How odd. I would have thought more people came to it through pop science or academic reading.
My final nudge was a book about cognition in fish /shrug.
Unfortunately academia in my experience has often overlooked the benefits of veganism. I literally had a debate with the professor in sociology class over the ethics of testing on animal victims.
Not in that sense, just we’re taught a lot of propaganda about how non humans don’t have minds in a comparable way to us.
It’s moved on from reflex machines but there’s still a lot of tacit assumptions about creatures “not really” suffering.
But if you examine brains and behaviour, or philosophy of consciousness, this all falls apart. Like it’s very difficult to explain why a zebra fish with harmlessly but painfully envenomed lips would behave more cautiously and make more pessemistic choices if that fish isn’t experiencing something quite similar to sulking because they’re in pain.
If birds, with their vastly different brains to mammals, can arrive at complex tool useage and even better model based thinking than first year physics students, why would we not assume they’d also share consciousness and so on.
Def a combination of all these, and a book (why we love dogs, eat cows), for me.
