Seeing live lobsters semi-frozen on ice so they can stay alive until you can take them home and then boil them alive is one of the cruelest forms of torture I've seen. Same with keeping chickens and pigs in cages the size of their bodies.
This is all disgraceful, and if we can't at least respect the animals we eat, we probably don't deserve to eat them.
You are going to have a very hard time to re-conciliate eating food without causing pain (and yes, trees/plants probably also feel some kind of pain, while not the same as in the animal realm).
Animals in the wild don't give a s** about the pain they cause to other species when they eat themselves alive, and eating a prey alive is the normal standard in nature.
This being said, I'm all for minimizing suffering of anything involved in the food chain as much as possible. I consider that avoiding wasting food is just as important as reducing the pain we cause to animals.
Just because other animals don’t consider the suffering of their prey isn’t an excuse for humans to do the same. Animals do what is instinctive. Humans (should) have empathy for others, including animals, and are able to make choices about their behaviour. Just because “in nature” animals are eaten alive doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to do better.
What about animals that are known to have emphatic behavior and are fully capable of making non instinctual choices yet will gladly be very cruel (e.g. wolves, dolphins)?
No contradictions here. You don't even have to go to the animal realm. There are some humans who are capable of empathy towards some people but happily inflict pain on other people. This however should not be an argument for the rest of us to behave in a cruel manner towards anybody.
Could you expand on that? I’m always curious to understand how other people think about these issues.
If I see people that are with causing folks around them pain, of whatever type, my usual suspicion is that they suffered some sort of massive pain or trauma themselves that they never
found a healthy way to deal with.
I'm not the GP, but I think what he means to say is that the in the realms of human nature and free association, empathy is not a default nor should is it required to be. My expansion on this thinking is that, with respect to Earth's total population, there are very few that one would concern himself with and, thus, fewer still who are granted any such depth of thought that could be considered empathy.
Humans are known to have empathic behaviour, yet can also be extremely cruel. Are you suggesting we should therefore take a regressive approach to societal development and do our best to mimic dolphin cruelty?
No, because that’s ridiculous. There are humans that can be cruel but I’m not saying humanity should mimic this. I’m saying that humans are much more developed than animals and can do better. Just because there are outliers that doesn’t mean the notion is invalid.
I don't think that would result in a better society but I think I can be convinced. We could instead also uphold the dolphins to our standards and give them the same rights and responsibility as any human. I would love to live in a world where we made dolphins pay tax.
I feel like empathy is used in confusing ways in the last 10 years or so. I consider empathy to be no different than theory of mind, a faculty all apes share, that is, we can model other people's states of mind. But whether most people are sympathetic, that is, in the strict etymological sense of the term, feel or identify with another's suffering, is a rather contextual, diverse phenomenon.
The C-level and oligarchs of the world tends to be highly empathic, hence their politicking skills, persuasion, observational skills and general theatre, but not particularly sympathetic.
Twitter is a mix of demonstrations of high empathy/low sympathy and every other permutation
moral is not an absolute. everybody who claims different is either incapable of or simply refuses to see the whole picture. moral is always biased and based on socio-political goals, under guarantee not meant for every entity on the planet.
depending on the socio/political background it is just to erase individuals who do not comply with the societys goal / judification system, speaking of death penalty or in other situations disbelievers & heretics. even in non-radical ethnocultural religious systems it is justifyable to use entities who are regarded of lesser value. or - if one belongs to the wrong political faction - it is also ok and just to strip away any so called basic human rights (just call sb a terrorist and therefor a prisoner of war, and - tadaa - it is ok to do so).
guidances such as some in stone written rules are also not for the greater good, but to keep sheeps in line and not to support any outgroups.
other ideological ideas/works/concepts/books are always used to support ones own position and goals. "humanism" is just another word for a moral ethical system which puts one sentinent species above other sentinent species.
in other words any moral is as good as the other. be it based on abstract concepts, words believed to be from higher entities or taken from animal kingdom. in the end the one who sits at the non-dangerous end of a gun is the one who is right.
if you want something absolute take this:
the one thing that we learn from history, is that we do not learn from history.
A monkey is walking by a river. It sees a lot of fish in a shallow area. The monkey makes its way there and starts grabbing them. One by one the monkey grabbed the fishes and put them up in tree branches.
Why would the monkey do such thing?
Well, you see, the monkey was saving the fish from drowning. What an empathetic creature!
Note that OP did not say "without causing pain." He/She said "respect" which is descriptive of both of your positions.
There is a tendency, in animal welfare discussions, to ratchet. As the conversation tips forward and back, meanings are interpreted a little more strictly each time.
Backyard chickens is a respectful way to have eggs and meat. Battery raising is disrespectful. Wasting meat is also disrespectful.
So while I agree with what you're saying, you'd better be able to come up with a legal standard of "respectful". I don't know what that is. If you don't you'll wind up with something like "killing a chicken by slitting its throat" [and facing mecca] is disrespectful.
You can kill a chicken by thrusting a knife into its open beak to pierce its brain (chickens actually have brains). You hold the bird by the feet, upside down and thrust. The bird will squawk once and go limp. Then you can cut its throat and let the blood out. The problem is that people don't know this and (even professional poultry growers) think that the only sensible way to kill a bird is to cut its throat.
Same for crabs. So far in the last two years I've seen crabs cooked alive twice right before my eyes, once roasted and the other boiled. I tried to intervene but was laughed away or told there was no time. In the second case, the lady who boiled the crabs alive didn't want to hear about their agony while eating them later (of course I had to twist the knife in).
I thought all this is just stupidity and ignorance. All it takes is five minutes to think, five minutes to go online and ask a question of a dumb search engine, and another five seconds for the chicken and a bit longer for the crabs. How hard is it? I mean, come on.
