But again, not everyone argues for human rights based upon cognitive abilities. In fact, I'm confident that PETA's animal rights claims center on the capacity of animals to feel pain.
But that's a stupid way to look at it. In that case insect = rat = monkey = human. You can argue that plants and even bacteria feel and respond to pain. If you don't take into account cognitive complexity you end up with a system that is blatantly, horrifically stupid.
I've always wondered: if it's the infliction of pain that makes it wrong to kill animals, does that mean that a truly painless way to kill them is all that's needed? Seriously: if your premise is "it's wrong to inflict pain" then the response could be "but method X causes no pain." And if the retort were, "Well, it's wrong to kill" then you'd be right back to asking "Why is it wrong to kill?"
Seriously, with pain and suffering taken out of the equation, what would be a good reason for thinking it was wrong to kill an animal?
I think things like availability of proper substitutes is why the movement and idea is very much an urban one. Or am I mistaken?
No, you're very much correct. Poor people in non-western countries survive on very little protein, but when they can get it they'll damn well eat it no matter how manky it is. And yet, they have a lower environmental impact, through things like less food packaging, local-goods consumption, and less overall meat consumption (although most of them don't get enough protein and shouldn't be praised for, you know, being malnourished). If you've seen Time or the National Geographic do those articles where they grab families from all over the world and photograph them with a week's worth of their normal food, you can really see the difference, and the incredible amount of waste we generate. Its a pretty impressive teaching tool, wish I could find a link to the version I saw.
But again, not everyone argues for human rights based upon cognitive abilities. In fact, I'm confident that PETA's animal rights claims center on the capacity of animals to feel pain.
But that's a stupid way to look at it. In that case insect = rat = monkey = human. You can argue that plants and even bacteria feel and respond to pain. If you don't take into account cognitive complexity you end up with a system that is blatantly, horrifically stupid.
I know it's a little late, but I have to address this:
I think anyone with even a modicum of sense and biology in high school knows that "insect = rat = monkey = human" is ridiculously absurd.
Sure, some PETA people are crackpots, like how they think lobsters being boiled in pots causes them tremendous pain (they go in head-first and are killed instantly).
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I mean, I go through maybe four bags of groceries in a week ($50) and generate approx half a bag of garbage a week (If I wasn't so lazy I could reduce it further - I only recycle plastic) but damn, some of those families go through an incredible amount of food.
And then you look at the family from Chad and think "I waste a zillion times as much as they do!"
I wonder, though, how you could change it to make society less wasteful. Our entire infrastructure would have to change to support more local mass production of foodstuffs.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
($50) and generate approx half a bag of garbage a week (If I wasn't so lazy I could reduce it further - I only recycle plastic) but damn, some of those families go through an incredible amount of food.
I also assume that you aren't buying for a four person family.
I mean, I go through maybe four bags of groceries in a week ($50) and generate approx half a bag of garbage a week (If I wasn't so lazy I could reduce it further - I only recycle plastic) but damn, some of those families go through an incredible amount of food.
And then you look at the family from Chad and think "I waste a zillion times as much as they do!"
I wonder, though, how you could change it to make society less wasteful. Our entire infrastructure would have to change to support more local mass production of foodstuffs.
I think it would and it wouldn't. It's frustrating to live in a big city (Philadelphia) and see corner grocery stores every few blocks stocked with the same pre-packaged crap food you see in big supermarkets, and think that cities like New York along with (I assume) most of Europe have plenty of markets and shops selling fresh produce daily. I know it's a stereotype, but isn't part of living in Paris going out daily or every other day to buy all of your food, and none of it is pre-packaged?
What I'm getting at is that I think we in America have some of the infrastructure in place, at least in urban areas, but we're saddled with the cultural inertia of being used to pre-packaged non-local food.
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($50) and generate approx half a bag of garbage a week (If I wasn't so lazy I could reduce it further - I only recycle plastic) but damn, some of those families go through an incredible amount of food.
I also assume that you aren't buying for a four person family.
Well, no, but take my x 4 = $200.
