> Surely if killing animals is wrong, so is exploiting them for eggs and milk?
Prefacing an argument with "surely" doesn't make it a stronger argument. I don't see why it follows at all that raising animals for eggs or milk could not be done humanely.
> Are you trying you imply chicken lives are as valuable as human lives? You are failing at doing so, if that is the case. What you are actually doing is saying human lives are as valuable as chicken lives, i.e., not very valuable.
Your argument doesn't prove your point.
FTR, I eat meat and I yet think that chicken lives are as valuable as human. I choose to eat them nonetheless.
> If that argument works with dairy, why doesn't it work with rape and sex slavery? Or keeping a Gattaca clone alive so you can enjoy some spare organs?
Because cows aren’t humans? I don’t think this is the gotcha you think it is.
>This is a much different argument than you have been making. You're (now) saying people can't be persuaded not to kill animals, so we should do so in a more humane way.
Can you help me to understand where i contradicted myself?
Do you not think that most people who have stopped using animal products have not already come to the conclusion that what they did was (direct or indirect) killing and they deemed it as immoral? Using this argument in an animal ethics debate is ineffective at best.
> why is it okay to inflict pain and suffering only on the less intelligent animals?
I don't think anyone argues that it's okay to inflict pain and suffering on animals. We do inflict pain and suffering on factory-farmed animals, but most people oppose it (at least in a half-assed verbal manner; people say they don't like it but still buy products made in that way, in the same way people say they care about slavery and racism and inequality and exploitation of the third world but don't change their consumer behaviour to avoid supporting those things.)
> I understand why people get upset about their companion animal bring purposely hurt, but I don't understand how most everyone in that same demographic has no problem killing (or having killed through their economic transaction) a cow, pig, or chicken.
Im just explaining this.
Yes, killing animals just because they cant lay eggs is fucked up. Animals raised in inhuman conditions is animal abuse and should be followed up as such.
But I do not understand how people can think this is one and the same.
> I can absolutely understand why someone would therefore conclude it's morally wrong to use animals for food. I'm just not sure I agree.
Why not? Your comment makes it clear that industrial animal agriculture is wrong (not to mention ecologically disastrous), but then your last sentence makes a 180 out of nowhere. It feels extreme at first, but I'd like to assure you that reducing your consumption of these industries is possible (and sometimes even easy!).
> This is not an argument that fairs well on HN in general, but the fact that we can eat something this similar to a burger but without the slaughter of living, feeling, individual being is so unbelievably important and incredible.
The problem I have with this argument is that it always seems to me to focus on the life of the animal, but not on the death of the animal.
All animals eventually die, and most natural deaths are far more horrifying than how we slaughter animals, especially in modern times (though even traditional slaughter is nothing compared to starving to death, being eaten alive by insects, being hunted and terrified by a predator etc).
So, I think that it is important how the animals are grown (factory farms are absolutely horrible, unacceptable places to live in, and should ideally become illegal sooner rather than later, regardless of the consequences on the price of food). But I really don't think there is any reason to feel bad about the slaughter of animals who have led a decent life, even if it may be shorter than they would expect in nature (the huge proliferation of their species is kind of payment for that, in a way).
> The cow wouldn't even exist if it weren't useful to us.
I hate this argument so much.
For a start, animals are perfectly capable of breeding on their own. They don't need you. You are not their god.
Who is pretending they are something they are not? They are sentient beings whether you like it or not. You might think you are superior, but your cat and your dog are certainly not.
And who says that being alive is good? They're born into captivity, without a chance and many of them tortured for their entire life. But that's OK, because at least they got to live?
> Trying to keep them alive even when they have terrible quality of life is not necessarily a humane option
Maybe this is too off-topic, but I've always thought that vegetarianism is not a very well thought through philosophy. Animals kept alive under uncomfortable, stressful, and undignified conditions are ok but putting them out of their misery is not? I know there's a wide fuzzy boundary between the two (some dairy cows are really happy; some slaughter cows die slow, painful deaths) but it doesn't seem like the quality of life of dairy cows, egg-laying hens, etc. is considered. Personally I'd much rather die than be forcibly impregnated, separated from my child, and milked, repeating this cycle for years.
> If you think killing animals is cruel in itself, then you have only two logically consistent options: you either a) change your lifestyle to ensure you don't kill any animals whatsoever, or b) accept that some cruelty is inevitable and set some standard of acceptable cruelty for yourself.
Neither of these are addressed by equivocating this to wild animals predating.
> I don't understand. You're saying the problem with eating animal meat is not that an animal has to die, but in who does the killing? So it'd be better if each person had to kill their own food, even though it would almost surely result in a lot more waste, and thus a lot more killing?