Btw, I eat meat and I'll be vegetarian when hell freezes over but you kill an animal to eat it, at least don't torture the poor beast. Just get it over with quickly.
This I can completely agree with. Wasting food is completely disrespectful in so many ways and is mostly avoidable.
Yet, just last year we saw supply chain breakdowns that caused farmers to dump so many potatoes and so much milk among everything else while people were in queues for free food.
Towards chicken? Maybe. But chicken isn't the only variable in the equation. I agree it'd be much less wasteful to grow meat in bioreactor without even wasting energy on growing feathers, organs and whatnot. But we're not there yet, and we might have a hard time feeding people without chicken factories.
There’s a huge difference: in the animal kingdom all species play their part and live freely—yes there is predators and prey, and the wilderness can be a violent place. But humans breed animals in cesspools, and humans rip mother cows from its children to mass produce milk and beef—much of which is tossed in the dump in the name of “food safety.”
Animals will catch what they eat, and catch no more than necessary. Humans will over-fish and dump shit all over the place killing marine life and filling oceans with oil.
I could go on and on. But you know, we’re all fucked from this behavior. In the name of money we will all perish at the hands of our fellow cheek-turners.
Orcas are known to play with seals they've killed and never eat as well. Chimps also participate in clan wars [0]. I'd venture to say that the more intelligent an animal the more capacity they have for needless killing, or at least killing for reasons other than food. What that says about humans specifically I'm not sure, but what I dislike about these conversations is the need to feel like we are so special compared to other animals. We are unique and I'm positive we'll reach a point where we won't need to kill animals for food, but we're not there yet and until then we'll need to be a responsible component of the natural food chain.
The thing is an orca isn’t going to mass-kill a bunch of seals because that’s wasteful (of energy). Sure they can kill and play with seals for entertainment, but they don’t (can’t?) cross the line of ecological torture/waste humans have.
On the human side: the problem is the producers (of meat/dairy) hide the torturous aspects from consumers by abstracting it away. We go to the store and get some chicken breast, steaks, or pork ribs, but we don’t do ANY of the work to prepare that animal. It’s prepared by underpaid/exploited foreign labor.
In contrast, even if a wolf killed a bunch of sheep for sheer pleasure: they are doing the killing, which takes energy. And if the sheep has a herd of rams with them the wolves might come out bloody themselves.
NOTE: I’m talking about factory farms and large scale production. There are farms which follow good, holistic procedures—where the farmers do care about the well-being of the animals and the cycle of life, even when animals are slaughtered.
I think the problem in our case specifically is that we centralise our food production, unlike other animals. Given our population size this sort of makes sense, but what you end up with is these death factories of concentrated animal slaughter. I would say the energy argument isn't a good one; factory farms are maximally efficient by design (which is why they're terrible for the animals) and humans definitely waste very little to nothing in these facilities since every inefficiency costs money.
I definitely think there's a disconnect between the average person and their food and it allows this sort of thing to happen more easily. I'm not sure what the right way to handle it all would be until we can 3D print all our food needs, but free range farms and farming animals that require less space (such as insects) are probably the best we can do currently.
Wolves are known to just kill a dozen sheep, either to train the young or because they can. Most predators are known to have behavior which involves killIng and/or maiming inefficiently and for reasons other than food. Even worse is that you have plenty of prey animals that will also go ahead and kill or maim each-other for social reason (elk, zebras).
So there are evolutionary reasons baked in such behaviors? Regardless, it's not quite the same as building factory for the sole purpose or killing, and esentially kill for pleasure. The equivalence would be an ongoing massacre which is not seen in nature to my knowledge.
Very ignorant, the difference is clearly the number, and the fact that humans kill for pleasure (taste) and convenience, but let's just focus on the number. Do you see the difference between murdering one person and murdering 10?
What's this quality of life horseshit? So if a person has "low quality of life" then i guess murdering them will get you a lighter sentence?
Sorry for using murdering as examples, I just dont have a better way to make the point.
Taste is a proxy for nutrition. Murdering people is bad not because of some abstract causing of pain or whatever(otherwise youd have nothing against killing people with heroin would you?) but because murder begets murder, making existence of organized society very hard and inefficient. Killing animals doesn't cause such problems so it's irrelevant.
> Murdering people is bad not because of some abstract causing of pain
Let’s just say it’s not, pain and suffering are still bad things youd want to minimize
You could say that the bad thing about death isn’t pain itself but the lost of life (otherwise an instant death would not be bad), based on the axiom that life is a good thing. You could also make your own axiom that only human lives are good.
> murder begets murder, making existence of organized society very hard and inefficient
So massacring uncivilized tribals that are not part of your organized society, like in the colonial days, is OK?
That is 100 percent unadulterated bullshit, that's what it is. Animals will happily grow their population till they ram their heads into whatever limit they reach.
They're not constrained by thought or conservation, they're constrained by environmental limits.
Cats, Orcas etc are known to do the same. But only humans have perfected the art and science of torture and killing on an industrial scale. Here is an example
We're simply more capable. That's really all there is to it. Animals are not limited by some magical conservationist instinct, they're limited by capability and environmental limitations.
And presumably there is some kind of genetic advantage to this. The cat probably doesn't know why it plays with the mouse or that the mouse is suffering. It is just following instinct.
An instinct that humans have is to project their own kind of consciousness into animals. We imagine the world through their eyes, but from a human perspective. So some animals are wicked, others show love. But it is really unfair to project human expectations onto animals.
> Animals will catch what they eat, and catch no more than necessary.
Bears love salmon brains. In boom years, bears will pull salmon after salmon out of the water, bite the head, and discard the rest. They're basically nature's dynamite fishers. Stray dogs will eat anything they can -- and they can and do kill themselves by overeating.
