[Answered] Why is the consumption of Meat considered bad
I heard something to do with Nitrogen and …cow farts(?) I am really unsure of this and would like to learn more.
Answer -
4 Parts
- Ethical reason for consuming animals
- Methane produced by cows are a harmful greenhouse gas which is contributing to our current climate crisis
- Health Reasons - there is convincing evidence that processed meats cause cancer
- it takes a lot more calories of plant food to produce the calories we would consume from the meat.
Details about the answers are in the comments
Because you need considerably more resources to grow meat than you need to to grow a nutritionally equivalent amount of vegetables.
The basic problem is that to get 1000 calories of beef, you need to feed the cow something like 10,000 calories. So growing a cow is actually growing an entire field of wheat/corn/etc., then feeding it to the cow, then eating the cow.
Farming all of those crops for the animals takes up a lot of land, consumes fresh water, produces wastes, and uses oil/gas (for farm equipment directly, or to produce things like nitrogen fertilizers) which produces co2. Cows also produce methane (that's the fart thing) which is a bad greenhouse gas.
You could just eat the wheat/corn/etc. directly (most of the time) and skip the meat step therefore saving a massive amount of environmental impact.
Meat sure is tasty though.
I remember driving through Iowa and seeing vast fields of corn and learning that the majority of that corn was not even destined for human consumption. That kinda blew my mind.
Luckily there is still enough left over to poison the population with high fructose corn syrup
If America was a food, it would be sugar and high fructose corn syrup.
You wanna know another fact? Not all corn can be consumed by humans. There is actually corn that can only be eaten by animals like cows.
Plus is the fact that not all plants have the right amount of vitamins and minerals necessary to maintain the human body like meat does. Although it is possible, it does require research and monitoring to ensure that your getting all the nutrients you need. And yes, meat just tastes good.
What kind of bullshit are you peddling?
If you're discussing complete proteins then all it takes is rice and beans. Not particularly difficult given that about half the world population survives on that without much meat.
But growing a cow that eats the grasses makes it for I get the meat and the vegetables all at once and it tastes great /s
Cow farts are methane, which are a more aggressive form of greenhouse gas, though with shorter lifespan.
Here's more info about meat and the environment.
For the cancer risk, this is the pertinent info:
That's about half a hot dog. Seeing as the news isn't exploding, this means that this is relative risk. Meaning your current chances of getting colorectal cancer is X. Eating a hot dog every other day continuously multiples your chance by 1.18. American Cancer Society states that over their lifetime, 1 in 23 men (4.35%) of men will develop colorectal cancer. This means if you ate 1 hot dog every other day continuously, a man's odds of contracting colorectal cancer changes from 4.35% to 5.13% over their lifetime.
That's just for colorectal cancer. It also affects other types of cancer (like breast cancer) and increases the chance of dying from heart disease considerably.
But there weren't any good numbers on those I saw in there. Which is why I ignored the entire "meat" claim as it didn't list useful metrics. "Might cause cancer" doesn't really help anyone. There only seemed to be useful data about processed meat and colorectal cancer.
A lot more water to make the food for cows than what humans consume.
A lot more food to feed a cow than what it would take to feed the human the same type of food.
And the growth of that food to keep feeding these animals in large batch is pretty much creating dead areas of land that gets ruined if it’s not carefully monitored. And the run off into the water supply is a problem. This is why industrial level of farming is really really bad for the environment.
You’re supposed to move cattle around in pastures for regrowth and not entirely decimate it. The capitalists do not care about that until a court summons tells them to care about that.
Currently there’s some better methods however the consumption stays high.
Health wise : all meat diets (meat at every meal) can produce issues in your body.
Cured meat or heavy salted meat can lead to heart issues and kidney stones.
You should mix in some fruit and vegetables and maybe even substitute some entire meals so that meat is consumed only a few times a week if only for your body’s sake. Your taste buds aren’t the same organ as your heart. They aren’t the organs that make your body stay alive.
animals are fed parts of plants that people can't or won't eat. all of the studies about the ecological impacts ignore this fact and then attribute the water used to produce, say, cotton to beef.
Is not the point of the argument when we’re taking about what humans shouldn't eat. We can’t cater to wants anymore when growing percentage are starving.
Which is bullshit. We didn’t invent their diet. we substituted it. They might eat grass but we eat plenty of other green substitutes. The amount we consume of it doesn’t come close to their needs though.
cows eat mostly grass but, for instance, poultry are fed a lot of soy. that soy is usually (almost always) in the form of so-called "soy meal" or "soy cake", but that is actually a waste product from pressing soybeans for oil. it would be industrial waste if we didn't feed it to livestock.
Soy oil is only one form of oil that humans can use. One of many. none of this argues the points put forward. It still requires much more water than if we stuck to humans eating less meat. And it not even requiring for people to completely cut out meat. Which has more pros for both humans and cows than cons.
~This is false. Cows in the US are primarily fed corn. Not the can't/won't eat stuff.~
Edit: I am wrong. They said only fed about 8% human edible grain.
Your edit is actually missing the biggest reason--all the energy and water it takes to raise the meat. It's just not sustainable.
Most tree and forest loss is from making land for grazing.
Not for grazing but for crops that are fed to animals in animal agriculture.
over 80% of soybeans are pressed for oil for human uses.
Without a source this is just a bogus claim.
here you go:
https://ourworldindata.org/soy
a soybean is only about 20% oil. in order for 17% of all end uses of soybeans to be oil, we need to press about 85% of them. which is exactly what the usda says:
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/soybeans-and-oil-crops/oil-crops-sector-at-a-glance/
76% of soybeans world wide are used as animal feed as per your own source. I'm not sure what you are trying to argue with your original comment to me?
the bulk of what's fed to animals is industrial waste from making soybean oil.
Care to quote the relevant parts of your sources? I'm not going to read everything from that just to find this claim.
both of them are pretty light reads.
if you prefer to live in ignorance I am not going to stop you.
