That's a weird complaint on a site about eternal disruption, eternal improvement of things that are basically fine already.
I'm an omnivore, and I'm comfortable with it. But that doesn't keep me from recognizing the ethical issues with killing and controlling other beings to survive. I really appreciate people pushing the envelope on this. If I could eat basically the same diet but have it all be from a replicator, I'd do it in a heartbeat. So keep pushing, vegans!
> That's a weird complaint on a site about eternal disruption, eternal improvement of things that are basically fine already.
I mean the subject matter is itself a disruption and improvement, which is being rejected. It is not the status quo. So I don't see that as analogous.
> But that doesn't keep me from recognizing the ethical issues with killing and controlling other beings to survive.
I also try to be cognizant of related issues. But I see developments like these as a win, whereas for for a certain demographic, it's irrelevant. They aren't the ones asking for this in the first place, egg consumers are. Granted vegans are a good base for criticism which probably contributed.
Vegans are not necessarily asking for anything. They will simply buy products that no harm was done to animals for, given the choice. As a result they will buy more of the non-animal derived products. Some plant-meat/dairy/egg may be on the menu for vegans, but that's not what defines them.
Sure some vegan may voice their believe that "all animals should be wild", but not even this belief is shared among all vegans and not all are activists.
Your statement "it's never enough for vegans" has two sides for me. If someone abstains from animal derived products, vegans will generally think that's "enough". The mission and "required behavioral change" is very commonly agreed on by vegans (contrary to other movements). On the other hand, most vegans are very aware that pest control is not going away soon, and that fast modes of transport will cause some (mostly bugs) collateral harm. From this point of view you are right: there will always be some next frontier of harm reduction. It will never be enough.
For me there is a line between breeding domesticated animals, and the regretted harm caused to wild animals. I find the first appalling, where the latter is something I cannot reasonably go completely without (bugs on my windshield, pest control, etc.).
> Your statement "it's never enough for vegans" has two sides for me.
That's all well and good, but the only side that matters is the side that the statement was responding to: the original parent's comment that advocated for not bothering with technologies such as this, but instead moving toward an all-vegan society.
From that perspective, I think "it's never enough for [that kind of] vegan" is quite apt here.
There are camps in the vegan movement. For instance the abolitionists vs the utilitarians. The latter are generally more supportive harm reduction and will sometimes also eat non-vegan food when it otherwise goes to waste.
I'd say most vegans at this point think "harm reduction" is just a form of "green washing" and does not deserve our support or attention.
I'm really disappointed in these sorts of low-effort responses because they seem to be interested in shutting down discussion without allowing for any differences of opinion.
The idea that animals should be revered and never used as food is an opinion, not a fact. One can be sympathetic toward the treatment of animals raised for food, and advocate for better treatment while still consuming animal products.
The funny thing is that your comparison is also just flat-out wrong: the technology in question is also in part a product of empathy! Yes, there are efficiency and cost concerns around incubating eggs to maturity where the (male) chick will just be discarded, but there's also a strong empathetic argument that terminating an egg shortly after fertilization is much more humane than killing male chicks after birth.
I value ethics and empathy deeply but, I don't understand vegans and vegetarians.
Their biggest line of defense is "animals are alive and they have feelings and senses, we abuse them for food". That's sadly right. And they implicitly say that "eating plants are OK because, plants are not animals and they're just happen to grow. They don't feel, they don't understand".
On the contrary, there's a growing mountain of research revealing that plants can communicate, issue warnings about diseases and bug infestations. They so-called get stressed when it rains, and their metabolisms startle during fast light changes (like eclipses). More shockingly, they release all the nutrients they store when they sense they're going to die, so other plants can thrive from their remains and nutrient stocks (writing this really moves me).
This is complete opposite of "plants are well, just alive wood" hypothesis. When I share this research with vegans and vegetarians, their response is: crickets.
Moreover, most hardcore ones suggest that we don't ever need meat to thrive or live a healthy life however, we've evolved that far because we consumed meat. Meat made us and, same people are ignorant of this fact.
I can understand that we need to grow these animals more ethically. This is why I always try to buy ethically produced food. I understand that these animals are adding great amounts of greenhouse gases. I can understand that we may live well with less meat. However, we need to understand, some of these animals are evolved under our reign and they may not survive outside farms for long. The cattle are grass puppies now and are essentially "useful pets". We need to understand where we are to move forward. Ignorance and fight won't take us anywhere. We need to talk openly and need to put our prejudice aside. We need to learn and understand first.
As a real vegan (not a meme about vegans that you saw from meat eaters) I can confidently tell you that "animals are alive and they have feelings and senses, we abuse them for food" is not my biggest line of defense.
