Visiting the Farm Wednesday, Dec 30 2009
animal rights 2:05 am
Here they are: the pigs, cows, and chickens.
But wait! An earlier commenter here on Accelerating Future had a different view on this…
HITLER WAS A VEGETARIAN! Oppps, there goes another simplistic, Left Wing Marxist utopian dreamy wish for a perfect world using one simple idea.
Darwin was right, and by the way, the reason human beings have big brains is because we ate meat. Lots of it. It takes 22 cups of flour to get some of the same needed nutrients in 4 ounces of RED MEAT.
Now if you Vegetarians wish to retard yourself and your offspring, please do so, but don’t think that us aggressive, intelligent, predatory meat eaters are going to let you just pass by and go on your way.
No, we Predatory Meat Eaters will make good little slaves out of you vegetarians. And, you will be cheap to feed and do as you are told. Why? Because you won’t have the strength or the brain power to resist domination by us Predatory Meat Eaters.
Yes, please promote Vegetarianism and Passivity. It makes it easier for us Predatory Meat Eaters to round you up and Eat You!
LOL
Be a vegetarian, become a slave to meat-eaters! Witness how such a simple trigger causes such controversy — the reaction is even more intense than that to atheism. Repeat it again and again for maximum effect!
Michael:
Everyone understands, on some level, that many animal species are conscious and it is therefore we should not kill and eat them. As a society, we have developed elaborate rationalizations to hide this from ourselves. Whenever someone violates the taboo by piercing through the rationalizations it provokes a vitriolic emotional response. Exactly the same happens with criticism of religion.
I think they should teach basic philosphy, without fancy jargon, in junior high and high school. It never ceases to amaze me how often people like your commentator commit the naturalistic fallacy. How do people graduate high school and fail to understand the difference between an “is” (the universe as revealed by science) from an “ought” (our goals/values including compassion for others).
Good post.
Woow…what an idiot……
Do you think banning people from eating cows would remain to appear ethical when viewed from cows’ own perspective as a species? Being tasty and easily bred is their only evolutionary advantage, after all. Even humans complain when their profession grows obsolete, and they can always learn several new ones over the course of their own lifetime – cows would require generations for that, so doesn’t it seem like genocide to take the only thing they’re good at from them?
Not to mention the increased suffering of dying from natural causes – disease, starvation, predators, – compared to the current ‘murder’, which is rather humane (thanks, partially, to animal rights activists, of course).
Obviously, I do realize that killing a living being isn’t nice on its own, but the reality is more complicated than all this ‘ethical/unethical’ stuff.
“the reaction is even more intense than that to atheism.”
That’s because meat tastes better than communion bread.
Vasilii, you must look at the pictures first! If you think the killing of meat animals is humane, you have to look at the images, underground investigations, and reports.
It seems that only vegetarians really know what conditions are like in slaughterhouses and for animals growing up, because no one else cares. Even when I ate meat I enjoyed becoming familiar with where it came from — precisely. Practice standing in a dark closet for several days and eating only gruel to get a taste of the life of a veal cow, for instance.
Anywhere that easily verifiable reality conflicts with popular conception is ripe for surprises and controversy. There are many places where this happens, but the life of meat animals is such a radical example that we can only look upon it in wonder, and if we assign even the tiniest shred of awareness to these animals, horror.
OK, sorry for the whole humane/inhumane thing, cruel treatment of animals is obviously not a nice thing. But still, the interesting (to me) part was about the “species’ viewpoint”.
“As with all posts here on animal rights, commenting is forbidden, because I believe that 99% of people who eat meat are fundamentally unable to think clearly on the ethics of meat-eating, and their opinion is worthless.”
Your words, Michael, and I happen to agree with you.
Did I miss a post where you indicated you’d revised this stance? Why not stick to this policy?
Or perhaps a review system for comments, to prevent this kind of vileness from seeing the light of day?
Do you really think somebody who ends with “LOL” is anything more than a troll wanting to bait you? Her reaction showed you’d touched a nerve.
I strongly suspect that this is the same Judy Weismonger that posted here:
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2004/04/bomb-destroys-shia-mosque-in-iraq.html
I’ll let you draw your own conclusions on her posts there. Whole paragraphs in capitals, wow! Should you take such a person seriously?
Those who use Darwinian justifications for their views are hoisted by their own petard. So we should adhere to the Darwinian imperative, should we?
Well then, as the author of the ‘reprogramming predators” (which few here seem to done more than skim) said, by that logic, a stepfather should kill his stepchildren to eliminate competition with his genes, much as a young lion does when defeating an old male.
