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Lions don't boil antelopes alive, nor do they reportedly tear them apart while they're alive, instead they suffocate or sever their necks before eating them [1]

• imgabe 5y ago
  That’s kind of beside the point. I’m sure the process of being killed and eaten by a lion nevertheless causes “pain, distress, and harm”. These things are a part of life.
  • jacquesm 5y ago
    Yes, but Lions lack - for want of a better term - options, whereas we humans have plenty of options. We decide to boil living creatures alive, their feelings be damned because we like their taste better that way. But that's a very conscious choice to inflict harm. In the court of ethics the Lion was just eating, the human being was inflicting unnecessary pain.
    • imgabe 5y ago
      Who decides what's necessary? It's not really "necessary" to eat a lobster at all. Maybe we should just live in mud huts, eating the bare minimum amount of soybeans and rice to keep us just alive. That would inflict the minimal amount of "unnecessary" suffering. But then, why is it even necessary that we should be alive? All living things suffer at one point or another, whether it was necessary or not. There is no grand cosmic register that tallies up all the suffering and is going to cause something bad to happen if it gets too high. Suffering, in and of itself, is just a subjective experience that exists solely in a mind.
      • jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
        We don't need to live in mud huts, I'm pretty sure houses can be vegan. Also it doesn't need to be all or nothing, we can simply reduce suffering. I don't understand the logic of "we can't eliminate suffering, so might as well maximize suffering by boiling animals to death."
        • imgabe 5y ago
          If someone actually cared about reducing suffering, there are far more egregious sources of it in the world that could be addressed. Worrying about lobsters suffering in boiling water for 2 seconds before they die is the plastic straw ban of reducing suffering. If you don't want to boil lobsters, then don't boil lobsters. Just don't kid yourself into thinking that introducing a ban on it is some kind of great victory for reducing suffering in the world.
          • jacquesm 5y ago
            This is a fallacy of thinking that many people suffer from: because you are taking care of one bad thing doesn't mean you are immediately responsible for taking all bad things, conversely, that you are not able to take care of all bad things does not mean that you can ignore the one bad thing that you can take care of. I'm surprised this is so persistent, it seems pretty obvious. If five houses are on fire and you decide to take care of one of them that's fine, even if one or two of the others are bigger and a couple are smaller. At least you're doing something rather than nothing.
            • imgabe 5y ago
              It's not a fallacy at all, it's a concept called opportunity cost. Resources are not infinite, so we should spend them where they can have the most and best impact. If five houses are on fire, and you decide to go organize your sock drawer... Hey, you're doing something. An organized sock drawer is surely better than a disorganized one. But you could still be rightly criticized for wasting time on something unimportant when there are bigger problems you could be attending to.
• yibg 5y ago
  Not lions, but plenty of videos of Hyenas eating them alive.