Anti-vegans will go to any depths of depravity in order to deal with their cognitive dissonance. Once, on Reddit, I got a commenter to agree that he would be fine if someone had a dog in a cage they tortured for entertainment, rather than agree that it’s kinda fucked up that we slaughter animals because their flesh tastes nice.
So let me get this straight, you were arguing with someone, tried to lead them to a contradiction, but they actually had a consistent view on it that you didn’t like, and your conclusion is that they have cognitive dissonance?
My friend, I do not think that means what you think it means.
Most people agree that raping dogs is bad. Maybe they genuinely believe that raping dogs is okay, or maybe they’re just saying that to deal with their cognitive dissonance. I would prefer that it’s cognitive dissonance, but if they’re a dog rape apologist, then they’re a piece of shit anyways.
I hope it’s cognitive dissonance and not authentic approval of dog rape.
“Feels good” is not a valid justification to harm others, imagine how that justification would apply in other cases and it’s pretty easy to see how it falls apart. You can’t be logically consistent with that justification to harm others. The same with apathy, also not a justification to needlessly exploit animals.
So a dog is someone and that’s what makes it rape? Where do you draw the line for someone? Is it the act of rape itself that’s bad, or is it the perpetrator getting sexual satisfaction from it? What if they don’t do it for that purpose, but some other more abstract reason? Is it okay then?
You thought you had me. Your argument is invalid and includes logical fallacies, because you’ve swapped the original situation, which was artificial insemination of livestock, for having sex with a pet. These are not comparable.
Whether a dog is “someone” or not is irrelevant when discussing a completely different situation.
Forcibly impregnating someone is rape. Artificially inseminating livestock is not rape. Having sex with a pet animal is rape. Having sex with a consenting adult is not rape. Different things actually are, in fact, different.
Like, what a fucking stupid answer that can apply to anything and nothing at the same time.
Animals are animals, and humans are animals. Kangaroos are not cows, but both are also animals - different things ARE different, but at the same time, in some aspects, they are not.
Why doesn’t my dog have a right to vote? Why can a snake eat eggs but I can’t? Why is it OK for ants to farm aphids but not for humans to farm cows?
Different things are, in fact, different. There are lots of dead simple and airtight arguments for veganism without counterproductive emotional appeals. Talk about economics or ecology or health and not about sad puppy dog eyes.
Hell yeah! Morals are just a suggestion, lions eat their young, but I can’t? That’s bullshit and we all know it. If you wanna argue against eating our young (just the disabled ones, of course), please keep that melodramatic stuff out of here.
If you believe that animals should have rights like humans do, then animals can be raped. If slavery was still legal, would you write “it’s pretty fucked up to equate slave husbandry with rape”? Just because we have historically done something, that doesn’t mean that what we’re doing is in any way moral.
Animals can have rights and be protected from unnecessary cruelty without anthropomophizing them and granting full human rights. You’re equating full, sapient humans with a species specifically bred for a base purpose without higher levels of thought and expression.
I don’t even think that statement is anthropocentric hubris. If ultra-advanced aliens showed up tomorrow and started domesticating humans for food or some other purpose, I would have the default expectation of them having the same or similar morals. Maybe we’d get access to decent healthcare and good libraries before we went to the slaughterhouse.
Cows get more rights than trees or crops because they have an ability to express pain and convey emotion. They don’t have the same rights as humans because they could never give a passionate argument for suffrage to a jury.
And to be clear: there are plenty of real, tangible reasons to end animal husbandry and make everyone vegan without even touching philosophy.
If ultra-advanced aliens showed up tomorrow and started domesticating humans for food or some other purpose, I would have the default expectation of them having the same or similar morals. Maybe we’d get access to decent healthcare and good libraries before we went to the slaughterhouse
I can’t believe you said this with a straight face. This is the depths of depravity and mental gymnastics that a non vegan philosophical position leads to. I’m also sure that if this actually happened, you would throw your logic in the trash, where it belongs, and you would fight for the liberation of the slaughtered race.
Do you want to extend the argument to a person who is in a permanent comatose state? By your definition, they are without “higher levels of thought and expression”. Is it cool to eat them?
If the advanced aliens had the control over us that we exert over animals then I wouldn’t have a choice. And whether I fight or not isn’t relevant to their choice to farm me. If anything it’s in their best interest to keep me healthy and content until I’m harvested.
Your coma example is laughable. They’re a human. A medical procedure (even if we don’t have the technology to perform it) could return them to normal function. Turning a cow into a human-like creature is a different discussion altogether, it would be a transformation at such a fundamental level that we might as well be discussing artificial personhood instead of the ethics of diet.
If we invented a procedure that could make corn moo would it no longer be vegan?
