Carnivores eat animals that eat a lot more plants than humans could ever eat.
That's why I only eat baby animals. They only drink milk, which hurts no one.
Everybody needs to eat stuff. And if it is about reducing pain and having a better climate impact, you should plants all the way. A cow eats 50 times the amount of plants that it gives back in meat.
But it tastes better
I'm afraid I'm going to need a better argument than "I support killing animals because it makes me feel good."
Then raise a cow and kill it.
Can't, don't really have the space for it, but you want to see my chickens and my ducks? Heck, you can have a picture of my dog, but I ain't eating that.
Well, now I'm just disappointed that that's just a vegan anti meat page.
Yeah, I was looking for recipes as well
I was more disappointed by the inconsistency of their claims.
On the front page, they said that, they gave their livestock the highest quality feed and kept them happy in an open environment.
Upon reading further, they changed their tone to keeping them in small cages, followed with stuff like, "don't worry, you won't taste it".
They, as a company, lost credibility. Definitely not buying from them.
I don't have the space for it, though I'd really like to have a little farm of my own.
"Know" is a stretch. Plants respond to attack by releasing chemicals (e.g. nettles and grasses), curling or retracting their leaves (e.g. acacia), or by changing their morphology (e.g. holly); but they have no nervous system - let alone a brain - so it's not like you're killing an animal.
Plants having no nervous system is being challenged with the idea that the plant itself is its central nervous system.
They react to stimulus, they emit sounds (different ones when in “pain”), and communicate with each other.
They don’t have consciousness in a way we understand
I dont mean this as a “dunk” but more of a how neat is that
It's always funny to me how people eat up the concept of a distrubuted neural network in tech but scoff at the same idea applying to something like a tree or a fungus.
Pando is the largest organism by area, and the Humungous Fungus is the largest by mass. The idea that those organisms don't "think" in some way is laughable.
"In some way" is doing A LOT of heavy lifting there. ... although in the general sense, agreed.
Especially given how many outright wrong or otherwise assinine conclusions some "thinking" animals come to... Perhaps communicative consciousness is overrated on the intelligence scale.
You should read the book "entangled life" if you haven't already. It's fascinating.
I'll trade you. I'll read ur book if you check out the ender quintet, or at least speaker of the dead. The hierarchy of foreignness is a concept that has REALLY stuck with me. Also pequininos are bros.
because humans invent things from scratch that nature has already created and optimzed, it's why we're seeing a lot of optimizations on current tech that comes from nature itself.
It's a really weird problem to have.
Go find that video of a slime mold optimizing Japan's rail system by finding oats in a maze
isn't this similar to or equivalent in concept to letting water pathfind through a maze for example?
No. The slime mold doesn't just solve the maze. It figures out the optimal path and grows only where it needs to reach the goal. It's a fascinating thing to watch in time-lapse. The "water in a maze" idea is that if it fills every passage, the only drain would be the exit.
obviously, but the flow path of the water is going to be a direct path to the end of the maze also. You just have to wait for it to fill up first lol.
It always seems lime some excuse in a counter response by vеgаns
The number of times I've responded to them telling them that plants probably process pain in a different way to us has always been shot down by them
Tell them that brains extremely simplified are just on and off responses to certain stimuli / information just like plants have specific reponsonses to stimuli and computers having 1's and 0's that respond to information
A mycelium network could be counted as a brain
If you actually believe harming plants causes them pain and that that is bad, you should be vegan. Animal agriculture harms far, far more plants than any plant agriculture ever could.
But then you're still causing plants pain by farming and eating them. Isn't that argument no different than saying if you believe that harming animals causes them pain, you should be in favor of eating the ones that are hunted because farming them causes more pain?
I really don't know if plants can cause pain and I think the environmental arguments for not eating meat are far more compelling than the ethical ones, but regardless, I think this is a poor argument for veganism.
But then you’re still causing plants pain by farming and eating them. Isn’t that argument no different than saying if you believe that harming animals causes them pain, you should be in favor of eating the ones that are hunted because farming them causes more pain?
If you insist on animal abuse then you should do it through hunting rather than factory farming precisely because of the diminished amount of suffering caused. But it's still more suffering than would be caused by just eating plants so I'm not sure I understand your point
I'm talking about an argument for veganism though. If you are saying that it's acceptable for people to eat hunted meat, you're not saying they should be vegans. And you're encouraging a massive increase in hunting.
What part of my reference to it as animal abuse sounds like an endorsement of the practice? I'm not sure about you, but personally I consider animal abuse to be unacceptable.
Okay, then I think you're completely missing my point, which is that arguing that causing less pain is good is a bad argument for veganism. Causing no pain would be the ethical argument, wouldn't it? Causing less pain would still be unethical, right?
It's sort of like trying to convince someone committing genocide they should stop by telling them they should slow down.
It's not sort of like that though because the practicality of the matter is that humans have to eat to survive but they don't have to genocide to survive. Reducing suffering as much as possible being the goal rather than eliminating it completely is not a new concept in philosophy considering eliminating suffering completely is impossible.
If it is only about reducing suffering as much as possible, would harvesting the meat from euthanized pets be acceptable?
I dont mean this as a “dunk” but more of a how neat is that
It's truly shameful that disclaimers like these feel necessary in this age of shitting on everyone else online. Lemmy users suck too.
Yeah, but on the other hand I’m old enough to know that when I get excited about something I can talk about it in a way that “clobbers” so I like to disclaimer myself when I know I’m exhibiting that kind of behavior.
We don't know how consciousness works enough to say they don't. Having a brain and/or nervous system might not be necessary.
They don't have muscles either, but some plants are known to uproot themselves and fucking move.
Yeah, plants aren't stationary. All plants move, just very, very slowly compared to animals. Looking at time lapse videos of vines growing, reaching out for something to grab on to and stuff is pretty neat. They kind of whip around in circles until they feel they've hit something worth grabbing onto.
We don’t know how consciousness works enough to say they don’t. Having a brain and/or nervous system might not be necessary.
Hmm sorry but no, there are traits exhibited by conscious entities which we don’t observe in those which lack consciousness. This is a nice explainer on consciousness, note that it’s not saying anything about needing a brain to exhibit those traits
there are traits exhibited by conscious entities which we don’t observe in those which lack consciousness.
Implying we have a way of determining whether an entity is conscious or not. That's the entire point of contention here.
How will we ever know for sure if plants have their own form of consciousness that doesn't follow a list of requirements that's based on animals, or can feel pain.
But why do you think plants should have some own form of consciousness? All organism which have circulatory systems have generally similarly behaving circulatory systems. So why should consciousness be different?
No, if an organism does not exhibit all properties of consciousness that we see in all other organisms, then it’s not conscious
I see what you are saying, but maybe you're looking at it from an animal perspective instead of a plant one. They could have consciousness in their own way that's not similar to ours, so we think they are "brainless" or not aware of what's going on. I'm not a scientist but I do wonder about plants. They are living creatures.
which we don’t observe in those which lack consciousness.
See what you did there? You assume a priori which entities lack consciousness, and then motivate this by claiming they lack traits that can be observed in conscious entities. That is very neatly circular.
What you and other people who’re objecting to my comment are saying is that there is no way to define consciousness because we don’t know all the different ways something can be conscious. But that doesn’t matter because these organisms lack the properties which we see in other conscious organisms, ie proprieties we do know about
Here’s what I am saying: consciousness is an emergent property of some discrete biological processes, and we have developed some idea of what consciousness looks like when exhibited by an organism.
So that means that all organisms which are conscious have to exhibit the same properties. You cannot pick and choose which properties to exhibit because then what you’re doing is something else, and not exhibiting consciousness.
Like, if you’re a heart of some sort, you have to exhibit the same activity as a heart in general across all different organisms to be classified as a heart.
It’s possible that same organisms exhibit some parts of consciousness as we have noticed till now, but if those organisms do not exhibit all parts of consciousness then they’re not conscious.
So, I'm guessing everyone in this thread has a different conception of what "consciousness" actually is and what we're talking about here, which makes it difficult to discuss casually like this. You seem to have a very exclusive definition of consciousness, which only serves to avoid the argument, really. "It’s possible that same organisms exhibit some parts of consciousness as we have noticed till now, but if those organisms do not exhibit all parts of consciousness then they’re not conscious"...you're splitting hairs. If plants could be proven to be aware, have subjective experience, a sense of self, it would be reasonable to change our definition of consciousness to be more inclusive - simply because such a concept of consciousness would be a lot more useful then.
Emergentism is a popular hypothesis, not a fact. Christof Koch lost the bet, remember? The idea that "all organisms which are conscious have to exhibit the same properties" and "you cannot pick and choose" does not logically follow from anything you've said. These are criteria that you set up yourself. Take the idea of qualia as an example, how could we ever observe that an animal or a plant does or does not experience qualia? Nobody solved the problem of other minds.
