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Don't know why I'm stumbling on this post from /u/satirizedoor now a year later and nearly two years after the original post that I made. I still call myself vegan, but I do eat oysters now. I have come to find most vegans, including my past self, as annoying as you: there is a lack of real reflection as to what the goals of the movement are, and if the individual actions that vegans advocate are actually effective at accomplishing those goals. Total cessation of animal suffering is as impossible as it would be totalitarian (some vegans advocate for GMOing away all predators). Some amount of meat eating will always be part of human culture, and is frankly, indistinguishable and perhaps better than what goes on in the wild. My problem in reality is with industrial factory farming. It would be far better for these animals and the planet if we merely advocated for reduction in meat consumption, but that position isn't really justifiable outside of utilitarianism. Most people are not utilitarian I think, which makes it difficult to advocate for a position that fails on consequentialist/deontological grounds. The fact is that some people don't think animals have moral worth, while others do. There's very little ability to reason across that line, despite pretty good scientific evidence that most farm animals do have some rudimentary reasoning and emotional abilities equivalent to that of a small child. To vegans like myself, this evidence is helpful but rather superfluous. My beliefs about animal consciousness come from personal interactions I've had with animals. For those who aren't vegan, evidence of reasoning and/emotional reactions isn't sufficient evidence of consciousness or moral worth. Being able to solve puzzles or display emotions isn't very good evidence that there's something going on inside of another creature.
I'm still convinced that veganism isn't harmful for performance, at least in endurance sports. Plenty of endurance athletes at the highest levels are at least mostly vegan. However, I think that performance enhancement is a different question that I don't think has really been settled scientifically. There are without a doubt certain plant-based substances that are performance enhancers (beet juice), but I don't think this says anything about the efficacy of the diet as a whole. A cycling YouTuber that I vaguely follow, Dylan Johnson is vegan for recovery reasons, as plant-based diets are apparently much less pro-inflammatory than meat-based diets. I can't say I'm fully convinced by this: I think the real culprit in inflammation may be macronutrient ratios. Diets high in fat, which many vegans also have, seem to be particularly pro-inflammatory, at least in animal models. There's also good evidence that high protein consumption is linked to decreases in lifespan, but again this isn't exclusive to meat-eating populations.
I am more shocked by how skewed most user's idea of a healthy body weight is. I'm closer to 160 now, but a 150 with a height of 6' put me at a very normal BMI of 20. I recognize that this weight makes it very difficult to be a strongman, but that's not my goal, nor the goal of most Americans. It is an absurd position to tell me that I am a twig or emaciated at that weight when I am well within the bounds of a healthy BMI.
I do not think animal suffering is a good, or even neutral thing, exactly, but I don’t think it’s in the same category of human suffering- it’s an ordinary evil similar to soil degradation from mono cropping or similar. No, I don’t see gorillas or elephants or whales as meaningfully different in that regard, even if they’re as smart as a child. I don’t care if harambe or dumbo or shamu are as smart as a child they don’t have the moral worth of one, it’s a qualitative difference not quantitative. To my way of thinking elephants are rarer than rats and so killing one should be a much higher bar to clear, but there isn’t a moral problem with shooting a depredating elephant from a helicopter in the same way that there isn’t a moral problem with setting a rat trap.
That’s why I don’t worry about shrimp eyestalk ablation or farrow crates. Doing these things for no reason would be profoundly evil. Doing them to have affordable animal protein is as necessary as tilling fields; and having almost everyone in society eat meat every day is a straightforwardly good thing so much so as to be miraculous, for child development reasons if nothing else.
I think I disagree. There's a point of rarity, or even just majesty, at which I'm more upset by the death of an animal than the death of a human.
I'd consider it worse to kill a critically endangered species than to kill a random human. Because killing the endangered species gets closer to robbing and harming every human forever (leaving aside scifi Jurassic park stuff) while the death of any individual human probably doesn't.
Where exactly I draw that line, I'm not sure. Definitely when a critically endangered species population is almost unviable, every kill is one step closer to extinction.
But examining my feelings, I'd probably also be more upset by a dead bald eagle than a dead person, depending on the person, for purely symbolic patriotic reasons.
Achilles to Lycaon:
And the same goes for all the species on this planet. Most of them are extinct already. Sure is nice to have more kinds of animals, for curiosity's and novelty's sake, but if I had to put a price on keeping any specific ones around, I'd place it around a day's wage for the ones that actually noticeably live nearby, and zero for everything else. Maybe a little more for bees, bumblebees and cicadas, which I personally enjoy, and some species of bird. And some species are just plain useful, of course - I'd hate to see cows, potatoes, cofee beans, apples or humans go. But these aren't endangered species.
Going further abroad and looking at the endangered exotics - too bad. If they can't survive the anthropocene on their own, but people want to have them - that's what pets and zoos are for. If that isn't an option because elephants and whales and panda bears are too hard to maintain, then they can join the billions of species that have gone before. 99% of all species that ever existed are gone. Eventually it will be 100%.
@RenOS
This is remarkably unresponsive to my comment. I didn't say, at any point, that extinction of any species was of infinite value. I said that an increased chance of extinction of certain species was more valuable than one human life in some cases, which is the contra to @hydroacetalyne who stated that
I don't think you value every human life at a higher value than you place every animal life, and I don't think most people do.
You might not value the life of a rare Rhinoceros infinitely, but I'm fairly certain based on my knowledge of you, South, that you do value it more highly than you value the life of a random 3rd worlder.
You wrote:
That's quite general about critically endangered animals, you don't make it clear that you only mean specific ones. So it seemed relevant to me to point out that in many cases you're not really robbing anyone of anything since it's just a variation of a common, non-endangered animal.
Likewise, the "scifi jurassic park stuff" isn't really scifi anymore, we're already doing it in a limited capacity.
Has this actually been done? I'm aware of people talking about it, but not of it actually happening.
But sure, I'll cop to both of us using extreme examples: you're thinking of "endangered species" that are slightly different varieties of Vole, which yes I probably don't much care about; while I'm thinking of things like megafauna and butterflies and stuff I would care about. I don't really care about every kind of crawfish; I do care about the rhinoceros.
See Colossal Biosciences and their Dire Wolf project. Regardless at which point you consider it "true de-extinction", they have demonstrated how you can modify key genome locations of a related species to the original of the species you want to de-extinct, and that these modifications do indeed generate the desired traits that species is known for. At the moment it's, as said, quite limited (they only made 20 edits with large phenotypic impact), but from here it's mostly just a question of doing this repeatedly to get arbitrarily close to the original species. And dire wolfs have gone extinct in ancient times; It should be much easier with contemporary animals due to the better availability of varied genomic information and more closely related species you can start from. That approach is probably not viable for every extinct animal, though.
To the second paragraph, I guess my opinion is probably close enough; I'd be lying if I claimed that I consider every human life more valuable than every extinction imaginable.
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