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I am an avid meat-lover but it does play on my conscience that I am in fact eating a former sentient being and potentially contributing to environmental devasta

I am an avid meat-lover but it does play on my conscience that I am in fact eating a former sentient being and potentially contributing to environmental devastation. I would appreciate answers to the following two, albeit simplistic questions that always plaque me when I consider stopping eating meat products: 1) Is it really unethical to eat animals when the natural trajectory of most animals lives was likely to be eaten by other animals or die some horrendous death in their natural environment? Isn't it better for an animal to live its best life on a free range farm being grass fed, then get quickly and humanely slaughtered? 2)If I made a personal decision to stop eating meat, would there be any significant impact at all on the overall environment realistically? For example, I recently watched the documentary Seaspiracy which showed the negative effects of commercial fishing. However, the reality is that me (not) eating a bowl of sashimi once a week makes no difference in the context of, say, countries like Japan slaughtering millions of fish daily (regardless of any change in behavior on my part or my small circle of influence)?

danShumway 5y ago
> Is it really unethical to eat animals when the natural trajectory of most animals lives was likely to be eaten by other animals or die some horrendous death The vast majority of meat that we produce isn't sparing animals that would have died anyway, it's not from hunting. We bring animals into existence (lots and lots of them, more than would naturally exist) for the sole purpose of killing them. Whether or not that distinction resonates with you morally -- different people have different reactions to that. But for me, it feels tangibly different. I also think about it from an individual perspective instead of a societal perspective. I stopped thinking about a binary "is it ever wrong to eat meat in any situation" question, and the question I started asking instead was "do I need to?" The answer to that question doesn't change just because of what the food chain is, or what animals would do to me if they got the chance, or what tigers do in the wild, or whether deer like being eaten by wolves. Those systems might exist, but do I need to be a part of them? Nearly all life on earth exploits other life to live. Humans aren't an exception to that, I'm not an exception to that. But if I can reduce my level of exploitation at little cost to me, then I want to. I don't buy that I would be killing animals as an act of charity, I know myself too well. For me personally, I can't pretend that I was eating chicken because I cared about the animals. > Isn't it better for an animal to live its best life on a free range farm being grass fed, then get quickly and humanely slaughtered? I don't think this is a scalable model for food production. My personal experience has been that choosing to eat only ethically sourced meat is more expensive and more difficult than going vegetarian. And I am doubtful even in a perfect world that free range farms with humane slaughterhouses would be capable of providing the amount of meat that people want to eat today. I think in order for that to happen, at the very least a lot of other people would need to go vegetarian or significantly reduce their meat intake. What you're asking is a complicated question, and different people have different answers to it, and even saying something like "killing animals is unethical" is itself a really broad answer that means different things to different people. But I feel reasonably confident today saying that inhumane treatment of animals is built into the agriculture industry at a very fundamental level, and I sort of think it's naive to say that's going to change. I see more people becoming vegetarian at a faster rate than I see people opting to find a local farmer that can supply them with local free range beef. And as uncomfortable as it might be to say, most of the meat you see in a store came from animals that led horrible lives before they were butchered in horrible ways. So on some level, I feel like the underlying ethical question of "do animals exist for food" is kind of besides the point, because even if they do exist for food, I don't see any evidence that we can keep meat production going at the same rate and at the same cost without being cruel to animals. I see a lot of people who want to believe that we can do free-range happy cows, but... everything I know about economy of scale contradicts that idea. > If I made a personal decision to stop eating meat, would there be any significant impact at all on the overall environment realistically? Maybe people can debate this, I can't say with certainty that insulating your house really well or reducing driving wouldn't be comparable in some cases. But most information I have seen suggests to me that for most people, eliminating meat (or even just reducing it) is one of the single highest-impact actions any individual can take for their own lives. So if you are looking for ways to reduce your personal environmental impact, then yes, reducing (or eliminating) meat does help at least as much as anything else you