I am surprised again and again that people are surprised that animals, and social ones at that, have thoughts and emotions and relationships. Have you never been around animals? Do you truly have believe humans are that special?
I don't think people are surprised that animals have thoughts and emotions. No farmer I know of thinks cows aren't capable of being trained: the ones down the road from my parents line up in an orderly queue to go into the dairy every morning and afternoon, including leaving a gap across the road and giving way to cars.
On the other hand, a lot of people who claim animals have thoughts and emotions seem to think that cows have complicated human-level thoughts like "I am an oppressed cog; my owner will send me to the glue factory when I am too old to give milk, and yet I must queue up regardless, for my spirit is broken; my calf has been taken and I will never know if he got a college degree; life is pure suffering." This seems unlikely to be true.
Your second description involves many aspects of human culture. No matter how smart cows are, they'll never think this way.
Then, a big difference of humans compared to other animals is accumulation. We create stuff (buildings, language, knowledge, ...) that further generations will use. To really compare, I'd say, we have to take that away.
Let's assume some people decide to go back into the forest. They go there with nothing and teach their children only the necessary skills to live in the forest. After some generations, a scientist discovers them.
How would we compare them to humans and other animals like the great apes? How would they score on common IQ tests?
> They go there with nothing and teach their children only the necessary skills to live in the forest.
To live in the forest like humans do? Because then they would absolutely teach them language, and show them how to make fire and use sticks and stones.
> How would they score on common IQ tests?
Common human IQ tests? Very badly, they would probably not do much with the paper other than maybe take it with them for fire starter, and would just wander out of the room.
On an IQ test you could conduct with great apes? Like various physical puzzles which hide treats? Very well presumably. They would have dexterous hands and great eyesight and problem solving skills, and oral traditions.
Are you honestly trying to say humans living in a primitive society would be comparable to most other animals (not even "intelligent" ones such as chimps)?
The cognitive dissonance in that statement is blinding. Even in the pre-agrarian hunter-gather millennia of human existence, human societies the world over independently figured out housing, carried the knowledge for fire and the wheel, had intensely complex (relative to every other species on the planet) communication and social skills. They all came up with ways to develop knives, arrows, cooking+eating utensils, protective clothing, complex hunting strategies, etc.
Like, yeah...they didn't have computers in front of them, but all of the inate skills that allows modern humans to conceptualize, build, repair and utilize those things existed just as inately in them. You could teach one of them about things piece by piece...you'll never be able to do that with even a chimp, let alone a cow.
> Are you honestly trying to say humans living in a primitive society would be comparable to most other animals (not even "intelligent" ones such as chimps)?
No, I'm not trying to say that. I'm trying to express my belief that the gap between the intelligence of humans and other animals is much smaller. Looking closely at chimp communities or dolphins shows that they also have complex communication patterns. Even trees in a forest communicate. So this is also an expression modesty because humans don't understand yet too much about communication of other creatures.
But you're misframing the point. No one is saying animals (or even simpler living life) can't communicate or do basic reasoning.
You're claiming that humans, without modern society, are somehow in the same realm of intelligence of even the next "smartest" animal (chimps), despite the fact that human intelligence is blatantly orders of magnitude higher just from mere observability let alone deep comparison of neural activity, reasoned and logical thought, and social interaction.
Especially if you start breaking things down into slime molds, ant colonies, plant interactions and somehow conflate relatively simplistic and predictable pattern-based behaviors to high-order reasoning and abstract thought that humans inately possess.
Is that to say human thought is non-deterministic and unpredictable? No, I'm not making that argument. I'm saying that the levels of abstraction and complexity is so much higher that it's blatantly fallacious and misleading to compare them.
The datapoints are sparse, but are “wild-childs” an order of magnitude more intelligent than the animals they bonded with?
I personally think human communities and societies emerge into a super-intelligence while single individual remain distinctly bland or unimpressive, provided the community leaves some room for the unusual to potentially thrive and find their niche.
An individual human is clearly and blatantly observably more intelligent and capable than an individual chimp.
The fact that y'all are speaking in such abstracts is telling in its own right. No one is saying animals are incapable nor that they don't possess plenty of abilities humans lack, however in the specific fields of strict intelligent thought processes (reason, abstraction and logic) and social interaction; it's not even a comparison.
The vast majority of animals can't even recognize themselves in a mirror let alone conceptualize other planets, atomic structures, mechanical processes and forces, mathematics, abstract concepts, create social contracts, etc.
It's just....ridiculous to even be having a discussion on this. It's honestly akin to discussing vaccines with a COVID denier.
> The vast majority of animals can't even recognize themselves in a mirror let alone conceptualize other planets, atomic structures, mechanical processes and forces, mathematics, abstract concepts, create social contracts, etc.
This is true, but it takes a great deal of creativity and awareness of a species, to create a “mirror-test” that applies to said species.
The naive mirror test is flawed. That’s not say most species will pass; just that it was laughably bad experiments that are being revisited.
> It's just....ridiculous to even be having a discussion on this. It's honestly akin to discussing vaccines with a COVID denier.
Why is it ridiculous? Nobody is saying humans aren’t smarter.
You’re looking at the end results of societies to prove that we’re orders of magnitude smarter; but take away our ability to write and record knowledge for the next generation: What are we left with? How scalable and robust are oral-tradition
cultures?
Also note that none of the things you’ve mentioned came naturally to humans: It took many millennia of trial and error to build up and even so it takes the threat of homelessness starvation for the majority to give a shit and learn this stuff.
Instead, I’d argue it takes a great deal of self-awareness and humility to tease out what gives us the leg up over other species, even if it makes some uncomfortable.
> You’re looking at the end results of societies to prove that we’re orders of magnitude smarter; but take away our ability to write and record knowledge for the next generation: What are we left with? How scalable and robust are oral-tradition cultures?
Very, considering we started at the exact same point as all of those other "equally" intelligent creatures.
We have human societies that never moved past hunter/gatherer; or basic agriculture. Or perhaps reverted back.
Does that imply that they’re somehow less intelligent? And so, by an order of
magnitude?
I don’t expect anyone to change your mind—that much is clear—but for someone like me it’s an interesting question because it gets to the heart of what it means to be intelligent; aware; and driven.
Even the standard “man is the measure of all things” has more nuance than at first glance.
I mean, they have isolated tribes that have seen limited outside contact even today. In the absence of outside contact, their culture is not as bland as in your example. Perhaps the formation of culture, religious beliefs, and higher levels of thought is one of the aspects that do make humans special.
As to the IQ tests, they can't ethically run them on uncontacted people. There have been many studies on indigenous people's that include a focus on intelligence. However, a major factor that usually comes up is that the format of standard IQ tests tend to be biased against indigenous people due to things like language issues.
