With US beef prices soaring to record highs, you might think that South Dakota cattle rancher Eric Gropper would be celebrating.
Yet while the cost of the meat in US supermarkets is now 12% higher than it was a year ago, a rise more than three times the rate of general inflation, Gropper says that he and all the other beef farmers aren’t making any more profit than usual.
Not sure. Personally I don’t subscribe to veganism because I believe what we considering suffering is usually based on the concept of beings born with a spine/central nervous system. If youre born a vertebrae only you are worthy of not experiencing “pain”. To me it seems as arbitrary as not killing a being because its considered cute
I’m vegan because of what causing in others what I perceive to be suffering in turn does to me.
Maybe I’m not understanding your point about veganism or maybe your understanding of veganism is incorrect.
Also, it seems to me that all living beings, including insects, do not want to be harmed or die. Ever try squishing an ant and have it run every which way to avoid your thumb, or swat a fly that just won’t be swatted? Egg-laying hens are tortured in the commercial egg factories. The dairy industry (probably as cruel as the egg industry, honestly) is why we have veal, which seems super cruel. I don’t like being involved with it at all.
I’d like to be vegan, and I’m trying to work my way toward it.
I look at plants biological/chemical response to tissue damage as no different to our neurological response to it. Fundamentally all organisms avoid tissue damage to pass on their genetics to the next generation. Thats a fundamental aspect of all life. The only reason we look at plant/fungi pain differently is because we dont respond to tissue damage the same way as they do. Personally i dont see plants moving energy to areas of tissue damage or releasing chemicals as a distress response any different than vertebraes own responses to tissue damage through what we consider “pain”. Its all based on a level of similarity we give certain organism to oursleves.
Here’s my example. if a society that is a type 5 civilization on Kardashev’s scale started to eat humans it would be along the same scale as us eating plants. Not eating beings with a gap so huge in intelligence isnt any different than not eating dogs because we find them cute. Its all arbitrary with no real logic. Limiting suffering based on intelligence or a nervous system is as arbitrary as limiting it based on cuteness or brain size. We just choose to give certain organisms more empathy because we consider them closer to ourselves but isnt that selfish? Youre only worthy if we consider you close to humanity
Edit: that being said id be more than happy to hear your thoughts on the flaws of my argument
There might be a relevant difference in the fact that most animals can run/move away from something that hurt them, and pain might be the necessary evolutionary adaptation to facilitate that. A plant or fungus just has chemical responses, which probably don’t rely on being sentient. Our skin most likely produces melanin without being sentient, after all.
I guess the interesting question is whether there are any processes in plants that somehow imply sentience. Afaik science hasn’t found a decisive example yet.
I’d say it’s wrong to harm other humans because it’s extremely likely that they feel pain and emotions in a similar way as I do. Roughly the same applies to chimps, and dogs, and pigs too. Maybe the emotions aren’t as complex, but they clearly behave according to the basic ones like joy and fear. The response to pain is basically the same as ours. So harming them without a necessity to do so seems cruel to me.
Even if plants were more conscious than animals, the animals have to be fed with tons of plants to begin with. Eating plants directly minimizes plant and animal deaths.
From my experience, most people assign deeper meaning and claims of consciousness simply because they do not have a grasp of molecular biology. Or if they do, it’s rudimentary. Not as an insult against them, just as a matter of fact.
Cells are 100% molecular machines. It’s why viruses works. The virus doesn’t actually hurt the cell, it just changes it’s programming so it makes viruses instead.
If you worked in a kitchen, and a new order came in that said “Chop off all your fingers, then disembowel yourself.” You wouldn’t do it. A cell would. So would an ant. So would a plant.
It literally dawned on my dumb ass that you were talking about plants like a half hour later. It’s one of the reasons why I think trees might be the highest form of existence before nirvana. They don’t have to inflict harm or pain to survive (they live off the rain, sun and soil).
My only response to the difference between eating something like, say, lettuce is that I can cut it down to eat off it and it grows back, where I can’t cut down a beef to the hooves and have a cow grow back. But yeah, I have to eat to survive, so vegan at least would free me of doing some of the harm I must cause in the world.
Are there any Buddhist monks out there that can weigh in with an official position on all of this to help a new practitioner (me) out?
But muscle grows back depending on how much energy it consumes. The only difference is we’re fully aware that that happens. If we cut down a tree to its roots its no different to eating a cow to its hooves. Plants are aware because they also need to consume organic matter to live and evolve to do so. If you burry a human corpse under a tree they leech the nutrients that make up the human body to grow stronger and pass on its genes. Parasitic or symbiotic plants and fungi consume live organisms to survive. Is that not an indication of a willingness to survive and therefore a form of consciousness?
You’re assigning human values and desires simply because it’s what you experience. By that same logic, you should be claiming LLMs and even the most basic old-school AI in videogames is conscious.
Physics mandates that the universe move towards its lowest energy state possible. This causes the formation of molecules that allow a release of energy. Some of these have a structure that tends them towards a shape, granting an interior and exterior. Some of these molecules are self-replicating, like proteins.
Now we have proto-life, with self replicating proteins inside the hydrophobic/philic sphere.
Lil tiny skip forward a billion years or so, and we have basic cells with no interiority, but chemical and molecular systems that are 100% reactionary. They actively move towards survival and away from death. Not because they are aware, because those lineages survived when the ones that sat idle and did nothing did not.
It’s easy to see motion as a sign of intelligence, even organization. But crystals are not alive. A cell is alive. Neither is conscious.
Unless you believe in magic, then no amount of science, logic, or conversation, matters.
I have had trees grow back from being cut down to their roots, to a flat stump on the ground. New shoots can come up around the perimeter of the stump.
Most of the mass of a tree is dead anyway, like our hair or fingernails or outer skin layers. The living part of the tree is like a skin on the outside of a massive, dead wooden structure, with another layer of dead tissue (bark) protecting it.
Could be, might be, yeah. 🤷
Because I cause harm/pain in one place doesn’t mean I should cause harm in places where I can choose to avoid doing so.
Sounds like veganism isn’t for you, homie. I still want good things for you anyway.
hardly any calves end up as veal at all.
this is some wishy-washy phrasing. henry the eighth didn’t want an iphone.
no, they’re not
Depends on what you consider torture, the fact that most large scale chicken farms have to use antibiotics premtivly because the livestock would get sick from the conditionss they live in is a good giveaway. Also the amount of space per animal is so abysmal that calling that torture isnt wrong.