can do. But, let's get to the rest of your question: > However, the reality is that me (not) eating a bowl of sashimi once a week makes no difference in the context of, say, countries like Japan slaughtering millions of fish daily Correct, but here's the thing. Literally nothing that you do to reduce your own individual emissions is ever going to be significant next to the impact of industry and government. You sort your plastic, great. The impact of doing that is negligible compared to a single bill that regulates how water bottles are made. What makes vegetarianism promising is that there is genuinely a social shift happening on a wider scale than just with individuals, and that social shift has impact on industries. The biggest environmental impact of vegetarianism is when enough people shift that the meat industry overall starts to pivot or produce less meat, or where enough political pressure builds up that meat subsidies start to go away. The other thing that makes vegetarianism promising is that the more demand there is for meat substitutes, the cheaper those products become and the more resources are devoted into developing better products. We saw a similar thing happen with green energy. Individual choices meant very little compared to the amount of energy that industries used. But at some point, green energy got cheap, and demand got higher, and companies started getting into it as well. So I am cautious about telling people that what they do doesn't matter, because a lot of this stuff only changes when a certain threshold of people start getting involved or putting pressure on politicians to make changes. I don't want to pretend that reducing your own emissions is going to save the world, but I also disagree with the fatalism that says that individual choices don't matter. I don't know if vegetarianism has enough momentum to significantly reduce meat demand, but it might. And when I look at the alternatives, I don't think there's any chance at all that the ethical meat movement has enough momentum to change anything, so throwing weight behind the vegetarians is about as good a plan as anything else. Beyond Burgers might get cheaper than normal burgers at some point, and that could drive a large change in how restaurants source food and how normal people buy food. If enough people stop buying fish, commercial fishing might go down because of a loss of profits. But there is basically zero chance that free-range chicken eggs will ever be cheaper than caged eggs, or that fisheries are suddenly going to become sustainable out of the goodness of their own hearts.
sedatk 5y ago
> If I made a personal decision to stop eating meat, would there be any significant impact at all on the overall environment realistically? I couldn't find the source for this now, but I read somewhere that just skipping one meat-based meal a day would have more positive environmental impact than all your other individual efforts (recycling, solar, avoiding plastics etc) combined for the same day.
- sedatk 5y ago
  Since somebody downvoted, I assume for the missing source, here is an excerpt: "As well as revealing a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, these new findings demonstrated that switching just one red meat meal to plant-based a week could result in a 23 percent reduction (8 million hectares) in the UK’s domestic and international farmland use, and a 2 percent reduction in the UK’s water use (the same as taking 55 fewer showers per person per year)." https://theecologist.org/2019/jun/07/swapping-one-meal-day https://theecologist.org/2019/jun/07/swapping-one-meal-day I'll leave the rest to the reader to come up with the conclusion.
blux 5y ago
One counterpoint against 1), and what eventually pushed me to stop eating meat, is the supposed humane slaughtering of the animals. It is not humane at all, and there is a lot of malpractice against the animals while they are in the slaughterhouse. There was a broadcast on Dutch television highlighting these issues. If your stomach can handle it; here is the link, but I warn it is very expressive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2bwr7RotAs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2bwr7RotAs (~2m40 people reacting to what you will see; ~3m23 the actual footage) To be sure, this is not some incident but some fundamental issue throughout the industry (at least in the Netherlands). There is only one big company responsible for most of the slaughtering. The government bodies supposed to be monitoring their practices had their budget cuts for years and now it turns out they can no longer do their job, and are said to be part of the problem. It is hard to give citations here because most of it is in Dutch, I am not sure about the situation in the US. Slowly but surely there are more biological farms operating in the Netherlands, but still these animals are slaughtered at the same slaughterhouses the factory animals are slaughtered at. I am afraid there is no good story here. Another counterpoint is; you are talking about cattle, but what about pigs and chicken for example? They are not happily grazing on some green meadow, but mostly always indoors (talking Netherlands here again), being overfed to grow as fast as possible, get as many piglets or produce as much meat in a as short amount of time as possible, then to be