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Also, I highly recommend this Kurzgesagt video on how paying just a bit more for meat or eggs drastically improves animals' living conditions: https://www.youtu

by stared 2y ago

Also, I highly recommend this Kurzgesagt video on how paying just a bit more for meat or eggs drastically improves animals' living conditions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sVfTPaxRwk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sVfTPaxRwk Additionally, while (pun intended) I am not religious about this, I try to avoid eating pork - as pigs are among the smartest animals humans eat (with intelligence comparable to dogs). For a similar reason, I avoid eating octopuses as well. Also, as a rule of thumb, "less meat is nearly always better than sustainable meat, to reduce your carbon footprint", https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat.

jampekka 2y ago
Paying more of course doesn't improve animals' conditions automatically. Improved conditions would most likely increase the price. But even with quite hefty price increse, the conditions will still be a living hell. And for an individual eating animals and animal produce is about the most environmentally harmful thing conducted regularly regardless of the price.
- jghn 2y ago
  This is a good thing to point out. I source most of my meat and eggs from local small farms where I know that the animals are raised in good conditions. Partially because I think it tastes better, partially for the ethics of it. Because of that, I pay more. But if one goes to the local supermarket, it's easy to find upbranded labels charging more for who knows what. Probably mostly to fund their marketing budget.
- stared 2y ago
  For some products, like free-range eggs, there is the possibility of choosing more ethical options. With many others, the supply chain is opaque, and paying more gives absolutely no guarantee of better conditions. The only way to be sure is if you know a local farmer personally. So, I think there should be much better regulations about minimal living conditions (though this would face strong opposition). Additionally, it would be wonderful if every animal-derived product had a recent photo (within the last year) from the exact farm of origin. It would be even better if every food product included a CO2e per calorie estimate (see e.g. https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore).
  - jghn 2y ago
    > The only way to be sure is if you know a local farmer personally This isn't as hard as people make it seem. I live in a city. Yet I participate in a local livestock farm share, the farm is about an hour away. They allow members & prospective members to come in and tour the farm, see the conditions, and their processes. They work to be transparent about everything that's going on. It took me about 10 minutes of googling 15 years ago to find it. The only extra work I've had to do since is once a month go about 30 minutes out of my way to the local pickup spot Yes, this isn't feasible for every American. Nor could the scale of small farms accommodate that. Yes, it's a luxury. But still, people discuss these things like it's fantasy land and it really isn't.
    - myself248 2y ago
      > Yes, this isn't feasible for every American. Nor could the scale of small farms accommodate that. Not immediately, but if the food-buying public started to prefer doing things that way, eventually the industry would reshape itself to accommodate. Over the span of decades, I figure.
    - aaronbaugher 2y ago
      Yes, it's more possible than most people realize. Where I live outside a town of 40,000, everyone could still buy meat and other food locally if they wanted to. Most just don't, and so many of the small farms have disappeared. But enough remain for everyone who's interested, and the farmers I know would like to sell more directly if they had the customers. (One problem is that farmers make terrible marketers and salesmen, generally.)
  - jampekka 2y ago
    > For some products, like free-range eggs, there is the possibility of choosing more ethical options. There sure are, e.g. anything plant-based! ;) > Additionally, it would be wonderful if every animal-derived product had a recent photo (within the last year) from the exact farm of origin. It would be even better if every food product included a CO2e per calorie estimate (see e.g. https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore). Produce animal welfare and environmental impact are orthogonal, and maybe even somewhat opposed. But both would indeed be better.
- titmouse 2y ago
  I've seen suggestions that livestock can actually be a key component to carbon sequestration, if done correctly. I think it was mentioned in the documentary Kiss the Ground, narrated by Woody Harrelson, but I may be wrong. I believe the gist was that no-till farming and managed grazing helps to save the topsoil, sequester more carbon dioxide, and make something like cattle farming effectively carbon-negative (ie, they're actually helping to mitigate climate change). I'd recommend watching if you haven't, it shows some compelling examples such as a farmer who's the only one in his area farming this way, and he's also the only one who's having successful harvests while being environmentally conscious. Also, farmed livestock don't automatically exist in a "living hell". Factory farms, yeah, but a properly-managed ranch should have happy, healthy animals.
  - shlant 2y ago
    > make something like cattle farming effectively carbon-negative The situations in which this is the case (which are oversimplified by the doc) are so specific and small scale that to think they will address the environmental impact without acknowledging the insane, unsustainable demand for meat is magical thinking. People love to point to ideas like this and stuff like feeding cows seaweed to avoid the reality of the dire need for significant shifts in our consumption behaviors. > but a properly-managed ranch should have happy, healthy animals. again - the percentage of meat that comes from these conditions is so small as to be virtually irrelevant in the context of the animal agriculture industry
    - ipaddr 2y ago
      That's what they said about solar power but year after year the industry grows.
      - shlant 2y ago
        I think the comparison of an industry of solar panels and batteries to one of the harvesting of living animals is not a very valuable one. Just as one example: you can improve the efficiency of solar panel and/or battery technology and the manufacturing processes but you can't do the same with cows. You could however move away from the breeding of living animals and instead improve something like lab grown meat which might have more overlap with technologies like solar panels. You have to recognize that the scale of demand for meat REQUIRES the conditions you find in factory farms. You do not get to keep the same demand while having it all come from Happy Healthy Farm™ for a wide variety of reasons.
- mistercheph 2y ago
  Eat your grain and don't pollute peon! No pork chops for you in New World!
- com2kid 2y ago
  > But even with quite hefty price increse, the conditions will still be a living hell. Local farmers markets sell animals that had quite happy lives. Some farms even have live webcams where you can check in on the animals 24/7. Honestly the prices aren't always that much higher, especially for certain cuts, with prices being at worst, about the same as higher end grocery stores, and at best, halfway between fancy grocery stores and a regular supermarket.
- slothtrop 2y ago
  > conditions will still be a living hell I've seen what better farms look like and I disagree. It most closely matches what consumers want and expect. Suffering is non-zero because it necessitate slaughter, but not as egregious as in commercial agriculture. In other words, there is a threshold of suffering consumers are ok with.
bombcar 2y ago
A bit more also can shield you from price shock - if you buy local. Could our egg farm sold theirs to some big city for big bucks during the eggsistential crisis? Probably, but they didn’t have it setup and just kept selling through normal channels and basically the same price.
- jghn 2y ago
