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On February 10 2011 06:38 PH wrote:
"Specie-cism"?
Speciesism.
Read some ethics and this issue will make a lot more sense to you, OP.
You're being influenced by what is essentially propaganda aimed at invoking pity and sympathy towards animals.
I do believe animals, depending on the kind, have some general rights and inviolabilities (I don't believe a scorpion is equivalent to a dog, per se). I do not believe that animals have the same general rights and inviolabilities human beings do. I do not believe the ability to feel pain and the ability to have an abstract concern for one's future (no one doubts animals are capable of either of those) grants them rights similar to that of human beings.
I don't believe you're "anti-human rights", but my eating meat doesn't make me unethical, either. In the same way as you, I have yet to hear a convincing argument that humans shouldn't eat meat on moral/ethical grounds.
I have raed ethics, in fact I have taken papers on it at university. If you have as well then consider this. Would you go out of your way to kick a dog. Or would you keep it in a cage for a large portion of its life with no freedom of movement. No, because it would be unnecessarily cruel. However, this is what we do to factory farmed animals on a daily basis. Pigs are more intelligent than dogs, yet we do the following:
By day 3 the piglets are commonly subjected to surgical procedures with out anaesthetic. These procedures include tail clipping, ear notching, tooth clipping and castration. Pigs have a complex brain and series of pain receptors. Experts say that it is likely that the feeling of pain experienced by these piglets would be similar to that which humans would experience.
Piglets become stressed under farm situations and this can lead to tail biting. Rather than removing the cause of the problem farmers instead choose to remove part of the piglets’ tail. Pigs use their tail for communication and such usage is considerably impaired by this procedure.
Ear notching means a piglets ear is essentially hole punched for identification purposes.
The teeth of piglets are usually shortened in order to avoid damage to the mother’s udder and to the other piglets. Such damage often does not occur or is very minor. Shortening of the point teeth is usually carried out by clipping half of their initial length.
Castration is carried out on all male piglets that are not going to be retained for breeding. The principal purpose of this procedure is to prevent ‘boar taint’ in the flesh of older male pigs.
In the wild piglets would be weaned at about 17 weeks of age but would remain with their mothers herd until they are at least 7 months old. On a factory farm the piglets are taken from their mothers at about 4 weeks old and placed in fattening pens or retained for breeding and sow ‘replacement’ purposes.
In a typical farm set up several hundred piglets from different litters are placed in a series of small pens in a dark concrete floored shed. The conditions are overcrowded and filthy. Like the boars and gilts, the piglets will quickly end up covered in their own excrement.
Pigs are very social and inquisitive animals with a complex brain. In a natural setting these piglets would be playing and learning by exploring their large home range with their mother and siblings. In these sheds piglets cannot do these things easily; this often leads to aggression and overeating.
Over half of the sows in NZ are placed in dry sow stalls for either part or all of their 115 day pregnancy. When the sows are about to give birth they are transferred to a farrowing crate. Given that sows are either nursing young or are pregnant they are essentially confined for their entire life on the farm.
A sow’s home range would usually be upwards of 100 hectares. However on a factory farm they are restricted to an area that measures 60 centimetres by 2 metres. The sows can not turn around in these stalls; they can only sit, stand or lie down.
Sows have strong behavioural desires to root and forage. Confinement and barren living conditions mean that the sows cannot carry out these behaviours and they become bored and frustrated. This leads to the development of abnormal behaviours which the sows regularly repeat. These behaviours include bar chewing, sham chewing, head weaving and tongue rolling.
Sows have also shown behaviour indicative of learned helplessness and depression; this is apparent in sows who can be seen in the ‘dog-sitting’ position.
Confinement also harms the sows physically; frustration can cause the sows to bite the ears of neighbouring sows leaving them with open wounds. The constant contact wit the metal stall bars also leave the sows with cuts and scratches. The constant kneeling on a concrete floor results in calluses forming on the sows knees.
Sows confined to stalls are prone to developing overgrown toenails which result in lameness, foot injuries and leg and foot deformities.
Pigs have strong maternal instincts and confinement to a sow stall makes it impossible for the expectant mother to prepare for the birth of her litter. Before the birth, the mother sow would naturally prepare a special nest for her young. On a factory farm sows cannot do this and instead are moved to a new stall called a farrowing crate where she will give birth and attempt to care for her young.