butchered in some awful way if they are unlucky. It takes very little effort to find mountains of footage of animals being mistreated on farms all over the world. So I don't think the assumptions you make in 1) hold. There is no way to ensure that the meat you are eating (even biological meat), is from an animal that was treated respectfully during its lifetime and slaughtered in a humane way. Ad 2), by the fatalistic argument, a whole lot of things no longer make sense (who would you vote, your vote does not matter). But consider the network effect you may have in your decision to no longer eat meat, and for example start making too long comments on HN to try to convince other people to stop eating meat. In case you can convince more than person during your lifetime to stop eating meat, habits and what is considered acceptable will shift eventually.
- gnull 5y ago
  > I warn it is very expressive > ~3m23 the actual footage Pigs are stunned, hanged by their back legs and have their throats cut. What's the problem? If this is inhumane, how should humane slaughtering look like according to you?
hervature 5y ago
I think danShumway answered 1) pretty well. I just wanted to add my opinion about 2). Nothing an individual does in terms of personal behavior can have any "significant impact" at a global scale. If all humans made decisions like this, we would all come to the same conclusion, none of our individual actions are responsible. Which, while true, is ultimately a useless conclusion. I'd rather that we as a collective change our fundamental behavior for the better instead of governments imposing on our lives. If all governments decided tomorrow to ban all meat products, the world would undoubtedly be in a much better place. You also mention second order effects (small circle of influence) but even that is marginal. Being a vegan, I believe I've "converted" (just by exposing them to an alternative lifestyle) two people to vegetarian.
- BHSPitMonkey 5y ago
  This is another classic example of Tragedy of the Commons [1]. Outright bans will likely never be feasible at all, though we could (and should) consider banning many of the bad practices that usually come with large-scale factory farming (and publicly funding grants/subsidies for these plant-based alternatives). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
  - hervature 5y ago
    I prefer the equivalent but opposite legislation, remove meat and dairy subsidies. I don’t have faith in governments to constantly fine tune subsidies to the right things. Subsidies just become a means for politicians to pass money to their constituents. It took Canada 60 years to stop emphasizing cow milk consumption in their dietary guide, I have very little faith in governments to get things right let alone in a quick iterative fashion.
atweiden 5y ago
> Is it really unethical to eat animals when the natural trajectory of most animals lives was likely to be eaten by other animals or die some horrendous death in their natural environment? The ethical base of factory farming starts off equivalent with putting a wild animal into a zoo cage for the remainder of its life against its natural will to have freedom. Tack off some “ethical” points for the misery of its living conditions, which are almost universally terrible. Tack off still more ethics points for systematic premeditated murder on a commercial scale for profit. > Isn't it better for an animal to live its best life on a free range farm being grass fed, then get quickly and humanely slaughtered? As someone who has lived in an area with heavy animal agriculture, “free range” basically translates to “cram as many $ANIMALS as we legally can into an area modulo our budget, and then neglect them to every extent allowable by law, followed by murdering them in cold blood because we need money”. IOW “free range” is sick, twisted marketing that doesn’t reflect reality. > If I made a personal decision to stop eating meat, would there be any significant impact at all on the overall environment realistically? Nothing matters more than money to animal agriculture operations. Don’t underestimate the power of taking your money elsewhere. The rest of your commentary is more a critique of human overpopulation, and the myriad problems this poses.
theptip 5y ago
> 2)If I made a personal decision to stop eating meat, would there be any significant impact at all on the overall environment realistically? I think this is a slippery slope, ethically speaking; you could use the same logic to argue that there is no point reducing your CO2 emissions because there are billions of other people emitting too, or no point in taking any good action like donating to charity because you won’t solve world hunger. I think having a significant impact on the environment is an unreasonably high bar, as an individual in modern society. All you can do is control your personal impact, and maybe convince some other people too. Maybe eating meat represents 10% of your overall negative impact on the world (maybe more, maybe less, that is up to you to figure out); that would be a significant improvement worthy of effort and praise, even if you alone didn’t change the overall environment. After all, it’s only by everyone making an individual decision like this that we could actually coordinate to make a big difference to the environment.