You provided the sources, so you read them right? It shouldn't be a problem for you to quote your sources to support your claims.
Thank you for quoting the relevant part.
But I think you are interpreting this wrong. This doesn't say that 80% of soybeans are pressed into oil at all. It says that 80% are processed into soybean meal (which gets fed to animals) and oil (which are mostly for human consumption). And with the data from ourworldindata it means that around 80%-13.2%=66.8% (very roughly) of soybeans are processed into soybean meals which is also very similar to the data ourworldindata provides:
Emphasize mine.
soybean meal is the byproduct of pressing soybeans for oil. you can't press soybeans for oil without getting the byproduct.
oh I see where you made a mistake. you didn't account for the 4% at the bottom of the chart. and you don't seem to understand that soy meal is the by-product of pressing soybeans for oil. That's soybean is only about 20% oil. In order for 17% of all end uses of soybeans to be oil about 85% of all soybeans must be pressed for oil The byproduct of that process produces soy meal that soy meal makes up about 69% of the weight of the entire soybean crop. that by-product is what is fed to animals.
How do you come to this conclusion? The data on ourworldindata is showing "the allocation of global soy production to its end uses by weight". Which means the "Oil (13.2%)" is the percentage of the total weight of the global soy production that is processed into oil.
Of what chart?
The core issue is soil quality. Without sufficient organic content in the soil, all our food, whether it be plant or meat, has drastically reduced nutritional content meaning we need to consume more for the same effect. We're heading for a global food shortage because of the one key issue. Healthy soil also sequesters an enormous amount of carbon from the atmosphere. So instead of fighting the beef vs tofu wars, we should be focusing on encouraging agricultural practices that enrich soil rather than destroy it. We have about 50 years of crop cycles left before the majority of arable earth turns to sand.
Shifting your diet to be more plant-based is a good idea, but it's not the crux of the issue.
Bam!
Ask the cow what she thinks?
She said moo
To learn more about the environmental impact of meat consumption, I recommend this Our World in Data article: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
I would highlight this chart: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-per-protein-poore?country=Pig+Meat~Beef+%28beef+herd%29~Eggs~Lamb+%26+Mutton~Grains~Milk~Other+Pulses~Poultry+Meat~Tofu+%28soybeans%29~Peas~Nuts~Groundnuts~Fish+%28farmed%29~Cheese~Beef+%28dairy+herd%29~Prawns+%28farmed%29~Tofu
For example, getting 100 g of protein from beef emits ~ 50 kg of CO2. Getting 100 g of protein from tofu only emits ~ 2 kg of CO2.
animals are fed parts of plants that people can't or won't eat. all of the studies about the ecological impacts ignore this fact and then attribute the water used to produce, say, cotton to beef.
This is simply not true. Globally, 77% of the land area that's used for agriculture is used either by livestock or to grow food to feed to livestock (such as corn and soy). Only 23% is used for crops for direct human consumption (1): This makes sense intuitively: If I feed a cow 1 kcal of energy, it will create way less than 1kcal of energy to be consumed. In fact, beef has an energy efficiency of 1.9%. This means, for every 100 kcal the cow eats, you only get out 1.9 kcal (2). Otherwise, cows would defy the laws of physics. Do you really think that the 74 billion chicken, 620 million sheep and 330 million cattle that we slaughter each year for meat just are fed human-food leftovers? (3)
1: https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture 2: https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production#energy-conversion-efficiency 3: https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production#livestock-counts
but cows are pastoral animals an eat mostly grass, not crops. and soy is a great example of what I'm saying: over 80% of soy is pressed for oil, and the industrial waste from that process is most of the soy that is fed to animals.
Because the amount of resources required to raise the livestock required to support the free market of meat is unsustainable. Also the impact of all that livestock is a huge contributor to climate change. So besides the moral argument of it being wrong to eat another living beings there is a very real danger to ourselves in the future.
I think everything has been addressed. I just wanted to clarify that the methane is from cow burps, not farts.
One other thing I think is worth mentioning: meat is good, but it’s not even that good. As a child I was a very picky eater and largely carnivorous, having to purposefully supplement the occasional vegetable. Now I’m essentially pescatarian because honestly, most meat isn’t really good. It can be low quality, bland, and boring. Innovative chefs seem to be realizing that, and I personally agree that Eleven Madison’s food is better now that it’s fully plant based.
Meat can be such a crutch, and when it’s not, it requires quality cuts and good preparation. And yet many people would rather eat a tough, poorly seasoned mediocre steak than a vegan dish, even if it’s genuinely a bad experience, but I’m pretty sure it’s a misplaced pride thing.
Finally, working with meat can be a lot harder than vegetables, especially chicken. Dominique Crenn has a wonderful cookbook featuring incredible plant based dishes, and of course Atelier Crenn is one of the most convincing arguments of plant superiority.
I find that, for those who simply don’t care about the world around them, an appeal to taste and ease is far more effective than trying to introduce humanity. It also prevents the knee jerk reaction to plant based diets— “sure, I like my meats too, but it’s just too boring/doesn’t taste good enough” shifts the discussion from tribalistic hatred of vegans to something that directly impacts them, largely the only way to actually get some people to listen.
Feeding cows takes up a lot of land, which often requires deforestation.
I'm going to piggyback off of this too since i havn't seen it mentioned as much, cows need a LOT of water. They are literally walking bathtubs (the average cow stomach is the size of a tub, i have a bachelor's in animal science and actually have seen in one ><) and this is why it baffles me when someone talks about the water need for plants or things like almond milk. It's not even comparable as far as efficiency is concerned, and honestly, plant producers have actually worked to be better at water conservation since it's important to them, but most cow production doesn't even consider it into the equation.
I did not know this; thank you for enlightening me. I should go back to being a vegetarian....
