6 ms·

Without speaking to any greater ethical obligation to “higher” animals: it feels very good to foster a conscious pattern of not harming bugs.

melony 5y ago
But they are delicious! I can't help eating them.
- mdp2021 5y ago
  Consider that they may have some self-restraint module you are unaware of, and you should start letting them bite you. Edit: I do not see how anyone can find this (contentful) statement disagreeable, which I see as purely logical conclusion (in form of a joke) after a few really simple assumptions. I am starting to assume disagreement comes from masochist insects which are part of the poster's collection, as they probably cannot type.
sweetheart 5y ago
We _should_ speak to the greater ethical obligations: animals feel a lot, including things like pain, discomfort, suffering, fear, anxiety, etc. Some more than others, certainly. This means that things we unnecessarily do to them which cause these feelings aren’t okay. And since we don’t need to eat any animals to be happy and healthy, raising and killing them in any capacity falls under “unnecessary suffering”. Don’t eat things that feel. You don’t need to and they don’t want to be consumed.
- tempestn 5y ago
  Don't treat farm animals cruelly I'm fully on board with. But if you don't eat animals at all, farm animals won't exist in the first place. The choice is between the animal having a life that ends as food, or no life. If the life is a miserable factory farm one, I can see how no life would be superior, but I don't believe that's always the case.
  - wander_homer 5y ago
    By far the majority of all cows on farms have a miserable life. The female ones were made to give ridiculous amounts of milk, they get forcibly impregnated every year so they constantly produce milk, their offspring is taken away from them immediately after birth and will likely never see a single drop of milk or touch from their mom, after a few years those cows are put down because their bodies are exhausted for being pregnant and producing milk for most of their lifes. Pigs and chicken have it probably even worse. A world with our demand for milk, eggs and meat is not possible without ridiculous amounts of harm for all animals involved.
    - tempestn 5y ago
      That's fair, and I agree that needs to change.
    - xattt 5y ago
      Weaning and raising a child with only vegan foods seems inhumane. How many beans, lentils and soy products do you need to make up for a serving of meat?
      - sweetheart 5y ago
        Why do you think it’s inhumane?…
      - wander_homer 5y ago
        Why is raising a child with vegan foods inhumane? And you do realize that in order for you to get a serving of meat, we first had to feed animals many times more calories from plant based products? The majority of our soy is used to fed animals. Right now we produce ~350 million tons of soy each year, which means with 150-450kcal/100gr for soy beans that's enough energy to feed everyone on earth. Since we're also eating other stuff this means we could actually reduce our soy production if we stopped feeding it to animals but used it ourselves.
  - sweetheart 5y ago
    Raising animals to torture and kill them is not a life we should seek out for anyone. Let’s not pretend we are doing anyone a favor. Cows, pigs, goats, horses, fish, clams, etc. will all be fine without us killing them by the billions.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- goatlover 5y ago
  And what are you going to do when plant and fungi researchers start making similar claims?
  - sweetheart 5y ago
    Then I'll live my life so as to not cause unnecessary suffering. For what it's worth, that still means eating plants as I need to (thus its necessary) and it still reduces the total amount of plants being eaten when compared to diets with animal products. But does anyone really believe plants are sentient? Nope! So we are likely able to completely avoid needing to worry about that.
    - Taywee 5y ago
      Plenty of people do believe that plants are sentient. It is a part of plenty of spiritual belief systems that ascribe life, spirit, and sentience to all living things, and often many nonliving things.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  It should be noted that animals won't stop suffering if we stop eating them. Animals in the wild usually live pretty desperate lives, and universally, always, 100% die horrible, horrible deaths that industrial processes would never inflict on them - their flesh tore open as they flee in a panic, or slowly starving to death as disease makes them unable to feed and insects burrow into their living bodies, or suffocating, or drowning or frostbite or or or. I'm not claiming that farm lives (or worse, industry lives) are in any sense good, or even better, but it's important to remember that nature itself has no qualms in inflicting pain and suffering on animals. Not to mention, we're only starting to learn how complex plants and fungi are, and that they have their own abilities to perceive the world, react to it, and communicate their reactions to other individuals. If (and this is a huge If, I fully admit that) it turns out plants and fungi are also capable of emotion or hurt, we really will need to re-examine some base assumptions of our morality.
  - sweetheart 5y ago
    I don't think any of that is relevant to the moral issue of eating animals when we don't need to to survive. The fact that animals die horrible deaths in the natural world is entirely irrelevant to our moral obligations to induce suffering. We can cross the plants-feel-pain bridge when and if we get there.

