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When I worked in Central Illinois recently, the home my wife and I rented bordered a field where young cows were raised. The small cows seemed to play some sort

• throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
  Pretty much all mammals engage in play. Play is practice for important life skills. Eg tickling is learning to protect vulnerable spots on the body
• username90 7y ago
  > Later my wife found stuff on the web about cows being given beach balls to play with and with each other. Uncomfortable truth for people who selfishly help environmentally destroy our planet with their meat addictions? I see it like this: Every time I pay for beef I create demand for more cows, thus I help fund little calves playing in the fields. Their lives might be a little shorter than usual, but I don't see why a short life wouldn't be worth living.
  • dr_dshiv 7y ago
    Would you pay 2x so you could know they had fields and beach balls? Or 1x for industrial cow-cubicles? Be honest now..
    • username90 7y ago
      That reasoning works just as well for human labor, we could always spend more to help the poor but we don't. At some point idealism hits reality and you have to make a trade-off. And at least I think it is better to give them 1x than 0x. And if some laws comes in saying that meat needs to cost 2x to give them decent conditions then I'd still buy meat. We even already have many such laws, so I'm not sure why people say that we don't care.
      • dr_dshiv 7y ago
        I'm not talking about being nice out of naive altruism, I'm talking about the selfish desire for karmic serenity. Sure, we could always act like assholes, but for many of us it doesn't feel good. That was Adam Smith's first book, "theory of moral sentiments", if you are into that sort of thing.
      • __s 7y ago
        My primary issue for paying premium for "the more ethical product" is that transparency is lacking, so I can't know whether I'd be only paying more to make myself feel better
    • usrusr 7y ago
      Not GP, just answering for myself: I definitely would. But I don't. Because without making it a full time hobby, it's impossible for me to know that the money will actually be spent on the animals' lifestyle and not on the lifestyle of their owners. Or even more likely, that of some intermediary. Also I don't really know if 2x would even be enough to offset the extra cost given the high efficiency of factory farming. The only practical way is improving minimum standards through regulation. Sorry free market, you are too opaque.
    • kpU8efre7r 7y ago
      2x. I respect meat and treat it as a special treat with small portions. If the price of meat were higher more people would do the same.
    • jancsika 7y ago
  • z_open 7y ago
    You also pay for calves being torn from their mothers while the mother weeps for days. You pay for the calf to be slaughtered in the cheapest legal way, and often not even that. You pay for the times the cow doesn't die immediately, but sits in agony haven't done nothing to deserve this. By the way, the agriculture industry loves that you believe those farms on the side of the road are where your meat comes from. Instead of the factories that actually produce the overwhelming majority of the meat in this country. You pay for them to be cramped up, tormented, and murdered.
    • codyb 7y ago
      Yea, the factory farms are definitely pretty awful. I’m lucky enough to both cook at home, live in a big city with lots of good butchers, and have the resources to be able to afford to buy organic, pasture raised, and grass fed meats as much as possible. It’s not always possible to avoid factory farmed meat products, I assume anything I eat out unless the restaurant is very upscale is going to be cheaper cuts, and my parents aren’t rich and don’t buy like that although I’ll try sometimes to grab a turkey for Thanksgiving for instance. Interestingly, my girlfriend is from India and vegetarian as many Indian people I’ve met seem to be, she didn’t like the Impossible Burger at all, because it was too meat like, which is a bit funny to me. Lab grown meats are showing promise for the future which is neat. But yea, life is bloody, violent, and miserable a lot of times. We should be thankful to live in such relatively peaceful times. Seems like there were just millenia’s of near constant region conflicts, famines, plagues, epidemics, religious wars. It hasn’t all gone away, but maybe we’re closer than we’ve ever been?
    • nradov 7y ago
      Do you get upset when a pack of wolves murders an elk? The elk seems to be suffering quite a bit of torment, and the killing process sometimes takes quite a while.
      • z_open 7y ago
        The wolf has little choice. You do but choose pain for others for hedonistic reasons. The agriculture industry is outrageously more cruel than a pack of wolves killing an elk. My expectation is for people to choose the path of least suffering to the extent they have the ability. And to answer your question, I do get upset when I watch a pack of wolves kill an elk. Just because it happens doesn't mean I don't recognize and empathize with things in pain.
