8 ms·

> "On a side note: I'm not vegetarian. I simply agree with those who are." This was my position for a long time until finally making the jump at the beginning

> "On a side note: I'm not vegetarian. I simply agree with those who are." This was my position for a long time until finally making the jump at the beginning of the pandemic (vegetarian, will rarely eat fish sometimes). For me, it was mostly about reducing suffering of other animals. I thought this way before but it's hard to change behavior and I liked hamburgers. I think this is the strongest argument and the environmental or nutritional arguments feel like side issues to avoid just tackling this issue directly. The meat substitutes are nice because they're close enough to satisfy the want at a cook out or something. There's some long reasoning behind it, but basically 'thoughtful local eating of meat' or whatever just felt like a rationalization to me. If an alien came down to earth and loved eating humans, but said they thanked every human they killed and ate or that the humans had a decent 20yrs of life before they killed them (and they only ate local humans), it still wouldn't sit well with me. In the above example I was basically the alien that understood and agreed with all the human arguments, but still ate human because I liked human burger. Being vegetarian makes my actions more consistent with what I think is the right thing to do. In theory, you could draw some line at 'well humans and other more intelligent beings are different because they have dreams and a plan for their future'. Even if humans could draw this line perfectly (which I'm skeptical of), you'd still need to kill the 'lesser' animals in a way without suffering or fear. I just don't think that's logistically possible. It's definitely not the way it's done in practice anyway.

