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go vegan!
Just don’t try to force it on your pets.
Cats are obligate carnivores.
Believe me vegans put a lot more thought into nutrition than omni’s do. Aside from that pet ownership is not vegan. The word “ownership” being operative. If you find yourself having to care for an animal then that’s a different situation of course.
Here is some surface-level reading about caring for animals in a vegan way https://www.peta.org/living/animal-companions/caring-animal-companions/
Obligate carnivores in nature. Why do you care if a cat is fed with fortified plant bits vs fortified animal bits? Neither product exists in nature and the cat can live a healthy life on both. Also breeding cats to be pets is completely unnatural, so why are you fine with that?
There are people working on foods for cats which aren’t based on cruelty. There already exist options, though some are sold as special diets.
Example: https://sustainablepetfood.info/
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0284132 it’s already happening.
The work in “lab meat” products is actually going to contribute to this too.
Note: cats don’t eat cows or pigs or even adult chickens in “nature”.
Silly vegoon, only the cute animals I didn’t want to eat have feelings. The others are unfeeling slabs of meat that is magically created by wholesome farmers being folksy.
A few coworkers refer to cows as giant dogs. Then they sell them to be butchered.
Seems well adjusted. I’d keep my kids away from them if I were you.
I don’t eat meat, but the more we learn about plant intelligence, the less I can say with confidence that plants do not have their equivalents of things like pain and emotion. It doesn’t help that we have great difficulty defining what emotion means.
But we know a lot about plants now that we thought were animal things. Grass “panics” or “screams” by sending out chemical signals when you cut it as a warning to others of its species that they are seriously injured and danger is coming. That’s what the smell of fresh-cut grass is. Sure, calling it a panic or a scream is anthropomorphizing it, but it’s kind of hard to describe it in other terms.
We also have learned about “mother trees,” which will send resources to their offspring if the offspring let the mother tree know they are in desperate need of them. Which sounds very much like parenting in animal species. There’s also lots of evidence that plants can learn from experiences and retain some sort of memory of them in some capacity.
Do I think plants have the same sort of sentience as animals and will I stop eating broccoli? Of course not. But I will still have to admit that at the end of the day, I might just be choosing to cause a different kingdom of life pain and suffering because it’s far enough away from my species that I don’t consider that to be pain and suffering.
You’re conflating very different processes here. While there is the hard problem of consciousness and we can’t falsify ideas like panpsychism consider a few things.
If you amputate my hand and press on it it will emit nervous signals. Does anyone feel pain? If you destroy most of my brain but keep me alive, then stab me almost all the nervous activity and hormones etc associated with injury will happen. Is there any reason to believe there is any pain felt?
I would say no in both cases, pain is not emitting nervous impulses, or something that precedes releasing endorphins and inflammatory factors etc. Pain cannot even necessarily be reliably correlated with stress markers like heart rate, and in the case of phantom limb syndrome pain can even be associated with a complete lack of signals.
There are good evolutionary reasons to exhange information and resources, even unwittingly. Apparently some bacteria in my tummy are in conversation with my body constantly but I’m not at all aware or actively participating in that. Maintaing pain only really seems to offer advantage if you can do something about it, while it’s possible for things to exist accidentally it’s not like grass can move to places without mowers or trees shade themselves. In all animals with nervous systems the nervous systems are the vastly most expensive thing to keep alive. In fact there are a few creatures who when entering an immobile stage of life rapidly digest their own (a good explaination for both tenure and retirees!).
Plants don’t have rapid long distance communication in their bodies, they don’t have centralised organs, they don’t even have anything approaching the levels of activity we associate with the simplest nervous systems.
It’s probably best to think of grass “screaming” as skin cells “screaming” for resources to make more melanin when exposed to UV. Or lymph nodes “screaming” when releasing hormones to heal a wound and stuff. This is all vastly below the level of consciousness.
