3 ms·

Would you raise your own animals to kill and eat? Animals eat other animals, it's nature.

xnx 9mo ago
Murder and rape are also part of nature, but humans can reflect and consider the effects of their actions in ways other animals can't.
CurrentB 9mo ago
Personally that would be even worse for me, though I understand maybe "better" on a societal scale by some metrics. To feed a being every day and care for it, to gain its trust, to appreciate their individuality, then to have them killed when they reach some fraction of its potential lifespan, I just don't want to do that. I'm perfectly happy eating legumes.
- 7777332215 9mo ago
  I'm not sure if it would be better on a societal scale in terms of pollution and efficiency, but instead in ethical concerns with how the animals were treated. What about raising cows or chickens, then consuming their milk and eggs?
  - CurrentB 9mo ago
    Presumably you only would acquire female chickens to lay eggs. What happened to the male ones? (I don't recommend googling this). What do you do with the cow when its milk yield drops after several pregnancies? what do you do with the male calves? Just keep them all as pets? I think there are situations I could contrive where I'd say yeah its fine ethically to eat these things, but the general case still has victims. And again, since maybe the first week without them, I truly haven't missed milk or eggs or anything else after eliminating them from my diet. Plant options are pretty good too and there are plenty of plants.
    - 7777332215 9mo ago
      Use the whole of it. Kill them, eat them, use their bones and hide. Why is okay to kill a tree to build a home, kill a plant to eat, but not okay to kill an animal to eat? Is it okay to kill a cockroach or a rat in your home? Does the biological complexity of the organism make it more or less okay to kill it?
      - CurrentB 9mo ago
        > Why is okay to kill a tree to build a home, kill a plant to eat, but not okay to kill an animal to eat? > Does the biological complexity of the organism make it more or less okay to kill it? The ability to suffer is the distinguishing/relevant factor. We all know what suffering feels like and we know that animals have the capacity to suffer. We don't really know that trees do. I want to reduce the suffering I am responsible for. > Is it okay to kill a cockroach or a rat in your home? I probably would get rid of infestations in my home and feel bad about it. It's not about having a 100% perfect record with not killing animals. It's about striving to minimize animal suffering as much as practicable. You're never going to reduce this to 0 animals. But you can get to 95% better than the average human pretty easily if you want.
        seec 9mo ago
        [flagged]
        rkomorn 9mo ago
        Flagged your comment and stopped reading after the first sentence. Entirely unnecessary.
        seec 8mo ago
        Boohoo, I'm so mad; you flagged me on an internet forum. I'm so scared. On top of clearly being retarded, you are a little bitch. Go suck dick...
  - kuerbel 9mo ago
    In dairy farming, calves are usually separated from their mothers shortly after birth so the milk can be used for production. There are a few farms that keep calves with their mothers, but this isn’t something that scales in industrial systems. I worked on a farm for a while, and the day I had to take a newborn calf away from its mother, I became vegan. Farmers often say that cows don’t form a bond after giving birth, but that doesn’t match what I experienced. I have never heard anything as deeply sad as a mother cow calling for her baby.
    - doodlebugging 9mo ago
      Wait till you get into the other agricultural practices like raising sheep for wool or selecting your herd bulls. Sheep get castrated, ears notched and tail docked. Then they get set out to pasture. A bull is selected to be your herd bull and any cows either get milked as you described or pastured to be mama cows for building a herd. Any bull calves either get sold off to be someone else's herd bulls if the genetics are good enough or they get castrated, notched ears and in at least one herd I have seen, their tails are docked. As the old ag teacher in high school explained, you castrate them to keep their minds off of the ass and put 'em on the grass.
hshdhdhj4444 9mo ago
Animals do a whole bunch of things to other animals we wouldn’t consider acceptable. Cannibalism, eating your young, rape, etc. I’m not sure why killing for food is the one place we should choose to define our values and ethics based on what animals in the wild do.
- robcohen 9mo ago
  The problem I have with being vegetarian is that you can't prove that it's actually healthier, because the current state of dietary science is pretty poor. Even if you could, you would also need to explain all of the evolutionary problems that could come from some humans going vegetarian while others don't. What if being vegetarian makes you smaller and weaker physically (perhaps the case in some vegetarian countries now). If you had the answer, and it was clear a diet consisting of vegetables causes reduction in physical size, then I have to ask: Would you want your kids to be shorter and physically weaker than you are?
  - gruez 9mo ago
    >Would you want your kids to be shorter and physically weaker than you are? As someone who eats meat, that's probably one of the worse arguments against vegetarianism/veganism I've heard. If eating animals is immoral, sure why not? If pillaging your neighbors makes your society better off, do you think a good objection to "maybe we shouldn't pillage our neighbors" is "Would you want your kids to be shorter and physically weaker than you are"?
    - robcohen 8mo ago
      The logical entailment is eventually your lineage will be wiped out on some timescale if they cannot compete. I guess this argument in null and void if you believe violence is obsolete.
  - CurrentB 9mo ago
    Do you want your kids to have colon cancer or heart disease because there is pretty strong evidence to suggest red meat contributes to these. And there's much stronger evidence for that than there is that suggests that vegetarian kids will be shorter and physically weaker (in fact I don't think there is much good evidence at all suggesting that). Do you also have a problem with red meat?
paprikanotfound 9mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature
mmooss 9mo ago
There are many good arguments I think, but not this one. Nature is eating your neighbor's children; it's starvation, epidemics, and massive forest fires; it's unrestrained homicide and rape; it's leaving your physically weakened child to die; it's eating the head of your spouse; it's survival of the fittest; ... (you get my point). The other animals in nature are not my standard of behavior. In a sense, the point of any culture is to exceed nature and by as much as possible.
midtake 9mo ago
Yes. That is far more harmonious with nature than using machines of industry to enslave animal species and slaughter them on profit-driven schedules. Don't get me wrong, I eat meat, but I also understand that the grand majority of fellow meat-eaters have never hunted or reared livestock. Instead they are complete soyboys (ironic isn't it) who merely consume the output from the machine. These same beta cucks will open their mouths to screech "but animals eat animals in the wild!" Completely missing how unnatural an industrialized slaughter machine is. The only reason they are enslaved is that they lack organization and understanding. Had they those two, they could kill us all.