fastball 6y ago
Drawing the line at cognizance is not something you do "in theory". That is where the vast majority of people on the planet draw the line. You going one step further doesn't make the line you've drawn any more objective.
- fossuser 6y ago
  It's not that the line is drawn 'in theory'. It's that they think they've drawn it in the right place (usually humans on one side and everything else on the other). I think this is pretty empirically wrong and I don't think humans are likely to get it right. Even ignoring that, there's still the suffering issue. There is objectivity at drawing the line to the left of neural nets.
  - jimmygrapes 6y ago
    If at some point in the future we discovered a way to identify and measure "suffering" in all creatures, and (given this) further found that the animals we eat do not experience it, then what? What if we managed to measure the opposite of suffering (whatever you want to call that; I'll go with pleasure for now)? What if the animals experience quantifiable higher pleasure when raised as food? What then? I'm sure you have thought of these scenarios in some way and have a more nuanced judgement, as most people I've talked to have. I'm just curious what are your reasons? Maybe they'll convince me!
    - fossuser 6y ago
      > "If at some point in the future we discovered a way to identify and measure "suffering" in all creatures, and (given this) further found that the animals we eat do not experience it, then what?" Then I'm okay with it (assuming in this hypothetical the result is true). I'd be surprised since fear/suffering is a pretty base level thing, but it'd change my mind. > "What if the animals experience quantifiable higher pleasure when raised as food?" There's still the issue of slaughtering them and the suffering/fear associated with that. Maybe you could argue on net that it's ethical from a utilitarian standpoint if their happy life outweighs their unhappy end. I think though, that I'd find it hard to overcome the negative suffering value they'd incur from getting killed. One thought experiment is imagine a pig that was historically bred to get happiness from being eaten. Its life dream is to get killed and eaten and that's its main purpose/goal in life, its only source of happiness. In this instance while breeding this animal may have been unethical, it already exists. Now is it ethical to not eat the pig? I think in the above example I think it'd be fine, but it's also pretty far removed from reality. Reminds me a bit of this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HawFh7RvDM4RyoJ2d/three-worlds-collide-0-8 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HawFh7RvDM4RyoJ2d/three-worl...
      - jjkaczor 6y ago
        > "One thought experiment is imagine a pig that was historically bred to get happiness from being eaten" Otherwise known as the 'Ameglian Major Cow' - https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Ameglian_Major_Cow https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Ameglian_Major_Cow
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
  I don't think this is true. People don't care about the thoughts and emotions of the animals we eat and we can eat other huamns, just as cognizant as ourselves, easily enough. Cannibalism is common throughout human history and there have been even quite advanced societies that practiced it widely, for instance the Aztecs. In any case humans have killed other humans for all sorts of reasons that do not include eating them, again throughout history. Why is invading another peoples' land and killing them to take their stuff any better than killing them to eat their meat?
  - fastball 6y ago
    I dunno, but 99.9% of human societies have outlawed murder. Name one that has outlawed killing all animals for food.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
      I can't. Can you name one society that has outlawed war? Because I was talking about war, not murder.
      - dane-pgp 6y ago
        By cross-referencing the list of states without armed forces[0] against the list of states which have ratified the amendment to the Rome Statute outlawing the crime of aggression under international law[1], I would say a reasonable list of countries would be: Andorra, Liechtenstein, and Samoa. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_without_armed_forces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_without_arme... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amendments_to_the_Rome_Statute_of_the_International_Criminal_Court#States_parties_to_the_amendment_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amendments_to_the_Rome_Statute...
numpad0 6y ago
> vegetarian, will rarely eat fish sometimes > Even if humans could draw this line perfectly (which I'm skeptical of), you'd still need to kill the 'lesser' animals in a way without suffering or fear. I just don't think that's logistically possible. So your line sits far above vegetables and below legged animals with fish near it on lesser side, I see...
- fossuser 6y ago
  I'm not perfect, I probably shouldn't eat fish either. Maybe I'll stop at some point. Just because you don't do something perfectly doesn't mean it's not worth doing at all.
  - the_gastropod 6y ago
    This is one reason I hate the common labels "vegetarian" and "vegan". People have this twisted "OHH! GOTCHA!" mentality if you're not perfectly consistent. And by that same token, I think it's common be be all-in or none-in. It's not at all uncommon for (especially Americans) to eat meat for every meal every day of the week. Cutting back is a good goal, even if you're still not "veg*"
  - uxcolumbo 6y ago
    Thanks for cutting back. The gradual approach is better than trying to change overnight. Veganism is pragmatic, not dogmatic.
    - numpad0 6y ago
      When there’s a hierarchy of “legged animals >> fish > plants”, it is dogmatic.
      - uxcolumbo 6y ago
        I don't fully get what you mean, can you clarify?
core-questions 6y ago
> For me, it was mostly about reducing suffering of other animals. I thought this way before but it's hard to change behavior and I liked hamburgers. I think this is the strongest argument and the environmental or nutritional arguments feel like side issues to avoid just tackling this issue directly. For me, this is the weakest argument. Animals are not people, and agriculturally farmed animals only exist because of our actions. Cruelty aside, farming and eating them is hardly immoral (as it is evolved behaviour - we wouldn't be here to talk about it otherwise). The suffering of an animal is not the suffering of a human; and if suffering is our primary concern, there's plenty of human suffering that still needs dealt with before we worry about animals. > In theory, you could draw some line at 'well humans and other more intelligent beings are different because they have dreams and a plan for their future'. I don't have to resort to dreams and plans. They're simply _not human_ and so as someone who doesn't anthropomorphize them it's easy to simply not care whatsoever about their emotional state. It doesn't noticeably impact the quality of the meat. I think there are a lot of oversocialized people who watched too many anthropomorphic movies and cartoons as kids. Some of them become sexually attracted to such, some of them just won't eat them anymore. Either way, it's a strange and divorced-from-reality way to go, seems to mostly have negative nutritional impact, and no difference is made in the world as less demand = cheaper meat = everyone else just gets more.
- cyberlurker 6y ago
  “Why help people in other countries when we have homeless? Why help homeless when we don’t help our veterans? Why help our veterans...”
  - core-questions 6y ago
    False equivocation. And yes, I'd help veterans first.
- fossuser 6y ago
