So are all carnivores inherently evil? Lions, evil, hawks, evil.
It’s not the meat eating that’s a problem, it’s our population that forces us into using industrial processes to produce the required amount of food. A world of 8 billion lions would have the same problem.
Evil is a societal definition. You’re seeing the beginning of the definition change to include the suffering of animals. The only way it will take hold permanently is if humans end up more empathetic in the future. The current batch don’t have it in them.
Carnivores have to eat animals to survive while we don’t, for starters. And they don’t have access to replacements or alternatives, like we do, which justifies omnivores as well. Additionally, animals in the wild are in a survival situation, they can’t really be picky about it. It’s literally kill or be killed (or starve). Most of us have the luxury of choice, and when you have a choice it’s then that the evil or good conundrum arises.
Overpopulation isn’t the issue either, since we’d save land compared to now if we all ate plants.
I don’t think it’s right to call an animal evil because it exists in a world where it’s food natural is produced in an evil manner (i.e. it was born into an evil culture). If that’s the case, even if you’re vegan, are you certain your clothes or possessions didn’t come from exploitative labor, otherwise, you’re evil too right?
Also, one can buy their meat from small non-factory producers or even hunt or fish their food, not uncommon at all in many parts of the world, I don’t see why this is inherently any more of a “problem” than any other animal eating meat (again, the problem arises from the scale of humanity).
Overpopulation isn’t the issue either, since we’d save land compared to now if we all ate plants.
At best ideas like veganism pushes problems of overpopulation back a few more years. The planet is not infinite, we cannot just grow forever so long as everyone is vegan and lives in a city and takes the bus.
Point is we don’t have to, and if you acknowledge this along with the fact that our consumption contributes to animal suffering, what does that make us?
I don’t much care for unhelpful labels like “evil,” but it sure isn’t good. It’s not even consistent.
Any animal higher on the food chain than herbivores causes animal suffering, this is nature, I didn’t make things this way, and I’m not evil/bad/whatever for doing what my genes instruct me to do.
We don’t have to consume animal products (in modern times where people have plenty of choices what to eat) , that’s true, but it doesn’t matter except to you, your friends, and the particular animals you didn’t eat.
I’m all for vegans choice to eat whatever, but many vegans say that we should all be vegan to save us from climate change or prevent animal cruelty and that is simply not going to happen. That’s like expecting the world to go on a diet and succeeding, or asking billions to abstain from sex. Our genes drive us to eat meat, you’re not gonna get a vegan world without a fascist world leader enforcing it harshly.
We can’t even get people to give up driving cars, why would vegans think people would give up meat? If we want to be realistic about solving climate change and reducing animal cruelty, we need to look for realistic solutions that don’t depend on most people in the the world denying biological instinct successfully their whole life.
but it doesn’t matter except to you, your friends, and the particular animals you didn’t eat.
Why does the animals’ interest to not be killed not outweigh you and your friends’ desire to end their life and eat their body, instead of plants that give you equal nourishment?
Why is the value of their very life less than the value of your whim?
Probably for the same reason that the value of a plant’s life is considered by you to be less than the value of the animal’s life. Just a disagreement about where the line between okay and not okay is.
Wow how it that some people are able to go against the will of their genes (and instincts!!) and forgot forego participating in the Natural Cruelty that is eating other animals! Amazing! Surely we would want to export this incredible gift to as many people as possible, right?
Who said anything about inherently evil? First, evil is a very religiously loaded term, harm or suffering is a better one. And we can absolutely morally judge a behaviour without making sweeping moral judgements about the person of being doing the behaviour.
What else was meant by “wrong to kill” other than evil/bad/not ok? We can use “bad” if evil is too loaded.
Would it be right to morally judge a lion for eating meat when it was born into a grotesquely overpopulated world, where the only appropriate way for the lion to eat is to participate in the food production system that treats prey animals as objects?
I hear you say “but humans don’t need to eat meat” or “humans were not evolved to eat meat” and to both of those I say you are wrong. Like I said, it’s possible in modern times with B12 supplementation but this is fairly recent. An understanding of the digestive system and comparison of it vs other animals shows we are obviously evolved to eat meat (stomach pH, intestine length, microbiota all point to meat digestion).