This isn't necessary. We don't need to eat pork to survive. We carry out these atrocious acts on pigs that we'd never do to dogs, all just to gratify our own lust for taste.
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On February 10 2011 06:41 Tony Campolo wrote:
Take for example the fact that thousands of Africans are dying daily from malnutrition and starvation. It would be better for less of them to have children, as these children are simply being born and living lives full of suffering.
whoa whoa WHOA
You object to humans making judgements about what's best for animals and then you rattle off this doozy
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OP, I think you are being incredibly insulting in comparing animal rights to the historical plight of Blacks and Jews. I think you should just stop using those analogies. Your comments such as "Just because you give a black person the right not to be racially attacked, does not mean you necessarily have to give them a sponsorship to go to university."
are also becoming increasingly racist, although hopefully not intentionally.
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On February 10 2011 06:41 Tony Campolo wrote:Show nested quote +On February 10 2011 06:33 101TFP wrote:
Misquoting is a very mature way to argue.
I like meat.
Most wild animals die of starvation or by getting eaten alive.
In the grand scheme of things, guess how many billions and billions of animals have suffered and died painful deaths in the history of the earth.
Our way of life has only existed for a very very short amount of time in comparison.
Just because we humans don't like pain and think that it is bad to cause pain to others, doesn't mean that it isn't a completely natural thing to kill other animals and make them suffer for our well-being if necessary.
Today we have very efficient methods of doing that, which seems to be necessary to uphold the need for meat of humanity.
Everyone is free to decide to not eat meat, just don't run around and expect us to actually care.
edit: Regarding your point of humans treating each other better than they treat animals. You are wrong. People tortured and killed each other all day long since the dawn of mankind. And it's still happening. Not true. Most animals die of intensive factory farm practices and in the slaughterhouses - billions per day. In the grand scheme of things, this suffering can be reduced - just because many people have died in wars in the past doesn't justify wars today. Take for example the fact that thousands of Africans are dying daily from malnutrition and starvation. It would be better for less of them to have children, as these children are simply being born and living lives full of suffering. Likewise for the billions of animals that are produced (via artificial insemination) on factory farms, it would be better if they were not created in the first place. If we can reduce that suffering, then we ought to.
Or you can go one step further and say if you kill the entire planet now you will stop generation after generation of suffering!
Life = suffering, the two really cannot be separated
The biggest problem I have with all this is you can actually apply most of your arguments about animals to plants as well. IMO it is best to pursue the best diet FOR ME, and that is a mixed diet.
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On February 10 2011 06:18 bonifaceviii wrote:Show nested quote +On February 10 2011 06:14 Tony Campolo wrote:
A dog owner doesn't need to beat their dogs. But he does have to humiliate and intimidate the dog in order to establish pack rank. It's dog psychology 101.
Ever watched the dog whisperer.
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On February 10 2011 06:11 Tony Campolo wrote:Show nested quote +On February 10 2011 05:48 SolHeiM wrote:
I think you're taking survival of the fittest too literally. It has nothing to do with being stronger or weaker and lacking compassion to "destroy the enemy" in order to survive. It means the fittest gene pool and whether or not you're chosen by nature and can reproduce. Not, and to quote Stephen Merchant, that Lions have been working out in a gym and got stronger and therefore survived.
The reason we don't show the same compassion towards animals is because they are inferior to humans, it's just that simple. It's not that simple. Do you lack compassion towards the physically or mentally disabled because they are 'inferior'? That's the kind of mindset racists had towards blacks in the past. Even if they are inferior, it takes nothing away from humans to be more compassionate to them than we already are. The worst thing that can happen is that you eat less meat and miss the taste. For us it's just a meal though. For them it's their whole lives, as well as losing their families. If you've ever been hunting before, you'd see that a kid (baby goat) grieves over the death of their mother.
But mental illness is not the same as being an inferior species. Being disabled doesn't make you less human. The worst thing that can happen is overpopulation, which is already occurring with humans anyway unless we regulate it. And about the racist part, we know better today than we did before. We know that black people are no different than white people. We also know that animals are in no way close to humans, which is why we can safely say we are superior to animals.
