Ive always found it strange when animal rights people talk about the suffering from farms and human consumption of meat. Do they not realise the suffering that exists in the natural world? Its a non-stop horror show of pain, suffering and death. — DingoJones
Well it seems strange to save an animal from suffering by ensuring it will suffer. Frying pan or fire? And thats besides the fact that most animals cannot make an ethical social contract. Its protecting an animal from suffering and death by sending it off to..suffering and death. (Presumably the alternative to being a farm animal is living in the wild). That doesnt seem odd to you? — DingoJones
Take vegans and vegetarians. In order to grow the food they eat, animals still have to be slaughtered en masse. Those fields of fruits or veggies result in countless deaths and plenty of suffering from displacement and starvation. If you want to say rodents and insects dont count or count less, then you are making the exact same calculus a meat eater is making. The moral high ground held by vegans or vegetarians is an illusion. — DingoJones
But practically no one ever suggests such a thing. The alternative to suffering of farmed animals is obviously not freeing them to starve in the wild, but not breeding them in the first place. That's a basic false dichotomy. — zookeeper
Sure, production of plants results in animals dying en masse. No one seriously thinks that's not the case. How or why would that eliminate the moral high ground? — zookeeper
I was comparing the suffering experienced by farm animals to the suffering of animals in the wild. Thats not a dichotomy, its a comparison. — DingoJones
Well it seems strange to save an animal from suffering by ensuring it will suffer. Frying pan or fire? And thats besides the fact that most animals cannot make an ethical social contract. Its protecting an animal from suffering and death by sending it off to..suffering and death. (Presumably the alternative to being a farm animal is living in the wild). — DingoJones
Not breeding them in the first place is a fair point but doesnt address what to do with the ones that have been bred already. — DingoJones
Also, regardless of what we do with the current stock of farm animals doesnt change the fact that animals, anywhere, live harsh and short lives that end in various horrific deaths. Thats the point I was making. There is no significant ethical difference between the suffering of farm animals and the suffering of animals in general. — DingoJones
It IS strange, as under your paradigm one should be out rescuing animals from the wild as well. — DingoJones
Well isnt preventing suffering what grants the moral highground? Suffering isnt being prevented by not eating meat, in fact id say that it causes more suffering just by the sheer numbers of individual suffering (unless you want to claim those lives are less significant somehow, but again that is the exact same calculus a meat eater is making). — DingoJones
That doesn't make any sense. How does plant-eating cause more suffering than meat-eating? It causes some, obviously, but if you make an esoteric claim such that it causes more suffering or suffering to more individual creatures, then surely you have some kind of rationale for that. What is it? — zookeeper
I was referring to the amount of lives lost/suffering. Insects and rodents are more enumerate than farm animals. Insects and rodents can co-exist with animal farm fields. Thats not the case with crops, the insects and rodents are wiped out or displaced (and most die). So many many times more individual lives and suffering result from a crop field. Ergo, if we are measuring the suffering of individuals we see there are more individuals suffering from the footprint of the crops than the animal farming. By a landslide really.
Just because you don’t understand something doesnt mean it doesnt make sense. I dont mind clarifying, I simply thought you understood the huge numbers difference in individual lives. My mistake, hopefully its clear what I meant now. — DingoJones
You will need to offer some actual numbers to back up your claim that the loss of animals from the proportion of crops to replace meat is astronomical when compared to the number of animals we kill/catch each year. I agree that generally speaking, cattle grazing on open range is relatively harm free and can be ecologically preferable, but we aren't talking about the impact of ALL crops grown for food versus just range grazed cattle. See my comment above. — Graeme M
So just to clarify: you personally value the lives and suffering of, say, a beetle and a cow equally (or, alternatively, that you believe a beetle and cow are equally capable of suffering)? That your ethical judgement if you see someone squash a cat with a bat is more or less the same as when you see someone squash a mosquito? — zookeeper
I was pointing out an inconsistency that arises from the vegan/animal rights premiss of reducing suffering. — DingoJones
Reducing suffering is not my own basis of morality, nor a metric I would use to defend/attack animal rights. — DingoJones
It's not an inconsistency unless one believes that beetles and cows are capable of equal amounts of suffering, or that their lives somehow matter equally much. You don't believe it, animal rights people don't believe it, so no one's being inconsistent. — zookeeper
I'm curious, what metric would you propose? Mind you, the original discussion was in relation to vegetarianism, extended to veganism. Neither is essentially about animal rights as far as I know. — Graeme M
Personally, I do eat meat - and it seems like any defense of eating meat is necessarily speciesist - i.e. it elevates and considers humans as just inherently more important than other animals. It seems funny to me than an accusation of someone being a "speciest" (sp?) is considered a serious accusation....[/
It is a serious enough accusation, but not from those who claim the categorization of animals is their primary focus of value and emphasis, in other words those who strived to be less discriminatory than humanists, but from those who favor being more discriminatory than humanists, and so are open about their primary focus of value and emphasize being categorizations within the human species.
An animalist could rightly claim that a meat eating humanist's value system arbitrarily focuses on his own species, but it's not much of a criticism coming from one who also has an arbitrary value system.
A species is a breeding type, meaning it's the total of all individuals who have genes which are compatible with each others' in terms of breeding. That the human species is composed of groups that have less genetic divergence than many other notable species isn't necessarily and argument in favor of valuing it as a collective entity in a way that discourages divergence through universal ethical standards.
One could argue that a healthy species is a more diverse species and so advocate uneven ethical standards to achieve that purpose.
if the choice was between saving 10 people or 10 cows are we really going remain indifferent about it? — BitconnectCarlos
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