Consciousness is nothing like a heart; the function of the heart can be observed and measured. How do you know that you possess awareness? You can only experience it. (Actually, that we are aware is the only thing we can know with complete certainty.)
Er, that’s what I am saying however is that you can observe and measure consciousness.
You seem to have a very exclusive definition of consciousness, which only serves to avoid the argument, really.
I don’t, I am just going based on current findings.
I am not sure why it’s hard to accept that some living things may not be conscious. Viruses propagate “mindlessly”, they’re neither living nor conscious.
I also don’t understand why you think emergent properties are a hypothesis. Emergent properties of biological processes are fact, look at any cell of any major organ in the body. Why do we treat the brain differently? Because I think we get irrational.
Er, that’s what I am saying however is that you can observe and measure consciousness.
Going with any definition of consciousness relevant to this discussion, say phenomenality and/or awareness, no.
I am not sure why it’s hard to accept that some living things may not be conscious. Viruses propagate “mindlessly”, they’re neither living nor conscious.
That's not really the point - I don't claim to know what entities possess consciousness. The point is that you don't either.
I also don’t understand why you think emergent properties are a hypothesis. Emergent properties of biological processes are fact
Obviously I'm talking about Emergentism as it relates to consciousness, and the idea that consciousness is an emergent property is not a fact, no. And there are perfectly valid reasons - for example, the "explanatory gap" - why someone might find it unsatisfactory.
We can't say that brains are required for a mind to exist; we have no way of knowing.
Lobsters contain 15 nerve clusters called ganglia dispersed throughout their bodies, with a main ganglion located between their eyes. So, according to the logic here whyis it wrong to boil them alive if they don't have a brain?
For the record, imo it is wrong to boil lobster, crabs, and other crustaceans alive. There is no reason you can't kill them directly before boiling them.
Isn't that how we justified boiling Crayfish alive though?
Some misguided monsters, yes.
They have the knowledge and are doing something about it. If other plants can send out this chemical by observing it themselves, that sounds like a reaction from a communication. It may not be cognition like we expect but it is behaving like cognition would. Hard to argue that plants don't know or care of their friends start dying.
I'd argue that knowledge is more than that, otherwise books or state machines could also be said to know things.
This is why I don't eat books
epistemologists agree: knowledge is a justified true belief.
The plants are acquiring information and making an independent change to their status with this information. Books do nothing with knowledge other than communicate it to others. Machines are unable to make independent changes to itself unless programmed to do so.
by this logic do people even truly exist. Maybe you're just the only real person in the world, maybe im the only real person in the world, we have no way of proving this.
Are vegans fine with fish? Seafood?
No, vegans aren't eating fish or seafood.
Some of them eat oysters, or so I'm told. They lack a brain and centralised nervous system.
One of my exes is very strictly vegetarian and will eat oysters. Oysters lack the capacity to consciously be aware of themselves or the environment, effectively they're a water pump made out of meat, and they're one of the most sustainable foods we can make leading to less planetary harm than a lot of plant crops even. It's definitely a controversial opinion though
When talking about the capacity to consciously be aware of themselves (the oysters) how is that actually measured and what do they look for
How are we sure they are not actually self aware through some other unknown mechanism
I am not a biologist but my understanding is that largely has to do with a lack of central nervous system. It would be like asking if a heart is aware of itself. It can autonomously react to things like low oxygen but that isn't because those signals go anywhere that makes a decision it's more like a chemical/biological Rube Goldberg machine. If you really want to get down to it though I don't think we can know for certain just make educated guesses, and imo oysters are even less likely to have any form of consciousness than a lot of plants or mushrooms
Oysters lack the capacity to consciously be aware of themselves
Fish too btw, as far as we know. Lizard brain is an evolution of fish brain, they are basically biological automata.
Makes one think, live getting on land was it getting into hard mode.
one of the most sustainable foods we can make leading to less planetary harm than a lot of plant crops even
I did read about damaging effects of oyster farms though, the ones with cages, because of their poop/piss(?). But sure, because hundreds in one place.
I did read about damaging effects of oyster farms though
Yeah no monoculture farm is without it's damage, for sure, but oysters are real low on the list. They are filter feeders so don't need any additional food source or fertilizer you just seed them somewhere and pull them out as needed. A single one filters something like fifty gallons of water a day, capture carbon for their shells, and they're incredible at pulling heavy metals out of the water but that's not something they're utilized for at scale afaik because then humans wouldn't want to eat those ones
Your fish science is wildly outdated.
Right, looks like some fish species can feel pain.
If it helps give context, various ... factions? (I'm not sure the best word here) consider honey OK and others do not. You can research that more if you want to get an idea of what some vegans might think.
Vegans don't really have factions. Every single one is an individual with their own values.
Yeah, I couldn't think of a better word at the moment. "schools of thought" is probably a better one for grouping overall themes that exist within the vegan movement.
hey vegans, cool fact, plant based diets are vastly more efficient and effective at feeding people than meat based diets.
Meat consumes plants to exist, most of that energy is lost. Not so much with plants.
Just start telling people this shit lmao. Who cares about morality when you can pretend to be saving the environment instead.
I'm no vegan but that's a common vegan talking point
It is, but many vegans also do really unhelpful things that are closer to trying to berate or shame people into not eating meat and it is obviously not effective.
Out of curiosity, how many people have you convinced to go vegan?
None. Why do I have to convince a single person to criticize an argument I don't think is convincing?
Well, I guess I'm just not sure why you're trying to give us advice about something you have zero experience with.
If I didn't know better, I'd say that you don't actually care what kind of approach is more convincing, and you're just trying to tell us to shut up, or say things in a way that makes us easy to ignore.
You have no idea what you're talking about at best, and realistically, you don't even want us to be successful. So, thank you for your unsolicited advice on which tacts are unhelpful, but, just so you know, I will be promptly tossing it into the trash.
I have a lot of experience with people trying to convince me of things.
And you are welcome to take the advice I didn't give to you in the first place and throw it in the trash.
I have a lot of experience with people trying to convince me of things.
how much experience do you have with people convincing you of things?
A lot. I just said.
How much experience do you have repeating useless questions?
no arguments there
and it's an interesting one too, if you like production stats at least.
You think they don't? And environmentalism is also morality.
environmentalism is morality sure, but doesn't it seem silly to use an appeal to morality to push for more morality.
Hey non-vegan, fun fact: No one really cares when you tell them eating plants are more efficient.
Common responses include "bAc0Nnnnnn!" and "I'm gonna eat two times the amount of meat to make your efforts useless".
Amazing strawman at the end there.
Hi friend, I propose you try an experiment: post a small handful of anonymous comments on the Internet, try to make them benign as possible but casually slip in an acknowledgement that you are vegan. Something along the lines of "God that recipe looks amazing, but I think I might swap out the beef broth for veggie broth as I am vegan" like I said the point of this experiment is to say something completely as benign and inoffensive as possible.
Once you post sit back and wait for the responses to roll in. You will likely find that while not every time, it is incredibly common for people to send you pictures of bacon, and an abundant of angry responses to the mere offhand mention of the word.
I sincerely wish it was a straw man fallacy, but it unfortunately is a exceedingly common response to the word.
It really isn't. I know plenty of anti-vegans who react in that manner.
hey non vegan vegan fun fact, you would be surprised at the sheer amount of consumption and productive the livestock sector of agriculture creates.
Likewise you could easily just respond to the last line with "you can't take away my gas stove, i'm just going to burn gas lamps in my home now" and get a little bit eepy and sleepy due to all the buildup of combustion products inside your home.
The animal industry feeds the plants as much as the plants feed the animals. I'm not sure how vegans feel about synthetic fertilizer like miracle grow, but that's what will have to be used in place of manure if the meat industry goes away.
Many of the organic crops grown use animal manure to fertilize the plants. I know you can use seaweed and other plants for compost(weeds are already composted back in via tilling, seaweed requires harvesting from the ocean or long distance shipping from farms), as well as cycling crops to prevent nutrient deficiency.....
BUT manure doesn't just add nutrients. It adds beneficial bacteria that helps keep the soil healthy and make the nutrients bioavailable to plants. It conditions the soil for water retention, and helps break up clay soil and add organic matter to sandy soil.
Will vegans keep animals just for manure? Or will organic lables on food be less important? Are we going to start scraping the forests for leaves to chop up an add to farm soil? That can't be good for forests though. I guess I'm just confused about how to maintain large farms without access to large amounts of manure.
The ideal answer is compost, regenerative agriculture, and (better treated) human-sources waste.
Organic crop yields will almost certainly reduce a bit without animal waste fertilizer, but that is fine since crop consumption will fall by a greater amount due to not needing to feed a bunch of extra animals.
an interesting idea, but anything that decays and "composts" can be used as a fertilizer so.
This includes things like organic scraps, you don't just have to use animal shit. Although it's a pretty good one if you have access to it.
