4 ms·

> I feel like most people are like one or two a-ha insights away from veganism. Intelligence and awareness definitely has a spectrum across the animal kingdom b

> I feel like most people are like one or two a-ha insights away from veganism. Intelligence and awareness definitely has a spectrum across the animal kingdom but I’m not so sure about sentience itself. Do fish feel pain? Do insects experience fear? The only people who don't think animals feel pain are people who don't spend time with animals. Every farmer since the neolithic has known that animals feel pain and are to some degree or another intelligent (we intentionally bred some of the intelligence out of many.) That has no bearing on whether someone eats meat or not. You have assumptions that most of the world do not share with you. I feel bad if I see a fly slowly dying, but I'll still kill all houseflies that bother me. There's no contradiction in that. Death isn't suffering; quite the opposite.

kinghtown 4y ago
- harpersealtako 4y ago
  Admittedly I only skimmed through through it, but it looks like yet another vegan documentary (e.g. Dominion, which I watched all the way through and wasn't convinced at all by) where the worst examples of the worst excesses of industrialized slaughter are taken in the worst possible light and suggested to be broadly representative of the whole. Honestly, anybody with basically any exposure to real-life animal husbandry can find issues in these sorts of documentaries with minimal effort. For myself, I'm a hunter and so I regularly kill and butcher wild animals literally as a hobby -- despite this (or maybe because of it), I'm actually quite open to criticizing the ethics of intensive livestock farms as long as it's not through the lens of "meat is murder". I wish there was a halfway decent documentary that took a more balanced approach, because if your goal is "better animal welfare" rather than "the abolition of meat eating on moral grounds" then there's actually a lot to criticize and improve on. e.g. I thought "Food Inc" was a lot more even-handed, even though it still fell into some of the usual traps.
  - kinghtown 4y ago
    oh for sure these vegan documentaries are going to cherry pick footage (because the goal is to shock and expose) but it’s not as though they were invited to film in multiple locations around the world and chose the most messed up place of the bunch. The problem is that most people have this like cartoon visual in their head of farming and that these animals are killed gently and instantly when an extreme opposite is closer to the truth. I’d argue that industrialized slaughter is just never going to look good regardless of what facility it is. Lab grown meat is something I would support but as it stands today the meat industry is an abject horror and deserves to be exposed.
    - harpersealtako 4y ago
      So the "killed gently and instantly" is the main one I think is wrong about these documentaries and the part that is certainly the easiest to construct a false narrative with. Largely IMO the horrors of industrialized animal husbandry are in the everyday life of the animal, e.g. feedlots, rather than slaughterhouses. An example: there's this classic image you see all the time of the cow strung up by its hindquarters, kicking and flailing as it's moved along the assembly line. The problem is that this narrative is literally fraudulent. That cow is already dead, its brain has been destroyed by a bolt gun, and the reason it's "kicking" is because its 100% dead carcass is being shocked with electricity to induce rigor mortis. It's actually illegal to slaughter a cow any other way in a slaughterhouse. For me at least the reason I hunt is because I love the personal connection I get to what I eat. Being responsible for my food is incredibly satisfying. Lab grown meat to me seems like the opposite of that.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  No, as I said you just have assumptions (and values) that most people don't. Much industrialized farming being a nightmare that needs to change is not going to make me a vegan and think eating animal products in general is wrong. That would be a fallacious non-sequitur because opposing abuses in industrialized farming, or even opposing all industrialized farming is not veganism. Your entire approach is foolish and condescending though, assuming I don't already know as much or more than you about the subject.
  - kinghtown 4y ago

kinghtown 4y ago

harpersealtako 4y ago
Admittedly I only skimmed through through it, but it looks like yet another vegan documentary (e.g. Dominion, which I watched all the way through and wasn't convinced at all by) where the worst examples of the worst excesses of industrialized slaughter are taken in the worst possible light and suggested to be broadly representative of the whole. Honestly, anybody with basically any exposure to real-life animal husbandry can find issues in these sorts of documentaries with minimal effort. For myself, I'm a hunter and so I regularly kill and butcher wild animals literally as a hobby -- despite this (or maybe because of it), I'm actually quite open to criticizing the ethics of intensive livestock farms as long as it's not through the lens of "meat is murder". I wish there was a halfway decent documentary that took a more balanced approach, because if your goal is "better animal welfare" rather than "the abolition of meat eating on moral grounds" then there's actually a lot to criticize and improve on. e.g. I thought "Food Inc" was a lot more even-handed, even though it still fell into some of the usual traps.
- kinghtown 4y ago
  oh for sure these vegan documentaries are going to cherry pick footage (because the goal is to shock and expose) but it’s not as though they were invited to film in multiple locations around the world and chose the most messed up place of the bunch. The problem is that most people have this like cartoon visual in their head of farming and that these animals are killed gently and instantly when an extreme opposite is closer to the truth. I’d argue that industrialized slaughter is just never going to look good regardless of what facility it is. Lab grown meat is something I would support but as it stands today the meat industry is an abject horror and deserves to be exposed.
  - harpersealtako 4y ago
    So the "killed gently and instantly" is the main one I think is wrong about these documentaries and the part that is certainly the easiest to construct a false narrative with. Largely IMO the horrors of industrialized animal husbandry are in the everyday life of the animal, e.g. feedlots, rather than slaughterhouses. An example: there's this classic image you see all the time of the cow strung up by its hindquarters, kicking and flailing as it's moved along the assembly line. The problem is that this narrative is literally fraudulent. That cow is already dead, its brain has been destroyed by a bolt gun, and the reason it's "kicking" is because its 100% dead carcass is being shocked with electricity to induce rigor mortis. It's actually illegal to slaughter a cow any other way in a slaughterhouse. For me at least the reason I hunt is because I love the personal connection I get to what I eat. Being responsible for my food is incredibly satisfying. Lab grown meat to me seems like the opposite of that.
guerrilla 4y ago
No, as I said you just have assumptions (and values) that most people don't. Much industrialized farming being a nightmare that needs to change is not going to make me a vegan and think eating animal products in general is wrong. That would be a fallacious non-sequitur because opposing abuses in industrialized farming, or even opposing all industrialized farming is not veganism. Your entire approach is foolish and condescending though, assuming I don't already know as much or more than you about the subject.
- kinghtown 4y ago