> On the other hand, a lot of people who claim animals have thoughts and emotions seem to think that cows have complicated human-level thoughts like "I am an oppressed cog; my owner will send me to the glue factory when I am too old to give milk, and yet I must queue up regardless, for my spirit is broken; my calf has been taken and I will never know if he got a college degree; life is pure suffering." This seems unlikely to be true.
Yes, but do we know how a cow experiences the loss of a calf? The loss of a human child is very painful because of human comprehension of permanence, death, and the future. Is a cow thinking "I can't find my child, I am sad, I'm going to bellow and walk around for a few days searching" or is she experiencing a longer-term loss which she understands as the irrevocable death of her calf + social isolation from the experience + the end of her personal dreams for the calf?
This is what I meant by "my calf has been taken and he'll never get a college degree". I'm not saying that a cow isn't upset when you take her calf away, but I am skeptical that she is capable of being upset in the way a human would be, or for as long and as deeply. I'm skeptical that even earlier humans from a time with ~50% child mortality would be as sad as a modern mother upon losing a child, just due to the relative normality of the loss.
I’m surprised too. But I suspect it’s more because it’s a very inconvenient truth: what about factory farms, the suffering we make billions of animals go through so we can eat them cheaply, and having to change our habits to accommodate this reality? It’s way easier and socially accepted to ignore this entirely and assume animals are dumb so it’s ok to keep doing what we do to them.
The broader context is a lot of the Western philosophy we rely on today formed around the same time we started building intricate machines, and those thinkers also wondered whether animals were just really intricate machines. Nothing nefarious. It’s probably fine if we express more gratitude towards these animals like we used to.
Meat, especially beef, is an utterly inefficient way to produce food.
People die from hunger not because the world is not producing enough food, and even not because the world is not trying to feed people in distress. It happens mostly because local politicians or warlords tend to steal or grab the humanitarian aid, or straight out not let it in, in order to preserve their power structures, and themselves on top. They don't mind killing some compatriots for that, with guns, or with hunger, no matter.
All food is not fungible, people eat meat because they want to eat meat, not other foods. Given that as a constant, find more efficient ways to make the same end product, because that is much less work than convincing whole swathes of people to want a different end product. Hence, lab-grown meat or plant-based meat have been way more effective at convincing people than decades of campaigning by those who want people to eat less meat.
When the world was much smaller, the same problems persisted. The Great Famine of 1845 in Ireland happened not just because crops failed in Ireland. England had enough crops, and the world was ready to sell more, but the British government kept Irish ports closed for imports of foods, and English Protestant farmers were not very keen to sell to Irish Catholics (fun: both considered themselves Christians). Estimated world population at the time was about 1 billion.
Man-made famines are a really common thing all along the human history; just consider the medieval sieges of cities, and routine deliberate destruction of enemy crops. This was happening when the world had merely 300-400M people.
It's not too many people. It's too little wisdom, and too much cruelty, per person.
Then again, if you believe that it's not 'too many people' and you also concede that population will continue growing as it has for the last 650+ years and the planet obviously isn't growing then surely you must also concede that at some point it has to become 'too many people', the only question is when.
No, population growth slowing down has nothing to do with a collective agreement on their being too many people.
It's simply that people in developed countries don't want to deal with the trouble of raising more than 1 or 2 kids because raising kids is difficult and expensive. You need 2 kids to replace the 2 adults, but then you add in other mortality factors and it drops below replacement.
Most of those people aren't agreeing that there are too many people, hell in cases like Japan, even their governments want them to have more children, they're just focusing on what strikes a balance for their comfort.
The population is demonstrably not continuing to grow at the same rates - all but sub-Saharan Africa is at below replacement fertility (and sub-Saharan Africa is also dropping fast), and much of the world today only experiences population growth due to immigration. With China likely now having slipped into decline net of migration, and India having dropped below fertility replacement rates and so only a couple of decades away from population decline, we're 50-100 years away from global population decline without drastic steps.
According to our best estimates we're already past the "peak children". World population growth has been slowing down for decades at this point, it will become negative in second half of this century.
World hunger is not caused by too many people, it's entirely caused by our priorities. World produces more food than it needs and that production grows faster than the population.
The elephant in the room that any discussion about social issues will bend over backwards to avoid mentioning.
Climate change, ecocide, many if not most international conflicts, the housing crisis, fossil fuel consumption, and countless other issues are simply proportional to the number of humans on the planet.
Yet directly addressing that fundamental problem is almost always the very last thing proposed, or even talked about.
Sure, these conflicts are caused by people, but 'there' s just too many of us' isn't a suppressed thought, just a bad one that we have since moved on from. Overpopulation was a trendy idea in the 70s that inspired many ugly policies, like sterilisation of ethnic minorities.
Poplation growth is slowing down everywhere, in the developed world (which uses the most energy and resources) it's been negative for some time.
Currently there's about 8 billion people, and estimates predict it will stop at 10 billion people and start to derease in the second half of this century.
So you're calling a temporary increase by 25% "elephant in the room", meanwhile the difference between resource consumption in USA (14 metric tons of CO2 per person per year) and the world average (4 metric tons of CO2 per person per year) is over 300%.
It's working everywhere. India dropped below replacement fertility a couple of years ago. The only part of the world left with above replacement growth is sub-Saharan Africa, and even the very highest, like Niger, has seen substantial drops in fertility rates.
If anything we're a few decades away from a rising panic about increasing them again.
> Climate change, ecocide, many if not most international conflicts, the housing crisis, fossil fuel consumption, and countless other issues are simply proportional to the number of humans on the planet.
Totally false, CO2 emissions coming from the US have fallen as the population has risen. No, that's not because of offshoring.
These things are caused by economic structure and government policy (independent of population) and technology efficiency (which gets better with more people, not worse). Examples being whether or not you're allowed to build apartments or beef is subsidized.
This is a common sentiment, but I have yet to hear any reasonable proposal for solutions. It certainly is talked about a lot in my experience.
It is so easy to complain about overpopulation. But how would you solve it?
1 child policy? Didn't work out great in China.
Some can have children, others can't? Doesn't exactly seem right.
Culling? Yeah, no-one wants genocide.
It's a very complex problem and people are very fast to complain about it, without thinking much about what actually to do.
It's a completely fake problem invented in the 70s by the book "The Population Bomb", and if it was true the things in that book would already have happened.
However, the West's strategy of writing moral panic books like this and then not actually reading them did allow us to defeat China (who read the book, actually did it and now has a demographic crisis) so that's something.
The cause and effect is not so clear. China's wealth has also risen substantially, and with it comes fertility decline. E.g. India reached below replacement fertility a couple of years ago without it.