My biggest lines of defense are:
* Dr. Kim Williams, former president of the American College of Cardiology, said "there are two kinds of cardiologists, vegans, and those who haven't read the data"
* Animal agriculture is responsible for 20-33% of all freshwater consumption globally
* Mass cultivation of animals increases the chances of pandemic
* 41% of mainland USA is used for grazing livestock, yet meat only provides 18% of our calories; feeding the world on a vegan diet could reduce farmland use by 75% or more
* Going plant-based for two-thirds of meals could reduce food-related carbon emissions by 60% (the way we produce, distribute, and refrigerate food is a huge contributor of global emissions)
* 70-75% of soybeans grown globally are for livestock, only 6% are used for human food products (meat eaters often try to claim that soy production is terrible for the environment; surprise, surprise, meat consumption is the main driver)
Thank you for these references; it's great to see some logical arguments here rather than knee-jerk responses.
But I do question how much of some the things you reference are actually problems.
We have plenty of fresh water. Distribution is often our problem when it comes to getting that water to humans everywhere, but stopping livestock production will not fix that.
Does it really matter how much of the USA is used for livestock grazing? Are we missing out on using that land for other things that are important to us?
I have no opinion on soybean production, but, again, does it matter that the lion's share of soybean production goes toward feeding livestock? And if soybean cultivation really is that bad for the environment, are there other things we could be feeding livestock that don't have such bad effects?
The carbon emissions suck, but are there ways to reduce these through better process?
I don't think any of these problems are unsolvable, but likely they're expensive, and there's no political will to tax the bad behavior to the point that it becomes financially better to do the right thing. Getting around that is likely easier than getting a significant chunk of the world to go vegan.
And that's the issue I have with most logical arguments around veganism. Meat production and consumption has a lot of problems, certainly, but vegans seem to believe that the only way to fix those problems is to throw the baby out with the bathwater, when there are almost certainly solutions or at least mitigations to those problems. I get that as an individual, you aren't going to fix those problems, so personally going vegan is a way for people to avoid being a part of the problem. That is a satisfying route for some people, but not for everyone.
Freed agricultural land can and should be returned to wild. Most of farmland that was freed in EU after discontinuing unproductive farming is now forested. Sorry I don't have a link, forgot where I read about this.
Cattle raising and soy production (for animal feed) are major contributors to the continued loss of Amazon.
Yours is probably the first comment I've seen that takes a rather logical approach. I'm an omnivore but always buy everything pasture raised and mostly local. Where not local, I order from farms listed on eatwild.com. The obvious hit is cost, but that means I eat less of it.
Eventually, humanity will have to accept that going vegan is the only sustainable method.
Yep, plant based diets aren’t a dogmatic all-or-nothing thing. You can still get a good portion of the benefits (health, ethical, and environmental) by cutting down on animal products even if you don’t cut them out completely. No need to let perfect be the enemy of good.
"* Dr. Kim Williams, former president of the American College of Cardiology, said "there are two kinds of cardiologists, vegans, and those who haven't read the data""
An appeal to authority. I'm mean surgeon general once called for not wearing masks until he changed his mind completely.
"* Animal agriculture is responsible for 20-33% of all freshwater consumption globally"
Why would that be problematic? There is no shortage of water where they raise animals. On the other hand there is a shortage of water in California where they grow crops on a massive scale.
"* Mass cultivation of animals increases the chances of pandemic"
That is a true, but the same can be said of large fields of monoculture crops where disease can quickly spread and destroy everything resulting in hunger.
"* 41% of mainland USA is used for grazing livestock, yet meat only provides 18% of our calories; feeding the world on a vegan diet could reduce farmland use by 75% or more"
Only if that 41% of mainland is suitable for plowing and you don't mind destroying other habitats for food production. Live stock can graze, humans cannot. Plus we don't need pesticides and insecticides on grasslands which are destroying our fresh water supplies.
"* Going plant-based for two-thirds of meals could reduce food-related carbon emissions by 60% (the way we produce, distribute, and refrigerate food is a huge contributor of global emissions)"
That is already true for vast majority of people on this planet. Think of the food pyramid.
"* 70-75% of soybeans grown globally are for livestock, only 6% are used for human food products (meat eaters often try to claim that soy production is terrible for the environment; surprise, surprise, meat consumption is the main driver) "
I don't know how real the numbers are, regardless it is not an ideal situation and we should strive towards less monulture.
Animal agriculture has its list of problem but so does crop agriculture. There are no free lunches here. One can argue about which problems are more harmful than the other, and its pretty clear that there exist some horrible practices in Animal agriculture. However when faced with a list of only the harms from the animal agriculture, I feel forced to mention a bit more facts about the whole picture.
For example, freshwater consumption is important in regions which lacks freshwater. Crop agriculture is however the most common source for water pollution, occurs in all regions, and is not only a major environmental problem but also harms the supply of fresh water even if its not responsible for the primary consumption. Fertilizers and pesticides being the main culprits here. Sadly there is very little food in stores that do not have a direct link to fertilizers and pesticides except for wild fish, shellfish and seaweed.