If the advanced aliens had the control over us that we exert over animals then I wouldn’t have a choice. And whether I fight or not isn’t relevant to their choice to farm me. If anything it’s in their best interest to keep me healthy and content until I’m harvested.
You keep avoiding the moral implications here because you know the argument is bs. If some groups of people mass bred and slaughtered monkeys or dogs on an industrial scale would you not care, because they don’t have a choice? It would be the same as your example, without the alien hypotheticals.
A medical procedure could return them to normal function
The disconnect between the logical, robotical analysis in the first case and the childish, optimistic look here really just highlights the compartmentalization you have to go through for a “coherent” position.
I don’t quite understand what you mean by moral implications. Would I be upset if aliens started eating people? Yeah, that would suck. Would it be morally defensible to fight back in the same way a cow might kick? Of course. But I can’t consider their view because they are defined as a higher tier of being in this scenario.
You’re imagining little green humans with forks when it may just as well be a hyper-developed cloud of space bacteria. In their view, every human gut biome is a slave pit where trillions can be massacred at will.
Using us as incubators and then harvesting the “human” collection of cell resources is a perfectly ethical thing to do. Who cares about the shrieking sound waves and fluid that spills out while humans melt, that might as well be the smell of fresh cut grass. It’s just a bunch of clones of one DNA sequence vs the plethora of diverse cells unleashed from the gut. Easy decision.
Keeping us happy and healthy is crucial for the health of the gut biome, no need to cause any undue stress because that would hurt the final product. But of course, through gene manipulation or artificial selection they can make us into a more durable and docile species.
…And at that point modern humans are effectively extinct. I don’t have to worry about the ethics of an incubation vat in the same way you don’t worry about our bizzarre and unnatural domesticated crops.
the childish, optimistic look here really just highlights the compartmentalization you have to go through for a “coherent” position.
I’m totally lost here. You’re saying a comatose human is actually not a human but it is an animal (and therefore gets human rights)? My “higher thought” point is that our measure of life is relative to human features and human ability. A comatose human is very obviously still a human. Hell, even a dead human is still a human until it decays away and is recycled into something else.
Instead of silly screaming corn: What if I bred creatures that couldn’t express pain in any measurable way? Just sacks of flesh that you could herd around and harvest when they’re big enough. Slice off some reproductive piece and stick it in a tube to grow the next batch. Basically a meat tree on legs.
Is that unethical? Just because it’s gross? It’s no different than a plant. What if I told you I made them from pig DNA [no harm was done to the pig btw] but I cut out all traces of sensory organs that might convey pain. They can sense just barely enough to stand upright and only have the barest parts of a brain needed to grow more mass.
At what point does the distasteful husbandry become acceptable gardening? When the creatures can’t move? When the red blood is sap? Does the flesh have to be green instead of pink? Do the insides need to taste like a mango instead of bacon? Does it need photosynthesis like a spotted salamander or a sea slug?
Your position is incoherent if you can’t tell me exactly where the line is crossed AND that line is solid for all vegans.
When does that lifeform gain or lose rights?
If you can’t do that or admit there’s subjectivity in the judgment then why can’t that subjectivity hold for cultures that bred dogs for food? Dogs are clearly not humans, but they’re too close to my personal experience of pets for comfort. That clearly isn’t the case with all humans, so I can’t pass judgment on the mere fact that a dog is eaten.
Slaves can have rights and be protected from unnecessary cruelty without anthropomophizing them and granting full human rights. You’re equating full, sapient humans with a species specifically bred for a base purpose without higher levels of thought and expression.
That’s exactly how people justified slavery in the past, and it is how the person I replied to justified their argument. That’s my entire point. It’s the same argument.
This is a ludicrous argument. If you truly believe that all animals have the same rights then the only internally consistent conclusion is the virtual extermination of the human species.
Life is a zero sum game. Something lives by consuming something else or displacing it for access to limited resources. Optimizing for the minimum harm to earth’s ecosystem is always going to be the end of agriculture, housing, hunting, industry and basically everything other human institution. We’re the most insidious invasive species ever and the world would be healthier without us mucking around.
So unless you’re stumping for that, don’t pretend to have the moral high ground. If you are, stop wasting your time shaming people and skip right to culling them.
Something lives by consuming something else or displacing it for access to limited resources.
True, but no one gives a shit when the consumed life is a plant.
People say the “plants feel pain” thing rhetorically, but it isn’t a serious argument. And if they were somehow actually being serious, then this would actually strengthen the case to only consume plants due the efficiency of doing so vs consuming animal products.
Plants don’t have to feel pain to be a lynch pin in the ecosystem supporting the animals around them. One less native plant is one less place to shelter or feed an endangered animal, or one less set of roots preventing the erosion of a habitat at risk.