  This is something I hadn't thought of until the current egg sticker shock. I buy my eggs from a local small farm. I'm still paying more than grocery store prices but my price hasn't changed. Meanwhile the local grocery store has increased by a large percentage. To the point where they're almost the same price.
  - bombcar 2y ago
    We realized a similar thing during Covid, when my parents couldn’t find milk on the shelves and we had farmers a few miles away from us dumping it down the drain. Buying local has an outsize influence for the small increase in price.
- xienze 2y ago
  Maybe your frame of reference is Whole Foods or something. Out here the farmers are wise to people “wanting to spend more for humanely-raised meat” and price it accordingly. It’s considerably more expensive at the farmer’s market than what it costs at a regular grocery store.
  - jajko 2y ago
    You simply don't understand economies of scale. If you produce 10,000kg of meat a month and decide to sell it off to private customers 0.5-3kg per sale on some farmer market, you need somebody spending whole day managing sales, delivering stuff to sales point, managing unsold meat and so on. If you don't manage to sell it and it goes bad, you tank and soon whole business is over, this ain't some pottery. Then you have hypermarket chain coming in and telling you they will buy 5,000kg per month, regularly, for next 12 months at lower price, just show it into back of that truck in 1 hour. For much lower price. Still farmers sell to them, so even with their additional 20-50% on top of the cost its cheaper for end customers. Or they subsidize some meat for few days to lure you into shop and bus some other necessities to balance this smaller income.
saganus 2y ago
This is offtopic (and not affiliated in any way), but I recently read this blog post [https://benthams.substack.com/p/what-to-do-if-you-love-meat-but-hate https://benthams.substack.com/p/what-to-do-if-you-love-meat-...] which gave me an interesting point of view about this, much in line with what you are saying, but most importantly, an actionable (and easy if you have some spare money) thing to do. I have since started donating to the mentioned organization, because I can't really bring myself to stop eating meat for several reasons (although I do avoid octopus just as you do), but at least this way I believe I might make a small difference. Also, I recommend not reading the linked post about factory farm hell if you'd like to avoid having horrific descriptions planted in your head for weeks.
- waffletower 2y ago
  I love meat yet stopped eating all mammalian and fowl protein more than 30 years ago. I compromised with fish, but have gone long stretches without. Yet somehow protein is still very primary in my diet. As many people speak of this difficulty to evolve and change their diet, I have come to theorize that people have a deep seated cultural need for sacrifice -- something must die for their meal to be legitimate. The OP/OA explores the history of this idea. With all of the well developed plant protein options, some imitative of meats and others unique and viable, and the obvious looming problem of scaling livestock production with population growth and climate change, there must be something deep seated holding our evolution back.
  - Ardon 2y ago
    Interesting framing, I've seen a similar 'If it's a meal, then where's the meat?' attitude from my own family, I've had some thoughts on where it came from, but I think part of it was escaping poverty in my grandparent's generation, and seeing 'success' as being able to afford meat in the first place. Meat was then a part of every meal, because doing otherwise would be socially... embarrassing? Not necessarily in a conscious way, but in a way it would be like giving you kids gruel. (Not that I have a problem with savoury oatmeal now :P) Then my parents grew up in that environment, and it was just part of the landscape of life. Meals have a meat ingredient. Or meat is the meal. There's a similar resistance to breakfasts that aren't egg-based. (honorable mention oatmeal again for breaking through) Or a similar resistance to eggs as the protein source for dinners, notice it just doesn't happen in north american cooking very much. Happens in other cuisines all the time though. I don't think it needs to be some deep seated gene-based flaw (at risk of putting words in your mouth) it only needs to be 'normal', and there's massive resistance to changing what's 'normal' when diverging from 'normal' isn't immediately more emotionally or physically comfortable than staying. Sometimes even then, if it makes you an outlier in the social landscape.
euroderf 2y ago
Agreed on octopuses. Sure they taste OK, but it's maybe more of a novelty food than anything else, and when you have read of their alien and physically-distributed intelligence, guilt accompanies any desire to munch one.
- LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
  It's certainly not a novelty around the coasts of the mediterran sea.
- colordrops 2y ago
  Guilt doesn't apply to all mammals?
  - euroderf 2y ago
    A separate issue, innit ? There is a broader consensus on the capacity of mammals for suffering. Plus the issue of the innate value of life at some level (let's say, vertebrates).
    - colordrops 2y ago
      100% agreed, just going one step at a time here
- hermitcrab 2y ago
  Last I heard, the EU is planning intensive octopus farming for meat. The seems really horrible for an intelligent and solitary animal. There are also questions about how humane the proposed killing methods are. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64814781 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64814781
  - seec 2y ago
    That's particularly weird because I think their meat is really not enjoyable at all. I have eaten just a piece of it once as a tasting of Spanish tapas tradition and I wouldn't want to renew the experience at all...
flanked-evergl 2y ago
If I give the grocery store more than sticker price for the animal products on their shelves it will in no way affect the animal's living conditions. And even if I bought the more expensive animal products it would also not in any way affect the animal's living conditions. The price of an animal product in no way affects the way the producer treats the animal. You have the causation completely backwards.
- galvin 2y ago
  The point obviously isn't to give grocery stores more money for no reason, it's to support products that have higher quality standards. Take poultry as an example, standards vary by county, but the differences between quality labels can be stark. Cheap poultry is often raised in tiny indoor cages and they need to be pumped full of antibiotics due to the unhealthy living conditions. On the other end of the spectrum, organic poultry is free to roam in fields and the coops are regularly moved or kept clean, avoiding the need for antibiotics in the first place. Even if you disagree that the latter provides a better quality product, it's pretty clear that supporting brands with higher standards results in better living conditions for the animals.
  - flanked-evergl 2y ago
    If an animal product is more expensive at point of sale it does not also follow that the producers of said product provided better living conditions for their animals. It could be that the producers of the cheaper of two similar products provided better living conditions. Again, you have the causation all mixed up. All else being equal, providing betting living conditions should increase the cost to the farmer. But thah A implies B does not mean thah B implies A. Not everything thah increases production cost is better animal living conditions.
crazygringo 2y ago
> how paying just a bit more for meat or eggs drastically improves animals' living conditions Not exactly. Supermarkets also jack up prices without any improvement at all. I.e. better conditions require higher prices, but higher prices can mean better conditions or more supermarket profit. And the supermarket is incentivized to pick profit, together with pretty pictures and words that "suggest" better conditions. Which is why I don't generally trust the wording on packages with regard to animal conditions. I'm not an expert in which exact phrases legally mean substantially better conditions, vs. which ones sound good but aren't meaningful at all. Nor should I be expected to. I'd much prefer the government just legislated conditions that are humane. Either animal welfare matters or it doesn't. It doesn't make any sense for it to depend on individual consumers. A few people buying top-tier eggs isn't ever going to improve anything for the vast majority of hens.