In quite a few times I have seen studies showing that the lowest carbon emission in any food group would be either shellfish, seaweed, or insects. No fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, minimal land usage and sustainable. Vegan would exclude two of those, and seaweed is pretty rare in non-asian diets.
In general I try to look for marks of sustainability when buying food. Small producers, non-factory farm operations, local, crops that are in season, and so on. The article here focus on the issue of sex determining the eggs, but my primary priority is the area that the hen has. In EU you can have 16 hens located in a small box the size of 0.2m². That is plain cruelty and so I choose eggs under the mark that require 4m², a requirement for outside area, always access to natural lighting, and given crops grown without chemical fertilizers, pesticides or herbicides.
Is it perfect? No. Not using fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides is still being debated and researched if they are better for the environment or worse since land usage increases from it, but since I regularly dive in the Baltic sea I am constantly reminded by the harm done already by the revolution of chemical fertilizers produced primarily by natural gas.
> In quite a few times I have seen studies showing that the lowest carbon emission in any food group would be either shellfish, seaweed, or insects… Vegan would exclude two of those…
There's a whole strand of veganism called bivalveganism which supports the usual vegan diet + eating bi-valve creatures like mussles precisely because their cultivation seems to have a lot of positive environmental benefits (or at least, it's one of the least harmful, as you mentioned) and because they seem to rank pretty low in terms of sentience / capacity-to-feel-pain.
> Crop agriculture is however the most common source for water pollution
Again I think the most compelling rebuttal is the fact that dairy/meat is the primary driver of crop agriculture today. We can feed the world on literally a fraction of the crop agriculture that we currently do. The vast majority of that crop agriculture goes towards feeding the animals we use for dairy or meat. So in terms of thinking about the whole picture, as you mention, any problems with crop agriculture are exacerbated by meat/dairy reliance.
It not much of a rebuttal since I agree with it above. A lot of rain forest is burned to make room for crop agriculture, most which get used as feed to animal agriculture. It is generally a good recommendation to avoid food that is created by burning rain forest, and animal products derived from that is the worst offender.
Thus why I go for "the whole picture" approach. Locally produced food with markings for organic and sustainability is usually devoid of burned rain forest. Small producers tend to value sustainability more than large factory farms. Crops in season tend to involve less obscurity and less complex process which can hide ecological crimes. Animal farms with fewer animals tend to care more about individual animals health than larger farms that treat animals as items.
A big reason why organic crops has a rather complex picture comes from the issue that there exist no free lunch. Farmers that do not use chemical fertilizers derived from natural gas will instead use natural fertilizers. What that actually mean from a ecological perspective is that the chemical fertilizers produced from natural gas get put in the ground to produce animal feed, the animal feed get put into animals, and the rest product in form of manure get sold as a natural fertilizers which then is used to produce organic crops. Since organic farmers need to use more manure than non-organic farmers, and the output is lower, the total amount of carbon emissions per product can be argued as higher depending on how one count and attribute emissions. Still I generally prefer organic over non-organic because it does not directly put natural gas into the ground, and I find the cost in increase land use preferable over the other trade-offs.
You are completely glossing over the fact that animals need to be fed.
Sustainable grazing (most grazing isn't) is a perfectly good use of marginal land, but that cannot produce anywhere near the meat we consume. Most animal production requires producing feed from other agricultural products. It is inherently less efficient to do this. Chicken is more efficient than beef, but still much worse than just eating plants directly.
For an alternative perspective that refutes a bit of this, maybe meat is actually the more environmentally healthy and human healthy way of going about things?
Americans consume protein like its the only nutrient that matters and that not getting the maximum amount possible will make you lose all of your muscle and become emaciated. Frankly, this is certainly helped by general marketing campaigns from the meat and dairy industry where they basically claim that protein makes you stronger.
The truth is pretty far from that and most people with a regular omnivore diet get enough protein just through the plants they eat without even considering the meat. The human body burns protein and most excess protein just ends up getting burned along with carbs and fat.
So while animals may take up a large percentage of protein intake, our irrationally high collective protein intake is hardly a good reason to chose meat over plants. Eating meat is really all about calorie density.
I don't know but I think I can anticipate your concern. It's very viable to meet your protein needs on a vegan diet. That stuff about vegans not being able to get complete proteins is meat industry propaganda. Furthermore, the World Health Organization said that only 10 to 15% of daily calories need to come from protein. I believe I've also read that there's no proven benefit to all of the extra protein that Americans eat daily (I haven't looked into that claim in-depth, though).
I disagree. I was vegetarian for 2 years for ethical reasons. Animal-based protein is much easier to digest. And your average person perhaps doesn't need much protein...because your average person has no concept of exercise or fitness except as something other people do. Then your average person falls victim to metabolic syndrome and other western lifestyle related diseases. Once you set fitness goals your nutrition perspective changes. There are very few vegan/vegetarian athletes.