I don't know if it's better if each person had to kill their own food. I'm not making a prescription on what people should do. I am only pointing out that there are real consequences to the current way we consume meat in a way that damages people and communities in a way that could be described as cruelty.
In short, I think killing another living being that experiences suffering is wrong.
There needs to be at least a base agreement on some ethics before diving into an ethical debate, and if you don't see a problem with needlessly killing animals, then this exchange will be worthless.
Extend the reasoning of how we know it's wrong to raise and kill a human for our own consumption to animals, and we arrive at veganism. Please see my second citation in the parent comment for a better overview.
> Octopuses have demonstrated significantly more intelligence than cows.
I fail to see how this is has any relevance. The ethical or emotional argument of killing an animal does not depend on vague assertions over the problem-solving skills of said animal.
Meanwhile I feel your blend of arguments is terribly disingenuous for the way they avoid facing the fact that people eat animals in general and octopuses in particular.
>>If we substitute your children into their lifestyle, would you be ok with that?
Animals are not humans though, so this comparison is completely moot(for me anyway).
>>Humans are still imposing their will on these animals.
That's like saying that I'm imposing my will on my dog by making him live with me. Like....I guess you are correct? That doesn't automatically make it bad - if it does for you, then I guess that's where we disagree.
>> I talked about self determination
I don't believe animals have self determination in the first place, not it in the same way humans do. A cow is neither capable of deciding its own fate, nor is any attempt to give it such agency even remotely reasonable. Again, I expect we will disagree here.
>> but saying humane farming is like saying humane torture
Uhmmm, again, no not really, because keeping an animal on an open moor like in my example wouldn't be called torture by literally anyone other than the most extreme believer in animal rights. After all that's where these animals normally live, the fact that there is a fence there(sometimes there isn't even one, or if there is the animal might literally never come across it), is literally the only difference between "wild" and "farmed" animal here.
But for the sake of the discussion - do you then consider hunting wild animals ethical or humane? Like a bunch of deer living in a forest, and they just get shot one day - is that more or less ethical than killing a sheep that spent its entire life out in the open? What makes that difference?
It's actually not an objective fact. Compare two scenarios:
10 acres of rainforest were clearcut to grow palm oil to make the mayo
1/2 acre of grassland in Iowa that was previously used for corn is allocated to raise pastured happy chickens, rotated with market heirloom grains. They are allowed to live out their natural life, and are fed even after they stop producing eggs.
Which of those scenarios has more animal cruelty? In one situation you are essentially committing genocide of an entire microecology, in the other you are giving some animals an incredible life, and eating part of their waste stream, eggs which are not necessary for their survival or happiness, and in fact are over-budgeted in their genetics to allow for predation.
Veganism is an OK heuristic for animal cruelty, but it's far from perfect. It's often better than nothing, but a vegan Whole Foods diet may well cause more animal harm than someone living near the poverty level in, say, Korea, eating some animal products, but also making much more efficient use of land. Vegans love to pretend land use doesn't matter, but land use = animal displacement.
Eating more plants can be a great way to reduce cruelty. But Vegan\ism\ as a hard rule is more about religious purity than it is about animal cruelty.
Signed,
Someone who ate entirely vegan today and most days
>My argument is about this case, not about hypothetical cases in which animals cause each other to suffer.
I don't know what you're talking about. You said it is wrong to assume humans are different from animals, which makes this case a case of animals (humans) causing suffering in other animals (cows).
>If I were able to communicate with, say, a predator who likes torturing its live prey, I'd be happy to do my best to convince them not to do so.
If I crapped gold, I would be rich. That doesn't mean you can assume I am rich. You can't make a convincing argument by basing your assumptions in fantasy.
>So as long as we strip children from their parents (like cows) and thereby ameliorate the generational connection to the parents suffering, it doesn't matter so much that we cause suffering to both the parent and the child?
What? No. This has nothing to do with parent-child relationships, it has to do with the fact that humans teach and write and communicate ideas across long periods of time. If you take away the ability of humans to communicate and teach each other, then their suffering will be comparable to animal suffering. If you teach cows to read and write, they will stop being treated like animals.
Sorry, I'm having trouble figuring out from your response what it is that you disagree with. The main point of my post is to address the question of whether it's ethical to raise and eat animals at all: whether, all things being equal, a world in which nobody eats cows or sheep or chickens is better than a world in which we eat cows and sheep and chickens, but give them decent living conditions.
Obviously other things are not equal, as I alluded to in my final paragraph.
Prefacing an argument with "surely" doesn't make it a stronger argument. I don't see why it follows at all that raising animals for eggs or milk could not be done humanely.
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