- liuxiansheng 2y ago
  While it's true marketing can impact how your dollars could actually contribute to better living conditions, I'd just it's defeatist to just throw your hands up and say it doesn't matter. A consumer can look up certifications like Certified Humane which does audits on farms to ensure they're following the required standards. While I'm sure it's not a perfect system it does hold farms to some accountability. https://www.aspca.org/shopwithyourheart/consumer-resources/certified-farms-state https://www.aspca.org/shopwithyourheart/consumer-resources/c...
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    Browsing that page, a state like New Hapshire has one pork farm and one beef farm listed and that's it. These seem like they're more for locals and farm-to-table restaurants? At my local supermarkets, even the nicer ones like Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, I don't ever recall seeing any of those logos on eggs, chicken, beef, anything at all. I'd love to know if I just missed them, though.
    - liuxiansheng 2y ago
      I believe Certified Humane has one of the most stringent requirements for animal welfare so there'll be fewer farms. There's other certifications out there such as Animal Welfare Approved. I admit for a welfare-conscious consumer it's not easy to sift through all the noise by doing actual research. Wish things were better but at least it's been trending in the right direction in the last couple of decades.
bejdofk 2y ago
[flagged]
- oaththrowaway 2y ago
  I've had both dogs and pigs as pets. Pigs are much smarter overall. They just have different behavior
readams 2y ago
It's sort of a disingenuous video since they try to present 50-200% increases as small by saying it's some number of cents. And ignoring the environmental land use concerns with these lower efficiency approaches
colordrops 2y ago
Not eating animal products at all improves animals living condition infinitely more.
- sigzero 2y ago
  That is a pipe dream.
- jansan 2y ago
  They would not have any living conditions (i.e. would not live at all), because they only live for the purpose of being eaten.
  - maeil 2y ago
    That line of thinking only leads to a conclusion where you should already have fathered a few dozen children, as otherwise you're depriving them of any living conditions.
    - Muromec 2y ago
      And ate them?
      - hilux 2y ago
        At least get some blood transfusions out of the deal!
bloomingkales 2y ago
Once you become a vampire meat eater it just becomes so hard to turn it off. It is the most immoral thing I do at the moment and I’m trying to create a multi year plan to be done with this. It’s nothing short of a sin, and to say a smarter animal shouldn’t be eaten as opposed to a dumber one just sounds like the words of a vampire, a tribe I also belong to.
- dudefeliciano 2y ago
  > a smarter animal shouldn’t be eaten as opposed to a dumber one i think there is something to this, it's about being able to relate to the animal more, making it more digusting. At some point also lactobacillaceae are living beings, is it unethical to eat bread then? Plants also have a level of intelligence. To me these living beings are so far removed from us that it's ok to eat them, mammals are much closer to us, we can empathize with them much more than a fish for instance.
  - danielbln 2y ago
    That's how I justify my pescetarian diet. Mammals and birds, too close to our cognition for comfort, fish.. eh, less so. I rarely eat fish anyway, but I haven't eaten mammals or bird since 2019. The second I can buy lab meat that is functionally the same but didn't require a brain (and suffering), I'm back to meat.
  - bloomingkales 2y ago
    Do you think that's where the battle is currently? People debating between Pigs and Bread? Let's avoid the reductive argument otherwise we can never determine right or wrong. Reductive arguments are Thor's hammer for those that want to be amoral at best. The animals we eat can play fetch, go look up cows. We think chickens are brainless. I don't think a single one of them likes being raised at mass scale in the way we do it. Few can look at it, but so many can debate down to the atom of whether we should stop eating literal matter. I'm not trying to be aggressive specifically towards you, I'm just trying to disturb a lurkers mind that thinks in this way. No one is going to look at the factory farm videos today, but they will talk their ass off about this topic. I hope everyone makes the pilgrimage to Youtube at the very least to see it every once in awhile.
y33t 2y ago
> with intelligence comparable to dogs Pigs are thought to be closer to toddlers in intelligence and they can use tools without any human help. Personally, I never eat them. Too weird.
- kennysoona 2y ago
  > Pigs are thought to be closer to toddlers in intelligence You're making a common mistake here, in conflating pigs being compatible with toddlers based on a very limited scope test, with being comparable to toddlers in general, which they are not remotely close to being. Pigs are comparable to dogs, but dogs are much more impressive overall. Lookup dogs like Chaser, for example, and show me a pig that has ever come close.
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - ahartmetz 2y ago
    I'm not sure how many pigs have had their intelligence evaluated. Most outliers probably go unnoticed. The experimental evidence seems to indicate that pigs are probably smarter than dogs. People think that dogs are special because they have relationships with them. But that doesn't really make dogs special except as far as the relationship is concerned.
    - kennysoona 2y ago
      > I'm not sure how many pigs have had their intelligence evaluated. The point is when intelligence of animals is evaluated like this, it's evaluated in very limited scopes, e.g. arithmetic abilities, mental time travel capabilities, abstract thinking capabilities, etc. To generalize the results from one limited scope test to intelligence in general is flawed and wrong. > The experimental evidence seems to indicate that pigs are probably smarter than dogs. It indicates nothing of the sort.
      - lo_zamoyski 2y ago
homefree 2y ago
I went vegetarian for similar animal welfare / cruelty reasons (though I'll have fish occasionally, but not octopus). We also buy the pasture raised eggs for this reason. I don't care that much about individual carbon footprint personally.
like_any_other 2y ago
> paying just a bit more for meat or eggs drastically improves animals' living conditions Billionaire Egg Baron Pays Contract Farmers Just 26 Cents Per Dozen - https://farmaction.us/exposed-billionaire-egg-baron-pays-contract-farmers-just-26-cents-per-dozen/ https://farmaction.us/exposed-billionaire-egg-baron-pays-con... Paying more could improve living conditions, but without directly forcing farms to provide better conditions, it won't.
xyproto 2y ago
It does not make sense to eat things with of a lack of intelligence as the guiding principle. Would you eat a human if he or her were stupid enough?
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  We group outliers with the rest of humanity because there are severe moral hazards with not doing that. If all humans had the IQ of a waffle, then it would be reasonably fine to farm humans.
  - ricudis 2y ago
    I have yet to see a sci-fi scenario where the extra-terrestial super-intelligence considers us just a food source.
    - seec 2y ago
      I don't have any example on the top of my mind but surely there is. Matrix is a story were sentient machine use humans as feed for energy so not extra-terrestrial but somewhat close.
- moffkalast 2y ago
  Yeah it seems like flawed logic to me too. Why is intelligent suffering worse than dumb suffering? Both feel the same pain when slaughtered. Are smart beings "worth" more? Does a smart pig contribute more to society than a dumb pig? Nonsense distinctions lead to nonsense questions I guess. But it does pile on more proof for that theory that on some level we are just "inteligence" personified and tend to instinctively act in the interest of inteligence as a concept. Probably also why we're nice to LLMs on principle despite them having zero ability to suffer, and we like to fantasize about making galaxy spanning alliances with smart aliens.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    Suffering and pain are supposed to be minimized no matter what. The pain from the slaughter itself is next to nothing when done properly, and not the reason for the distinctions about which animals it's acceptable to kill.