  Just because something is evolved behavior doesn't make it moral: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QsMJQSFj7WfoTMNgW/the-tragedy-of-group-selectionism https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QsMJQSFj7WfoTMNgW/the-traged... Natural selection doesn't have morality as a goal, only passing on genetic material. > "The suffering of an animal is not the suffering of a human; and if suffering is our primary concern, there's plenty of human suffering that still needs dealt with before we worry about animals." I think it's possible to care about both and not eating meat is a relatively easy way to reduce one. > "They're simply _not human_ and so as someone who doesn't anthropomorphize them it's easy to simply not care whatsoever about their emotional state." This just puts humans in a special reference class by themselves. It makes it easy then, but I just don't find this that compelling. > "I think there are a lot of oversocialized people who watched too many anthropomorphic movies and cartoons as kids." If you have spent any time with animals you learn more about them, fear, suffering, varied emotional states are not uniquely human.
YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
>> For me, it was mostly about reducing suffering of other animals. The way I think of it, pigs are very intelligent, more intelligent than dogs. However, humans are more intelligent. If pigs were more intelligent, pigs would eat humans. And that's not a figure of speech. Pig would eat us if they could. They wouldn't stop and think, gee, does this little baby human girl cry because it doesn't want to be eaten, maybe I should stop munching on its belly? They wouldn't stop to think, sheesh, this little blond baby boy with piercing blue eyes is so cuuute, how can I eat it? They'd eat us. And they'd also eat the cows and the chicken and the sheep and the fish and everything else we eat. And they'd kill their babies to keep the cows lactating and to take their stomachs to make cheese with. And so on, and so forth. So why should I not eat them? What kind of superior morality am I supposed to claim for myself to think I'm morally better than a pig? None. A pig would eat me, so I eat a pig. I appreciate that's not a common line of reasoning and I'm possibly overestimating the nutritional value of humans, but in any case I don't see any problem with eating meat, given that I'm an animal and some animals eat other animals' meat.
- fossuser 6y ago
  > "So why should I not eat them? What kind of superior morality am I supposed to claim for myself to think I'm morally better than a pig? None. A pig would eat me, so I eat a pig." This just isn't very strong reasoning to me. Pigs and other animals do lots of things you would presumably not do. A pig would also not keep you in a farm to eat later (among many other industrialized things we do to livestock). Just because a pig would do something and is unable to choose does not make that equivalent to you doing the same thing as the pig when you are able to choose. We have the capacity to choose not to eat them and to reduce suffering as a result. That seems like something a more intelligent creature should have as a goal. If we set the bar at what other animals would do if they could, doesn't that justify basically any behavior? Other animals eat their own young sometimes, but if someone used that as a justification to eat their own infant I doubt you'd think that's a good thing. You are not a pig.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
    >> Pigs and other animals do lots of things you would presumably not do. Yes, but they also do this thing that I would do. This is why this debate exists in the first place, yes? Because some animals eat other animals and we're that kind of animal. It doesn't matter if some aninmals would, e.g., eat their own excreta, because that is not something that humans do anyway and so there is no reason to discuss whether we should do it too or not. >> A pig would also not keep you in a farm to eat later (among many other industrialized things we do to livestock). I am arguing that if pigs were more intelligent than we are they would do to us exactly what we do to them, including keeping us in farms to eat later etc. >> We have the capacity to choose not to eat them and to reduce suffering as a result. Most animals, particularly pigs, would get eaten by something anyway. By not eating them we are not reducing suffering, we are simply shifting the blame.
jessewmc 6y ago
If you want to reduce animal suffering, there's a pretty good argument that cows are the last animals/animal products you should stop eating. You should definitely stop eating eggs, as egg-laying chickens live short, miserable lives where their bodies are destroyed rapidly. Chickens, fish and other small animals in captivity live short, miserable lives, and one family can eat a whole chicken in a day -- thats alot of chicken deaths to eat chicken regularly. Cows by comparison generally live pretty good lives, better than any wild cattle. They can roam and eat well and socialize, and slaughter is pretty humane compared to being hunted down by predators or dying slowly of an infection, broken leg or other natural cause. And one cow death can feed an entire family for a very long time.
- fossuser 6y ago
  Yeah, I go out of my way to get eggs from pasture grazed hand collected chickens via goodeggs because of how they're tortured otherwise (https://www.goodeggs.com/sfbay/home https://www.goodeggs.com/sfbay/home). I learned about the difference between 'pasture grazed', 'free range', 'cagefree', etc. Pasture is the only one that seemed cruelty free. I was told in 'free range' they raise them inside with a door closed for the first part of their life because they lobbied for this due to 'disease', but then when they eventually open the door the chickens never go out because they've lived their whole lives in the little room. Being vegetarian is hard for me because I really love eating, it took me a while (and the pandemic) to really change behavior to align with what I think is the right thing.
  - string 6y ago
    Good for you for making the effort. I mean that honestly. You're right that free range is a complete bullshit term. Cruelty free eggs is unfortunately also a difficult one as far as I can tell. I can only speak for the UK but here it seems a lot of eggs are marketed along those lines, but they neglect to inform you that the male chicks are still either put in shredding machines or gassed to death. It I could find a supplier that sexed embryos prior to hatching I'd likely start eating eggs again.
  - HenryBemis 6y ago
gitrog 6y ago
I'm not trying to criticise you here at all, but since you don't eat meat mainly to reduce animal suffering, why are you okay with dairy? The dairy industry arguably abuses and mistreats animals far worse than the meat industry. Full disclosure: Vegetarian for 10 years, eat fish occasionally and have recently been trying to cut out dairy (but it's tough).
- fossuser 6y ago
  Probably because I’m new to it (about a year), it’s hard, and I’m imperfect. Cutting milk I think would be easy (decent alternatives), but losing cheese would make things a lot more difficult.
  - gitrog 6y ago
    I understand, believe me, I do, I guess I just brought it up as a warning not to do what every new vegetarian (including myself) has done: Use moral arguments to try to convince people that being a vegetarian is a more ethical choice. I think the sentiment applies to vegans as well, even if the impact isn't as direct. If everyone started consuming non-meat/non-dairy products, the socio-economical and agricultural effects of things like soy, almonds, etc will be egregious as well. We need to look at non-cruel and sustainable sources of food, but at the industrial level, not at the individual.
argvargc 6y ago
If I absolutely had to cause the suffering and death of an animal in order to keep myself alive, I would. But I don't, so I won't.