I respect vegans, those willing avoid animals for moral reasons and using modern tech to do so is admirable. I was a vegetarian (still consumed milk and egg) myself 20 years ago for about 3 years. But I don’t think blaming humans for desiring what our genes make us desire is the right direction. It’s like blaming people for desiring sweet foods, sugar production causes massive harm as well.
In fact a similar issue exists with sugar. Significant harm to animals, the humans that harvest, and the environment come from sugar production. But the solution to this issue isn’t to shame those who consume sugar, it’s to understand that the issue comes from operating at a massive scale that devalues the lives of the animals (humans included) who produce the product.
The fact is, life is not pretty when looked at from certain angles. Animals higher on the food chain can only live by consuming those lower on the chain. The prey hunted down by the lion isn’t having any better of a time than an animal raised humanely and slaughtered without torture.
Carnivores aren’t evil because they don’t have a choice in the matter. They are acting on instinct and do not care for ethics. Humans have a choice and moral compass, yet still create unnecessary mass death for personal gain.
As a hypothetical, if lab-grown meat becomes viable and scalable, thus offering a 1:1 replacement for meat, wouldn’t we be evil if we were to reject it just because it didn’t come from a dead animal? If no, why not? If yes, how dissimilar does the meat replacement have to be before humans stop being evil?
I actually eat meat fairly regularly, I’m just curious what other people think about this.
Humans have a choice and moral compass, yet still create unnecessary mass death for personal gain.
We do. And yet that is not all we are. Should one aspect of what it means to be human being valued above the others?
The elevation of critical thinking faculties to being the measure of a man is a very modern post Renaissance concept, one that is slowly losing traction thankfully
The elevation of critical thinking faculties to being the measure of a man is a very modern post Renaissance concept, one that is slowly losing traction thankfully
You celebrate the loss of critical thinking right here in your own words.
The elevation of them being the measure of a man is being lost, not the critical thinking skills themselves.
You know that reading comprehension is an aspect of critical thinking right? So is the capacity to engage in the discussion without attacking the speaker?
“That is not all we are” is not an excuse for unethical behavior. Recognizing the needless death of trillions of innocent, sentient beings is not a critical thinking exercise. It is something one willingly turns a blind eye to.
I wonder if there’s any difference at all between a lion and a human in terms of reasoning. Like does a typical human have the capability to plan outcomes and make decisions based on expectations for the long term?
Lions have nutritional requirements that can’t be met without meat or enough generations and pressures to evolve the ability to process what they need from plants.
That is a major difference between big cats and dogs, as dogs are omnivores and could make due without meat.
I think it’s mainly a semantic dispute, but I don’t think I would classify dogs as omnivores. They are more like scavenging carnivores, who will fortify their diet with some vegetation. I believe dogs are slightly better than wolves at absorbing some nutritional value out of starchy vegetables, but I don’t think they would “make do” without meat for very long.
The fact that veganism is possible in the modern world due to B12 supplementation doesn’t mean that it’s practical to expect a species to stop eating what it’s evolved to desire on a large scale.
I’ve been around these arguments enough times to see the discussion inevitably get to this point. We dance around the idea of “is it worth it to go vegan or not?” long enough, until eventually someone concedes that “yes it is better to do, but it’s not practical to ask everyone to do it/you can’t get everyone to go vegan/it won’t solve the problem if we go vegan and do nothing else/etc.”
If you truly think that it’s worth doing, either do it, or admit that you selfishly don’t want to. Don’t try and pretend the climate science backs up your opinions though.
As an aside, this is basically my goodbye letter to Lemmy, so so probably not going to follow up on this thread. The platform is so small that people can’t help but creep into communities that show up in the overall feed. Say what you will about Reddit, but at least there, spaces created specifically for in-groups (like a space called “vegancirclejerk”) didn’t constantly get commenters from the wider world knocking on the door and starting flame wars in the comments. Like, can there be no space for vegans to just fuck around and post memes in peace?
Maybe finally I’ll get some peace by logging off and touching some grass. And then eating the grass, bc I’m vegan btw
I don’t understand your argument. I went vegan at age 51. Before I went vegan I was a meat eater and loved meat. I can honestly say I do not crave meat now.
I think it is just a case of developing your palette. It’s like when some children don’t like veggies but then grow to love them as part of the diet or cutting down on sugar.