374838644 2y ago
I watched the video but I found his premise that there's extreme market pressure to keep prices low lacking. I think that could be true some places but in highly populated areas like California I think prices could be much lower. Whenever the topic comes up people will highlight how laws/regulations like cage free don't raise prices by that much. Which could be true. What this point sidesteps though is that as a collective these limitations make prices much higher because they mean a large amount of product can only be sourced in-state. In short, they collectively act as a form of protectionism that jacks up prices even if their regional impact is minor. It's minor because they're playing into a paradigm that already wildly jacks up prices. What would bring prices down a lot and by extension benefit the poor Americans in these places a lot more is removing all of the barriers to importing these products from other states where they are significantly cheaper.
lostlogin 2y ago
Pigs sleep and root in shit. That's a filthy animal. https://clip.cafe/pulp-fiction-1994/want-some-bacon/ https://clip.cafe/pulp-fiction-1994/want-some-bacon/
- umbra07 2y ago
  We used to own chickens. They had no qualms about walking over their own poop, and getting it between their claws. They would peck through their own poop to look for food, getting it all over their beak. Their idea of a bath was covering themselves in dust. Do you also forgo chicken?
  - lostlogin 2y ago
    I do, I’m vegetarian. But my comment entirely missed the mark. It’s referencing the great Pulp Fiction scene.
- timc3 2y ago
  No they don’t. They build latrines and that is their toilet which they certainly do not sleep in. They cover themselves in mud because it acts as sun block and helps against certain pests. The rooting is either to sort out the land or literally looking for roots, truffles and other things to eat.
selfsimilar 2y ago
Octopodes don't actually have a very long lifespan, as adults die shortly after mating. Which is only to say that the decision to consume is more complicated for this creature than others, because if the goal is to minimize suffering, an ethically aquaculture-farmed octopus harvested after mating will not live much longer anyways. And I've always found the argument that "more intelligent/sentient creatures deserve more protection and rights" to be basically a post hoc defense against cannibalism. We can't know what "suffering" feels like to less intelligent and "simpler" animals so why make our sentience a criterion for the morality of eating? Just from a safety concern we shouldn't be eating humans, but not because we "suffer uniquely more" than other species.
- MrLeap 2y ago
  > We can't know what "suffering" feels like to less intelligent and "simpler" animals so why make our sentience a criterion for the morality of eating? Using the power of the scientific method, we can form hypothesis. Take a bite out of a few hundred people, give them IQ tests. Give surveys. Use induction. As our ability to communicate with more and more animals improves with technology, start giving them surveys after taking a bite out of them. My hypothesis is that every animal along the questionnaire wave front will overwhelmingly self report that they prefer not to be eaten. At some point, we'll all have to wring our hands about an arXiv preprint where somebody convincingly lets us know that the corn doesn't like being eaten either. We'll find a few really depressed plants and animals that are ready to be eaten, and some people will propose we make the world a more depressing place so there's more consent in all this. That's a bad take, but the argument will last 1000 years. All the while everyone and everything will keep on eating and eating. Have you ever sat and thought about all the eating that has gone into making this moment for you? Like, all the eating you've done, all the eating of the creatures and plants that you've eaten have done. All your ancestors. So on and so forth back to the simplest primordial chemical reactions. Life is the tip of the spear atop a long cone of death and teeth gnashing. It's quite horrific. The universe would be a lot more chill if we could just leave the clouds of fluorine to meditate. They're quite serene when they do that.
  - lelanthran 2y ago
wetpaws 2y ago
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ridgeguy 2y ago
I worked on classical conditioning of isolated invertebrate nervous systems for my Ph.D. I worked on sea slugs. Our seawater facility had octopus in several tanks. It became obvious that they easily recognized and differentiated among people who entered the lab. They would approach the front of their tanks when their caretakers (who fed them and cleaned their tanks) arrived, and would hide from the grad students who studied them. When I noticed that decades ago, I stopped eating octopus.
- seec 2y ago
  That's weird take unless you decided to be completely vegan. Cows recognize people very well too and will definitely flock to their feeder yet we have been eating them for centuries. In fact, one could argue that to allow domestication a minimum amount of intelligence is necessary in the animal otherwise it's impractical. Animals have various degrees of intelligence but that's hardly relevant. What matters is that they are not our own species and they are less intelligent than us so we can dominate them. People have been looking at some sort of morals in the food we eat, especially the animals, as if it mattered or made us better in any way (probably looking for some sort of religion replacement). The circle of life doesn't care about your morals/feelings and if some other species were to become dominant because of their intelligence, they would gladly eat us. Eating things in relation to their perceived intelligence makes no sense, but I guess you can very much go into the cult of veganism.
  - skyyler 2y ago
    Some people have a conscious, as irrational and unprofitable as that is. I think it's a fairly coherent position to not want to kill and consume intelligent creatures. At the same time, I think it's kind of telling of the irrationality in your argument here that, in the first line, you claim that someone's line of thinking is weird unless they took it to the extreme logical conclusion of veganism. Then in your last line you call veganism a cult. Do you realize that you're arguing in bad faith, or is it unintentional?
bgnn 2y ago
Last 5 years or so I buy meat maybe once in 3 months, and that is strictly from the local farm. They have their own cows, goats, pigs and sheep. You just get an email for the next slaughtered animal and reserve the cuts you want. This happens once in 6 weeks, so I do every other event. You can see the animals in the farm, it's all open. It's maybe 50% more expensive than horrible spongy chewy supermarket meat. Sometimes they have game meat which is mummy. Chicken per kg costs as much as beef, if not more. But it is so tasty! They are from another farm, which is also open to visit. Reducing my meat consumption and going for higher quality helped me to appreciate meat more! It's a speciality. I think about the dish days ahead, what side dish I should make, which wine should I pair it with..
easterncalculus 2y ago
Eating sustainable meat from local farms has never been bad for the environment, which is what this article actually says as well. Of course plants are less. Also, this article looks extremely deceptive. "Feed and excreta at the bottom of warm, unaerated fish ponds can create more methane than cows" - more than how many cows?
watwut 2y ago
> how paying just a bit more for meat or eggs drastically improves animals' living conditions It does not. Farms will happily eat the additional earnings and wont improve animals living conditions just because they have money. What improves animal living conditions are regulations and their actual enforcement. That may raise cost of the meat, sure. But just paying more wont improve nothing.

