Circle of life. If I were in the wild and defenseless and animal wouldn’t hesitate to kill me, as it should be. It’s not wrong, it’s nature. Morality isn’t the same from person to person.
I agree with the people here calling out the cruelty of the industrialized meat industry, but eating meat in and of itself is not inherently wrong. The universe seems to consume itself by design—there is a reason Ouroboros (the serpent eating its own tail) is an ancient symbol for eternity. We are in an interlocked system that recycles matter and energy to sustain life.
Moderation in all things. Don’t take more than you need, but don’t deny yourself either. If I had my druthers, I would much rather be eaten by a cool animal after I die than sit in a box embalmed. Live a good life, and at least the animals you eat will be part of that positive contribution too.
I can completely agree the means to get to the end is indeed very cruel. We are all animals and I would not like to be treated so inhumanely just to die. However, eating meat is as natural as breathing.
I agree that I would rather my body go back into the circle than decay in the ground.
You appealed to nature and threw a desert island scenario when the OP is clearly about animals raised in captivity and to be slaughtered way before their natural end of life. Also, eating meat is natural for carnivores. Us omnivores can do well (even better) without animal products.
There was no desert island scenario. There was a comparison to eating and being eaten, which is natural in both senses. As omnivores we developed to eat both meats and plants just like all other omnivores on the planet. To deny one part of our natural diet is unhealthy. You seem to have some kind of agenda which I will not be a part of.
You are entitled to your opinions and I will respect that but I will no longer communicate with you on the subject. Have a good week.
It’s not the meat eating that’s immoral, it’s the industrialization of meat production that is - robbing an animal of all its freedom and all its chances to actually be alive. It kills evolution. It is anti-life.
What is happening on these industrialized meat farms is utterly disgusting and will become a crime once synthetic meat production is economically viable. It’s existentially wrong beyond any morals.
Absolutely can’t wait for lab grown meat to reach industrial scale.
Hunted meat is really ethical in the mean time, in my country that usually means pheasant (at the right time of year) or venison (which is unfortunately not cheap at all, I’d really like to see deer hunting for meat encouraged by the government).
I do eat farmed meat, but I definitely eat less of it than I used to.
It’s neither moral nor immoral to eat any of those things… “moral” is objectively not a word that holds any context whatsoever in a conversation about food…
If you would literally die before you would eat another human, you are psychologically broken. Your decision not to do that except as a last resort has nothing to do with morality whatsoever. It’s simply adherence to societal standards, rules, and personal standards.
If the neighbor’s pet is a pig or cow, it would literally be the first thing I ate if food truly became scarce enough to warrant that effort and upset. If it’s another animal, it simply follows the hierarchy of preference all humans have established for themselves. Zero morality involved.
Well, you have full permission to eat my corpse if I die first. Because it’s pretty psychotic to demand that another person die to preserve a body you don’t need anymore.
I’ve never given this much thought before, however I’d argue that once you view other humans as food, your interactions change.
If you’re stuck in a mountain and your partner breaks a leg, if you view them as a food source you’re much less inclined to provide aid. “It sure would be a shame if you died”.
viewing humans as food is essentially a prisoners dilemma - society has an agreement to not do so (similarly to how folks don’t snitch in prisoners dilemma). This encourages more mutual aid between members of society for the reason I described above.
It just takes one party who thinks it’s acceptable to eat a person before coming across hardship for the final night’s of a stranded group to be spent eying each other in suspicion.
Who said I would eat YOUR stuff? What if I purchased a puppy from a breeder (hence, my property), raised it till it was three, slaughtered it one day, marinated its meat, stuffed its ass with some of those noice spices, chucked it in the oven and served it to my kids for Thanksgiving? Would that be animal abuse?
Let’s go a step further. Let’s start a breeding farm for kittens.
“Meow”
“Shut the fuck up u furball! Now get into my fryer you! Gotta keep our Kentucky Fried Kittens profitable, don’t we?”
Would that be animal abuse? Would I be allowed to start my KFC alternative- KFK?
Oh, sorry, I somehow misread your comment as “if I killed and ate your puppies and kittens”. I gotta read more careful next time.
Now get into my fryer you!
(That kinda sounds like you’d want to fry the animal without killing it before, which would obviously be animal abuse.)
If you don’t abuse the animal, it’s ok that you eat kittens and puppies.
That being said, I myself would still not want eat cat meat, because cats resemble humans too much, and because we interact with them a bit like they were human. For similar reasons I also wouldn’t want to eat ape meat, for example.