I think personally, we should move to a more decentralized food production system, to help alleviate some of the costs of industrial agriculture, which are pretty heavy.
Veganic agriculture is already a thing, and it works fine.
Diseases spread via human feces which why we tend to not use it. We could sanitize it by processing it, but then it won't carry the benefit of beneficial bacteria cultures so it's not as good as animal supplied manures.
but much of the plant matter that animals eat is grazed or waste from some other agricultural product.
TBF land clearance for grazing land is a catastrophic issue for the environment and going on in places like the Amazon rainforest.
Some ecosystems are naturally evolved to supporting grazing species like the grasslands of North America which was once home to millions of Buffallo but that's not true of most land currently used for grazing.
land clearance for grazing land is a catastrophic issue for the environment and going on in places like the Amazon rainforest.
absolutely. I have some ideas about what to do about it, but none of them involve buying beans
It's at a point where I'm all for a UN resolution to end land clearance in locations like the Amazon Rainforest, to be enforced by lethal means if necessary.
Billions of lives may depend on securing such important ecosystems.
I don't have any influence with the un.
Haha not saying you do but it’s what I would like to see happen
The UN doesn't even have any influence with the UN. Even if I supported lethal enforcement of environmental protections (which I do in many cases), the UN's idea of enforcement is a kindly-worded letter. If the USA doesn't back something the UN has no power. And the USA is one of literally only two countries in the entire world that don't recognize access to healthy food as a human right.
that can be true, but we also grow a substantial amount of feed for agriculture usage, even if it's not local to us. A lot of alf alfa being grown is exported.
It's all dependent on whatevers cheapest at the end of the day. And regardless of this fact, a lot of energy is still lost in this process, cows are a significant contributor to climate change, ironically.
There was a good discussion of this on Reddit recently. Sorry to link to Reddit, but it's a good, topical post worth perusal.
We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). These actions have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (eight times less).
Total aviation is responsible for about 2.5% of worldwide carbon emissions. That's all air travel, private jets included. While it's obviously very popular to focus on the luxuries of the rich, it just won't be effective to focus on those when fighting climate change, let alone being a solution as you claimed.
What's an easier solution, in your opinion? Getting the ultra wealthy to give up their yachts and jets (by getting rid of the ultra wealthy entirely, which also addresses the evils of capitalism), or convincing hundreds of millions of people to change just about everything about the diet they've been eating for tens of thousands of years?
That's actually a good question. Considering the political power the ultra-rich wield, I'm not sure. But I think we should focus what brings the most bang for the buck.
wait until you find out about all of the infrastructure and build costs for these things.
realistically we should do everything, but transit is one of the significant providers of emissions, along with power production and agriculture.
all of agriculture is only about 20% of our GHG emissions. cows are a fraction of that.. there are definitely bigger issues.
as for the alfalfa, it's also a small fraction of global crops. 2/3 of all crop calories go to humans with only 1/3 going to livestock.. this includes about 70% of the weight of the global soy crop (after we have pressed it for oil), as well as fodder like corn stalks. we basically fed livestock trash and get food. it's a pretty good deal.
all of agriculture is only about 20% of our GHG emissions. cows are a fraction of that… there are definitely bigger issues.
obviously, but in terms of livestock, cows are pretty significant.
30% of all global stock going to feed is a pretty large percentage of global crop production.
I think it's probably fine. it will work itself out when the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
i think it's a lot more likely to work out better in a highly decentralized system, i'm not much of a commie myself personally, as i prefer to live outside the bounds of normalcy, and unless i get a lot of say in the commie meetings i'm not sure i can justify existing in that society lol.
the iww encourages your autonomy
bro this shit came from chicago and they call themselves the "wobblies?" Who the fuck created this a british person?
Shitposting aside, we do love a good humanitarian group posting from time to time
We don't base policy on some chuds thoughts
I'm quoting the iww constitution, so I don't know what chud you're talking about
Cool, but steak is my favorite animal.
true, cows are my favorite food.
Boobs are my favorite source of entertainment.
Wait... Nope, nothing to do with sustenance
nothing to do with sustenance
You think? I'm pretty sure that's the purpose of boobs.
i thought it was for us to legislate female top wear?
That's why I only eat fungi. It'll be reciprocal eventually.
Fun fact, humans share more DNA with fungi than they do with plants. We share nearly 50% of our DNA with fungi.
Plus mushrooms are the sex organs of the mycelium organism. Just an extra fun fact for free there.
So, OP eats mushroom dick. Got it.
There are theories that hypothesize that mycelium came to earth via asteroids from space.
So it may be more apt to say that OP eats space dick instead.
It's my understanding that fungi came around rather late in the game. Long after animals and plants both.
The earliest fungi evolved approximately 1.5 billion years ago, while green algae, the earliest plant, only evolved ~1 billion years ago. Animalia is significantly newer.
Similarly, I plan on double crossing the mafia so Thin Lips Johnny can chop me up and feed me to the pigs. Circle of life.
Let's assume for a moment that somehow your salad was conscious. That's an even bigger reason not to eat an animal that has to be fed on plants for a long time.
Or maybe its just a fundamental fact of life that something has to die in order for you to live and virtue signaling about the degree to which you participate in that death is a pointless exercise.
Ah yes, the old "I accidentally stepped on a fly, might as well exterminate the whole biosphere" defense
"our new cancer drug is 99% effective!"
"So it doesn't work in 1% of cases? Then what's the point, throw it away, we just have to accept that cancer is going to happen"
These arguments are exactly why people hate vegans. It's nonsense.
Not only do you jump to an insane straw man. You showcase that you ignore a clear increasing contradiction around your world view and choose reactionary nothing.
If you care about life realize the harder question. If you care about the environment realize clear inefficiencues. Currently, you showcase nothing more than crude thoughtlessness.
I'm not a vegan but it's foolish to think that vegans aren't objectively correct. Let's even say that plants are conscious beings on the level of cows or pigs. The conditions these plants are grown in are a million times better than that of the average factory farm animal. Additionally, in order to sustain ourselves on cows and pigs, exponentially more of these conscious plants need to be killed to fatten the conscious animals we are eating.
If we just ate the plants instead there would be several orders of magnitude less suffering in the word, antibiotic resistant bacteria would be a less immediate issue, a significant amount of our greenhouse gas emissions would disappear, and we'd all probably be healthier to boot.
Yes, something has to die in order for any organism to continue it's existence. Let's not pretend that only plants dying aren't a better alternative in every way to animals dying in order to further our collective existence. You accuse vegans of being reactionary but your comment smacks of knee-jerky defensiveness for something you seem to understand is wrong
Devil’s advocate: are they a million times better?
Monocultures, moldboard plowing destroying soil structure and creating an Ap horizon, organics depletion and excessive application of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides…
Suspending any personal beliefs in the matter, it is truly easier to empathize with people, mammals, then others animals because we better understand their experience. We cannot understand the abstractions of a plant’s lived experience. Humans are only just starting to examine the intricacies of plant familial systems through root and mycorrhizal networks.
Fair enough. I'm not going to sit here and claim that out current agricultural structure is perfect or even ideal. I personally think a decentralized and highly local system of food production and distribution would be better for the products themselves as well as the environment, human health, and community strength. A million times better is hyperbole but I think it's fair to say industrial agriculture is better for the plant than it's equivalent for livestock.
Fertilizers aren't great, pesticides aren't great, soil erosion isn't great. If we waved a magic wand and turned everyone vegan we would still see a net decrease in these harmful agricultural practices simply because people need less food than cows or pigs (among others), especially in the numbers were raising these animals in. If we're going to care for the wellbeing of the plants we eat, it would still be better to stop raising animals for food from a purely mathematical perspective.
I also agree that animals are easier to empathize with, and as such, we may overlook other (possibly intelligent) forms of life as a consequence. Perhaps one day we will achieve a thorough understanding on the lived experiences of plants and that knowledge may create another paradigm shift. But we need a planet that is capable of sustaining life for that to happen. Reducing our collective meat consumption is one of the myriad tools we have to ensure that end. Sorry if I'm coming off as confrontational or anything. I'm sick and my brain is foggy so I wasn't paying much mind to tone in this comment haha. Not trying to start shit or anything, just too lazy to edit
Not only do you jump to an insane straw man.
It wasn't an insane strawman though? It was literally the argument they made. Something has to die for you to eat, therefore it doesn't matter how many things you kill or how necessary those deaths are. The fact that you must kill something absolves you of any guilt for any amount of killing, is the ridiculous argument the person made (and which carnists often make) which we are making fun of for being obviously evil and wrong.
It is - it's a super affirmative position. It takes an extreme position within the sphere it's trying to criticize to make an exaggerated point to attack. It's literally a classic strawman.