> Animals will catch what they eat, and catch no more than necessary
Nope:
> Surplus killing, also known as excessive killing, henhouse syndrome,[1][2] or overkill,[3] is a common behavior exhibited by predators, in which they kill more prey than they can immediately eat and then they either cache or abandon the remainder. The term was invented by Dutch biologist Hans Kruuk after studying spotted hyenas in Africa[4] and red foxes in England.[5][6] Some of the other animals which have been observed engaging in surplus killing include orcas, zooplankton, humans, damselfly naiads, predaceous mites, martens, weasels, honey badgers, jaguar, leopards, lions, spiders, brown bears,[7] american black bears, polar bears, coyotes, lynxes, minks, raccoons and dogs.[citation needed]
The wiki passage lumps "saving for later" (caching) and abandoning the food completely into the same category. Which doesn't support your point as well as you think — the cached food may well be "necessary" over a longer time frame.
I'm not saying your point isn't valid, just that the passage quoted is too broad to be a strong support of your argument.
At any rate, there are always outliers, no? When someone makes a generally true statement, is it really that useful to reply with a rude "Nope" and point to outliers?
I took the parents' comment to mean that it is a general truth, not an absolute truth.
> I'm not saying your point isn't valid, just that the passage quoted is too broad to be a strong support of your argument.
What is my argument? You're making some assumption there that I'm not privy to.
The OP says "Animals will catch what they eat, and catch no more than necessary". That's a very broad statement that obviously ignores surplus killing even for the purpose of storing more food for later (which is often also abandoned when the animals move away or find something better to eat). Anyway, killing more than you can eat right now and storing it "for later" is exactly what humans do, that the OP is trying to say animals don't do.
Hence, "nope".
I agree my reply is rude. I apologise to the OP, but it's frustrating to see how popular opinions seem to be shaped by the behaviour of Disney animals, and yet are expressed with great certainty. It's very frustrating.
Would you agree that "Animals will catch what they eat, and catch no more than necessary" is a generally true statement then?
>Anyway, killing more than you can eat right now and storing it "for later" is exactly what humans do, that the OP is trying to say animals don't do.
The OP was referring to hunting for sport (and other similar excesses)[0]. That is, they were making a moral argument. "Saving things for later" is a weird thing to be hung up on and has nothing to do with the article or this thread.
[0] Yes I know some animals have been known to do this, but they are the exception.
> Would you agree that "Animals will catch what they eat, and catch no more than necessary" is a generally true statement then?
See: "Nope".
> The OP was referring to hunting for sport (and other similar excesses)[0].
You are putting way too much interpretation on what the OP actually wrote: "Animals will catch what they eat, and catch no more than necessary".
That's not true: many animals will "catch" (really, savagely kill) more than necessary, much much more. In case you consider food stored for later "necessary", that also doesn't work: animals will kill much more than they can ever eat in an entire lifetime, much more than can be expected to stay in the ground without rotting away. Not to mention, many animals will just kill, without any attempt at storing or returning to the kill.
The OP also said nothing at all about hunting. They talked about over-fishing:
> Humans will over-fish and dump shit all over the place killing marine life and filling oceans with oil.
And also about ripping "mother cows from its children to mass produce milk and beef" and other things like that. Nothing to do with hunting, for sport or not.
> "Saving things for later" is a weird thing to be hung up on and has nothing to do with the article or this thread.
I don't understand what you mean. Can you explain?
If you're going to insist that hunting is somehow different from fishing (literally: hunting under water) in this context, I think I'm going to disengage. You just don't seem genuinely interested in honest discussion. Have a good day.
The OP talked about overfishing. You said they were referring to hunting for sport. Overfishing is relevant to commercial fishing, wich is practiced not for sport, but for food.
So it really doesn't look like the OP and you were talking about the same thing and I can't see that you should expect me to automatically understand what you meant when the OP said "over-fishing" and you said "hunting for sport". If you meant "hunting under water for sport" you should have said that more clearly, because it's not the first thing that springs to mind when someone speaks of "over-fishing".
Edit: here's the relevant quotes from earlier comments.
OP: "Humans will over-fish and dump shit all over the place killing marine life and filling oceans with oil."
You: "The OP was referring to hunting for sport (and other similar excesses)[0]."
Can you see why it's not immediately obvious why you think you're talking about the same thing as the OP?
Also, can you see why these discussions get derailed so easily? The OP said one thing and then you joined the conversation to explain what you thought the OP meant. But how could you know what the OP meant any better than me, when neither of us is the OP? If there are different interpretations to what the OP said, then your guess of what they really meant is as good as mine. So when you insist that, no, your interpretation is correct, and here's what they really meant, even if they used different words (words that may be stretched to mean what you want to say they meant "literally", like "fishing = hunting undewater") there is inevitable confusion and the discussion is derailed.
Why not just let the OP respond to my comment, if they think they should? And what exactly do you think we have both achieved here, with all this back-and-forth about exactly how much animals or humans kill and why? We have just both wasted each other's time. You're happy with that?
You chose to ignore that. In doing so, interpreted my comment uncharitably.
>Why not just let the OP respond to my comment, if they think they should?
When did I stop the OP from commenting? What a bizarre thing to suggest.
>And what exactly do you think we have both achieved here, with all this back-and-forth about exactly how much animals or humans kill and why? We have just both wasted each other's time. You're happy with that?
No, I'm not. That's why I attempted to disengage.
It was you who started this particular chain off by being combative and rude (by your own admission). Then you refused to accept the basic principle around the idea of generalizations. It was you who has been combative and have failed to interpret other users' comments charitably. Both the OP's comments and mine.
Remember likening the OP's statement to a child who gets their understanding of the animal world from Disney movies? You did that right after you "apologized" to the OP for being rude. See the problem?
Its purely chemical and much slower than a nervous system. Really just signaling and arguably we dont even know if animals feel/expirience pain like we do either. Kinda begs the question what is actually capable of suffering
You'd be surprised how much we thought the world was magic just a few hundred years ago. In 100 years from now people will look down at us like complete ignorants just like we look down at our ancestors.
