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I am surprised again and again that people are surprised that animals, and social ones at that, have thoughts and emotions and relationships. Have you never bee

I am surprised again and again that people are surprised that animals, and social ones at that, have thoughts and emotions and relationships. Have you never been around animals? Do you truly have believe humans are that special?

beebeepka 3y ago
Allowing other animals to be like glorious humans would mean they deserve better. Can't have that. Story as old as the world
ornornor 3y ago
I’m surprised too. But I suspect it’s more because it’s a very inconvenient truth: what about factory farms, the suffering we make billions of animals go through so we can eat them cheaply, and having to change our habits to accommodate this reality? It’s way easier and socially accepted to ignore this entirely and assume animals are dumb so it’s ok to keep doing what we do to them.
- threeseed 3y ago
  9 million people die every year from hunger. Humanity will do just fine ignoring the suffering of animals however smart they are.
  - frakrx 3y ago
    Less meat consumption should lead to more production and decrease in price of of other types food. Also despite all the suffering in the world people still care very much about the wellbeign of dogs and cats. If anything with inflation and more and more wars around the globe the world needs cheaper food now more than ever.
    - randomdata 3y ago
      > the world needs cheaper food now more than ever. We are getting there. The price of food has crashed pretty hard over the last couple of years, and we're already back to 2019 levels, with little sign of that trend stopping. Barring some major shift, food will be cheaper than ever by next year. It may not actually be cheaper food that you need, but rather cheaper retail workers. While food has crashed, the price of food in the grocery store still seems to be climbing.
    - giantg2 3y ago
      The inputs into meat today are things like soy and feed corn, which aren't particularly good for people. It's not quite as easy as just not eating meat. Many of the farms need to switch to other crops that are healthy which requires different machines, more labor, or other factors. You probably aren't going to see too much drop in other food prices since much of the cost of foods (especially corn and soy related) is in the processing and distribution, not in the actual growing. Then you need to convince people they want to eat whatever the new product is. You could give people something made from scraps similar to dog food, but that's not going to go over well for a bunch of reasons.
  - ornornor 3y ago
    And westerners throw away an obscene amount of edible food on a daily basis. I don’t see how being more compassionate and opting out of participating in animal suffering will make people who don’t have enough to eat have more to eat.
    - actionfromafar 3y ago
      Lower grain price?
      - ornornor 3y ago
        This makes no sense. Animals eat grain. We eat the animal. Animal has to eat 10x the calories in grain for 1x the calories to whoever eats the animal. VS 1x the calories in grain if you skip eating the animal in between.
  - nine_k 3y ago
    Meat, especially beef, is an utterly inefficient way to produce food. People die from hunger not because the world is not producing enough food, and even not because the world is not trying to feed people in distress. It happens mostly because local politicians or warlords tend to steal or grab the humanitarian aid, or straight out not let it in, in order to preserve their power structures, and themselves on top. They don't mind killing some compatriots for that, with guns, or with hunger, no matter.
    - assimpleaspossi 3y ago
      I think the real problem is there are too many people.
      - p-e-w 3y ago
        The elephant in the room that any discussion about social issues will bend over backwards to avoid mentioning. Climate change, ecocide, many if not most international conflicts, the housing crisis, fossil fuel consumption, and countless other issues are simply proportional to the number of humans on the planet. Yet directly addressing that fundamental problem is almost always the very last thing proposed, or even talked about.
        yvely 3y ago