fastball 6y ago

Drawing the line at cognizance is not something you do "in theory". That is where the vast majority of people on the planet draw the line. You going one step further doesn't make the line you've drawn any more objective.

fossuser 6y ago
It's not that the line is drawn 'in theory'. It's that they think they've drawn it in the right place (usually humans on one side and everything else on the other). I think this is pretty empirically wrong and I don't think humans are likely to get it right. Even ignoring that, there's still the suffering issue. There is objectivity at drawing the line to the left of neural nets.
- jimmygrapes 6y ago
  If at some point in the future we discovered a way to identify and measure "suffering" in all creatures, and (given this) further found that the animals we eat do not experience it, then what? What if we managed to measure the opposite of suffering (whatever you want to call that; I'll go with pleasure for now)? What if the animals experience quantifiable higher pleasure when raised as food? What then? I'm sure you have thought of these scenarios in some way and have a more nuanced judgement, as most people I've talked to have. I'm just curious what are your reasons? Maybe they'll convince me!
  - fossuser 6y ago
    > "If at some point in the future we discovered a way to identify and measure "suffering" in all creatures, and (given this) further found that the animals we eat do not experience it, then what?" Then I'm okay with it (assuming in this hypothetical the result is true). I'd be surprised since fear/suffering is a pretty base level thing, but it'd change my mind. > "What if the animals experience quantifiable higher pleasure when raised as food?" There's still the issue of slaughtering them and the suffering/fear associated with that. Maybe you could argue on net that it's ethical from a utilitarian standpoint if their happy life outweighs their unhappy end. I think though, that I'd find it hard to overcome the negative suffering value they'd incur from getting killed. One thought experiment is imagine a pig that was historically bred to get happiness from being eaten. Its life dream is to get killed and eaten and that's its main purpose/goal in life, its only source of happiness. In this instance while breeding this animal may have been unethical, it already exists. Now is it ethical to not eat the pig? I think in the above example I think it'd be fine, but it's also pretty far removed from reality. Reminds me a bit of this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HawFh7RvDM4RyoJ2d/three-worlds-collide-0-8 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HawFh7RvDM4RyoJ2d/three-worl...
    - jjkaczor 6y ago
      > "One thought experiment is imagine a pig that was historically bred to get happiness from being eaten" Otherwise known as the 'Ameglian Major Cow' - https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Ameglian_Major_Cow https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Ameglian_Major_Cow
YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
I don't think this is true. People don't care about the thoughts and emotions of the animals we eat and we can eat other huamns, just as cognizant as ourselves, easily enough. Cannibalism is common throughout human history and there have been even quite advanced societies that practiced it widely, for instance the Aztecs. In any case humans have killed other humans for all sorts of reasons that do not include eating them, again throughout history. Why is invading another peoples' land and killing them to take their stuff any better than killing them to eat their meat?
- fastball 6y ago
  I dunno, but 99.9% of human societies have outlawed murder. Name one that has outlawed killing all animals for food.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
    I can't. Can you name one society that has outlawed war? Because I was talking about war, not murder.
    - dane-pgp 6y ago
      By cross-referencing the list of states without armed forces[0] against the list of states which have ratified the amendment to the Rome Statute outlawing the crime of aggression under international law[1], I would say a reasonable list of countries would be: Andorra, Liechtenstein, and Samoa. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_without_armed_forces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_without_arme... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amendments_to_the_Rome_Statute_of_the_International_Criminal_Court#States_parties_to_the_amendment_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amendments_to_the_Rome_Statute...

numpad0 6y ago

> vegetarian, will rarely eat fish sometimes > Even if humans could draw this line perfectly (which I'm skeptical of), you'd still need to kill the 'lesser' animals in a way without suffering or fear. I just don't think that's logistically possible. So your line sits far above vegetables and below legged animals with fish near it on lesser side, I see...