I agree with the perspective on limiting animal suffering and I buy pastured meat. I agree with the vegan perspective on many things but I think its limited and fails to consider other aspects of the human condition. I oppose the widespread mockery and lack of respect that vegans get. The health issues associated with an ethical commitment to avoiding animal products makes it more worthy of respect.
No disrespect but I see this "I'm an athlete, I need more protein" thing all the time. It's yet another meme that has spread that has the convenient side effect (or main effect) of shutting people off from considering the effects of their food choices. There are an abundance of plant-based protein supplements for hitting your nutrition targets.
I don't know if you're talking about the broader community of people who self-identify as athletes but I'll restrict the discussion to professional athletes for the sake of clarity.
Here's a few household-name professional vegan athletes:
* Venus Williams
* Lewis Hamilton
* Colin Kaepernick
* Kyrie Irving
* Tia Blanco
* Meagan Duhamel
Veganism isn't very popular in general so I'm not sure if this "if professional athletes don't do it, then it must be bad" argument holds. I'm also not even sure if that claim is true. If we could compile a list of all professional athletes, find the vegan population, and then compare that to the general population, I would wager that veganism might have a higher percentage in the athlete population than the general population. Pure speculation, though, and obviously I'm biased. But I follow lots of vegan channels and they're very proud and vocal about vegan athletes and it's the kind of news that I think you won't be exposed to unless you're inside the vegan community. In other words we should both acknowledge that there's a lot of selection bias / echo chamber at play here and I don't think either of us can definitively say whether veganism is more popular or less popular among professional athletes.
I wasn't sure about this because it contradicts my priors so I did some quick searching:
Venus Williams is a "chegan" and uses milk-based protein.
Lewis Hamilton is a driver and is unlikely to have protein demands related to his sport that are different than the average person.
Colin Kaepernick became a vegan at approximately the same time he stopped playing professionally.
Kyrie Irving: I can't find what he does for protein but SI says he may not be a pure vegan. [0]
Tia Blanco is a surfer and also unlikely to have protein needs different from a normal person.
Meagan Duhamel is a good example and seems to be one of the few people who is known to have achieved professional goals while vegan.
> I don't know if you're talking about the broader community of people who self-identify as athletes but I'll restrict the discussion to professional athletes for the sake of clarity.
There are some confounders with professional athletes that make those examples less persuasive than they might be otherwise. Pros have access to more resources (such as medical/endocrine assistance) and are able to structure their lifestyle around their training and competition. Additionally I'm unable to find anyone who went from an amateur to a professional while vegan in a competitive sport that requires one to build a physique. It is somewhat more believable that some people can maintain a professional-grade physique on a vegan diet.
> No disrespect but I see this "I'm an athlete, I need more protein" thing all the time. It's yet another meme that has spread that has the convenient side effect (or main effect) of shutting people off from considering the effects of their food choices.
I'm not really repeating a meme but arguing from my personal experience and my understanding of diet and physiology. The effect of relying on plant-based protein is that your protein sources are more difficult to digest.
> I would wager that veganism might have a higher percentage in the athlete population than the general population. Pure speculation, though, and obviously I'm biased.
I'm glad you're conscious of your biases and while I would take that wager opposite you, I will also admit that is more a result of my biases. I'll also mention that professional athletes tend to be outliers and if a genetic freak can build muscle on a vegan diet, it may be evidence that they are a genetic outlier their rare physiology is able to build muscle on any diet with protein but more sensitive to the byproducts of animal product consumption.
> But I follow lots of vegan channel and they're very proud and vocal about vegan athletes
Thats because they are passionate about veganism and want to counter the meme you referred to above. I would be more persuaded if people who were passionate about nutrition or athletics were vocal about veganism as a performance enhancer.
Thanks for the reply and much respect to you for making ethical decisions a central part of your lifestyle.
Formula 1 athletes (Lewis Hamilton) get that critique a lot but from what I've heard, it's a physically demanding activity that requires a lot of physical fortitude and therefore the "F1 drivers aren't athletes" argument is dubious (although I admit it's not a persuasive argument on my side precisely because people don't automatically think of F1 drivers as athletes).
Professional surfing is not physically demanding and doesn't require needs different from normal people? Do you think that they just casually go out on the water once a week? Also, from my brief experiences surfing, I seem to recall it being one of the most physically taxing sports I've ever done, in terms of total body usage.
Valid points about needing to distinguish between professional athletes who were vegan at their peak versus after their peak, and diving into the details about how precisely how "vegan" each of the people I quoted actually are.
> Thanks for the reply and much respect to you for making ethical decisions a central part of your lifestyle.
I avoided saying that they weren't athletes for specifically those reasons. Driving at a professional level and surfing competitively are indeed strenuous, difficult, and athletic activities but they do not seem to require building lots of muscle, which would mean they wouldn't be good counter-examples for our protein discussion.