Np! And I'm going to say something controversial to my fellow vegetarians and vegans. Giving up meat can be very very hard depending on your personal circumstances. I grew up 30 minutes away from any groceries in cow country. I'm also autistic with mild food issues. It's taken me a long time, work, and circumstances changes (i live in a nice vegetarian friendly city now) to get where i am now. I think the "do or you are a utter failure" that is rampant in anti meat spheres is honestly to its harm. Instead of encouraging everyone to do their best while we fight for better systematic changes, there is scorn and fingerwagging if someone isn't perfect.
That's an excellent point! I totally agree harm reduction is the goal here.
However and alas, I have absolutely no excuse living where I live and having the extensive cooking skills I gained over the years. No excuse at all. It's on my mind a lot lately.
Because it's speciesism. If we started giving birth to humans to eat them, that would be absolutely outrageous, but to do that to animals seems perfectly fine to most people. Animals have the same desire as we do not to be killed or abused, and to live a happy life.
This argument also implies that "dominionism" is wrong, i.e. all life has a right to not be killed or abused. Yet human life is impossible without killing and consuming other living organisms, be it plants, animals og fungi. Thus it is unethical to continue living.
This argument is bad, because for human life to be possible, you must draw the line between life that you consider ethical to kill and life that you consider unethical to kill.
It's not about "all life" but about "all sentient life". Only beings that are able have pleasant and unpleasant experience should be considered. If something (living or not) cannot experience suffering then you can't harm it, by definition.
Sentience is studied scientifically. It cannot be stated with absolute certainty but scientists have good sets of criteria and experiences that helps identify it. With the current knowledge it's almost certain that all mammals are sentient, like us. Fishes and birds are also very likely to be sentient. Some species of insects are probably sentient while others may not be. And plants are likely not sentient.
But even if all living things are sentient, it doesn't change very much. Speciesism means treating beings differently only because they belong to some specific species. There are good reasons to treat different beings differently but they should be based on the beings' interests, not their species (and studying sentience helps identifying these interests). It's very likely that we do less harm by growing plants than by breeding animals. And even if it was the same amount of suffering we would still do less harm by avoiding eating animals because breeding them to eat them actually requires more plants than just eating plants. We should seek to minimise suffering and avoiding eating animal is a good way to do that.
I don't agree on your analysis of sentience. The term sentience has no concrete meaning, so how can you base your moral judgements on this? Plenty of plant life has senses and are able to "feel" things.
This follows no definition of harm that I am aware of, and I do not agree with it. If you are not aware that you have been harmed, you are still harmed. So you should also be able to be harmed even when you could not be aware of it. Therefore, I do not accept this sentiocentric (just learned this word) argument.
And this is one of those reasons. A human's (or any other animal's) continued existence is mutually exclusive with the food's continued existence. If we do not follow speciest dogma, we might as well eat other humans.
I've heard this tired argument that plants and sentient mammals have the same capacity for suffering so many times. I think it is a disingenuous way of excusing the suffering your choices support.
A plant does not grieve when it's offspring is removed from it. It does not have fear, or joy. Plants don't play with each other and bond.
Yes. They communicate, and react to stimuli. So does a computer, but neither are sentient
I don't think it is disingenuous at all. You may draw the line at sentience, but you have provided no argument for why this is correct. Why must we consider the harm exactly up to sentience? Why must we only consider conscious pain resulting from harm, and not nociception? It is easy to dismiss people as disingenuous, especially if you don't really have any arguments for your case.
I don't see how there can exist any good arguments for where to draw the line, which is why it bothers me when people claim the moral high ground, but cannot offer any arguments on why their behaviour is most morally correct. You can say "reduce suffering of sentient beings", and most people probably agree, but I think it is completely natural to prioritise yourself, your family and friends and your species above other animals. So how much suffering of yourself is as important as the suffering of a chicken. Probably substantially less. I don't think you will ever convince anyone of your beliefs by simply denying that their weightings of human-to-animal suffering is wrong and yours is right.
That's a lot of rationalization with no facts to back it up.
I'm getting a "well ackchually" vibe from your comment. If I put a mouse on the ground next to a flower and told you to stomp one of them to death, You would be comfortable with either option equally?
Yes plants respond to negative stimuli, that doesn't imply suffering on the level of a conscious being.
You're making a lot of assumptions about my beliefs in your comment. I do not believe any animal has more right to life than any other animal. With that said if you are in the woods trying to survive like our ancestors then your biological needs take priority, you can't survive on plants in winter. The thing is that is not our reality. We are wolfing down red meat giving ourselves colon cancer needlessly. Trading suffering for joy, not suffering for survival
I, honestly, have no idea what you are talking about. Which facts would you find relevant in a philosophical discussion on morality?
I am sorry you feel that way, that was not my intention.
Honestly I find this example a little comical because I think most people would definitely choose to rid themselves of the pest and keep their pretty flower. However, I do understand your sentiment. I don't think my personal views really matter, but I have some rough hierarchy of living organism ordering how highly I value their interests. For example, I think a human is more important than a mouse to me, so I would rather kill a mouse than a human, if I had to choose. Similarly, I think a hare is more important than a flower, so I would rather kill a flower than a hare.
I am sorry, I have incorrectly conflated your comment with that of the original.
These to statements are completely contradictory. You are more important than other animals, thus you sacrifice them for you own survival. If you have no more "right" to survival than a hare, how is it ethical to kill it to ensure your own survival?
It does have a concrete meaning. Scientific papers usually define what they are studying. For example the Review of the Evidence of Sentience in Cephalopod Molluscs and Decapod Crustaceans has a definition. It also has criteria to evaluate it.
Having reactions to external stimulus is different from having feelings. Feelings require consciousness, or sentience.
Even having nociceptors doesn't mean you can experience pain (see the above review in the "Defining sentience" section).
Yes you can be harmed without knowing it, but it still must have a negative effect on you. If something can't have negative (or positive) experience then how can you say it's being harmed?
If I throw a rock to the ground, it doesn't make sense to say I harmed the rock, because a rock can't experience being harmed. Being sentient is having this ability to experience being harmed. That's why I meant it's by definition that non sentient beings can't be harmed. The word exists to distinguish what can and cannot experience harm (among other feelings).