ainiriand 5y ago
When I was a teenager I worked for dairy farms helping them with the accounting. A big part of their expenses were antibiotics and antidepressants for the cows that had a calf taken away and they had to stay there producing milk. It really shocked me.
open-source-ux 5y ago
I'm also a meat eater but have cut down on the amount of meat I eat. I think many of us in wealthy "western" countries don't realise we eat more meat today than in any time of history, thanks to industrial-scale farming and cheap supermarket prices. It wasn't always like this but we're now conditioned to think plentiful and cheap meat has always been the norm. In fact, in many countries where meat is more expensive, meat dishes are balanced with vegetables to create a dish where both are equal partners. In contrast, in western cuisines meat often dominates a meal with vegetables playing a poor or non-existent supporting role. This lengthy 2011 article by a British chef makes a good case for eating mostly vegetables but still occasionally enjoying meat from farms with high welfare standards. The joy of veg: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/aug/26/hugh-fearnley-whittingstall-vegetables https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/aug/26/hugh-fe... From the article: "Let me be clear: I have not become a vegetarian, nor do I think I ever will. So the dialogue I'm keen to begin with other meat-eaters is not about vegetarianism, it's about vegetables. I would love to persuade you to eat more vegetables. And thereby to eat less meat – and maybe a bit less fish too. Why? To summarise, we need to eat more vegetables and less flesh because vegetables are the foods that do us the most good and our planet the least harm."
scns 5y ago
I turned vegan after watching Game Changers: https://gamechangersmovie.com/the-film/where-to-watch/ https://gamechangersmovie.com/the-film/where-to-watch/ It was made by a guy who trains soldiers in deadly unarmed combat. He got injured and read that a vegan diet could speed up recovery. Instead of trying to convince with ethical concerns, it gave me plenty of sound logical reasons to eat vegan. The reason for me to eat organic meat was B12, but 39% of the people eating meat still have a B12 deficiency. 80% of farmland is used for animal husbandry, the size of Africa! We can feed way more than seven billion, if we farm more efficient. And when the strongest man in the world got there being vegan, i can skip animal products too.
- baud147258 5y ago
  > 80% of farmland is used for animal husbandry and how much of that is marginal land that can't be used to grow crops?
  - cies 5y ago
    Most of that 80% is used to grow crops, that are then fed to animals.
- ianai 5y ago
  Where do you get your b12 then? It’s excreted by bacteria and cleaned off in processing. Then, in most functional foods, put back in place as cyanocobalamin. But that produces cyanide when your liver processes it. So again, where do you get your b12? Is it cyanocobalamin?
  - danShumway 5y ago
    > But that produces cyanide when your liver processes it. Very small amounts. I don't see much evidence that people should be scared of cyanocabalamin (smokers potentially excluded), but of course if it's something you're worried about there are supplements that are based on adenosylcobalamin and methylcolbalamin instead. I'm sure some people will disagree with me on this, but I would not personally recommend going vegan without taking a B12 supplement. Yes, there are fortified foods now, but I sort of feel like it's safer. Honestly, it's something that non-vegans should at least kind of think about as well, since... a non-trivial number of non-vegans are also B12 deficient. But the more straightforward way to sort this stuff out is to just get a blood test and then ask a doctor.
ookdatnog 5y ago
I'm quite torn about the utilitarian argument, that claims that it is justified to kill animals for their meat as long as we give them better lives than they would have in nature. I have used this argument myself, but it occurred to me that you could use a similar argument to defend human slavery: why should it not be legal to buy a slave from a poor country where there's famine and war? You could provide your slave with an objectively better, safer, and more comfortable life, and it's unlikely someone else would help them. I don't buy that argument at all though, so I'm not sure I should buy the quality-of-life argument for farm animals. But I'm not really sure and I've gone back and forth on this, would love to see some other thoughts on this.
kexx 5y ago
1) The ethicality of something is not sourced from nature. If this would be the case, then raping would be completely okay as animals doing something like that too, right? It's more coming from empathy, like we don't let people beating or killing each others as you don't want that happened to you as well. 2) In reality this is more like a demand issue. I eat meat because I like it even if I see it as somewhat unethical. Your personal decision does not really count, but the society's overall understanding of the issue. It's like your vote vs election results, your vote counts, but you are not gonna change the world single-handedly. Personally I think the real solution will be growing meat artificially, only muscles without the rest of the animal.