xnx 9mo ago

Murder and rape are also part of nature, but humans can reflect and consider the effects of their actions in ways other animals can't.

CurrentB 9mo ago

Personally that would be even worse for me, though I understand maybe "better" on a societal scale by some metrics. To feed a being every day and care for it, to gain its trust, to appreciate their individuality, then to have them killed when they reach some fraction of its potential lifespan, I just don't want to do that. I'm perfectly happy eating legumes.

7777332215 9mo ago
I'm not sure if it would be better on a societal scale in terms of pollution and efficiency, but instead in ethical concerns with how the animals were treated. What about raising cows or chickens, then consuming their milk and eggs?
- CurrentB 9mo ago
  Presumably you only would acquire female chickens to lay eggs. What happened to the male ones? (I don't recommend googling this). What do you do with the cow when its milk yield drops after several pregnancies? what do you do with the male calves? Just keep them all as pets? I think there are situations I could contrive where I'd say yeah its fine ethically to eat these things, but the general case still has victims. And again, since maybe the first week without them, I truly haven't missed milk or eggs or anything else after eliminating them from my diet. Plant options are pretty good too and there are plenty of plants.
  - 7777332215 9mo ago
    Use the whole of it. Kill them, eat them, use their bones and hide. Why is okay to kill a tree to build a home, kill a plant to eat, but not okay to kill an animal to eat? Is it okay to kill a cockroach or a rat in your home? Does the biological complexity of the organism make it more or less okay to kill it?
    - CurrentB 9mo ago
      > Why is okay to kill a tree to build a home, kill a plant to eat, but not okay to kill an animal to eat? > Does the biological complexity of the organism make it more or less okay to kill it? The ability to suffer is the distinguishing/relevant factor. We all know what suffering feels like and we know that animals have the capacity to suffer. We don't really know that trees do. I want to reduce the suffering I am responsible for. > Is it okay to kill a cockroach or a rat in your home? I probably would get rid of infestations in my home and feel bad about it. It's not about having a 100% perfect record with not killing animals. It's about striving to minimize animal suffering as much as practicable. You're never going to reduce this to 0 animals. But you can get to 95% better than the average human pretty easily if you want.
      - seec 9mo ago
        [flagged]
        rkomorn 9mo ago
        Flagged your comment and stopped reading after the first sentence. Entirely unnecessary.
        seec 8mo ago
        Boohoo, I'm so mad; you flagged me on an internet forum. I'm so scared. On top of clearly being retarded, you are a little bitch. Go suck dick...
- kuerbel 9mo ago
  In dairy farming, calves are usually separated from their mothers shortly after birth so the milk can be used for production. There are a few farms that keep calves with their mothers, but this isn’t something that scales in industrial systems. I worked on a farm for a while, and the day I had to take a newborn calf away from its mother, I became vegan. Farmers often say that cows don’t form a bond after giving birth, but that doesn’t match what I experienced. I have never heard anything as deeply sad as a mother cow calling for her baby.
  - doodlebugging 9mo ago
    Wait till you get into the other agricultural practices like raising sheep for wool or selecting your herd bulls. Sheep get castrated, ears notched and tail docked. Then they get set out to pasture. A bull is selected to be your herd bull and any cows either get milked as you described or pastured to be mama cows for building a herd. Any bull calves either get sold off to be someone else's herd bulls if the genetics are good enough or they get castrated, notched ears and in at least one herd I have seen, their tails are docked. As the old ag teacher in high school explained, you castrate them to keep their minds off of the ass and put 'em on the grass.