It’s not unreasonable to assume that if a nervous system is present and similar pain signals are send, similar suffering is experienced by animals as humans. Simply because suffering is a motivation to take action. There might be a difference in that most animals, like baby’s, wont be able to seperate themselves from their suffering/pain. I am suffering vs suffering is all there is. If thats the case, pain for animals might even be worse then humans. That might be backed up by the fact that most animals are very pain avoidant (makes them really scared), where some humans seek it out, and most of us are able to accept a bit of pain to get something better. (There seems to be some indication that other animals have a sense of self, like dolphins, certain birds, elephants etc) (Also seems that pain for animals, same as with humans, is not felt when they are filled with adrenaline and in fight mode)
How do you suppose one can feel pain with a nervous system? We have no explanation or real understanding of the mechanism that underlies human consciousness, so there's no real reason why it couldn't occur via a mechanism that plants share.
But you would have to redefine pain to ignore the experience aspect. And that would be a completely different phenomenona. Yes it may share the same mechanism, but so what?
Plants are immobile. The only mechanism they have for moving about is relatively slow and lacks agency. They can grow in a particular direction, send out a clone,or use reproduction. A hormonal reaction to external stimuli could trigger that kind of behaviour. But what advantage would there be in having a consciousness? A chicken on the other had can run away. It can hide. It can learn to avoid damaging itself. Pain has an advantage.
> But you would have to redefine pain to ignore the experience aspect
No, it's the opposite. Plants clearly don't have the reactive aspect, but we have no idea whether they have the experience aspect, because we have no idea what causes experience or how it works.
We also don't know that consciousness provides an advantage to animals. We associate consciousness with intelligent response. But it may well be possible to have intelligent response without consciousness (e.g. like computers, although technically we can't be sure that they don't have consciousness either)
An intelligent response without consciousness is different to an intelligent response with consciousness. That is the re-definition.
We can speculate that the full human experience of pain may exist in the absence of a brain. And we can estimate the probability of that being the case in plants. Do you really think that probability is high?
Also, plants can and do react to damage and even touch.
It would have been a reasonable response had OP mentioned anything about eating food without causing pain. As it is the response makes no sense because it addresses a point not raised by OP.
You've changed things a bit now. The phrase in question is:
eating food without causing pain
The OP doesn't say this is what should be done. OP says that we should respect our food and talks about the living conditions of animals we eat and how they are killed. OP doesn't say or imply that we should eat food without causing pain.
This reminds me that everyone should read Consider The Lobster by DFW. [1] It's such a straightforward, yet well written think piece about this exact subject.
I think it's important to approach this topic with some nuance. There is a wide variety of intelligence in the animal kingdom - ranging from primates down to bivalves, which lack a distinct "brain" at all. In terms of intelligence, a lobster is closer to some insects, which we seem to have no problem killing en-masse with chemical agents if they enter our home or threaten our crops. I'm not sure it's totally knowable whether lobsters have the capacity to suffer, but moral consistency on this issue would require sacrifices far above just "not eating meat".
I agree. Even assuming that lobster suffer when they are boiled - that's an event that lasts but a minute or two. Many factory farmed animals spend their entire lives in various states of stress and suffering.
Why do people think that the cruel behaviour of other creatures should give humans any pass in their own cruel behaviour? People don't seem to apply this logic when it comes to rape and murder (both very common in the animal kingdom) but when it comes to torturing other animals, suddenly it's all good for some reason.
Because food doesn't fit in the same good/bad area. You can live without tape and murder, you can't live without food.
And no, I don't want to eat fake plant based surrogate.
The belief that rape and murder are bad is not universal in human history. That kind of behaviour was just a normal part of life for many. We may see it is a black and white issue, but that took thousands of years to achieve.
Why tie your hands with this kind of black and white thinking?
Out of interest, how do we decide if something is a torture? Imagine a machine that’s broken, does it feel pain? Say, you drop your iPhone with Siri on the floor. Is it cruel? Isn’t a lobster the same kind of machine, just a biological one?
We can't decide because we don't have a machine that objectively measures consciousness. But it's safer to err on the side of mercy than to accidentally create hell on Earth.
I'm quite certain that the current scientific understanding is that we don't know how consciousness works at all. This is exactly the kind of landscape where one might expect big surprises.
Think about how useless our intuitions proved to be when it comes to other phenomena like gravity or electromagnetism. It took a while to (kind of) figure these out despite them being easier to measure than consciousness.
W.r.t. fish: they act in a way you'd expect a creature to act if they felt pain. If they had vocal cords and thus the ability to scream, would you agree that they feel pain? Same applies to insects.
I guess it also applies at some level to animals and insects - we can assume they feel some of the basic things as us, but their "understanding" of it might be quite different.
Anthropomorphism is probably just a result of human capacity for theory of mind. That is the ability to understand mental states in ourselves and others. We can look at the world from the animal hunting us, or the animal we are hunting. That is ridiculously useful, but may misfire sometimes. We think things are exhibiting human properties when we really shouldn't.
This is a feeling you have in time of fat cows, where food is everywhere and you probably should eat a bit less even.
In times or places where this abundance is not as shockingly unnatural, the feeling of the food we consume takes less importance. And, as others said, it's not just animal. Killing a plant, often in way more atrocious manners, is just as bad.
We'll probably have to murder and massacre our food for a bit longer. Live with it and work on synthetic food, this will resolve the problem you have with life-sourced food. Well except we'll probably still have to kill millions of animal and plants for population control. Heh.
You know we also kill, without asking their opinion or respecting them much, other more exotic life-forms, like virii or bacterias, that are as innocent as the rabbit you had in your last civet. All they did was follow their instincts, and they didn't have a choice contaminating you; but you had a choice killing them.