But having food doesn't necessarily mean harming something. And even if it does, different foods have different level of harm. We can choose the foods that minimize harm.
Indeed meat eaters don't really have good reasons to exclude human meat.
When I say concrete meaning I mean that sentience is an abstract concept of which we can observe evidence of, but we cannot define clearly what it is. In the report you mentioned, you will see that they give 8 criteria for scientific evidence of sentience, i.e. these do not define what sentience is, but they are criteria that we presume sentient beings should satisfy. They even require several pages to explain the complications of how to define sentience and how to observe it.
I do admit that the extent of study on sentience of animals is greater than I initially thought, and I can see that one might have reasonably sufficient knowledge to judge, with some certainty, which life organism might be sentient (under definitions such as the one used in the report). But it seems to me nearly all animals fall under this umbrella of "some level of sentience", I found this paper highlighting that many insects seem to have cognitive abilities, and might be capable of feeling harm. So to what extent must this go, can you not swat a mosquito in fear of its suffering?
But a rock is not alive, there is no evolutionary force driving its interest, as with all other living organisms. A sea cucumber has no proper nervous system (as I understand from a quick search), and thus could not "feel" pain. Yet, if you cut one in half, I would say that you have harmed it. But this is really just discussing the semantics of the word "harm", the real point is that you are doing something to the organism that goes against its natural interests.
Yes they do, speciesism. A quite natural reason.
Swatting a mosquito generally doesn't induce suffering, if it's done quickly. And since they are not social animals other mosquito probably won't suffer from the loss.
But yes, if an animal is probably sentient you should avoid inflicting pain to it, for the same reason you should avoid inflicting pain to humans: because they can suffer.
Indeed, but going against natural interests or not is not the point. The point is about suffering. And more specifically the fact that the amount of suffering we inflict to animals to eat their meat would be inacceptable if it was done to humans.
That's like saying people have a good reason to beat people who don't look like them: racism.
This is like saying it is okay to kill a lonely person with no friends and family, as long as it is an instant death.
I don't agree with you that suffering is the single center concept to base your moral judgement on these issues. Not all living things that i care about are able to suffer, and I do not care about all living things that do suffer. I do not care that i cause a mosquito suffering by killing it (wounding it), if it is sucking my blood, or even just being annoying when flying around me, because I value my comfort above its existence (and suffering). I expect you do the same? This is speciesism.
Except we both agree that racism is wrong. We do not both agree that speciesism is wrong.
No, it is more like saying it doesn't cause suffering, which is true. Whether it's ok or not is another matter, but some could argue can be.
I didn't say suffering is the single center concept to base moral judgment on, although some moral philosophers argue it is (negative utilitarians). But suffering is the main problem with speciesism: we accept much more suffering on non-human animals than we do on on humans, for no good reason.
If you care about things that cannot suffer, then you do not care for their well being, since they can't experience well being. It may be a semantic problem here, because I thought caring was about the other's well being.
Anyway what you do care about is not really relevant unless you consider we should just follow our instinctive morality. What I was discussing is what we should care about.
No, I would avoid causing suffering to the mosquito (for example by moving it our of the room or protecting myself). And if killing it is the only practical way to make it stop being an unacceptable annoyance I would still try to minimize its suffering. It's not speciesism because I would apply the same logic if it was a human or any other species.
And yet speciesism is very similar to racism. It's the same mechanism. Racism is a discrimination on irrelevant characteristics like skin color, and speciesism is a discrimination on irrelevant characteristics like cognitive ability, cuteness, ability to talk, etc.
In both cases these characteristics are irrelevant when we try to decide whether we can cause suffering to these beings. The only relevant characteristic is whether they can suffer.
why should sentience matter at all?
Because if something is not sentient it cannot have negative experiences, so it can't be harmed.
so?
The question was "why is eating meat bad?", my answer is something like "because to have meat you must harm animals", and someone answered that "we always harm something when we eat" and my answer is "no, there are foods that you can't harm because they are not sentient".
first, you can't prove plants aren't sentient. second even if you could, why should sentience matter? what ethical system even accounts for sentience as a factor of right behavior?
And you can't prove something is sentient. But scientists have criteria that help determine whether a species is sentient. See this review for example.
I already answered. If something can't be harmed there no need to prevent harming it.
About all animal welfare:
i don't really like your use of harm here to exclude everything but sentient beings, but as a term of art, for the purposes of this discussion, i will indulge you.
why does it matter if something CAN be harmed? what creates a duty to NOT HARM something?
About all ethics is about reducing harm. If you don't know that harming is bad I don't think we can have a discussion.
deontological ethics are explicitly not about that. divine command theory is unconcerned with that. can you name an ethical system that does concern itself with that?
Even if plants were sentient, and I’m not saying they are, but if. Would you rather “kill” orders of magnitude more plants to feed them to animals, then kill the animals and eat them, or would you kill the plants and eat them directly? One of them causes a lot less harm (if any at all), and it’s not eating the animals.
well, first, animals are mostly fed plants or parts of plants that people can't or won't eat, so the scale of the difference you described is orders of magnitude less than you are suggesting.
but, more importantly, why should sentience matter?
finally, whether i buy food from a shelf or not, the creature (flora or fauna) it came from is already harmed, and my purchase causes no more harm to it, so eating it has exactly no impact.
