Quote:Original post by Edtharan
You have to be actively conscious of the pain to fell pain (beyond just the stimulus/response). Even as a human if we are distracted from the stimulus/response of an injury we don't feel the pain. It is not just a matter of sentience, but it is applied sentience.

Then, what does this have to do with the morality of meat? Animals are clearly capable of sentience, so I still don't understand your point.

Quote:Compared to reality, the meat industry is down right humane. Despite all the really bad places.

I don't want you to take it personally, but I am rolling my eyes so hard right now. There's more to the meat industry than cutting a cow's throat. They feed them cheap corn, which the cows can't digest, and give them boatloads of drugs to counteract the sickness from the corn. There are also ridiculously packed pens for most animals. Egg-laying hens are kept in boxes hardly larger than their own bodies and have their beaks removed to keep them from injuring each other in such close quarters. I would rather suffer for 2 minutes at the hands (claws?) of a predator than live in that kind of nightmare my whole life.

I'm beginning to think one of us doesn't know nearly enough about the industry as a whole, but I'm only tangentially acquainted with it, so I won't make any hasty claims.

EDIT:
To reclarify my position, I think it's perfectly acceptable to eat meat, but that the cruelty associated with the industry is completely abhorrent. Deer hunters (assuming they shoot to kill and aren't sadists) are great.

[Edited by - templewulf on November 21, 2007 12:18:20 PM]

Quote:Original post by Way Walker
There's a few things:

• When I put on my underwear, I tend to be in a less social situation. I guess I could make the joke to myself, but I usually don't do that sort of thing.
  
• The evidence of the absurdity is present in a much more real form in the sandwich. Blood, sweat, and tears went into the production of my underwear and only metaphorically into the underwear itself; that chicken nearly literally gave an arm and a leg for my sandwich (technically, they use breast meat... if it were a bucket from KFC, then, yeah, that chicken really gave an arm and a leg), and that "arm and a leg" is physically present in my sandwich. Maybe if, instead of "Inspected by No.2" I found a bit of paper saying, "Help, I'm trapped in an underwear factory", then things would be different.
  
• I say it's absurd, but I don't necessarily take that to mean it's wrong. I mean, I think dreaming is quite absurd, but that doesn't mean I believe I've done anything wrong by dreaming. If I think any part of it is wrong, it's how we treat the animals before we eat them (I find the idea of boiling a lobster alive quite unsettling). In that way, you could say that I don't think the manufacturing and wearing of underwear is wrong, but the way we treat those who made it can be.
  

I can't say I understand your justifications. The world is full of cruelty and absurdity. Perhaps a better example than underwear would be diamonds. When you decide to marry, and go shopping for a diamond ring, will you take a friend along and then make a joke about Africans having their hands chopped off or worse?

I think these meat jokes are really about faux machismo, as BerwynIrish put it. I think they're very similar to misogynistic jokes that supposedly aren't to be taken seriously. Even I make these kinds of jokes every now and then, so I understand exactly why they're funny. I don't know if I would post them in a thread about women's rights, though, unless I was trying to irritate someone.

Quote:
It puts me off because it's not a "vegetarian recipe" it's a "recipe with fake meat instead of real meat".

It is a vegetarian recipe. Maybe it isn't a "vegetable" dish because the vegetables aren't in a "normal" form.

Quote:Original post by Edtharan
The animals suffer less at the hands of the meat industry than they would if they were allowed to "Run Free" and get eaten by "natural" predators.

That's a fallacious argument. Most of those animals would probably have never been born and of those that had, I'm not going to be convinced until I see hard numbers that they would mostly perish in the jaws of predators. And of those that do, their lives would arguably be better overall.

Quote:
Well I have been slapped by a Vegan because I said that I liked to eat meat.

Is that all you said? Or did you make a bad joke or an insulting comment for which you deserved to be slapped?

I've never been slapped by vegetarians. Most of the ones I've met have been quiet and unassuming and didn't force their views on me. The rest were on street corners yelling things or handing out fliers, but again, nobody has degraded or hurt me, or even made fun of me for eating meat.

On the other hand, I hear a lot of jokes about vegetarians. I guess it's funny because they're in the minority right? What easier a way to reaffirm how macho you are than by making jokes about a harmless minority groups' lifestyle choice.

I've indirectly encountered weird vegans through housing classifieds. I think they're weird not because they don't use animal products but because they're so insistent on living only with people who agree with them. I have my own pots and pans for God's sake! But that's about the weirdest I've encountered. I don't think it's a huge deal though.

I just want to know why it is more "ethical" to slaughter a plant and eat it than to do the same with an animal. You can't eat without killing something. Even if you decided that eating fruit isn't killing (it is but for those who disagree...) you still cannot live a healthy life on fruits alone.

Also, the OP mentions our molars, but what about our incisors and bicuspids?

Quote:Original post by T1Oracle
I just want to know why it is more "ethical" to slaughter a plant and eat it than to do the same with an animal. You can't eat without killing something. Even if you decided that eating fruit isn't killing (it is but for those who disagree...) you still cannot live a healthy life on fruits alone.

It is probably more ethical to slaughter a plant than a cow due to the fact that as far as we understand, plants do not consciously experience life, are not sentient, and do not experience pain. Obviously, reality dictates that we have to eat something. Our ethical standards will change over time with circumstances and values. Arguably, the shift has been towards an awareness that there is no fundamental difference between an animal's life and our own, and that we judge relative worth based on other criteria which are grounded in pragmatism and our perception of our identity as humans and empathy towards those of our own species.


You're not going to settle this argument with absolutes and meaningless logical extremes. You have to take the full complexity of it all into account rather than attempting to distill the problem into some simpler scenario.

Quote:Original post by Kest

Quote:Original post by trzy
It is probably more ethical to slaughter a plant than a cow due to the fact that as far as we understand, plants do not consciously experience life, are not sentient, and do not experience pain.

So we should measure what is okay to eat with the intensity of pain? Since humans feel the same type of pain as animals, do you find it just as acceptable to eat humans?

Pain is short-lived. And we don't really know how much pain plants feel. Why don't we measure with something more meaningful, like how acceptable it is to extinguish certain types of life? No one is enlightened enough to answer that. But since we are human, it makes sense to place humans above other types of life. And it makes sense to place things that are similar to humans above other types of life. And so on. Where you draw the line is entirely arbitrary.

I think you have to take into account sentience in determining what life you want to "extinguish." Of course it's arbitrary... the question is, where do you want to draw that line? Do you have compassion for your fellow man? Why do you empathize with people? Is it solely because of how much DNA they share with you? Or is it because you can relate to them and can understand what it's like to suffer when they suffer?

It seems perfectly reasonable to take this into account with regards to animals who are also sentient and who feel pain. They may not be your "fellow man", but they are fellow life forms, fellow observers of reality, and share common ancestry with you. If possible, I would argue that you should minimize other beings' suffering as much as you reasonably can be expected to.