I find it a bit strange that you seem to be assigning moral equivalence to animals, plants, viruses and bacteria. Animals should be of top priority because they are the most likely to feel the highest amount of pain by our actions, and we can feasibly take measures to prevent it
There’s plenty of empirical studies done on animals where we observe they respond to painful stimuli similarly to humans and avoid similar situations thereafter. We can’t ask them so this is the best we have.
How about lettuce, carrots, eggs, etc? Just because their reaction times are slower does not mean they are not suffering?
The truth is humans are wired to gauge the level of environmental danger by looking for personably relatable aggression events. And there is a practical limit how low we should go. Also with living more dense, humans are gotten way better at handling various aggressive stimuli, like noise, air pollution, constant close interaction. We have stopped treating them as aggression, but it still is for the rest of life on this rock.
The difference in intelligence between an egg and a chicken aren't just reaction times. Basic cellular life might respond to stimuli in a way we can call "pain", but they'll never understand it the same way.
The difference is like us touching a hot stove and pulling away as an automatic response, versus the various forms of torture we've invented.
That doesn't mean it's right, just that there is a difference and we'll all draw a line somewhere. A bit like how people see eating cats and dogs as somehow different from chickens and cows.
The most significant gain for animal rights will be the day, when we can produce inexpensive lab-grown meat (including fish) that is indistinguishable from livestock based products.
We could also really use a framework for recognizing and categorizing consciousness in other lifeforms. And translate that into a law that automatically applies tiered protection to all other lifeforms. We probably need to figure out consciousness in ourselves first, though.
Possibly, but this could also be the day that animals we now eat are considered useless to us and so not worth caring about. They could be driven to extinction if we decide to use the land for other purposes, such as building huge labs to produce the meat. So we'll need to think about keeping areas available for animals. And enough people will need to care.
The far simpler first step, while lab grown meat is being developed, is eating much less meat.
We really don't need the amounts of meat (if at all), averagely consumed in the US, EU or many other places nowadays. Not by far.
And if you insist: there are plant based products today, that are often tastier and offer better nutrients than large swaths of the meat products they replace.
There certainly is no lab-grown alternative for a tasty slab of expensive beef (I presume, I haven't looked for it), but there certainly is a tastier and healthier plant-based alternative for that €2,99 bucket of fried chicken things. Or for 6 of the 10 cheap burgers at your supermarket.
Point: we really don't have to wait for lab grown meat. Not if you are a meat lover, nor if you are a habitual meat eater.
> We really don't need the amounts of meat (if at all), averagely consumed in the US, EU or many other places nowadays. Not by far.
Define need.
I don't live to be a drone guided by some moral principles of other human who has the same rights as I do.
If I want meat - I will eat it regardless of whether I need it or not.
> And if you insist: there are plant based products today, that are often tastier and offer better nutrients than large swaths of the meat products they replace.
I hear the same mantra for last 10 years.
> There certainly is no lab-grown alternative for a tasty slab of expensive beef (I presume, I haven't looked for it), but there certainly is a tastier and healthier plant-based alternative for that €2,99 bucket of fried chicken things. Or for 6 of the 10 cheap burgers at your supermarket.
You forgot psychological factor. While the bucket of fried chicken is rarely as pretty before cooking as they display it, but in the end it is 100% meat. If we're talking about some plant surrogate, most people would probably puke at the thought of eating this. I certainly wouldn't enjoy it.
Lab-grown meat sounds dystopic. Imagine a giant machine shitting out nutrient bricks forever.
Plant-based meat substitutes are ridiculous. Americans, North and South, eat way too much meat (Europeans eat much less). To cut down on the extravagant amounts of meat consumed in the Americas is a great idea, but why do those need to be replaced with meat substitutes? Teach people to cook good food with plants, otherwise you're just keeping them dependent on the food industry that just wants to sell them cheap overprocessed shit that makes them sick and sad.
Why not attack that from all angles? Convince people to eat less meat and more vegetables…sure. But you will still have holdouts saying that they prefer the taste of meat. Hence plant based meat alternatives and lab grown meat.
There can be multiple solutions to a given problem.
I agree on principle but I'm not sure what you mean by "systematic animal torture". For example, for me industrial farming is just that, but small-scale farming (where herds are no larger than a few dozen animals, for cows, more for goats and sheep) are not.
So I think we'll disagree on that. Basically, I think some people find eating animals dystopic regardless of how it's done, while I don't.
sorry i should have been more clear, my comment was referring to factory farming specifically. i agree that small scale farming can be done in a more humane, ethical way. unfortunately, it does not scale to meet global food demand.
lab-grown meat may be a net-negative if it takes too much energy to produce or requires other animal inputs (currently fetal bovine serum). It'll need a lot of improvement to beat chicken or insects in terms of feed conversion factor or carbon footprint.
The farms that grow the inputs to your lab goo will have permits to shoot wild animals on these properties… it’s called a “block permit” and farmers in my area are known to kill so many deer through these permits that bulldozers are needed to handle the disposal/burial of the masses of animals they kill… and why do they do this? Because feeding humans is actually a rather important task.
Step off the concrete sometime… the solutions to the worlds problems and injustices are often far more complex and nuanced than what is proposed by the modern left.
The scale of these "block permit" killings and the amount of suffering this would cause is incomparable to industrial farming. This is not worth worrying about
Okay, how do you feel about monocultures of soybean doused in glyphosate and multi-annual applications of synthetic fertilizers (which create radioactive leachate as a manufacturing byproduct)?
The primary ingredients in the fake meats being proselytized are plant proteins… meaning massive monocultures, pesticide and herbicide application, fertilizer application and manufacturing, and decimation of many thousands of acres of natural ecosystems. This doesn’t seem like a clear net positive change to me.