        This is a common sentiment, but I have yet to hear any reasonable proposal for solutions. It certainly is talked about a lot in my experience. It is so easy to complain about overpopulation. But how would you solve it? 1 child policy? Didn't work out great in China. Some can have children, others can't? Doesn't exactly seem right. Culling? Yeah, no-one wants genocide. It's a very complex problem and people are very fast to complain about it, without thinking much about what actually to do.
        nine_k 3y ago
        It worked so well in China that they have a birth rate well below replacement level 20 or so years after the one-child policy was repealed.
  - dfgfek 3y ago
    How smart were those 9 million people? Given that most of them live in zones where they couldn't apply even the simplest agriculture techniques, I would say not much.
    - jhanschoo 3y ago
      What is your argument here relating to the original argument?
  - johnnyworker 3y ago
    In this day and age, people aren't still starving because the animals and plants don't give up their nutrients easily enough, but because humans trample and prey on humans at worst, or neglect their suffering at best. And empathy is empathy, I doubt you can outright ignore the suffering of animals while having a whole lot for the suffering of humans.
  - BeFlatXIII 3y ago
    Those 9 million can be properly nourished on a plant-based diet.
- junofan 3y ago
  The broader context is a lot of the Western philosophy we rely on today formed around the same time we started building intricate machines, and those thinkers also wondered whether animals were just really intricate machines. Nothing nefarious. It’s probably fine if we express more gratitude towards these animals like we used to.
dotnet00 3y ago
It doesn't feel that surprising to me. I would've been in the same camp if I hadn't gone through a phase of being interested in random animal related trivia (eg wondering why so many mammals seem to enjoy being pet). I just never really grew up with much interaction with animals, and what I did see was mostly stuff that could be passed off as just instincts without deeper thought. It took actually thinking about their behavior and realizing that "being social" as an instinct includes having some level of intelligent emotions and relationships, it isn't just some mechanistic urge to be in a group based on some hardcoded rules.
nine_k 3y ago
Humans are special, but in more subtle ways than "thinking vs dumb". I think it's safe to assume that all higher mammals have some idea about the world around, themselves, their kin, etc, with a social structure of sorts, unless they are solitary. Many of them, like wolves, pass their learned experience to their progeny, that is, possess and sustain a culture. Some of them, like cetaceans, are officially considered conscious. (And there are comparably intellectual birds, too.) Humans have unique achievements, like constructive syntax, or overcoming of the Dunbar number limitation in cooperative structures, or mathematics, but these stem from a really tall intellectual base humans share with other mammals.
- frakrx 3y ago
  Dont forget the birds sone birds like corvids and parrots are roughly intellectualy equal to primates and cetaceans.
- isoprophlex 3y ago
  > overcoming of the Dunbar number limitation in cooperative structures ... but only barely ;)
  - nine_k 3y ago
    Look at any armed forces. An army worth the name is always larger than 150 people. Then look at Walmart or Amazon. Then consider democracies in countries with tens and hundreds of millions of people.
- justanotherjoe 3y ago
  I'm an atheist, but the book of genesis put it very well on this subject. There is one emotion that is unique to humans. It is not compassion, or sense of justice or fairness, aninals have those. It is shame. Which is unique to humans. On a related note, I heard some interesting theory by Robin Hanson on Lex Fridman's podcast. The guy said that the ego is our brain's attempt at forming a story around the brain's decisions (which are made pre-thought). It's crazy to consider that what we are is just our brain attempt at storytelling to justify ourselves.
c048 3y ago