Those plants still have to be cultivated. If there are no animals to feed those plants to (for instance, low quality corn or low quality soy), the lane can be used for cultivating food for humans or in the case of low quality soy, the rain forest doesn’t have to be mowed down for it. Sentience matters because ideally, one should strive to reduce harm as much as possible. Especially unnecessary harm. There is a reason why I don’t torture cats and dogs for fun, and it’s the same reason I don’t eat killed and tortured cows, pigs, chickens, etc. just because I like the flavour of them. And of course your purchasing behaviour has impact on the amount of harm caused. Maybe not instantaneously, because it is indeed on the shelves already, but just like with voting in elections, if you don’t buy products that cause harm, demand drops ever so slightly. Then when more people inevitably follow, demand drops further in a big enough quantity to matter. That’s why you see a lot more vegetarian or vegan options in your supermarket today: because people buy them.
how do you know what is necessary for other people?
there are more vegetarian options and even more meat is produced now than ever before. the production hasn't dropped.
why should reducing harm be a goal? suggesting that eating meat is equivalent to torturing animals for fun is totally specious: almost everyone eats meat, almost no one tortures animals.
the soy fed to livestock is almost entirely the industrial waste from making soybean oil.
The line you mention is sentience, for many
Sure, so then they should instead be arguing that sentience is the morally correct line to draw.
This is kind of a straw man argument. I don't feel guilty at all eating a carrot I pulled out of the ground.
So we can all agree that it’s morally ok to eat a carrot, but not to eat a human. The difference is sentience. The hard part is where exactly to draw the line. Which side of the line is a cow on? A fish? A bug?
This guy thought about that question, if you wanted to see that perspective.
https://reducing-suffering.org/how-much-direct-suffering-is-caused-by-various-animal-foods/#Summary
Yeah, I see he’s thought it through and generated numbers, but it’s counter-intuitive to say we should give up fish for beef, or that milk causes more suffering than beef
I'm not a meat eater personally.
But I don't understand why people who like to eat meat don't eat human.
I think there are, or have been, some who do. It's seems cultural, and a bit of a luxury to be wasteful.
I don't think there's any socially agreed line between "good" and "bad".
I reckon people mostly do what their culture prefers or tolerates.
Different cultures have different ranges of acceptable behavior from different people fulfilling different roles within them . Most people are members of many sub-cultures going right down to small family groups , professional associations, work-teams, sports teams and so on. There'll be some sort of consequence for transgression, maybe verbal shaming, spitting in someone's beer, withheld services, exclusion from jobs, or expulsion from the group.
Sometimes people (in power) agree to put in laws and expend resources on enforcement instead of cultural norms; probably because the clashes within or between (sub)cultures and the inconsistent treatment of transgressions becomes too costly or disruptive.
That's when you get a "line" that says "wrong", once its been put into an enforced law. Even then the law, and enforcement, is always still a bit blurry. partial, and biassed so it's really just a formalisation of the process for administering the consequences of transgression.
i think it is possible to find things that look similar in other social animals too like, other apes, wild dogs, things with pecking orders , rats and so on. I wonder if there are even roles similar to " police" in some non-human cultures?
no. it's not. the difference is that one of them is human.
why should sentience matter?
We could certainly discuss that, but it appears to, regardless of whether there is a good reason.
I disagree that it matters in any obvious sense.
I don't believe this is a straw man argument, I never claim that they believe these conclusions. Quite the opposite, I am showing how their argument, not their conclusion, is not good. As I understand their argument, it is basically this:
(i) If something does not want to be killed, it is morally wrong to kill it. (ii) Animals do not want to be killed. Thus, it is morally wrong to kill animals.
I do not agree with (i), which I try to explain by reductio ad absurdum, arguing that if (i) is true it leads to obviously incorrect conclusions, thus (i) must be false.
The straw man argument comes from your point about combining plants and animals as food, and stating that they were both living. If you compare a cow to parsley, it is silly to say that we shouldn't eat parsley for the sake of it being a living organism. With cows in the same argument, they get dismissed since they're in the same group as plants.
Plants are the straw man in this case because it's easy to dismiss the argument that we shouldn't eat plants, for some reason. Animals are conscious creatures that experience suffering. Plants don't experience the same pain.
A straw man argument is when the other person believes A and you act like they in fact believe B, so you argue against B.
I am not claiming they believe it immoral to kill plants. Quite the opposite, I don't think anyone believes this in general. Therefore, it is not a straw man.
Not quite. From https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Strawman-Fallacy:
With this in mind:
You are misunderstanding my argument. I am not arguing against their conclusion, "it is morally wrong to kill animals", I am arguing against the validity of their argument, "If something does not want to be killed, it is morally wrong to kill it". Therefore, I am not restating their claim, I am saying that their argument leads to this absurd conclusion, thus it must be wrong. I have already explained this in a previous comment. You appear to be ignoring what I am writing.
I don't feel guilty at all eating animals. Kind of a subjective point, no?
And others don't feel guilty for eating meat. Than you for recognizing that people have different feelings.
Carrots are incapable of feeling anything: they can't be affected in a morally relevant way. Animals have emotions, preferences, can experience suffering and can be deprived of positive/pleasurable experiences in their lives.
Obviously this isn't a sufficient justification for harming others. "I don't care about people with dark skin, please recognize that different people have different feelings." The fact that I don't care about the individuals I'm victimizing doesn't mean victimizing them is okay.
Isn't it funny how everyone becomes a subjectivist when trying to defend meat eating?
IMO what's bad is not meat consumption itself, which we were able to do sustainably for millennia and it was never really a problem. The problem is that now you're getting too much of it way too easily. Eating too much meat is a problem because it perpetuates demand for unethical mass-production of meat and livestock are made to suffer as a direct result.
Take a look at the global human population chart over the last few millenia. Things can seem sustainable when there are a million people on the planet. When there are 8 billion things are a bit different.
There is a lot of waste from the agricultural process that needs to be considered as well, like fertilizer run off into rivers, etc.
Which applies even more to meat production. You have to grow massive amounts to feed livestock, more than if we just grew and ate the food directly.
Exactly my point. We can’t just look at the meat. We have to look at the entire process.
Even if we stopped eating meat agriculture in its own right is a big problem.
If we stopped eating meat we’d have to grow a lot more crops to make up for it which will only cause other problems instead of fixing the root cause.
If we stopped eating meat we would have 50% more land for farming human food than we currently do (we currently use 33% of cropland for feed alone). Raising cattle is not efficient at all, it is a waste of energy and land and water.
