@ Grain + cityofmist + Churchill Salmon
Firstly thanks for answering.
Secondly: What about keeping animals (happy conditions like last question I asked) that aren't for eating, they instead have resources that are harvested like wool from sheep and eggs from chickens?
Would the harvesting give the animals anxiety? Would a sheep be unhappy without its wool? Would a bird be distressed if its eggs were stolen? Is it possible to steal these things in small enough quantities that the animals would not be distressed?
edited 8th Feb '11 1:31:30 PM by Grain
Anime geemu wo shinasai!
Well with chickens (I keep some hence the line of questioning), unless they are broody they don't notice, and if you collect the eggs regularly they won't go broody.
I can see a case where certain breeds have Crippling Overspecialization such as a chicken breed designed to lay at the cost of life, same with sheep and wool.
By the powers invested in me by tabloid-reading imbeciles, I pronounce you guilty of paedophilia!I'd actually like to go hunting once, even if I don't manage to bag anything, so I have no issue with Drunk's viewpoint. Kind of impractical for everyone to go out and hunt, though, but if the opportunity presents itself, no problem.
We had our own chickens for awhile. Those were the best eggs ever.
edited 8th Feb '11 1:43:10 PM by pvtnum11
Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.Talking about animal rights makes me feel utilitarian, which bothers me somewhat.
Anime geemu wo shinasai!Utilitarianism has monstrous moral implications if taken too far. For example, I invoked negative utilitarianism when I said that humanely killing animals is okay if they live happily. Well, the most moral action from a pure negative utilitarian viewpoint is to destroy the world. It seems that my mind in particular easily wanders to the negative utilitarian side of things, which makes me feel guilty.
It's very ironic, but analyzing things with utilitarianism makes me feel like a heartless monster sometimes.
edited 8th Feb '11 2:09:43 PM by Grain
Anime geemu wo shinasai!You don't have to take utilitarianism to its logical conclusions. Your morality is your morality and if you think killing everyone to remove suffering is wrong then you should find a better descriptor for your morality instead of redefining your morality to fit a description. The whole point of consequentialism is that doing the right thing makes the world a better place and thus one's morality should be described by what one would like the world to be like (or at least what one would like there to be) instead of what extrapolating one's ideal world from actions which in the current situation might be approximations for what is the right thing to do.
And when it comes to utilitarianism, because of problems with the human hardware ends don't really justify the means, or at least one should pay a price for using bad means to make sure one doesn't use them too lightly is a very good heuristic.
edited 8th Feb '11 2:55:13 PM by ChurchillSalmon
Regarding eggs, I think the major problem there is the industry. If you keep ten or so chickens, from a traditional breed like leghorns or rhode island red, I don't think anybody would dispute that those chickens have a good life. The trouble is when you keep them on industrial scale. Even the 'free range' industry is still not ideal. The breeds used in commercial farms are, like Ian ex Machina said, overspecialised so that they're constantly thin as a rail and only live for a palty 4 or so years, as opposed to the 7 or 8 a traditional breed will.
Be not afraid...eh, I'll eat my meat and drink my milk, and I'd appreciate a bunch of know nothings like PETA staying away and not trying to evangelize like the even more moronic cousin of the fundies.
I consider my meat intake a natural process. We humans were created omnivores, not herbivores. If some animal dies, so what? Death is a part of life.
edited 8th Feb '11 3:41:49 PM by NickTheSwing
This thread isn't about PETA or evangelical vegans. My problem isn't animal death; the problem is animal suffering.
edited 8th Feb '11 3:57:03 PM by Grain
Anime geemu wo shinasai!You're just thinking about it too linearly. Imagine utilitarianism as a blackbox, the input is your action and your output is happiness/unhappiness.
You input "kill some animals for meat" and you get out some level of happiness. So you figure, why don't we kill all animals for meat? Put it into the blackbox, out comes "unhappiness". So then clearly, the function isn't so simple (ie. not linear).
