Obviously this question is only for people who eat beef regularly.
But I just was wondering, what IQ/ability would make you swear off beef? If they could speak like an 8 y.o, would that be enough to cut off beef? If they got an IQ of 80, would that do it?
Smart enough to feel pain.
That is why by law cows are made unconscious before slaughtered.
In which country? I’ve never heard of this, at least in the US.
Thanks for the link. It says nothing about making them unconscious before slaughter. They’re just saying that the slaughter should be quick and not subject the animals to additional suffering beforehand:
No method of slaughtering or handling in connection with slaughtering shall be deemed to comply with the public policy of the United States unless it is humane. Either of the following two methods of slaughtering and handling are hereby found to be humane:
(a) in the case of cattle, calves, horses, mules, sheep, swine, and other livestock, all animals are rendered insensible to pain by a single blow or gunshot or an electrical, chemical or other means that is rapid and effective, before being shackled, hoisted, thrown, cast, or cut; or
(b) by slaughtering in accordance with the ritual requirements of the Jewish faith or any other religious faith that prescribes a method of slaughter whereby the animal suffers loss of consciousness by anemia of the brain caused by the simultaneous and instantaneous severance of the carotid arteries with a sharp instrument and handling in connection with such slaughtering.
The Act requires all meat companies selling to the US government to provide stunning by mechanical, electrical, or chemical means prior to the killing of cattle, calves, horses, mules, sheep, swine, and other livestock, except in the case of slaughter for religious or ritual purposes. Stunning must be accomplished in a manner that is rapid and effective before the animal is shackled, hoisted, thrown, cast, or cut. (While the law refers to “other livestock,” poultry is not specifically included.)
So I went a little further by reading parts of the actual regulations, i.e., the implementation and enforcement of the act, because I’m genuinely curious to learn about this. It seems that they’re defining stunning as basically destroying the brain of the animal before killing the body. For instance: “Unconsciousness is produced immediately by physical brain destruction and a combination of changes in intracranial pressure and acceleration concussion.” It seems like a distinction without a difference, since they’re essentially killing the animal by “stunning” it or making it “unconscious”.
Stunning it doesn’t kill it, it renders it unable to feel pain. They sell the cow brain so no, it doesn’t destroy it. Midwesterners love some cow brain to eat, it’s sold in grocery stores.
Even plants can do that.
Even plants can do that.
There’s no reason for a rational person to believe this. There’s just no evidence for plants feeling pain. They can react to some stimuli of course, but experiencing things is a different matter.
how do you know
A pop science article using misleading language to drive traffic. They don’t literally scream.
Anyway, no one is saying that plants can’t react to stimuli. There’s a difference between nociception and experiencing pain, fear, or other emotions. There’s no evidence that plants (or any creature without a CNS) can do that.
They literally do scream. Textbook definition.
“The car’s tires screamed in protest as he drifted around the curve.”
From this we can conclude that tires are sentient.
that doesn’t mean they feel pain
No smarter than they are now.
Do you eat beef regularly? If so, then you would stop, and if you’ve already stopped you were precluded from this question so really shouldn’t have answered.
I do currently, but I was vegetarian for over a decade and vegan for part of that. I never buy beef and only eat it because I work in a restaurant and eat for free.
But the intelligence isn’t really at issue, the ecological impact is why I don’t buy beef. That and the taste: it’s a C-grade meat at best, way below pork and most poultry, especially given the higher price point.
I think people forget that nature is quite brutal. If humans stopped eating meat, millions of animals would still be killed by predators, illness, parasites, old age, accidents, etc.
If cows became intelligent enough to participate in society but we had lab grown beef, I’d eat it.
So you would also eat humans?
Why don’t we eat humans?
If humans stopped eating meat, millions of animals would still be killed by predators, illness, parasites, old age, accidents, etc.
If I don’t murder people, people will still get murdered. Therefore it doesn’t make a difference if I choose not to murder people?
If I don’t murder people, people will still get murdered. Therefore it doesn’t make a difference if I choose not to murder people?
No. First of all the tenses are wrong, then the equivalence is wrong.
If people stopped getting murdered, they’d still be killed by illness, parasites, old age, accidents. Basically the loss of life will not stop simply because humans stop taking that life. Are you going to start telling lions not to kill gazelle? Or parasites, viruses, and bacteria not to infest hosts?