Four person family in that list = $500 or $341. I mean, there were others, but it's those ones that had me go :shock:
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I think it would and it wouldn't. It's frustrating to live in a big city (Philadelphia) and see corner grocery stores every few blocks stocked with the same pre-packaged crap food you see in big supermarkets, and think that cities like New York along with (I assume) most of Europe have plenty of markets and shops selling fresh produce daily. I know it's a stereotype, but isn't part of living in Paris going out daily or every other day to buy all of your food, and none of it is pre-packaged?
What I'm getting at is that I think we in America have some of the infrastructure in place, at least in urban areas, but we're saddled with the cultural inertia of being used to pre-packaged non-local food.
They did a report in Canada about how food is made, packaged and transported in relation to food spoilage. With how spread out the population is in Canada, a lot of what's done in Europe is simply not feasible because of distances involved. Europe is made up of small nations with dense populations. The example given was pastries, and this is why pastries used partially-hydrogenated oil (The source of trans-fats, I think?). It was a preservative because of how long the pastries were in transport for. So as we become more aware of the effects of these different things on human health, changes have to be made, but it doesn't change the fact that a lot of national and international companies struggle with getting foodstuffs across Canada cheaply because of the lack of population density.
They did a report in Canada about how food is made, packaged and transported in relation to food spoilage. With how spread out the population is in Canada, a lot of what's done in Europe is simply not feasible because of distances involved. Europe is made up of small nations with dense populations. The example given was pastries, and this is why pastries used partially-hydrogenated oil (The source of trans-fats, I think?). It was a preservative because of how long the pastries were in transport for. So as we become more aware of the effects of these different things on human health, changes have to be made, but it doesn't change the fact that a lot of national and international companies struggle with getting foodstuffs across Canada cheaply because of the lack of population density.
Aha, I suspect that same thing is going on here, what with the state of big agribusiness and all. Very interesting.
It was interesting how little produce the American family was eating, and how much the German family was apparently drinking. Were all those bottles in the picture alcohol?
I wonder, though, how you could change it to make society less wasteful. Our entire infrastructure would have to change to support more local mass production of foodstuffs.
The problem here is some heavily populated areas of the country suck for food production. Southern California, for example, is most desert. It grows food anyway, but the environmental consequences of that aren't great, and the result of trying to grow ALL the food for that area locally would probably be much worse than just shipping the stuff in.
I'm not a vegetarian but I think "true kosher" is vegetarianism. There is no right way to sacrifice an animal. I've seen video footage of kosher farms where it looked like it was the most brutal and savage way to kill these animals ever. To those who eat meat, I'm not making a judgement call. I'm just worried about what those substances are doing internally to you. We think that once something was living becomes dead it starts to decompose and we inject it with a ton of preservatives to keep it looking fresh and pink in the meat aisle of our supermarkets...
We burn it or cook it or what have you, and we think that it's somehow free of its debilitating effect. But, there is the boot of a human which has sacrificed this animal, and the animal has bitten into the heel of the human. I don't want us to be put in a situation that would require some kind of revenge to be taken upon us. I don't want you hurting animals and then having, by law, to necessarily have them to hurt you. Red meat - where did we get this idea that read meat tastes good? Is it because it does? Or is it not because the joy you get through the consumption of an animal, you could get ten times the amount of joy in simply conferencing with their living self. Think about that.
I'm not a vegetarian but I think "true kosher" is vegetarianism. There is no right way to sacrifice an animal. I've seen video footage of kosher farms where it looked like it was the most brutal and savage way to kill these animals ever. To those who eat meat, I'm not making a judgement call. I'm just worried about what those substances are doing internally to you. We think that once something was living becomes dead it starts to decompose and we inject it with a ton of preservatives to keep it looking fresh and pink in the meat aisle of our supermarkets...
We burn it or cook it or what have you, and we think that it's somehow free of its debilitating effect. But, there is the boot of a human which has sacrificed this animal, and the animal has bitten into the heel of the human. I don't want us to be put in a situation that would require some kind of revenge to be taken upon us. I don't want you hurting animals and then having, by law, to necessarily have them to hurt you. Red meat - where did we get this idea that read meat tastes good? Is it because it does? Or is it not because the joy you get through the consumption of an animal, you could get ten times the amount of joy in simply conferencing with their living self. Think about that.
That's definitely going to require some thought....
Although the initial point of true kosher slaughtering practices is to reduce cruelty to the animal alongside health reasons. The biggest problem I have with kosher slaughtering it's that it really can't be both done right, and done on a scale for mass production. You'd need a lot of rabbis. Let me get my books.