I think it's likely the one child policy contributed a bit, but a substantial part of the decline is clearly also due to economic development.
The solution is talked about and is reasonable - creating western-like living environments in the remaining high fertility rate areas. Higher standard of living and more individual freedom leads to fertility rates near or even below replacement rate.
No, the real problem is there isn't enough people. If one Einstein is born per 1bln people, imagine what kind of progress in culture efficiency, technology, and ideas in general we would make as a species if there was 1T people (tera as in trilion).
None. At our current efficiency levels, 1T of us would destroy our home planet's ability to support ourselves in a week.
If we want to go multiplanetary and support populations of that kind of size, we have to get much better at optimising our footprint. Which probably requires ethical/philosophical innovation as well as hard science/technology. What we have now is too wasteful and inefficient to scale up in that way, indeed so much so that it risks poisoning itself before it's able to develop those capabilities.
You're presuming that Einsteins are born and destined to greatness regardless of their environmental conditions. What if Einsteins require particularly social/environmental conditions to reach their full potential and furthermore, what if those particular conditions cannot arise when people are packed together like sardines in a can?
This statement ignores a ton of other factors, and provides a particularly poor example. What did Einstein do to alleviate hunger? Most of his contributions remain theoretical or applied to things that don't directly help the population (or haven't paid off yet).
Even if you have someone who is intelligent, will their contributions actually make life better for people? Or will their ideas become commercially corrupted and be used for greed (Edison commercialization vs Tesla gifting)? Will they complicate our lives or provide harm along with some benefit (social media, TV, etc)? At such a small rate of the population (using your 1/1 billion), would a truly good idea gain traction? Maybe the idea to eliminate or restrict meat is theoretically a good one. But are you going to convince all the people to support it? Then how much impact will it actually have?
There is no magic solution nor hyper intelligent person that will save us.
But has it helped with living conditions like food and shelter? Sure it's made life easier, even for stuff like tractor positioning for field planting. But I don't see it having a real impact on those sorts of issues. I guess it has made many munitions more accurate and reduced collateral damage.
Have you tried moving through a desert or a steppe in the dead of night, far from human infrastructure? It's damn dark, the land is literally darker than the star-strewn sky. Headlights give you only so much light, for the next 100-150m of the road maximum. Unless it's a really nice, well-maintained road, with reflector posts, etc (and usually it's not), it's really easy to lose your way if you drive a tad too fast. You either crawl, or choose to camp and wait until the morning light.
With a GPS map, you can proceed much more confidently. And a few hours may play a serious role in disaster relief.
So too can the stars, or proper time/speed/direction navigation.
I'm not saying GPS isn't useful. I'm saying it hasn't had a life changing impact for the masses that allows for a larger population (eg it's not providing more food, shelter, etc).
In this day and age, people aren't still starving because the animals and plants don't give up their nutrients easily enough, but because humans trample and prey on humans at worst, or neglect their suffering at best.
And empathy is empathy, I doubt you can outright ignore the suffering of animals while having a whole lot for the suffering of humans.
Less meat consumption should lead to more production and decrease in price of of other types food. Also despite all the suffering in the world people still care very much about the wellbeign of dogs and cats. If anything with inflation and more and more wars around the globe the world needs cheaper food now more than ever.
The inputs into meat today are things like soy and feed corn, which aren't particularly good for people. It's not quite as easy as just not eating meat. Many of the farms need to switch to other crops that are healthy which requires different machines, more labor, or other factors. You probably aren't going to see too much drop in other food prices since much of the cost of foods (especially corn and soy related) is in the processing and distribution, not in the actual growing. Then you need to convince people they want to eat whatever the new product is. You could give people something made from scraps similar to dog food, but that's not going to go over well for a bunch of reasons.
> the world needs cheaper food now more than ever.
We are getting there. The price of food has crashed pretty hard over the last couple of years, and we're already back to 2019 levels, with little sign of that trend stopping. Barring some major shift, food will be cheaper than ever by next year.
It may not actually be cheaper food that you need, but rather cheaper retail workers. While food has crashed, the price of food in the grocery store still seems to be climbing.
And westerners throw away an obscene amount of edible food on a daily basis. I don’t see how being more compassionate and opting out of participating in animal suffering will make people who don’t have enough to eat have more to eat.
This makes no sense. Animals eat grain. We eat the animal. Animal has to eat 10x the calories in grain for 1x the calories to whoever eats the animal. VS 1x the calories in grain if you skip eating the animal in between.
How smart were those 9 million people? Given that most of them live in zones where they couldn't apply even the simplest agriculture techniques, I would say not much.
Humans are special, but in more subtle ways than "thinking vs dumb". I think it's safe to assume that all higher mammals have some idea about the world around, themselves, their kin, etc, with a social structure of sorts, unless they are solitary. Many of them, like wolves, pass their learned experience to their progeny, that is, possess and sustain a culture. Some of them, like cetaceans, are officially considered conscious. (And there are comparably intellectual birds, too.)
Humans have unique achievements, like constructive syntax, or overcoming of the Dunbar number limitation in cooperative structures, or mathematics, but these stem from a really tall intellectual base humans share with other mammals.
I'm an atheist, but the book of genesis put it very well on this subject. There is one emotion that is unique to humans. It is not compassion, or sense of justice or fairness, aninals have those. It is shame. Which is unique to humans.
On a related note, I heard some interesting theory by Robin Hanson on Lex Fridman's podcast. The guy said that the ego is our brain's attempt at forming a story around the brain's decisions (which are made pre-thought). It's crazy to consider that what we are is just our brain attempt at storytelling to justify ourselves.
I've lived around animals all my file, even my SO grew up on a farm. Why on earth do you (or anyone) think they experience thoughts, emotions and relationships in a human way?
Simply because we have similarities does not equate that animals experience things the same way. We know this because we have a better understanding of what goes on in a more limited human brain (be it a child or neurodivergent) compared to a healthy adult one.
I frankly compare this humanization of animals as a sign of not having sufficiently worked and lived with animals, with apophenia/pareidolia playing a large role.
Maybe also depends on what the animals are used to. As someone who grew up in the alps with free roaming cows, these are some clever animals. They definitly know what they are allowed to and what not, they have character differences, etc. The frolicking they do when they are let out in spring is not something you would forget.
If you look at cows who never where outside you the same nuanced behavior isn't that easy to spot, they become much more dull and complacent.
I grew up with animals and I would definitely say they have feelings. Of course it is hard to say how deep those go, or how refined they are and whether they are comparable to human feelings, but there are clear similarities: cows get afraid in bad weather or when they see something they don't know, a mother cow will be proud and protective over their calf, some will be mischiefous and ashamed once you catch them doing something they shouldn't do. That is not nothing. Sure inside that cow could be a complex Rube Goldberg machine that makes it look like fear, pride or shame to us silly humans, but given that we are both mammals evolutionary more likely is that these emotions are at least somewhat similar because they served similar purposes. What cows think is a much harder question. They are surprisingly clever if they think no one is around (and they have a very, very good sense for that).
