5 ms·
I personally think vegans should consider eating cows. If you care about sentient life and abuse, think about how much meat one cow produces. Killing a single c
by bko 6mo ago
I personally think vegans should consider eating cows. If you care about sentient life and abuse, think about how much meat one cow produces. Killing a single cow can feed you for well over a year.
- malfist 6mo agoYou say that like it's mandatory to kill sentient life to feed people. It isn't.
- nickburns 6mo agoI can imagine this poster's chortle thinking to themself, 'they thought I meant the animals!'
- amanaplanacanal 6mo agoI always wonder what vegans think is going to happen to all the pigs, cows, and chickens if people stop eating meat?
- cfstras 6mo agoDemand would go down, so meat companies would reduce breeding to reduce output. Or start an ad & lobbying campaign to increase demand again.
- marliechiller 6mo agoBillions of pigs cows and chickens will stop being massacred in grizzly ways? Yours is an extremely common and unfortunately ill-informed argument that I see a lot. If I was given the choice between end all suffering by killing all factory farmed animals right now vs perpetuate it, im choosing kill all animals right now
- amanaplanacanal 6mo agoIt sounds like you don't have a problem with killing animals. Is it just the living conditions? If we replaced factory farms with more ethical practices, would that solve the problem for you?
- hnhn34 6mo ago> would that solve the problem for you? not the person you replied to, but it mostly would for me. Factory farms are among the closest things to hell on earth.
- amanaplanacanal 6mo agoMaybe we need a certification for ethical animal raising. I know we can buy free range eggs and chicken, and grass fed beef, but I know know if that really means anything.
- marliechiller 6mo agoSomewhat. I think we are still quite a long way from ethical practices even in the "good" cases. I eat meat, but try to limit it to once a week and have replaced milk with oat and soy in a lot of places. I still love cheese but it does give me conflict when I spend even a second thinking about what it takes to actually get cheese. (Cows dont lactate without pregnancy). That said, my own personal philosophy is that we have likely evolved to consume animal products so I cant dismiss it fully, just reduce my own consumption. ~75% of all agricultural land is used to feed livestock, yet livestock produces only 18% of the world's calories and 37% of its protein, which just seems insanity to me. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
- turtlesdown11 6mo ago> I always wonder what vegans think is going to happen to all the pigs, cows, and chickens if people stop eating meat? factory farms would stop breeding animals to kill them? Did you think you had an argument here?
- notlenin 6mo agoaren't plants also sentient? Isn't all life sentient? If not, where do you draw the line? "It has eyes and bilateral symmetry and an endoskeleton looks vaguely human-like so I can anthropomorphize it"? "Only members of the animal kingdom are conscious"?
- nickburns 6mo agoDo you think plants achieve the same degree of sentience as say, a pig? Or would drawing even that line be too arbitrary for you?
- notlenin 6mo agohonestly, I don't know. Sentience is consciousness. I can't imagine what it must be like to be a plant, the plants existence is too different from mine for me to imagine it. It would be like trying to imagine life in a 12-dimensional space - I'm a human, with a human consciousness, living in 3-dimensional space, that makes sense to me. I can empathize, and to a certain degree imagine what it must be like to be a dog or a cat or a cow, because they're very similar to me in how they work. They move, they eat, they poop, they reproduce sexually. They have similar mammalian feelings and similar DNA (well, more similar than the plant). But for all I know a plant, say the spinach I had a few days ago, could be just as conscious, albeit in a way that I absolutely cannot comprehend, and my ripping off the plant's leaves to eat them may be, to the plant, every bit as painful as someone ripping out my lungs to eat them.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- nickburns 6mo agoSo you acknowledge the former but can't get past the latter. Got it. I wonder how the judges will score.
- notlenin 6mo agosorry for the stupid question, but what is "the former" and what is "the latter"? Did you mean I acknowledge the sentience of plants but not animals? I believe that all life might be conscious, but life that is "very different" from me I have a hard time imagining what that consciousness might be like. For animals, especially mammals, I can easily imagine what they must be feeling and empathize with them. I can understand that a cow feels pain when hurt, because the cow is very similar to me. A plant might also feel pain when hurt (even the grass I step on might not appreciate me walking on it), but I'd have a harder time empathizing with that.
- IAmBroom 6mo agoShould pacifists likewise murder one person?
- stasomatic 6mo agoI’m gonna pull a Rogan and mention how many other sentient beings are massacred while plowing a field. Rodents, insects, snakes, birds, etc. Is that a myth? What is the answer to feed everyone during these budget constrained times? It can’t be tofu, can it? There are just too many of us. In the meantime, the US is overrun by dear and boars, and I’ve been learning archery.
- Ritewut 6mo ago> What is the answer to feed everyone during these budget constrained times? It can’t be tofu, can it? There are just too many of us. You are very wrong here by orders of magnitudes. The US produces about 5 billion bushes of soybeans. 1 bushel is around 60 lbs. Having made tofu myself, depending on the type of tofu you make 1 lb of dry soybeans is anywhere from 1.5 to 2 lbs of tofu(remember we are adding water to the mix so we increase weight). If 1 bushel is 60 lbs and we produce 5 billion then we have 136 million metric tons of soybeans which makes 272 million tons of tofu which is enough to feed the entire US several times over. This doesn't even begin to touch the amount of food you can make from the byproduct of tofu, soy pulp which is itself a food in some countries. I'm not suggesting we actually do it but to answer your question of "is tofu the answer," it could be. The vast majority of our soybean crop was sold to other countries until Trump tariffs made China switch from us to Russia. I'm not sure what the current status of our soybean production is but we have the crop production to feed the entire US.
- stasomatic 6mo agoThanks for the math. Obviously not everyone will go for Soyfu, but I'll attempt to integrate it into my diet. I've had it, it's an acquired taste, but what isn't really. I remember hating black caviar growing up in Ua.
- Ritewut 6mo agoI'd recommend checking out Serious Eats for Kenji's "Vegan Experience" recipes. He has some tofu recipes for omnivores that I really endorse. His tofu banh mi is divine.