While it’s hard to rule out genetic abnormalities, there is a huge difference between being fit and the kind of physical trauma associated with absolute peak human performance.
Plant based protean is often used for pure muscle building simply due to cost. With actual vegan examples being Barny du Plessis a bodybuilder, and Kendrick Yahcob Farris a weightlifter.
In terms of endurance Jack Lindquist a track cyclist shows that’s likely viable for the overwhelming majority of people. So while I think it likely takes more effort that’s in part due to market forces and economy of scale not inherent physical differences. If anything the higher amount of calories burned by top athletes often mean they need a larger quantity but lower percentage of protein in their diets.
I'm not finding a lot of people answering this question from a cursory search, but I found one source saying 33% globally[0]. (This may include eggs and dairy.)
Personally, I eat more protein than I did when I ate meat, though to be fair I still eat eggs. It's not hard at all to get adequate protein.
Cooled storage/transport, waste (a lot of meat is wasted due to limited shelf life and the following regulations), distribution of feed, water usage, methane (like 4x worse than CO2 i believe), more plastic used in packaging.
There are several responses to the "plants have senses" rebuttal:
If you care about the well being of plants, you should still prefer to eat plants rather than animals. The trophic level of animals in the food chain necessitates that they will eat more calories of plant matter than would provide calories of food upon being eaten.
Secondly, you should look at the sorts of plants being consumed and where they fall in the plant's life cycle. Fruits and nuts have been evolved to be eaten by animals. Staple crops such as grains and pulses are generally harvested from plants that have already lived to maturity and died off. Really it's only fresh greens and tubers that require the damage or destruction of a living plant.
Lastly, it's important to recognize the evolutionary purpose of sensing pain and suffering from it. Animals use pain and suffering to detect harmful situations and learn how to avoid them in the future. This process consists of sensations, memory and adaptive behavior. Plants may have "reflexive" responses to stimulus, but these responses aren't adaptive and aren't affected by previous experience (mostly... there are some exceptions). There would be no evolutionary purpose for plants to develop a sense of suffering if they have no practical use for that sensation.
> If you care about the well being of plants, you should still prefer to eat plants rather than animals. The trophic level of animals in the food chain necessitates that they will eat more calories of plant matter than would provide calories of food upon being eaten.
To put this into more laymen's terms, meat cultivation dramatically increases the total amount of plants that we need to grow.
As mentioned in my other comment:
> 70-75% of soybeans grown globally are for livestock, only 6% are used for human food products (meat eaters often try to claim that soy production is terrible for the environment; surprise, surprise, meat consumption is the main driver)
So, it's a bit counterintuitive, but globally switching to a plant-based diet would actually dramatically reduce the total amount of plants that we are raising, and therefore would dramatically reduce overall suffering of plants (if they suffer)
"So, it's a bit counterintuitive, but globally switching to a plant-based diet would actually dramatically reduce the total amount of plants that we are raising, and therefore would dramatically reduce overall suffering of plants (if they suffer)"
Only if you believe you are more efficient at digesting grass and other plants than animals.
> There would be no evolutionary purpose for plants to develop a sense of suffering if they have no practical use for that sensation.
You've made interesting points, but I think the most important point here isn't one of biology but of moral philosophy: animals presumably outrank plants in terms of moral standing.
Torturing a person is presumably worse than torturing a mosquito. A person has more capacity for pain than a mosquito, and in turn the mosquito has more capacity for pain than does a heap of sand.
I figure plants lie further down the ranking than mosquitoes, for the reasons you've just explained. They're certainly further down than farmyard animals. It would be considerable moral progress to switch from torturing billions of chickens and pigs, to torturing billions of plants (and that's ignoring that a plant in a farm environment is likely 'happier', in its own terms, than a livestock animal).
A vaguely related TED talk on how brains ultimately exist to orchestrate movement, and essentially nothing else: https://youtu.be/7s0CpRfyYp8?t=15
> animals presumably outrank plants in terms of moral standing.
In aggregate I probably agree but one thing I've wondered, especially in the last year as I started gardening during lockdown, is if that's really universally true. Large, long-lived plants - redwoods, oaks, saguaros, and so on - seem very close to the same niche in the plant kingdom humans occupy in the animal one. They exert significant energy to cultivate and modify their environment; they gather and store resources they do not immediately need; they change "behavioral" patterns significantly and cyclically over the course of their life; they maintain vast communication networks.
I have no doubt a pig "outranks" a mosquito. But I also suspect a redwood outranks a mosquito. The middle is all fuzzy though - where does my cucumber (which exhibits relatively complex reproductive behavior to attract pollinators, and expresses significant "wants" in terms of vining and leaf facing) lie in relation to mosquitos, or aphids, or bees?
The "plants have senses rebuttal" as you put it is only an illustration that exposes the absurdity of the whole attachment of ethics to consumption of any form in and of itself.
