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This is an excellent documentary but I'm surprised on how many people simply don't get the point. This documentary is not about being vegan, is about give the

• nawitus 13y ago
  In my opinion realizing that speciesism is wrong directly leads to veganism. I do think that it's import that point out that veganism is a mere side-product of anti-speciesism.
  • rangibaby 13y ago
    How is it specisist to eat things that an omnivore naturally eats in Nature?
    • nawitus 13y ago
      According to Wikipedia: "Speciesism involves the assignment of different values, rights, or special consideration to individuals solely on the basis of their species membership." A non-speciesist who kills other animals to eat them would be a priori okay with killing humans to eating them.
      • Nursie 13y ago
        So a non-speciesist also considers every act of animal-on-animal violence in the natural world to be tantamount to murder and cannibalism?
      • belorn 13y ago
        In what way is Speciesism connected with canibalism by any species? But regardless, eating humans is unhealthy and thus contrary to evolution. Its the same reason why animals that live for a long time (~100) rarely have many enemies, especially if they are omnivores. Evolutionary, it is better to eat meat that do not had years to build up on heavy metals and toxins. So to put it to a simple point, regardless of the morality with cannibalism, humans would still not eat other humans. There is no -ism needed to explain why we do not eat sulfur, or drink mercury.
    • PavlovsCat 13y ago
      It's speciesist to treat them in a callous and reckless way, because they are considered less worthy of respect and care than humans. Primitive hunters seem to have respected their prey... just because they killed and ate them didn't mean they considered themselves above them. And from such hybris results shameful behaviour.
      • Oletros 13y ago
        > just because they killed and ate them didn't mean they considered themselves above them Any source for the claim that "primitive hunters didn't considered themselves above animals"?
        • PavlovsCat 13y ago
          It's hard to prove that about times before written history, isn't it.. but there is animal worship, for one? As for written history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_status_of_animals_in_the_ancient_world http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_status_of_animals_in_the_... might be a start
          • Oletros 13y ago
            Please, feel free to point where in that link people doesn't consider themselves above animals.
            • PavlovsCat 13y ago
              In the sense of being able to do whatever with them? You can read, right?
              • Oletros 13y ago
                That was not the sense of the OP. You can read and understand, right?
  • quchen 13y ago
    I think there is a large transitional zone between veganism and, well, non-veganism. I don't see anything wrong with my neighbour's hobby chicken farm (of 4) for example. It's the industrialized setting, designed to be opaque to its consumers, that one should be opposed to.
    • nawitus 13y ago
      I think the world would be a hugely better place if everyone would only eat animals from neighbours' hobby farms. That said, it's a slippery slope in practise. Usually people who argue using these special circumstances then continue to argue that "local farms" are magically ethical, because they're non-factory farms. Then in real life these people actually eat non-local meat and factory farmed meat. The point of non-speciesism is that it's not automatically ethical to eat animals even if they're not in horrendous factory farms. You're still treating non-humans in a separate ethical category. An additional point to make is that even if something appears ethical, it often is not. Usually hobby farm chickens are sourced from unethical places, for example. Of course there's no point in talking about this particular hobby chicken farm because nobody else knows anything about it.
  • belorn 13y ago
    I reject the very idea that omnivorous diet is in any way or form connected with speciesism. As humans, we have the ability (through not uniquely) to consider the acts we do in a third-party perspective. We can think about the consequences of our actions, and how our actions will effect nature. We can think rational about fishing, hunting, and even keeping a healthy sized population of farm animals. One can respect animals while at the same time making sure that a population of fast breeding animals are kept to a size which is healthy.
    • nawitus 13y ago
      >I reject the very idea that omnivorous diet is in any way or form connected with speciesism. It can be. If a person assigns different values depending on the species, that person is speciesist. And obviously that person's diet is affected by speciesism or lack of it. Wikipedia: "Speciesism involves the assignment of different values, rights, or special consideration to individuals solely on the basis of their species membership."
      • Oletros 13y ago
        Really, being omnivorous has nothing to do with speciesism, being omnivorous is just a biological threat
• donquichotte 13y ago
  I wonder where non-speciesits turn into speciesists --- rats in their bedroom? Insects? Bacteria? Viruses? Prions? Fungi? The line can be drawn somewhat arbitrarily. If I fight bacteria with antibiotics, why not fight mosquitoes? Or rats?
