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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32547 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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What is the alternative? It's not like those animals are not killed in the production of the regular omnivorous diet. If you are interested in animal welfare, it makes sense to go with the diet that kills the fewest possible animals even if the number is not zero. (Growing all of one's own food? I'm not sure you can get all the range of nutrients with your own work, and you are still going to kill the soil microfauna and plant parasites.Vat-growing food seems the ideal, but it will take a while before that is enough to fully support a human body.)

Commensurably more are killed in the extra vegetable production required for a vegan diet, so there could be some inflection point where killing animals directly provides enough calories that it means fewer dead animals in total compared to the sheer volume of rodents killed.

I don't know if this is necessarily true; meat and dairy animals also require plenty of plant food, so an omnivorous diet still requires a lot of agriculture in addition to direct human food production. Granted, many such animals are raised on pasture land that could not be farmed in the first place, and even the ones fed with crops are given cellulose-rich material that humans could not digest, but factory farming still has a pretty large agricultural footprint.

If someone is to the point of caring about the soil bacteria, wouldn't vat-grown food still be wrong? It's living... sort of... and the nutrients that compose it come from somewhere. Wouldn't all existence be basically impossible?

I was thinking more of insects and earthworms. No, if you add bacteria to the moral calculus then one's immunitary system is a worse atrocity than any ever devised by humans, and that's indeed not a very practical principle.

Commensurably more are killed in the extra vegetable production required for a vegan diet, so there could be some inflection point where killing animals directly provides enough calories that it means fewer dead animals in total compared to the sheer volume of rodents killed. This assumes that vegans treat all animals as morally equivalent (1 cow=1 mouse).

Isn't one of the vegan arguments about the amount of crops grown purely to feed animals and that the same land could be used to just directly grow more calories than are produced by the feed crops once converted into meat?

Main issues I could see with this:

  1. Marginal land used for grazing not suitable for crops / feed crops more resilient + able to grow where the human consumption equivalents cannot (know this is to some extent true in terms of pastures, though not for all pastures, do not know enough about soil and climate preferences for different crops for that bit)

  2. Harvesting feed crops somehow kills less birds / rodents etc (have absolutely no idea, obviously combine harvesters and pesticides would kill regardless, but don't know if feed crops are less attractive to those animals to begin with so less wind up dead)

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