The only logical endpoint is that humans should just off themselves so we don't participate past one cycle of reabsorption into the Earth's environment.
One way or another, everything is going to die and be consumed by another living organism.
That's why it's absurd. You can arbitrarily pick your own resolution, but it's only arbitrary until you exit the cycle completely.
> The only logical endpoint is that humans should just off themselves so we don't participate past one cycle of reabsorption into the Earth's environment.
That would obliterate all future human happiness. It doesn't stand up even under a cold utilitarian conception of morality.
I thought the whole premise was that we needed to limit the suffering of other living things that aren't humans at all costs, not about human happiness.
That's not the premise at all.
That's a disingenuous strawman that anti-vegans would say to eachother about vegans to rile themselves up. It shows a total lack of understanding of what they're really about.
Please don't twist my contributions to being so ill-hearted. We're supposed to respond to each comment with generosity around here—defaulting to sincerity.
The discussion began with moralizing about eating other living things.
I didn't propose anything, Mike—let alone killing all humans. But maybe I made too many assumptions and should have anticipated some might take my comment literally.
I'm an optimist, but I also don't anoint humankind with some divine moral authority—I put us on the level with every other animal on the planet.
I was being hyperbolic, yes. That was the point. I think the entire argument over the morality of it is an appeal to absurdity. There are gross assumptions made on every side of the argument and I don't see any clear path to one side of the discussion about whether or not eating animals is immoral being possible.
I'm not anti-vegan. How could one even be anti-vegan? Seems more like a personal conviction to me, and that's, quite frankly, none of my business.
That's the eternal question isn't it: Where's the line?
In this case I think the question is something like "is it cruel to eat an animal?"
I'm not a spiritual person, but I like what the general consensus of the tribes around the Great Lakes (and elsewhere) saw of it: we're very much part of the [natural] world, not above or outside of it in any way. And I don't see that as a bad thing. Now, talking scale of consumption and all that is another matter that I didn't gather was at the core of this discussion—at least that is the way I've been framing my comments.
But now I'm getting a bit worried I'm taking this too far off track of the actual linked content and discussion so I think I'll have to leave it at that—but I'm happy to continue to discuss if you wanted to—just fire me an email.
I'm unsure what this comment is trying to say. If your objective is to have empathy for plants and thereby eat fewer of them, then you would also seek to eat less meat since raising livestock requires vast amounts of plant-based feed. In addition, any scientist who has ever taken an animal laboratory ethics course will understand that there exists a rough hierarchy of public empathy towards certain animals: first primates, then typical companion animals, then livestock animals, then fish, then vermin, then insects. There is no "gotcha" here; it is entirely reasonable for someone to have more empathy for, say, mammals than they have for grain. And I say all this as someone who eats meat.
Animals also die in a lot of vegetable farming too. Lots of small rodents, squirrels, birds, insects and so on grinded up by various farming machinery or poisoned from pesticides, and until we have replicators or scalable permaculture farming we will never escape that.
If 800 rats and fluffy squirrels die violently & painfully for the equivalent amount of veggie nutrition of one cow who is killed ethically, eating grass grown naturally, are their lives worth less? What is the ratio?
Most vegans and vegetarians are well aware of the "but plants have feelings tho" argument. It's actually one of the most common arguments that people who like to "gotcha" vegans will bring up.
The fact that plants can have subconcious reactions to stimuli does not mean they are sentient beings. These reactions are more akin to when you subconciously kick when a doctor hits a hammer on your knee.
Plants do not have a central nervous system nor do they feel pain in the same way animals do. In an evolutionary sense, pain is useful for animals because it tells us to deliberately move and avoid that pain, plants are obviously not able to do this.
Plants don't feel as much animals do. They don't feel the torture animals do. They don't grief. They don't show responses that they don't want to be killed.
The fact is at the end we have to draw lines even though we don't want. For vegans its probably in bacteria. Vegans don't care about bacteria even though they are living.
Its the situation where vegans cannot go beyond right? Are you going to say vegan eat bacteria so eating meat should be justified? Nope.
"When I share this research with vegans and vegetarians, their response is: crickets."
I'm suprised the vegetarians you're talking to would suggest crickets, even though that's one of the leading animal protein replacements in the form of insects.
Do vegetarians/vegans have similar ethical objections about eating crickets for food? I suspect so, but I don't know if crickets have the same type of cognition/emotions as vertebrate animals.
As someone who raises crickets for pet food, I can confidently tell you that you needn't kill crickets. Just give them a water dish and at least 10 will promptly drown themselves. They're either suicidal, or so painfully stupid that the only reason they haven't been wiped off the face of the planet is the incredible rate they reproduce at.
In a less facetious sense, I do believe that insect neurology is substantially different. Crustaceans have a nervous system web, which is why you have to cut crabs and lobsters in half to kill them rather than just stabbing them in the head.