I've lived around animals all my file, even my SO grew up on a farm. Why on earth do you (or anyone) think they experience thoughts, emotions and relationships in a human way? Simply because we have similarities does not equate that animals experience things the same way. We know this because we have a better understanding of what goes on in a more limited human brain (be it a child or neurodivergent) compared to a healthy adult one. I frankly compare this humanization of animals as a sign of not having sufficiently worked and lived with animals, with apophenia/pareidolia playing a large role.
- callmeal 3y ago
  >Why on earth do you (or anyone) think they experience thoughts, emotions and relationships in a human way? GP poster did not use the qualifier "in a human way". Take that away, and it's really hard to argue that animals do not experience thoughts, emotions and relationships. If you say otherwise, it makes it really hard to believe that you lived around animals all your life.
  - c048 3y ago
    'GP poster' said: 'Do you truly have believe humans are that special?'
    - atoav 3y ago
      Yeah but throughout a lot of western philosophy animals have been seen as totally incapable of feeling and thought. I had a philosophy professor (a year before his retirement) who was proclaiming just that. As someone who also has visited seminars in ethics and animal ethics I will now recite the train of thought of Prof. Fink from Oxford: That is obviously bullshit. Animals have feelings and thought (and we have the behavioral studies to show this to some degree). Yet we are not in a pixar movie and the animals don't have human-like interior worlds — but that doesn't mean they don't have their own variants that could be deep and rich in their own ways (or not, who knows). Ethically the question for everyone of us is: Given a being that is very likely to experience feelings and though; given we don't know how deep the inner world of that being is — what is the right way to treat such a being? Do we assume it won't notice anything and treat it accordingly? Or do we side with caution and treat it carefully till we know more? Of course to make things even more complicated the society we live in (in the form of previous generations) has made some of those choices for us already. So it might seem more normal to treat animals as if they have no feelings, because that is what we grew up with. But just because our ancestors did it that way doesn't mean it is ethically the right thing to do. Especially since we, unlike our ancestors, life in a world where survival without eating meat is not only possible, but doesn't come with huge downsides. Many would say we are allowed to herd, hold and slaughter animals because we are more intelligent than them, and because they lack the inner life. But if an alien race or an AI came by that was more intelligent than us and had a richer inner life, wouldn't they then be right to do the same to us? Ethical systems should be universally applicable, not just when it suits us. One could make all of this less complicated by ditching right and wrong and just asking who is stronger. But that isn't the kind of thinking that built the societies whose fruits we are all enjoying in the form of working division of labour, developed technologies, etc.
strken 3y ago
I don't think people are surprised that animals have thoughts and emotions. No farmer I know of thinks cows aren't capable of being trained: the ones down the road from my parents line up in an orderly queue to go into the dairy every morning and afternoon, including leaving a gap across the road and giving way to cars. On the other hand, a lot of people who claim animals have thoughts and emotions seem to think that cows have complicated human-level thoughts like "I am an oppressed cog; my owner will send me to the glue factory when I am too old to give milk, and yet I must queue up regardless, for my spirit is broken; my calf has been taken and I will never know if he got a college degree; life is pure suffering." This seems unlikely to be true.
- tehjoker 3y ago
  The part about "my calf has been taken" doesn't seem so far fetched though.
  - strken 3y ago