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Why don't we go a step further. Aside from not eating any animal products, lets put some cheese out so that family of rats can stave off the winter. Oh sorry, put out some tofu cheese.
Maybe we can move that colony of termites in to our attic. That'll really reduce their suffering. After all, what is my right to live in a house compared to their right to survive? I can always sleep in a tent. Its just a simple move. No human rights infringed !!
Come to think of it, animals are pretty close to their mom and dads. Maybe when an animal dies, I'll bury it and not disturb its resting ground. Of course, I can't use fossil fuels, might disturb some animals from worshipping their ancestors.
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I like to eat meat, but I have a dog and have an understanding. As long as animals are treated decently and their death is met with as little or no pain, I don't understand why anyone would be against it. Humans are omnivorous, but veggies along simply don't cut it. It takes a balanced diet of fruits, veggies, grains, and meats.
I also think that the video exaggerates a problem. There are already laws against animal cruelty and codes which require farmers to follow specific procedures. When working at kinkos, foster farms gave us their manual to reproduce. When scanning the individual pages, I saw their entire procedure including how to feed the chickens, how to prepare them, and how to kill them. The process was very safe and ethical and the manual stressed the utmost care when following this procedure. There was very little blood in the end.
You view on species assumes that all animals are equal in status and deserve the same chance to live, however, real life would show otherwise. If humans didn't exist at all, animals of all kind would eat each other, hurt each other and show no regards for the suffering of other animals. Humans are the only species truly capable of compassion. (dog's might seem compassionate, but they are simply expressing the emotional component of compassion).
Obviously it is important to treat all animals correctly.
One other thing that's interesting is that animals that are used as food often are the ones that don't go extinct as quickly since it is in the best interest of the farmers to keep a healthy population alive.
Enjoy your veganism, but I can tell you that until we come up with supernatural farming techniques and adequate protein/etc substitutes, that humans will be eating meat for the next thousand years.
Say no to animal cruelty, say yes to eating meat.
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plants are alive too, is it specesism to eat them? also you describe a dairy cows life as being bad simply because it is not natural. i suggest you read GE Moore principa ethica or anything else on the naturalistic fallacy. eg that which is good is not good solely because it is a natural state of affairs
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On February 10 2011 06:48 SolHeiM wrote:
But mental illness is not the same as being an inferior species. Being disabled doesn't make you less human. The worst thing that can happen is overpopulation, which is already occurring with humans anyway unless we regulate it. And about the racist part, we know better today than we did before. We know that black people are no different than white people. We also know that animals are in no way close to humans, which is why we can safely say we are superior to animals.
They're a lot closer than you think. Find someone who owns a pet dog or cat, and then ask them whether they would be willing to put their cat or dog through what a pig goes through in a factory farm. We don't need to afford them the same rights as humans - but as a minimum they deserve the same rights (animal cruelty laws) that domesticated animals have. It is against the law to mistreat your dog, but if it's a pig then it's OK. But a pig is in actual fact more intelligent than a dog. I'm not saying give animals human rights, but give them the same rights as animals we arbitrarily decide to love more than others.
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On February 10 2011 06:53 darmousseh wrote:Enjoy your veganism, but I can tell you that until we come up with supernatural farming techniques and adequate protein/etc substitutes, that humans will be eating meat for the next thousand years.
Say no to animal cruelty, say yes to eating meat.
There are plenty of adequate protein substitutes for meat, what are you talking about?
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Evolution and natural selection. It;s only natural that a species fights for its own survival and cares solely for itself. Why do you think basically all atruistic behavior is between two animals of the same species? Its only natural that we look after our own preservation. Yes, humans are rational and capable of complex thought and what not but the basic sentiment still stands. We are mainly concerned with the preservation of our own species and theres nothing wrong with that. Eating meat is healthy on top of tasting good. Now of course I'm not going to get carried away with this. I'm not going to torture an animal because I'm bored and I do feel sad when I see a wounded dog. Unnecessary suffering of animals is of course wrong and something I feel terrible about when I see or hear, but I'm not going to let it dictate everything I do and change my eating habits. Animal rights matter, but not nearly as much as human rights. I won't become a vegetarian "because its wrong to kill animals". Fuck no, I love my steak
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On February 10 2011 06:45 bonifaceviii wrote:Show nested quote +On February 10 2011 06:41 Tony Campolo wrote:
Take for example the fact that thousands of Africans are dying daily from malnutrition and starvation. It would be better for less of them to have children, as these children are simply being born and living lives full of suffering. whoa whoa WHOA You object to humans making judgements about what's best for animals and then you rattle off this doozy
Look to the logic of the point I was making, which is that the number of animals that are created for the express purpose of going through the factory farm process should be avoided if possible. We are creating billions of pigs and chickens everyday to go through the process outlined at the beginning of page two of this thread. It is unnecessary.