danShumway 5y ago

> Is it really unethical to eat animals when the natural trajectory of most animals lives was likely to be eaten by other animals or die some horrendous death The vast majority of meat that we produce isn't sparing animals that would have died anyway, it's not from hunting. We bring animals into existence (lots and lots of them, more than would naturally exist) for the sole purpose of killing them. Whether or not that distinction resonates with you morally -- different people have different reactions to that. But for me, it feels tangibly different. I also think about it from an individual perspective instead of a societal perspective. I stopped thinking about a binary "is it ever wrong to eat meat in any situation" question, and the question I started asking instead was "do I need to?" The answer to that question doesn't change just because of what the food chain is, or what animals would do to me if they got the chance, or what tigers do in the wild, or whether deer like being eaten by wolves. Those systems might exist, but do I need to be a part of them? Nearly all life on earth exploits other life to live. Humans aren't an exception to that, I'm not an exception to that. But if I can reduce my level of exploitation at little cost to me, then I want to. I don't buy that I would be killing animals as an act of charity, I know myself too well. For me personally, I can't pretend that I was eating chicken because I cared about the animals. > Isn't it better for an animal to live its best life on a free range farm being grass fed, then get quickly and humanely slaughtered? I don't think this is a scalable model for food production. My personal experience has been that choosing to eat only ethically sourced meat is more expensive and more difficult than going vegetarian. And I am doubtful even in a perfect world that free range farms with humane slaughterhouses would be capable of providing the amount of meat that people want to eat today. I think in order for that to happen, at the very least a lot of other people would need to go vegetarian or significantly reduce their meat intake. What you're asking is a complicated question, and different people have different answers to it, and even saying something like "killing animals is unethical" is itself a really broad answer that means different things to different people. But I feel reasonably confident today saying that inhumane treatment of animals is built into the agriculture industry at a very fundamental level, and I sort of think it's naive to say that's going to change. I see more people becoming vegetarian at a faster rate than I see people opting to find a local farmer that can supply them with local free range beef. And as uncomfortable as it might be to say, most of the meat you see in a store came from animals that led horrible lives before they were butchered in horrible ways. So on some level, I feel like the underlying ethical question of "do animals exist for food" is kind of besides the point, because even if they do exist for food, I don't see any evidence that we can keep meat production going at the same rate and at the same cost without being cruel to animals. I see a lot of people who want to believe that we can do free-range happy cows, but... everything I know about economy of scale contradicts that idea. > If I made a personal decision to stop eating meat, would there be any significant impact at all on the overall environment realistically? Maybe people can debate this, I can't say with certainty that insulating your house really well or reducing driving wouldn't be comparable in some cases. But most information I have seen suggests to me that for most people, eliminating meat (or even just reducing it) is one of the single highest-impact actions any individual can take for their own lives. So if you are looking for ways to reduce your personal environmental impact, then yes, reducing (or eliminating) meat does help at least as much as anything else you can do. But, let's get to the rest of your question: > However, the reality is that me (not) eating a bowl of sashimi once a week makes no difference in the context of, say, countries like Japan slaughtering millions of fish daily Correct, but here's the thing. Literally nothing that you do to reduce your own individual emissions is ever going to be significant next to the impact of industry and government. You sort your plastic, great. The impact of doing that is negligible compared to a single bill that regulates how water bottles are made. What makes vegetarianism promising is that there is genuinely a social shift happening on a wider scale than just with individuals, and that social shift has impact on industries. The biggest environmental impact of vegetarianism is when enough people shift that the meat industry overall starts to pivot or produce less meat, or where enough political pressure builds up that meat subsidies start to go away. The other thing that makes vegetarianism promising is that the more demand there is for meat substitutes, the cheaper those products become and the more resources are devoted into developing better products. We saw a similar thing happen with green energy. Individual choices meant very little compared to the amount of energy that industries used. But at some point, green energy got cheap, and demand got higher, and companies started getting into it as well. So I am cautious about telling people that what they do doesn't matter, because a lot of this stuff only changes when a certain threshold of people start getting involved or putting pressure on politicians to make changes. I don't want to pretend that reducing your own emissions is going to save the world, but I also disagree with the fatalism that says that individual choices don't matter. I don't know if vegetarianism has enough momentum to significantly reduce meat demand, but it might. And when I look at the alternatives, I don't think there's any chance at all that the ethical meat movement has enough momentum to change anything, so throwing weight behind the vegetarians is about as good a plan as anything else. Beyond Burgers might get cheaper than normal burgers at some point, and that could drive a large change in how restaurants source food and how normal people buy food. If enough people stop buying fish, commercial fishing might go down because of a loss of profits. But there is basically zero chance that free-range chicken eggs will ever be cheaper than caged eggs, or that fisheries are suddenly going to become sustainable out of the goodness of their own hearts.

