7 ms·

You personally have the luxury of reflecting on food ethics. That doesn't make the whole of humanity "cruel" and "lacking empathy". Raw, brutal hunger simply d

by tpfour 7y ago

You personally have the luxury of reflecting on food ethics. That doesn't make the whole of humanity "cruel" and "lacking empathy". Raw, brutal hunger simply does not exist in advanced societies anymore. You have the privilege to be allowed to question your and others' eating habits. For most of our history that wasn't really a possibility.

kaesar14 7y ago
Almost every one in America has the "luxury" of examining food ethics, when 95% of people in this country actively consume a product made through what amounts to a holocaust. Of course we all are part of some systemic oppression one way or another in the products we consume, but with the availability of information on how brutal and sadistic factory farming is, nobody has an excuse in the first world.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  >what amounts to a holocaust. Hyperbole aside, I think we can all agree that farming and killing animals isn't as bad as mass executions of people.
  - meowface 7y ago
    Of course. The Armenian Holocaust also wasn't as bad as the Jewish Holocaust, by numbers. I'd still consider all three a kind of holocaust.
    - whatshisface 7y ago
      I still think the Armenian Holocaust was worse than farming. In fact I would go so far as to say every human genocide was worse than farming.
      - meowface 7y ago
        It depends what value you attribute to a life. For example, is the life of one adult human more valuable than the life of one hundred million adult chimpanzees? These things are very hard to quantify. It might be best to split human and non-human slaughter into entirely separate categories. You don't need to make comparisons between one and the other; you can just accept that both are unacceptable.
  - kaesar14 7y ago
    Why is it hyperbole? We slaughter 25 million animals a day in the United States. That amounts to over 9 billion animals a year. Do you attribute 0 consciousness to those animals, a complete and total unawareness of their suffering? Almost every single one of those animals goes through torture and standards of living no one would deign as humane if they were done on their pets.
    - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
      8 billion of those are chickens. Not gonna get excited about a chicken. Used to take care of them as a kid. Its not even apples-to-oranges to compare humans to chickens. Its apples-to-something-that-isn't-even-a-fruit. Apples-to-French-poetry...
      - kaesar14 7y ago
        Would you voluntarily clip the beaks of a chicken, pump them full of growth hormones, and pack them so tight they live on top of mounds of their own feces and degraded corpses of other chickens for a fraction of their natural lifespan before having their throats cut, often while not stunned? Regardless of how you feel about chickens vs humans, I don't see why it's binary. Life is life. Suffering is suffering. There's plenty of inside footage of how chickens and turkeys are treated, no conscious being should be subjected to that. What about the 121 million pigs slaughtered a year? The 29 million cows?
        whatshisface 7y ago
        Some people don't put any weight at all on animal suffering as long as a human benefits. You can't really prove that killing a pig isn't worth the ham you get, how would you even begin to make that objective?
        kaesar14 7y ago
        Ultimately it's up to each and every human to make that moral judgement. I don't have a problem with meat eating in the abstract, our species have done it for years, but I do take issue with the idea that it's 1) a luxury to examine food ethics for the first world, when most people commenting on this website live in a land of plenty in terms of food availability and 2) an animal's suffering means absolutely nothing, when I would bet that 99% of people visiting a slaughterhouse would be absolutely reviled by the modern animal condition with how animal farming is currently done. Does our perceived superiority of consciousness entitle us to the vile exploitation of billions of life forms? Would an aliens superior technology visiting Earth entitle them to enslave us, since we'd be nothing more than animals to them?
- anoncake 7y ago
  No one has ever been convinced to eat less meat by being compared to a Nazi.
  - kaesar14 7y ago
    I didn't say consuming meat products made by the modern factory farming system/methodology makes anyone a Nazi. I'm saying that consuming those products means you're consuming the products made by a system that actively commits genocide and torture at the scale of billions of lifeforms. That doesn't make everyone doing it evil, and I hope that as people come to read more and become more aware of what's going on they choose to stop their consumption of animal products. Individual agency is all we can have.
mfoy_ 7y ago
I think the point was that if aliens are to us as we are to cows, then... well... you can draw your own conclusions.
- meiraleal 7y ago
  And we might already be :) The same way the cow doesn't know it is going to be eaten.
  - WhompingWindows 7y ago
    That's a stretch...cows know of humans, they know specific humans, they fear the slaughterhouse in many cases. They may not understand their ultimate destiny, but it seems a vast stretch to imply our buried-in-the-ground corpses are being eaten by ultra intelligent aliens.
    - meiraleal 7y ago
      > but it seems a vast stretch to imply our buried-in-the-ground corpses are being eaten by ultra intelligent aliens. That is exactly what I mean. We, the not ultra intelligent specie might not have even a clue about how they could benefit from raising and harvesting us :) Maybe that is what some people call faith/religion. Some believe it, some disregard it as low level primitive behavior.
- dspig 7y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Skin_(novel) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Skin_(novel)

by tpfour 7y ago

kaesar14 7y ago

Almost every one in America has the "luxury" of examining food ethics, when 95% of people in this country actively consume a product made through what amounts to a holocaust. Of course we all are part of some systemic oppression one way or another in the products we consume, but with the availability of information on how brutal and sadistic factory farming is, nobody has an excuse in the first world.