By analogy, millions of children are being born into poverty without the resources to adequately care for them. It would be better if contraception, for example, was used, so that there would be less pregnancies, as these children are often born with nothing ahead of them but malnutrition and death before their fifth day of life.
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if you started eating dogs then you would no longer have this "arbitrary animal love" which I will agree sounds fairly illegal.
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On February 10 2011 06:45 lixlix wrote:
OP, I think you are being incredibly insulting in comparing animal rights to the historical plight of Blacks and Jews. I think you should just stop using those analogies. Your comments such as "Just because you give a black person the right not to be racially attacked, does not mean you necessarily have to give them a sponsorship to go to university."
are also becoming increasingly racist, although hopefully not intentionally.
I fail to see how I am racist considering I am advocating against differential treatment of blacks and whites.
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I really think vegans shoot themselves and their goals in the foot when they try and do stuff like this. There are damn good environmental and health reasons to eat much less meat that the average person living in a developed country does, but rhetoric like what you're using is damaging to that cause.
I am fully aware that you and many other vegans think that consuming animal products is tantamount to murder, slavery, and pretty much everything else evil. However, you need to recognize that most people simply don't feel that way, and are unlikely to change. Simply put, we have different assumptions about the world, and while the arguments you are making seem persuasive to someone like you, they ring hollow to people like me who have no problem thinking of animals as lesser moral subjects than humans. For example, no matter how offensive you and your ilk find factory farms, I and many other meat eaters simply don't care, because for me a cow is nothing more than a source of useful material. You're preaching to the choir, not making a persuasive attempt to change minds.
Furthermore, when you go and make arguments like comparing eating steak to slavery, you actively drive most people away from your movement. Because most people view animals as less important than humans, their reaction to such claims will likely lie somewhere between amusement and taking offense, neither of which are conductive to your cause. More importantly, you drive them away from even considering that maybe they should try and cut down on their meat intake. This is bad, and ends up detracting from your goal of decreasing the consumption of animal products.
Finally, the claim that everyone can live completely healthy lives on vegan diets is provably false. Example.
As a side note, i just want to make clear to you that you will never, ever convince me to be a vegan, so don't waste your time trying. As a type one diabetic, my life depends on regular injections of insulin harvested primarily from genetically modified animals. There are millions of people like me whose lives depend on medications either harvested from or tested on animals, and i can never endorse a philosophy that would condemn me and all of them to death.
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On February 10 2011 06:55 Tony Campolo wrote:Show nested quote +On February 10 2011 06:48 SolHeiM wrote:
But mental illness is not the same as being an inferior species. Being disabled doesn't make you less human. The worst thing that can happen is overpopulation, which is already occurring with humans anyway unless we regulate it. And about the racist part, we know better today than we did before. We know that black people are no different than white people. We also know that animals are in no way close to humans, which is why we can safely say we are superior to animals. They're a lot closer than you think. Find someone who owns a pet dog or cat, and then ask them whether they would be willing to put their cat or dog through what a pig goes through in a factory farm. We don't need to afford them the same rights as humans - but as a minimum they deserve the same rights (animal cruelty laws) that domesticated animals have. It is against the law to mistreat your dog, but if it's a pig then it's OK. But a pig is in actual fact more intelligent than a dog. I'm not saying give animals human rights, but give them the same rights as animals we arbitrarily decide to love more than others.
But we don't eat dogs. I don't think those laws specifically mention dogs but mention house pets. If you happened to have a house pet pig, then it would probably be illegal to mistreat the pig. Sharing a certain percentage of our DNA (like we do with monkeys) or being intelligent doesn't make a difference to me. They're not humans.
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On February 10 2011 06:45 Treemonkeys wrote:
Or you can go one step further and say if you kill the entire planet now you will stop generation after generation of suffering!