fossuser 6y ago
I'm not perfect, I probably shouldn't eat fish either. Maybe I'll stop at some point. Just because you don't do something perfectly doesn't mean it's not worth doing at all.
- the_gastropod 6y ago
  This is one reason I hate the common labels "vegetarian" and "vegan". People have this twisted "OHH! GOTCHA!" mentality if you're not perfectly consistent. And by that same token, I think it's common be be all-in or none-in. It's not at all uncommon for (especially Americans) to eat meat for every meal every day of the week. Cutting back is a good goal, even if you're still not "veg*"
- uxcolumbo 6y ago
  Thanks for cutting back. The gradual approach is better than trying to change overnight. Veganism is pragmatic, not dogmatic.
  - numpad0 6y ago
    When there’s a hierarchy of “legged animals >> fish > plants”, it is dogmatic.
    - uxcolumbo 6y ago
      I don't fully get what you mean, can you clarify?

core-questions 6y ago

> For me, it was mostly about reducing suffering of other animals. I thought this way before but it's hard to change behavior and I liked hamburgers. I think this is the strongest argument and the environmental or nutritional arguments feel like side issues to avoid just tackling this issue directly. For me, this is the weakest argument. Animals are not people, and agriculturally farmed animals only exist because of our actions. Cruelty aside, farming and eating them is hardly immoral (as it is evolved behaviour - we wouldn't be here to talk about it otherwise). The suffering of an animal is not the suffering of a human; and if suffering is our primary concern, there's plenty of human suffering that still needs dealt with before we worry about animals. > In theory, you could draw some line at 'well humans and other more intelligent beings are different because they have dreams and a plan for their future'. I don't have to resort to dreams and plans. They're simply _not human_ and so as someone who doesn't anthropomorphize them it's easy to simply not care whatsoever about their emotional state. It doesn't noticeably impact the quality of the meat. I think there are a lot of oversocialized people who watched too many anthropomorphic movies and cartoons as kids. Some of them become sexually attracted to such, some of them just won't eat them anymore. Either way, it's a strange and divorced-from-reality way to go, seems to mostly have negative nutritional impact, and no difference is made in the world as less demand = cheaper meat = everyone else just gets more.

cyberlurker 6y ago
“Why help people in other countries when we have homeless? Why help homeless when we don’t help our veterans? Why help our veterans...”
- core-questions 6y ago
  False equivocation. And yes, I'd help veterans first.
fossuser 6y ago
Just because something is evolved behavior doesn't make it moral: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QsMJQSFj7WfoTMNgW/the-tragedy-of-group-selectionism https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QsMJQSFj7WfoTMNgW/the-traged... Natural selection doesn't have morality as a goal, only passing on genetic material. > "The suffering of an animal is not the suffering of a human; and if suffering is our primary concern, there's plenty of human suffering that still needs dealt with before we worry about animals." I think it's possible to care about both and not eating meat is a relatively easy way to reduce one. > "They're simply _not human_ and so as someone who doesn't anthropomorphize them it's easy to simply not care whatsoever about their emotional state." This just puts humans in a special reference class by themselves. It makes it easy then, but I just don't find this that compelling. > "I think there are a lot of oversocialized people who watched too many anthropomorphic movies and cartoons as kids." If you have spent any time with animals you learn more about them, fear, suffering, varied emotional states are not uniquely human.

YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago

>> For me, it was mostly about reducing suffering of other animals. The way I think of it, pigs are very intelligent, more intelligent than dogs. However, humans are more intelligent. If pigs were more intelligent, pigs would eat humans. And that's not a figure of speech. Pig would eat us if they could. They wouldn't stop and think, gee, does this little baby human girl cry because it doesn't want to be eaten, maybe I should stop munching on its belly? They wouldn't stop to think, sheesh, this little blond baby boy with piercing blue eyes is so cuuute, how can I eat it? They'd eat us. And they'd also eat the cows and the chicken and the sheep and the fish and everything else we eat. And they'd kill their babies to keep the cows lactating and to take their stomachs to make cheese with. And so on, and so forth. So why should I not eat them? What kind of superior morality am I supposed to claim for myself to think I'm morally better than a pig? None. A pig would eat me, so I eat a pig. I appreciate that's not a common line of reasoning and I'm possibly overestimating the nutritional value of humans, but in any case I don't see any problem with eating meat, given that I'm an animal and some animals eat other animals' meat.