Your follow up is in the same vein. Its empty rhetoric
That's called Reductio Ad Absurdum and is a valid, classic form of argumentation. If you take their premises to their logical conclusion, the result is absurd, so their premises must be false.
You don't get to arbitrarily limit where a premise gets applied in order to pick and choose which conclusions to stand by. It isn't a strawman to show that someone's premises lead to conclusions that they would disagree with, that's literally the point.
Lol I despise people not knowing what a strawman is. Go back to english class.
I'm not a vegan. Their argument was literally that morally there is no difference in the amount of death caused by any person for the purposes of consumption.
This logic doesn't make sense in any other context. Like, if I say we should try to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere, you could point out that emitting CO2 is a fundamental part of human life, so something something virtue signaling blah blah blah. Just because something is unavoidable to a certain degree doesn't mean we shouldn't try to minimize it.
Or maybe there's happy middle where everyone can live comfortably while keeping the harm we cause at a minimum.
Or, at the most selfish, we could make sure we don't kill ourselves this decade or the next.
We as humans are blessed with the ability to choose how we interact with these "facts of life".
unless the point is that consciousness is not a disqualifying trait to become food
It wasn't for the donner party.
Well a salad is made of cells that have responses to certain stimuli
The brain if you where to go and simplify it down to its most very basic layer is just responses to stimili
The brain is a collection of responses to stimuli that together create a kind of network that can respond to stimuli in complex ways
Plants are a collection of cells that respond to stimuli
So they very well will likely to be conscious on some level
The above comment is made of glyphs arranged to convey meaning. The Code of Hammurabi is made of glyphs arranged to convey meaning.
So the comment will very well be likely a significant contribution to human culture.
So the comment will very well be likely a significant contribution to human culture.
i think statistically it would be insignificant based on the sheer amount of written material out there, so it should actually be a function of how long the work is, plus how long it's been around for, the longer it is, and the longer its been around for, the more complete of a historical document we have.
There's a type of person that thinks Joe Rogan is clever because they agree with him.
I mean if you stretch the definition enough even cells know they are being eaten. they usually respond by "shit this cant be good, I better press this big red button"
Yeah, that's absolutely what keeps happening with these news items. "Lifeform demonstrates reaction to stimulus!"
What will Staples do?
dont get the reference
Is that the browning that goes on on the outside when baking some meat?
There was a Hungarian cult that convinced others that people can survive by eating light. There were some deaths and was quickly shut down, but they exist forever in anorexia-related jokes.
I think you're talking about Breatherism? There've been a couple of those cults all over Europe. It's not particularly popular, luckily, but they often make it to the newspapers, because someone usually dies.
It originates from Hinduism though. There's a another Indian religion called Jainism. These are the monks you see brushing away the beetles before their feet, to not step on them. It's very much about nature and spiritualism and being good. Fasting is a key concept of this religion and the most extreme cases will choose to fast until death to cleanse the world. This is all very spiritual though and takes years of preparation.
There's no way this won't restart the same argument with someone, huh? Top-tier shitpost, well done.
Thanks, I saw it come across my FB feed and knew what had to be done.
Yo fuck that propagandist piece of shit Joe Rogan. Keep him off of my feed.
I'm constantly dismayed to find that brain damaged ape, topping the podcast charts weekly. He's such a disease
Ew, Joe Rogan.
Joe Rogan 🤮
That's not how knowledge works.
Do y'all not eat vegetables too?
Finally we have one thing to pin on like 3 weird vegans.
Siding with alt right trash like Joe Roegan to own the libs vegans 😎
Their fault for dressing so sexy
Those poor cats. Vegans shouldn't be allowed to own meat.
Dogs taste better anyways. Can’t beat a good Elwood’s steak!
That website is confusing, it doesn't let you order any dog meat. It also seems to assume I would have a problem with the product? Is that a strategy to make me want it more?
Doing this sort of "eating a cow is no more ethical than eating a dog" thing isn't necessarily untrue (although ethics are, of course, a subjective thing) but it does not really convince people not to eat meat. If you are going to argue from an ethics of killing and eating an animal angle, talk about why it is cruel to kill and eat animals that most people who eat meat are used to eating.
Different people react to different things. It takes many approaches to reach multiple types of humans.
I personally reacted after months of being shown hypocrisy, with the tipping point being when I said there’s no problem with eggs and dairy before I was shown what the egg and dairy industries do.
Part of that process was really realizing, not just knowing but consciously thinking about and considering the fact that humans are also meat. I am meat. The cats I loved were meat. My human family is meat. It’s not okay to eat them in a sandwich. Why is it okay to eat strangers in a sandwich?
No one approach will work on every human, and many people take a lot of different approaches over time to really understand.
I always fall back on the concept of graphing how delicious the animal is vs how much of an asshole it is. Ducks? Absolutely delicious and raging assholes; they are the perfect meal. Dogs? Too sweet to ever try and on the negative side of the asshole graph. Cats? Rather asshole but not sure how they taste...
Maybe you're joking but I have seen people say this seriously so I'll respond seriously. Determining which conscious beings to inflict pain and suffering onto based on characteristics they were born with through no choice of their own is pretty shitty.
I’m all for the most humane and ethical means of getting meat and the day I can get a steak that didn’t require a cow to die but is indistinguishable from the real thing I will absolutely switch over, but until then I’m going to enjoy delicious, delicious duck and not feel bad about. Wouldn’t eat a dog even in an apocalypse though.
Yeah that's an obvious troll response you vеgаn's use
People are well aware of it
I am mostly vegan and my cat and dog eat mostly meat 🖕
Vegan is a philosophy, not a diet. The word you’re looking for is plant-based, not vegan.
A vegan wouldn’t buy leather shoes or woolen sweaters. Someone on a plant-based diet would.
Sure, but the average person does not know or care about the distinction. It's much easier to explain this way. I'll see if I can incorporate this terminology instead next time though
That you for being reasonable and not insane.
vegans care about animals. I assure you it is the norm
Yep. My vegan brother has two dogs and three cats and has no problem giving them meat (or meat-based food anyway) as part of their diet.
It's not some universal idea that vegans will be okay with keeping meat-eating pets but refuse to give them that meat.
No it's not a universal idea, but it does happen and it is animal abuse when it does.
I agree with you, but this is definitely not an argument you want to go into because it caused an absolute massive shitshow. Check out the top pinned post on Lemmy.world.
I did see that shitshow you refer to.
I realized that was likely true, but the ones who aren't are just so damn loud about it.
I have met far more people complaining loudly about vegans than I have loud vegans
Great idea, let's stop re-homing rescue animals shall we?
lmfao this is hilarious
So many vegans taking this 100% seriously lmao
NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL SHITPOSTING VOL. 68
Let's go to the extremes here: let's say I'm a vegan, and love snakes and want my snake to not eat live mouse, do you think I can feed the snake vegan snake food?
This is all hypothetical as I dislike snakes and love bacon.
Veganism is a philosophy that calls for reducing harm to animals where practical and possible. You can conjure up whatever hypothetical you like, and if you specifically look for situations where harm to animals is unavoidable, then harm to animals will be... unavoidable, in those situations.
However, the vast majority of choices you'll make that affect the lives of animals don't happen within the context of these sorts of thoughts experiments. You don't have to eat rats or bacon in order to survive. So it's not really relevant, unless you're actually in that sort of situation.
Personally, I simply wouldn't keep a snake as a pet, and if I had one, I'd give it away. The delimma you've presented pits my feeling of wanting a snake against my ethical beliefs about not harming animals, and I consider that ethical belief to be more important. I could always just watch videos of snakes or go see them at the zoo or whatever. But if you did one of those, "You're stranded on a deserted island with nothing to eat but a crate full of frozen steaks that washed ashore," then sure, I'd prioritize my survival because it wouldn't be practical to avoid them in that situation.
Well sure, but it was all a shit-post comment not actually meant to be taken seriously. I chose a snake for that very reason. Though your comment gave me a ton to think about and was well thought out! Bravo!
Let’s go to the extremes here: let’s say I’m a vegan, and love snakes and want my snake to not eat live mouse, do you think I can feed the snake vegan snake food?
well i mean, snakes are pretty fucking stupid. assuming the snake can digest it properly, and gets the required nutrients, it should be fine.
However we can also consider that mayhaps you live in NYC which has a rat problem, perhaps you should just feed your snake rats instead.
For no particular reason I'm heading to new York with my van of 1000 snakes.
whatever you do, don't hold on to them, NYC has a snake under population, they desperately need more snakes. For uhhhh....
Snaking.
You can tweak this metaphor and get plenty of real life examples. Cats are obligate carnivores. There’s been lots of morons who went vegan and decided their cats could be vegan, too. I’ll leave guessing the outcome of that as an exercise to the reader.
I believe cats can't properly digest the plants right? Probably kills them slowly.
I guess vegan cat owners are doing their Job and eradicating meat eaters from the world. /s
But for real, crazy that some did that to their pets.
