You can't equivocate chicken sentience with human sentience. What you can do is suggest they have a high enough level of sentience to warrant that certain treatments be immoral. I think infliction of constant stress and suffering certainly would be immoral, however, raising chickens does not necessitate it. And moreover, the level of sentience is not so high that captivity in itself / exploitation be problematic. If that were true keeping domestic pets ought to be just as problematic.
Animals suffer in the wild, that is a constant. They require vigilance over a) predators, b) constant search for food, c) other natural threats. In captivity, these issues don't exist.
Notwithstanding the symbiotic evolution of chicken with humans, a chicken is arguably better off in a free-roam farm than in the wild. This is constantly ignored.
The vegan solution is such that these animals basically cease to exist (i.e. are killed) because they are more dependent on humans than their ancestors. That's what letting them be "sentient" beings instead of commodities would mean.
There is a whole lot of citation needed on this reply, not to mention you’re talking about consciousness as something that can be clearly defined and measured.
This is not physics. If you think it’s ok to breed beings that clearly look to avoid suffering and care for their offspring with the sole purpose of exploiting them, and that’s fine because life > death, there you have it. Just don’t try to push a pseudoscientific scale to vegans just to prove their fallacy.
> There is a whole lot of citation needed on this reply, not to mention you’re talking about consciousness as something that can be clearly defined and measured.
With sentience it's speculation, and that's part of the point I'm making. I responded to an ethical claim on the basis of sentience (no citation) by bringing to question what it means to be sentient when some beings e.g. insects demonstrate it.
Notwithstanding immeasurability, our perception of this level of sentience is relied on to determine our moral standing. We see this through actions we take for granted.
It might be regarding insects, but I don’t think it is that much regarding farm animals. Also, not being able to nail it in a materialistic framework does not put it in the nothing can be known/fair game territory.
But let me set this aside since it might obscure our dialog. What surely can be measured is the degree of immune system depression this animals experience, how far do their life cycles deviate from control, and what health an behavioral consequences they experience from being forced to live the way we make them live. We can also measure the impact this ways have on ourselves and the environment.
Would we put the family dog trough this experience just because it is not clear (to us) if it fully understands or experience what is happening, ignoring all the fairly obvious signals that it will experiment a great deal of suffering?
I once witnessed an organic cow’s sacrifice and no one in its right heart can argue it didn’t experience an great deal of distress and suffering.
I don’t judge people from being meat eaters, I’m no vegan myself, but I won’t play conceptual games to ease people’s minds. If you have the heart to kill this animals and eat them (and I don’t mean this pejoratively or disrespectfully), go ahead. Just don’t pretend there is a gray area in what this animals will be experiencing and what does this means in terms of their lives. I mean, we eat calves that have been kept all their short lives strained in cages just for the taste, and we do this in mass scale.
This is not something to run from.
(To clarify, I’m not trying to make it personal, english is not my native language. On the contrary, I’m very open to talk about this topic with an open mind and a warm heart).
> Just don’t pretend there is a gray area in what this animals will be experiencing and what does this means in terms of their lives.
To reiterate, this is a fair assessment as per pain, stress. This is easily detected in the animals. Where a gray area exists to me is commodification, i.e. there is no reason to believe captivity in a safe environment would lead to some sort of existential crisis for the animals. There's a persistent argument from a sizable base that holding animals in captivity is inherently immoral, with sentience as the basis. This is the usual response to the notion that animals can and should be killed fairly painlessly/quickly without persistent stress.
Octopus have a pop culture reputation for being intelligent owing to lab maze experiments, but their intelligence isn't well known or defined. They have an average lifespan between 3-6 months to a few years depending on the species.
"Until the 1970s, researchers tried to classify the intellectual abilities of different animals and rank them within a universal intelligence scale with humans at the top. That view crumbled as it became obvious that the abilities of different animals were tuned to the circumstances in which they live.
Rats learn some things slowly and others very rapidly. Just one experience with a novel food that makes them ill will put them off that food for life, even if they only become sick many hours after eating it. It's a useful memory feat for an animal that survives by scavenging. Honey bees remember the location of a flower that is producing nectar after a single visit and with just a few trips will learn at what time of day the nectar flow is at its peak.
Octopuses are not very social so we should not expect their intelligence to show itself in observational learning. [...] True, octopus have huge brains. But they look nothing like the brains of the vertebrates that are so adept at learning. [...] some critics suspect that their intelligence has been grossly exaggerated by anthropomorphising observers-"they watch my every move, therefore they must be curious". On the other hand, because cephalopod behaviour and brain structure are so foreign, others argue that their greatest cognitive feats are probably still being overlooked. " -- https://web.archive.org/web/20120407062518/http://www.fortun...
There is this Netflix movie “my octopus teacher” where the octopus develops rather advanced hunting and camouflage techniques. Like how it knows how to handle sharks or how to build a shell for itself to hunt a particular type of food. That seems quite intelligent and beyond observing humans studiously in labs.
* unscrew the lid of a peanut butter jar to get a treat without training
* hop from one tank to another to prey on the fish in the tank. This was observed quite by accident and not part of an experiment at first. In fact the octopus waited for its human handlers to leave the room before going in for the kill; the incident was caught on camera.
* gently grasp the hand of a friendly human with their tentacles, and squirt water through their siphon at a disliked human
All spontaneously, without training or prompting.
That last bit is particularly interesting to me, because they are recognizable signs of affection and dislike. Octopuses show some semblance of an ability to bond with us, despite having vastly different brains from us.
- mussels/mollusks (zero sentience) - insects (very low demonstrated consciousness) - fish (low demonstrated consciousness) - chickens/reptiles (disputed level) - dogs, dolphins, primates, etc (high)
You can't equivocate chicken sentience with human sentience. What you can do is suggest they have a high enough level of sentience to warrant that certain treatments be immoral. I think infliction of constant stress and suffering certainly would be immoral, however, raising chickens does not necessitate it. And moreover, the level of sentience is not so high that captivity in itself / exploitation be problematic. If that were true keeping domestic pets ought to be just as problematic.
Animals suffer in the wild, that is a constant. They require vigilance over a) predators, b) constant search for food, c) other natural threats. In captivity, these issues don't exist.
Notwithstanding the symbiotic evolution of chicken with humans, a chicken is arguably better off in a free-roam farm than in the wild. This is constantly ignored.
The vegan solution is such that these animals basically cease to exist (i.e. are killed) because they are more dependent on humans than their ancestors. That's what letting them be "sentient" beings instead of commodities would mean.