On the topic at hand I've always regarded veganism like I do any other aspect of culture. It's difficult to pin it on a scale of right/wrong because it's more of a "natural consequence of the environment". Veganism makes sense in the original cultures from where it arose because of the environment they live in. You transplant that concept to somewhere else, it doesn't make as much sense. Take for instance the practice of "if a wife's husband dies then she instantly marries the late husband's brother". Today we would decry the lack of freedom inherent in such a practice. Back then, when you're in the Mongol steppes where men get killed left and right, it offered stability for your family.
@Silent Stranger: Fair enough, I suppose. I call bullshit on you eating meat without doing it.
@Grain: Animals suffer in the wild, too. Sometimes more than in captivity. I believe it's how things work out there, though I could be mistaken.
If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~Some people
would say that because we're human, we don't have to act naturally. (By "naturally", I think we mean as meat-eating animals do.) As humans, we can consider the consequences of what we do and don't have to eat animals.
IMHO, that seems to leave a discussion for the amount of suffering vs. amount of gain open, but in Singer's mind it's a definite case * for vegetarianism/Veganism.
edited 8th Feb '11 11:32:18 PM by newtonthenewt
She's playing with fire! He's not ready for Nibbly Pig!In theory, I'm fine with keeping animals for wool, eggs, etc, hence vegetarianism. However, the problem with this is that if everyone were vegetarian, then we would only have a use for female chickens and female cows (eggs and milk). What would we do with male ones? Also, cows only produce milk when they've had calves in the last year or so (I think) so it's necessary to keep them near constantly breeding; many of the calves produced for this purpose are used for veal, and almost all of them end up dead within months. If you care about animal rights then vegetarianism is not viable as an actual 'ideal moral standard' because on a large scale it doesn't work. However, I am a deeply selfish person and vegetarianism is as far as I'm willing to go.
Also, I find it annoying when people say that 'eating meat is natural'. Get off your enormously complicated electronic communications device, made entirely of artificial components and using science that you almost certainly don't even understand, because let's face it pretty much nobody does, and then we'll talk natural.
edited 9th Feb '11 11:18:37 AM by cityofmist
Scepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom. - Clarence Darrow...If we want to talk natural, we could discuss just how difficult it woudl be to go full out off-the-grid and all that. Make a house - with wood that you cut - using tools that are all natural (as in stone, wood and whatever else youc an find) - getting yoru water from a stream or natural aquifer...
Yeah, I can't do that, either.
Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.I have a cousin who was vegan for a while. She had to take supplements, looked ill all the time (not to mention being really, really skinny) and ended up having to pack it in for health reasons. Personally when it comes to animal products (meat, eggs, dairy, leather, wool, ect) my attitude can be more or less summed up as 'that's what they're there for.' If we didn't eat meat, eggs or dairy, the cows and chickens wouldn't exist and I mean that literally since both species are more or less man made for the purpose of being a food source for humans. If everyone went vegan then they'd be surplus to requirements and go extinct (probably with some help from us to avoid wasting money/resources).
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So, you're a Creationist? And veganism is invalid by Creationist standards?
Oi, what an ugly topic.
I'll keep myself laconic. I eat some kinds of meat (chicken, namely) couldn't ever kill a chicken myself. If that's hypocritical to you, than oh well. I don't raise anything I eat. If people don't want to eat meat, I see no reason to try to convince them otherwise. Some people have moral objections, others just don't like the taste.
I spread my wings and I learn how to fly....What? No, I'm not, in fact I think that that particular concept is one of the world's biggest wallbangers. What I meant was that there are no wild cows or wild chickens out there, although there probably was at some point. We, meaning humanity, took whatever the original animal was and through careful breeding turned them into living, breathing milk or egg factories that are also delicious in and of themselves. The only reason they're still around and their ancestors aren't is because as food sources they are useful to us so we keep breeding and taking care of them. From the moment a cow comes into this world it's purpose in life is to be a milk factory, if it's female, or to die and get turned into steak and potroasts if it's a male. If they didn't have that function then they wouldn't exist because we wouldn't bother breeding them.

Drunk@ Yeah, I call bullshit on your idea that you need to kill an animal yourself before you should eat meat.