Everything that is, is alive.
Yeah, that's what most people don't understand... People should do some shrooms/LSD to get out of their head and back to their heart.
This would solve most if not all the cognitive dissonance we strugle with every day...
Lemmyworld admins be like
Carnivores eat animals that eat a lot more plants than humans could ever eat.
That's why I only eat baby animals. They only drink milk, which hurts no one.
Everybody needs to eat stuff. And if it is about reducing pain and having a better climate impact, you should plants all the way. A cow eats 50 times the amount of plants that it gives back in meat.
But it tastes better
I'm afraid I'm going to need a better argument than "I support killing animals because it makes me feel good."
Then raise a cow and kill it.
Can't, don't really have the space for it, but you want to see my chickens and my ducks? Heck, you can have a picture of my dog, but I ain't eating that.
Why not :P
Well, now I'm just disappointed that that's just a vegan anti meat page.
Yeah, I was looking for recipes as well
I was more disappointed by the inconsistency of their claims.
On the front page, they said that, they gave their livestock the highest quality feed and kept them happy in an open environment.
Upon reading further, they changed their tone to keeping them in small cages, followed with stuff like, "don't worry, you won't taste it".
They, as a company, lost credibility. Definitely not buying from them.
Anti Commercial-AI license
So the choice is meat or division of labor?
I don't have the space for it, though I'd really like to have a little farm of my own.
"Know" is a stretch. Plants respond to attack by releasing chemicals (e.g. nettles and grasses), curling or retracting their leaves (e.g. acacia), or by changing their morphology (e.g. holly); but they have no nervous system - let alone a brain - so it's not like you're killing an animal.
Plants having no nervous system is being challenged with the idea that the plant itself is its central nervous system.
They react to stimulus, they emit sounds (different ones when in “pain”), and communicate with each other.
They don’t have consciousness in a way we understand
I dont mean this as a “dunk” but more of a how neat is that
It's always funny to me how people eat up the concept of a distrubuted neural network in tech but scoff at the same idea applying to something like a tree or a fungus.
Pando is the largest organism by area, and the Humungous Fungus is the largest by mass. The idea that those organisms don't "think" in some way is laughable.
"In some way" is doing A LOT of heavy lifting there. ... although in the general sense, agreed.
Especially given how many outright wrong or otherwise assinine conclusions some "thinking" animals come to... Perhaps communicative consciousness is overrated on the intelligence scale.
You should read the book "entangled life" if you haven't already. It's fascinating.
I'll trade you. I'll read ur book if you check out the ender quintet, or at least speaker of the dead. The hierarchy of foreignness is a concept that has REALLY stuck with me. Also pequininos are bros.
because humans invent things from scratch that nature has already created and optimzed, it's why we're seeing a lot of optimizations on current tech that comes from nature itself.
It's a really weird problem to have.
Go find that video of a slime mold optimizing Japan's rail system by finding oats in a maze
isn't this similar to or equivalent in concept to letting water pathfind through a maze for example?
No. The slime mold doesn't just solve the maze. It figures out the optimal path and grows only where it needs to reach the goal. It's a fascinating thing to watch in time-lapse. The "water in a maze" idea is that if it fills every passage, the only drain would be the exit.
obviously, but the flow path of the water is going to be a direct path to the end of the maze also. You just have to wait for it to fill up first lol.
It always seems lime some excuse in a counter response by vеgаns
The number of times I've responded to them telling them that plants probably process pain in a different way to us has always been shot down by them
Tell them that brains extremely simplified are just on and off responses to certain stimuli / information just like plants have specific reponsonses to stimuli and computers having 1's and 0's that respond to information
A mycelium network could be counted as a brain
If you actually believe harming plants causes them pain and that that is bad, you should be vegan. Animal agriculture harms far, far more plants than any plant agriculture ever could.
But then you're still causing plants pain by farming and eating them. Isn't that argument no different than saying if you believe that harming animals causes them pain, you should be in favor of eating the ones that are hunted because farming them causes more pain?
I really don't know if plants can cause pain and I think the environmental arguments for not eating meat are far more compelling than the ethical ones, but regardless, I think this is a poor argument for veganism.
If you insist on animal abuse then you should do it through hunting rather than factory farming precisely because of the diminished amount of suffering caused. But it's still more suffering than would be caused by just eating plants so I'm not sure I understand your point
I'm talking about an argument for veganism though. If you are saying that it's acceptable for people to eat hunted meat, you're not saying they should be vegans. And you're encouraging a massive increase in hunting.
What part of my reference to it as animal abuse sounds like an endorsement of the practice? I'm not sure about you, but personally I consider animal abuse to be unacceptable.
Okay, then I think you're completely missing my point, which is that arguing that causing less pain is good is a bad argument for veganism. Causing no pain would be the ethical argument, wouldn't it? Causing less pain would still be unethical, right?
It's sort of like trying to convince someone committing genocide they should stop by telling them they should slow down.
It's not sort of like that though because the practicality of the matter is that humans have to eat to survive but they don't have to genocide to survive. Reducing suffering as much as possible being the goal rather than eliminating it completely is not a new concept in philosophy considering eliminating suffering completely is impossible.
If it is only about reducing suffering as much as possible, would harvesting the meat from euthanized pets be acceptable?
Huh, neat.
It's truly shameful that disclaimers like these feel necessary in this age of shitting on everyone else online. Lemmy users suck too.
Yeah, but on the other hand I’m old enough to know that when I get excited about something I can talk about it in a way that “clobbers” so I like to disclaimer myself when I know I’m exhibiting that kind of behavior.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm3JodBR-vs
We don't know how consciousness works enough to say they don't. Having a brain and/or nervous system might not be necessary.
They don't have muscles either, but some plants are known to uproot themselves and fucking move.
Yeah, plants aren't stationary. All plants move, just very, very slowly compared to animals. Looking at time lapse videos of vines growing, reaching out for something to grab on to and stuff is pretty neat. They kind of whip around in circles until they feel they've hit something worth grabbing onto.
Hmm sorry but no, there are traits exhibited by conscious entities which we don’t observe in those which lack consciousness. This is a nice explainer on consciousness, note that it’s not saying anything about needing a brain to exhibit those traits
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/#DesQueWhaFeaCon
correct me if I am misremembering sth
Implying we have a way of determining whether an entity is conscious or not. That's the entire point of contention here.
How will we ever know for sure if plants have their own form of consciousness that doesn't follow a list of requirements that's based on animals, or can feel pain.
But why do you think plants should have some own form of consciousness? All organism which have circulatory systems have generally similarly behaving circulatory systems. So why should consciousness be different?
No, if an organism does not exhibit all properties of consciousness that we see in all other organisms, then it’s not conscious
I see what you are saying, but maybe you're looking at it from an animal perspective instead of a plant one. They could have consciousness in their own way that's not similar to ours, so we think they are "brainless" or not aware of what's going on. I'm not a scientist but I do wonder about plants. They are living creatures.
See what you did there? You assume a priori which entities lack consciousness, and then motivate this by claiming they lack traits that can be observed in conscious entities. That is very neatly circular.
What you and other people who’re objecting to my comment are saying is that there is no way to define consciousness because we don’t know all the different ways something can be conscious. But that doesn’t matter because these organisms lack the properties which we see in other conscious organisms, ie proprieties we do know about
Here’s what I am saying: consciousness is an emergent property of some discrete biological processes, and we have developed some idea of what consciousness looks like when exhibited by an organism.
So that means that all organisms which are conscious have to exhibit the same properties. You cannot pick and choose which properties to exhibit because then what you’re doing is something else, and not exhibiting consciousness.
Like, if you’re a heart of some sort, you have to exhibit the same activity as a heart in general across all different organisms to be classified as a heart.
It’s possible that same organisms exhibit some parts of consciousness as we have noticed till now, but if those organisms do not exhibit all parts of consciousness then they’re not conscious.
So, I'm guessing everyone in this thread has a different conception of what "consciousness" actually is and what we're talking about here, which makes it difficult to discuss casually like this. You seem to have a very exclusive definition of consciousness, which only serves to avoid the argument, really. "It’s possible that same organisms exhibit some parts of consciousness as we have noticed till now, but if those organisms do not exhibit all parts of consciousness then they’re not conscious"...you're splitting hairs. If plants could be proven to be aware, have subjective experience, a sense of self, it would be reasonable to change our definition of consciousness to be more inclusive - simply because such a concept of consciousness would be a lot more useful then.
Emergentism is a popular hypothesis, not a fact. Christof Koch lost the bet, remember? The idea that "all organisms which are conscious have to exhibit the same properties" and "you cannot pick and choose" does not logically follow from anything you've said. These are criteria that you set up yourself. Take the idea of qualia as an example, how could we ever observe that an animal or a plant does or does not experience qualia? Nobody solved the problem of other minds.