by stared 2y ago

jampekka 2y ago

Paying more of course doesn't improve animals' conditions automatically. Improved conditions would most likely increase the price. But even with quite hefty price increse, the conditions will still be a living hell. And for an individual eating animals and animal produce is about the most environmentally harmful thing conducted regularly regardless of the price.

jghn 2y ago
This is a good thing to point out. I source most of my meat and eggs from local small farms where I know that the animals are raised in good conditions. Partially because I think it tastes better, partially for the ethics of it. Because of that, I pay more. But if one goes to the local supermarket, it's easy to find upbranded labels charging more for who knows what. Probably mostly to fund their marketing budget.
stared 2y ago
For some products, like free-range eggs, there is the possibility of choosing more ethical options. With many others, the supply chain is opaque, and paying more gives absolutely no guarantee of better conditions. The only way to be sure is if you know a local farmer personally. So, I think there should be much better regulations about minimal living conditions (though this would face strong opposition). Additionally, it would be wonderful if every animal-derived product had a recent photo (within the last year) from the exact farm of origin. It would be even better if every food product included a CO2e per calorie estimate (see e.g. https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore).
- jghn 2y ago
  > The only way to be sure is if you know a local farmer personally This isn't as hard as people make it seem. I live in a city. Yet I participate in a local livestock farm share, the farm is about an hour away. They allow members & prospective members to come in and tour the farm, see the conditions, and their processes. They work to be transparent about everything that's going on. It took me about 10 minutes of googling 15 years ago to find it. The only extra work I've had to do since is once a month go about 30 minutes out of my way to the local pickup spot Yes, this isn't feasible for every American. Nor could the scale of small farms accommodate that. Yes, it's a luxury. But still, people discuss these things like it's fantasy land and it really isn't.
  - myself248 2y ago
    > Yes, this isn't feasible for every American. Nor could the scale of small farms accommodate that. Not immediately, but if the food-buying public started to prefer doing things that way, eventually the industry would reshape itself to accommodate. Over the span of decades, I figure.
  - aaronbaugher 2y ago
    Yes, it's more possible than most people realize. Where I live outside a town of 40,000, everyone could still buy meat and other food locally if they wanted to. Most just don't, and so many of the small farms have disappeared. But enough remain for everyone who's interested, and the farmers I know would like to sell more directly if they had the customers. (One problem is that farmers make terrible marketers and salesmen, generally.)
- jampekka 2y ago
  > For some products, like free-range eggs, there is the possibility of choosing more ethical options. There sure are, e.g. anything plant-based! ;) > Additionally, it would be wonderful if every animal-derived product had a recent photo (within the last year) from the exact farm of origin. It would be even better if every food product included a CO2e per calorie estimate (see e.g. https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore). Produce animal welfare and environmental impact are orthogonal, and maybe even somewhat opposed. But both would indeed be better.
titmouse 2y ago
I've seen suggestions that livestock can actually be a key component to carbon sequestration, if done correctly. I think it was mentioned in the documentary Kiss the Ground, narrated by Woody Harrelson, but I may be wrong. I believe the gist was that no-till farming and managed grazing helps to save the topsoil, sequester more carbon dioxide, and make something like cattle farming effectively carbon-negative (ie, they're actually helping to mitigate climate change). I'd recommend watching if you haven't, it shows some compelling examples such as a farmer who's the only one in his area farming this way, and he's also the only one who's having successful harvests while being environmentally conscious. Also, farmed livestock don't automatically exist in a "living hell". Factory farms, yeah, but a properly-managed ranch should have happy, healthy animals.
- shlant 2y ago
  > make something like cattle farming effectively carbon-negative The situations in which this is the case (which are oversimplified by the doc) are so specific and small scale that to think they will address the environmental impact without acknowledging the insane, unsustainable demand for meat is magical thinking. People love to point to ideas like this and stuff like feeding cows seaweed to avoid the reality of the dire need for significant shifts in our consumption behaviors. > but a properly-managed ranch should have happy, healthy animals. again - the percentage of meat that comes from these conditions is so small as to be virtually irrelevant in the context of the animal agriculture industry
  - ipaddr 2y ago
    That's what they said about solar power but year after year the industry grows.
    - shlant 2y ago
      I think the comparison of an industry of solar panels and batteries to one of the harvesting of living animals is not a very valuable one. Just as one example: you can improve the efficiency of solar panel and/or battery technology and the manufacturing processes but you can't do the same with cows. You could however move away from the breeding of living animals and instead improve something like lab grown meat which might have more overlap with technologies like solar panels. You have to recognize that the scale of demand for meat REQUIRES the conditions you find in factory farms. You do not get to keep the same demand while having it all come from Happy Healthy Farm™ for a wide variety of reasons.
mistercheph 2y ago
Eat your grain and don't pollute peon! No pork chops for you in New World!
com2kid 2y ago
> But even with quite hefty price increse, the conditions will still be a living hell. Local farmers markets sell animals that had quite happy lives. Some farms even have live webcams where you can check in on the animals 24/7. Honestly the prices aren't always that much higher, especially for certain cuts, with prices being at worst, about the same as higher end grocery stores, and at best, halfway between fancy grocery stores and a regular supermarket.
slothtrop 2y ago
> conditions will still be a living hell I've seen what better farms look like and I disagree. It most closely matches what consumers want and expect. Suffering is non-zero because it necessitate slaughter, but not as egregious as in commercial agriculture. In other words, there is a threshold of suffering consumers are ok with.

bombcar 2y ago

A bit more also can shield you from price shock - if you buy local. Could our egg farm sold theirs to some big city for big bucks during the eggsistential crisis? Probably, but they didn’t have it setup and just kept selling through normal channels and basically the same price.