Life = suffering, the two really cannot be separated
The biggest problem I have with all this is you can actually apply most of your arguments about animals to plants as well. IMO it is best to pursue the best diet FOR ME, and that is a mixed diet.
On February 10 2011 06:54 rolfe wrote:
plants are alive too, is it specesism to eat them? also you describe a dairy cows life as being bad simply because it is not natural. i suggest you read GE Moore principa ethica or anything else on the naturalistic fallacy. eg that which is good is not good solely because it is a natural state of affairs
Occasionally, vegans encounter the claim that plants are sentient as a kind of objection to going vegan. The uninformed reasoning suggests that since ‘all life’ is sentient, it doesn’t matter what we eat. Vegans have three replies to this: 1) accept the premise that plants are sentient (no matter how offensive to common sense it is) and argue from there; 2) deny that plants are sentient; or 3) reply with both 1) and 2), as I intend to do here.
First Reply: Plants Are Sentient; Therefore, Go Vegan
Let’s put science and common sense on hold for a couple of minutes and assume for argument’s sake that plants are sentient. Not only that, but let’s take it all the way to absurdity and assume that plants are the most sentient life on Earth.
Even if it’s true that plants are the most sentient life on Earth, veganism would still be the minimum standard of decency. This follows from the simple fact that animals are reverse protein factories, consuming multiple times the protein in plant food that they produce in protein from their flesh and bodily fluids. Cows consume from 9 to 13 times, and pigs 5 to 7 times, the protein they produce, depending on diet and confinement factors. Chickens consume 2 to 4 times the protein they produce, also depending on diet and confinement factors. So the more we’re concerned about the ‘sentience’ of plants, the less we want to contribute to the staggering inefficiencies of cycling plants through animals, and the more reason we have to go vegan to reduce both animal and plant ‘suffering’.
Second Reply: Plants Aren’t Sentient; Therefore, Go Vegan
Let’s now examine the idea that plants are sentient and see why people might believe, contrary to common sense, that plants are sentient, and where they might go wrong.
Equivocation on Sentience
To start with, let’s look at the meaning of the word sentience, because equivocation on the meaning of sentience is often a source of confusion. The definition of sentience in standard usage is an organism’s capacity to experience sensations and emotions. A non-standard definition of sentience, introduced by Robert A. Freitas Jr., and used in the so-called “sentience quotient” (SQ), is the relationship between the estimated information processing rate (measured in bits per second) of each individual processing unit, the weight or size of a single unit, and the total number of processing units. [1]
When a claim is made that plants are ‘sentient’, it is helpful to ask in what sense the claim is being made. Under the SQ definition, plants are ‘sentient’ in that they have an (extremely low) SQ value, but this low SQ value says nothing about sentience under the standard definition. Consciousness sufficient to support experiential sentience almost certainly requires a sufficiently high SQ value in addition to other neuronal properties, neither of which, for example, do computers and plants possess. [2]
Computers have an SQ value that is several orders of magnitude higher than all plants; and animals, including humans, have an SQ value that is up to several orders of magnitude higher than all computers. If computers can’t experience sensations and emotions, then it is almost certainly impossible that plants can, given plants’ extremely low SQ value and a non-neuronal information processing system. As such, it is unreasonable to believe that plants are sentient under the standard (non-SQ) definition.
Plants Are Complex
Another source of confusion regarding plants that leads some people to speculate that they are sentient is that plants are highly evolved and complex organisms that ‘react’ to their environment in surprising ways, especially in larger time scales than we perceive in everyday life. Some plants ‘react’ to insects by releasing deterrent or poisonous chemicals. Some plants release chemicals to deter other plants from growing near them. Some plants are either aggressive or passive in root development depending on whether or not they are around their own species. The Venus Flytrap catches and consumes insects when insects come in contact with tiny hairs that trigger the trap to close.
The confusion arises when the assumption is made that such plant ‘behavior’ is caused by the plants “subjectively experiencing the world through sense data” rather than by insentient hormonal, electrical, mechanical, and chemical processes.