Eliminating animal products mitigates the problem but it in no way absolves you from our exponential consumption of finite resources, and in many ways it’s naive non-solution.
For example: culling and eating pest animals like deer is not vegan, but leaving them alone with no natural predators does exponentially more harm to all other animals that depend on the native plants decimated by an unchecked deer population. Eliminating the predators is a human-caused problem but washing our hands of the situation will kill far more.
I advocate for humanity to live in harmony and balance with our environment, that is why I am anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist as well as vegan. Our history is plagued with exploitation, that can’t be denied, but I am trying to change it and you are arguing that it cannot be changed and that we shouldn’t even try.
Humanity’s relationship with animals and nature has historically been exploitative but it doesn’t need to be that way.
We have vastly increased our ability to produce food. There are ample resources available on the planet for all of us to share and live in abundance. Human greed and selfishness is rewarded by our society. That means our society needs to change.
I reject your argument that life is a zero-sum game. My happiness does not need to come at the expense of another’s unhappiness. We can all work together to create a better future for all living things on our planet.
I reject your argument that life is a zero-sum game
Then you’re a fundamentally blind idealist or just lying to yourself. The absolute bare minimum, purely vegetarian footprint needed to support a human is about 0.2 acres (~800 m²). That’s 0.2 acres of precious arable land that could support dozens of species of plants, insects and animals purely dedicated to one human and their crops. A diverse and thriving array of life traded for one person and a handful of domesticated species.
From there you’re now looking at displacement and damage from housing, water usage, soil degradation, waste disposal, pest control and every other basic necessity. God forbid you get into modern niceties like health care, transportation, education, arts, sciences, etc…
Humans aren’t friendly little forest nymphs, we’re megafauna. Even the most benign and innocuous species of primates (such as lemurs and marmosets) peaked their populations in the high millions. Getting the human population down from 8.3 billion to a sustainable level is a 99%+ reduction. That’s a more complete eradication than any genocide in recorded history, let alone the sheer amount of death and scope of institutional collapse.
That’s just a flat fact of our reality. Either 99% of humans have no right to exist or humans are inherently a higher class of animal. Choose one.
We have vastly increased our ability to produce food. There are ample resources available on the planet for all of us to share and live in abundance.
Uh ooooooh… someone isn’t familiar with how dependent our agriculture is on pesticides, petrochemicals and heavy industry 😬
We (currently) have ample oil and topsoil. Not ample sustainable food. Don’t even get me started on out other niche limits, like our approach to peak mineral supply or pollinator collapse.
We have vastly increased our ability to produce food.
And it has been largely the (petro)chemical industry responsible for this. The Haber-Bosch process transformed agriculture, but accounts for percent-level quantities of global energy consumption and carbon emissions. And it requires raw materials that are typically produced from hydrocarbons (although admittedly there are renewable options). And other nutrients typically come from mining (even organic options) - which displaces many species of all sorts. And this does not account for pesticides, etc., that others have mentioned.
Prior to the development of modern chemistry, our best sources of fertilizer were often animal manures - which require breeding, raising, and ultimately usually killing animals.
Sure, there is a lot we can do to minimize harm, and generally we should, and I try to myself as much as possible. But I’m not fooling myself into thinking that eating vegan or growing my food organically means nothing or no one suffered. Until we all go back to pre-agrarian societies, we will continue to cause large-scale destruction in some way. But of course this in itself would cause massive population decline and resultant suffering in humans.
Brother I am vegan (at least 95% in diet if you want to quibble over niche animal product additives). I’m just not going to shed tears over every single creature on earth like they’re my family pet while losing sight of the purpose of harm reduction. Why is the few grams of milk powder in your chips more important than mass deforestation supporting your avocados and coffee?
If most militant vegans actually examined their emotional arguments before they posted them people would take them way more seriously. Animals suffering and dying might make you deeply uncomfortable but that’s not a universal experience. You can’t browbeat people out of 15k years of animal husbandry just because you personally couldn’t stomach skinning a rabbit.
I am, the comparison is extremely apt. An entire group of thinking, feeling, sentient, living creatures, exploited for profit. We look down on them as being beneath us, and a culture that normalizes beating, raping and killing them. Living beings, treated as property. They are slaves. Lots of people like to believe that if they had lived during slavery, they would have been against it. This is the modern equivelent.
Artificial insemination without consent is rape. Natural insemination without consent is rape.
Cows cannot give consent to humans. No animal can. Hell, even if we discovered another human-like species but couldn’t have meaningful communication with them, it’d still be rape.
a) we don’t b) they can happily fuck on their own, it just makes it harder to exploit them for their body fluids. Nobody cares about the calves, they are just needed for the mothers to lactate
Wouldn’t it make more sense to simply induce lactation than go through the whole rigmarole of artificial insemination and then having to dispose of the unwanted calves?
