this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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I am not sure how you ethically kill someone who doesn't want to die.
On principle I don't object to scavenging, I find it repulsive but just like how if you ate your parents when they died nobody would be hurt per se collecting road kill or something is not unusually cruel. Just creepy and gross given the lack of necessity.
But chickens are bred, the excess are killed young, chickens themselves have been selected for some pretty nasty traits in favour of making them more useful to us. Their ancestors live much longer, lay 10x fewer eggs, and don't grow oversized straining their skeletons. It's like pugs and stuff, we've bred in pain. I doubt your grandmother would give them medical care and comfort aimed at optimising their lives and happiness and only eating them after natural passing.
It's like when people try to say "oh but such and such a slavery was better than this other slavery" or something. Like ok it's probably true idk Roman house slaves had better lives than medieval Russian serfs but it doesn't fundamentally change how unjust the social relation was and how unnecessary that injustice was.
How do you feel about "this animal has to be culled for the good of the ecosystem, and incidentally makes good eating"?
Where I live, Australia, we have the issue that kangaroos have few predators (dingoes and wedge-tailed eagles have to attack in groups to even bring down one (plus both are rare nowadays and prefer to poach farm animals now anyway) and the predators who could have soloed a kangaroo, like thylacoleo, megalania, and quinkana, are all 40000 years extinct, give or take), but they still breed like animals expecting to meet their end to some manner of predator. So in place of the predators that would usually keep their numbers down, hunting quotas are used to keep their numbers at an appropriate level. And as a side effect of this, a large amount of kangaroo meat enters the market, because they're not exactly small animals and they're perfectly edible.
We also have issues with feral pigs, rabbits, cats, camels and horses (among other animals, most of which are either too small to eat and/or have horrible fucking toxins in their flesh) that should not be here at all, given the horrific amount of damage they do to the native ecosystem on account of evolving in a far more competitive environment. The end goal is that they all fucking die, so it's not a totally sustainable business to hunt them for meat, plus the pigs and rabbits are disease-ridden (some of which we gave them in order to achieve the objective of total eradication) and the public has issues with eating cat meat, but we could totally do the same with the camels and horses, at least until the feral populations cease existing.
I always find this kind of thought process fascinating because I'm also australian and as aussies we use much more than our fair share of resources in this planet. We pollute excessively, drive cars that are much too large, have excessively large homes and use ridiculous amounts of energy. I don't belong in our ecosystem, my ancestors were brought over by the english same as the bunnies, cats and foxes. Well half the line anyway, the other half is a more recent transplant from post war Poland.
So uhhh I'm pretty sure I'm fucking terrible for the environment, and odds are you are too. Here's the sticky point though: I actually don't want to die. I would be pretty fucking upset if you told me I had to get culled to preserve ecosystem balance and prevent "overhousing" of bushland or whatever. Now the way I see it, any right I might have to exist unmolested is predicated on the notion that sentient beings' desire to live matters, that while I'm not free to do whatever I like and have some responsibility to try and mitigate the harm to others I cause by being alive I am allowed to be alive.
So I'd ask you: why is it OK to shoot kangaroos but not humans? Why are we special? I think I have a life a little more complex than a kangaroo but I'm just guessing and that's scary anyway because some humans might have more complex lives than me, and some less (e.g. the very young, old, or people with brain injuries) and that seems like a fucked up to all hell calculus to start doing. The kangaroos seem to want to keep being alive, I mean they eat, drink, run away when people start shooting them (the few that jump in front of traffic might be suicidal I'll pay that but we can't know).
Also like, those kangaroos are a way lower ecological load than idk all the animal ag we have and we actually have a way to reduce that load without murder. We can just stop breeding them! A plant based agriculture would be much less hard on the land which would allow us a lot more time to find some other way to manage populations, the same compassion we extend to ourselves! Maybe we could teach them about birth control, or less flippantly maybe we could reduce fertility somehow.
Shit maybe the only way for the next little while is killing but that doesn't mean each death is ethical. They didn't do anything wrong, it's just doing a mass murder to avoid a complete murder and tbh if we think we're being reasonable we ought to be completely comfortable applying the same reasoning to ourselves and I see absolutely nobody signing up eagerly to be population controlled.
Except in rare circumstances, mostly human ones, animals (including humans) don't want to die, and die anyways.
The best we can give them is a ~~fervent (typo)~~ decent life and a humane death. The meat industry is atrocious at this, and carbon dioxide is a terrible idea - particularly when nitrogen is readily available, humane, and cheap.
I'm not sure how you get "Breeding people to kill them in their prime and eat their bodies" from "death is inevitable".
Could you step through your chain of reasoning please?
Nature will undoubtedly provide a grisly and cruel death. Animals don't have a concept of "long, well-lived life full of meaning." They do have a direct experience of "having food and shelter and being generally free of pain is enjoyable."
It doesn't matter if it's in their prime (before they decline and life becomes difficult) or of it's after their prime - except that if you wait too long, life starts to suck pretty bad.
If you want to end predation, you'll have an eternal task on your hands.
That is not a chain of reasoning, would you mind trying again. Step by step please.
edit: most charitable read (they blocked me?)
The most charitable read I can see is
1 - everyone dies 2 - I assume without evidence that death is generally unpleasant and painful 3 - I assume without evidence animals don't have complex internal worlds and desires for things like freedom or long life 4 - I assume the lives animals lead in farms is good 5 - I am a naive utiliarian and see no issues with mere addition/the repugnant conclusion 6 - a quick death does not count negatively in a utiliarian sensw C - therefore we should breed as many animals as we can, kill them whenever convenient as long as they are not old, and this makes the world better.
I do not see how 1 through 3 connect to 4 through 6. And 4 through 6 is just the repugnant conclusion.
It was three distinct points. But it wouldn't matter if I did reason it out for you - your stance is emotive, and you won't agree with me unless that viewpoint underlying your stance changes, and it won't change due to someone reasoning it out for you.
The slow grind of time, and the steady erosion by nature may cause you to change, though. Fortunately, whether it does or not, it's basically irrelevant to me whether or not you believe or act as I do.
Edit, in response to your edit:
You sure do assume a lot about me. But, so it goes. Again - I'm not really concerned with whether you think like I do or not. You can even hate me if you like. I don't expect you to come to my viewpoint by anything I say. My viewpoint is different than yours, and that suits me fine. Such is diversity.
The most charitable read I can see is
1 - everyone dies 2 - I assume without evidence that death is generally unpleasant and painful 3 - I assume without evidence animals don't have complex internal worlds and desires for things like freedom or long life 4 - I assume the lives animals lead in farms is good 5 - I am a naive utiliarian and see no issues with mere addition/the repugnant conclusion 6 - a quick death does not count negatively in a utiliarian sensw C - therefore we should breed as many animals as we can, kill them whenever convenient as long as they are not old, and this makes the world better.
I do not see how 1 through 3 connect to 4 through 6. And 4 through 6 is just the repugnant conclusion.
Well said. People like you make me wish I could follow users on lemmy
You bookmark my profile, show up randomly to just say nice things to me like this so I feel less like I'm begging into a void (￣▽￣)ノ <3
For real though thanks for the kind words. Because controversy generates engagement saying anything against eating meat gets you inundated with replies, like 1 in 40 of which seem remotely good faith.
I've saved your comment, if I'm going through my saved stuff hopefully I'll remember to look at your stuff again and chime in 🤞😊 in the meantime, keep it up!
Wait I didn't even realize you couldn't follow users on lemmy, huh
Yep, the devs refuse to implement it. There's an issue on github for it and the recommended solution is "use kbin or mastodon or something else"