Conventionally raised animals get all sorts of drugs, vitamins, etc. I’m sure.
Cows and other ruminants wouldn’t normally need to be given B12 as it’s created by their gut microbiota and available to their bodies. If they are indeed supplemented with B12 I wonder if it’s because a corn based diet doesn’t support a microbiome that can create B12?
@mojo_raisin It’s because of factory farming which is 97%+ of all production. Factory farmed animals don’t have access to a healthy soil where they would normally get their B12 and other nutrients. That means rising animals for mass consumption is totally wrong.
Same goes with humans. People today are so separated from the healthy soil, they lack B12.
First part makes sense. Humans, like other primates get B12 (outside of supplementation) from either eating animal/dairy, bugs, or feces, since humans can produce B12 in our guts, but really only in our colon where it’s not available to us.
This video presents a false dichotomy between meat-only eaters and vegans and treats a specific group as if it represents all humans. Also, there are not many people actually claiming all early humans only ate meat.
Pre-humans were omnivores as we are now, we evolved for adaptability. We can adapt to diet with virtually any ratio of animal to vegetable. Either can be healthy or unhealthy depending on exactly what’s eaten and how it’s processed/prepared. How much meat vs vegetable was eaten varied greatly between groups of humans and at different times/seasons. There was no single “cavemen” or “paleo” population that all ate the same diet.
If a person chooses to avoid animal nutrition for moral reasons, that’s great. Every animal counts. Counting on a majority of the world’s population to deny what biology tells them to eat to solve climate change or animal cruelty is a vain pursuit.
just because we’re adapted for something doesn’t mean we should continue that behavior.
So you’re saying, rather than consider how our population affects us and our world, we should go against what millions of years of evolution has come to as being appropriate for us?
Red meat is not carcinogenic, if it is, why don’t we see carnivores dying of cancer constantly? Cancer is a growth due to mutated DNA, are you saying red meat mutates our DNA?
And if what you take from me is that we shouldn’t consider how our population affects us and the world then either I seriously fucked up in communicating or your reading comprehension is garbage. The way our population affects us and our world is why people should be vegan in the first place. When we consider our impact seriously and without bias, going vegan is the biggest, easiest thing to do first to reduce our impact
Red meat consumption is associated with increases in cancer. Correlation does not imply causation. What is the alleged mechanism of cancer inducement?
I agree, more people should be vegan (well not really, just veganish), and I’m glad you are, but that’s not the solution to our problems. Asking billions to deny a huge part of their biological hunger imperative and changing fundamental aspects of long-term human culture is just not going to happen on a wide enough scale to help in time to do much about climate change.
Vegetarian and vegan diets have been around for thousands of years in parts of Asia, well before B12 supplements. Cultures sorted out the nutritional requirements through ingredients, and the lack of B12 in western vegan diets has more to do with common western ingredients than some inherent problem with a plant based diet.
I’m not even vegetarian or vegan, just annoyed with misconceptions about their feasibility.
Ancient and prehistoric peoples didn’t care about dogma, being “vegan”, that’s a modern thing. To these peoples veganism would’ve been dumb, a population that denies important nutrition isn’t likely to compete well against other populations that don’t. They didn’t have factory farms and YouTube videos showing how cruel they are. They didn’t have social media showing them cute cows and saying they deserve life. Animals were food if we were hungry.
I’m sure there have been groups that were mostly vegan for periods but B12 is essential and not available in plants. To think that most of humanity somehow acquired B12 and decided to forgo meat is silly.
Oh, and those “vegan” cultures for thousands of years, they probably figured out how to supplement such as via brewer’s yeast or were not completely vegan. Remember, they didn’t have their “vegan” dogmatic friends around them to shame them if they ate a bug.
So are all carnivores inherently evil? Lions, evil, hawks, evil.
It’s not the meat eating that’s a problem, it’s our population that forces us into using industrial processes to produce the required amount of food. A world of 8 billion lions would have the same problem.
Evil is a societal definition. You’re seeing the beginning of the definition change to include the suffering of animals. The only way it will take hold permanently is if humans end up more empathetic in the future. The current batch don’t have it in them.
So that generation will see natural predators as evil?
Neutral predators don’t factory farm their prey.
C’mon, I love meat and even I see these arguments are weak.