But again, not everyone argues for human rights based upon cognitive abilities. In fact, I'm confident that PETA's animal rights claims center on the capacity of animals to feel pain.
But that's a stupid way to look at it. In that case insect = rat = monkey = human. You can argue that plants and even bacteria feel and respond to pain. If you don't take into account cognitive complexity you end up with a system that is blatantly, horrifically stupid.
I know it's a little late, but I have to address this:
I think anyone with even a modicum of sense and biology in high school knows that "insect = rat = monkey = human" is ridiculously absurd.
Sure, some PETA people are crackpots, like how they think lobsters being boiled in pots causes them tremendous pain (they go in head-first and are killed instantly).
Of course it's absurd, but that's what you get when you just rely on "ability to feel pain." And if you are trying to say that certain animals have "more ability to feel pain" than others, try and define that. You'll see that it's just a synonym for cognitive complexity.
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Of course it's absurd, but that's what you get when you just rely on "ability to feel pain." And if you are trying to say that certain animals have "more ability to feel pain" than others, try and define that. You'll see that it's just a synonym for cognitive complexity.
Okay, good point. It is a synonym for cognitive complexity---but there's more to it than that.
I'm not a biologist, but I'm operating under the assumption that vertebrates have a vastly different nervous system than invertebrates. While the complexity of sensations experienced by a chimp may vastly outweigh that of a chicken, there's still far more similarity in the basic feeling of pain and discomfort between the chicken and chimp than between the chicken and insect.
tl;dr - Dogs may not have the complexity of human emotion and sensation, but they still do have some emotion and sensation and that needs to be respected akin to humans'.
You say "there's more to it," but I fail to see how you've differentiated "ability to feel pain" and cognitive complexity. Perhaps if you could give an example of an animal that supposedly feels pain more than a more cognitively complex animal?
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You say "there's more to it," but I fail to see how you've differentiated "ability to feel pain" and cognitive complexity. Perhaps if you could give an example of an animal that supposedly feels pain more than a more cognitively complex animal?
I usually find myself in near total agreement with RandomEngy, but I think this equating of "ability to experience pain" and "cognitive complexity" is spurious. Think of it thusly:
1) Certain electrochemical impulses in the peripheral nervous system (PNS) are a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for feeling pain.
- pretty much unchallengeable.
2) Given a particular level of (what we could call) PNS-based ability to feel pain, more cognitive complexity generally results in the experience of more pain.
- supported by a fair bit of research, and also backs up RandomEngy's stance.
3) It is possible to damage the PNS without otherwise impacting cognitive complexity.
- innumerable case studies on tissue damage, including cases like Gabby Gringas.
4) We have or will acquire the potential to genetically engineer animals with reduced or eliminated ability to feel the PNS-basis of pain.
5) Those animals will not be otherwise more or less cognitively complex.
Definitely open to challenge, but the point is that pain is a complex phenomenon that requires the participation of parts of the nervous system that are not otherwise involved in cognitive processes. Hence, the ability to feel pain cannot be equated with cognitive complexity.
This is why I think we should engineer cows and chickens who can't feel pain - to shut up the PETA people
This is why I think we should engineer cows and chickens who can't feel pain - to shut up the PETA people
This would actually be a poor move since they'd end up tearing their legs to shreds and cooking themselves on electric fences they didn't know they were being zapped by.
This is why I think we should engineer cows and chickens who can't feel pain - to shut up the PETA people
This would actually be a poor move since they'd end up tearing their legs to shreds and cooking themselves on electric fences they didn't know they were being zapped by.
Why would they need legs? For that matter, why would they need any brain beyond the basic centers required for metabolic processes? Gengineering is so sweet. :twisted:
This is why I think we should engineer cows and chickens who can't feel pain - to shut up the PETA people
This would actually be a poor move since they'd end up tearing their legs to shreds and cooking themselves on electric fences they didn't know they were being zapped by.
Why would they need legs? For that matter, why would they need any brain beyond the basic centers required for metabolic processes? Gengineering is so sweet. :twisted:
Meat is basically muscle tissue, and muscle tissue needs to be exercised in order to develop correctly. The ideal artificial meat would be muscle placed under a constant mechanical strain. Ideally we'd grow it with plants engineered to produce the basic vitamins and necessities etc. etc.
