Hehe, we like meat so much that we’re going to ignore the fact that it destroys the environment and continue farming and eating it like there is still a billion of us on this planet. Also, the prices must be low but i don’t care that living beings are raised in hellish conditions for our convenience. We made it illegal to record those conditions so we don’t have to look at them. Meat delicious, I deserve it three meals a day because look at my prosperity.
Yeah. It’s the usual nonsense habits of people that they will defend to their dying breath
Thats what you get when you base your personality on what you eat.
You would think mutton would be more popular…
I know it’s a cliché, but say this on Reddit and you’ll be downvoted into oblivion. Tried it many times. Criticize meat and seemingly reasonable people suddenly start making the same circular arguments they usually mock.
People consider themselves good people and don’t like thinking about the consequences of their actions.
Same happens when you point out that children lose their limbs for our smartphones. People aren’t going to stop using their smartphones, aren’t going to consider themselves bad people, and so will rationalize however they can.
AKA the Bullshit Bingo!
For anyone interested, here is a relevant documentary about how Earth is experiencing a sixth mass extinction event because of our actions like you mentioned.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://youtu.be/6TqhcZsxrPA?si=GvgvuvKJmKO0X3zd
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
It kills me how often I see people claim that it is the corporations that are driving climate change and that individuals can do nothing when going plant based would make a huge difference.
They’re like giant dogs.
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Every time I see this cow picture, I’m always reminded of Pink Floyd.
Mmm. Delicious giant dogs
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you should show your scientific sources for that claim
when not eating meat has been scientifically proven to reduce your health due to protein starvation…
You misunderstood the science. Not getting a sufficient intake of nutrients, including proteins, is what’s killing you. You can easily get proteins from plants and plant based foods. Then everything is fine.
but we do have to because we evolved to require it over 12k years ago and nature is cruel like that […] consuming flesh is inevitable
No. We didn’t and we don’t. If I am not mistaken, in humanities history we mainly had a plant based diet. The massive increase in meat consumption is a rather modern phenomenon.
We are omnivores, yes. That means we have a digestive system which is able to process meat as well as plants. But that doesn’t mean we have to use both or a single source. It is possible to get all of your required nutrients from plants and plant based sources.
12k years ago we learned to farm crops.
We have been eating meat way longer before that (I believe ~400k years?) but only because we were able to use fire to make it consumable for us (cooking also expanded the availability of plant proteins at the same amount). We aren’t really capable of consuming raw meat very effectively until this day. Especially when looking at our digestive system, we’re still very close to the fruit, nut and bug eating apes.
That’s not evolution.
not eating meat has been scientifically proven to reduce your health due to protein starvation
Citation needed
It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.
Is dog meat really that tasty?
I never tasted it but people claim that it’s strong-smelling. So perhaps it’s like goat or sheep?
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Haha rhetorical questions get rhetorical answers haha
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https://youtu.be/zV5K3v0u1J8?si=L6PwLxpNCz7x_75L
Skip to the 45 second for the relevant bit.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://youtu.be/zV5K3v0u1J8?si=L6PwLxpNCz7x_75L
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Why does that cow have 3 legs?
They’ve already started eating her 😞
They couldn’t find a real cow out on a pasture, so they had to AI generate it.
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~One is probably behind the other leg~
That’s a dairy cow; you can eat that one without killing it.
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Milked it so hard a leg was sucked inside!
Extra protein
Okay that caught me off guard and made me fucking laugh.
I would feel a lot better about it if we treated cattle with existential respect while they gather for our consumption.
But capitalism does not do that to humans so hoping for mad cow respect in the US is about largely remembering about the fatal neurodegenerative disease of cattle.
Just go buy your meat directly from a farmer that only raises a few each year and that lets the cows roam free, it’s not impossible to buy meat that’s much more ethical, you just have to accept the price that comes with it.
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It tastes good and I don’t eat it everyday and I try to eat quality meat as much as possible, give me a break.
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The device you typed this on surely do not contain any precious metal obtained through human abuse.
One form of harm does not excuse the other. We all have to make some effort on multiple fronts if we want the future to be brighter. Besides, it’s easier to survive as a vegetarian than without technology in modern society.
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Thing is I could make efforts on all fronts except for eating meat every now and then and you guys would still be mad even if I made more effort then you everywhere else.
irrelevant
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Meat eating is tightly connected to manliness. Also ideas of freedom. People think doing away with meat would mean more austerity and an attack on their individuality. You could sit someone down, join the dots for them linking meat to environmental catastrophe that affects them and they will still laugh it off with a vapid joke like in the meme.
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Man, my girlfriend wants to eat meat more often than I do, what does that mean? 🤔
*in your culture
Meat eating is tightly connected to manliness.
That’s an interesting proposition. You have a source for that, or a theory of your own? Please share.