Remember there have been at least one-doctor that did this to women, not in his offices to become pregnant (warning, SP?). A famous case was a doctor that raped/impregnanted (SP?) a lot of women looking to become mothers, with his own sperm. The obvious results/proof came after birth,
Arguing with vegans is like arguing with antivaxxers, they are positions based on emotions and they have their own version of reality they use to reinforce their believes. They often claim they have studies to back up their claims but the most shallow dive shows them to be bullshit.
It’s literally evident as they try to reframe this as rape. Their need to lean on rhetoric shows they have a strong basis for their believes.
What do we call a sexual act with a being that did not consent?
Does it matter if the being is human? And what if the being is a neanderthal?
Or say we find a lady on the street and DNA test her, find out she’s technically not human. What would we call sexually acting upon her without her consent?
If defining this action triggers you emotionally this much, that’s a reflection of your ability to have level-headed conversations. It’s not your interlocutor as much as you’d like to claim.
My criticism here isn’t about any specific group or topic. It’s about this aggravating debate pattern where rhetoric is used to paint the opponent’s argument into a morally charged form rather than addressing the actual claim being made.
That style of engagement is not something that ever leads to meaningful discussions.
A similar dynamic occurs in other highly polarized subjects where participants are more focused on signaling moral positions than resolving the underlying question.
This sort of shit has been going on since at least the times of Artistole who championed logic over emotion.
Trying to be “facts forward” so make of this what you will. Source: I was in FFA in highschool in a beef intense-ish area.
The method of collecting semen I’m most familiar with is when they take a female cow in heat and tie her up, then bring a male bull they want to collect semen from into the same pen. The male will smell the female is in heat, gets erect, and will attempt to mount her.
As the male is trying to mount the female, people in the pen with the cattle will have a large rubbery “sleeve” on a pole (imagine a cow sized condom on a stick) that they will maneuver around the bull’s penis as it mounts the cow. He does his thing in the condom thinking he’s inside the female (usually less than 30 seconds) dismounts and then the ranchers have their semen for artificial insemination.
I’ve been out of that area for over a decade now so a new method may have emerged since then, but in my Animal Sciences class, that’s how we were taught semen is harvested for most livestock.
Edit: I distinctly recall the “artificial vagina” being on a stick (and laughing about it in class), but best video I can find on the quick:
https://youtu.be/-4ma3WeOxbo
Eh, I feel like the female cow is still getting a raw deal. Less raw than the classic “breed this bull with this cow” arrangement, but still somewhat not good.
You left out the rest, where the calf is seperated from its mother, tortured and killed for veal, while the mother mourns the loss of her child that the milk she produces is actually for, so the milk can be stolen from her for profit.
Veterinary in the sense that “it’s a duty a veterinarian might perform do,” but in this context it’s done to create more animals for us to harvest food from. Because letting them do it at their own rate wasn’t fast enough for this industrialised society’s appetite.
It’s disingenous to call it a veterinary procedure; we’re under no illusions about why this is being done. The cow didn’t ask for a bloody sperm donor, lol.
I mean, it’s not really bestiality if it isn’t sexual. A gynocological exam also isn’t fingering.
A gynaecologist “treats” the patient, benefitting the patient.
Forcibly impregnating someone is also called rape.
Key word.
It’s not rape if it’s your dog
I would really like to see you try to get your dog pregnant.
Why do you want to watch that?
A human can try to impregnate a dog, they just can’t succeed
I’m the dog.
I think I need to mute this thread before I dig this hole too deep.
That’s correct, yes.
However, my dog is my property, and someone can only artificially inseminate my property with my permission.
What in the fuck
Anti-vegans will go to any depths of depravity in order to deal with their cognitive dissonance. Once, on Reddit, I got a commenter to agree that he would be fine if someone had a dog in a cage they tortured for entertainment, rather than agree that it’s kinda fucked up that we slaughter animals because their flesh tastes nice.
So let me get this straight, you were arguing with someone, tried to lead them to a contradiction, but they actually had a consistent view on it that you didn’t like, and your conclusion is that they have cognitive dissonance?
My friend, I do not think that means what you think it means.
Most people agree that raping dogs is bad. Maybe they genuinely believe that raping dogs is okay, or maybe they’re just saying that to deal with their cognitive dissonance. I would prefer that it’s cognitive dissonance, but if they’re a dog rape apologist, then they’re a piece of shit anyways.
I hope it’s cognitive dissonance and not authentic approval of dog rape.
Real question, what if there is no cognitive dissonance.
Like someone who knows exactly what’s going on and says “fuck it, it’s delicious” ?
I’d ask them to sit down and watch a documentary about the animal agriculture industry (such as Earthlings) to be sure they really do know the truth.
