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There's a third solution. A field mouse living in a wheat field lives a normal field mouse life until one day it's instantly shredded by a thresher. That doesn't resemble the life of the vast majority of farm animals in the US, who are typically raised in very poor conditions and then are slaughtered in more or less stressful environments.
inb4 "I only buy meat from my uncle's farm": good for you, but again, that's not reflective of the reality of factory farming which produces most meat.
Okay, that's at least a compromise solution where you're willing to trade off some animal suffering and death in exchange for giving up a lot more animal suffering and death. Presumably, you'd be okay with farmed fish and the likes, since fish aren't that high on the "they gots qualia just like us!" scale?
This is a position that can be debated, with room to give on both sides. It's the vegans who, like one online lassie, can't even look at people fishing because of the persons (she meant fish, not humans) dying, or those who seem to think you can switch to all-plant diet with no animals at all harmed, that are the unreasonable ones. And being online, they're the vocal majority who are seen as representative, not types like "Well, Hindu diet is vegetarian" but acknowledging that it uses milk, butter, ghee, cheese, yoghurt etc. and depends on dairy farming and isn't 100% vegan.
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It is very easy to source ethical meat and not very expensive either. Treating it as some kind of unfeasible or cumbersome solution is so strange to me. If we want to reduce suffering then surely that must be an easier ask than asking people to eschew meat entirely.
But that's kind of the point isn't it? The vegans don't really want to reduce animal suffering, they want to be on a moral crusade. Veganism isn't an intellectually principled moral stance, it's a religious one.
Some of 'em. It's the zeal of the convert problem, where for some people it is an all-or-nothing crusade. And if you're basing your veganism on the suffering of sentient others, of course it's appalling to them.
It really is the equivalent of the abortion debate, though vegans may not wish to see it in those terms, but they can both consider abortion to be a human right and Constitutional right and healthcare because of bodily autonomy and the foetus is not a person, and object to meat-eating because even if animals are not persons, they're sentient or sapient or both. One question is a matter of private personal morality and the other is plain observable fact and nothing to do with personal morals other than "you should be horrified by this scale of torture and murder".
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A normal field mouse lives in constant fear of being eaten alive by a dozen different types of predators, and their population is kept in check either by being relentlessly hunted by perpetually hungry overpopulated predators or hideous, agonizing plagues if their population density gets high enough.
The un-hunted deer where I live all caught a wasting disease that rots their brains as they grind their teeth out and and wander in circles. I watched a baby fawn starve to death next to the already-skeletal body of her mother.
Nature is horrifying. Man is kind.
And how long did the death from starvation take? A few weeks, maybe a month at most? Meanwhile human will force human into a prison to suffer for decades. I would much, MUCH rather starve in a month or two.
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To me this gives away the whole game. When someone says “This is cruel and inhumane!” The natural follow up question for someone interested in actually understanding the truth of the matter is “Compared to what?”
For actions between humans it’s incredibly easy to find alternative contexts and thus possible to make judgements about what’s moral and what is not.
But the life of animals, with or without human intervention, is just one rolling atrocity after another, forever and ever, without end.
I think it’s no accident this ideology only came into being after it became possible for people to live lives so alienated from wild nature that their only real experience of it is through a Disney-fied, highly sanitized lens.
And the natural follow up answer is "compared to not raising those pigs at all".
Then you’d be effectively saying that it would be better for domesticated pigs to have never existed at all, which is a whole other can of worms. Comparing not existing in the first place to existing is largely a fool’s game.
But it also belies almost a closed system of philosophical belief. Barring extreme and probably impossible human action, animals will exist. Their existence will consist of some amount of suffering. So the question isn’t “will animals suffer?” it’s “how much, and for what purpose?”
I understand if you, personally, don’t wish to participate in any action that causes animals to suffer. That has been a relatively common personal and religious choice throughout history. But the idea of systematically lessening animal suffering through collective human action is more than a little farcical.
As compared to human suffering, which while it waxes and wanes throughout the ages and will likely never be eliminated, we are able and have been able to really dull the edge of the lovecraftian horror that is the state of nature.
Veganism always reminds me of anarchism for this reason, an utopian vision of erasing a somewhat tragic aspect of the universe by radically decontextualizing it, then arguing it can be eliminated by ignoring all context.
We don't need to solve every problem in existence, but if we find ourselves in a hole we should stop digging.
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Nature is horrifying, Man is part of Nature. Life itself might be described as self-organizing horror.
Yes, the conversation had me trying to remember Land's "Hell-Baked," from one of his lighter meth binges.
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Certainly. Of course, if that field mouse has baby mice they will die as they cry out for their mom. That’s pretty awful.
If the vegan argument is “make factory farming more humane” I’m here for it. If the argument is eating animals is wrong because it requires killing, then nah fam I’m out.
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