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/3/1290
The idea isn’t new or obscure but there is an academic source. Have you never heard of alt-right idiots complaining about soy boys? You know they are referring to men who have been emasculated because of aversion to meat and consumption of estrogen-like soy products?
I’ve heard about that, but I feel a majority of meat eaters are quite tolerant with veganism and don’t see it a a threat to their masculinity. And I think I can say this threat isn’t even relevant in the case of women meat eaters. About the study you linked: it doesn’t really try to take an objective standpoint on the matter since its entire premise is the necessity to convince meat eaters to change their eating habits. Also is says itself (end of section 5) that the link between eating meat and masculinity wasn’t specifically targeted by the study. The authors do mention though that the link between masculinity and meat eating can be attributed to perceptions created by industry marketing. But in this article (as well as in my own personal experience) this link seems at best anecdotal.
Yeah but what about my cat? What about animals in the wild? How can we stop them from eating meat?
But what about you?
“You’re supposed to pretend that you’re something speshul and above those filthy, disgusting and immoral animals!” - vegans.
EDIT, replying to a comment (from another poster? the same poster?) elsewhere. I think that it was answering this comment, but the thread got deleted so…
Yeah, not eating animals means we think we’re “above” them because that makes sense.
Yes, it does. Unless you also expect other omnivorous species and the carnivorous ones to refrain to eat meat… do you? (You don’t.)
And yes, this makes sense even if it hurts your “precious, oooh so preeecious!” feelings of superiority over other animals.
Also some other animal killer here in the comments flat out said “humans are above animals, this is fact” but evil vegans think they’re above animals!
- Whataboutism: “but what about what the other guy said?”, disingenuously shifting the focus from vegans to non-vegans. Also I’m not responsible for someone else’s statements.
- False dichotomy: implying that a non-vegan putting himself over other animals automatically excludes vegans from doing the same.
The false dichotomy is so fucking dumb that it makes me think that you’re implictly admitting to not have any actual argument at hand.
If you want a serious reply then bring up some something not so infested by fallacies as the above, otherwise I’ll just keep laughing at you, “sorry”.
(Arguably also loaded language but I’ll cut you some slack on that, given that it has some entertainment value.)
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How is it relevant to the question I’m asking?
How are your cat and animals in the wild relevant to your choices for yourself?
I agree with you that it’s a personal choice. I was replying to someone who seemed to imply that it wasn’t, and was suggesting that someone who eats meat can just stop doing it. I think that, for some people or some cultures, transitioning to a vegan diet isn’t that easy.
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It was an honest question, and you didn’t answer it.
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Taste
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I’m not saying it has variety but that the taste of it is great
it’s ethical because they name them before slitting their throats 🥰
No, but it is better since the animals get some quality life before we slit their throats.
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I hope you eat them afterward. That would be so wasteful if you didn’t.
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“have a little priest.”
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That’s not what I said, but whatever 🤷
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you can just stop eating meat lol
And what does this existential respect look like?
Having a bit more joy in life and living a day longer in a cage which is one squaremeter larger until they get slaughtered?
Still no freedom and an unnaturally early end of life.
Oh boy, another dogshit kill animals hehe meme. Very funny maymay community. Psuedoprogressive animal abusers the lot of ya. There is not enough resources on Earth to quench your never ending demand for bodies. Just have ten trillion kids who all definitely have the opportunity to eat just as many animals as you do! Primitive zero brain cell fools. I’d throw you all out of Athens.
internet is filled with echo chambers who cant make ethical decisions of their own. veganism gets downvoted because it makes people question their morality & they have to make the effort of buying plant-based options. god forbid they eat food without cholesterol
Veganism gets downvoted for the same reason any other fanaticism gets downvoted: the vocal minority that talks about it does so with a hoiler-than-thou attitude, much like you are doing right now.
The people who want me to stop punching nonconsenting people in the face unprovoked sure are smug about not punching nonconsenting people in the face unprovoked. They should stop telling me what to do. Live and let live. I am very intelligent. An enlightened centrist you might say! ☝️🤓
That’s a false equivalence.
The vast majority of the Western world does not consider farm animals to have the same rights as humans or pets. Equating the ethics of eating meat and battery is really reaching for an example to make me look stupid.
But hey, if we’re playing that game, here’s some examples that demonstrate unnecessary and annoying proselytizing:
The people who want me to {blank} sure are smug about how they {blank}. They should keep telling me how their lifestyle is better. My opinion isn’t as important as theirs. I am very happy to be talked down upon. An enlightened listener, you might say! ☝️🤓
- Drive a Tesla
- Drink Pepsi instead of Coke
- Try homeopathy
- Wear Versace
- Own a PlayStation instead of Xbox
- Cook with propane instead of charcoal
On the basis of their being conscious feeling thinking emotional beings I assert that there is no moral difference between violating the bodily autonomy of a non-human animal and a human. Given a no alternative hypothetical it’s fair to give preference for who to spare, but this is not the same as willful unnecessary violence and killing.