What sort of meat someone wants to eat can’t only be as rigid as either anything but human or anything but animal. One could for example decide not to eat any mammal meat, but still eat fish and bird. Or one could not want to eat the meat of any life-form, nor exploit any life-form for their needs (how gross of you to hold trees in masses and rip off their unborn offspring!), though living like that would be super difficult as of now.
It just so happens to be that many people decide that lamb meat is ok for them to eat.
Sure? I don’t think they’d taste very good, but some cultures eat dogs. There’s definitely a hungry enough that I’d eat dog, and it’s way before shit like shoe leather
Breeding animals to slaughter is more water, land and time intensive than growing crops, and produces substantially fewer calories for even more land area. Breeding animals to slaughter also generates far more CO2 then crops, either from the animal directly or from transport and butchering processes.
Not relevant. The field that is used to grow food stock for animals could have been used to grow food stock for humans. Potatoes have a high calorie count and are not particularly difficult to grow.
You’ll get far more calories out of the field of potatoes than a field of cows, unless you’re packing them in at the same density as the potato plants which I’m assuming you’re not.
You still need to grow food to feed the cattle, if only for winter stock, so you have to find a fertile field to grow food stock, so that field could be used for growing crops and the field that’s unsuitable for anything else could just be, well not used. There’s absolutely no scenario where cattle are going to be more sustainable than crops.
What does /s mean? Does it mean back by science? Does it mean I should do this?? Please answer quickly, I have a piece of uranium here and I’m dying to eat it
1 cow, consuming 1.8 acres of land, produces on the scale of 0.5 to 1.4 million calories, according to this estimate
However farming produces up to 18 million calories per acre, so if you were growing potatoes you’d have 32 million calories. On the same land that produced up to 1.4 million calories via grazing cow.
aren’t most pastures also planted, fertilized, and watered?
no. they’re grasslands, and hilly terrain or rocky soil is a common feature of land designated as pastures because of the difficulty of working the land.
no, i’m not. i was comparing the work done to plant a field of potatoes against raising an equivalent amount of cattle. i’m making no sweeping policy proposals.
However farming produces up to 18 million calories per acre, so if you were growing potatoes you’d have 32 million calories. On the same land that produced up to 1.4 million calories via grazing cow.
so? the work of lettin a cow eat what grows is still less work than planting, tending, and harvesting.
if you ask a seed salesman whether you should buy his product for your pasture, he’ll try to sell it to you. but no, for the most part pasture management is very low intensity: repair fences and deter predators. these have direct analogues in raising crops though in warding off pests that would eat the crops.
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Circle of life. If I were in the wild and defenseless and animal wouldn’t hesitate to kill me, as it should be. It’s not wrong, it’s nature. Morality isn’t the same from person to person.
I agree with the people here calling out the cruelty of the industrialized meat industry, but eating meat in and of itself is not inherently wrong. The universe seems to consume itself by design—there is a reason Ouroboros (the serpent eating its own tail) is an ancient symbol for eternity. We are in an interlocked system that recycles matter and energy to sustain life.
Moderation in all things. Don’t take more than you need, but don’t deny yourself either. If I had my druthers, I would much rather be eaten by a cool animal after I die than sit in a box embalmed. Live a good life, and at least the animals you eat will be part of that positive contribution too.
I can completely agree the means to get to the end is indeed very cruel. We are all animals and I would not like to be treated so inhumanely just to die. However, eating meat is as natural as breathing.
I agree that I would rather my body go back into the circle than decay in the ground.
Quite an assumption. There’s nothing natural in factory farming. Circle of death, that is.
You are assuming now. I never said anything about factory farming, just that eating meat was natural. I agree the methods are detestable.
You appealed to nature and threw a desert island scenario when the OP is clearly about animals raised in captivity and to be slaughtered way before their natural end of life. Also, eating meat is natural for carnivores. Us omnivores can do well (even better) without animal products.
There was no desert island scenario. There was a comparison to eating and being eaten, which is natural in both senses. As omnivores we developed to eat both meats and plants just like all other omnivores on the planet. To deny one part of our natural diet is unhealthy. You seem to have some kind of agenda which I will not be a part of.
You are entitled to your opinions and I will respect that but I will no longer communicate with you on the subject. Have a good week.
And good day to you, sir, too.
it’s not supernatural
It’s not the meat eating that’s immoral, it’s the industrialization of meat production that is - robbing an animal of all its freedom and all its chances to actually be alive. It kills evolution. It is anti-life.