Consciousness is nothing like a heart; the function of the heart can be observed and measured. How do you know that you possess awareness? You can only experience it. (Actually, that we are aware is the only thing we can know with complete certainty.)
Er, that’s what I am saying however is that you can observe and measure consciousness.
I don’t, I am just going based on current findings.
I am not sure why it’s hard to accept that some living things may not be conscious. Viruses propagate “mindlessly”, they’re neither living nor conscious.
I also don’t understand why you think emergent properties are a hypothesis. Emergent properties of biological processes are fact, look at any cell of any major organ in the body. Why do we treat the brain differently? Because I think we get irrational.
Going with any definition of consciousness relevant to this discussion, say phenomenality and/or awareness, no.
That's not really the point - I don't claim to know what entities possess consciousness. The point is that you don't either.
Obviously I'm talking about Emergentism as it relates to consciousness, and the idea that consciousness is an emergent property is not a fact, no. And there are perfectly valid reasons - for example, the "explanatory gap" - why someone might find it unsatisfactory.
Wait that's cool as hell, which plants?
Maybe tumbleweeds? I think..
Banana plants for one.
https://www.ic-s.org.uk/2017/03/05/trees-walk-yes/
We can't say that brains are required for a mind to exist; we have no way of knowing.
Lobsters contain 15 nerve clusters called ganglia dispersed throughout their bodies, with a main ganglion located between their eyes. So, according to the logic here whyis it wrong to boil them alive if they don't have a brain?
For the record, imo it is wrong to boil lobster, crabs, and other crustaceans alive. There is no reason you can't kill them directly before boiling them.
Isn't that how we justified boiling Crayfish alive though?
Some misguided monsters, yes.
They have the knowledge and are doing something about it. If other plants can send out this chemical by observing it themselves, that sounds like a reaction from a communication. It may not be cognition like we expect but it is behaving like cognition would. Hard to argue that plants don't know or care of their friends start dying.
I'd argue that knowledge is more than that, otherwise books or state machines could also be said to know things.
This is why I don't eat books
epistemologists agree: knowledge is a justified true belief.
The plants are acquiring information and making an independent change to their status with this information. Books do nothing with knowledge other than communicate it to others. Machines are unable to make independent changes to itself unless programmed to do so.
by this logic do people even truly exist. Maybe you're just the only real person in the world, maybe im the only real person in the world, we have no way of proving this.
Are vegans fine with fish? Seafood?
No, vegans aren't eating fish or seafood.
Some of them eat oysters, or so I'm told. They lack a brain and centralised nervous system.
One of my exes is very strictly vegetarian and will eat oysters. Oysters lack the capacity to consciously be aware of themselves or the environment, effectively they're a water pump made out of meat, and they're one of the most sustainable foods we can make leading to less planetary harm than a lot of plant crops even. It's definitely a controversial opinion though
When talking about the capacity to consciously be aware of themselves (the oysters) how is that actually measured and what do they look for
How are we sure they are not actually self aware through some other unknown mechanism
I am not a biologist but my understanding is that largely has to do with a lack of central nervous system. It would be like asking if a heart is aware of itself. It can autonomously react to things like low oxygen but that isn't because those signals go anywhere that makes a decision it's more like a chemical/biological Rube Goldberg machine. If you really want to get down to it though I don't think we can know for certain just make educated guesses, and imo oysters are even less likely to have any form of consciousness than a lot of plants or mushrooms
Fish too btw, as far as we know. Lizard brain is an evolution of fish brain, they are basically biological automata.
Makes one think, live getting on land was it getting into hard mode.
I did read about damaging effects of oyster farms though, the ones with cages, because of their poop/piss(?). But sure, because hundreds in one place.
Yeah no monoculture farm is without it's damage, for sure, but oysters are real low on the list. They are filter feeders so don't need any additional food source or fertilizer you just seed them somewhere and pull them out as needed. A single one filters something like fifty gallons of water a day, capture carbon for their shells, and they're incredible at pulling heavy metals out of the water but that's not something they're utilized for at scale afaik because then humans wouldn't want to eat those ones
Your fish science is wildly outdated.
Right, looks like some fish species can feel pain.
If it helps give context, various ... factions? (I'm not sure the best word here) consider honey OK and others do not. You can research that more if you want to get an idea of what some vegans might think.
Vegans don't really have factions. Every single one is an individual with their own values.
Yeah, I couldn't think of a better word at the moment. "schools of thought" is probably a better one for grouping overall themes that exist within the vegan movement.
hey vegans, cool fact, plant based diets are vastly more efficient and effective at feeding people than meat based diets.
Meat consumes plants to exist, most of that energy is lost. Not so much with plants.
Just start telling people this shit lmao. Who cares about morality when you can pretend to be saving the environment instead.
I'm no vegan but that's a common vegan talking point
It is, but many vegans also do really unhelpful things that are closer to trying to berate or shame people into not eating meat and it is obviously not effective.
Out of curiosity, how many people have you convinced to go vegan?
None. Why do I have to convince a single person to criticize an argument I don't think is convincing?
Well, I guess I'm just not sure why you're trying to give us advice about something you have zero experience with.
If I didn't know better, I'd say that you don't actually care what kind of approach is more convincing, and you're just trying to tell us to shut up, or say things in a way that makes us easy to ignore.
You have no idea what you're talking about at best, and realistically, you don't even want us to be successful. So, thank you for your unsolicited advice on which tacts are unhelpful, but, just so you know, I will be promptly tossing it into the trash.
I have a lot of experience with people trying to convince me of things.
And you are welcome to take the advice I didn't give to you in the first place and throw it in the trash.
how much experience do you have with people convincing you of things?
A lot. I just said.
How much experience do you have repeating useless questions?
no arguments there
and it's an interesting one too, if you like production stats at least.
You think they don't? And environmentalism is also morality.
environmentalism is morality sure, but doesn't it seem silly to use an appeal to morality to push for more morality.
Hey non-vegan, fun fact: No one really cares when you tell them eating plants are more efficient.
Common responses include "bAc0Nnnnnn!" and "I'm gonna eat two times the amount of meat to make your efforts useless".
Amazing strawman at the end there.
Hi friend, I propose you try an experiment: post a small handful of anonymous comments on the Internet, try to make them benign as possible but casually slip in an acknowledgement that you are vegan. Something along the lines of "God that recipe looks amazing, but I think I might swap out the beef broth for veggie broth as I am vegan" like I said the point of this experiment is to say something completely as benign and inoffensive as possible.
Once you post sit back and wait for the responses to roll in. You will likely find that while not every time, it is incredibly common for people to send you pictures of bacon, and an abundant of angry responses to the mere offhand mention of the word.
I sincerely wish it was a straw man fallacy, but it unfortunately is a exceedingly common response to the word.
It really isn't. I know plenty of anti-vegans who react in that manner.
hey non vegan vegan fun fact, you would be surprised at the sheer amount of consumption and productive the livestock sector of agriculture creates.
Likewise you could easily just respond to the last line with "you can't take away my gas stove, i'm just going to burn gas lamps in my home now" and get a little bit eepy and sleepy due to all the buildup of combustion products inside your home.
The animal industry feeds the plants as much as the plants feed the animals. I'm not sure how vegans feel about synthetic fertilizer like miracle grow, but that's what will have to be used in place of manure if the meat industry goes away.
Many of the organic crops grown use animal manure to fertilize the plants. I know you can use seaweed and other plants for compost(weeds are already composted back in via tilling, seaweed requires harvesting from the ocean or long distance shipping from farms), as well as cycling crops to prevent nutrient deficiency.....
BUT manure doesn't just add nutrients. It adds beneficial bacteria that helps keep the soil healthy and make the nutrients bioavailable to plants. It conditions the soil for water retention, and helps break up clay soil and add organic matter to sandy soil.
Will vegans keep animals just for manure? Or will organic lables on food be less important? Are we going to start scraping the forests for leaves to chop up an add to farm soil? That can't be good for forests though. I guess I'm just confused about how to maintain large farms without access to large amounts of manure.
The ideal answer is compost, regenerative agriculture, and (better treated) human-sources waste.
Organic crop yields will almost certainly reduce a bit without animal waste fertilizer, but that is fine since crop consumption will fall by a greater amount due to not needing to feed a bunch of extra animals.
an interesting idea, but anything that decays and "composts" can be used as a fertilizer so.
This includes things like organic scraps, you don't just have to use animal shit. Although it's a pretty good one if you have access to it.
I think personally, we should move to a more decentralized food production system, to help alleviate some of the costs of industrial agriculture, which are pretty heavy.
Veganic agriculture is already a thing, and it works fine.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegan_organic_agriculture
https://goveganic.net/
We humans shit as well
Diseases spread via human feces which why we tend to not use it. We could sanitize it by processing it, but then it won't carry the benefit of beneficial bacteria cultures so it's not as good as animal supplied manures.
but much of the plant matter that animals eat is grazed or waste from some other agricultural product.