If it’s false equivalency, demonstrate why it is permissible to kill non humans but not even permissible to punch humans in the face. What is the morally relevant difference? If you could apply that difference to a human, would you then justify doing to them all the things we do to animals?
Your examples don’t have victims, this one does.
From the perspective of cultural relativism.*
Insofar as our laws view animals, we do not afford them the same considerations or rights as we do our own species. I can’t speak for Europe, but in the legal systems of North American countries, animals are granted their own distinct protections separate from the protections given to entities with the designation of personhood (i.e. humans or service animals).
For instance, with permits and barring species that are protected for conservation reasons, humans are allowed to hunt and kill animals for both sport and sustenance. In such cases, animals do not consent to their hunting.
However, that does not mean that it is okay to hurt animals without cause. There are animal cruelty laws that cover unjustified and inhumane treatment of wild and pet animals.
If it is legal to kill animals but illegal to be “cruel” to them, then the act of killing an animal is not, in itself, cruelty. If it was, then animal cruelty would unconditionally occur during the process of hunting, making the latter illegal.
With these four points, and keeping in mind that laws are a reflection of the collective beliefs of society, we see that:
- Harming humans is viewed as a different act than harming animals, and is not generally permissible.
- Killing animals is permissible.
- Inflicting intentional cruelty on animals is not permissible.
- (2) is not precluded by (3).
By (1) and that punching a human in the face is an act of harming them (and also illegal), I conclude that it is not morally permissible to punch humans in the face.
By (2) and (4), I conclude that it is morally permissible to kill non-human animals.
Just in case anyone thinks relativism is a cop-out answer because laws were written in the past and may not be reflective of society’s current moral views, I ask you to consider this:
Laws are constantly changed to align with updated beliefs. Canada amended its laws to consider gender identity a protected class, which reflects the contemporary belief that transgender individuals deserve equality and freedom from being discriminated against. If society cared about not killing animals, hunting for sport would be unconditionally outlawed.
Edit 1: I meant cultural relativism. Non-Western cultures have different (and in some cases, more progressive) views on animal rights.
Foundationally we already disagree, as I’m a moral objectivist. To assert moral subjectivity is to assert that moral progress does not exist. But with your edit your argument is actually now even worse IMO, because instead of focusing on a moral relativist position you’re now basically saying morality=culture/law. i.e., since you have no say in what another society does without disrupting their agreed practice, all their actions are permissible. Bigotry is permissible. Slavery is permissible, hangings are permissible, genocide is permissible, etc, just so long as it simultaneously does not occur within proximity to you and rejects your preference. I think you are tolerant of intolerance.
See but you’re assuming that we agree to your axiomatic premise that there is no moral difference between the two.
We reject your premise. Prove there’s no difference.
You don’t think animals are conscious? Or do you not care that they are conscious?
There are plant foods with cholesterol. Palm oils and coconut oils will contain them fir example.
More than half of America lives paycheck to paycheck. Vegan options are more expensive. Until you fix the economic crisis and solve poverty you really can’t enforce veganism.
This isn’t even getting into the fact that vegan options are literally nonexistent in many places.
Oh but you don’t care about that because you only care about veganism because it allows you to feel morally superior to others.
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You’re not going to change any minds by shutting on the people you’re proselytizing to.
Give it a few more years until lab-grown meat is cheaper than live animals, and then recommend that as an alternative. People are more motivated by money than ethics.
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Habits are hard to break, and the other person needs to have an incentive to stop eating meat and/or animal products. Much like New Years Resolutions, those “I’m thinking of” thoughts are just going to be dropped because there’s no tangible motivation to follow through with them.
You can try convincing people by teaching them the health benefits from avoiding red meats, but realistically, you’re not going to get far. There’s a lot of misinformation and outdated research on the viability of vegetarian and vegan diets, and it’s hard to change somebody’s mind when they feel like it might be unhealthy.
This is why I’m hopeful for lab-grown meat being cheaper than actual meat. You’re going to have the “GMO science evil” crowd that can’t be helped, but the average consumer would gladly trade their ground beef for an equivalent-tasting alternative that saves them money. It’s not vegetarian or vegan, but it solves the ethical issue of factory farming.
If you don’t believe you’re going to change anyone’s mind what are you doing except virtue signalling?
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Cuz they take it personally and then proceed to project onto you.
People are more motivated by money than ethics.
pulses, whole grains and vegetables are cheaper than flesh and secretions of animals
Cheap lab grown meat is not “a few years” out. Furthermore, this is like saying you shouldn’t berate people for owning slaves because they are just waiting for robots to come along that can fulfill the same tasks. Even if some magical x factor will cause everyone to be vegan two years from now that would not excuse the conditions we subject animals to in the present.
Just a terrible attempt at trolling.