I would be interested to hear a comparison on this, but from what I’ve heard the resources that go into growing and feeding livestock is orders of magnitude more intensive than a plant based meal. I honestly don’t know if that would change with something like beyond but I would highly doubt it
Do you realize that much of American beef cattle actually graze on natural grasses for most of their lives… in largely natural settings that support complex natural ecosystem? That will not be the case for “Beyond/Impossible/Soylent” burgers; they will be composed of plant proteins that require toxic monocultures to produce.
You need 15 such farms to create the food for 1 equivalent of beef. So the argument would be for any those goo-creating farms, because we need far less of them, than we need when creating goo that feeds cows which we then eat.
I find this article jarring. FTA - "it's important to be cautious even if there's not complete certainty these animals are sentient." Uh what? I am no zoologist or marine biologist (or whatever 'ologist) but this is ridiculous. Octopii are known to be very intelligent. Lobsters may not be as intelligent as octopii but they are big and complex creatures. To assume that they are not sentient and will not feel pain if you throw them alive in boiling water is arrogant and pretentious. If you don't know for sure, the assumption should be the opposite unless proven otherwise.
Off topic, but the correct plural of octopus is octopodes (or octopuses). From the classical Greek word for foot (πούς, plural πόδες). Only Latin 2nd declension nouns turn -us into -i. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/octopus#Noun
There isn't a correct plural for 'octopus' because it's a Greek word filtered into English by way of Latin and so you can make a reasonable argument for basically any option.
If language evolution followed strict deterministic rules, then it probably would be "octopodes", but that's not the case - language changes and grows in all sorts of different ways and words become valid despite their "pedigree".
As your link says, "sources differ on which plurals are acceptable"; there's no single correct option and basically all of the suggested ones are in reasonably-common usage.
I would agree to err on the side of caution, but the fact of the matter is we really don't know how different the qualia of other animals are from that of humans.
I think a society must first define their values before trying to align to them.
Elimination of pain and suffering as a primary value, changes everything. A superintelligent overlord given that objective would simply eliminate all life on earth. If preservation of life was a value, it would sterilize everything and put all existing life in a coma. If the objective was happiness, it would drug us during the coma.
But it would not be so dumb as to choose those things. I don’t know what it would choose exactly, but, I think it would have something to do with the purpose of life itself in this universe, which can be seen as a fundamental force to fight entropy at the mesoscale between electromagnetism and gravity.
"A society must" in what sense? Some, mostly modern, societies (eg constitutions) sometimes do "define their values" but rarely in the way that you mean. IE, they're defined in regular human terms like justice and stuff. No society that I know of "defines its values" in terms of uber abstract principles that everything else is derivative of.
Some, mostly modernist, occasionally platonist philosophers try to do this... but thats a philosophical exercise.
The way societies actually work is that we have values, because people have values. We rationalise, abstract, deconstruct, cross reference, expand, contract, torture, abandon, repurpose, revise and revisit those values in a never ending process. That is, in fact, what society is.
Just a personal comment.
I used to love calamari, I'm from Scotland so seafood is plentiful and of a high standard. However I decided never to eat it again after watching "my octopus teacher" on Netflix. It's an emotive documentary clearly made to evoke feelings in the audience, it certainly changed my mind.
We can't effectively measure animal intelligence compared to humans, we make decisions based on ethics and morality so I made that decision to never eat squid again.
It's clear that humans over-consume and as an "intelligent species" who can make decisions based on morality and ethics, we still collectively seem unable to logically reason this overconsumption will eventually effect us all.
> It's clear that humans over-consume and as an "intelligent species" who can make decisions based on morality and ethics, we still collectively seem unable to logically reason this overconsumption will eventually effect us all.
Why should individuals that live for themselves and don't share the same values as you do suffer because of your decisions?
You've summed it up in your sentence "live for themselves" i.e. greed and selfishness.
And what do you mean by suffer? Do you mean the richest people earning less or people in poverty?
We could live in a more ethical and sustainable way, we just choose not to
Wow, I'm surprised you actually typed that out in public but fair play for being honest
> I couldn't care less about rest of people.
I can clearly see that
> I could live without shower and toilet paper, I could live without washing machine or meat. Doesn't mean that I want to.
Overconsumption isn't having toilet paper or a shower, those are necessities. Drilling in the Arctic for more oil, shark finning, the strive for constant economic growth are examples of overconsumption
> I couldn't care less about rest of people. When it comes to either me or them*.
Small fix to clarify. I'm not some cynical edgelord, don't misunderstand, I probably care a fair bit more about other people than your average person. But when it comes to situation where I have to give up something that I don't consider morally absurd, well then we have a problem.
> Overconsumption isn't having toilet paper or a shower, those are necessities. Drilling in the Arctic for more oil, shark finning, the strive for constant economic growth are examples of overconsumption
Sure. But we're discussing food here. I don't see why me, an average Joe, has to discard of the only joys of my life because someone thinks that it is morally correctly to switch to artificial meat.
Bacteria will form on your skin and can lead to infection. Maybe that's the answer to population growth, never shower or excercise good hygiene measures therefore increasing mortality rates.
We don't need to clean our teeth either right? We can lower food consumption through that too.
We can "make decisions based on morality and ethics" but why do these decisions have to be that we shouldn't eat meat? What is it that is inherently immoral, or unethical, about eating meat?
I mean, I'm probably just as capable as you of making "decisions based on morality and ethics" as you are, but I don't think it's immoral to eat meat. So clearly there are different interpretations of "morality" (duh). But your comment seems to assume that no, there's just one morality: eating meat is immoral. Why?
You've completely misread or misunderstood my post.
Eating meat is not wrong, overconsumption is wrong, wasting resources is wrong. The question of morality is, is it right to over consume the planet to the point we extinguish other species, or even our own?
Are we comfortable that future generations look back on us as selfish and greedy for what we did, or didn't do?