“Feels good” is not a valid justification to harm others, imagine how that justification would apply in other cases and it’s pretty easy to see how it falls apart. You can’t be logically consistent with that justification to harm others. The same with apathy, also not a justification to needlessly exploit animals.
So you’re aware, that’s a really fucked up thing to think. Let alone say.
But maybe we disagree only on terminology?
What would you call the act of nonconsensually sticking your dick into your dog, and do you think it’s horrible?
Raping a dog is bad, yes.
So a dog is someone and that’s what makes it rape? Where do you draw the line for someone? Is it the act of rape itself that’s bad, or is it the perpetrator getting sexual satisfaction from it? What if they don’t do it for that purpose, but some other more abstract reason? Is it okay then?
You thought you had me. Your argument is invalid and includes logical fallacies, because you’ve swapped the original situation, which was artificial insemination of livestock, for having sex with a pet. These are not comparable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence
Whether a dog is “someone” or not is irrelevant when discussing a completely different situation.
Forcibly impregnating someone is rape. Artificially inseminating livestock is not rape. Having sex with a pet animal is rape. Having sex with a consenting adult is not rape. Different things actually are, in fact, different.
If it applies to one animal it should apply to all, but go ahead and be a special snowflake instead
no. different things are different.
Like, what a fucking stupid answer that can apply to anything and nothing at the same time.
Animals are animals, and humans are animals. Kangaroos are not cows, but both are also animals - different things ARE different, but at the same time, in some aspects, they are not.
Why doesn’t my dog have a right to vote? Why can a snake eat eggs but I can’t? Why is it OK for ants to farm aphids but not for humans to farm cows?
Different things are, in fact, different. There are lots of dead simple and airtight arguments for veganism without counterproductive emotional appeals. Talk about economics or ecology or health and not about sad puppy dog eyes.
Hell yeah! Morals are just a suggestion, lions eat their young, but I can’t? That’s bullshit and we all know it. If you wanna argue against eating our young (just the disabled ones, of course), please keep that melodramatic stuff out of here.
Pretty fucked up to try to equate animal husbandry with rape.
If you believe that animals should have rights like humans do, then animals can be raped. If slavery was still legal, would you write “it’s pretty fucked up to equate slave husbandry with rape”? Just because we have historically done something, that doesn’t mean that what we’re doing is in any way moral.
Animals can have rights and be protected from unnecessary cruelty without anthropomophizing them and granting full human rights. You’re equating full, sapient humans with a species specifically bred for a base purpose without higher levels of thought and expression.
I don’t even think that statement is anthropocentric hubris. If ultra-advanced aliens showed up tomorrow and started domesticating humans for food or some other purpose, I would have the default expectation of them having the same or similar morals. Maybe we’d get access to decent healthcare and good libraries before we went to the slaughterhouse.
Cows get more rights than trees or crops because they have an ability to express pain and convey emotion. They don’t have the same rights as humans because they could never give a passionate argument for suffrage to a jury.
And to be clear: there are plenty of real, tangible reasons to end animal husbandry and make everyone vegan without even touching philosophy.
I can’t believe you said this with a straight face. This is the depths of depravity and mental gymnastics that a non vegan philosophical position leads to. I’m also sure that if this actually happened, you would throw your logic in the trash, where it belongs, and you would fight for the liberation of the slaughtered race.
Do you want to extend the argument to a person who is in a permanent comatose state? By your definition, they are without “higher levels of thought and expression”. Is it cool to eat them?
If the advanced aliens had the control over us that we exert over animals then I wouldn’t have a choice. And whether I fight or not isn’t relevant to their choice to farm me. If anything it’s in their best interest to keep me healthy and content until I’m harvested.
Your coma example is laughable. They’re a human. A medical procedure (even if we don’t have the technology to perform it) could return them to normal function. Turning a cow into a human-like creature is a different discussion altogether, it would be a transformation at such a fundamental level that we might as well be discussing artificial personhood instead of the ethics of diet.
If we invented a procedure that could make corn moo would it no longer be vegan?
You keep avoiding the moral implications here because you know the argument is bs. If some groups of people mass bred and slaughtered monkeys or dogs on an industrial scale would you not care, because they don’t have a choice? It would be the same as your example, without the alien hypotheticals.
The disconnect between the logical, robotical analysis in the first case and the childish, optimistic look here really just highlights the compartmentalization you have to go through for a “coherent” position.
I don’t quite understand what you mean by moral implications. Would I be upset if aliens started eating people? Yeah, that would suck. Would it be morally defensible to fight back in the same way a cow might kick? Of course. But I can’t consider their view because they are defined as a higher tier of being in this scenario.
You’re imagining little green humans with forks when it may just as well be a hyper-developed cloud of space bacteria. In their view, every human gut biome is a slave pit where trillions can be massacred at will.