Civilized people find such a concept repugnant (although ‘Judy Weismonger’ clearly doesn’t) because we as a species have learned compassion – even if we don’t always exhibit it.
Weismonger, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t sneer at those who have the conviction to become vegetarians on the grounds of not wanting to take life, and then claim you are a compassionate person (unless you think compassion is only for us passive vegetarians) while spitting hate speech. You demeaned only yourself here.
I always find it amusing at the vitriol meat eaters pour on vegetarians, exposing the fact that their reaction is based on emotion, not ‘Objectivism and Reason’ that Weismonger espouses on her ‘blog’ on Salon.
If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say they resent having their conscience’s pricked by vegetarians.
Dman, some vegans got me to change my mind on allowing comments. I also realized that if I am so correct that eating animals is bad then arguments in favor of doing so would look stupid. So far, I am right.
In real life, the silliness dynamic would probably work against me, because even idiotic excuses build social solidarity. But here on the Internet, we are all separated in glass cages and normal social solidarity dynamics do not apply as readily.
I posted the Judy comment because of how radically unethical it shows she is. With enemies like these, who needs friends?
As a long-time member of the Tribe of Internet, I also have a penchant for Troll Analysis. Over the years, I have compiled a variety of exciting troll reactions in my personal archives, and I have every intention to keep gathering them.
Vasilii, the notion that the view of an individual cow and the view of what’s best for its species are the same thing is laughable. Only humans think on that scale, and we mainly do it only for social signaling when we do. Most organisms, and humans, just care about their own situation. Your idea of the “species view” harkens back to group selectionist theory, which got flushed down the toilet by evolutionary biologists several decades ago.
All I can say is that I hope that if we ever end up creating intelligences greater than our own that they have more ethical consideration for us “lesser” beings than we have shown to our animal relatives.
I think we should eat that guy – the world would be a nicer place.
More seriously, it’s funny how people always fall back on the “it takes X amount of single plant product to equal Y amount of meat”, where X >> Y. Because vegetarians can’t eat varied diets?
And most of the vegetarians I know (including myself no doubt) are much smarter than average.
Aw, come on, the “species’ viewpoint” was just a metaphor. What I meant to say was that being edible is the only cause why these species have come to their evolutionary prosperity. I’m not trying to claim that evolution and its results are somehow “right” or “moral” – but the alternative to being eaten is not having existed.
Just as you say, there’s a big difference between an individual cow’s view and the metaphorical view of “the cows”, but then, on the other side, there’s a difference between “stop eating animals” and “stop being cruel to animals”. Of course, it would (arguably) seem ethical in the long run to just sustain all living creatures and make their life as pleasant as possible, but the actual realization of this “there’s room for all god’s creatures” programme is a whole another matter.
But I still have to admit I didn’t really bother to seriously consider the actual situation with agricultural animals and their suffering before :(
Sorry, probably just a stupid load of BS from me tonight…
@Vasilii: The difference between you and I is that I consider a life where suffering significantly outweighs pleasure not worth living. This comes from a silly axiom of mine, which is that suffering = bad and bad = to be avoided.
If a cow’s pride at existing and at its species existing made it happy, I would draw a very different conclusion about the whole mess.
Joel
You said “And most of the vegetarians I know (including myself no doubt) are much smarter than average.”
Don’t we always consider those that agree with us more intelligent? I’m willing to bet that there is a fairly equal distribution of smart people on both sides (are you claiming that higher intelligence is the result of vegetarianism, or that smarter people are vegetarians? Just curious.)
Fact is, whoever says they know exactly how the body works and exactly what is “healthy” and “unhealthy” is lying, or fooling themselves. The body is still a bit of a mystery; and there are few obvious answers when it comes to health, fitness, and longevity.
I think the moral case for less-or no- meat consumption is wonderful. It’s when vegans and vegetarians move into health arguments that they start getting themselves onto shaky ground. Unfortunately, they make themselves complete untrustworthy when it comes to health, because they have ulterior motives not necessarily related to human wellness (I have no statistical evidence to back this up, but most vegetarians and vegans seem to be vegetarians and vegans for moral reasons; if I’m wrong about this, then ignore most of my argument.)
Confirmation bias has been well studied, people are much more likely to believe something if it confirms or supports their world-views. Health issues included. (Disclaimer: I am including meat-eaters in this.)
Which is not to say that a Vegan or Vegetarian diet is wrong, in terms of human health. There is plenty of science that suggests a vegetarian diet is very healthy (and some suggesting otherwise on certain issues.)