It's not like the land we used to grow the feed we'll just evaporate. This is why so much lobbying has gone into pushing the narrative that we all need to eat a ton of red meat.
I am not disagreeing. My whole point is that agriculture in itself is a problem. Simply getting off meat doesn’t solve the problem.
We need a way to make agriculture not so wasteful and damaging to the environment. Cutting out meat reduces the need for agriculture but doesn’t eliminate it. As long as agriculture is around we will be destroying our environment.
Downvote me all you want.
animals are fed parts of plants that people can't or won't eat. all of the studies about the ecological impacts ignore this fact and then attribute the water used to produce, say, cotton to beef.
I'm not arguing that we should eat animal feed, but rather use that land to grow food for humans
we already do that. for instance, soybeans. over 80% of the global soy crop is pressed for oil for human use, but then the industrial waste is fed to livestock.
You're not getting many answers yet regarding nitrogen.
As a preface: When it comes to climate and environmental concerns with respect to agriculture, the word "nitrogen" does usually not refer to the completely harmless atmospheric nitrogen (N2). Instead, it refers to various compounds that contain nitrogen.
Nitrogenous pollution from cattle comes in two shapes:
The first is methane (NH3). A single cow burps and farts out about 100kg of methane each year. Methane is a greenhouse gas that's 28 times as potent as CO2. This means a single cow is responsible for as much as 2800kg equivalent in CO2 each year due to burps and farts alone. For reference, the CO2 per capita emissions globally are about 4 tons (4000kg) per year, for all sources combined. Cows, relatively speaking, therefore produce a huge amount of CO2 equivalent.
The second is all the nitrogenous compounds in their excrements. This acts as a fertilizer on soil and in the water. While that sounds good, it leads to various unwanted effects. One is that agricultural runoff causes algal blooms in water that then ends up killing a significant amount of marine life. Another is that nutrient-rich soils tend to seriously decrease plant species diversity. Many native and wild plants actually need nutrient-poor soils to thrive. Those plants will get outcompeted by a small group of fast-growing plants that do well in all the cow-poop-infested soil. These compounds also tend to travel far, via agricultural runoff or even via the air, so ecosystems far away from farms are also impacted.
Is there a way to absorb methane from the atmosphere? Ie like a plant absorbing CO2 is there a substance which does something similar for methane?
Also for runoff, I assume there are no ways to contain this issue. Or is there perhaps a more sinister answers that it is possible but farms have not invested into such structures due to economical reasons.
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There is no solution to capture methane in the air. Its lifespan in air is 12years, so if we stop emitting, it will go away by itself. Until then, it's quite bad. Capturing it at the source is also challenging (can you hemetically seal a cow's ass without impacting its health?!).
The best solution is... less farms, less cows but that means less meat!
The main issue is probably less meat itself than the ginormous quantities we consume.
Most livestock farming is intensive, meaning they can't rely on grazing alone and need extra food sources, typically corn. They emit methane, a greenhousing gas on steroids.
That grain is produced through very intensive agricultural methods because we can't get enough of it. It consumes ridiculously large amount of water and slowly degrades the soils. Nitrates eventually end up in the sea, causing algea to proliferate while other lifeforms are suffocated. See the dead zone in Mexico's gulf.
71% of agriculture land in Europe is dedicated to livestock feeding.
The percentage must be similar or higher in America, and don't count North America alone: without grains from Brazil, we're dead. Period. So next time you hear the world blaming Brazil for deforestation, keep in mind that a large share of it is to sustain livestocks...
Cattle farming in the USA is heavily subsidized, by allowing farmers to use federal land for grazing for free (I believe something similar is in place in Canada?). The claim they "take care of the land" is absurd: nature has been doing that for millenias without needing any help. First nations have been living in these lands also without supersized cows herds and it was going alright. Farms actually prevent wildlife to take back its place.
But I wouldn't blame them. People in North America (among others, and I live in Canada, definitely me too) eat indecent and unhealthy quantities of meat, and that has to come from somewhere.
Now, simple math will tell you: if everyone in the world was consuming meat in the same quantities as us, there would'nt be enough suitable land on Earth to grow the corn that needs to go with it.
Another thing is not all meats are equal in terms of pollution. From the worst to the least bad, in equivalent kgCO2 per kg of meat you can actually eat: -Veal: 37 -Chicken (intensive, in cage): 18 -Beef: 34 -Pork: 5--7 -Duck, rabbit, pork: 4--5 -Chicken ("traditonal, free range): 3--4 -Egg (for comparison): <2
You can appreciate the orders of magnitude!
There are only 2 ways out of this:
One can be done today, starting with your next meal. We don't need meat every meal, we don't even need meat every day, but it is true that going full vegetarian force a certain gymnastic to get all the nutriments one need.
The other solution is barely getting there, so there are still unknown (food quality, resources consumption, etc.) and the economics may not help it taking off.
The third (and let's face it: current approach at national level everywhere on this issue) option is to do nothing and keep going as if the problems didn't exist. This is guaranteeing a famine in the coming decades. When we'll fail to feed our livestock, and it will start dying, it will be too late to turn around and get the whole agriculture sector to transition. These things take many years.
We're trying to reduce our meat consumption at home, or to favor the least impacting ones. We still eat too much meat, but I hope we can gradually improve.
because you have to kill a living thing for it
I swear there was another reason why the practice was considered bad. Something about nitrogen and sustainability. I never really understood that part, hence the question.
I think that one was the cows burp methane, which is a greenhouse gas. So if you apportion the greenhouse gas emissions over the delicious hamburgers, you make more climate change by making a cow burger than a veggie burger. So we should cease the production of cows as part of our attempt to not make our planet terrible. And buying cow burgers to eat is contrary to the goal of ceasing cow production.