sedatk 5y ago

> If I made a personal decision to stop eating meat, would there be any significant impact at all on the overall environment realistically? I couldn't find the source for this now, but I read somewhere that just skipping one meat-based meal a day would have more positive environmental impact than all your other individual efforts (recycling, solar, avoiding plastics etc) combined for the same day.

sedatk 5y ago
Since somebody downvoted, I assume for the missing source, here is an excerpt: "As well as revealing a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, these new findings demonstrated that switching just one red meat meal to plant-based a week could result in a 23 percent reduction (8 million hectares) in the UK’s domestic and international farmland use, and a 2 percent reduction in the UK’s water use (the same as taking 55 fewer showers per person per year)." https://theecologist.org/2019/jun/07/swapping-one-meal-day https://theecologist.org/2019/jun/07/swapping-one-meal-day I'll leave the rest to the reader to come up with the conclusion.

blux 5y ago

One counterpoint against 1), and what eventually pushed me to stop eating meat, is the supposed humane slaughtering of the animals. It is not humane at all, and there is a lot of malpractice against the animals while they are in the slaughterhouse. There was a broadcast on Dutch television highlighting these issues. If your stomach can handle it; here is the link, but I warn it is very expressive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2bwr7RotAs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2bwr7RotAs (~2m40 people reacting to what you will see; ~3m23 the actual footage) To be sure, this is not some incident but some fundamental issue throughout the industry (at least in the Netherlands). There is only one big company responsible for most of the slaughtering. The government bodies supposed to be monitoring their practices had their budget cuts for years and now it turns out they can no longer do their job, and are said to be part of the problem. It is hard to give citations here because most of it is in Dutch, I am not sure about the situation in the US. Slowly but surely there are more biological farms operating in the Netherlands, but still these animals are slaughtered at the same slaughterhouses the factory animals are slaughtered at. I am afraid there is no good story here. Another counterpoint is; you are talking about cattle, but what about pigs and chicken for example? They are not happily grazing on some green meadow, but mostly always indoors (talking Netherlands here again), being overfed to grow as fast as possible, get as many piglets or produce as much meat in a as short amount of time as possible, then to be butchered in some awful way if they are unlucky. It takes very little effort to find mountains of footage of animals being mistreated on farms all over the world. So I don't think the assumptions you make in 1) hold. There is no way to ensure that the meat you are eating (even biological meat), is from an animal that was treated respectfully during its lifetime and slaughtered in a humane way. Ad 2), by the fatalistic argument, a whole lot of things no longer make sense (who would you vote, your vote does not matter). But consider the network effect you may have in your decision to no longer eat meat, and for example start making too long comments on HN to try to convince other people to stop eating meat. In case you can convince more than person during your lifetime to stop eating meat, habits and what is considered acceptable will shift eventually.