hshdhdhj4444 9mo ago

Animals do a whole bunch of things to other animals we wouldn’t consider acceptable. Cannibalism, eating your young, rape, etc. I’m not sure why killing for food is the one place we should choose to define our values and ethics based on what animals in the wild do.

robcohen 9mo ago
The problem I have with being vegetarian is that you can't prove that it's actually healthier, because the current state of dietary science is pretty poor. Even if you could, you would also need to explain all of the evolutionary problems that could come from some humans going vegetarian while others don't. What if being vegetarian makes you smaller and weaker physically (perhaps the case in some vegetarian countries now). If you had the answer, and it was clear a diet consisting of vegetables causes reduction in physical size, then I have to ask: Would you want your kids to be shorter and physically weaker than you are?
- gruez 9mo ago
  >Would you want your kids to be shorter and physically weaker than you are? As someone who eats meat, that's probably one of the worse arguments against vegetarianism/veganism I've heard. If eating animals is immoral, sure why not? If pillaging your neighbors makes your society better off, do you think a good objection to "maybe we shouldn't pillage our neighbors" is "Would you want your kids to be shorter and physically weaker than you are"?
  - robcohen 8mo ago
    The logical entailment is eventually your lineage will be wiped out on some timescale if they cannot compete. I guess this argument in null and void if you believe violence is obsolete.
- CurrentB 9mo ago
  Do you want your kids to have colon cancer or heart disease because there is pretty strong evidence to suggest red meat contributes to these. And there's much stronger evidence for that than there is that suggests that vegetarian kids will be shorter and physically weaker (in fact I don't think there is much good evidence at all suggesting that). Do you also have a problem with red meat?

paprikanotfound 9mo ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature

mmooss 9mo ago

There are many good arguments I think, but not this one. Nature is eating your neighbor's children; it's starvation, epidemics, and massive forest fires; it's unrestrained homicide and rape; it's leaving your physically weakened child to die; it's eating the head of your spouse; it's survival of the fittest; ... (you get my point). The other animals in nature are not my standard of behavior. In a sense, the point of any culture is to exceed nature and by as much as possible.

midtake 9mo ago

Yes. That is far more harmonious with nature than using machines of industry to enslave animal species and slaughter them on profit-driven schedules. Don't get me wrong, I eat meat, but I also understand that the grand majority of fellow meat-eaters have never hunted or reared livestock. Instead they are complete soyboys (ironic isn't it) who merely consume the output from the machine. These same beta cucks will open their mouths to screech "but animals eat animals in the wild!" Completely missing how unnatural an industrialized slaughter machine is. The only reason they are enslaved is that they lack organization and understanding. Had they those two, they could kill us all.