Once you get into it synthmeat could be awesomely efficient.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
edited September 2007
It would also be totally morally acceptable. I'm pretty much waiting with baited breath.
I don't know that animals are smart enough now to feel pain. Sure, I beat my dog around, and he cowers from me. You might take that as memory or learning, but he might just as well be cowering because it's how he says, "I love you." Just how I say "I love you, too" by throw glass vases at his tiny, metal, electrified cage while he sleeps.
We don't eat dog though. Chicken is fine, cow is fine. Fish is fine. Dog, though, sacred. Horse, not allowed. A cat is not fine, too.
I don't know that animals are smart enough now to feel pain. Sure, I beat my dog around, and he cowers from me. You might take that as memory or learning, but he might just as well be cowering because it's how he says, "I love you." Just how I say "I love you, too" by throw glass vases at his tiny, metal, electrified cage while he sleeps.
We don't eat dog though. Chicken is fine, cow is fine. Fish is fine. Dog, though, sacred. Horse, not allowed. A cat is not fine, too.
Your sarcasm is either rampant and scary or this post is horrifying. I'm going with the former. Also, people eat feral cats in Australia. Kind of hard to disagree really, since feral cats want nothing to do with people and destroy wildlife, and frankly they'd do the same to us if for whatever reason we die or they learn to use guns and return fire.
Tabu seems to be the operator behind quite a few opinions here, such as ege's.
Maybe this debate wouldn't have people shouting "hypocrite!" if it were simply legal to eat humans. It is fairly easy to take the proper precautions to protect oneself from kuru.
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I've always wondered: if it's the infliction of pain that makes it wrong to kill animals, does that mean that a truly painless way to kill them is all that's needed? Seriously: if your premise is "it's wrong to inflict pain" then the response could be "but method X causes no pain." And if the retort were, "Well, it's wrong to kill" then you'd be right back to asking "Why is it wrong to kill?"
Seriously, with pain and suffering taken out of the equation, what would be a good reason for thinking it was wrong to kill an animal?
I would really, really like to see that.
EDIT: ding ding!
I know it's a little late, but I have to address this:
I think anyone with even a modicum of sense and biology in high school knows that "insect = rat = monkey = human" is ridiculously absurd.
Sure, some PETA people are crackpots, like how they think lobsters being boiled in pots causes them tremendous pain (they go in head-first and are killed instantly).
Wow. That's incredible.
I mean, I go through maybe four bags of groceries in a week ($50) and generate approx half a bag of garbage a week (If I wasn't so lazy I could reduce it further - I only recycle plastic) but damn, some of those families go through an incredible amount of food.
And then you look at the family from Chad and think "I waste a zillion times as much as they do!"
I wonder, though, how you could change it to make society less wasteful. Our entire infrastructure would have to change to support more local mass production of foodstuffs.
I also assume that you aren't buying for a four person family.
I think it would and it wouldn't. It's frustrating to live in a big city (Philadelphia) and see corner grocery stores every few blocks stocked with the same pre-packaged crap food you see in big supermarkets, and think that cities like New York along with (I assume) most of Europe have plenty of markets and shops selling fresh produce daily. I know it's a stereotype, but isn't part of living in Paris going out daily or every other day to buy all of your food, and none of it is pre-packaged?
What I'm getting at is that I think we in America have some of the infrastructure in place, at least in urban areas, but we're saddled with the cultural inertia of being used to pre-packaged non-local food.
Well, no, but take my x 4 = $200.
Four person family in that list = $500 or $341. I mean, there were others, but it's those ones that had me go :shock:
They did a report in Canada about how food is made, packaged and transported in relation to food spoilage. With how spread out the population is in Canada, a lot of what's done in Europe is simply not feasible because of distances involved. Europe is made up of small nations with dense populations. The example given was pastries, and this is why pastries used partially-hydrogenated oil (The source of trans-fats, I think?). It was a preservative because of how long the pastries were in transport for. So as we become more aware of the effects of these different things on human health, changes have to be made, but it doesn't change the fact that a lot of national and international companies struggle with getting foodstuffs across Canada cheaply because of the lack of population density.
Aha, I suspect that same thing is going on here, what with the state of big agribusiness and all. Very interesting.