>Why on earth do you (or anyone) think they experience thoughts, emotions and relationships in a human way?
GP poster did not use the qualifier "in a human way". Take that away, and it's really hard to argue that animals do not experience thoughts, emotions and relationships. If you say otherwise, it makes it really hard to believe that you lived around animals all your life.
Maybe we should be asking "do humans feel emotions in a bovine way". And the answer would be an unsurprising no, so why should one spend any time stating and disproving the converse. Animals do not have to feel in a human way for their feelings to be valid. That does not make killing them and torturing them any less barbaric. And we can be humane in our treatment of animals regardless of what importance we give to their feelings. Cat and dog owners will tell you their pets have feelings. Numerous studies on pigs show they are more clever than dogs. Do they somehow have to develop humanlike emotions to count?
The difference becomes important though when deciding where the line of 'torture' or 'barbarism' starts or ends. If you'd ask certain people, the act of castrating lambs with bands is barbaric.
I brought up neurodivergence before, but we have clear proof of situations where even non-healthy brains caused a clear difference on how that line can sometimes be interpreted. A very simple example is extremely repetitive work. Same goes for children.
Yeah but throughout a lot of western philosophy animals have been seen as totally incapable of feeling and thought. I had a philosophy professor (a year before his retirement) who was proclaiming just that.
As someone who also has visited seminars in ethics and animal ethics I will now recite the train of thought of Prof. Fink from Oxford:
That is obviously bullshit. Animals have feelings and thought (and we have the behavioral studies to show this to some degree). Yet we are not in a pixar movie and the animals don't have human-like interior worlds — but that doesn't mean they don't have their own variants that could be deep and rich in their own ways (or not, who knows).
Ethically the question for everyone of us is: Given a being that is very likely to experience feelings and though; given we don't know how deep the inner world of that being is — what is the right way to treat such a being? Do we assume it won't notice anything and treat it accordingly? Or do we side with caution and treat it carefully till we know more?
Of course to make things even more complicated the society we live in (in the form of previous generations) has made some of those choices for us already. So it might seem more normal to treat animals as if they have no feelings, because that is what we grew up with. But just because our ancestors did it that way doesn't mean it is ethically the right thing to do. Especially since we, unlike our ancestors, life in a world where survival without eating meat is not only possible, but doesn't come with huge downsides.
Many would say we are allowed to herd, hold and slaughter animals because we are more intelligent than them, and because they lack the inner life. But if an alien race or an AI came by that was more intelligent than us and had a richer inner life, wouldn't they then be right to do the same to us? Ethical systems should be universally applicable, not just when it suits us.
One could make all of this less complicated by ditching right and wrong and just asking who is stronger. But that isn't the kind of thinking that built the societies whose fruits we are all enjoying in the form of working division of labour, developed technologies, etc.
From a cold utilitarian POV, ideas of justice and equity only need to be applied to those wo will, do, did, or might contribute to the common good (and the ones emotionally close to these), and would not do that if they weren't well treated. That is not the case for animals.
In fact, that is, I believe, a pretty good description of how things are. The treatment of animals will improve, if it does, by moving into the "emotionally close" group.
There is a lot going on in what constitutes "common good" here. The standard "ethical" vegan position would contend that the happiness of animals count among intrinsic common good.
I meant a definition of "common good" from, again, a cold utilitarian POV - providing goods and services (but including decidedly social ones like child bearing, taking care of the elderly and such)
That's not what's commonly understood by utilitarianism, by the way. If said activity to render goods and services does not result in increased total happiness or average happiness, after factoring in externalities, many utilitarians do not consider that a "good" activity.
(via Wikipedia) for example, Bentham, the first formulator of says that utility is
> That property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness ... [or] to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered.
but the question is open as to whether or not the happiness of animals is included in it. So just as exploitation of many to a great degree for services like a relatively small increase in comfort of few (as in chattel slavery) would be negative utility for Bentham, the suffering of animals for food would be considered negative utility to the utilitarian animal rights advocate.
It doesn't feel that surprising to me. I would've been in the same camp if I hadn't gone through a phase of being interested in random animal related trivia (eg wondering why so many mammals seem to enjoy being pet).
I just never really grew up with much interaction with animals, and what I did see was mostly stuff that could be passed off as just instincts without deeper thought.
It took actually thinking about their behavior and realizing that "being social" as an instinct includes having some level of intelligent emotions and relationships, it isn't just some mechanistic urge to be in a group based on some hardcoded rules.
Over the break I was thinking a lot about C.S. Lewis an his issekai Christianity as well as the alternate-world Christmas of Terry Prachett’s Hogfather so I was really in the right mood when Jehovah’s Witnesses came to my door.
They led with the question of “Do you think God made a mistake when he created the world?”. I thought about it really hard and answered “I could make the case either way.”
Where does evil come from? My answer is that “Well you try to push a fluid in a certain direction and it goes sideways and swirls…” (must have been a dynamicist in a past life)
Where we really differed from them the most I think was their insistence that humans are completely different from a spiritual viewpoint than animals which I’d reject completely because my experience with cats and dogs and horses is that animals seem very much to have a moral sense and to feel bad when they fail to match expectations. The first time I fell off a horse it seemed the horse felt a lot worse about it than I did and she seemed exceptionally contrite.
Sure people do have languages, beavers are never going to figure out that they could make much bigger dams with concrete, but animals do appear to have moral feelings which is consistent with the Buddhist idea that animals are subject to the law of karma, you can reincarnate as animal, etc.
Not so long ago we had surgery on babies without anesthesia because people somehow thought they didn't feel pain
I imagine it's a mental safety mechanism, involving various degrees of mental gymnastic depending on the individual, otherwise everyone would be vegetarian/vegan after watching a single industrial farm/slaughter house video
I doubt you've seen industrial slaughterhouse videos that aren't meant to sensationalize. I've even walked around in some, where all rules and guidelines are followed, and I can still eat meat just fine. The animals don't realize what happens and death is instantaneous.
How do I rationalize it? Animals are being eaten in nature too, we at least don't eat them while they're often still alive (like in nature). Plants are living organisms too, and everyone eats those without a second thought. It's just that they don't pass a self-determined bar for many.
The environmental impact is a completely different question, unrelated to this.
The only one arguing in bad faith is you, along with the cookie-cutter propaganda that you consume without further thought.