From your line of reasoning, I'd guess that you have no moral issues with eating humans. If eating animals and plants is the same, then isn't eating non-human and human animals the same?
If you do have a moral problem with eating humans, then you probably have moral hierarchy - humans' lives are the most important, and every other life is less important.
Some vegetarians have a different moral hierarchy - animals' lives are most important, then plants' lives. You can value plants' lives, and treat plants with respect, and still decide that you're morally okay with eating plants.
> Moreover, most hardcore ones suggest that we don't ever need meat to thrive or live a healthy life however, we've evolved that far because we consumed meat. Meat made us and, same people are ignorant of this fact.
That's just flat-out untrue. Meals would be less delicious and you'd have to plan a bit better to get certain nutrients (B12) but healthy life is absolutely possible on a vegan diet. And even more so on a lacto-vegetarian diet (one of the most ripped guys I know is lacto-veg).
You know that it takes more plants to raise animals than it does to just eat the plants directly, right? So even if you believe your argument that plants feel pain just like animals do then it's preferable to go vegan.
> On the contrary, there's a growing mountain of research revealing that plants can communicate, issue warnings about diseases and bug infestations.
The TV show Cosmos with Neil deGrasse Tyson discussed this "Mycelium Network" on Season 3/Episode 7, "The Search for Intelligent Life on Earth," that aired Nov. 17th. It was quite fascinating. It starts about the 5 minute mark.
Believe me that we have heard all the possible arguments against veganism including “plants feel pain too”, it’s not one or the other, livestock is fed plants, so you cause more suffering by eating them.
Vegans and vegetarians want to legislate meat eating away, and there is a lot of nutritional deficiencies and allergic reactions that come from vegan eating that carnivores / omnivores would want to avoid.
There is a big moralizing streak in veganism, and a lot of vegans are into it from ethical, moralizing or emotional reasons, which leads to activism and trying to ban, tax and reduce meat eating. We see where the puck is heading.
> I value ethics and empathy deeply but, I don't understand vegans and vegetarians.
That’s a ironic contradiction. If you witness the conditions in which animals are born, raised, harvested and culled by the millions, and still be okay with it, you really don’t have a claim to empathy.
Maybe vegans do that but most vegetarians I know of don't eat meat for one simple reason: they are disgusted by it. Vegetarians don't really care about the ethics of it. In fact they are fine with animal based products, like milk.
You are in fact make a generalization and thats fair here. But I must so you are little incorrect here. You have clearly not seen how world lies, how society lies. So let me explain it to you.
First when you grow you drink mom's milk and you are under impression drinking milk is good for health which indeed is. So people start consuming milk everywhere.
And there are advertisements which shows happy cows, chocolates made from milk. Vegetarians are under impression that its ethical. And many farmers advertises as if their cows are happy they are grass fed etc. In some religion they even worship cows etc giving impression that cows are respected etc.
And the other thing you often hear is cows babies get enough milk and farmers only sell excess milk. So from religion, society people are brain washed so much they don't even see how animals are tortured, left on road after buffalo/cows stops giving milk.
I wish media would cover this subject more especially in India which is probably top 3 vegetarian country in the world.
I was speaking from my own experience. Many of my family members are vegetarians and some of them are in the milk business (small scale). Pretty much everyone knows that the cow's milk should go to the calves. Sure almost all companies lie in their ads but people aren't as stupid as some would think. Some people are under the impression that they are into some great secret of the world (about how cows are handled in the milk business). But the reality is that most people know about it but don't care.
So to reiterate the number one reason most people (that I know of) become vegetarians because they are disgusted by meat. I wish there was some great vision to it but there isn't.
> That's a weird complaint on a site about eternal disruption, eternal improvement of things that are basically fine already.
I disagree. Vegans generally adopt a hard-line, no-compromising position on things like this. That's the antithesis of a lot of what we talk about here, which is continual improvement, perfect-is-the-enemy-of-good, and making reasonable trade-offs and compromises to find better solutions.
A startup that said "We're going to build X in the most perfect, idealized way, and will settle for nothing less! We'll never ship until it's perfect" would be laughed out of town and burn through their money before shipping anything. And that's pretty much what veganism advocates for.
I agree that some people here are in the perfect-is-the-enemy-of-good camp. But far from all of them. Think about all the arguments about which technology is best. Or the worship of people like Steve Jobs, famous for being unreasonable and uncompromising. Or the continual brushing aside of societal balance when it's a shiny new technology or a company on the rise.
Even as a person big on incrementalism, I believe that there's a lot of benefit in being uncompromising in long-term goals. Look at Toyota and their "one piece flow" concept, which they've been pursing for decades. I also think the people who seem unreasonable in the moment turn out to be right in the long term. Look at Google launching when people thought search was basically a solved problem. Or Dropbox. When they were getting going many saw them as entering a crowded market with a too-simple product.