The scientific principle of parsimony strongly suggests that we shouldn’t postulate a complex explanation for phenomena when a simpler explanation will suffice. When autonomic systems in mammals, such as the cardiovascular system, the immune system, and the reproductive system at the level of the ‘behavior’ of sperm in the presence of an egg appear to be reacting ‘subjectively, consciously and intentionally’ to perpetuate either themselves or their host organism, we don’t assume that these systems are sentient independently of their host organism and acting volitionally. We recognize that there are insentient hormonal, electrical, mechanical, and chemical processes that cause various ‘behaviors’ and events to take place. The development of these insentient processes can be explained by tens and hundreds of thousands of years of natural selection, where hundreds of billions of small, genetic mutations and combinations survived or failed to survive based on how adaptive they were. We should apply the principle of parsimony in our assessment of the causes of plant ‘behavior’ similarly.
Sentience and Neurobiology
Neuroscientists have positively confirmed the areas of our neurology (brain stem, limbic system, etc) that serve to provide sentience and complex emotion. All vertebrates and at least some non-vertebrate animals have these nervous system components, providing strong positive, empirical evidence that such beings are sentient, and that most of them have highly subjective, emotional lives. Plants do not have any of these neurological components.
Back to Common Sense
Organisms such as humans, dogs, chickens, pigs, cows, goats, and sheep look, behave, and move in ways that highly suggest sentience defined as the experience of sensation and emotion. Organisms such as plants look, behave, and stay still (unless the wind is blowing) in ways that highly suggest absolutely no sentience (again, defined as the experience of sensation and emotion). Absent an excellent reason to reject such strong appearances we ought to accept them.
If there is any room for debate and legitimate questions on sentience, it is in the biological continuum between insects and bacteria. Insects such as spiders certainly behave and move in a manner that highly suggests at least some degree of experiential sentience. How much sentience comes in degrees, and how sentient certain organisms like spiders are, are difficult questions. But we know beyond any reasonable doubt that vertebrates are sentient; and we know with a very high degree of confidence that plants are not sentient.
Conclusion
As unconscious entities, plants have no subjective, conscious interest that would be morally relevant to whether we kill them for food or other sufficient reasons (e.g. removing/killing them to build a shelter). We should respect plants in the same sense in which we respect the beauty, complexity, and wonder of insentient nature and natural phenomena in general, which entails reducing our impact on them as much as is reasonable, and not destroying them gratuitously. Our moral obligations regarding plants, however, do not compare in kind to our direct moral obligations to vertebrates, whose sentience and conscious, intentional striving for life and survival is obvious to us. Given this eager striving for life and survival of sentient vertebrates, veganism is the minimum standard of decency.
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My only stake in the matter would be getting meat and milk. Find some other way to create the same commodities just as efficiently and you could convince me. Also, who think compassion is the only way to go are just naive. There's still competition daily to survive and mate(in first world countries mostly just to mate). Its great to show compassion when that luxury is available, but when it comes down to it sane people will gut each other to survive, and the same thing goes for animals.
Obviously in first world countries we aren't reliant on livestock to survive. Its more of a dietary tradition. I'm willing to bet in the (somewhat distant) future we will be eating processed nutrient paste as a dietary staple. Livestock are really not a very efficient food source. You have to feed them, contain them, kill them, repeat. As the population grows, we will need to find more efficient methods of growing food than livestock. There's a lot of cool research and engineering projects in hydroponics and other farming methods.
However, in third world countries people need livestock to survive. This is where any moral qualms about eating an animal should go out the window. Its no longer a trade off between having a clear conscience and quality of life, but a trade off between conscience and survival, which is a really easy pick.
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On February 10 2011 06:58 Tony Campolo wrote:
Look to the logic of the point I was making, which is that the number of animals that are created for the express purpose of going through the factory farm process should be avoided if possible. We are creating billions of pigs and chickens everyday to go through the process outlined at the beginning of page two of this thread. It is unnecessary.
By analogy, millions of children are being born into poverty without the resources to adequately care for them. It would be better if contraception, for example, was used, so that there would be less pregnancies, as these children are often born with nothing ahead of them but malnutrition and death before their fifth day of life.
"Excuse me African madam, we have determined that you do not have the means to take care of a child and, even if you did, the mortality statistics show that it would die before five days. Please take these contraceptives and refrain from reproducing, since your choices are outweighed by our measure of potential suffering. Thank you."
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EPT