Yeah dude idk how to tell you this but some people actually do have an interest in a sustainable planet and individual’s bodily autonomy. Idc if these are foreign ideas to you. OP’s post itself is the trolling. If y’all don’t want reactionary responses, dont troll this shit to the top post for the last six hours. You’ve all demonstrated very clearly how little you care about anything outside of your own momentary pleasure.
You are as pathetic as your trolling attempts. Please shut up.
Edit: fuck it, I realise that engaging you. Just gonna block you and move on. Have a nice day.
Animal abuser
Thousands of animals are killed in every field of vegetables. Rodents, birds, insects. It’s a fucking bloodbath. Don’t pretend you are innocent.
Zero sum game that requires my own death to achieve - seems a reasonable request compared to a request to not participate in the forcible birthing of billions of animals into exploitative confinement until they are killed at our convenience for eternity, or the unecessary trawling of trillions of them.
Or we can seek to achieve what is possible, and work out what isn’t over time. You describe a technical problem. That aside can you even empirically prove that more animals die in agricultural fields than in nature? I’m all in favor of reducing those deaths but is it actually any worse than if we let the existing fields reforest? I don’t see your point as analogous to my own concerns.
No one is. A lot of people who are preferring a plant based diet due to moral reasons are well aware of such “roadkill”.
Thing is, we’re not breeding them into existence. These deaths are accidental and if there were a technical solution to the problem everyone would be in favour of that. In the animal industry on the other hand everything is intentional. Both, the scale and the moral intentions are a completely different world there.
So, from the moral stand point of veganism: is it bad to kill animals? Yes. Is it worse to kill animals intentionally on an industrial scale, which could be prevented, than accidentally on a much smaller scale during plant farming where it currently can not be prevented? Absolutely, yes.
And 1.3 million people are killed by cars every year. It’s a fucking bloodbath. So driving a car is similar to intentionally murdering people, of course. Don’t pretend you are innocent if you drive a car.
No. That’s not what I was saying. I’m saying that when a cow dies it’s one death. When a field of the same volume in terms of nutrition is harvested it’s many deaths.
Beef is worse in the long run for the water and energy use, but not in terms of slaughter.
“please shut up!”
-the response of a child when faced with a situation that makes them uncomfortable
“please shut up!” // -the response of a child when faced with a situation that makes them uncomfortable
“Shut up” is also the sensible answer of adults when Christian zealots, nationalists and racists soapbox their shit.
the meat industry put out decades of propaganda during the great depression & world wars to convince the western world to buy meat & dairy. truth is, humans have lived off plant based diets for millennia. ending factory farming is one of the easiest ways to combat climate change & corporations
- Humans have also been eating meat for millennia. We’re omnivores, and have always been opportunistic about what we eat
- Individuals cutting down their personal meat consumption won’t stop factory farming, but ending subsidies that make that practice highly profitable might
Point 2 would never be politically possible unless there’s already critical mass of voting vegetarians.
The only evolutionary reason humans have advanced brains is because of nutrient rich meat.
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Most people have consumed animal proteins the catch is they weren’t eating a lot meat regularly. One of my ancestors was upper middle class when he migrated to the USA and founded a small city. His journal talks about his meals and as a wealthy person with a dairy farm he still mostly had stew and rarely ate steak. He wasn’t eating animals all the time and that was 1840-80s. We need to go back to a time when eating a whole chicken among a family of four in a single meal almost never happened IF we continue farming animals which as you noted is a climate change nightmare.
Now tell the not romanticized portion, where people get to know the average cow is not friendly nor playful towards humans.
Cool, that means we can put them in a cage and eat their children vrfore we eat them. Thanks man.
You missed the “/s” there.
Nah nah, the children are a delicasy. No need for /s
There is so much wrong in those words I can’t decide from which to approach it.
But then again: you do you.
Now look at what humans do to cows, or even to other humans. We commit atrocities at a scale that no other species has ever achieved. According to your logic, humans deserve to be treated even worse than cows.
If I wasn’t clear, I’m claiming for the not so pretty side of the story to be told; people tend to romanticize everything, especially when it comes to animals.
I am not in favour, to any degree, to animals being mistreated and/or abused to any degree, regardless if those same animals are a food source.
Raising animals for food is not incompatible with caring and making all humanly possible efforts to assure the animals live a good life.
Raising animals for food is not incompatible with caring and making all humanly possible efforts to assure the animals live a good life.
People won’t ever stop buying from factory farms as long as it’s socially acceptable, or cheaper options with a close enough taste become available.
“Nearly 99 percent of farmed animals in the US are factory farmed. There are around 250,000 farms in the US. Every day, 23 million land animals are killed on these farms – around 266 every second”
https://animalequality.org/blog/2022/10/14/factory-farming-facts/
I don’t know a single meat eater that doesn’t eat factory farmed meat, including my former self. Do you really believe that people will suddenly start asking about living conditions in restaurants and supermarkets, pay a higher price, and boycot all factory farmed animal products? Speaking of romantizing. This seems like a complete fantasy to me. The vast majority will always buy the cheapest options they can find, no questions asked.