You're allowed to your own opinions and discuss them, but what you're doing is just regurgitating an opinion and trying to use THAT as a fact that should somehow persuade people.
Why is it that militants like you ever think that'll work in a discussion where you can't use pressure or force is beyond me.
> because people somehow thought they didn't feel pain
The boring alternative explanation would be that doctors knew that anesthesia can kill a baby, because babies have a not fully formed lung system; and pain is temporal but death is permanent.
But this explanation does not inflame a social warrior heart in the same way. The rush of outrageine is much lower and less satisfying. Repeating the same arguments since 1820 without thinking a second about it, is much better.
A drug applied topically. Can be the same drug or other drug.
The problem is that religious thinking is not compatible with modern medicine.
Anesthesia inhibits thermoregulation on babies. It is common for core temperature to drop by 1 to 2 degrees Celsius in the first hour of anesthesia. Sick babies can became hypothermic easily and struggle to keep themselves warm. Add anesthesia to that mix and you could be reducing the survival rate.
Some researchers also claim that anesthetic exposure can cause toxicity and neuronal apoptosis (death of neurons) in the developing brain of a baby, and this has the potential to became a long term problem in the later nerve development.
This is a problem particularly for premature infants. This babies sometimes need to pass by multiple surgical procedures with multiple anesthesia. Premature birth is a main cause of death in children, so they have yet a lot of things to address even without the toxics.
Avoiding punctual pain at any cost shouldn't never be the main (and much less the only) objective here. And adding a new risk to the medical procedure, just for ideological reasons, is very stupid.
> One of the animals raises her head over her enclosure and gazes pensively at me, her widely spaced eyes and odd, rectangular pupils seeking to make contact—and perhaps even connection.
One time I did scuba, and I'm swimming in the water. There were fish, I have no idea what kind of fish, kinda small, maybe they size of an open hand. One fish swam in front of me, facing me, and stopped. It just chilled there. You can't speak under water, and even if you could you can't communicate with a fish. But there was some kind of connection we were making. I realized at that moment, in that moment, we were both experiencing something, and we were both inquisitive of each other. Me, a foreigner to the water, a tourist, and the fish, a local, wondering about this one biped that looks kinda funny.
After a few minutes I guess it decided that the "conversation" had come to a natural ending and swam away. Out of the many fish that were near me that day, that was the one to stop and say hi.
There are many tourists in this world. I have gone abroad and witnessed the tourists expecting something from the locals. I also see a lot of tourist and noticed they look at me, a local, like I'm a (non-human) animal. Over the years I like to think back to that specific individual fish, and realize that our differences aren't so great, and humans are the tourists that expect something from them, entire industries that capture a number of them every year that's so large many of us can't even comprehend.
I have a few stories similar to this fish with other animals, and because of that the above quote resonates with me. I hope more articles come out which are not about just "sciency things" void of the humans and non-human condition, but the self actualization and realization of the individual that we're not alone.
> I also see a lot of tourist and noticed they look at me, a local, like I'm a (non-human) animal.
How exactly is that expressed? I often gawk at things and people on the streets when I'm traveling (and at home), but not out of disrespect, the exact opposite - awe, interest, desire to spot the details. Such as seeing a local in cool clothes and trying to figure out if it's from a local brand that I could buy from. Does that come off as treating people like animals? How can one get better about not doing that?
Sometimes I like to wave at people. On tour buses they will almost never wave back, off tour buses they will sometimes. In the latter case I'm not really making a judgement, but in the former case it feels like a safari kind of thing.
Of course it's a subjective feeling I have, but I think this is different than people watching which I suspect you're referring to.
In the your comment I've started asking people about their cool/interesting clothes. Some people are receptive others aren't. This is an aside from what I was saying but just want to mention I've started having fun and interesting conversations that way.
Same for me. I've been mostly vegan for over ten years now. I "downgrade" to only vegetarian when it really cannot be avoided – which, luckily, has been only when I've travelled to countries where there really weren't any vegan options.
Why would you be against eating animals products? Many produce them naturally themselves. For example, chickens lay eggs if we want them to or not. If humans don't take the eggs, chickens would eat them themselves or leave them to rot. If you're against industrial farming of them, fine, but there are plenty of eggs you can buy from certified ethical farms. Or even better, you can keep them yourself! They are great to get rid of food scraps.
Same with bees and honey. The only times you hear it mentioned that it harms the bees is when no sources are provided or the study turns out to be garbage (and waylaid by multiple other studies that are tiptoed around).
I’m against industrial farming because of the horrific conditions.
Also stuff drinking the milk of another animal, something that’s reserved for its child, is kind of horrible. All those cows are lined up and pumped and then what? Probably killed. At least to me it is fuckin brutal.
The only thing you can legitimately call me out on is that I don’t go to the doctor or engage much in modern medicine. Seeing monkeys with their brains exposed or puppies and cats suffering “for science” is also wack to me. When it’s my time I’ll go. Hopefully not too much pain.
> If you're against industrial farming of them, fine, but there are plenty of eggs you can buy from certified ethical farms.
The parent notes that they are willing to compromise on being vegan for convenience, so presumably they are not against ethically produced animal products, but would forgo animal products altogether as a matter of convenience as well. Ethically produced animal products may not be verifiably accessible for someone for many reasons.
Of course much of this seems obvious, but I think it's also required to pave the way for more complex research.
If you jump into research that does not show results because it's too complex, you don't learn anything. (That particular experiment didn't work, not "the species is too stupid to do X")
You have to build up to it both to provide a path of credibility (we know they can do A,B,C, but when we tried D or E those didn't work) and also to develop the facilities, tools, techniques to be able to ask and answer these questions.
It feels shameful because so many farmers or 4H students know all of this stuff. We shouldn't need to publish papers to know these animals are intelligent. This is referenced in the article, though - they publish both types of research (this animal can do that & treating your animals well in this way gives these specific benefits)
I'm excited for the future where we have a much finer-grained understanding and can probe more specific questions from individual animals though
"overturn the idea that livestock are dumb and unworthy of scientific attention."
Where's this idea? Most of the farmers I know don't believe this. They know their animals have some level of intelligence. There is a huge amount of scientific attention given to livestock - from genetics and breeding, to disease, management practices, etc.
Maybe this is just what people who have never been around livestock believe?
Fully agree. I grew up on a farm. The animals included cows, sheep, goats, chickens and donkeys. You quickly learned their distinct personalities. You could tell when they were stressed and when they were content. It sure felt a lot better when they were content and you went out of your way to achieve that, both short term in what you did that day and longer term as you structured the farm to better fit what the animals wanted.
The animals learned about the humans as well. For instance, walking to the back edge of the farm in the fall to fix fencing, the cows would change their routine to follow - especially the part were you might route through the field full of apple trees.
