The meat has never been more expensive, due to supply shortages, but there's a big squeeze on profits.

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.

  • DarthFrodo@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 day ago

    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.

    • Fawkes@lemmy.zip
      1·
      11 hours ago

      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.