As one vegan (we don't all think the same) I can say yes, I absolutely recognize the issues of how we control plants. I mention it tangentially in this other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25211083
I sense that some vegans give the impression that it's totally OK to eat plants, and there are no repercussions. Or maybe that's what meat eaters think vegans are saying. In my experience as a vegan, it's not about plants versus meat. It's about let's be more aware about the impact of our daily actions and strive towards optimal decisions. (As I mention in the other comment) when I consider the health, environmental, ethical, and maybe even spiritual benefits of veganism, it clearly seems like a more optimal general strategy, both for myself and for the world.
Have you ever raised a garden or slaughtered an animal?
I would never hold it against you if you had not, I didn't for the first decades of my life, but anyone who has done both of those things and tries to equate them is not being intellectually honest. Or has the emotional capacity of a potato, which I posit is strictly less than the emotional capacity of a chicken.
Again, if you haven't done either of those things, that is OK. I do however encourage others to do so, because I have gained so much appreciation and understanding for what it takes to keep individuals, and therefore the world, fed.
Sorry, just saw this. Yes. The ethical issues for me are smaller, but they're not nonexistent. This is especially true when we look at the environmental effects of large-scale agriculture.
> But that doesn't keep me from recognizing the ethical issues with killing and controlling other beings to survive.
We don't undergo photosynthesis, so fundamentally we have to kill and eat other beings to survive. Plants are other living beings too. And a revolution is underway in learning about plant intelligence -- while not a nervous system, trees communicate with each other and share resources. [1]
My primary reason for trying to eat less meat is the environmental harms -- not the individual rights of animals -- as I think might eventually find ourselves in a place where we recognize that we cannot escape denying the rights of another organism (plants included) for our own nourishment given that we aren't photosynthesizers. Unless we become fruitarians and only eat fruit that naturally falls from the tree -- but obviously that is ludicrous.
Plants are not beings under any standard usage of the word. While plants certainly communicate and show some level of computational processing, there is no evidence they have subjective experiences. There is a very clearly line to be drawn between plants and animals.
And if that's not a compelling enough counterargument, there are two additional issues with trying to conflate plants and animals in this context. First, it takes far more plants to support an omnivorous diet than a plant-based diet. Second, many plant-based products are obtainable without having to harm the plant.
People made this exact same "no evidence" argument about animals for years, and many still believe it. The fact is we don't know enough about how plants or animals experience life to be sure of anything.
People made the claim _while_ ignoring the evidence. And as I went on to argue, if you really want to play it safe and assume plant sentience, you would still adopt a plant-based diet.
>People made the claim _while_ ignoring the evidence. And as I went on to argue, if you really want to play it safe and assume plant sentience, you would still adopt a plant-based diet.
People would still adopt a plant-based diet because there is no other alternative right now. Purely lab-synthesized food that does not involve cultivation of any other organization is still a long way off from reaching any kind of scale for mass consumption.
> Purely lab-synthesized food that does not involve cultivation of any other organization is still a long way off from reaching any kind of scale for mass consumption.
I don't disagree, but I don't see how that's relevant to my point.
I think you should be careful of our heritage of narcissism here. Historically, ethical protections are extended to anybody sufficiently like the speaker's in-group, and denied outside it. You're making an identical argument here. There are always lines to be drawn, and they're almost always the ones convenient for the speaker.
> We don't undergo photosynthesis, so fundamentally we have to kill and eat other beings to survive.
Currently that's true. But it's not an essential property of the universe. Yesterday's ludicrous may be tomorrow's normal. Thus my mention of Star Trek's replicator. Imagining those were common helps make clear the ethical tradeoffs.
If everybody were used to getting any food they wanted from a magic box, then what would we think of people who insisted on doing it the old way? A guy who spent months raising animals just to murder and consume them would certainly hear about it.
A person who had a vegetable garden might just be seen as a quirky hobbyist, or he might be seen as a person doing something weird and gross, the way many Americans feel about somebody who eats organ meat or dog. They might even be seen as heretical; many religions see life as sacred, after all. And if they did it at modern, industrial scale where they destroyed square miles of ecosystem? Perhaps it would be seen as historical reenactment, or perhaps it would be taken as a sign of severe mental health problems.
As I said, I'm an omnivore. But I try to be an honest, self-aware one. I just dismembered a turkey, ripping joints apart and rending flesh from bone. I'll enjoy the meal, but I'm aware of the horror, too. That's the deal with evolution and being part of a species that is early on in the self-uplift process.
That's a weird complaint on a site about eternal disruption, eternal improvement of things that are basically fine already.
I'm an omnivore, and I'm comfortable with it. But that doesn't keep me from recognizing the ethical issues with killing and controlling other beings to survive. I really appreciate people pushing the envelope on this. If I could eat basically the same diet but have it all be from a replicator, I'd do it in a heartbeat. So keep pushing, vegans!