  • Footkerchief 7y ago
    The above comment may read to some like a facile argument, but it expresses an important problem in some formulations of utilitarian ethics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox
  • Noos 7y ago
    Yeah, the main poster doesn't get that the end result of veganism is the relegation of food species to very expensive, very impractical pets that many people won't see outside of youtube or in protected areas.
    • hombre_fatal 7y ago
      Well, they probably do understand that but reject that on the same grounds they reject raising humans just to harvest their organs when they're 10 years old no matter how great of a life they had up until they were lead into the operating room. And organs actually save lives. It seems obviously unethical to me to raise a sentient organism (human or cow or cat) just to kill it prematurely for what's purely a luxury good for most people. Giving it a beach ball to play with seems completely ethically inconsequential. I wonder how many people who assert how great of a life this must be, only to be killed at someone else's pleasure, would accept this life for themselves or their children or even their pets. And they certainly buy their meat from the supermarket where their meat never got to play with a beach ball, anyways. It's closer to ethics-at-a-distance fantasy and utopian thought experiments instead of anything grounded in the horrors of reality.
    • ben_w 7y ago
      Why do you consider that outcome to be bad?
  • ben_w 7y ago
    None of the logic in that argument would change if I replaced “beef” with “long pork”. Personally, I don’t claim to know how much “personhood”[0] a cow has. It’s possible they don’t count and we shouldn’t care. But it’s only consistent to say “the meat industry is good for cows“ if you also say “the cannibalism industry is good for humans”. Not that I’m doing a great job of being a morally consistent person myself, as I’m only vegetarian, and dairy is also really bad for bovine welfare, what with the forced pregnancies and slaughtered newborn calves. [0] for lack of a better term — I know some people regard “person” as a synonym for “human”, but “self aware” and “sentient” are just as bad.
• simonsarris 7y ago
  > people who selfishly help environmentally destroy our planet with their meat addictions? I would say yes. You know you're not the only dog owner to say stuff like this, which I've always found odd. I think it's a kind of American exceptionalism writ large into vegetarian(?) thinking, where people see themselves as separate from the circle of life, instead of as someone in a relationship with nature. (Where they consider their pets "separate" and "part of nature" so its OK when they consume meat.) Pretty much everyone in farming communities knows that animals are intelligent, its the people who are extremely separated that find the odd epiphany. I recommend talking to the farmers next time you're in Central Illinois. By the way, pasture is good for the environment.
  • rfeather 7y ago
    Where did the OP say that they have a dog? I grew up around hunting and farms and also don't find it surprising that animals are fairly intelligent. While your statement about pasturing being good for the environment is partially true in that there are some forms that do some good, by and large meat production is actually one of the largest causes of GHG emissions.[1] A lot of this land would actually be used more efficiently for production of non-animal proteins like legumes, especially considering the land that is used to supplement pasturing through production of animal feed in most modern agriculture. http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/197623/icode/ http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/197623/icode/
    • simonsarris 7y ago
      I just clicked his blog and searched "dog" to see if he had a dog. > by and large meat production is actually one of the largest causes of GHG emissions. Your link puts it at 14.5% for the entire life-cycle, which makes it one of the... smallest causes for GHG emissions. It's the smallest versus any other sector in the graphs I can find[1] (vs Commercial and residential, Transportation, Industry, Electricity are all larger slices of pie). Why say its one of the largest? It really depends on the land and the crops. Lots of land cannot support anything but pasture, and lots of places would be ecologically improved with more pasture. Killing (say) a cow is worse than the killing all animals + ecosystem of the field that row crops require (obviously complete habitat destruction for any field critters at harvest time, but also pesticides and herbicides and such side effects). If you are worried about GHG issues, why not talk about food footprint or animal deaths per calories? Should you really be trucking in lettuce from Mexico and California if you live in New Hampshire, where I live? Should you be buying avocados if what grows here are