Defending the notion that systematic exploitation is fine, as long as you stab them “humanely” in the throat, provides the ideological basis for treating animals as products, reducing the cost by treating them as worst as possible. Like most people do right now.
As I see it, the only realistic way to end factory farming is if either plant-based meat alternatives or lab-grown meat are produced on a large scale to become price competitive. Which seems to be where things are going for many meat categories, although customer acceptance still has a long way to go.
Are you in the USA?
Whether we treat animals fairly shouldn’t depend on whether they’re friendly or playful towards humans.
Still, every cow looks curious and investigative. And even if they’re skittish, they’re still much more trusting towards humans than we deserve. If the cow understood what was really happening, it would be horrified of the monsters that humans are towards cows.
Now please stop blaming yourself and your entire species for existing.
Are we supposed to lay on the ground and die because we require animal products to live?
Let’s stop being stupid or coy and assume we either eat meat and animal products and are willing to pay the moral and material price for it or want to whitewash our conscience by making a life of blaming others for just being alive.
Yes I totally agree, we can be humane to animals and still eat them
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Animal products are all across our civilization, regardless you use it personally or not.
Horseshoe crab blood is used to perform specialized tests and analizys. Many forms of gelatin extracted from animal tissues is used to inoculate cultures. Ever heard of lab mice and their importance for scientific research and development, especially when it comes to biomedical and pharmaceuticals? Are you aware that pigs provided human compatible insulin for decades before the synthetic formula was developed? You know replacement heart valves can be harvested from animals? Horses aid in producing antivenoms.
These are very niche yet very important roles animals play to support our entire civilization.
So enjoy your dietary option and allow others to do the same.
Unsure if I fully agree. On one side, yeah cows are exploited. But they get a safe life, with medicine and treatment for illness and physical issues (hooves). Access to food without concern of predators, safe place to sleep and give birth.
Cows are one of the most successful animals in the world because they’re a resource for humans. They are not allowed to go extinct.
I’d say humans are by far the best thing that happened to any domesticated animal.
this is the exact same argument made to keep slaves.
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I don’t see how that is relevant.
IME cows were big, dumb and not at all interested in people. Pigs on the other hand have very clear personalities.
Every and any animal has a personality; you just need more time to discover it on some species than others.
Cows can be very tame, if from a milk breed, and brutal pointy ended stomping and biting machines if from beef breeds.
Pigs are not tame, at all. I’ve raised potbelly pigs and they could absolute sweets or complete assholes capable of biting or headbutt you without warning. It’s the only farm animal that can revert to feral state.
And chickens know they were once dinossaurs. Get them in sufficient numbers and they become dangerous. Ever seen a fox afraid inside a chickencoop? I have; at a 100:1 ratio, the poor fox was hoping for a fine meal but was instead made a meal.
I have more experience with pigs than anything else so I’ll take your word for it.
Any horror stories?
No because they were not slaughtered on site but you could tell they all knew when someone wasn’t coming back. It made it hard to eat pork realizing that part.
Pigs can have a sense of numbers, like any herd animal. I get your point. But there are breeds and breeds.
To my very limited personal knowledge, landrace breeds tend to be more like that, especially breeds selected to be grazed and kept outside, which made sense as it would be desirable to have a closely knit group, where individuals would look out for each other. And this gave rise to breeds that can be extremely dangerous to other animals, including humans.
Talking with a few pig herders that live around the area I live, Inwas told more “modern” pig breeds tend to be less group and motherly care driven, to the point of sows mauling piglets out of food drive.
These were kept outside except in rain or during the height of winter so that might be a factor.
Fitting slogan i heard at fridays climate strike:
“For the climate, change your diet! Eat! - The! - Rich!”
I can butcher it if she wants help. It shouldn’t be too different from pigs.
(It’s really precious though. Think on how many kilos of meat it has!)
Pigs are as smart as dogs. It’s weird that harming onenis animal abuse and the other is breakfast. Especially when some cultures eat dogs as well.
Some of us don’t draw a distinction at all. Shout-out to Elwood’s Organic Dog Meat!
Dunno about other people, but in my case:
- I don’t consider killing a dog for eating as intrinsically abusive.
- I never ate dogs, but I’d probably try it as long as raised and butchered as livestock. On the other hand I’d never touch someone’s pet potbelly pig.
- I’m drinking and you made me crave salami.
One could make the same points about any animal, really.
Like, the possibility of eating cats, or keeping a pet cow? Yes, and it would be consistent with the above.
Humans are animals as well. Just keep them as lifestock (e.g. on a cotton field or labor camp as we have done in the past), and killing them should be completely fine according to your logic. Who cares about the victims if we just declare them lifestock. Great ethics!
Humans are animals as well.
No shit Sherlock.
Just keep them like lifestock (e.g. on a cotton field or labour camp as we have done in the past), and killing them should be completely fine according to your logic.