TBF land clearance for grazing land is a catastrophic issue for the environment and going on in places like the Amazon rainforest.
Some ecosystems are naturally evolved to supporting grazing species like the grasslands of North America which was once home to millions of Buffallo but that's not true of most land currently used for grazing.
absolutely. I have some ideas about what to do about it, but none of them involve buying beans
It's at a point where I'm all for a UN resolution to end land clearance in locations like the Amazon Rainforest, to be enforced by lethal means if necessary.
Billions of lives may depend on securing such important ecosystems.
I don't have any influence with the un.
Haha not saying you do but it’s what I would like to see happen
The UN doesn't even have any influence with the UN. Even if I supported lethal enforcement of environmental protections (which I do in many cases), the UN's idea of enforcement is a kindly-worded letter. If the USA doesn't back something the UN has no power. And the USA is one of literally only two countries in the entire world that don't recognize access to healthy food as a human right.
that can be true, but we also grow a substantial amount of feed for agriculture usage, even if it's not local to us. A lot of alf alfa being grown is exported.
It's all dependent on whatevers cheapest at the end of the day. And regardless of this fact, a lot of energy is still lost in this process, cows are a significant contributor to climate change, ironically.
There was a good discussion of this on Reddit recently. Sorry to link to Reddit, but it's a good, topical post worth perusal.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Agriculture/comments/1dv7fw9/how_much_good_land_is_used_to_grow_food_for/
ETA:
yeah that pretty much checks out. The best solution to climate change is to kill shit like private jets and yachts. But that's unlikely to happen.
I severely doubt those emissions are anything but negligible because there are so few yachts and jets.
Edit: Yeah, just downvoting is cheap, so here's just a single statistic for you: https://ourworldindata.org/global-aviation-emissions
Total aviation is responsible for about 2.5% of worldwide carbon emissions. That's all air travel, private jets included. While it's obviously very popular to focus on the luxuries of the rich, it just won't be effective to focus on those when fighting climate change, let alone being a solution as you claimed.
What's an easier solution, in your opinion? Getting the ultra wealthy to give up their yachts and jets (by getting rid of the ultra wealthy entirely, which also addresses the evils of capitalism), or convincing hundreds of millions of people to change just about everything about the diet they've been eating for tens of thousands of years?
That's actually a good question. Considering the political power the ultra-rich wield, I'm not sure. But I think we should focus what brings the most bang for the buck.
wait until you find out about all of the infrastructure and build costs for these things.
realistically we should do everything, but transit is one of the significant providers of emissions, along with power production and agriculture.
all of agriculture is only about 20% of our GHG emissions. cows are a fraction of that.. there are definitely bigger issues.
as for the alfalfa, it's also a small fraction of global crops. 2/3 of all crop calories go to humans with only 1/3 going to livestock.. this includes about 70% of the weight of the global soy crop (after we have pressed it for oil), as well as fodder like corn stalks. we basically fed livestock trash and get food. it's a pretty good deal.
obviously, but in terms of livestock, cows are pretty significant.
30% of all global stock going to feed is a pretty large percentage of global crop production.
I think it's probably fine. it will work itself out when the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
i think it's a lot more likely to work out better in a highly decentralized system, i'm not much of a commie myself personally, as i prefer to live outside the bounds of normalcy, and unless i get a lot of say in the commie meetings i'm not sure i can justify existing in that society lol.
the iww encourages your autonomy
bro this shit came from chicago and they call themselves the "wobblies?" Who the fuck created this a british person?
Shitposting aside, we do love a good humanitarian group posting from time to time
We don't base policy on some chuds thoughts
I'm quoting the iww constitution, so I don't know what chud you're talking about
Cool, but steak is my favorite animal.
true, cows are my favorite food.
Boobs are my favorite source of entertainment.
Wait... Nope, nothing to do with sustenance
You think? I'm pretty sure that's the purpose of boobs.
i thought it was for us to legislate female top wear?
hmm
"Plants rights activists" out in full force in this thread lol
it's not that they want to reduce plant suffering. it's that they don't care if plants suffer.
Imo, the person in red looks much healthier.
Low effort
That's why I only eat fungi. It'll be reciprocal eventually.
Fun fact, humans share more DNA with fungi than they do with plants. We share nearly 50% of our DNA with fungi.
Plus mushrooms are the sex organs of the mycelium organism. Just an extra fun fact for free there.
So, OP eats mushroom dick. Got it.
There are theories that hypothesize that mycelium came to earth via asteroids from space.
So it may be more apt to say that OP eats space dick instead.
It's my understanding that fungi came around rather late in the game. Long after animals and plants both.
The earliest fungi evolved approximately 1.5 billion years ago, while green algae, the earliest plant, only evolved ~1 billion years ago. Animalia is significantly newer.
Similarly, I plan on double crossing the mafia so Thin Lips Johnny can chop me up and feed me to the pigs. Circle of life.
Let's assume for a moment that somehow your salad was conscious. That's an even bigger reason not to eat an animal that has to be fed on plants for a long time.
Or maybe its just a fundamental fact of life that something has to die in order for you to live and virtue signaling about the degree to which you participate in that death is a pointless exercise.
Ah yes, the old "I accidentally stepped on a fly, might as well exterminate the whole biosphere" defense
"our new cancer drug is 99% effective!"
"So it doesn't work in 1% of cases? Then what's the point, throw it away, we just have to accept that cancer is going to happen"
These arguments are exactly why people hate vegans. It's nonsense.
Not only do you jump to an insane straw man. You showcase that you ignore a clear increasing contradiction around your world view and choose reactionary nothing.
If you care about life realize the harder question. If you care about the environment realize clear inefficiencues. Currently, you showcase nothing more than crude thoughtlessness.
I'm not a vegan but it's foolish to think that vegans aren't objectively correct. Let's even say that plants are conscious beings on the level of cows or pigs. The conditions these plants are grown in are a million times better than that of the average factory farm animal. Additionally, in order to sustain ourselves on cows and pigs, exponentially more of these conscious plants need to be killed to fatten the conscious animals we are eating.
If we just ate the plants instead there would be several orders of magnitude less suffering in the word, antibiotic resistant bacteria would be a less immediate issue, a significant amount of our greenhouse gas emissions would disappear, and we'd all probably be healthier to boot.
Yes, something has to die in order for any organism to continue it's existence. Let's not pretend that only plants dying aren't a better alternative in every way to animals dying in order to further our collective existence. You accuse vegans of being reactionary but your comment smacks of knee-jerky defensiveness for something you seem to understand is wrong
Devil’s advocate: are they a million times better?
Monocultures, moldboard plowing destroying soil structure and creating an Ap horizon, organics depletion and excessive application of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides…
Suspending any personal beliefs in the matter, it is truly easier to empathize with people, mammals, then others animals because we better understand their experience. We cannot understand the abstractions of a plant’s lived experience. Humans are only just starting to examine the intricacies of plant familial systems through root and mycorrhizal networks.
Fair enough. I'm not going to sit here and claim that out current agricultural structure is perfect or even ideal. I personally think a decentralized and highly local system of food production and distribution would be better for the products themselves as well as the environment, human health, and community strength. A million times better is hyperbole but I think it's fair to say industrial agriculture is better for the plant than it's equivalent for livestock.
Fertilizers aren't great, pesticides aren't great, soil erosion isn't great. If we waved a magic wand and turned everyone vegan we would still see a net decrease in these harmful agricultural practices simply because people need less food than cows or pigs (among others), especially in the numbers were raising these animals in. If we're going to care for the wellbeing of the plants we eat, it would still be better to stop raising animals for food from a purely mathematical perspective.
I also agree that animals are easier to empathize with, and as such, we may overlook other (possibly intelligent) forms of life as a consequence. Perhaps one day we will achieve a thorough understanding on the lived experiences of plants and that knowledge may create another paradigm shift. But we need a planet that is capable of sustaining life for that to happen. Reducing our collective meat consumption is one of the myriad tools we have to ensure that end. Sorry if I'm coming off as confrontational or anything. I'm sick and my brain is foggy so I wasn't paying much mind to tone in this comment haha. Not trying to start shit or anything, just too lazy to edit
It wasn't an insane strawman though? It was literally the argument they made. Something has to die for you to eat, therefore it doesn't matter how many things you kill or how necessary those deaths are. The fact that you must kill something absolves you of any guilt for any amount of killing, is the ridiculous argument the person made (and which carnists often make) which we are making fun of for being obviously evil and wrong.
It is - it's a super affirmative position. It takes an extreme position within the sphere it's trying to criticize to make an exaggerated point to attack. It's literally a classic strawman.
Your follow up is in the same vein. Its empty rhetoric
That's called Reductio Ad Absurdum and is a valid, classic form of argumentation. If you take their premises to their logical conclusion, the result is absurd, so their premises must be false.