Carnivores have to eat animals to survive while we don’t, for starters. And they don’t have access to replacements or alternatives, like we do, which justifies omnivores as well. Additionally, animals in the wild are in a survival situation, they can’t really be picky about it. It’s literally kill or be killed (or starve). Most of us have the luxury of choice, and when you have a choice it’s then that the evil or good conundrum arises.
Overpopulation isn’t the issue either, since we’d save land compared to now if we all ate plants.
I don’t think it’s right to call an animal evil because it exists in a world where it’s food natural is produced in an evil manner (i.e. it was born into an evil culture). If that’s the case, even if you’re vegan, are you certain your clothes or possessions didn’t come from exploitative labor, otherwise, you’re evil too right?
Also, one can buy their meat from small non-factory producers or even hunt or fish their food, not uncommon at all in many parts of the world, I don’t see why this is inherently any more of a “problem” than any other animal eating meat (again, the problem arises from the scale of humanity).
At best ideas like veganism pushes problems of overpopulation back a few more years. The planet is not infinite, we cannot just grow forever so long as everyone is vegan and lives in a city and takes the bus.
Point is we don’t have to, and if you acknowledge this along with the fact that our consumption contributes to animal suffering, what does that make us?
I don’t much care for unhelpful labels like “evil,” but it sure isn’t good. It’s not even consistent.
Any animal higher on the food chain than herbivores causes animal suffering, this is nature, I didn’t make things this way, and I’m not evil/bad/whatever for doing what my genes instruct me to do.
We don’t have to consume animal products (in modern times where people have plenty of choices what to eat) , that’s true, but it doesn’t matter except to you, your friends, and the particular animals you didn’t eat.
I’m all for vegans choice to eat whatever, but many vegans say that we should all be vegan to save us from climate change or prevent animal cruelty and that is simply not going to happen. That’s like expecting the world to go on a diet and succeeding, or asking billions to abstain from sex. Our genes drive us to eat meat, you’re not gonna get a vegan world without a fascist world leader enforcing it harshly.
We can’t even get people to give up driving cars, why would vegans think people would give up meat? If we want to be realistic about solving climate change and reducing animal cruelty, we need to look for realistic solutions that don’t depend on most people in the the world denying biological instinct successfully their whole life.
Why does the animals’ interest to not be killed not outweigh you and your friends’ desire to end their life and eat their body, instead of plants that give you equal nourishment?
Why is the value of their very life less than the value of your whim?
Probably for the same reason that the value of a plant’s life is considered by you to be less than the value of the animal’s life. Just a disagreement about where the line between okay and not okay is.
This is why I’m glad A.I. will be the ones to venture to the stars.
Wow how it that some people are able to go against the will of their genes (and instincts!!) and forgot forego participating in the Natural Cruelty that is eating other animals! Amazing! Surely we would want to export this incredible gift to as many people as possible, right?
Who said anything about inherently evil? First, evil is a very religiously loaded term, harm or suffering is a better one. And we can absolutely morally judge a behaviour without making sweeping moral judgements about the person of being doing the behaviour.
What else was meant by “wrong to kill” other than evil/bad/not ok? We can use “bad” if evil is too loaded.
Would it be right to morally judge a lion for eating meat when it was born into a grotesquely overpopulated world, where the only appropriate way for the lion to eat is to participate in the food production system that treats prey animals as objects?
I hear you say “but humans don’t need to eat meat” or “humans were not evolved to eat meat” and to both of those I say you are wrong. Like I said, it’s possible in modern times with B12 supplementation but this is fairly recent. An understanding of the digestive system and comparison of it vs other animals shows we are obviously evolved to eat meat (stomach pH, intestine length, microbiota all point to meat digestion).
I respect vegans, those willing avoid animals for moral reasons and using modern tech to do so is admirable. I was a vegetarian (still consumed milk and egg) myself 20 years ago for about 3 years. But I don’t think blaming humans for desiring what our genes make us desire is the right direction. It’s like blaming people for desiring sweet foods, sugar production causes massive harm as well.
In fact a similar issue exists with sugar. Significant harm to animals, the humans that harvest, and the environment come from sugar production. But the solution to this issue isn’t to shame those who consume sugar, it’s to understand that the issue comes from operating at a massive scale that devalues the lives of the animals (humans included) who produce the product.