Following the reasoning that I’ve posted in another comment, another species keeping us as livestock wouldn’t be doing something immoral in my book; they’re defending their own interests, in detriment to ours. I don’t expect for example a jaguar to put my self-preservation above its cub’s desire for food.
And similarly it wouldn’t be immoral if we fought against it.
Contrariwise to vegans I’m not putting humans on some holier-than-thou ground with intrinsically better moral grounds than the other species; it boils down to defence of one’s own interests. Take a clue from the fact that my avatar is a smoking chimp dammit.
Who cares about the victims if we just declare them lifestock. Great ethics!
Appeal to emotion and other forms of stupidity/fallacy/irrationality don’t work well against me. Try something else.
Although I’m suspecting that you guys’ approach is something else: ad nauseam / sealeoning, is it?
Wouldn’t make much sense to raise dogs as livestock though, not enough meat on them and they pretty much need a diet that includes meat so it gets very expensive, especially for a dog that gets big enough to make a real steak from it…
My point was mostly to highlight that pet vs. livestock for me depends on raising conditions, not on species.
That said you’re correct that raising dogs as a main source of meat wouldn’t be efficient or practical, unlike pig, horse, cow, rabbit, guinea pigs etc.
That doesn’t need to stop us. We got pretty good with breeding animals for specific traits. So you could take dogs which are very massive and breed them until they yield even more meat. Just like we did and do with cows and pigs. Also it is possible to feed dogs on a plant based diet, so it wouldn’t be that much more expensive. (Besides, meat is extremely cheap due to subsidies. It costs much more to have a plant based diet, especially if it’s organically grown. You could also use meat scraps as it is also done for pet food. Further lowering the price.)
funny how serial killers get upvoted when it’s non-human animals getting killed
As I said in the other reply, you got to choose between the serious and memes-friendly reply. You had ~3h to do so, and you’re showing activity, so you picked neither = both.
c/memes friendly answer: Serial killer? Come on, I don’t put ketchup on pizza, sauce on ribs or hard cheese on seafood!
Serious answer. Spoilers for the sake of other users.
First off. I will cut you some slack, but keep in mind that “serial killer” is generally understood as “one who periodically kills humans”, so what you’re doing is libel. Others might not cut you the same slack, so get a bit more insightful with your insults.
Secondly. I also understand that “I shouldn’t soapbox in a meme comm” is a bit too complex of an idea for nationalists, vegans, racists, and Christian zealots. And given that you belong to at least one of those groups, this should be really hard for you, o poor thing.
Final and more importantly:
You wouldn’t call a jaguar piercing the necks of capybaras “serial killing”, even if they periodically do so. Or orcas hunting seals, even if they can get really “playful” (cruel) towards their prey, also periodically. Or chickens eating bugs alive, so they die either crushed or dissolved in hydrochloric acid, even if they don’t need it to survive. Or chimps hunting termites and teaching their children how to do so, even if there’s a cultural factor in this.
And yet you refer to a human being killing a member of another species [ipsis ungulis] “serial killer” Why, even if by the above we know that you don’t give a fuck about periodicity, cruelty, necessity, or culture? Why?
Because you want to pretend that you’re part of a very, very special snowflake species, “holier and above all those filthy irrationals”, above them. As if you were better, more moral, more deserving of The Kingdom of God than those “poor things”.
Cut off the bullshit. You and me are catarrhines with a weird hair pattern. We are animals; acknowledge you as such, instead of wallowing in wishful belief. The morality behind our acts is the same as the morality of the same acts of other species. If eating flesh is immoral for us, so is for both other omnivorous species and the carnivorous ones. You can claim that eating flesh is moral, or immoral, but you need to do it for both sides.
If you claim that it’s immoral, go grab your shotgun and kill every fucking jaguar, orca, chimp, and chicken out there. (Except battery farm chickens, those cause less death of precious animals than you’d like to admit.) Or even better, go ramble at the jaguar, he’ll totally listen to you and stop eating capybaras. (He’ll probably eat something dumber than a capybara then. You.)
If you claim that it’s moral, I rest my case.
You’re also putting animal lifes in a weird altar over the lives of everything else. Every fucking living thing thrives off the death of something else; even plants, bacteria and funghi. Why is this weird altar even there? Because you’re an animal and put your own group over the others, in detriment of those.
I’ll pre-emptively rebuke some really stupid counter-arguments that you perhaps might utter:
- Any reasoning trying to pretend that humans are “speshul”, such as intelligence - refer the paragraph starting with “Cut off”.
- “Dis is appoeal to narurr! [nature]” - nope. I’m highlighting that your standards are arbitrary and, if consistently applied, would go completely against what you probably claim to defend (“poor crirrurrs” [critters])
- Something about tone - deal with it. You brought this to yourself.
- “haha didn’t read lmao XD lol” - can’t have your precious, oh precious feelings ( = garbage) being broken, right?