What is happening on these industrialized meat farms is utterly disgusting and will become a crime once synthetic meat production is economically viable. It’s existentially wrong beyond any morals.
Absolutely can’t wait for lab grown meat to reach industrial scale.
Hunted meat is really ethical in the mean time, in my country that usually means pheasant (at the right time of year) or venison (which is unfortunately not cheap at all, I’d really like to see deer hunting for meat encouraged by the government).
I do eat farmed meat, but I definitely eat less of it than I used to.
Hunting is also beneficial to the health of game animal herds, and is a fundamental part of wildlife conservation.
So it can be ethical, healthy, and tasty to eat meat from killed animals.
Not true they hunt the wrong ones. In nature the sick and weak are eaten by predators. We shoot the healthiest ones. Bad idea.
OK smart guy, go ask any wildlife conservationist about it or just google it. I’m right and you are absolutely wrong.
There’s no morality in food. What the actual fuck is wrong with the world?
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It’s neither moral nor immoral to eat any of those things… “moral” is objectively not a word that holds any context whatsoever in a conversation about food…
If you would literally die before you would eat another human, you are psychologically broken. Your decision not to do that except as a last resort has nothing to do with morality whatsoever. It’s simply adherence to societal standards, rules, and personal standards.
If the neighbor’s pet is a pig or cow, it would literally be the first thing I ate if food truly became scarce enough to warrant that effort and upset. If it’s another animal, it simply follows the hierarchy of preference all humans have established for themselves. Zero morality involved.
Cannibal time let’s go
Hey, trap us on a mountainside with no escape in the freezing cold - guess what?
Point taken, I will avoid camping trips with you.
Well, you have full permission to eat my corpse if I die first. Because it’s pretty psychotic to demand that another person die to preserve a body you don’t need anymore.
I’ve never given this much thought before, however I’d argue that once you view other humans as food, your interactions change.
If you’re stuck in a mountain and your partner breaks a leg, if you view them as a food source you’re much less inclined to provide aid. “It sure would be a shame if you died”.
viewing humans as food is essentially a prisoners dilemma - society has an agreement to not do so (similarly to how folks don’t snitch in prisoners dilemma). This encourages more mutual aid between members of society for the reason I described above.
It just takes one party who thinks it’s acceptable to eat a person before coming across hardship for the final night’s of a stranded group to be spent eying each other in suspicion.
Lmao “you don’t get to actually disagree and the only options are you being wrong.”
Nah. Animals are lesser than people, and it’s fine to eat them
So u would be completely fine if I killed and ate puppies and kittens, right?
No. I also wouldn’t be fine if you ate other stuff that I have for purposes other than eating, like a chocolate sculpture.Edit: Misread. My answer is yes.
Who said I would eat YOUR stuff? What if I purchased a puppy from a breeder (hence, my property), raised it till it was three, slaughtered it one day, marinated its meat, stuffed its ass with some of those noice spices, chucked it in the oven and served it to my kids for Thanksgiving? Would that be animal abuse?
Let’s go a step further. Let’s start a breeding farm for kittens.
“Meow”
“Shut the fuck up u furball! Now get into my fryer you! Gotta keep our Kentucky Fried Kittens profitable, don’t we?”
Would that be animal abuse? Would I be allowed to start my KFC alternative- KFK?
“KFK- Tasty, Cute, Meow meow”
Oh, sorry, I somehow misread your comment as “if I killed and ate your puppies and kittens”. I gotta read more careful next time.
(That kinda sounds like you’d want to fry the animal without killing it before, which would obviously be animal abuse.)
If you don’t abuse the animal, it’s ok that you eat kittens and puppies.
That being said, I myself would still not want eat cat meat, because cats resemble humans too much, and because we interact with them a bit like they were human. For similar reasons I also wouldn’t want to eat ape meat, for example.
What sort of meat someone wants to eat can’t only be as rigid as either anything but human or anything but animal. One could for example decide not to eat any mammal meat, but still eat fish and bird. Or one could not want to eat the meat of any life-form, nor exploit any life-form for their needs (how gross of you to hold trees in masses and rip off their unborn offspring!), though living like that would be super difficult as of now. It just so happens to be that many people decide that lamb meat is ok for them to eat.
Sure? I don’t think they’d taste very good, but some cultures eat dogs. There’s definitely a hungry enough that I’d eat dog, and it’s way before shit like shoe leather
Alright, at least you’re morally consistent then.
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Yea, animal are basically slaves. They feed us and keep the ecosystem going. They are property, not individual.
Slavery was bad because it was people treating people like animals, so no they’re not like slaves, slaves were like them.
