integral domain

I really hate it when people say this to me. It's like saying "you can think what you want... just keep your mouth shut about it." Well, you can... @#%$^&.... nevermind. I have the right to try to get people to see things my way. If they don't want to listen, then they can just walk away. I'm not going to chain anyone up and ~impose~ my beliefs on them Funny... this is exactly what christians tell me when I say I'm agnostic; "that's nice... just don't try to impose your beliefs on us."

Sorry... that phrase just really irks me.

Look, my arguement is much too single to warrent all this verbage... I think animals can feel pain (or, sensations in response to damage, or, discomfort... however you want to say it). I don't think one has to have human consciousness to feel pain or discomfort... and really, you can't prove me wrong here. In my experiences with animals... it seems to be that they feel physical pain just the same way humans do... and all the scienctific evidence supports this. That would be why animals are used in medical experiments.

SO! SINCE I BELIEVE ANIMALS CAN FEEL PAIN... and there's NO WAY to prove they can't.... I THINK IT'S WRONG TO HURT OR KILL THEM FOR LUXURY!!

It's so simple... geez. I don't see what the big fuss is about... if you don't think animals feel pain, fine! Then don't be a vegetarian.

integral domain

I understand what you're saying... but I still don't think it makes my conclusions illogical...

I do not shellfish or fish... or ANYTHING WITH A NERVOUS SYSTEM. COme on... you have to see why I drawn the line where I do. It has to do with nerves... and sensation. You can chose not to draw the line where I have and that's fine... but don't telll me I've just "arbitrarily" drawn the line.


no no no no pay attention... this is not the dictum... the dictum is "do not kill or severely harm living things WHICH CAN FEEL PAIN for food." And, I believe anything with a nervous system can feel pain.

integral domain

Thank you for your honesty with us and with yourself. That's really very admirable.

I like chicken a lot too... sometimes it's REALLY hard for me not to eat it. And tuna too... and beef... I actually love meat. I used to eat it a lot. It was really hard for me to give up... and in fact, took me nearly a year to completely give up. It is hard.

Why don't you try morning star products? Their "chicken" nuggets are almost like the real thing.

integral domain

AWESOME!! I wish I could be there. I'm a math major in college... in case you haven't guessed. Where do you go to school?

Chicken Girl

Well, of course. I'm an emotional creature, and I wuv widdle furry cuddly things, and therefore I'd rather not eat them. Especially if they're kept in a tiny dirty smelly cage with barely enough room to stand up and turn around, sitting in their own feces, the farmer takes their children and kills them for veal and then hooks them up to a milk machine all day...

That's just plain evil.

I'd consider it if (a) I were starving or severely malnourished or in danger of being in such a condition in the near future, and (b) there were no other suitable food around, or just a coconut tree and a couple of potato plants or something. (hey, I'm a realist. A woman cannot live on spuds alone, and if I were in a situation like the one described I would just be forced to accept it and do what I had to do.)

hey, haven't you heard? Carrot juice constitutes murder!

but seriously, as far as I'm concerned there are enough definite differences between the animal and plant kingdom for me to feel comfortable "discriminating". An animal can move around, it's aware of its surroundings, it interacts with others, it has a personality and emotions (obviously to varying degrees depending on which animal we're talking about), a plant sits there turning sunlight and nutrients into flowers, seeds, pollen and fruit and looking pretty.

Obviously, I'm simplifying quite a bit but that's how I see it.

oh, agreed. They give the rest of us a bad name.

Oxymoron

I could live without chicken nuggets... but a tandoori chicken, red, tender and juicy, brought smoking from the oven on a bed of caramelised onions... argh! I'm sitting there with my tarka daal and some lucky bastard at the next table has just received THAT.
(Tarka daal is very nice too, I have to say).

I have also given up meat sausages because, well, there is no meat in them anyway: it's all skin, bone, gristle and eyeballs And Morning Star "streaky strips" are just enough like bacon to stop me grumbling.

fried beef sandwich

I'm a ... hm...

actually, you can probably tell from my name.

Oolon Colluphid

Hiya Chris
No, the other way around. It is a lack of empathy with organisms that are sufficiently unlike us that suggests an ignorance of evolution. Let me lay it out.

• We are empathetic creatures: we have an ability to ‘read’ the emotions of our fellow humans from their behaviour.
  
• It is hardly surprising that we also do this for other species. This, inevitably, is easiest for those species that are most like us: because they are more closely related, they share more of the signals we read as pain, suffering etc.
  