For the methane issue. Apparently adding seaweed to their feed reduces that by up to 82%:
https://caes.ucdavis.edu/news/feeding-cattle-seaweed-reduces-their-greenhouse-gas-emissions-82-percent
It would be such a small but significant thing to pass a law requiring adding seaweed to their feed. Even if they passed the cost on, it would raise the price of meat insignificantly. It's crazy that we haven't done it yet. Same with making new roofs white to reflect light instead of absorbing it.
EVEN at 18% it's way too fucking high
I guess my only follow up would be that if we reduce our meat consumption to a more sustainable level, that would mean that we would have to replace our protein source with something more sustainable.
Seafood maybe out of the question as I hear concerns about overfishing as it is.
I would assume that would leave plant protein, like Peanuts or something similar. Are there other sources of protein that are in development (Also major assumption that Beyond and those other meats are also based on the plant protein)
Beans dude. They’re good and good for you. Also lentils are great
We do not mention beans lightly here...
DID SOMEONE SAY BEANS?
Yes, pulses like peanuts, beans, lentils, as well as rice and other grains (and a variety of other vegetable sources) are alternative sources of protein. As far as development, the only thing aside from plant-based meat substitutes are the new lab-grown meats that are being developed. Those are actual meat, but grown in a lab instead of on an animal's body.
well lab grown meat has just recently been approved for sell. So that's a major thing. But there are a lot of plant protein resources. I'm vegetarian so I eat eggs and some milk. (I actually prefer almond milk, most of my milk consumption probably comes from why protein powder cause I can't afford the plant protein powders for weight lifting). Now as someone who actually studied nutrition in college, the confusion comes from the fact that people don't factor amino acids. As my teacher said "You don't have a protein requirement, you have an amino acid requirement" once you look at it in this way, there are ways around this that we can do, but there are shortcomings as of right now (especially socio-economic) if you cut out eggs. However, it would be pretty easy to add the missing nutrients in other foods the issue comes from good ol classic capitalism issues of "efficiency and money" shit.
Honestly, some of the biggest problems we face is just a matter of focus and funding in research. There are a lot of solutions and it's honestly amazing how far we've come despite special interest groups (oil, farming trusts, etc) have worked to stunt the growth of things, so you just have to imagine what ecological, vegan, etc tech could do if it hand the same funding and backing as these other sectors. I honestly can't wait.
Meat is actually not a good source of protein compared to plant proteins. Meat was a good way of turning stuff we couldn’t eat into stuff we can, but now they just feed livestock grains anyways.
Lentils have waaaayyyyyy more protein to weight.
I'm not sure I understand you correctly, but lentils have ~20g protein per 100g while chicken has ~50g. Do you mean compared to grains?
Everything I can find says that lentils have waaaayyyy more protein. Maybe it’s the difference between cooked and dry? The water is going to add a lot of weight and zilch protein.
Can you post a source? I'd like to believe this but it seems incorrect considering the protein content I googled.
https://cheatdaydesign.com/what-does-100g-of-protein-look-like/
Could you? I’m very curious as to the discrepancy lol
But they taste like lentils :-(
Delicious?
I mean yeah. Sometimes they're really good. Sometimes they're bland mush.
Yeah, you have to cook them right, just like anything. Meat tastes awful if you cook it wrong, too.
Besides the other stuff I wrote, I just like chickpeas better.
But must of us grew up to know how to cook meat. I learned how to cook vegetarian meals that aren't side dishes when I was 30. Besides spaghetti Napoli I mean.
🤮
Thanks everyone for the answers, I will update the post to add in the answer.
people have lots of different reasons. some don't like the idea of killing a big animal with feelings and expressiveness. some because of how farms abuse or torture animals in some countries. some think Anibal farming is worse for the environment. some have religious prohibitions. some think it's bad for your health. some people don't like the taste or can't afford it but don't want people to think they are weird so they tell people they have a principled argument for it.
Agreed up until the last part. I think most people would accept "I don't like the taste" or "I can't afford it" sooner than a vegan argument. I've gotten some really unhinged reactions from people just by bringing the topic up. Veganism really, really triggers some people.
yes lots of people cant understand that others can have other ideas about the world. in fact the historical norm for humans is for everyone in the same community to believe the same thing. this time of ideological diversity we live in is anomylous.
of someone says “i believe the earth is flat” most people will not accept that immediately. it's triggering.
people are triggered by alien ideas. it’s not bad. it’s just being human.
Let me guess, the same kind of people who get triggered about vaccines and own pickup trucks as fashion accessories? They tend to get triggered a lot, ironically, for people claiming that society became too sensitive.
Different vegetarians have different motives. Some of the more common ones include:
animals are fed parts of plants that people can't or won't eat. all of the studies about the ecological impacts ignore this fact and then attribute the water used to produce, say, cotton to beef.
Today in the developed world, meat animals such as cattle and hogs are mostly fed fodder — not a byproduct of human food, but rather crops grown specifically as animal feed. Farmers who grow those crops know how much water they're using, because they keep track of their irrigation needs.
even the particle you linked says they are fed silage and that the legumes they are fed are from spent malt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fodder#Types
Some agricultural byproducts fed to animals may be considered unsavory by humans.
Just how many times did you copy-paste that comment?! Are you a bot or a lobbyist by any chance?
You think that we started producing some grains, and one day we realized we had too much by-products and one smart guy said: "let's start a cows herd so that they'll eat these". Sounds legit. Especially if you consider that eating beef the way we do is very recent in human history, and still inexistent in many parts of the world. Poor folks must be buried under the by-products...
So, since I don't think farmers are total morons, I would rather imagine they would produce different kind of food, such as leguminous.
Its not bad in my world
Same world as everyone else tho
Unless it's meat synthesized in a lab, it requires the forced breeding, enslavement, abuse, and eventually murder of sentient animals which don't jive too well with the golden rule.
I personally could give a hoot about it's negative impacts on environment. Gd bacon memes, humanity can go extinct good riddance
you know wild animals are suffering and dying and whole species are going extinct as a result of climate change and deforestation, right? how does that jive with the golden rule in your book?