    Yes, but do we know how a cow experiences the loss of a calf? The loss of a human child is very painful because of human comprehension of permanence, death, and the future. Is a cow thinking "I can't find my child, I am sad, I'm going to bellow and walk around for a few days searching" or is she experiencing a longer-term loss which she understands as the irrevocable death of her calf + social isolation from the experience + the end of her personal dreams for the calf? This is what I meant by "my calf has been taken and he'll never get a college degree". I'm not saying that a cow isn't upset when you take her calf away, but I am skeptical that she is capable of being upset in the way a human would be, or for as long and as deeply. I'm skeptical that even earlier humans from a time with ~50% child mortality would be as sad as a modern mother upon losing a child, just due to the relative normality of the loss.
- Mandelmus 3y ago
  > On the other hand, a lot of people who claim animals have thoughts and emotions seem to think that cows have complicated human-level thoughts like "I am an oppressed cog; my owner will send me to the glue factory when I am too old to give milk, and yet I must queue up regardless, for my spirit is broken; my calf has been taken and I will never know if he got a college degree; life is pure suffering." This seems unlikely to be true. That straw man could fatten a whole cow.
lm28469 3y ago
Not so long ago we had surgery on babies without anesthesia because people somehow thought they didn't feel pain I imagine it's a mental safety mechanism, involving various degrees of mental gymnastic depending on the individual, otherwise everyone would be vegetarian/vegan after watching a single industrial farm/slaughter house video
- c048 3y ago
  I doubt you've seen industrial slaughterhouse videos that aren't meant to sensationalize. I've even walked around in some, where all rules and guidelines are followed, and I can still eat meat just fine. The animals don't realize what happens and death is instantaneous. How do I rationalize it? Animals are being eaten in nature too, we at least don't eat them while they're often still alive (like in nature). Plants are living organisms too, and everyone eats those without a second thought. It's just that they don't pass a self-determined bar for many. The environmental impact is a completely different question, unrelated to this.
  - lm28469 3y ago
    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KWbgZQxd6J4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KWbgZQxd6J4 This is from a "good rated" slaughter house in one of the most advanced country on earth The fact that animals are eaten in nature doesn't mean we can treat them like we treat metal ore. Comparing eating animals to eating plants is just arguing in bad faith, you know it, I know it, everyone knows it > The animals don't realize what happens and death is instantaneous Sure, and people in gulags don't realize it either, it's just work like every other work.
    - c048 3y ago
      The only one arguing in bad faith is you, along with the cookie-cutter propaganda that you consume without further thought. You're allowed to your own opinions and discuss them, but what you're doing is just regurgitating an opinion and trying to use THAT as a fact that should somehow persuade people. Why is it that militants like you ever think that'll work in a discussion where you can't use pressure or force is beyond me.
PaulHoule 3y ago
Over the break I was thinking a lot about C.S. Lewis an his issekai Christianity as well as the alternate-world Christmas of Terry Prachett’s Hogfather so I was really in the right mood when Jehovah’s Witnesses came to my door. They led with the question of “Do you think God made a mistake when he created the world?”. I thought about it really hard and answered “I could make the case either way.” Where does evil come from? My answer is that “Well you try to push a fluid in a certain direction and it goes sideways and swirls…” (must have been a dynamicist in a past life) Where we really differed from them the most I think was their insistence that humans are completely different from a spiritual viewpoint than animals which I’d reject completely because my experience with cats and dogs and horses is that animals seem very much to have a moral sense and to feel bad when they fail to match expectations. The first time I fell off a horse it seemed the horse felt a lot worse about it than I did and she seemed exceptionally contrite. Sure people do have languages, beavers are never going to figure out that they could make much bigger dams with concrete, but animals do appear to have moral feelings which is consistent with the Buddhist idea that animals are subject to the law of karma, you can reincarnate as animal, etc.