whatshisface 7y ago
>what amounts to a holocaust. Hyperbole aside, I think we can all agree that farming and killing animals isn't as bad as mass executions of people.
- meowface 7y ago
  Of course. The Armenian Holocaust also wasn't as bad as the Jewish Holocaust, by numbers. I'd still consider all three a kind of holocaust.
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    I still think the Armenian Holocaust was worse than farming. In fact I would go so far as to say every human genocide was worse than farming.
    - meowface 7y ago
      It depends what value you attribute to a life. For example, is the life of one adult human more valuable than the life of one hundred million adult chimpanzees? These things are very hard to quantify. It might be best to split human and non-human slaughter into entirely separate categories. You don't need to make comparisons between one and the other; you can just accept that both are unacceptable.
- kaesar14 7y ago
  Why is it hyperbole? We slaughter 25 million animals a day in the United States. That amounts to over 9 billion animals a year. Do you attribute 0 consciousness to those animals, a complete and total unawareness of their suffering? Almost every single one of those animals goes through torture and standards of living no one would deign as humane if they were done on their pets.
  - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    8 billion of those are chickens. Not gonna get excited about a chicken. Used to take care of them as a kid. Its not even apples-to-oranges to compare humans to chickens. Its apples-to-something-that-isn't-even-a-fruit. Apples-to-French-poetry...
    - kaesar14 7y ago
      Would you voluntarily clip the beaks of a chicken, pump them full of growth hormones, and pack them so tight they live on top of mounds of their own feces and degraded corpses of other chickens for a fraction of their natural lifespan before having their throats cut, often while not stunned? Regardless of how you feel about chickens vs humans, I don't see why it's binary. Life is life. Suffering is suffering. There's plenty of inside footage of how chickens and turkeys are treated, no conscious being should be subjected to that. What about the 121 million pigs slaughtered a year? The 29 million cows?
      - whatshisface 7y ago
        Some people don't put any weight at all on animal suffering as long as a human benefits. You can't really prove that killing a pig isn't worth the ham you get, how would you even begin to make that objective?
        kaesar14 7y ago
        Ultimately it's up to each and every human to make that moral judgement. I don't have a problem with meat eating in the abstract, our species have done it for years, but I do take issue with the idea that it's 1) a luxury to examine food ethics for the first world, when most people commenting on this website live in a land of plenty in terms of food availability and 2) an animal's suffering means absolutely nothing, when I would bet that 99% of people visiting a slaughterhouse would be absolutely reviled by the modern animal condition with how animal farming is currently done. Does our perceived superiority of consciousness entitle us to the vile exploitation of billions of life forms? Would an aliens superior technology visiting Earth entitle them to enslave us, since we'd be nothing more than animals to them?
anoncake 7y ago
No one has ever been convinced to eat less meat by being compared to a Nazi.
- kaesar14 7y ago
  I didn't say consuming meat products made by the modern factory farming system/methodology makes anyone a Nazi. I'm saying that consuming those products means you're consuming the products made by a system that actively commits genocide and torture at the scale of billions of lifeforms. That doesn't make everyone doing it evil, and I hope that as people come to read more and become more aware of what's going on they choose to stop their consumption of animal products. Individual agency is all we can have.

mfoy_ 7y ago

I think the point was that if aliens are to us as we are to cows, then... well... you can draw your own conclusions.

meiraleal 7y ago
And we might already be :) The same way the cow doesn't know it is going to be eaten.
- WhompingWindows 7y ago
  That's a stretch...cows know of humans, they know specific humans, they fear the slaughterhouse in many cases. They may not understand their ultimate destiny, but it seems a vast stretch to imply our buried-in-the-ground corpses are being eaten by ultra intelligent aliens.
  - meiraleal 7y ago
    > but it seems a vast stretch to imply our buried-in-the-ground corpses are being eaten by ultra intelligent aliens. That is exactly what I mean. We, the not ultra intelligent specie might not have even a clue about how they could benefit from raising and harvesting us :) Maybe that is what some people call faith/religion. Some believe it, some disregard it as low level primitive behavior.
dspig 7y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Skin_(novel) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Skin_(novel)