Using us as incubators and then harvesting the “human” collection of cell resources is a perfectly ethical thing to do. Who cares about the shrieking sound waves and fluid that spills out while humans melt, that might as well be the smell of fresh cut grass. It’s just a bunch of clones of one DNA sequence vs the plethora of diverse cells unleashed from the gut. Easy decision.
Keeping us happy and healthy is crucial for the health of the gut biome, no need to cause any undue stress because that would hurt the final product. But of course, through gene manipulation or artificial selection they can make us into a more durable and docile species.
…And at that point modern humans are effectively extinct. I don’t have to worry about the ethics of an incubation vat in the same way you don’t worry about our bizzarre and unnatural domesticated crops.
I’m totally lost here. You’re saying a comatose human is actually not a human but it is an animal (and therefore gets human rights)? My “higher thought” point is that our measure of life is relative to human features and human ability. A comatose human is very obviously still a human. Hell, even a dead human is still a human until it decays away and is recycled into something else.
Instead of silly screaming corn: What if I bred creatures that couldn’t express pain in any measurable way? Just sacks of flesh that you could herd around and harvest when they’re big enough. Slice off some reproductive piece and stick it in a tube to grow the next batch. Basically a meat tree on legs.
Is that unethical? Just because it’s gross? It’s no different than a plant. What if I told you I made them from pig DNA [no harm was done to the pig btw] but I cut out all traces of sensory organs that might convey pain. They can sense just barely enough to stand upright and only have the barest parts of a brain needed to grow more mass.
At what point does the distasteful husbandry become acceptable gardening? When the creatures can’t move? When the red blood is sap? Does the flesh have to be green instead of pink? Do the insides need to taste like a mango instead of bacon? Does it need photosynthesis like a spotted salamander or a sea slug?
Your position is incoherent if you can’t tell me exactly where the line is crossed AND that line is solid for all vegans. When does that lifeform gain or lose rights?
If you can’t do that or admit there’s subjectivity in the judgment then why can’t that subjectivity hold for cultures that bred dogs for food? Dogs are clearly not humans, but they’re too close to my personal experience of pets for comfort. That clearly isn’t the case with all humans, so I can’t pass judgment on the mere fact that a dog is eaten.
Your ancestors, probably
Kind of racist to suggest that slaves were a different species
That’s the point
The point is that the animals I eat are the same species as me?
You seem confused.
That’s exactly how people justified slavery in the past, and it is how the person I replied to justified their argument. That’s my entire point. It’s the same argument.
Except that slaves were/are humans. Literally the same species.
This is a ludicrous argument. If you truly believe that all animals have the same rights then the only internally consistent conclusion is the virtual extermination of the human species.
Life is a zero sum game. Something lives by consuming something else or displacing it for access to limited resources. Optimizing for the minimum harm to earth’s ecosystem is always going to be the end of agriculture, housing, hunting, industry and basically everything other human institution. We’re the most insidious invasive species ever and the world would be healthier without us mucking around.
So unless you’re stumping for that, don’t pretend to have the moral high ground. If you are, stop wasting your time shaming people and skip right to culling them.
True, but no one gives a shit when the consumed life is a plant.
People say the “plants feel pain” thing rhetorically, but it isn’t a serious argument. And if they were somehow actually being serious, then this would actually strengthen the case to only consume plants due the efficiency of doing so vs consuming animal products.
Plants don’t have to feel pain to be a lynch pin in the ecosystem supporting the animals around them. One less native plant is one less place to shelter or feed an endangered animal, or one less set of roots preventing the erosion of a habitat at risk.
Eliminating animal products mitigates the problem but it in no way absolves you from our exponential consumption of finite resources, and in many ways it’s naive non-solution.
For example: culling and eating pest animals like deer is not vegan, but leaving them alone with no natural predators does exponentially more harm to all other animals that depend on the native plants decimated by an unchecked deer population. Eliminating the predators is a human-caused problem but washing our hands of the situation will kill far more.
I advocate for humanity to live in harmony and balance with our environment, that is why I am anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist as well as vegan. Our history is plagued with exploitation, that can’t be denied, but I am trying to change it and you are arguing that it cannot be changed and that we shouldn’t even try.
Humanity’s relationship with animals and nature has historically been exploitative but it doesn’t need to be that way.
We have vastly increased our ability to produce food. There are ample resources available on the planet for all of us to share and live in abundance. Human greed and selfishness is rewarded by our society. That means our society needs to change.
I reject your argument that life is a zero-sum game. My happiness does not need to come at the expense of another’s unhappiness. We can all work together to create a better future for all living things on our planet.