Important distinction
under what ethical system?
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I don’t know of any divine command theory systems that hold this axiom.
I was hoping they’d commit to, yes, ANY ethical system when I asked this, but they didn’t seem to even know what options existed
deontological systems are unconcerned with consequences.
Under literally any ethical system you choose.
Forget harm to the animal for a moment.
Breeding animals to slaughter is more water, land and time intensive than growing crops, and produces substantially fewer calories for even more land area. Breeding animals to slaughter also generates far more CO2 then crops, either from the animal directly or from transport and butchering processes.
most of the crops fed to animals are parts of plants people can’t or won’t eat.
Not relevant. The field that is used to grow food stock for animals could have been used to grow food stock for humans. Potatoes have a high calorie count and are not particularly difficult to grow.
You’ll get far more calories out of the field of potatoes than a field of cows, unless you’re packing them in at the same density as the potato plants which I’m assuming you’re not.
often, it is. as i said, most of the crops fed to animals are parts of plants people can’t or won’t eat.
if the land is unsuitable for crop production, you can often still raise cattle on it.
You still need to grow food to feed the cattle, if only for winter stock, so you have to find a fertile field to grow food stock, so that field could be used for growing crops and the field that’s unsuitable for anything else could just be, well not used. There’s absolutely no scenario where cattle are going to be more sustainable than crops.
you can feed cattle silage and crop seconds from food grown for people. you don’t need to plant crops just to feed cattle.
wrong.
why, though? making food is a good use of land.
Yay, deforestation is such a cool thing
i don’t know of any divine command theory that says anything like that
If it’s pure calories you’re after, might I suggest Uranium? It’s pretty cheap considering what you can theoretically get out of it.
^/s
I don’t think that you Uranium contains any calories.
A calorie is the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature one kg of water by 1°C, so uranium has quite a few, hard to digest though.
Edit: I was curious so I looked it up, 1 gram of uranium has 20 billion calories
Microdosing time!
I don’t think you understand what calories are.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie
Food calories and scientific measurement calories are different. It’s literally in the first paragraph of the article.
My comment specifically says “pure calories”.
What does
/smean? Does it mean back by science? Does it mean I should do this?? Please answer quickly, I have a piece of uranium here and I’m dying to eat itYes, science has confirmed that Uranium is perfectly edible and that it’ll provide you enough energy for the rest of your life.
Wow!! Thanks
deontological ethicists aren’t concerned with the consequences, only the action itself.
letting a cow graze a field and killing it next year takes way less time than tilling and planting and fertilizing and watering and harvesting.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t most pastures also planted, fertilized, and watered? You’re also assuming infinite land here - I don’t know shit about farming, but the first google hit I got suggests that cows need about 1.8 acres of pasture per year.
1 cow, consuming 1.8 acres of land, produces on the scale of 0.5 to 1.4 million calories, according to this estimate
However farming produces up to 18 million calories per acre, so if you were growing potatoes you’d have 32 million calories. On the same land that produced up to 1.4 million calories via grazing cow.
no. they’re grasslands, and hilly terrain or rocky soil is a common feature of land designated as pastures because of the difficulty of working the land.
no, i’m not. i was comparing the work done to plant a field of potatoes against raising an equivalent amount of cattle. i’m making no sweeping policy proposals.
Great, in a vacuum, and assuming efficiency of land does not matter, you are correct in saying it takes less work to produce less calories.
not just in a vaccuum but literally any time you have the option to plant a field or put a cow in it, it will always be less work to put a cow in it.
so? the work of lettin a cow eat what grows is still less work than planting, tending, and harvesting.
if you ask a seed salesman whether you should buy his product for your pasture, he’ll try to sell it to you. but no, for the most part pasture management is very low intensity: repair fences and deter predators. these have direct analogues in raising crops though in warding off pests that would eat the crops.
Did you miss ‘/s’ or do you genuinely believe that?
Cause if it’s the latter, you should go to your school and ask for a refund.
I don’t think youve ever planted a field if you think I’m wrong
And I don’t think you’ve ever considered the amount of food and water required for just a kilo of meat.
Hint: It’s exponentially more than a kilo of veggies or grains.
you haven’t been reading what I’m writing.
buy a cow. put it in a pasture. come back in 18 months.
OR
buy seed. till. plant. water. feed. harvest.
the time investment per calorie is vastly different.
Yeah good luck with that when 8 billion people start doing that. Moron.
We’ve got machines for that stuff.
making food is a good use of land.
it’s not a sealion: it’s a clarifying question.