The problem here is some heavily populated areas of the country suck for food production. Southern California, for example, is most desert. It grows food anyway, but the environmental consequences of that aren't great, and the result of trying to grow ALL the food for that area locally would probably be much worse than just shipping the stuff in.
We burn it or cook it or what have you, and we think that it's somehow free of its debilitating effect. But, there is the boot of a human which has sacrificed this animal, and the animal has bitten into the heel of the human. I don't want us to be put in a situation that would require some kind of revenge to be taken upon us. I don't want you hurting animals and then having, by law, to necessarily have them to hurt you. Red meat - where did we get this idea that read meat tastes good? Is it because it does? Or is it not because the joy you get through the consumption of an animal, you could get ten times the amount of joy in simply conferencing with their living self. Think about that.
That's definitely going to require some thought....
Although the initial point of true kosher slaughtering practices is to reduce cruelty to the animal alongside health reasons. The biggest problem I have with kosher slaughtering it's that it really can't be both done right, and done on a scale for mass production. You'd need a lot of rabbis. Let me get my books.
Of course it's absurd, but that's what you get when you just rely on "ability to feel pain." And if you are trying to say that certain animals have "more ability to feel pain" than others, try and define that. You'll see that it's just a synonym for cognitive complexity.
Okay, good point. It is a synonym for cognitive complexity---but there's more to it than that.
I'm not a biologist, but I'm operating under the assumption that vertebrates have a vastly different nervous system than invertebrates. While the complexity of sensations experienced by a chimp may vastly outweigh that of a chicken, there's still far more similarity in the basic feeling of pain and discomfort between the chicken and chimp than between the chicken and insect.
tl;dr - Dogs may not have the complexity of human emotion and sensation, but they still do have some emotion and sensation and that needs to be respected akin to humans'.
I usually find myself in near total agreement with RandomEngy, but I think this equating of "ability to experience pain" and "cognitive complexity" is spurious. Think of it thusly:
1) Certain electrochemical impulses in the peripheral nervous system (PNS) are a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for feeling pain.
- pretty much unchallengeable.
2) Given a particular level of (what we could call) PNS-based ability to feel pain, more cognitive complexity generally results in the experience of more pain.
- supported by a fair bit of research, and also backs up RandomEngy's stance.
3) It is possible to damage the PNS without otherwise impacting cognitive complexity.
- innumerable case studies on tissue damage, including cases like Gabby Gringas.
4) We have or will acquire the potential to genetically engineer animals with reduced or eliminated ability to feel the PNS-basis of pain.
5) Those animals will not be otherwise more or less cognitively complex.
Definitely open to challenge, but the point is that pain is a complex phenomenon that requires the participation of parts of the nervous system that are not otherwise involved in cognitive processes. Hence, the ability to feel pain cannot be equated with cognitive complexity.
This is why I think we should engineer cows and chickens who can't feel pain - to shut up the PETA people
This would actually be a poor move since they'd end up tearing their legs to shreds and cooking themselves on electric fences they didn't know they were being zapped by.
Why would they need legs? For that matter, why would they need any brain beyond the basic centers required for metabolic processes? Gengineering is so sweet. :twisted:
Once you get into it synthmeat could be awesomely efficient.
For... a kiss?
I don't know that animals are smart enough now to feel pain. Sure, I beat my dog around, and he cowers from me. You might take that as memory or learning, but he might just as well be cowering because it's how he says, "I love you." Just how I say "I love you, too" by throw glass vases at his tiny, metal, electrified cage while he sleeps.
We don't eat dog though. Chicken is fine, cow is fine. Fish is fine. Dog, though, sacred. Horse, not allowed. A cat is not fine, too.
Your sarcasm is either rampant and scary or this post is horrifying. I'm going with the former. Also, people eat feral cats in Australia. Kind of hard to disagree really, since feral cats want nothing to do with people and destroy wildlife, and frankly they'd do the same to us if for whatever reason we die or they learn to use guns and return fire.
You've heard that the dingo ate my baby. I'm trying to work it so my baby can eat the dingo. That's where I stand.
Maybe this debate wouldn't have people shouting "hypocrite!" if it were simply legal to eat humans. It is fairly easy to take the proper precautions to protect oneself from kuru.