You don't get to arbitrarily limit where a premise gets applied in order to pick and choose which conclusions to stand by. It isn't a strawman to show that someone's premises lead to conclusions that they would disagree with, that's literally the point.
Lol I despise people not knowing what a strawman is. Go back to english class.
I'm not a vegan. Their argument was literally that morally there is no difference in the amount of death caused by any person for the purposes of consumption.
This logic doesn't make sense in any other context. Like, if I say we should try to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere, you could point out that emitting CO2 is a fundamental part of human life, so something something virtue signaling blah blah blah. Just because something is unavoidable to a certain degree doesn't mean we shouldn't try to minimize it.
Or maybe there's happy middle where everyone can live comfortably while keeping the harm we cause at a minimum.
Or, at the most selfish, we could make sure we don't kill ourselves this decade or the next.
We as humans are blessed with the ability to choose how we interact with these "facts of life".
unless the point is that consciousness is not a disqualifying trait to become food
It wasn't for the donner party.
Well a salad is made of cells that have responses to certain stimuli
The brain if you where to go and simplify it down to its most very basic layer is just responses to stimili
The brain is a collection of responses to stimuli that together create a kind of network that can respond to stimuli in complex ways
Plants are a collection of cells that respond to stimuli
So they very well will likely to be conscious on some level
The above comment is made of glyphs arranged to convey meaning. The Code of Hammurabi is made of glyphs arranged to convey meaning.
So the comment will very well be likely a significant contribution to human culture.
i think statistically it would be insignificant based on the sheer amount of written material out there, so it should actually be a function of how long the work is, plus how long it's been around for, the longer it is, and the longer its been around for, the more complete of a historical document we have.
There's a type of person that thinks Joe Rogan is clever because they agree with him.
I mean if you stretch the definition enough even cells know they are being eaten. they usually respond by "shit this cant be good, I better press this big red button"
Yeah, that's absolutely what keeps happening with these news items. "Lifeform demonstrates reaction to stimulus!"
What will Staples do?
dont get the reference
Is that the browning that goes on on the outside when baking some meat?
There was a Hungarian cult that convinced others that people can survive by eating light. There were some deaths and was quickly shut down, but they exist forever in anorexia-related jokes.
I think you're talking about Breatherism? There've been a couple of those cults all over Europe. It's not particularly popular, luckily, but they often make it to the newspapers, because someone usually dies.
It originates from Hinduism though. There's a another Indian religion called Jainism. These are the monks you see brushing away the beetles before their feet, to not step on them. It's very much about nature and spiritualism and being good. Fasting is a key concept of this religion and the most extreme cases will choose to fast until death to cleanse the world. This is all very spiritual though and takes years of preparation.
There's no way this won't restart the same argument with someone, huh? Top-tier shitpost, well done.
Thanks, I saw it come across my FB feed and knew what had to be done.
Yo fuck that propagandist piece of shit Joe Rogan. Keep him off of my feed.
I'm constantly dismayed to find that brain damaged ape, topping the podcast charts weekly. He's such a disease
Ew, Joe Rogan.
Joe Rogan 🤮
That's not how knowledge works.
Do y'all not eat vegetables too?
Finally we have one thing to pin on like 3 weird vegans.
Siding with alt right trash like Joe Roegan to own the
libsvegans 😎Their fault for dressing so sexy
Those poor cats. Vegans shouldn't be allowed to own meat.
Dogs taste better anyways. Can’t beat a good Elwood’s steak!
That website is confusing, it doesn't let you order any dog meat. It also seems to assume I would have a problem with the product? Is that a strategy to make me want it more?
Dog is a fine meal!
Doing this sort of "eating a cow is no more ethical than eating a dog" thing isn't necessarily untrue (although ethics are, of course, a subjective thing) but it does not really convince people not to eat meat. If you are going to argue from an ethics of killing and eating an animal angle, talk about why it is cruel to kill and eat animals that most people who eat meat are used to eating.
Different people react to different things. It takes many approaches to reach multiple types of humans.
I personally reacted after months of being shown hypocrisy, with the tipping point being when I said there’s no problem with eggs and dairy before I was shown what the egg and dairy industries do.
Part of that process was really realizing, not just knowing but consciously thinking about and considering the fact that humans are also meat. I am meat. The cats I loved were meat. My human family is meat. It’s not okay to eat them in a sandwich. Why is it okay to eat strangers in a sandwich?
No one approach will work on every human, and many people take a lot of different approaches over time to really understand.
I always fall back on the concept of graphing how delicious the animal is vs how much of an asshole it is. Ducks? Absolutely delicious and raging assholes; they are the perfect meal. Dogs? Too sweet to ever try and on the negative side of the asshole graph. Cats? Rather asshole but not sure how they taste...
Maybe you're joking but I have seen people say this seriously so I'll respond seriously. Determining which conscious beings to inflict pain and suffering onto based on characteristics they were born with through no choice of their own is pretty shitty.
I’m all for the most humane and ethical means of getting meat and the day I can get a steak that didn’t require a cow to die but is indistinguishable from the real thing I will absolutely switch over, but until then I’m going to enjoy delicious, delicious duck and not feel bad about. Wouldn’t eat a dog even in an apocalypse though.
Yeah that's an obvious troll response you vеgаn's use
People are well aware of it
I am mostly vegan and my cat and dog eat mostly meat 🖕
Vegan is a philosophy, not a diet. The word you’re looking for is plant-based, not vegan.
A vegan wouldn’t buy leather shoes or woolen sweaters. Someone on a plant-based diet would.
Sure, but the average person does not know or care about the distinction. It's much easier to explain this way. I'll see if I can incorporate this terminology instead next time though
That you for being reasonable and not insane.
vegans care about animals. I assure you it is the norm
Yep. My vegan brother has two dogs and three cats and has no problem giving them meat (or meat-based food anyway) as part of their diet.
It's not some universal idea that vegans will be okay with keeping meat-eating pets but refuse to give them that meat.
No it's not a universal idea, but it does happen and it is animal abuse when it does.
I agree with you, but this is definitely not an argument you want to go into because it caused an absolute massive shitshow. Check out the top pinned post on Lemmy.world.
I did see that shitshow you refer to.
I realized that was likely true, but the ones who aren't are just so damn loud about it.
I have met far more people complaining loudly about vegans than I have loud vegans
Great idea, let's stop re-homing rescue animals shall we?
lmfao this is hilarious
So many vegans taking this 100% seriously lmao
NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL SHITPOSTING VOL. 68
Let's go to the extremes here: let's say I'm a vegan, and love snakes and want my snake to not eat live mouse, do you think I can feed the snake vegan snake food?
This is all hypothetical as I dislike snakes and love bacon.
Veganism is a philosophy that calls for reducing harm to animals where practical and possible. You can conjure up whatever hypothetical you like, and if you specifically look for situations where harm to animals is unavoidable, then harm to animals will be... unavoidable, in those situations.
However, the vast majority of choices you'll make that affect the lives of animals don't happen within the context of these sorts of thoughts experiments. You don't have to eat rats or bacon in order to survive. So it's not really relevant, unless you're actually in that sort of situation.
Personally, I simply wouldn't keep a snake as a pet, and if I had one, I'd give it away. The delimma you've presented pits my feeling of wanting a snake against my ethical beliefs about not harming animals, and I consider that ethical belief to be more important. I could always just watch videos of snakes or go see them at the zoo or whatever. But if you did one of those, "You're stranded on a deserted island with nothing to eat but a crate full of frozen steaks that washed ashore," then sure, I'd prioritize my survival because it wouldn't be practical to avoid them in that situation.
Well sure, but it was all a shit-post comment not actually meant to be taken seriously. I chose a snake for that very reason. Though your comment gave me a ton to think about and was well thought out! Bravo!
well i mean, snakes are pretty fucking stupid. assuming the snake can digest it properly, and gets the required nutrients, it should be fine.
However we can also consider that mayhaps you live in NYC which has a rat problem, perhaps you should just feed your snake rats instead.
For no particular reason I'm heading to new York with my van of 1000 snakes.
whatever you do, don't hold on to them, NYC has a snake under population, they desperately need more snakes. For uhhhh....
Snaking.
You can tweak this metaphor and get plenty of real life examples. Cats are obligate carnivores. There’s been lots of morons who went vegan and decided their cats could be vegan, too. I’ll leave guessing the outcome of that as an exercise to the reader.
I believe cats can't properly digest the plants right? Probably kills them slowly.
I guess vegan cat owners are doing their Job and eradicating meat eaters from the world. /s
But for real, crazy that some did that to their pets.
Everything that is, is alive.
Yeah, that's what most people don't understand... People should do some shrooms/LSD to get out of their head and back to their heart.
This would solve most if not all the cognitive dissonance we strugle with every day...