beebeepka 3y ago

Allowing other animals to be like glorious humans would mean they deserve better. Can't have that. Story as old as the world

ornornor 3y ago

I’m surprised too. But I suspect it’s more because it’s a very inconvenient truth: what about factory farms, the suffering we make billions of animals go through so we can eat them cheaply, and having to change our habits to accommodate this reality? It’s way easier and socially accepted to ignore this entirely and assume animals are dumb so it’s ok to keep doing what we do to them.

threeseed 3y ago
9 million people die every year from hunger. Humanity will do just fine ignoring the suffering of animals however smart they are.
- frakrx 3y ago
  Less meat consumption should lead to more production and decrease in price of of other types food. Also despite all the suffering in the world people still care very much about the wellbeign of dogs and cats. If anything with inflation and more and more wars around the globe the world needs cheaper food now more than ever.
  - randomdata 3y ago
    > the world needs cheaper food now more than ever. We are getting there. The price of food has crashed pretty hard over the last couple of years, and we're already back to 2019 levels, with little sign of that trend stopping. Barring some major shift, food will be cheaper than ever by next year. It may not actually be cheaper food that you need, but rather cheaper retail workers. While food has crashed, the price of food in the grocery store still seems to be climbing.
  - giantg2 3y ago
    The inputs into meat today are things like soy and feed corn, which aren't particularly good for people. It's not quite as easy as just not eating meat. Many of the farms need to switch to other crops that are healthy which requires different machines, more labor, or other factors. You probably aren't going to see too much drop in other food prices since much of the cost of foods (especially corn and soy related) is in the processing and distribution, not in the actual growing. Then you need to convince people they want to eat whatever the new product is. You could give people something made from scraps similar to dog food, but that's not going to go over well for a bunch of reasons.
- ornornor 3y ago
  And westerners throw away an obscene amount of edible food on a daily basis. I don’t see how being more compassionate and opting out of participating in animal suffering will make people who don’t have enough to eat have more to eat.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    Lower grain price?
    - ornornor 3y ago
      This makes no sense. Animals eat grain. We eat the animal. Animal has to eat 10x the calories in grain for 1x the calories to whoever eats the animal. VS 1x the calories in grain if you skip eating the animal in between.
- nine_k 3y ago
  Meat, especially beef, is an utterly inefficient way to produce food. People die from hunger not because the world is not producing enough food, and even not because the world is not trying to feed people in distress. It happens mostly because local politicians or warlords tend to steal or grab the humanitarian aid, or straight out not let it in, in order to preserve their power structures, and themselves on top. They don't mind killing some compatriots for that, with guns, or with hunger, no matter.
  - assimpleaspossi 3y ago
    I think the real problem is there are too many people.
    - p-e-w 3y ago
      The elephant in the room that any discussion about social issues will bend over backwards to avoid mentioning. Climate change, ecocide, many if not most international conflicts, the housing crisis, fossil fuel consumption, and countless other issues are simply proportional to the number of humans on the planet. Yet directly addressing that fundamental problem is almost always the very last thing proposed, or even talked about.
      - yvely 3y ago
        This is a common sentiment, but I have yet to hear any reasonable proposal for solutions. It certainly is talked about a lot in my experience. It is so easy to complain about overpopulation. But how would you solve it? 1 child policy? Didn't work out great in China. Some can have children, others can't? Doesn't exactly seem right. Culling? Yeah, no-one wants genocide. It's a very complex problem and people are very fast to complain about it, without thinking much about what actually to do.
        nine_k 3y ago
        It worked so well in China that they have a birth rate well below replacement level 20 or so years after the one-child policy was repealed.
- dfgfek 3y ago
  How smart were those 9 million people? Given that most of them live in zones where they couldn't apply even the simplest agriculture techniques, I would say not much.
  - jhanschoo 3y ago
    What is your argument here relating to the original argument?
- johnnyworker 3y ago
  In this day and age, people aren't still starving because the animals and plants don't give up their nutrients easily enough, but because humans trample and prey on humans at worst, or neglect their suffering at best. And empathy is empathy, I doubt you can outright ignore the suffering of animals while having a whole lot for the suffering of humans.
- BeFlatXIII 3y ago
  Those 9 million can be properly nourished on a plant-based diet.
junofan 3y ago
The broader context is a lot of the Western philosophy we rely on today formed around the same time we started building intricate machines, and those thinkers also wondered whether animals were just really intricate machines. Nothing nefarious. It’s probably fine if we express more gratitude towards these animals like we used to.

dotnet00 3y ago

It doesn't feel that surprising to me. I would've been in the same camp if I hadn't gone through a phase of being interested in random animal related trivia (eg wondering why so many mammals seem to enjoy being pet). I just never really grew up with much interaction with animals, and what I did see was mostly stuff that could be passed off as just instincts without deeper thought. It took actually thinking about their behavior and realizing that "being social" as an instinct includes having some level of intelligent emotions and relationships, it isn't just some mechanistic urge to be in a group based on some hardcoded rules.

nine_k 3y ago

Humans are special, but in more subtle ways than "thinking vs dumb". I think it's safe to assume that all higher mammals have some idea about the world around, themselves, their kin, etc, with a social structure of sorts, unless they are solitary. Many of them, like wolves, pass their learned experience to their progeny, that is, possess and sustain a culture. Some of them, like cetaceans, are officially considered conscious. (And there are comparably intellectual birds, too.) Humans have unique achievements, like constructive syntax, or overcoming of the Dunbar number limitation in cooperative structures, or mathematics, but these stem from a really tall intellectual base humans share with other mammals.

