obligation for society to prevent that from happening. So why should we not also save animals from their fate in nature instead of perpetuating it?
infruset 8y ago
How does your argument not apply to eating human beings, say those who would objectively have had a painful life, by first giving them a quality life before slaughtering them?
- goldenkey 8y ago
  Seems pretty fair. Imagine you are in the Matrix and eventually when you die, it wasn't actually your real death, it was the harvesting of your meat in the real universe above. They gave you a pretty decent ride, eh? At some point we all have to admit we don't have full control of the universe - and we hope the universe will treat us kindly. Unfortunately, the universe itself, and the powerful within it, can become muddled - when men determines fate of others, as if they are Gods, then one must question their allegiance to `going with the flow.` It seems like most of us are only happy going with the flow of the all-powerful universe, not his second rate stooges... Pretty sure most vegetarian philosophy comes down to - if you want to act like a God when it comes to determining other's fates, be the God you'd want for yourself.

telesilla 8y ago

There is a distinct difference between being born naturally, or living a kind life free range, and suffering for a short period, than being bred for industrial purposes. Industrial breeding usually means male and females of the species are separated and artificially inseminated, the mothers are separated from their offspring, male animals are routinely killed or used for young meat, female animals are forced into often crowded conditions and given antibiotics and hormones to grow faster. This is not the pleasant life, it is slavery from the beginning with a most cruel end.

cageface 8y ago
Not to mention that the breeds we raise for mass production are now Frankenstein creations that could never survive in the wild. A lot of broiler chickens can’t even walk because they’re so top heavy.

megablast 8y ago

Do you drive? If so you are partly responsible for over 2 million world wide deaths a year. Many times that in number of animals cruely killed.