- “B-but the environment!” - the issue with continued sustainability of Earth to keep human life is not the fact that we eat meat. It’s the 1% hoarding resources and making sure that we exploit the shit out of the environment so they can count coins.
- “this dunt maek sense i dun unrurrstand” - it does make sense even if you pretend that it doesn’t.
Get off your high horse.
Note for other vegans that might be reading this, before some assumer starts whining and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: I’m not chewing on this moron because it’s a vegan, but because it showed itself consistently dumb across the thread.
TL;DR but jaguars dont have moral agency. People do.
TL;DR
Fourth bullet point.
but jaguars dont have moral agency. People do
First bullet point.
Whoa now don’t go comparing the natural order to factory farms. There’s a huge difference.
The most important being that no other animal farms other animals to the scale humans do. There are some examples of ants harvesting honeydew from aphids, and other symbiotic relationships…but the relationship between predator/prey makes up the majority of animal life, and in doing so, ensures a natural sort of checks-and-balances to keep things from spiraling out of control.
And on top of that, the natural order is damn near close to zero-waste. Nearly everything down to the bone gets consumed by a variety of predators and scavengers, right down to the insects cleaning up the scraps.
Factory farming is a big middle-finger to the whole natural balance. We breed, raise, and slaughter huge populations of large animals at a massive scale. And it’s effects are only worsened by growing alfalfa in the desert and soy in the regions formerly known as rainforest, and transport those by millions-of-years-sequestered carbon off to the factory farms to make the specially-bred bovine grow especially fast.
Personally I went “mostly vegan” for environmental reasons (will still enjoy an occasional high-quality cheese or dairy-based sweet treat). I just can’t reconcile the GHG impact of meat farming with my personal needs. Plenty of other sources of protein and micronutrients than the 3-4 sources of meat that regularly make their way to most American diets.
Whoa now don’t go comparing the natural order to factory farms. There’s a huge difference.
This is the fallacy of appeal to nature. “Natural order” isn’t necessarily “good”.
Regarding the rest of your comment, refer to the fifth bullet point.
Hunting/gathering societies, much like predator/prey relationships, are intrinsically more sustainable. It’s pretty much the only system of checks and balances on population growth.
I don’t think you can handwave away natural selection under appeal to nature fallacy. That’s usually reserved for medicine. The only place it’s really applied in agriculture is organic/non-GMO produce which is a whole other shovel of BS.
And in point 5, if not for factory farming, our consumption of beef is not sustainable as it is. There is, quite simply, not enough arable grazing land in the world to accommodate our consumption of beef. The only solutions to that are to reduce the level of beef consumption, or to expand factory farming. And any institutional/government-level intervention to do the former would be wildly unpopular without there first being a sizable voting population who reduced or eliminated beef consumption themselves.
After reading that, I’m curious about your stance on ethics.
A utilitarian could argue that—even if their lives were fleeting and miserable—the factory-farmed animals would otherwise not exist were it not for their use as livestock. Would it be less ethical to have prevented their existence entirely?
[A] The existence of these animals contributes to the net quantity of happiness in our world. Even if it’s very little on an individual scale, it’s a significant amount as a whole. Wouldn’t it, therefore, be better that they do exist, even in such conditions?
[B] Does a livestock animal’s life not have a value in itself? Even if its life was objectively awful, it was given the opportunity to experience it. Would it be more cruel to—as argued by pro-life individuals—deny it the chance to experience life, no matter how such a life turned out in the end?
[C] Relatively speaking, perhaps the animal did not have such a miserable life as we imagined. From the perspective of an outsider, growing up in a cage sucks. But, maybe an animal would enjoy being constantly given access to food and water for no effort. We can generalize based on scientific data, but much like humans, there could be lazy animals that enjoy the lifestyle.
Sorry for the huge wall of text. It’s a bit of a complex theme.
At its core I think that my ethic stance is best described as anti-realism. There’s no intrinsic value; value is assigned by the subject. In turn, each individual (incl. me) assigns values due to a bunch of different factors: defending one’s own interests, instinct (kin selection), culture/ideology, Realpolitik, or even on a whim.
Thus moral premises (or their absence - moral nihilism) are individual and arbitrary. I personally picked “weighted selfishness” and kin selection as two of mine. This leads to some sort of “rank”, like: myself > my close relatives > other humans > other primates > other vertebrates > other animals > other living beings. Some individuals are sub-ranked higher due to their effect on individuals on higher ranks (e.g. someone’s pet dog is above a stray dog, my lemon tree is above other non-animal living beings, etc.)
Beyond that it works like a “weighted utilitarianism” where life, general well-being and happiness of a higher category are more important than the ones of lower categories. It works symmetrically though - for example a jaguar hunting a human being is still moral, even if the jaguar was somehow intelligent. (And so is the self-defence of the potential human. Or of a pig against a human.)