Sure enough, you'd see that the cows had eaten all the apples they could reach but there were vast quantities of ripe apples higher up. So you climbed the tree and used your legs to shake branches, causing bushels of apples to thunder down. The cows that had followed would call loudly to summon their herd mates, who would come at the run.
If the sheep saw me on the same trip, I'd be ignored...unless I was carrying a bucket, which meant it probably had oats, at which point I'd have a herd of sheep converging on my position.
I thought it well known that pigs were considered as smart as dogs. Pigs might be a special case, as they are kept as pets much as a dog would be in a few countries.
Remember the scene in the first avatar movie where Jake is learning how to be like the Na'vi and he gives a solemn speech to the animal as he kills it, thanking it for its sacrifice and showing it respect?
I wonder, if we took indigenous perspectives for animal life, would it be more acceptable to take the life of animals for consumption? Minimize suffering, use the whole animal, don't overconsume so that the species can sustainably live on, let them live life more free range, not in prisons, etc. Or would it still be just as bad because the animal still can suffer? Indigenous thinking is something that is being promoted by certain sustainability movements, and I wonder if it applies here and would make animal consumption more ethical, or would it just be whitewashing?
For me it comes down to choice. I don't think it's right to kill anything if you don't have to. It's trivially easy to live well on a vegetarian or vegan diet. People don't kill animals because they are hungry. They kill them because they want to.
Not caring about animals leads to not caring about nature in general and that is leading towards us destroying earth ecosystem and making our planet not be able to sustain human civilization.
There are some philosophies which teaches that everything was created for human. It was and is good excuse for exploitation of nature. No wonder we have climate change now.
It does not help that those philosophies are also very closedminded and very agressive towards any new ideas or any changes to their worldview and lifestyle.
I really hope the journals pick up the work. The article implies publication is proving difficult. If they don't, this field my become career limiting or give way to studies which directly improve yield rather than indirectly through well being.
When you spend a lot of time around a mammal, you will start to see that it has a personality, particularly if you’ve spent time around other individuals of similar species.
Humans have very similar neurological equipment to other mammals. I don’t see why anyone finds it surprising that mammals have intelligence or even consciousness.
Consciousness in others is a leap of faith. We have no unambiguous way to measure it. Most people take it for granted that other people are conscious, if they communicate in certain ways. Animals lack those manners of communication; that doesn’t mean they aren’t conscious; it means we don’t have a common language.
I’m happy that people are doing this research; I hope it leads to more kind treatment of livestock.
No, I won’t stop eating meat regardless of the results, but I would choose to support both regulation and private efforts to reduce stress and discomfort when harvesting animals.
I've once spent a summer herding cows in Switzerland. Mostly bringing the to and from pastures in de morning and evening. I've had farm animals and pets most of my life, but here I learned something new.
I quickly learned that cows have personality. Multidimensional. E.g. one (older one) was mischievous but also ver sweet. Another one mischievous and aloof. One was lazy and easily frightened.
It was one herd and I presume they were well adjusted to another until I came along and ruined their balance. It took us about a week to get used to another.
Moenie,the bull, challenged me twice and had to stay home even, I could not assert dominance.
Cows, I learned, are complex, deep, and above all very sweet animals.
Needles to say that it strenghtened my vegetarianism. When media and people make me think of animals as production units I think back at this herd I got to know some 27 years ago and realize that no: they are not ever "units of production"
This article and the research it describes are so confusing to me, as someone who owns livestock and has been around a variety of farm animals. Of COURSE they have friends, can hold their pee, and have complex emotions. If people spent time with meat animals, there would be a lot more vegetarians.
I feel like the only reason we tell ourselves otherwise is because we want to be able to excuse terrible practices like battery cages and feed lots. If they’re dumb animals that can’t feel, it’s easier to allow that treatment. I didn’t think actual farmers or people who research farm animals would be surprised at these kinds of results.
“I believe I have omitted mentioning that, in my first voyage from Boston, being becalm'd off Block Island, our people set about catching cod, and hauled up a great many. Hitherto I had stuck to my resolution of not eating animal food, and on this occasion consider'd, with my master Tryon, the taking every fish as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had, or ever could do us any injury that might justify the slaughter. All this seemed very reasonable. But I had formerly been a great lover of fish, and, when this came hot out of the frying-pan, it smelt admirably well. I balanc'd some time between principle and inclination, till I recollected that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then thought I, "If you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you." So I din'd upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat with other people, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet. So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.”
I’d say the difference is that we have the possibility to not eat them and still sustain ourselves well. Fishes don’t have canned beans and tofu factories, it’s either eat other fish or die, there is no choice. Unlike for humans, where eating animals is a choice not an obligation.
Every time there's an article posted somewhere stating the obvious (as the original post does), there's always someone in the comments referring to non-humans as if they are objects, insisting that of course it is okay to breed various animals into existence to exploit someone for life and then hang them by a hook when they're no longer useful, and slit their throats or shoot them or to dismember them alive (as is documented).
"Of course cows are treated well!", nevermind their children being taken away from them and slaughtered in childhood—love for your children must just be a human thing. Nevermind that the majority of cows, hundreds of millions of them, exist in factory farms. No, you should continue to eat flesh because "we treat them well in ranches".
Incredibly depraved behaviour that history will not look kindly upon. It should, and does, make anyone with a conscience nauseous and sick.
My feeling is not that killing is morally justified by their lack of intelligence, but that there is no purely ethical choice in food besides starving to death. Even veganism necessitates environmental destruction, exploited labor, and other externalities under industrial farming. Anyone that’s harvested a grain field knows that a vegetarian diet is not free from costing animal lives just because it doesn’t include animal protein.
I give my animals the best life and the best death that I can. I hugely value getting significant calories from the sun to my mouth, without environmental destruction /global shipping/slavery/preservatives/etc.
That there are deaths during crop harvesting does not mean that one should then feed those crops to other animals and then kill them for flesh too—instead of growing and eating something human edible. The vast majority of animals killed for their flesh are fed grains and various other harvested crops.
I of course don't know what you specifically are doing—but if it somehow does result in lesser suffering, it is remotely not the norm.
Your original point was that breeding animals and shooting them was incredibly depraved behavior that should make anyone with a conscience sick.
I don’t agree- I think there are ways that raising animals for meat can be an ethical choice. I offered up my own experience of living closely with my animals, relating to them with respect while still using them for meat and fiber.
We are in agreement on the horrors of modern industrial farming. I’m not making any kind of argument in support of factory farming, because I DO find it morally abhorrent.
I hoped by sharing my own experience with my animals, I could add some nuance to the conversation. I now see that that’s unlikely.
