
New Rules Against Animal Cruelty Raise the Stake for India's Beef Wars - Mz
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/06/30/535016207/indias-new-animal-cruelty-rules-threatens-livelihoods-and-beef-exports
======
weeksie
I find it laughable that rules against animal slaughter in India are being
made based on cruelty. This is in a country where cows (though supposedly
holy) are treated horribly. Cows in every part of that country can be found:

* Grazing on garbage heaps

* Tied up on short ropes through their noses on hot days

* Malnourished, covered in sores

* Deformed

* Dripping snot

And so on.

~~~
naravara
India has plenty of human beings who live like that. It doesn't mean they
shouldn't be legally recognized as being entitled to decent treatment though.

~~~
weeksie
Sure! But if you're going to make animal cruelty laws, at least make it
illegal to be cruel to animals. I'd rather be butchered and eaten than spend
my entire life in the hot sun, tied to a post through my nose, eating garbage.

------
sillysaurus3
Could someone counter this morality argument?

If the world stopped eating meat, animals would no longer be bred for this
purpose.

Since animals are bred for meat, I'm not bothered by eating them. Their
treatment is generally poor, but again their purpose is to be food. They
wouldn't have existed otherwise.

This is a genuine good-faith question, so hopefully the replies will be
similar.

Is it a matter of opinion, or is there something closer to an objective truth
to be found in this?

~~~
harigov
One could argue that the national forests and parks can be a new home for
these animals if we stop messing with them. So the argument that they won't
survive is a non-starter. Can these many animals survive? Probably not, but
the species will. For ex., no one eats squirrels or mice but there are quite a
lot of them around. In India, some stray animals (dogs, cats, cow, rats) just
gaze out in the wild and live on their own. So it is totally possible.

If we really take any logical argument against meat eating to its root, we
will be left with nothing to eat. Unless we manufacture artificial meat, we
won't be able to live without killing/hurting some living being. Even if we
can, one can then argue about lives of bacteria and we will be back to square
one. When we don't have a strong moral argument against eating meat, there is
no point forcing an entire society to follow some rules. What Indian govt is
trying to do is going to hurt that society a lot in the long run.

~~~
moosey
> If we really take any logical argument against meat eating to its root, we
> will be left with nothing to eat.

I would argue that this is [edited out: Reductio ad absurdum] a straw man
argument. One of the best 'logical' reasons for not eating meat, as opposed to
ethical arguments, is the reduction of greenhouse gases and other negative
outputs the lower an individual eats on the foodchain. This argument doesn't
suggest that an individual starve or die, but instead pushes that individual
towards more careful use of the resources available to humanity.

In addition, an ethical argument could be made for not causing pain. Since the
vast majority of life on the planet is incapable of experiencing pain, it
leaves the vast majority of food that humans eat available for consumption.

So there exist logical arguments against eating meat that do not leave a
person with nothing to eat.

Edited because Reductio ad absurdum is not a fallacy, but a straw man is a
fallacy brought about by faulty application of Reductia ad absurdum.

~~~
noir-york
> the lower an individual eats on the foodchain

Why are you privileging organisms higher up the food chain? There should
ethically be no difference in how we treat living things based on where they
are in the food chain, except for qualitative reaons (bacteria vs a cow), so
you are making the distinction on purely practical reasons.

> is the reduction of greenhouse gases and other negative outputs the lower an
> individual eats on the foodchain

That is at best a practical argument, and one that can be made only because
technology to scrub greenhouse gases is not yet in use.

> Since the vast majority of life on the planet is incapable of experiencing
> pain

Counting by species or by total population? Insects may not feel pain (AFAIK)
but most species (animals and plants) experience pain or stress.

> exist logical arguments

Not sure why you keep saying logical arguments. As opposed to what? Non-
rational ones?

There are strong ethical arguments to be made for not causing pain/stress when
killing animals (and plants) and not killing life unnecessarily. But against
eating meat? Its in our very nature to eat it, indeed meat is part of a
healthy and balanced diet.

~~~
blacksmith_tb
Eating lower on the foodchain is a strategy to reduce the suffering caused by
one's own survival - a cow shares much of our physiology, so reasonably we can
assume it suffers from things which would cause us to suffer; a crustacean,
less so, and a cucumber, not at all, at least by any mechanism we understand.

~~~
noir-york
Simply kill the animal humanely and it will not suffer. Make sure that grazing
animals have adequate space and aren't fed shit, offal and pumped full of
antibiotics to save money and con the consumer.

In other words, treat the animals, and the people who will eat their meat,
with some dignity.

------
jff
> "I see a monitoring and surveillance system on farmers and traders," says
> Ramdas. "It's very Orwellian, our Animal Farm."

Mr. Ramdas may be confusing his Orwell stories a bit :) Although I gave it a
shot, it's difficult to draw many parallels between the Soviet allegory of
Animal Farm and post-independence India.

(I'm commenting on this inconsequential line because I don't have much to say
about the larger article beyond "religious extremism sucks")