• Side issue: This happens whether they are in fact experiencing these things or not -- they may well just be putting out the signals. They themselves do not have to be conscious for behaviour that amounts to shouting ‘help me!’ to have a selective advantage. We are so comfortable with our own consciousness that we assume everything else has it too -- despite the fact that it is possible even for us to perform complex actions while sleepwalking, it just doesn’t occur to us that the rest of nature might be permanently sleepwalking. (Consciousness is a complex thing. Complex things require an evolutionary explanation. And this will include a reason for the complexity being there. IOW, if consciousness doesn’t serve a substantial purpose to any/all living things, and/or is not required to explain what we see, then other animals may not have it. We should be wary of assuming either way. Personally, I’m inclined to think it is our empathy that makes us see consciousness wherever we look... except in those things too alien to us.)
  
• Therefore we are most easily bothered by such behaviour in our fellow mammals. Animals that exhibit diminishingly fewer or none of the usual signals -- fish, or arthropods, or polychaete worms -- we literally find it harder and harder to empathise with. (But we nevertheless try, because we feel that in so-and-so circumstances they must be experiencing these feelings. Hey, maybe they are.)
  
• We stretch our empathetic capabilities near breaking point with things with rudimentary nervous systems... and we can’t manage it at all for things like plants. They are simply too alien for us to get upset about.
  
• Now the crux: evolutionarily, there is no difference between plants, animals, fungi, viruses, protists or bacteria. They are all ‘here’, their lineages have equally well survived into the present. No species is ‘better’ or ‘worse’; no species is ‘more advanced’ or ‘less advanced’, ‘superior’ or ‘inferior’. Each is well adapted to its niche, and its genes have every bit as much right to be here (by virtue of past success) as every other.
  
• All organisms -- every living thing -- are all part of the tree of life. This is a tree that grows not vertically through the air, but through time. Imagine ‘now’ as a horizontal straight plane, pruned flat across the top of a tree. Each twiglet protruding into the ‘now’ is just as relevant as any other. They have all made it this far.
  
• As before, we most readily empathise with those twiglets in the ‘now’ that are most like ourselves. But stand on the plane of ‘now’ -- a perspex platform atop the tree, if you like -- and look around. On what grounds do we decide that this group of twigs should be protected from harm while those over there can be treated however we wish? Is such a ring-fence made on moral grounds not arbitrary?
  
• Conclusion: in an ideal world where we could synthesise our own food as plants do, if we decide that species should be protected in principle, then we ought to treat all living things with equal respect. Instead, we use our empathetic nature to justify unequal treatment.

This is, incidentally, exactly the same reasoning I would use in favour of conservation of biodiversity. If we put a value on any other organisms at all (and I do), then a ‘lowly’ snail, or bacterium, or fern, or mushroom, or amoeba... ought to be just as precious to us as a chimpanzee. Yet that is not how it works with us empathetic humans. Try making a collection for (a) gorilla conservation, and (b) conservation of the rare Grimmia moss, and see how much each raises.

Returning to the original topic, my conclusion is simply that, since we do not have a choice but to eat other organisms, what does it matter which of the twiglets in the ‘now’ plane we take our food from? Provided, of course, that we do our best to avoid unnecessary pain and suffering, just in case other animals do happen to experience these things as we do.

Clear now?

Cheers, DT

Oolon Colluphid

You eat otters ??

DT

Oxymoron

Geez. This is just one of those "moral equivalence" arguments that is just used as a shield from having to feel a bit guilty about the choices we make.

To paraphrase (and exaggerate): "I can't be perfectly good therefore I might as well be perfectly evil".

Most vegetarians are quite clear about what they will and won't eat - anything that has a central nervous system, basically. Seems reasonable. Maybe animals with a CNS do suffer when being farmed, maybe they don't (I believe they do, in a limited way). If it was demonstrated that they did, would meat-eaters stop eating meat? Bet you a pound and a pomegranet they wouldn't, because meat-eaters like eating meat and any other argument is just smoke and mirrors.

This has been admirably demonstrated in the UK, where despite terrible disease outbreaks that threaten human life directly through the consumption of meat and have been entirely caused by despicable farming practices - CJD and salmonella, in particular - meat consumption has not been adversely affected.

So these moral equivalents are not made because omnivores feel strongly about carrots suffering. The fact is, they don't care. All that they care about is that their choices are not questioned because that might make them feel uncomfortable.

Hmmm... reminds me of something.