I guess my point is this: both rabid meat eaters and vegetarians have a tendency to omit data they don’t like and hype the data they do like. You shouldn’t trust either, but neither should you dismiss them offhand.
When even scientists can’t agree on what’s healthy (the shear amount of contradictory studies attests to that) the rational default position should probably be skepticism.
We do, though, have most of the data we need to have an intelligent, moral, and philosophical conversation about eating meat; which is probably what we should focus on.
Regards,
P.S. — Oh, and in terms of nutrition, Vegetarians can get pretty much anything meat eaters can from their diet (granted they might have to be a little more creative.)
This is an interesting article against the “health argument”:
http://www.veganoutreach.org/articles/healthargument.html
Vegan diet isn’t more or less healthy than a non-vegan diet –it depends on the food you eat. Someone just can be vegan without health problems, as the American Dietetic Association says:
http://www.eatright.org/About/Content.aspx?id=8357
Thank you for the post michael and the link to the pictures. I just found my New Year’s resolution.
An interesting post about intelligence and meat-eating:
http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/low-carb-library/are-we-meat-eaters-or-vegetarians-part-ii/
Anon, he’s right that our ancestors ate a lot of meat and meat was helpful to power the brain, but that doesn’t mean we will keep eating it forever. Vegetarians’ victory is a foregone conclusion, in fact, because in vitro meat will be cheaper and healthier than non in vitro meat.
> Vegetarians’ victory is a foregone conclusion, in fact, because in vitro meat will be cheaper and healthier than non in vitro meat.
If you want to defend vegetarianism on ethics, that’s fine, but I just don’t share your values. Nothing wrong on growing animals for food, as long as is done correctly.
But if you want to base your defense on health then you are dead wrong. To engineer “healhier meat” is, I suppose, possible, but we would need detailed knowledge of what is actually healthy for us, and we are on a terrible track record about it.
Meat and animal fat has been blamed for our modern illnesses, when the real culprits are probably industrial products with actually a vegetable origin: fructose (sugar and HFCS), refined carbohydrates (white flour), excess omega-6 from seed oils, etc.
So no, I don’t think so. Not for the foreseeable future.
Hi anon.
You think “nothing wrong on growing animals for food, as long as is done correctly”. Is it wrong to grow humans for slavery, as long as is done correctly?
> Is it wrong to grow humans for slavery, as long as is done correctly?
Obviously not. Maybe you don’t see the difference, I do. As I said, different values.
My point is just this: please let’s not mix personal ethics with objective facts about health.
Anon, the article by Eades is somewhat disingenuous.
Eades misses the point, as do many who defend meat-eating. The question is not if meat eating assisted our evolution, but where do we want to go from here?
And perhaps I’m wrong here, but do I understand correctly that:
A) the paper he bases it on was written by 2 anthropologists who are not evolutionary biologists (nor is Eades – he’s an m.d. with some metabolic and nutritional training, not the same thing).
B) They base a significant portion of their conclusions on papers written in 1961 and 1947? Has there been no research on this since 1961?
C) Paul Harvey of Oxford University, who IS an evolutionary biologist, disputes Aiello and Wheeler’s hypothesis. So this theory is hardly universally accepted in the scientific community.
Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to assume that meat eating, or more precisely cooperative behaviour in pack-based predation played a significant – if not vital – role in our evolution.
Again however, not the point that (reasonable) vegetarians are making.
“If we evolved because we ate meat, why would we want to stop now?” Eades asks. I don’t know – maybe because we want to evolve morally as well as biologically?
And because unlike gorillas, which indeed have smaller brains compared to more omnivorous primates, we actually have the means to have balanced neural nutrition without it.
Even more ridiculous is the argument in some of the commenters on Eades article that because we evolved as meat eaters, vegetarianism is ‘unnatural’.
Well so is our entire civilization an ‘unnatural’ artefact. We didn’t evolve wearing clothes, using medicine, flying aircraft and spacecraft, so we should remain naked, disease-ridden and earthbound by that logic.
Speaking for myself, vegetarianism is a sacrifice. I love meat. And I do agree it’s a lot easier to get energy and nutrition from a carnivorous diet than a vegetarian one. But for me it’s not about what’s easiest – I don’t like where the meat comes from.
To me it’s the height of hypocrisy for Western meat eaters react with horror to dogs being kept as food in the east, being left skinned alive in Hong Kong markets – but seem wilfully oblivious to equal and worse cruelty to equally intelligent pigs in battery farms. Perhaps some think that because cruelty is abundant in nature, we should perpetuate it.