melony 5y ago

But they are delicious! I can't help eating them.

mdp2021 5y ago
Consider that they may have some self-restraint module you are unaware of, and you should start letting them bite you. Edit: I do not see how anyone can find this (contentful) statement disagreeable, which I see as purely logical conclusion (in form of a joke) after a few really simple assumptions. I am starting to assume disagreement comes from masochist insects which are part of the poster's collection, as they probably cannot type.

sweetheart 5y ago

We _should_ speak to the greater ethical obligations: animals feel a lot, including things like pain, discomfort, suffering, fear, anxiety, etc. Some more than others, certainly. This means that things we unnecessarily do to them which cause these feelings aren’t okay. And since we don’t need to eat any animals to be happy and healthy, raising and killing them in any capacity falls under “unnecessary suffering”. Don’t eat things that feel. You don’t need to and they don’t want to be consumed.

tempestn 5y ago
Don't treat farm animals cruelly I'm fully on board with. But if you don't eat animals at all, farm animals won't exist in the first place. The choice is between the animal having a life that ends as food, or no life. If the life is a miserable factory farm one, I can see how no life would be superior, but I don't believe that's always the case.
- wander_homer 5y ago
  By far the majority of all cows on farms have a miserable life. The female ones were made to give ridiculous amounts of milk, they get forcibly impregnated every year so they constantly produce milk, their offspring is taken away from them immediately after birth and will likely never see a single drop of milk or touch from their mom, after a few years those cows are put down because their bodies are exhausted for being pregnant and producing milk for most of their lifes. Pigs and chicken have it probably even worse. A world with our demand for milk, eggs and meat is not possible without ridiculous amounts of harm for all animals involved.
  - tempestn 5y ago
    That's fair, and I agree that needs to change.
  - xattt 5y ago
    Weaning and raising a child with only vegan foods seems inhumane. How many beans, lentils and soy products do you need to make up for a serving of meat?
    - sweetheart 5y ago
      Why do you think it’s inhumane?…
    - wander_homer 5y ago
      Why is raising a child with vegan foods inhumane? And you do realize that in order for you to get a serving of meat, we first had to feed animals many times more calories from plant based products? The majority of our soy is used to fed animals. Right now we produce ~350 million tons of soy each year, which means with 150-450kcal/100gr for soy beans that's enough energy to feed everyone on earth. Since we're also eating other stuff this means we could actually reduce our soy production if we stopped feeding it to animals but used it ourselves.
- sweetheart 5y ago
  Raising animals to torture and kill them is not a life we should seek out for anyone. Let’s not pretend we are doing anyone a favor. Cows, pigs, goats, horses, fish, clams, etc. will all be fine without us killing them by the billions.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
goatlover 5y ago
And what are you going to do when plant and fungi researchers start making similar claims?
- sweetheart 5y ago
  Then I'll live my life so as to not cause unnecessary suffering. For what it's worth, that still means eating plants as I need to (thus its necessary) and it still reduces the total amount of plants being eaten when compared to diets with animal products. But does anyone really believe plants are sentient? Nope! So we are likely able to completely avoid needing to worry about that.
  - Taywee 5y ago
    Plenty of people do believe that plants are sentient. It is a part of plenty of spiritual belief systems that ascribe life, spirit, and sentience to all living things, and often many nonliving things.
tsimionescu 5y ago
It should be noted that animals won't stop suffering if we stop eating them. Animals in the wild usually live pretty desperate lives, and universally, always, 100% die horrible, horrible deaths that industrial processes would never inflict on them - their flesh tore open as they flee in a panic, or slowly starving to death as disease makes them unable to feed and insects burrow into their living bodies, or suffocating, or drowning or frostbite or or or. I'm not claiming that farm lives (or worse, industry lives) are in any sense good, or even better, but it's important to remember that nature itself has no qualms in inflicting pain and suffering on animals. Not to mention, we're only starting to learn how complex plants and fungi are, and that they have their own abilities to perceive the world, react to it, and communicate their reactions to other individuals. If (and this is a huge If, I fully admit that) it turns out plants and fungi are also capable of emotion or hurt, we really will need to re-examine some base assumptions of our morality.
- sweetheart 5y ago
  I don't think any of that is relevant to the moral issue of eating animals when we don't need to to survive. The fact that animals die horrible deaths in the natural world is entirely irrelevant to our moral obligations to induce suffering. We can cross the plants-feel-pain bridge when and if we get there.