Meat animal farming contributes to climate change and abstaining makes the demand for meat lower. It's actually perfectly consistent.
They said they don't care about the effects on the environment.
no, it doesn't.
Demand just means how much is bought. Less bought is less demand.
I'm pretty sure more is bought every year, not less
Less than it would be with X people plus 1 (me)
Are you deliberately being obtuse?
if you buy something, it's not available for someone else to buy it.
also, you can't prove a counterfactual.
the golden rule applies to humans.
My changing climate has a very good video on this just last week actually that goes over everything including the shortcomings of veganism and the actual nuance in it. ( I say this as a vegetarian, but let me tell you, growing up in cow country SE Oklahoma, an hour from a walmart with groceries, I know it's not as simple as some people claim it is. but i'm getting off-topic)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwYoe-0ncVk&t=1s
Since you specifically mentioned "cow farts", you were probably thinking of this: https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-eating-meat-bad-for-the-environment/a-63595148
tl;dr - cattle produces a lot of methane while digesting stuff
animals are fed parts of plants that people can't or won't eat. all of the studies about the ecological impacts ignore this fact and then attribute the water used to produce, say, cotton to beef.
No... No... The studies account for that. Most cattle in the US are fed human quality base ingredient feed... It's much cheaper to feed them corn meal than anything else. (I say base ingredient because the standard on cattle feed as a whole is not human grade, but the bulk of the food, the corn, could be human grade if it had been processed for humans instead of cattle.)
The water numbers are pretty well understood.
show me one study that accounts for that.
I read your other post using poor and nemeck and even that article shows it.
if you can cite where in that article it gives credit to cattle for conserving water that would be wasted, I would eat my hat.
so how much water do they say cows consume through cotton?
You are making this argument: https://hoards.com/article-20263-lets-end-the-feed-versus-food-debate.html
You want me to peer review the article and check that they did what they claim they did? That they actually recorded the water use at each step?
that article is awesome
A non-peered review article from a totally unbiased source.
Coming up next, an article demonstrating the benefit of burning oil for the environment by Shell.
did he lie about something in that article?
Today we burn tons of oil. Say tomorrow we have switched to all electric. Do you think we'll keep extracting oil and that will create an environmental burden because of that oil sitting around?
That's the same reasoning.
Today we grow megatons of corn,... for different things, including feeding livestocks.
Tomorrow, if we have less livestock, we'll adapt the crops mix, just like rest of the world has been or is still doing fine without having mega-herds of cows.
We don't have too many cows because we had too much crops. We increased the crops to match the herds!
no. I just want to see how much water they say cows consumed from cotton and the total amount of water they say was used to grow the cotton. and then I want you to ask yourself if it's reasonable to attribute ANY of that water to cows (it isn't)
Cam you link specifically what you mean? I don't see any attribution of cotton water to cattle in the 2018 Poor, Nemeck.
i'm having problems right now even pulling up the full article, but, to my recollection, they didn't actually gather any of this data themselves, so you should be able to find some oblique reference to water used somewhere in the body of the paper, and then follow the citation to the actual study that did gather the data.
The 2018 article doesn't mention cotton at all as far as I can tell.
Not trying to be a dick here, but do you honestly think that you, a non-expert who likely doesn't even practice in ecology or environmental sciences, are the authority here on whether any studies have attempted to account for the water consumption based on the feed variety and sources?
Because if you thought of it as a way to shoot down a random internet comment, then the experts who work in the field have certainly done so and followed through with those calculations already. Have you ever met a professor? They fucking love to tear apart arguments because it gets their names into publications and that's how they earn tenure and notoriety for grant funding.
you have no idea what my background is. this is just an appeal to authority.
Meat is less bad if it's crickets.
Is the methane really that bad?
I’d think it’s more the amount of energy that goes into feeding and raising them. Tractors, creating/shipping feed, etc.
Yes, it is. Cow's methane is the biggest agricultural contributor to greenhouse gases.
Each year, a single cow will produce about 220 pounds of methane. Methane from cattle is shorter lived than carbon dioxide but 28 times more potent in warming the atmosphere, so the 220lbs of methane equal 6160lbs of CO2. A car produces 400g of CO2 per mile, so a cow damages the environment similarly to driving 7000miles. Since cows grow at least for 2 years before being slaughtered it will produce the equivalent of 14.000 miles of driving. A cow produces almost 900lbs of meat, so each pound of beef is like driving 15.5 miles.
Wow, that’s a really good explanation. Thanks.
Not sure why I’m getting downvoted for asking a question that got a really good answer.
I guess some people thought the question was stupid. It's not a good way to foster productive discussion, though, I agree.
Yes, the methane is that bad. Fossil methane is also bad but we need to halve methane emissions in the next 10 years or so to have a shot at keeping global warming to ~1.5-1.7c
I think we shouldn't go vegan altogether, instead limit our meat consumption more, for health purposes too. that being said the evidence for cancer ties is not convincing at all and the WHO is freaking trippin balls for putting it together with plutonium.
I went vegan. It was the best decision I've ever made. I'm healthier, happier, and I'm helping animals and the environment. I also eat better, because it forces me to be aware of what's in my food and make more creative meal choices.
I don't understand what you wrote about the WHO and plutonium.
being vegan doesn't help animals or the environment
basically iirc the who cathegorized meat as bad as plutonium in terms of cancer risk but like last time I ate plutonium my skin was liquefying before my eyes and that never happened with meat. that being said, the choice of going vegan is not for everyone. for some it will be dire on their mind and dire on their health. physiology changes from person to person.
This is a very important point. Eating some meat isn't inherently bad for the environment. Eating TOO MUCH meat is TERRIBLE for the environment, and not very good for you.
Meat used to be a fancy treat for most families, an expensive meal for special occasions. Eating a heaping portion of meat for every meal is fucking ridiculous, but that's exactly what many people do.
It's not. Some people are just crazy.