  • contextual 13y ago
    I'm sure slave owners in the South used the same slippery logic: "If we let black people free, what's next? Women with voting rights?! I can't whip my boy when he acts up?!" Change is hard, but if you're genuinely confused, simply follow what the great mindhacker Gautama Buddha taught: compassion for all and without judgement.
• zamalek 13y ago
  I wish I could agree with your thoughtful argument. The problem is that the site makes it seem as though becoming a Vegan is the only way to solve this problem (I most certainly agree that there is a problem here). Therefore this is once again going to fall on deaf ears because some simply can't resist pushing a pet agenda. They should have left off the whole vegan concept or added home range. We are biologically hardcoded to eat both meat and vegetables. The problem is not what our diet is: rather how we go about fulfilling such a massive demand due to our inability to curb our breeding habits. Becoming a vegan only partially solves the problem (partially = swathes of the Amazon forest being chopped down for vegetable farming). The other solution is only purchasing home range (which I always do unless it's absolutely not available) - but that had the problem of where the animals would be farmed (probably the Amazon too). Cut down enough of the Amazon and guess what happens, not only do you stress the wildlife as you displace them but you also rapidly cause extinctions. The problem is lack of self control, not our diet.
  • jerf 13y ago
    "due to our inability to curb our breeding habits." Reminder: We have curbed our breeding habits. Industrialized societies now generally face more pressing underpopulation problems than overpopulation problems, and the global population is now predicted to peak within this century, then start going back down. You may wish they had been curbed at a lower number, you may still be concerned that we may still pass a carrying capacity before we quite peak, but a fashionably misanthropic "woe, woe, we just keep breeding forever" is not currently a valid concern based on facts.
  • mcantelon 13y ago
    The site is not the official site of those who made the documentary by the looks of it. The official site is http://earthlings.com/ http://earthlings.com/. So discounting the film because someone promoting it advocates veganism is probably misguided. At for environmental impact, a meat diet is generally more environmentally expensive than a vegetable diet. Animals either directly eat vegetables or indirectly (eating other animals that eat other animals that eat vegetables, etc.). Through the life of the animal it's burning the calories from the vegetables. Eat the vegetable calories directly and you're not eating them through an animal conduit that consumed much of them while existing.
• jere 13y ago
  >Also talks about speciesism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciesism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciesism comparing it to racism. That's a nonstarter for me and makes me want to avoid this film. Speciesism is a perfectly reasonable position. Assigning the exact same values and rights to cockroaches/jellyfish/ants as we do to humans is ludicrous. Any number of moral thought experiments should immediately demonstrate how absurd that would be (e.g. would you refuse to sacrifice 2 ants to save 1 human?).
  • deleted 13y ago
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  • PavlovsCat 13y ago
    > Any number of moral thought experiments should immediately demonstrate how absurd that would be (e.g. would you refuse to sacrifice 2 ants to save 1 human?). Ahh, but don't stop there. Make such though experiments with humans (Would you sacrifice one 80 year old to save two 40 year olds? Would you sacrifice 3 illiterate children to save one wunderkind? Is a person you know worth 1.3 or rather 2.7 people you don't know?) quickly shows that those are equally absurd, so the absurdity in one case proves nothing.
    • jere 13y ago
      No, I don't think so. Just because you've chosen silly numbers doesn't mean those are absurd. Moral thought experiments are useful for understanding what value people tend to place on human life. See, even with your trolling questions, most people would have a queasy feeling in their stomach when considering sacrificing a human being. But when I ask you to compare the value of ant life to human life, there's no comparison. You wouldn't hesitate. They aren't equal at all.
    • pavelrub 13y ago
      There is nothing absurd about any of those scenarios. Those are perfectly valid questions, and to answer them might be difficult - that's why it's not at all obvious that 40 year olds are more morally "important" than 80 year olds (for me they obviously aren't). However, to answer the original question is very easy: Human > Rat. Defending the opposite position is absurd, and although some people might feel Human=Rat - it's a fallacy to compare this to "Black human = White human", or to "Jew=Non-Jew".