I am not vegetarian, pardon the pun but that's maybe what your beef is about
Again, I''m confused by the very, very strange replies.
Yes, it seems I did misunderstand your post, because you started it with saying that after watching "My Octopus Teacher" you decided never to eat calamari again. The context of the film and the post is that cephallopods are intelligent creatures and I thought that you meant you decided never to eat callamari again because of that.
So now I'm very confused. Why did you decide never to eat calamari again? What does your decision have to do with a film about an octopus? What does any of that have to do with over-consumption?
You made your comment very confusing so I was confused. Thanks for clarifying, but it's still very confusing so don't go accusing me of having any "beef" with anyone. Just make sure your comments are easier to understand.
> You made your comment very confusing so I was confused. Thanks for clarifying, but it's still very confusing so don't go accusing me of having any "beef" with anyone. Just make sure your comments are easier to understand.
No it really wasn't confusing. Perhaps English isn't your native language, nowhere did I mention meat, unless you define a mollusc as meat (some vegetarians do choose not to eat them). I think you just wanted an argument on the internet which you'll find I don't do
Sometimes I like to think about how historians will talk about us in the distant future where artificial meat production is the norm. I think it is quite likely that the big story about us will be our treatment of other conscious animals rather than the culture war issues dominating people's minds now.
Like us looking at times before slavery was abolished. We're probably on the wrong side of history.
The really big issue staring us in the face though is that our treatment of animals is accelerating the pace of pandemics.
Every tightly confined animal farm in the world is another lab doing serial passage gain of function experiments with zero BSL protections by the lab workers.
Humans are still doing some pretty awful things to each other, I'm not sure our treatment of animals is really near the top of the list. We can obviously do much better with regard to our treatment of animals, but the same can be said about a lot of things.
I think we have too look at the numbers. There are 600 million pigs kept worldwide, most of them in miserable circumstances. The more this number grows (and it is on a growth trajectory) the more we should be concerned about this. (Though my personal opinion is that the current number is already unacceptable.)
That said, whether to spend your energy on global poverty or abolishing factory farming really comes down to how you highly you rank animal suffering.
Is a thousand chickens tortured from birth to slaughter, worse than someone dying from malaria? What about ten thousand?
It's not at all obvious to me how animal sentience compares to human sentience, but it's clear to me that we should at least give it some consideration.
Even when I give animals only a fraction of the concern I have for humans, it's clear to me that factory farming is an incredible source of unnecessary suffering.
I hope we can learn to be considerate of not only humans different from us but other species too.
> Sometimes I like to think about how historians will talk about us in the distant future where artificial meat production is the norm.
Why is "artificial meat production" the norm in "the distant future"? Couldn't humans just as well re-organise their societies in small agrarian groups that produce their food without torturing animals?
This conflates at least three different issues. To me, it is irrelevant how intelligent a creature is or whether it can react to pain. The fundamental issue is whether or not it experiences suffering.
We are very close to having synthetic intelligences. That doesn’t mean we should care about shutting them off or damaging them, as long as they cannot suffer.
I think people are generally aware that the fundamental issue is experience of suffering, as you say. It's just that since that can't be measured directly, people talk about intelligence and pain reaction since that's what is studied and observed in order to infer about experience of suffering.
But for synthetic intelligences, I think we need to be extra careful because the suffering can be there without any means to notify humans, if those means were never programmed in. If an AI has self awareness and self preservation goals comparable to humans, but no comparable e.g. English language subroutines, being shut off at random times would probably cause it to suffer psychological distress in silence.
This is all to say that for the sake of both AI and animals, we need to learn how to directly detect brain activity corresponding to pain, in different types of brains.
This is really about money. Big business is ramping up artificial meat and big farming is also shifting to growing vegetarian food crops. Real meat will be only for the rich. Just the way they like it.
Good. Market incentives are not always unethical. If anything, we should strive to build an economy where market incentives align with moral objectives. I welcome a world where artificial meat is practical.
Except that the artificial meat substitutes we have right now, eg those fake burgers, aren't exactly better. They are worse than the meat they replace. Its not ethical or moral its just the market moving.
The vegetarian farming isn't more ethical either. Its usually mono-cropping at large scale. see also: corn.
If you want to improve a situation, at first you will make slow progress. But I'm willing to bet on artificial meat being an engineering problem and ultimately becoming better than the real thing.
You welcome a world where affluent elites eath high quality food and everyone else eats shit?
Well, you don't have to welcome it. That's the current world. Ask the lady who cleans your office toilets how often she eats organic, or even just fruit, other than tomatoes.
There exist dumb rich people who drink unpasteurized milk, and then get diarrhea or worse. It seems unimaginative of you to suppose that meat that comes from a live animal will always be necessarily higher quality than meat that comes from cultured cells. I, for one, would prefer a lab grown meat over a farmed meat whose tissues are infused with antibiotics and is generally covered with feces emitted from the slaughtering process
> I, for one, would prefer a lab grown meat over a farmed meat whose tissues are infused with antibiotics and is generally covered with feces emitted from the slaughtering process
For the time being you can find such meat in countries outside the Americas that still have small scale farms, particularly in the EU where the prophylactic use of antibiotics on farm animals is banned since 2018.
" It seems unimaginative of you to suppose ..."
What is it with the personal tone in comments in these sorts of discussions? I've had the absolute worst experience discussing these things on HN, as opposed to all other kinds of discussion. Other discussions are generally civil and polite. When it comes to meat eating and animals' rights, it's a free for all and everyone thiks it's fine to walk all over good manners and attack other commenters' intellect, their morality, anything. I mean, wtf?
Regarding the "unimaginative" comment: OP might have just meant that we are in the very early days of artificial meat and dismissing it now would be tantamount to dismissing the internet in the early 90s.