animals? Should lettuce be grown at all? It seems very... speculative that so many are confident that the calculus tips in favor of "not the cow" here. If you eat pastured cow, you are supporting the ecosystem of cow (for its life or partial life if it EOLs in a feedlot) but also possums, raccoons, ducks, field mice, butterflies, snakes, birds, bees, and thousands of other insects that populate the fields of pasture. Ideally, for your entire meat consumption for the entire year, you eat a grand total of 1/2 cow. If you eat only row crops you support the destruction of these creatures, necessarily, unless at the same time you are carving out land for them elsewhere. But if there is reduced insect biomass in the world, or colony collapse disorder among pollinators, then I say this is blood on the hands of the vegetarians. Row crops (corn/soy/etc) have other destructive effects in the nature of their planting and harvesting, and good pasturing (which isn't all of it) builds soil and restores land. (If you want better pasturing everywhere, you're making an economic argument for something else, just like people who wish row crops didn't require mass pesticide/herbicide dousing.) It gets even more nuanced and weird if you look into the ecological destruction required to keep other crops going. And it gets further nuanced still if you get into what GHG emissions for livestock are. In the 1800's Americans destroyed an absolutely massive biomass of bison, to near extinction[2], and replaced them with an almost equivalent biomass of cows, unintentionally making the methane impact... pretty neutral, on the lifetime scale of things. But maybe if the bison still roamed free today, environmentalists would advocate for destroying them, I don't know. [1] for example: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bison_hunting#/media/File:Bison_skull_pile_edit.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bison_hunting#/media/File:Biso...
• stjohnswarts 7y ago
  i think you mean 1 cubic inch unless your parrot is only 2 dimensional
  • Baeocystin 7y ago
    Well, if we want to get technical, birds don't have a neocortex- it is a mammalian-only structure.
  • ben_w 7y ago
    The neocortex is only 2-4mm thick, so it kinda is 2D — I’ve seen it suggested that our brains have so many bumps in them just to provide more surface area. (Technically birds don’t have a neocortex, but apparently they have something that allows them to do many of the things that our neocortexes do).
• hyperpallium 7y ago
  > some pressure for life to develop different types of intelligence based on their biology and environment. I always wonder what was the pressure for humans to develop recursive language, and the cultural explosion about 70,000 years ago. And in the millions of years before that, the pressure to rapidly dwvelop larger brains. Other animals didn't seem to do that (though, we probanly haven't tracked the development of other animals brain-sizes over such time spans as assiduously as our own).
  • Madmallard 7y ago
    Everything is recursive anyway. I don't think it is a special property of our language.
  • WalterBright 7y ago
    The pressure may have been having hands. It's amazing all the things we can do with our hands.
    • hyperpallium 7y ago
      Interesting. Could have opened possibilies for intelligence to have utility. BTW parrots are quite dextrous with their feet and tongue.
      • WalterBright 7y ago
        Unfortunately for parrots, they cannot evolve larger brains without giving up flying. I suspect that birds in general have very optimized brains because of the weight constraints.
        • hyperpallium 7y ago
          Though flightlessness is an option: emu, penguin, dodo, even a parrot (New Zealand Kakapo).
          • 7y ago
• nick_mt 7y ago
  My grandmother (she died 5 years ago and I still miss her, she died at the venerable age 99) used to train calves to peform and win medals in festivals when she was a young girl. According to her they are one of the most intelligent mammals. Yet when they aged and fatten she participated in the butchery and preparation of the meat and everyone in tbe family still eat beef. I forgot was was my point, I apologize and miss my grandmom.
• l1g2d5 7y ago
  > Uncomfortable truth for people who selfishly help environmentally destroy our planet with their meat addictions? I would say yes. The best diet for the environment is the hunter gatherer diet. The second best diet for the environment is the omnivore diet. The worst diet for the environment is the vegan diet. People like you need to go learn what farming is. An inuit in alaska can eat a environmentally friendly hunter gather diet ( mostly meat ). An inuit cannot have an environmentally friendly vegan diet. Nowhere on earth can you have a environmentally friendly vegan diet. A vegan diet requires globalism. I swear veganism is the new anti-vaxx movement and it needs to be countered before it harms more people.