fossuser 6y ago
> "So why should I not eat them? What kind of superior morality am I supposed to claim for myself to think I'm morally better than a pig? None. A pig would eat me, so I eat a pig." This just isn't very strong reasoning to me. Pigs and other animals do lots of things you would presumably not do. A pig would also not keep you in a farm to eat later (among many other industrialized things we do to livestock). Just because a pig would do something and is unable to choose does not make that equivalent to you doing the same thing as the pig when you are able to choose. We have the capacity to choose not to eat them and to reduce suffering as a result. That seems like something a more intelligent creature should have as a goal. If we set the bar at what other animals would do if they could, doesn't that justify basically any behavior? Other animals eat their own young sometimes, but if someone used that as a justification to eat their own infant I doubt you'd think that's a good thing. You are not a pig.
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
  >> Pigs and other animals do lots of things you would presumably not do. Yes, but they also do this thing that I would do. This is why this debate exists in the first place, yes? Because some animals eat other animals and we're that kind of animal. It doesn't matter if some aninmals would, e.g., eat their own excreta, because that is not something that humans do anyway and so there is no reason to discuss whether we should do it too or not. >> A pig would also not keep you in a farm to eat later (among many other industrialized things we do to livestock). I am arguing that if pigs were more intelligent than we are they would do to us exactly what we do to them, including keeping us in farms to eat later etc. >> We have the capacity to choose not to eat them and to reduce suffering as a result. Most animals, particularly pigs, would get eaten by something anyway. By not eating them we are not reducing suffering, we are simply shifting the blame.

jessewmc 6y ago

If you want to reduce animal suffering, there's a pretty good argument that cows are the last animals/animal products you should stop eating. You should definitely stop eating eggs, as egg-laying chickens live short, miserable lives where their bodies are destroyed rapidly. Chickens, fish and other small animals in captivity live short, miserable lives, and one family can eat a whole chicken in a day -- thats alot of chicken deaths to eat chicken regularly. Cows by comparison generally live pretty good lives, better than any wild cattle. They can roam and eat well and socialize, and slaughter is pretty humane compared to being hunted down by predators or dying slowly of an infection, broken leg or other natural cause. And one cow death can feed an entire family for a very long time.

fossuser 6y ago
Yeah, I go out of my way to get eggs from pasture grazed hand collected chickens via goodeggs because of how they're tortured otherwise (https://www.goodeggs.com/sfbay/home https://www.goodeggs.com/sfbay/home). I learned about the difference between 'pasture grazed', 'free range', 'cagefree', etc. Pasture is the only one that seemed cruelty free. I was told in 'free range' they raise them inside with a door closed for the first part of their life because they lobbied for this due to 'disease', but then when they eventually open the door the chickens never go out because they've lived their whole lives in the little room. Being vegetarian is hard for me because I really love eating, it took me a while (and the pandemic) to really change behavior to align with what I think is the right thing.
- string 6y ago
  Good for you for making the effort. I mean that honestly. You're right that free range is a complete bullshit term. Cruelty free eggs is unfortunately also a difficult one as far as I can tell. I can only speak for the UK but here it seems a lot of eggs are marketed along those lines, but they neglect to inform you that the male chicks are still either put in shredding machines or gassed to death. It I could find a supplier that sexed embryos prior to hatching I'd likely start eating eggs again.
- HenryBemis 6y ago

gitrog 6y ago

I'm not trying to criticise you here at all, but since you don't eat meat mainly to reduce animal suffering, why are you okay with dairy? The dairy industry arguably abuses and mistreats animals far worse than the meat industry. Full disclosure: Vegetarian for 10 years, eat fish occasionally and have recently been trying to cut out dairy (but it's tough).

fossuser 6y ago
Probably because I’m new to it (about a year), it’s hard, and I’m imperfect. Cutting milk I think would be easy (decent alternatives), but losing cheese would make things a lot more difficult.
- gitrog 6y ago
  I understand, believe me, I do, I guess I just brought it up as a warning not to do what every new vegetarian (including myself) has done: Use moral arguments to try to convince people that being a vegetarian is a more ethical choice. I think the sentiment applies to vegans as well, even if the impact isn't as direct. If everyone started consuming non-meat/non-dairy products, the socio-economical and agricultural effects of things like soy, almonds, etc will be egregious as well. We need to look at non-cruel and sustainable sources of food, but at the industrial level, not at the individual.

argvargc 6y ago

If I absolutely had to cause the suffering and death of an animal in order to keep myself alive, I would. But I don't, so I won't.