Or whatever, embrace panpsychism, like the invisible dragon in my garage nobody can prove it false /shrug. Animals eat plants though and thermo law 2 is a thing so even panpsychics minimise suffering by being plant based.
If you’re eating meat, then you’re contributing to the death of all of those plants that had to feed the animals you’re eating. Even if you grant plants sentience, veganism is still the more ethical option.
if you grant plants sentience, veganism is still the more ethical option.
… for ethical systems in which sentience is a consideration.
Which ethical systems don’t consider sentience?! Big yikes.
I can only think of one that does: utilitarianism. it’s frought with epistemic problems not to mention it can be summed up “the ends justify the means” which most people think is itself unethical.
Is “more ethical” really enough if you accept that plants can suffer? You’re still essentially saying one group of living things’ suffering is acceptable to you. Isn’t that like saying the holocaust of the Jews was bad, but the holocaust of the Roma at the same time was fine because there were fewer Roma than Jews? Does “less” matter when we’re talking quantities so massive?
I don’t think there are easy answers to any of these questions. Not if you want to approach them from an honest philosophical level.
Is “more ethical” really enough if you accept that plants can suffer
I don’t accept that, but even if I did, you should still act to minimize suffering as much as possible.
Do you really believe that killing a plant is the same as killing an animal?
If our ability to modify ourselves reaches sci fi levels, allowing us to photosynthesize and fix amino acids from nitrogen in the atmosphere (or if there’s any hope of making that happen), then that likely will be the new vegan position.
Photosynthesis would probably not work too well for people who aren’t outside a lot. But there might be other possibilities.
Sounds like a good way to incentivise touching some grass.
I know you’re being flippant, but I do like the idea of coming up with a variety of ways for humans to get food which don’t require life at all. Finding a way to make a construction worker photosynthetic but also finding a way for an office worker to be chemosynthetic. Hydrogen and methane are in abundance on the planet and bacteria can use them as food. Maybe one day we can too
As someone who‘s allergic to an ungodly amount of vegetable oils, fruit and gluten: no.
Weird how every time veganism comes up everyone is suddenly deathly allergic to anything that doesn’t scream when it dies
Stuff from milk, mushrooms and eggs don’t scream, so do a lot of salads and olive oil, even rice is silent.
And don’t start with those industrial cows that only get to live because of the milk. That stuff tastes like shit. Same with those chickens in cages.
I’m pretty sure, that both cow and calf are screaming when they are separated shortly after birth. Alnost like a mother and her baby have an emotional bond.
And even the smallest farm will absolutely kill them once they aren’t profitable anymore, or they’d have an ever increasing population of animals.
Plants scream when they die, we just don’t notice it. They release all sorts of pheromone type chemicals that warn other plants that there is danger. That’s definitely a scream.
I’m not saying eating meat is better, I’m just saying that seemingly the only truly ethical things to eat are raw minerals, and I don’t believe that’s possible, other than salt. Salt seems to be the only tasty rock.
Graphics cards totally scream when they die too, the smell warns their symbiotic sysadmins to turn off the power
And don’t even get me started on how chalkboards scream when you scratch them, why do vegans not talk about this cruelty
Vegans complaining about other people needlessly injecting themselves into conversations is peak copium.
…every time veganism comes up…
You mean every time that a vegan uses whatever tenuous link to the current topic they can imagine exists to bring up veganism?
Post: animals have emotions
Comment: we shouldn’t kill things with emotions
I dunno seems pretty related. And when we’re feeling a lot of empathy for animals is probably the best time to think about these issues
And then when someone brings a topic to discussion related to these issues
“I can’t be vegan, i’m allergic to a lot of stuff”, suddenly it’s not about having a discussion anymore but rather to push one side of the story without consideration for others.
You can still care about animal cruelty and be ethical, even if you have an allergy. Having a medical condition doesn’t give you a free pass to do whatever you want.
Tax animal meat, put the proceeds into precision fermentation.
Really, just stop subsidizing the shit out of it.