Nature is harsh, brutal and pitiless. It is not our friend. Those who sing its praises in TV nature programs should cast their children into a savannah filled with hungry predators, or watch someone slowly die of cancer, then tell me how wonderful nature is.
It has a million ways to kill us. But are we ourselves a blind, insensate force of nature, or are we conscious beings?
Compassion is not ‘natural’ perhaps – but without it I think most would agree we are lesser beings. And to Eades question as to why we should stop eating meat – well, as the saying goes: “For those who must ask, no answer will suffice”.
It;s a democracy. And apart from it being a democracy, the system is hackable as cheese. I will seek to create a product that is (a) more nourishing than bacon, (b) healthier, (c) less ecologically damaging, (d) cheaper and (e) easier to produce.
Thereafter I will seek by democratic means, the road to treat dead animal eaters (*) as criminals, and seek to rehabilitate them. Since prisons are dehumanizing, and don’t work, I will see to apply what does work. I am thinking of using effective and humane psychotropic treatments to rehabilitate meat eaters in to synthmeat eaters. It is my democratic policy as a transhumanist semi-vegetarian (oops, I still eat meat every so often, especially in winters) to replace meat with something better, and after I have done that, treat meat eating as superfluous, immoral and criminal.
(*) dead animals with a brain, able to experience stuff. Who gives a hoot about brainless cows?
Hi Michael,
I’m fairly new to the transhumanist meme (sci-fi interest aside), but have been vegan for a few years. It’s interesting that you refer to ‘vegetarianism’ when talking about framing morals that respect sentient life. I think it’s all to easy with this terminology for people to think that consuming dairy products and eggs (amongst other animal products) is acceptable. I would argue (along the lines of philosophers Gary Francione and Peter Singer) that the moral baseline for anti-speciesism should be veganism. It’s impossible to divorce dairy and leather from the suffering (or even killing) of cows for example, or eggs from the killing of male chicks. For me, lacto-ovo-vegetarianism was always a half-way house.
If we want any future AGIs to respect us through learning from us, then veganism is surely a good start. Why should we expect a greater intelligence/sentience to treat us well, when we abuse so many lesser intelligences/sentiences ourselves? When even the most intelligent of us think it’s okay for animals to be abused for our pleasure/comfort, how can we expect any different from our superiors?
It would be interesting to know how many transhumanists are vegan. If it’s so few, is that just because they haven’t considered it? Is factory farming that under the radar of most people?
Hope this doesn’t appear like too much of a rant, I don’t mean it to be. I’d be interested to hear what transhumanists have to say on it though.
Greg, obviously everyone should be vegan, but there’s this radical concept that if you first get someone to do something easier then you can get them on the course to doing something harder.
Michael, “there’s this radical concept that if you first get someone to do something easier then you can get them on the course to doing something harder”: I’m not so sure that it’s so simple, or whether that is even correct in this case. I think that people are prone to resting on their laurels, especially if they think that what they are doing is enough. Another example of this would be people recycling and changing their lightbulbs, and then thinking they’ve “done their bit” for the environment.
From personal experience, I would suggest many lacto-ovo-vegetarians consider themselves to be “doing their bit”, even though they may be making no material difference to the amount of suffering farm animals endure; this considering that many largely replace their meat intake with cheese and eggs, which is often the case. These same vegetarians are disgusted by people eating meat, and consider themselves morally superior those who do. Yet, when challenged over the issue of dairy, will say that they couldn’t possibly give it up “because cheese tastes so good”, basically the same argument that the meat eaters use on them (“I couldn’t give up meat because meat tastes so good”)! I think most of this stems from the fact that lacto-ovo-vegetarianism is regarded as the moral baseline for compassion towards animals, and therefore as a sufficient end point for most people. (As an aside, it’s easy to see how this came about: meat is obviously and viscerally associated with death, whereas dairy isn’t)
I like Francione’s idea of “breakfast, lunch and dinner” as opposed to phasing out foods. See: http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/media/pdf/the-vegan-2010spring.pdf
Btw, having recently discovered your blog, I have to say that I find it very interesting. I’m in the process of signing up for cryonics. Most of my friends and family think I’m crazy, even if they didn’t already because of the veganism! :-)
Hmm, thanks for sharing your views on this. I guess I was being a bit over-snarky in my comment. I myself have been a lacto-ovo-vegetarian for more than a decade, and I always felt bad about not being vegan. More recently, I am making an effort to be “as vegan as possible”, but we have to understand that making good, fatty vegan food is very hard.