gnull 5y ago
> I warn it is very expressive > ~3m23 the actual footage Pigs are stunned, hanged by their back legs and have their throats cut. What's the problem? If this is inhumane, how should humane slaughtering look like according to you?

hervature 5y ago

I think danShumway answered 1) pretty well. I just wanted to add my opinion about 2). Nothing an individual does in terms of personal behavior can have any "significant impact" at a global scale. If all humans made decisions like this, we would all come to the same conclusion, none of our individual actions are responsible. Which, while true, is ultimately a useless conclusion. I'd rather that we as a collective change our fundamental behavior for the better instead of governments imposing on our lives. If all governments decided tomorrow to ban all meat products, the world would undoubtedly be in a much better place. You also mention second order effects (small circle of influence) but even that is marginal. Being a vegan, I believe I've "converted" (just by exposing them to an alternative lifestyle) two people to vegetarian.

BHSPitMonkey 5y ago
This is another classic example of Tragedy of the Commons [1]. Outright bans will likely never be feasible at all, though we could (and should) consider banning many of the bad practices that usually come with large-scale factory farming (and publicly funding grants/subsidies for these plant-based alternatives). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
- hervature 5y ago
  I prefer the equivalent but opposite legislation, remove meat and dairy subsidies. I don’t have faith in governments to constantly fine tune subsidies to the right things. Subsidies just become a means for politicians to pass money to their constituents. It took Canada 60 years to stop emphasizing cow milk consumption in their dietary guide, I have very little faith in governments to get things right let alone in a quick iterative fashion.

atweiden 5y ago

> Is it really unethical to eat animals when the natural trajectory of most animals lives was likely to be eaten by other animals or die some horrendous death in their natural environment? The ethical base of factory farming starts off equivalent with putting a wild animal into a zoo cage for the remainder of its life against its natural will to have freedom. Tack off some “ethical” points for the misery of its living conditions, which are almost universally terrible. Tack off still more ethics points for systematic premeditated murder on a commercial scale for profit. > Isn't it better for an animal to live its best life on a free range farm being grass fed, then get quickly and humanely slaughtered? As someone who has lived in an area with heavy animal agriculture, “free range” basically translates to “cram as many $ANIMALS as we legally can into an area modulo our budget, and then neglect them to every extent allowable by law, followed by murdering them in cold blood because we need money”. IOW “free range” is sick, twisted marketing that doesn’t reflect reality. > If I made a personal decision to stop eating meat, would there be any significant impact at all on the overall environment realistically? Nothing matters more than money to animal agriculture operations. Don’t underestimate the power of taking your money elsewhere. The rest of your commentary is more a critique of human overpopulation, and the myriad problems this poses.

theptip 5y ago

> 2)If I made a personal decision to stop eating meat, would there be any significant impact at all on the overall environment realistically? I think this is a slippery slope, ethically speaking; you could use the same logic to argue that there is no point reducing your CO2 emissions because there are billions of other people emitting too, or no point in taking any good action like donating to charity because you won’t solve world hunger. I think having a significant impact on the environment is an unreasonably high bar, as an individual in modern society. All you can do is control your personal impact, and maybe convince some other people too. Maybe eating meat represents 10% of your overall negative impact on the world (maybe more, maybe less, that is up to you to figure out); that would be a significant improvement worthy of effort and praise, even if you alone didn’t change the overall environment. After all, it’s only by everyone making an individual decision like this that we could actually coordinate to make a big difference to the environment.

ainiriand 5y ago

When I was a teenager I worked for dairy farms helping them with the accounting. A big part of their expenses were antibiotics and antidepressants for the cows that had a calf taken away and they had to stay there producing milk. It really shocked me.