frakrx 3y ago
Dont forget the birds sone birds like corvids and parrots are roughly intellectualy equal to primates and cetaceans.
isoprophlex 3y ago
> overcoming of the Dunbar number limitation in cooperative structures ... but only barely ;)
- nine_k 3y ago
  Look at any armed forces. An army worth the name is always larger than 150 people. Then look at Walmart or Amazon. Then consider democracies in countries with tens and hundreds of millions of people.
justanotherjoe 3y ago
I'm an atheist, but the book of genesis put it very well on this subject. There is one emotion that is unique to humans. It is not compassion, or sense of justice or fairness, aninals have those. It is shame. Which is unique to humans. On a related note, I heard some interesting theory by Robin Hanson on Lex Fridman's podcast. The guy said that the ego is our brain's attempt at forming a story around the brain's decisions (which are made pre-thought). It's crazy to consider that what we are is just our brain attempt at storytelling to justify ourselves.

c048 3y ago

I've lived around animals all my file, even my SO grew up on a farm. Why on earth do you (or anyone) think they experience thoughts, emotions and relationships in a human way? Simply because we have similarities does not equate that animals experience things the same way. We know this because we have a better understanding of what goes on in a more limited human brain (be it a child or neurodivergent) compared to a healthy adult one. I frankly compare this humanization of animals as a sign of not having sufficiently worked and lived with animals, with apophenia/pareidolia playing a large role.

callmeal 3y ago
>Why on earth do you (or anyone) think they experience thoughts, emotions and relationships in a human way? GP poster did not use the qualifier "in a human way". Take that away, and it's really hard to argue that animals do not experience thoughts, emotions and relationships. If you say otherwise, it makes it really hard to believe that you lived around animals all your life.
- c048 3y ago
  'GP poster' said: 'Do you truly have believe humans are that special?'
  - atoav 3y ago
    Yeah but throughout a lot of western philosophy animals have been seen as totally incapable of feeling and thought. I had a philosophy professor (a year before his retirement) who was proclaiming just that. As someone who also has visited seminars in ethics and animal ethics I will now recite the train of thought of Prof. Fink from Oxford: That is obviously bullshit. Animals have feelings and thought (and we have the behavioral studies to show this to some degree). Yet we are not in a pixar movie and the animals don't have human-like interior worlds — but that doesn't mean they don't have their own variants that could be deep and rich in their own ways (or not, who knows). Ethically the question for everyone of us is: Given a being that is very likely to experience feelings and though; given we don't know how deep the inner world of that being is — what is the right way to treat such a being? Do we assume it won't notice anything and treat it accordingly? Or do we side with caution and treat it carefully till we know more? Of course to make things even more complicated the society we live in (in the form of previous generations) has made some of those choices for us already. So it might seem more normal to treat animals as if they have no feelings, because that is what we grew up with. But just because our ancestors did it that way doesn't mean it is ethically the right thing to do. Especially since we, unlike our ancestors, life in a world where survival without eating meat is not only possible, but doesn't come with huge downsides. Many would say we are allowed to herd, hold and slaughter animals because we are more intelligent than them, and because they lack the inner life. But if an alien race or an AI came by that was more intelligent than us and had a richer inner life, wouldn't they then be right to do the same to us? Ethical systems should be universally applicable, not just when it suits us. One could make all of this less complicated by ditching right and wrong and just asking who is stronger. But that isn't the kind of thinking that built the societies whose fruits we are all enjoying in the form of working division of labour, developed technologies, etc.

strken 3y ago

I don't think people are surprised that animals have thoughts and emotions. No farmer I know of thinks cows aren't capable of being trained: the ones down the road from my parents line up in an orderly queue to go into the dairy every morning and afternoon, including leaving a gap across the road and giving way to cars. On the other hand, a lot of people who claim animals have thoughts and emotions seem to think that cows have complicated human-level thoughts like "I am an oppressed cog; my owner will send me to the glue factory when I am too old to give milk, and yet I must queue up regardless, for my spirit is broken; my calf has been taken and I will never know if he got a college degree; life is pure suffering." This seems unlikely to be true.