I disagree that lacto-ovo vegetarianism doesn’t avoid more animal suffering than meat-eating. Some people just assign chickens zero moral value, and while I assign them moral value just to err on the correct side, one can theoretically imagine someone who eats egg and fish but not mammals. The problem with cheese is that many people are undereducated when it comes to the process of making it. I only recently discovered, despite over a decade of being interested in veganism, that cheese necessarily supports the veal industry.
Taking the long-term view, I think that lacto-ovo vegetarianism is much better than nothing, and even if hypothetically it did nothing for animal suffering, it could be viewed as a stepping stone to veganism. You are going to have a way easier time getting a lacto-ovo vegetarian to quit all animal products than a meat eater.
In the end, I think all this is moot because only in vitro meat will end the suffering. There are many hundreds of millions of people in countries like India and China just getting involved with factory farming and I don’t think that moral arguments will carry much weight with many of them. (Except insofar as Hindus already forgo consumption of cattle.)
Thanks for reading, and congratulations on choosing to sign up for cryonics! I’m surprised that only a couple thousand people worldwide are signed up, but that’s much better than nothing.
“You are going to have a way easier time getting a lacto-ovo vegetarian to quit all animal products than a meat eater.” I’m still not convinced of this, going by experience. Whilst I have not managed to persuade any lacto-vegetarian friends to go vegan, my dad went straight from meat eater to vegan a couple of years ago!
As for in vitro meat, I think it’ll be great when it arrives, but in vitro dairy? That’s gotta be a long way off, surely (brainless automoton cows? direct molecular assembly?). At the moment the fake cheeses aren’t well liked by people who eat the real thing. [Personally, I found that after going without the real thing for a while you can eat decent fake stuff (I only really rate Sheese) and like it because you forget just what the real stuff tastes like and your palate adjusts.]
Regarding cryonics, I’m finding when discussing it with family and friends that a sticking point is over waking up in an alien future with no one you know there. I say, “well if you sign up too then at least we’ll know each other” But I guess it’s a case of early adopters being at a disadvantage in this sense. Then there’s also the Christian tradition that is rooted deep in the western civilisational psyche, even amongst secular agnostic society.
In all likelihood, for me the discussion is academic; I really just see cryonics as a temporary insurance policy. I think that rather than being frozen it’s more likely that either I’ll live long enough to be biologically immortal, or civilisation will decline/collapse for any number of reasons (I think there is a significant likelihood of this) rendering cryonics inoperable, or future reanimation highly unlikely.
Hi Greg, interesting stuff. I’ll still bet, that by the numbers, more people go from ovo-lacto to vegan than meat-eating to vegan, and I’ll bet the former prevails by a factor of 3-4, at least. It would be nice if there were studies on this.
I don’t see why in vitro dairy would be that much harder than in vitro meat. Cheese is just coagulated casein with various flavor-imbuing trace components. Brainless automaton cows at first, maybe (there are already prominent people proposing that in the UK), then perhaps detached organs. Within 50 years it seems likely to me.
I always thought that was an odd hangup on cryonics. People move to new cities all the time where they don’t really know that many people, if anyone. People make new friends all the time. If a tornado carried me to Oz tomorrow and I couldn’t get back, that would be very unfortunate, but I don’t think I would spontaneously self-detonate or anything. Sometimes people’s families and closest friends are killed in accidents — does that mean it’s time to stop living? I love my friends but I don’t think that my life is only worth living because I happened to meet them. If I were incidentally born somewhere else, I would have made new friends there and wouldn’t even notice that I wasn’t friends with my current friends, otherwise we would have still run into each other over the Internet.
Sorry for the rant, I just wanted to get out my ideas on that one, because I’ve heard it enough that it’s now obviously a salient issue.
I generally agree with you on cryonics. The chance of cryonics being useful could be lower than 1%. I am interested in the design of a totally automated nuclear-powered cryonics facility. That might allow a cryonics facility to survive a major disaster like nuclear war with a minimal and grateful staff. Such a facility would be possible today if someone had enough money. Bodies could be maintained for thousands of years if there is only a continuity of people who are competent and care, and they aren’t devoured by really huge disaster. Global EMP could theoretically take us back a hundred years in progress, for instance, but as long as there are facilities to manufacture replacement parts for refrigeration tools to produce liquid nitrogen, it’s fine. An EMP-shielded machine shop would be sufficient for a few decades of success. Eventually you’d need to smelt iron for it.
The “Hitler was a vegatrain” line was actually a piece of Nazi propaganda, designed to make him seem more “pure.” In reality, old Adolph favored snacking on a greasy type of sausage that left him flatulant. And really, what’s more charming than a flatulant Hitler?