jghn 2y ago
This is something I hadn't thought of until the current egg sticker shock. I buy my eggs from a local small farm. I'm still paying more than grocery store prices but my price hasn't changed. Meanwhile the local grocery store has increased by a large percentage. To the point where they're almost the same price.
- bombcar 2y ago
  We realized a similar thing during Covid, when my parents couldn’t find milk on the shelves and we had farmers a few miles away from us dumping it down the drain. Buying local has an outsize influence for the small increase in price.
xienze 2y ago
Maybe your frame of reference is Whole Foods or something. Out here the farmers are wise to people “wanting to spend more for humanely-raised meat” and price it accordingly. It’s considerably more expensive at the farmer’s market than what it costs at a regular grocery store.
- jajko 2y ago
  You simply don't understand economies of scale. If you produce 10,000kg of meat a month and decide to sell it off to private customers 0.5-3kg per sale on some farmer market, you need somebody spending whole day managing sales, delivering stuff to sales point, managing unsold meat and so on. If you don't manage to sell it and it goes bad, you tank and soon whole business is over, this ain't some pottery. Then you have hypermarket chain coming in and telling you they will buy 5,000kg per month, regularly, for next 12 months at lower price, just show it into back of that truck in 1 hour. For much lower price. Still farmers sell to them, so even with their additional 20-50% on top of the cost its cheaper for end customers. Or they subsidize some meat for few days to lure you into shop and bus some other necessities to balance this smaller income.

saganus 2y ago

This is offtopic (and not affiliated in any way), but I recently read this blog post [https://benthams.substack.com/p/what-to-do-if-you-love-meat-but-hate https://benthams.substack.com/p/what-to-do-if-you-love-meat-...] which gave me an interesting point of view about this, much in line with what you are saying, but most importantly, an actionable (and easy if you have some spare money) thing to do. I have since started donating to the mentioned organization, because I can't really bring myself to stop eating meat for several reasons (although I do avoid octopus just as you do), but at least this way I believe I might make a small difference. Also, I recommend not reading the linked post about factory farm hell if you'd like to avoid having horrific descriptions planted in your head for weeks.

waffletower 2y ago
I love meat yet stopped eating all mammalian and fowl protein more than 30 years ago. I compromised with fish, but have gone long stretches without. Yet somehow protein is still very primary in my diet. As many people speak of this difficulty to evolve and change their diet, I have come to theorize that people have a deep seated cultural need for sacrifice -- something must die for their meal to be legitimate. The OP/OA explores the history of this idea. With all of the well developed plant protein options, some imitative of meats and others unique and viable, and the obvious looming problem of scaling livestock production with population growth and climate change, there must be something deep seated holding our evolution back.
- Ardon 2y ago
  Interesting framing, I've seen a similar 'If it's a meal, then where's the meat?' attitude from my own family, I've had some thoughts on where it came from, but I think part of it was escaping poverty in my grandparent's generation, and seeing 'success' as being able to afford meat in the first place. Meat was then a part of every meal, because doing otherwise would be socially... embarrassing? Not necessarily in a conscious way, but in a way it would be like giving you kids gruel. (Not that I have a problem with savoury oatmeal now :P) Then my parents grew up in that environment, and it was just part of the landscape of life. Meals have a meat ingredient. Or meat is the meal. There's a similar resistance to breakfasts that aren't egg-based. (honorable mention oatmeal again for breaking through) Or a similar resistance to eggs as the protein source for dinners, notice it just doesn't happen in north american cooking very much. Happens in other cuisines all the time though. I don't think it needs to be some deep seated gene-based flaw (at risk of putting words in your mouth) it only needs to be 'normal', and there's massive resistance to changing what's 'normal' when diverging from 'normal' isn't immediately more emotionally or physically comfortable than staying. Sometimes even then, if it makes you an outlier in the social landscape.

euroderf 2y ago

Agreed on octopuses. Sure they taste OK, but it's maybe more of a novelty food than anything else, and when you have read of their alien and physically-distributed intelligence, guilt accompanies any desire to munch one.

LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
It's certainly not a novelty around the coasts of the mediterran sea.
colordrops 2y ago
Guilt doesn't apply to all mammals?
- euroderf 2y ago
  A separate issue, innit ? There is a broader consensus on the capacity of mammals for suffering. Plus the issue of the innate value of life at some level (let's say, vertebrates).
  - colordrops 2y ago
    100% agreed, just going one step at a time here
hermitcrab 2y ago
Last I heard, the EU is planning intensive octopus farming for meat. The seems really horrible for an intelligent and solitary animal. There are also questions about how humane the proposed killing methods are. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64814781 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64814781
- seec 2y ago
  That's particularly weird because I think their meat is really not enjoyable at all. I have eaten just a piece of it once as a tasting of Spanish tapas tradition and I wouldn't want to renew the experience at all...

flanked-evergl 2y ago

If I give the grocery store more than sticker price for the animal products on their shelves it will in no way affect the animal's living conditions. And even if I bought the more expensive animal products it would also not in any way affect the animal's living conditions. The price of an animal product in no way affects the way the producer treats the animal. You have the causation completely backwards.

galvin 2y ago
The point obviously isn't to give grocery stores more money for no reason, it's to support products that have higher quality standards. Take poultry as an example, standards vary by county, but the differences between quality labels can be stark. Cheap poultry is often raised in tiny indoor cages and they need to be pumped full of antibiotics due to the unhealthy living conditions. On the other end of the spectrum, organic poultry is free to roam in fields and the coops are regularly moved or kept clean, avoiding the need for antibiotics in the first place. Even if you disagree that the latter provides a better quality product, it's pretty clear that supporting brands with higher standards results in better living conditions for the animals.
- flanked-evergl 2y ago
  If an animal product is more expensive at point of sale it does not also follow that the producers of said product provided better living conditions for their animals. It could be that the producers of the cheaper of two similar products provided better living conditions. Again, you have the causation all mixed up. All else being equal, providing betting living conditions should increase the cost to the farmer. But thah A implies B does not mean thah B implies A. Not everything thah increases production cost is better animal living conditions.

crazygringo 2y ago

> how paying just a bit more for meat or eggs drastically improves animals' living conditions Not exactly. Supermarkets also jack up prices without any improvement at all. I.e. better conditions require higher prices, but higher prices can mean better conditions or more supermarket profit. And the supermarket is incentivized to pick profit, together with pretty pictures and words that "suggest" better conditions. Which is why I don't generally trust the wording on packages with regard to animal conditions. I'm not an expert in which exact phrases legally mean substantially better conditions, vs. which ones sound good but aren't meaningful at all. Nor should I be expected to. I'd much prefer the government just legislated conditions that are humane. Either animal welfare matters or it doesn't. It doesn't make any sense for it to depend on individual consumers. A few people buying top-tier eggs isn't ever going to improve anything for the vast majority of hens.