The fact is, life is not pretty when looked at from certain angles. Animals higher on the food chain can only live by consuming those lower on the chain. The prey hunted down by the lion isn’t having any better of a time than an animal raised humanely and slaughtered without torture.
Carnivores aren’t evil because they don’t have a choice in the matter. They are acting on instinct and do not care for ethics. Humans have a choice and moral compass, yet still create unnecessary mass death for personal gain.
As a hypothetical, if lab-grown meat becomes viable and scalable, thus offering a 1:1 replacement for meat, wouldn’t we be evil if we were to reject it just because it didn’t come from a dead animal? If no, why not? If yes, how dissimilar does the meat replacement have to be before humans stop being evil?
I actually eat meat fairly regularly, I’m just curious what other people think about this.
We do. And yet that is not all we are. Should one aspect of what it means to be human being valued above the others? The elevation of critical thinking faculties to being the measure of a man is a very modern post Renaissance concept, one that is slowly losing traction thankfully
Why would you celebrate the loss of critical thinking?
I didn’t say it’s being lost
You celebrate the loss of critical thinking right here in your own words.
The elevation of them being the measure of a man is being lost, not the critical thinking skills themselves.
You know that reading comprehension is an aspect of critical thinking right? So is the capacity to engage in the discussion without attacking the speaker?
I’m aware. Please quote where I attacked you.
“That is not all we are” is not an excuse for unethical behavior. Recognizing the needless death of trillions of innocent, sentient beings is not a critical thinking exercise. It is something one willingly turns a blind eye to.
I get a choice in the matter and what that means is I can be wrong where the stupids can’t. Great. Fuck you AND your free will.
I wonder if there’s any difference at all between a lion and a human in terms of reasoning. Like does a typical human have the capability to plan outcomes and make decisions based on expectations for the long term?
lions don’t have tofu and supermarkets
Lions have nutritional requirements that can’t be met without meat or enough generations and pressures to evolve the ability to process what they need from plants.
That is a major difference between big cats and dogs, as dogs are omnivores and could make due without meat.
I think it’s mainly a semantic dispute, but I don’t think I would classify dogs as omnivores. They are more like scavenging carnivores, who will fortify their diet with some vegetation. I believe dogs are slightly better than wolves at absorbing some nutritional value out of starchy vegetables, but I don’t think they would “make do” without meat for very long.
Neither did we for 200,000 years.
The fact that veganism is possible in the modern world due to B12 supplementation doesn’t mean that it’s practical to expect a species to stop eating what it’s evolved to desire on a large scale.
i hear what you’re saying, but we’re in 2024 now and large-scale veganism is definitely practical
It is practical, it’s not gonna happen though, not in time to save our environment. We need to be looking elsewhere for solutions.
I’ve been around these arguments enough times to see the discussion inevitably get to this point. We dance around the idea of “is it worth it to go vegan or not?” long enough, until eventually someone concedes that “yes it is better to do, but it’s not practical to ask everyone to do it/you can’t get everyone to go vegan/it won’t solve the problem if we go vegan and do nothing else/etc.”
Convenient that any time an environmental initiative requires even tiny changes to our day to day lives, suddenly we need to look for the solutions vaguely “elsewhere.” I guess let’s ignore the fact that emissions from food alone are enough to push the planet over the 1.5C degree warming threshold for the planet, and that the average US consumer eats an order of magnitude more red meat than could ever be sustainable.
If you truly think that it’s worth doing, either do it, or admit that you selfishly don’t want to. Don’t try and pretend the climate science backs up your opinions though.
As an aside, this is basically my goodbye letter to Lemmy, so so probably not going to follow up on this thread. The platform is so small that people can’t help but creep into communities that show up in the overall feed. Say what you will about Reddit, but at least there, spaces created specifically for in-groups (like a space called “vegancirclejerk”) didn’t constantly get commenters from the wider world knocking on the door and starting flame wars in the comments. Like, can there be no space for vegans to just fuck around and post memes in peace?
Maybe finally I’ll get some peace by logging off and touching some grass. And then eating the grass, bc I’m vegan btw
I don’t understand your argument. I went vegan at age 51. Before I went vegan I was a meat eater and loved meat. I can honestly say I do not crave meat now.