Then you’re a fundamentally blind idealist or just lying to yourself. The absolute bare minimum, purely vegetarian footprint needed to support a human is about 0.2 acres (~800 m²). That’s 0.2 acres of precious arable land that could support dozens of species of plants, insects and animals purely dedicated to one human and their crops. A diverse and thriving array of life traded for one person and a handful of domesticated species.
From there you’re now looking at displacement and damage from housing, water usage, soil degradation, waste disposal, pest control and every other basic necessity. God forbid you get into modern niceties like health care, transportation, education, arts, sciences, etc…
Humans aren’t friendly little forest nymphs, we’re megafauna. Even the most benign and innocuous species of primates (such as lemurs and marmosets) peaked their populations in the high millions. Getting the human population down from 8.3 billion to a sustainable level is a 99%+ reduction. That’s a more complete eradication than any genocide in recorded history, let alone the sheer amount of death and scope of institutional collapse.
That’s just a flat fact of our reality. Either 99% of humans have no right to exist or humans are inherently a higher class of animal. Choose one.
Uh ooooooh… someone isn’t familiar with how dependent our agriculture is on pesticides, petrochemicals and heavy industry 😬
We (currently) have ample oil and topsoil. Not ample sustainable food. Don’t even get me started on out other niche limits, like our approach to peak mineral supply or pollinator collapse.
And it has been largely the (petro)chemical industry responsible for this. The Haber-Bosch process transformed agriculture, but accounts for percent-level quantities of global energy consumption and carbon emissions. And it requires raw materials that are typically produced from hydrocarbons (although admittedly there are renewable options). And other nutrients typically come from mining (even organic options) - which displaces many species of all sorts. And this does not account for pesticides, etc., that others have mentioned.
Prior to the development of modern chemistry, our best sources of fertilizer were often animal manures - which require breeding, raising, and ultimately usually killing animals.
Sure, there is a lot we can do to minimize harm, and generally we should, and I try to myself as much as possible. But I’m not fooling myself into thinking that eating vegan or growing my food organically means nothing or no one suffered. Until we all go back to pre-agrarian societies, we will continue to cause large-scale destruction in some way. But of course this in itself would cause massive population decline and resultant suffering in humans.
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Brother I am vegan (at least 95% in diet if you want to quibble over niche animal product additives). I’m just not going to shed tears over every single creature on earth like they’re my family pet while losing sight of the purpose of harm reduction. Why is the few grams of milk powder in your chips more important than mass deforestation supporting your avocados and coffee?
If most militant vegans actually examined their emotional arguments before they posted them people would take them way more seriously. Animals suffering and dying might make you deeply uncomfortable but that’s not a universal experience. You can’t browbeat people out of 15k years of animal husbandry just because you personally couldn’t stomach skinning a rabbit.
Wow, comparing actual human slavery to cattle production. That’s certainly a take
Fucking hell, now you’re comparing slaves to animals? Seek help
I am, the comparison is extremely apt. An entire group of thinking, feeling, sentient, living creatures, exploited for profit. We look down on them as being beneath us, and a culture that normalizes beating, raping and killing them. Living beings, treated as property. They are slaves. Lots of people like to believe that if they had lived during slavery, they would have been against it. This is the modern equivelent.
Artificial insemination is a treatment.
If the recipient asked for it and the donor is giving it out of free will with the explicit intention then yes it is a medical treatment.
With humans yes, but in the case of non-human animals these decisions are up to the owner.
edit: clarification for the ultra-dense.
You are aware humans are animals? The differentiation “human” is artificial and made up…
non-human animals … I didn’t think it needed spelling out.
You share 25% of your DNA with a tree, is it slavery to own four apple trees?
Uh… So the differentiation between ‘cow’ and ‘chicken’ is also artificial and made up, as well as the differentiation between ‘rock’ and ‘jetplane.’
What’s your point?
Ah yes so when I give my dog antibiotics for an infection against his will it’s definitely not medical treatment
Making an animal pregnant isn’t solving a medical issue. How do you not see the difference?
Personally I view it the same as giving medicine to a baby. They don’t understand, sometimes you have to make decisions in their best interests.
Key point: in their best interests, not for personal gain.
Are you planning on eating said dog?
If we’re gonna eat it then same goes for my chickens
Artificial insemination without consent is rape. Natural insemination without consent is rape.
Cows cannot give consent to humans. No animal can. Hell, even if we discovered another human-like species but couldn’t have meaningful communication with them, it’d still be rape.
You can get consent from the cows owner. Definitely don’t inseminate some else’s cow without asking.
Consent from the owner?
And what if chattel slavery still existed? Would you be free to rape a black woman if her “owner” said yes?
No, because owning humans is wrong.
If owning humans were ok, nothing else would be stopping you from going into your slaves?
I can’t really answer that because I’m apparently having different moral values in this hypothetical scenario.