Why is it OK for other animals to prey on other living beings, but not humans? You think humans are cruel? Read about what happens in the animal world. Hyenas eating buffalo alive, snakes eating their prey whole (while alive), parasites of course needing live hosts: one eats a fishes tongue and takes its place, another eats a whale’s eyes, yet another takes over the motor functions of ants and forces it clamp down on a plant where the ant dies of hungers and the fungus grows from the corps, the parasitic wasp that lays its eggs within tarantulas and the worms eat the tarantula alive, and so many more gruesome ways to die in the animal kingdom.
If people stopped getting murdered, they’d still be killed by illness, parasites, old age, accidents.
So it’s okay for me to murder, because those people would die anyway? If not, then there’s no point in bringing it up.
If humans stopped eating meat, millions of animals would still be killed by predators, illness, parasites, old age, accidents
Just like there’s no point in saying that, unless it’s intended as some kind of justification.
Why is it OK for other animals to prey on other living beings, but not humans?
In other words, why should we hold humans to a higher moral standard than lions? Are you really asking that?
If so, I can give you an answer but it seems like a ridiculous thing to ask and I’m just about positive you don’t actually believe that if the standard is good enough for lions and sharks it’s good enough for humans.
but not humans?
Think about it for 30 seconds and I bet you can come up with two really good reasons why there should be a different standard. If you give up, I can tell you the answer but it’s really obvious. I’m confident you can come up with them if you try.
to prey on other living beings
This is also reframing the problem in a weird way. Living isn’t the same as having interests, preferences, emotions, being able to suffer, etc. The majority of people who are against (unnecessarily) eating animal products don’t take that position just because animals are living, but because they’re sentient.
We’re also the only species who raises animals just to eat them later. I’m not a vegetarian, I’m just planning out that you’re logic isn’t exactly perfect there.
That is false. Monkeys cultivate ants to eat them IINM and ants raise other aphids to do the same.
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They’d have to be on one level with pigs, basically.
But I just was wondering, what IQ/ability would make you swear off beef?
10% of the current IQ would probably be high enough.
Intelligence has nothing to do with it. Intelligence isn’t even well defined or measurable. Things like IQ are designed for humans, so they would not be applicable to other beings. They’re barely even useful for human applications.
It’s an interesting question though. First, I’ll ask myself why I eat beef in the first place.
- It’s tasty
- It’s relatively cheap
- Very nutrient dense, so it’s easier to consume
Why do I not eat dogs or cats?
- They are not socially acceptable to consume
- They contribute positively to my life in other ways than being a food source
I’m pretty sure that a dog/cat could be dumb as a rock and I still wouldn’t eat them because I’d still enjoy their company.
Now I do try to reduce the amount of beef I consume, but it’s mainly for environmental reasons.
Cows and pigs are great company and can get really attached to you.
How does that differ - but just social norms?
Nothing. That’s my point. Unless you count the practicality of having a pet cow/pig in a city.
Ah, ok, gotcha. Then we see it the same, I think
At the point where it consciously knows that we breed and slaughter them for meat. That would be my red line. I don’t know what IQ that equals to.
How do you know livestock cows don’t already know this?
I know they don’t know this consciously because of their behaviour. If we suppose they were intelligent enough to understand their predicament, I would expect them to protest in some way. For example by breaking out of their captivitity, trying to kill their captors, or even commit suicide.
This is not the behaviour we observe from cows. They seem perfectly happy to bond with and follow along their captors (farmers) right up to the point where they get a bolt through their head.
This - to me - clearly indicates that they are far below an intelligence level where they can understand the living conditions we put them in.
Because they’ll just walk into the slaugherhouse unaware like a dumb cow.
They’ll basically need to become smart enough to sue for their right not to be eaten and win before I stop eating them.
What I eat is already dead. I’ve never decided to eat something in such a way that it contributed to the harm of any lifeform. So it’s not a matter of intelligence, but if it was, it could be as intelligent as a snail and I still wouldn’t eat it.
I eat meat, but this is a dumb fucking take. The meat industry exists because we eat meat. If people didn’t eat meat, then cows wouldn’t be slaughtered. Therefore, if we all didn’t eat meat, that cow that you ate wouldn’t be dead.
The meat industry exists because we eat meat.