Overall getting protein from meat is something like 10x less efficient resource-wise so if you pull back and look at the numbers, it's better to eat plants. One can think of meat eaters as greedily using 10x what they need in a world where resources are scarce.
Note that this is only true for modern agricultural practices. The norm for much of human history was to graze cows and sheep on grass, which humans can't consume at all, and which has evolved in concert with grazing animals. Pigs would often be fed on leftovers and also plenty of non-edible foodstuffs. Chicken were more of an exception, but then again their eggs were eaten much more often than sacrificing the chicken itself.
There is nothing preventing us from going back to more traditional agricultural practices in this area, just as we need to do for most crop harvests to avoid depleting the soils everywhere. Of course, this will require meat to become more expensive, seasonal, and a less common food overall. But there is no reason a 0-emission world would require the whole humam population to be vegan.
Neither wheat, rice, maize, barley, nor millet grow on mountain pastures where many sheep and cows are traditionally grazed. In addition, humans can only process the seeds of those plants, while grazing animals can eat the entirety of the plant (and in fact typically don't digest the seeds, instead spreading them in their feces).
most humans do not live on mountains. most livestock are not grazed on mountains. those who do eat goat. even if that were true, out of the many cultivars available, there will be some hardy enough for mountain growth. additionally, neither of your statements refute the fact that cereals and grains are grasses
That's just not true, at scale. I did some googling and all signs point to single percentage points of beef being handled that way. That's US beef, you think the last 20 years of Argentinian beef has coexisted with the Amazon?
> One can think of meat eaters as greedily using 10x what they need in a world where resources are scarce.
Go ahead and try to replace the protein that meat gives. Cows feed so many people.
So, sure let's replace that ranchland with farmland, what's so hard about that?
That huge amount of natural grassland the cows usually roam on is going to need to be tilled, planted, and fertilized (synthetic via oil or animal based).
You're going to need a lot of water and a lot of fertilizer and resources (labor, machinery, etc.)
Man those cows in Arizona and Nevada really put up with some harsh conditions.
Looks like we need like... a lot water, and a lot more fertilizer...
You know what is scarce, fresh water! California knows this.
Adding just so it’s explicit: modern factory farming is morally abhorrent. Yes, the abuses are well-documented and disgusting, and there is no argument in my mind that can ever justify that level of treatment for any conscious being.
If cows were raised like they were throughout history - free range instead of in factory farms, and calves sharing closeness and the milk - would you have the same objection to them being slaughtered at some point later without much suffering?
Perhaps such a system did exist somewhere in some bygone era—maybe in ancient India where milk was common but where cows or calves were never intentionally killed, and skin and carrion was sometimes taken from the corpse. I think most people would consider that non-objectionable—as did most ancient Jains, Buddhist, and Hindus, who believed in ahimsa.
But such a system does not, and probably can not, exist at any significant scale in the modern era. And while instant death is sometimes preferable to a "natural death"—I doubt those interested in "harvesting" the corpse would ever have any incentive to care about whether the death was "without much suffering".
> I doubt those interested in "harvesting" the corpse would ever have any incentive to care about whether the death was "without much suffering".
I am. I work really hard to make sure my animals have the best death I can possibly give them. There’s horrific things happening in industrial meat production, no argument. That doesn’t mean that everyone who raises meat animals is uncaring.
I raise my own animals and eat them, and was also a vegetarian for a big chunk of my life. I have friends visit who have never been around livestock, never thought too hard about where their meat comes from, and don’t understand how I can kill animals that I also give scritches to and let nap in my lap.
For me, midwifing and raising and caring for animals so they have good lives and quick deaths is the better choice. For many people, the weight of the death is too much. That’s why I say there would be more vegetarians, not because I think vegetarianism is morally superior (or inferior!).
I can choose to get my protein all kinds of ways, including from tofu made in a factory, out of soy grown on another continent, on ground that used to be rainforest and fertilized with nitrogen produced at the cost of huge carbon emissions, then shipped across an ocean. I can also choose to get it from an animal I helped birth, that eats blackberry bushes and grass in my pasture with their family until they’re grown, then gets led to some food on the ground and doesn’t even know what hit them.
I can choose either, and I’m not going to argue on the internet that one is inherently morally superior to the other. ALL of the things we consume come with costs. Just because they’re hidden in the end product doesn’t make them nonexistent.
I also know enough vegans and was a staunch enough vegetarian to know that neither of us is likely to change our minds or even really absorb new information here.
> including from tofu made in a factory, out of soy grown on another continent, on ground that used to be rainforest and fertilized with nitrogen produced at the cost of huge carbon emissions, then shipped across an ocean
or from tofu made from organic, local soy. Why would you want it to come from another country and produced in horrible ways? Of course one can do anything badly, so let's focus on realistic, proper ways to do things.
Unlike raising one's own animals in awesome conditions, which is very costly and basically requires to be a full time job so which most people can't realistically do, I can just drop by the organic shop nearby and buy my organic, local tofu easily enough. Which I do.
Around 80% of the soy is produced to feed animals so that argument does not even work. If you eat meat, you are probably actually doing both at the same time and probably indirectly consume a lot more soy than a vegetarian. I see that you actually raise your own animals in other comments, so maybe not you, and congrats, but your situation does not generalize well.
[edit: oh, you meant the parent comment is a strawman?]
Why? The parent comment says that you can choose to eat "proteins" in any way possible, from eating horrible soy to eating meat from animals raised in awesome conditions.
I argue that this is not really a useful statement (I want to say, it actually feels misleading and dishonest and that's why I reacted. OP writes about changing one's mind and absorbing new information, a prerequisite of this is to be honest with oneself - the thing that most vegetarian people, who weren't born like this, have already done because they had to to change their minds).
I do want to eat properly and that's what we are discussing. I point out that while the average person can realistically buy local, organic soy easily, one can't do so for meat from properly raised animals.
Of course I can choose to eat horrible soy (I guess? Not sure where I would find tofu made from it actually), like I can choose to eat horrible meat. But if we are to do things the proper way, neither of these options are good. Though eating horrible meat (which includes the horrible soy!) is the realistic option for meat because that's what scales.
(where "horrible meat" means "meat from animals who suffered")
The horrible soy is not even worth mentioning because it harms the pro-meat argument. Like, why even mention the horrible soy to the vegetarians? It's laughable.
Most soy grown is to be fed to animals so we can kill them and eat them. If we ate the soy (and other grains) directly, we wouldn’t need to grow anywhere near as much and destroy as much land as we currently do (+ the land required to raise the animals).
Let's be fair and acknowledge the difference between a small local farm and the larger "industrial"-like ones. I grew up in a farm, I know others too, people are kind to their animals.
Of course, the larger ones don't care. The same happens even when producing vegetables, no regards to nature in those cases either.