liuxiansheng 2y ago
While it's true marketing can impact how your dollars could actually contribute to better living conditions, I'd just it's defeatist to just throw your hands up and say it doesn't matter. A consumer can look up certifications like Certified Humane which does audits on farms to ensure they're following the required standards. While I'm sure it's not a perfect system it does hold farms to some accountability. https://www.aspca.org/shopwithyourheart/consumer-resources/certified-farms-state https://www.aspca.org/shopwithyourheart/consumer-resources/c...
- crazygringo 2y ago
  Browsing that page, a state like New Hapshire has one pork farm and one beef farm listed and that's it. These seem like they're more for locals and farm-to-table restaurants? At my local supermarkets, even the nicer ones like Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, I don't ever recall seeing any of those logos on eggs, chicken, beef, anything at all. I'd love to know if I just missed them, though.
  - liuxiansheng 2y ago
    I believe Certified Humane has one of the most stringent requirements for animal welfare so there'll be fewer farms. There's other certifications out there such as Animal Welfare Approved. I admit for a welfare-conscious consumer it's not easy to sift through all the noise by doing actual research. Wish things were better but at least it's been trending in the right direction in the last couple of decades.

bejdofk 2y ago

[flagged]

oaththrowaway 2y ago
I've had both dogs and pigs as pets. Pigs are much smarter overall. They just have different behavior

readams 2y ago

It's sort of a disingenuous video since they try to present 50-200% increases as small by saying it's some number of cents. And ignoring the environmental land use concerns with these lower efficiency approaches

colordrops 2y ago

Not eating animal products at all improves animals living condition infinitely more.

sigzero 2y ago
That is a pipe dream.
jansan 2y ago
They would not have any living conditions (i.e. would not live at all), because they only live for the purpose of being eaten.
- maeil 2y ago
  That line of thinking only leads to a conclusion where you should already have fathered a few dozen children, as otherwise you're depriving them of any living conditions.
  - Muromec 2y ago
    And ate them?
    - hilux 2y ago
      At least get some blood transfusions out of the deal!

bloomingkales 2y ago

Once you become a vampire meat eater it just becomes so hard to turn it off. It is the most immoral thing I do at the moment and I’m trying to create a multi year plan to be done with this. It’s nothing short of a sin, and to say a smarter animal shouldn’t be eaten as opposed to a dumber one just sounds like the words of a vampire, a tribe I also belong to.

dudefeliciano 2y ago
> a smarter animal shouldn’t be eaten as opposed to a dumber one i think there is something to this, it's about being able to relate to the animal more, making it more digusting. At some point also lactobacillaceae are living beings, is it unethical to eat bread then? Plants also have a level of intelligence. To me these living beings are so far removed from us that it's ok to eat them, mammals are much closer to us, we can empathize with them much more than a fish for instance.
- danielbln 2y ago
  That's how I justify my pescetarian diet. Mammals and birds, too close to our cognition for comfort, fish.. eh, less so. I rarely eat fish anyway, but I haven't eaten mammals or bird since 2019. The second I can buy lab meat that is functionally the same but didn't require a brain (and suffering), I'm back to meat.
- bloomingkales 2y ago
  Do you think that's where the battle is currently? People debating between Pigs and Bread? Let's avoid the reductive argument otherwise we can never determine right or wrong. Reductive arguments are Thor's hammer for those that want to be amoral at best. The animals we eat can play fetch, go look up cows. We think chickens are brainless. I don't think a single one of them likes being raised at mass scale in the way we do it. Few can look at it, but so many can debate down to the atom of whether we should stop eating literal matter. I'm not trying to be aggressive specifically towards you, I'm just trying to disturb a lurkers mind that thinks in this way. No one is going to look at the factory farm videos today, but they will talk their ass off about this topic. I hope everyone makes the pilgrimage to Youtube at the very least to see it every once in awhile.

y33t 2y ago

> with intelligence comparable to dogs Pigs are thought to be closer to toddlers in intelligence and they can use tools without any human help. Personally, I never eat them. Too weird.

kennysoona 2y ago
> Pigs are thought to be closer to toddlers in intelligence You're making a common mistake here, in conflating pigs being compatible with toddlers based on a very limited scope test, with being comparable to toddlers in general, which they are not remotely close to being. Pigs are comparable to dogs, but dogs are much more impressive overall. Lookup dogs like Chaser, for example, and show me a pig that has ever come close.
- deleted 2y ago
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- ahartmetz 2y ago
  I'm not sure how many pigs have had their intelligence evaluated. Most outliers probably go unnoticed. The experimental evidence seems to indicate that pigs are probably smarter than dogs. People think that dogs are special because they have relationships with them. But that doesn't really make dogs special except as far as the relationship is concerned.
  - kennysoona 2y ago
    > I'm not sure how many pigs have had their intelligence evaluated. The point is when intelligence of animals is evaluated like this, it's evaluated in very limited scopes, e.g. arithmetic abilities, mental time travel capabilities, abstract thinking capabilities, etc. To generalize the results from one limited scope test to intelligence in general is flawed and wrong. > The experimental evidence seems to indicate that pigs are probably smarter than dogs. It indicates nothing of the sort.
    - lo_zamoyski 2y ago

homefree 2y ago

I went vegetarian for similar animal welfare / cruelty reasons (though I'll have fish occasionally, but not octopus). We also buy the pasture raised eggs for this reason. I don't care that much about individual carbon footprint personally.

like_any_other 2y ago

> paying just a bit more for meat or eggs drastically improves animals' living conditions Billionaire Egg Baron Pays Contract Farmers Just 26 Cents Per Dozen - https://farmaction.us/exposed-billionaire-egg-baron-pays-contract-farmers-just-26-cents-per-dozen/ https://farmaction.us/exposed-billionaire-egg-baron-pays-con... Paying more could improve living conditions, but without directly forcing farms to provide better conditions, it won't.

xyproto 2y ago

It does not make sense to eat things with of a lack of intelligence as the guiding principle. Would you eat a human if he or her were stupid enough?

Dylan16807 2y ago
We group outliers with the rest of humanity because there are severe moral hazards with not doing that. If all humans had the IQ of a waffle, then it would be reasonably fine to farm humans.
- ricudis 2y ago
  I have yet to see a sci-fi scenario where the extra-terrestial super-intelligence considers us just a food source.
  - seec 2y ago
    I don't have any example on the top of my mind but surely there is. Matrix is a story were sentient machine use humans as feed for energy so not extra-terrestrial but somewhat close.
moffkalast 2y ago
Yeah it seems like flawed logic to me too. Why is intelligent suffering worse than dumb suffering? Both feel the same pain when slaughtered. Are smart beings "worth" more? Does a smart pig contribute more to society than a dumb pig? Nonsense distinctions lead to nonsense questions I guess. But it does pile on more proof for that theory that on some level we are just "inteligence" personified and tend to instinctively act in the interest of inteligence as a concept. Probably also why we're nice to LLMs on principle despite them having zero ability to suffer, and we like to fantasize about making galaxy spanning alliances with smart aliens.
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  Suffering and pain are supposed to be minimized no matter what. The pain from the slaughter itself is next to nothing when done properly, and not the reason for the distinctions about which animals it's acceptable to kill.