I think it is just a case of developing your palette. It’s like when some children don’t like veggies but then grow to love them as part of the diet or cutting down on sugar.
@mojo_raisin @toxicbubble Did you knew they supplement farm animals with B12 and other vitamins and stuff?
Conventionally raised animals get all sorts of drugs, vitamins, etc. I’m sure.
Cows and other ruminants wouldn’t normally need to be given B12 as it’s created by their gut microbiota and available to their bodies. If they are indeed supplemented with B12 I wonder if it’s because a corn based diet doesn’t support a microbiome that can create B12?
@mojo_raisin It’s because of factory farming which is 97%+ of all production. Factory farmed animals don’t have access to a healthy soil where they would normally get their B12 and other nutrients. That means rising animals for mass consumption is totally wrong.
Same goes with humans. People today are so separated from the healthy soil, they lack B12.
First part makes sense. Humans, like other primates get B12 (outside of supplementation) from either eating animal/dairy, bugs, or feces, since humans can produce B12 in our guts, but really only in our colon where it’s not available to us.
Yeah but muh ideals
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc8XTLpqxLw
This video presents a false dichotomy between meat-only eaters and vegans and treats a specific group as if it represents all humans. Also, there are not many people actually claiming all early humans only ate meat.
Pre-humans were omnivores as we are now, we evolved for adaptability. We can adapt to diet with virtually any ratio of animal to vegetable. Either can be healthy or unhealthy depending on exactly what’s eaten and how it’s processed/prepared. How much meat vs vegetable was eaten varied greatly between groups of humans and at different times/seasons. There was no single “cavemen” or “paleo” population that all ate the same diet.
If a person chooses to avoid animal nutrition for moral reasons, that’s great. Every animal counts. Counting on a majority of the world’s population to deny what biology tells them to eat to solve climate change or animal cruelty is a vain pursuit.
Yeah, I mean if you look at how carcinogenic red meat is to humans, it’s unlikely we ate all that much of it
but even so, just because we’re adapted for something doesn’t mean we should continue that behavior.
So you’re saying, rather than consider how our population affects us and our world, we should go against what millions of years of evolution has come to as being appropriate for us?
Red meat is not carcinogenic, if it is, why don’t we see carnivores dying of cancer constantly? Cancer is a growth due to mutated DNA, are you saying red meat mutates our DNA?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vu9w4klc-B4 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34455534 and more sources in the description. Red meat definitely is carcinogenic lmao.
And if what you take from me is that we shouldn’t consider how our population affects us and the world then either I seriously fucked up in communicating or your reading comprehension is garbage. The way our population affects us and our world is why people should be vegan in the first place. When we consider our impact seriously and without bias, going vegan is the biggest, easiest thing to do first to reduce our impact
Red meat consumption is associated with increases in cancer. Correlation does not imply causation. What is the alleged mechanism of cancer inducement?
I agree, more people should be vegan (well not really, just veganish), and I’m glad you are, but that’s not the solution to our problems. Asking billions to deny a huge part of their biological hunger imperative and changing fundamental aspects of long-term human culture is just not going to happen on a wide enough scale to help in time to do much about climate change.
Vegetarian and vegan diets have been around for thousands of years in parts of Asia, well before B12 supplements. Cultures sorted out the nutritional requirements through ingredients, and the lack of B12 in western vegan diets has more to do with common western ingredients than some inherent problem with a plant based diet.
I’m not even vegetarian or vegan, just annoyed with misconceptions about their feasibility.
Ancient and prehistoric peoples didn’t care about dogma, being “vegan”, that’s a modern thing. To these peoples veganism would’ve been dumb, a population that denies important nutrition isn’t likely to compete well against other populations that don’t. They didn’t have factory farms and YouTube videos showing how cruel they are. They didn’t have social media showing them cute cows and saying they deserve life. Animals were food if we were hungry.
I’m sure there have been groups that were mostly vegan for periods but B12 is essential and not available in plants. To think that most of humanity somehow acquired B12 and decided to forgo meat is silly.
Oh, and those “vegan” cultures for thousands of years, they probably figured out how to supplement such as via brewer’s yeast or were not completely vegan. Remember, they didn’t have their “vegan” dogmatic friends around them to shame them if they ate a bug.
That is why I was clear about the diets being around. Diets can exist without the dogma.