open-source-ux 5y ago

I'm also a meat eater but have cut down on the amount of meat I eat. I think many of us in wealthy "western" countries don't realise we eat more meat today than in any time of history, thanks to industrial-scale farming and cheap supermarket prices. It wasn't always like this but we're now conditioned to think plentiful and cheap meat has always been the norm. In fact, in many countries where meat is more expensive, meat dishes are balanced with vegetables to create a dish where both are equal partners. In contrast, in western cuisines meat often dominates a meal with vegetables playing a poor or non-existent supporting role. This lengthy 2011 article by a British chef makes a good case for eating mostly vegetables but still occasionally enjoying meat from farms with high welfare standards. The joy of veg: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/aug/26/hugh-fearnley-whittingstall-vegetables https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/aug/26/hugh-fe... From the article: "Let me be clear: I have not become a vegetarian, nor do I think I ever will. So the dialogue I'm keen to begin with other meat-eaters is not about vegetarianism, it's about vegetables. I would love to persuade you to eat more vegetables. And thereby to eat less meat – and maybe a bit less fish too. Why? To summarise, we need to eat more vegetables and less flesh because vegetables are the foods that do us the most good and our planet the least harm."

scns 5y ago

I turned vegan after watching Game Changers: https://gamechangersmovie.com/the-film/where-to-watch/ https://gamechangersmovie.com/the-film/where-to-watch/ It was made by a guy who trains soldiers in deadly unarmed combat. He got injured and read that a vegan diet could speed up recovery. Instead of trying to convince with ethical concerns, it gave me plenty of sound logical reasons to eat vegan. The reason for me to eat organic meat was B12, but 39% of the people eating meat still have a B12 deficiency. 80% of farmland is used for animal husbandry, the size of Africa! We can feed way more than seven billion, if we farm more efficient. And when the strongest man in the world got there being vegan, i can skip animal products too.

baud147258 5y ago
> 80% of farmland is used for animal husbandry and how much of that is marginal land that can't be used to grow crops?
- cies 5y ago
  Most of that 80% is used to grow crops, that are then fed to animals.
ianai 5y ago
Where do you get your b12 then? It’s excreted by bacteria and cleaned off in processing. Then, in most functional foods, put back in place as cyanocobalamin. But that produces cyanide when your liver processes it. So again, where do you get your b12? Is it cyanocobalamin?
- danShumway 5y ago
  > But that produces cyanide when your liver processes it. Very small amounts. I don't see much evidence that people should be scared of cyanocabalamin (smokers potentially excluded), but of course if it's something you're worried about there are supplements that are based on adenosylcobalamin and methylcolbalamin instead. I'm sure some people will disagree with me on this, but I would not personally recommend going vegan without taking a B12 supplement. Yes, there are fortified foods now, but I sort of feel like it's safer. Honestly, it's something that non-vegans should at least kind of think about as well, since... a non-trivial number of non-vegans are also B12 deficient. But the more straightforward way to sort this stuff out is to just get a blood test and then ask a doctor.

ookdatnog 5y ago

I'm quite torn about the utilitarian argument, that claims that it is justified to kill animals for their meat as long as we give them better lives than they would have in nature. I have used this argument myself, but it occurred to me that you could use a similar argument to defend human slavery: why should it not be legal to buy a slave from a poor country where there's famine and war? You could provide your slave with an objectively better, safer, and more comfortable life, and it's unlikely someone else would help them. I don't buy that argument at all though, so I'm not sure I should buy the quality-of-life argument for farm animals. But I'm not really sure and I've gone back and forth on this, would love to see some other thoughts on this.

kexx 5y ago

1) The ethicality of something is not sourced from nature. If this would be the case, then raping would be completely okay as animals doing something like that too, right? It's more coming from empathy, like we don't let people beating or killing each others as you don't want that happened to you as well. 2) In reality this is more like a demand issue. I eat meat because I like it even if I see it as somewhat unethical. Your personal decision does not really count, but the society's overall understanding of the issue. It's like your vote vs election results, your vote counts, but you are not gonna change the world single-handedly. Personally I think the real solution will be growing meat artificially, only muscles without the rest of the animal.