Based on that: battery farm is for me less moral than free range, but still within acceptable morality - because it benefits beings high in my priority (humans) by a lot.
Animal lives matter a bit. Animals closer to us matter more. I’m not sure however if their simple existence has a positive “happiness” value, it’s just referring to the life itself.
Thank you for your feedback, PETA.
I can give you a serious answer or one suitable for a memes community. Which one shall you pick? [EDIT: picking neither will yield you both.]
How does beef taste anyway? I have resolved to never eat it because of my religious upbringing, although I am an atheist now. How does it taste?
The closest analogy that I have found is Ostrich, though that tastes of beef and liver. Venison, aka deer, is much like beef, but with almost no fat, so you have to mix it with a fatty meat to use it as beef, even then there’s a richer “beefyness” to the end result.
I wish I had tried an antelope steak, when I had the ability to do so, I suspect that would be closer to beef in taste and fat content upon further research.
Source: over 20 years as a chef.
Why don’t we have a cooking community here?
I have eaten deer, It was ok! I prefer chicken tbh, but yeah to each our own. Thank you for this! I can trust your because of the sauce lol
I aint got any way of describing it, good I guess. Its my prefered meat of choice if that gives you any idea. Also what relgion were you raised in? Im gonna guess Hindu.
Im gonna guess Hindu
yes, I was raised Hindu
Excellent
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go away temptation. gooo…
Just kidding, if I feel like I am missing something, I might give it a go, But, I doubt if I will
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It’s the best meat imo. Way better than pork and sheep
If you were born after 1985 and are American your views on pork’s flavor aren’t exactly spot on. We moved to leaner breeds in the 1980s and as a result our pork has a lot less flavor than it used to. There’s a richness to heritage breeds like the ones Neiman Ranch sells that have that flavor still. Other nations I do not believe made this shift.
I’m from austria and if this were the case here, boomers and milenials would constantly nag about it.
Infact complaining is part of austrian culture (it’s called “sudern”, this word is only used in austria and bavaria)
It’s overrated in my opinion. It’s tasty but not mind blowing in any way like the internet claims. I’ve had better tasting fried chicken to be honest.
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This mfing hot dog comment
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Carnism is one hell of a drug. Hope you can escape it soon OP. Good luck.
Same for all the others here still trapped in the beliefs of carnism.
“Carnism” that’s the difference between vegans and non-vegans.
Only vegans view their diet as a lifestyle and shit on everyone else who isn’t vegan. We’re not “carnists” we don’t give a fuck really except that we hate vegans. Why? Because you lot are the pushiest, most openly judgemental, arrogant pieces of shit to walk the earth.
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Carnism is simply a name of the belief system. For a long time it didn’t have a name, which is something that psychologically helps oppressors not question their own actions.
So it was given a name to help point out that it is, in fact, a belief system. The belief that eating animals and their secretions is normal, natural, and necessary.
Recipes ain’t the problem. It’s butchering. How do I get the steak out
Just cut away all the bits that aren’t steak.
And then draw the rest of the fucking owl.
The Michaelangelo approach
Knives help.
I have to eat meat for dietary reasons, but I don’t enjoy it. I do wish I could be vegetarian or vegan.
What are the dietary reasons?
It tastes too good
Possibly iron. There’s heme and non-heme forms of iron and some people are just physically incapable of using non-heme (plant based) iron. It’s uncommon but definitely a thing.
If for some reason he medically required heme-iron, I’d rather publicly subsidize the price difference for them to eat impossible meat as that does contain heme-iron. No more requirement to rely on animal products for that. As far as I’m aware though, it’s just a concern of absorption rate. If the absorption rate is the concern they should just focus on taking a higher dosage supplement - which would not require heme-iron.
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Growing children will literally starve to death without protein
Everyone will die without proteins. And you can get all of the required protein from plants and plant based foods. This is not only the case for adults and children but also for pregnant people.
don’t kid yourselves; if we don’t eat that cow, another omnivore or a carnivore will
You know that we breed a crazy amount of animals into existence for the sole purpose of killing and consuming them, don’t you? And you know that a lot of times we even throw away a lot of what’s edible from the animal? No other species on earth does this.
Furthermore, even in the wild predatory carni- or omnivores usually don’t kill a whole population of animals. They kill some, yes for the purpose of survival. But by far not all. And even if that happens, those predators will starve and die until more prey is available again. That’s how predators and prey are balancing. Meanwhile we kill basically every animal we breed for food and we wouldn’t even need them for our survival. There is no such balance. To the contrary. It is one of the major factors of environmental destruction and pollution.
while dogs, cats and ferrets are obligate carnivores and at least need meat-derived pet kibble in their diet to live
First of all that might be a reason not to get a pet. Secondly, dogs, cats and ferrets can be fed on a plant-based diet. It might not be as easy and should definetly happen with support of a veterinarian (as most people won’t know for sure what they are doing), but it is proven to be possible without inflicting harm on the animals.