tehjoker 3y ago
The part about "my calf has been taken" doesn't seem so far fetched though.
- strken 3y ago
  Yes, but do we know how a cow experiences the loss of a calf? The loss of a human child is very painful because of human comprehension of permanence, death, and the future. Is a cow thinking "I can't find my child, I am sad, I'm going to bellow and walk around for a few days searching" or is she experiencing a longer-term loss which she understands as the irrevocable death of her calf + social isolation from the experience + the end of her personal dreams for the calf? This is what I meant by "my calf has been taken and he'll never get a college degree". I'm not saying that a cow isn't upset when you take her calf away, but I am skeptical that she is capable of being upset in the way a human would be, or for as long and as deeply. I'm skeptical that even earlier humans from a time with ~50% child mortality would be as sad as a modern mother upon losing a child, just due to the relative normality of the loss.
Mandelmus 3y ago
> On the other hand, a lot of people who claim animals have thoughts and emotions seem to think that cows have complicated human-level thoughts like "I am an oppressed cog; my owner will send me to the glue factory when I am too old to give milk, and yet I must queue up regardless, for my spirit is broken; my calf has been taken and I will never know if he got a college degree; life is pure suffering." This seems unlikely to be true. That straw man could fatten a whole cow.

lm28469 3y ago

Not so long ago we had surgery on babies without anesthesia because people somehow thought they didn't feel pain I imagine it's a mental safety mechanism, involving various degrees of mental gymnastic depending on the individual, otherwise everyone would be vegetarian/vegan after watching a single industrial farm/slaughter house video

c048 3y ago
I doubt you've seen industrial slaughterhouse videos that aren't meant to sensationalize. I've even walked around in some, where all rules and guidelines are followed, and I can still eat meat just fine. The animals don't realize what happens and death is instantaneous. How do I rationalize it? Animals are being eaten in nature too, we at least don't eat them while they're often still alive (like in nature). Plants are living organisms too, and everyone eats those without a second thought. It's just that they don't pass a self-determined bar for many. The environmental impact is a completely different question, unrelated to this.
- lm28469 3y ago
  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KWbgZQxd6J4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KWbgZQxd6J4 This is from a "good rated" slaughter house in one of the most advanced country on earth The fact that animals are eaten in nature doesn't mean we can treat them like we treat metal ore. Comparing eating animals to eating plants is just arguing in bad faith, you know it, I know it, everyone knows it > The animals don't realize what happens and death is instantaneous Sure, and people in gulags don't realize it either, it's just work like every other work.
  - c048 3y ago
    The only one arguing in bad faith is you, along with the cookie-cutter propaganda that you consume without further thought. You're allowed to your own opinions and discuss them, but what you're doing is just regurgitating an opinion and trying to use THAT as a fact that should somehow persuade people. Why is it that militants like you ever think that'll work in a discussion where you can't use pressure or force is beyond me.

PaulHoule 3y ago

Over the break I was thinking a lot about C.S. Lewis an his issekai Christianity as well as the alternate-world Christmas of Terry Prachett’s Hogfather so I was really in the right mood when Jehovah’s Witnesses came to my door. They led with the question of “Do you think God made a mistake when he created the world?”. I thought about it really hard and answered “I could make the case either way.” Where does evil come from? My answer is that “Well you try to push a fluid in a certain direction and it goes sideways and swirls…” (must have been a dynamicist in a past life) Where we really differed from them the most I think was their insistence that humans are completely different from a spiritual viewpoint than animals which I’d reject completely because my experience with cats and dogs and horses is that animals seem very much to have a moral sense and to feel bad when they fail to match expectations. The first time I fell off a horse it seemed the horse felt a lot worse about it than I did and she seemed exceptionally contrite. Sure people do have languages, beavers are never going to figure out that they could make much bigger dams with concrete, but animals do appear to have moral feelings which is consistent with the Buddhist idea that animals are subject to the law of karma, you can reincarnate as animal, etc.