374838644 2y ago

I watched the video but I found his premise that there's extreme market pressure to keep prices low lacking. I think that could be true some places but in highly populated areas like California I think prices could be much lower. Whenever the topic comes up people will highlight how laws/regulations like cage free don't raise prices by that much. Which could be true. What this point sidesteps though is that as a collective these limitations make prices much higher because they mean a large amount of product can only be sourced in-state. In short, they collectively act as a form of protectionism that jacks up prices even if their regional impact is minor. It's minor because they're playing into a paradigm that already wildly jacks up prices. What would bring prices down a lot and by extension benefit the poor Americans in these places a lot more is removing all of the barriers to importing these products from other states where they are significantly cheaper.

lostlogin 2y ago

Pigs sleep and root in shit. That's a filthy animal. https://clip.cafe/pulp-fiction-1994/want-some-bacon/ https://clip.cafe/pulp-fiction-1994/want-some-bacon/

umbra07 2y ago
We used to own chickens. They had no qualms about walking over their own poop, and getting it between their claws. They would peck through their own poop to look for food, getting it all over their beak. Their idea of a bath was covering themselves in dust. Do you also forgo chicken?
- lostlogin 2y ago
  I do, I’m vegetarian. But my comment entirely missed the mark. It’s referencing the great Pulp Fiction scene.
timc3 2y ago
No they don’t. They build latrines and that is their toilet which they certainly do not sleep in. They cover themselves in mud because it acts as sun block and helps against certain pests. The rooting is either to sort out the land or literally looking for roots, truffles and other things to eat.

selfsimilar 2y ago

Octopodes don't actually have a very long lifespan, as adults die shortly after mating. Which is only to say that the decision to consume is more complicated for this creature than others, because if the goal is to minimize suffering, an ethically aquaculture-farmed octopus harvested after mating will not live much longer anyways. And I've always found the argument that "more intelligent/sentient creatures deserve more protection and rights" to be basically a post hoc defense against cannibalism. We can't know what "suffering" feels like to less intelligent and "simpler" animals so why make our sentience a criterion for the morality of eating? Just from a safety concern we shouldn't be eating humans, but not because we "suffer uniquely more" than other species.

MrLeap 2y ago
> We can't know what "suffering" feels like to less intelligent and "simpler" animals so why make our sentience a criterion for the morality of eating? Using the power of the scientific method, we can form hypothesis. Take a bite out of a few hundred people, give them IQ tests. Give surveys. Use induction. As our ability to communicate with more and more animals improves with technology, start giving them surveys after taking a bite out of them. My hypothesis is that every animal along the questionnaire wave front will overwhelmingly self report that they prefer not to be eaten. At some point, we'll all have to wring our hands about an arXiv preprint where somebody convincingly lets us know that the corn doesn't like being eaten either. We'll find a few really depressed plants and animals that are ready to be eaten, and some people will propose we make the world a more depressing place so there's more consent in all this. That's a bad take, but the argument will last 1000 years. All the while everyone and everything will keep on eating and eating. Have you ever sat and thought about all the eating that has gone into making this moment for you? Like, all the eating you've done, all the eating of the creatures and plants that you've eaten have done. All your ancestors. So on and so forth back to the simplest primordial chemical reactions. Life is the tip of the spear atop a long cone of death and teeth gnashing. It's quite horrific. The universe would be a lot more chill if we could just leave the clouds of fluorine to meditate. They're quite serene when they do that.
- lelanthran 2y ago

wetpaws 2y ago

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ridgeguy 2y ago

I worked on classical conditioning of isolated invertebrate nervous systems for my Ph.D. I worked on sea slugs. Our seawater facility had octopus in several tanks. It became obvious that they easily recognized and differentiated among people who entered the lab. They would approach the front of their tanks when their caretakers (who fed them and cleaned their tanks) arrived, and would hide from the grad students who studied them. When I noticed that decades ago, I stopped eating octopus.

seec 2y ago
That's weird take unless you decided to be completely vegan. Cows recognize people very well too and will definitely flock to their feeder yet we have been eating them for centuries. In fact, one could argue that to allow domestication a minimum amount of intelligence is necessary in the animal otherwise it's impractical. Animals have various degrees of intelligence but that's hardly relevant. What matters is that they are not our own species and they are less intelligent than us so we can dominate them. People have been looking at some sort of morals in the food we eat, especially the animals, as if it mattered or made us better in any way (probably looking for some sort of religion replacement). The circle of life doesn't care about your morals/feelings and if some other species were to become dominant because of their intelligence, they would gladly eat us. Eating things in relation to their perceived intelligence makes no sense, but I guess you can very much go into the cult of veganism.
- skyyler 2y ago
  Some people have a conscious, as irrational and unprofitable as that is. I think it's a fairly coherent position to not want to kill and consume intelligent creatures. At the same time, I think it's kind of telling of the irrationality in your argument here that, in the first line, you claim that someone's line of thinking is weird unless they took it to the extreme logical conclusion of veganism. Then in your last line you call veganism a cult. Do you realize that you're arguing in bad faith, or is it unintentional?

bgnn 2y ago

Last 5 years or so I buy meat maybe once in 3 months, and that is strictly from the local farm. They have their own cows, goats, pigs and sheep. You just get an email for the next slaughtered animal and reserve the cuts you want. This happens once in 6 weeks, so I do every other event. You can see the animals in the farm, it's all open. It's maybe 50% more expensive than horrible spongy chewy supermarket meat. Sometimes they have game meat which is mummy. Chicken per kg costs as much as beef, if not more. But it is so tasty! They are from another farm, which is also open to visit. Reducing my meat consumption and going for higher quality helped me to appreciate meat more! It's a speciality. I think about the dish days ahead, what side dish I should make, which wine should I pair it with..

easterncalculus 2y ago

Eating sustainable meat from local farms has never been bad for the environment, which is what this article actually says as well. Of course plants are less. Also, this article looks extremely deceptive. "Feed and excreta at the bottom of warm, unaerated fish ponds can create more methane than cows" - more than how many cows?

watwut 2y ago

> how paying just a bit more for meat or eggs drastically improves animals' living conditions It does not. Farms will happily eat the additional earnings and wont improve animals living conditions just because they have money. What improves animal living conditions are regulations and their actual enforcement. That may raise cost of the meat, sure. But just paying more wont improve nothing.