Why is it wrong?
Same reason anything subjective “is” wrong, because it feels wrong. Just my opinion.
*Procedure, a treatment is to relieve negative symptoms
it is not a needed treatment for the health and well being of the cow, it is a unecessary treatment forced upon the animal
Right, but we do need more cows in the long run.
a) we don’t b) they can happily fuck on their own, it just makes it harder to exploit them for their body fluids. Nobody cares about the calves, they are just needed for the mothers to lactate
Wouldn’t it make more sense to simply induce lactation than go through the whole rigmarole of artificial insemination and then having to dispose of the unwanted calves?
You can find cows that fuck, no need to insert yourself into the reproductive cycle of cows.
are they in my area
Not a vegan but if you think what happens to cows is a medical “treatment” then you are a dumbass
It is rape!
Remember there have been at least one-doctor that did this to women, not in his offices to become pregnant (warning, SP?). A famous case was a doctor that raped/impregnanted (SP?) a lot of women looking to become mothers, with his own sperm. The obvious results/proof came after birth,
Cows are not on the same level as humans
Arguing with vegans is like arguing with antivaxxers, they are positions based on emotions and they have their own version of reality they use to reinforce their believes. They often claim they have studies to back up their claims but the most shallow dive shows them to be bullshit.
It’s literally evident as they try to reframe this as rape. Their need to lean on rhetoric shows they have a strong basis for their believes.
What do we call a sexual act with a being that did not consent?
Does it matter if the being is human? And what if the being is a neanderthal?
Or say we find a lady on the street and DNA test her, find out she’s technically not human. What would we call sexually acting upon her without her consent?
If defining this action triggers you emotionally this much, that’s a reflection of your ability to have level-headed conversations. It’s not your interlocutor as much as you’d like to claim.
My criticism here isn’t about any specific group or topic. It’s about this aggravating debate pattern where rhetoric is used to paint the opponent’s argument into a morally charged form rather than addressing the actual claim being made.
That style of engagement is not something that ever leads to meaningful discussions.
A similar dynamic occurs in other highly polarized subjects where participants are more focused on signaling moral positions than resolving the underlying question.
This sort of shit has been going on since at least the times of Artistole who championed logic over emotion.
Do bulls obtain consent? Nature is rapey as hell
It is sexual, it sounds like they jack them off to acquire genetic material to impregnate the female livestock with
Trying to be “facts forward” so make of this what you will. Source: I was in FFA in highschool in a beef intense-ish area.
The method of collecting semen I’m most familiar with is when they take a female cow in heat and tie her up, then bring a male bull they want to collect semen from into the same pen. The male will smell the female is in heat, gets erect, and will attempt to mount her.
As the male is trying to mount the female, people in the pen with the cattle will have a large rubbery “sleeve” on a pole (imagine a cow sized condom on a stick) that they will maneuver around the bull’s penis as it mounts the cow. He does his thing in the condom thinking he’s inside the female (usually less than 30 seconds) dismounts and then the ranchers have their semen for artificial insemination.
I’ve been out of that area for over a decade now so a new method may have emerged since then, but in my Animal Sciences class, that’s how we were taught semen is harvested for most livestock.
Edit: I distinctly recall the “artificial vagina” being on a stick (and laughing about it in class), but best video I can find on the quick: https://youtu.be/-4ma3WeOxbo
TBF that one sounds like no lines are crossed
Eh, I feel like the female cow is still getting a raw deal. Less raw than the classic “breed this bull with this cow” arrangement, but still somewhat not good.
You left out the rest, where the calf is seperated from its mother, tortured and killed for veal, while the mother mourns the loss of her child that the milk she produces is actually for, so the milk can be stolen from her for profit.
almost no calves end up as veal at all. the vast majority are brought to full weight before slaughter
Unless they are jacking off themselves at the same time, it’s not sexual.
I get what you’re saying but it’s sexual assault, no?
Is artificial insemination of livestock sexual assault?
…
No.
If I were to artificially inseminate a woman with sperm from a spermbank without her consent, would that be sexual assault?
Unless that women is a literal cow, yes.
Others Beings have rights!!! If you believe in god(s), then you are in real trouble after death, let alone those that do this.
Only if we say so. We invented the entire “rights” thing in the first place and we’re kind of in charge of handing them out.
Nope, just plain old non-existence after death for me.
it’s a veterinary procedure
Veterinary in the sense that “it’s a duty a veterinarian might perform do,” but in this context it’s done to create more animals for us to harvest food from. Because letting them do it at their own rate wasn’t fast enough for this industrialised society’s appetite.
It’s disingenous to call it a veterinary procedure; we’re under no illusions about why this is being done. The cow didn’t ask for a bloody sperm donor, lol.