You might be taking this a tad bit too personal. OP described how your argument sounded to them. They didn't condemn your entire personhood because of it.
It's a personal comment about my imagination. How else am I supposed to take it, if not personally? If the OP didn't want me to take it personally, they should have not made a personal comment.
> You welcome a world where affluent elites eath high quality food and everyone else eats shit?
That's a bit of a strawman there. Improving food tech does not need to be a zero sum game. Can it not be that food quality will in general improve? Much like how access to clean water (at least in the Western world) has improved a lot compared to past centuries.
No. What is weird about this is that octopuses are already included in animal rights legislation and have the same protection as vertebrates. It's like these MPs haven't even bothered to check...
Edit: I should have read TFA. It's actually about commercial fishing more than labs. I have some sympathy with the octopus bit. But I have a hard time getting too protective of lobsters.
I'm not sure why we consider more intelligent life as more worthy of protection. Why do we consider a specimen in isolation and not a species in its ecosystem.
Eating one crab is considered better than one octopus. What about 100 crabs vs 1 octopus? Where do we draw the line? Or if we consider something not smart enough based on our arbitrary criteria, it's open season to eat as much as we can of it.
We're mixing here categories that completely don't go together. Whether we hunt and eat an animal shouldn't be based on its intelligence. But rather on considerations of sustainability and ecosystem disruption.
This entire article seems extremely far off from making a coherent argument whatsoever that our actions should be based on.
whether we should protect animals should be based on the sustainability of such practice (can the human race sustain not eating/experimenting on octopuses and lobsters), not the fact that they feel pain. Of course they do.
If this "discovery" is how they try to convince people to support the cause then they're out of touch with reality.
- Boiling alive lobsters is illegal in New Zealand and Switzerland
- Robert Elwood, a professor at Queen's University Belfast, is a leading researcher in this field. He believes lobsters should be killed before boiling.
- Accepted wisdom about crustacean behaviour to painful stimuli is that it is a reflex, not a reaction to pain.
- No experiment can answer questions about pain in crustaceans definitively, but Elwood's research makes him see "as much evidence for pain in crustaceans as there is in many vertebrates".
- The argument against crustacean pain is that their brain structure is so different to ours. We know where pain occurs in the human brain, but those equivalent brain regions do not exist in crustaceans.
- Robert Steneck, professor of marine sciences at the University of Maine, has been studying lobsters since 1983: "I'm not convinced they feel pain...The problem has more to do with how we anthropomorphise various critters"
- Maisie Tomlinson, a campaigner for a charity called Crustacean Compassion, says "It’s estimated that an edible crab that is boiled alive may take up to three minutes to lose consciousness. That’s something that would be unconscionable in a vertebrate animal, where they talk about milliseconds to lose consciousness [in a slaughterhouse]"
- Is there a best way to kill a lobster? For a restaurant, professor Robert Elwood says "I would have [a device] that gave them electrical stunning, which completely destroys the central nervous system in a microsecond".
I was always told that the reason lobster is usually sold live is because bacteria in the lobster starts to multiply quickly after they die and the meat will become unsafe.
Cooks have told me to either run a knife through their brain or throw them in a freezer for half an hour to shut them down.
Incidentally, I used to do the latter as a kid when catching bugs outside to feed a green anole I caught and was taking care of for a Boy Scout merit badge...
I guess feeling pains by that definition isn't really an useful test, being sentient is. We dont know what animals have sentience, but the prevailing theory is a central nevous system makes it possible.
The simple counter argument is that most life in nature does not end well or painlessly at all. Dying sucks. Especially when you are being mauled to death by some predator. The best you can hope for is that it will be quick. Violent death is a near certainty; unless some crippling decease gets you first. The reality of nature is that there are no nursing homes, only jaws of death.
It's of course not an excuse to be needlessly cruel. But it is a valid reason to re-consider how nature works. Leaving animals alone does not mean they get to die in their sleep surrounded by their loving families and mourned by their loved ones like we all hope for. Worse, a lot of the animals we kill in order to eat them exist solely because we eat them. Ceasing to eat them adds up to genocide.
We have entire sub species of all sorts of animals that would not exist or continue to exist if it weren't for the fact that we breed them in order to eat them. Cows, pigs, and chickens are good examples of animals that have no place in nature and would likely die out quickly because of the very same properties that caused us to breed them in that direction.
Many billions of animals would not exist if it weren't for the fact that we plan to eat them. Equating veganism to genocide is clearly a bit of a stretch. But just ask yourself if it is better for the animal and its species to not have existed at all or is eating meat under some circumstances perhaps not that unethical? It's what the rest of nature does after all.
My guess is this is the UK government trying to somehow mess with the seafood markets to benefit the UK seafood industry. Their quibbles with neighbouring countries over fishing territories is well known. Maybe they are trying to introduce some legislation that makes it much harder for neighbouring countries to sell fish to the UK.
I see no reason why this wouldn't be serious. To put these comments into context, it's in preparation of the government's Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill[1] coming before the Commons. The Bill would set up an Animal Sentience Committee to scrutinise policies' effects on sentient animals. The government have brought this forward in preparation of future changes to British animal welfare legislation, now Britain has legislative independence in this area, post-EU exit. The Queen's Speech in May announced Britain would pursue "the highest standards of animal welfare", and the government said it would make Britain a "global leader" in this area[2]. As the Bill currently stands, it limits the Committee in considering only vertebrate animals (and therefore it cannot report with regards to others, including octopuses and lobsters). These MPs want to amend it to cover these other animals. Whether or not the Sentience Committee's reports are properly considered in policy is another matter.
Compassion != action. Let’s forget about cows and lobsters. We know that African children are mining cobalt and Asians are working in sweatshops to make those 15 EUR H&M hoodies. Do we do enough to help them?
This is all disgraceful, and if we can't at least respect the animals we eat, we probably don't deserve to eat them.