Chickens are very affectionate though. They love to be patted, will run through the field with you, and sit down when they want you to take them to the coop to be locked in for the night (there's many foxes and marters where we live, and no matter how much you try, eventually your free range chickens will be taken by them).
> Cows are treated very well in all the ranches I've been on.
The ones with horrible practices do not allow visitors or even cameras. While it is possible to source all your meat from happy places, statistically almost nobody does.
> We estimate that 99% of US farmed animals are living in factory farms at present. By species, we estimate that 70.4% of cows, 98.3% of pigs, 99.8% of turkeys, 98.2% of chickens raised for eggs, and over 99.9% of chickens raised for meat are living in factory farms.
>Cows are treated very well in all the ranches I've been on.
Unfortunately, that's the minority of cattle and AFAIK it's not really possible to replace all current meat production with the kind of treatment you're talking about, even if everyone was willing to stomach a big price increase.
> Your alternative is them not existing at all, they cannot survive in nature.
What’s wrong with not existing at all vs being exploited and eventually killed before your natural life is over? Statistically speaking, if you’re a cow or other animal we exploit, your chances are far greater to be born and exist in a factory farm. Is it really a life worth living at all?
Happy lives… that’s not the case for most meat you buy in the $1 bonus packs in the supermarket. Those animals get tortured every day of their short and miserable lives. You have seen different but stimulating meat consumption while those factories exist is wrong imho as that will only grow as a result. But it is not fixable because there is no space to grow meat for all humans this way in a free range way, so better stop eating it at all (until it comes from labs or space or whatever).
So visit one of the horror pig farms and see how the bacon tastes after that I would say. In my view only actual psychopaths can eat it after seeing that.
My son and I often joke that in the same way that some countries require a period of military service, we could require a period of agricultural and meat farm service. Maybe even garbage disposal service.
It’s quite a practical one where I come from, you can choose civil service instead of military service, where you’ll function as an underpaid slave to an organization that lacks incentive to develop your skills, pay a fair wage and focus on things that are relevant, it will rather do whatever keeps the inflow of almost free labor going.
This is all because someone thought it’s good to have young people give something back to society, whatever that means.
People use the word feedlot interchangeably to describe anything from an indoor shed where animals are so crammed in they're nearly immobilised, to an outdoor area with some shadecloth and troughs but no grass, to animals kept in exactly the same paddocks they're usually in but fed supplemental feed during a drought[1].
Yes, the weird American torture sheds are bad, but an outdoor feedlot with shade and space is really not that bad for the animals. It's a complicated tradeoff between different factors: cattle are much more protected from predators (dogs, usually) and random stressors, they have ample food and water at all times, they're better able to be monitored for disease and injury; however, they've got less space, it can be hot and dusty, and there's more random stuff going on around them[0]. People have this idea in their heads that a feedlot looks like a sow stall or a chicken cage when in actual fact it's a crowded paddock with all the grass trampled[1]. Not exactly nice, but not some insane torture device either.
Most people I've talked to want farm animals to be treated "well", and whatever that word means in their heads, we all agree that it's some standard higher than industrial scale factory farming.
The problem is that meat and dairy from humanely treated free-range animals is generally more expensive, and most people aren't willing to pay extra or cut down on their meat consumption.
>I feel like the only reason we tell ourselves otherwise is because we want to be able to excuse terrible practices like battery cages and feed lots.
No, the reason is simply a desire to feel superior; a desire to have unique properties not shared by other organisms. It's raw, undiluted human egoism; we desire to be gods of the universe.
Growing up always thought about the thought experiment of how aliens would treat us compared with how we treat our fellow sentient beings in the animal kingdom (I couldn't find a good answer and stopped consuming animals). Now with a potential for AGI and perhaps sentient AI in coming years or decades, those philosophical questions suddenly become a lot more pressing
As AIs can only be trained on datasets of colected human experiences if/when one day a superintelligent AI comes about I am sure it will only percieve us as inferior, unrational and dangerous beigns.
I've had conversations with people who are entirely convinced that animals like cats, dogs, birds, have no conscious experience and therefore are not aware of our presence or feel any pain. They think the pain is simply a signal to make the animal act in different ways, like a robot would. It actually made me speechless to hear that people believe this, and I wonder if it's an effect of being too distanced from the animal world so we start to think of animals as being there for our benefit and nothing else.
Genuinely curious questions, as I only know people who have made the decision to go vegan as adults: do you feel or know that this diet had any side effects on you growing up? How much attention did you pay to getting a diverse diet and all required nutrients? How long have you been vegan now?
No side effects. I was quite healthy in my teen years and early 20s. Not saying I'm unhealthy now, but I don't workout like I did back then. I'm no less healthy than my brothers. 1 follows a regular omnivore diet, the other is vegetarian.
I eat a good variety of fruits and vegetables, but have started eating more processed crap as I've got older and busy with work and life. When I was younger I was really into cooking intentionally healthy meals. Most of my protein comes from beans and tofu. I get asked about that a lot.
I've been vegan for 21 years. Spring of 2002 I started cutting back on meat, slowly went mostly vegetarian over the summer, then vegan that autumn. Initially I stopped eating beef because of seeing some of the health issues my uncle's were experiencing and I attributed it to overconsumption of beef. I don't know if that's true, but anyway. Then reading about antibiotics and hormones given to the animals, I just didn't want to eat that. So I was in the mindset that I wouldn't eat factory farmed meat. I thought hunting was ok. Until I went hunting. Deer and pheasant seasons are early autumn, I think. Hunting both was what made me decide I was completely done with all animal products. My dad got a deer and I helped butcher it. That was some fucked up shit. I went pheasant hunting, shot one, didn't kill it, strangled it to put it out of its misery/not shoot it again and ruin the meat. That shit was really fucked up. So yeah, killing an animal and helping to skin and cut up that animal and another one are what really did it for me. Had I not gone hunting I might have just stayed a vegetarian and maybe eaten the occasional meat. These animals were no different than my pets and I would never do that to one of those guys.
When it's breakfast time and the chicken complains about having her eggs stolen before they have a chance to hatch, the pig says "you think you've got it bad, I'm in whole hog!"
I have farm animals and am a farmer. I raise these animals as a hobby to get cheaper high quality meat. Veganism bothers me because it places animal life on a pedastool over plant life. Plants suffer upon death too.
Long story short, relative chance of plant consciousness is a lot lower than that of members of animal species.
Regardless, the point is moot - if plants are sentient, that's even more an argument to consume less of them, directly, vs a lot more of them, via animals.
But if you eat animals, then they first eat the plants, much more than you do, and then you eat the animals. Veganism doesn't "put animal life on a pedestal", it just uses fewer resources.