But not all meat-eating leads to the perpetuation of the meat industry. Not all exchanges involving meat are fuel for said industry.
The goal of pro-animal ethics is “do no harm”, not “do not eat them”. There are several workarounds to the former. I’m not pulling these out of my ass, there are century-old industries around these too.
Sorry to inform you, but plants are lifeforms.
What’s a plant going to object to if it’s eaten? I doubt there are any as intelligent as a snail.
To be fair, cows don’t object to it either.
So should I not eat plants either? What should I live off of, Lemmy crowd? Photosynthesis? Gravitosynthesis?
You can eat whatever you want.
Us deciding to eat meat contributes directly to the harm of cows
Unless it’s already dead, at which point there is nothing to harm. Vegetarianism is a spectrum.
Have you ever heard of demand and supply? You are being willfully ignorant or playing dumb
It’s not demand and supply if you don’t “demand” the supply of anything. Sure, I buy meat, but it’s not something I look forward to the existence of.
If someone strikes an animal while driving, or a natural disaster takes its life, and someone decides it might as well be eaten, is that supply and demand? If I stop over at someone’s house, and they have hunted an animal they’re about to eat, but I neither hunted the animal nor knew they would eat the animal for dinner that night as I visited, is that supply and demand, or did I just happen to be somewhere where someone else’s guilt of having killed an animal is in my favor?
It’s a spectrum, hence the link.
you’re contributing to demand if you buy meat
It depends on the circumstances of its origins, as I explained below.
“what if”
.__.
The purchase of an item is treated as the demand of an item. This is how an economy works. They don’t mean that you’re barging into places yelling about how you want meat. Your money flowing to them is enough to justify further slaughter to provide more meat.
Sometimes the supply exceeds the demand though. Suppose there are a thousand pieces of meat in a store. Only eight hundred are bought. The other two hundred isn’t bought and spoils, yet with no bearing on the market. So then imagine someone standing in the store mulling this over, “I could buy the meat, as long as it’s there, or I could refuse it, and it has died in vain, but also if I buy it, who is to say I have a bearing on its death or if the money goes to the industry, when the store already paid for it and might have backup uses for it?”
I don’t think in black and white.
They always prepare more than the allotted amount based on demand to meet unanticipated fluctuations. Your spent dollars on meat per month are calculated into their spreadsheets. No amount of pretend justification liberates you from the consequences of your actions. If you did not buy meat, there would be (your consumption*1.25) less meat in the store on average. You are not buying overflow meat. They are producing your meat plus overflow.
Just for you.
That’s a no on your link dawg. I like the magical land you live in tho, where meat just appears for you to consume
Meat doesn’t magically appear. It comes from animals who have just died. But the deaths do not necessarily come via a single means, nor does the consumer necessarily have any bearing on the suffering of the animal or future animals.
I am surprised that anyone would mention “supply and demand” at all given Lemmy has a largely (including myself, just not from a Marxist viewpoint) anti-capitalist demographic, which would mean supply and demand shouldn’t be seen as a necessary factor.
nor does the consumer necessarily have any bearing on the suffering of the animal or future animals.
That’s absurd. So if I hire an assassin to kill you, I have absolutely no responsibility if you’re killed by an assassin?
Companies won’t kill animals to produce meat unless there’s demand. If you buy meat, you’re creating demand. There is a causal link between your consumption and what happens to the animals. Therefore, you have at least a share of the responsibility.
I am surprised that anyone would mention “supply and demand” at all given Lemmy has a largely (including myself, just not from a Marxist viewpoint) anti-capitalist demographic
Being anti-capitalist doesn’t mean one is incapable of understanding how capitalism works. There are rules that govern it, and those exist whether you’re in favor of it as a system or not.
Is “directly” the new “literally”? Because it literally contributes indirectly.
Us deciding to heat meat contributes directly to the ham of pigs
If all of those typos were a joke, I salite you
Well I don’t eat meat at all, and part of the reason is the video on YouTube of the little girl who snuck her pet cow onto her indoor porch and is holding it in her lap and scratching it while it sighs contentedly.
I think it should be mandatory for everyone to spend at least one day of their young adult life hunting, killing, dressing, and cooking. The experience will likely alter the person’s entire outlook on life and meat in general.
I never forget that meat was a life that mattered; with a personality; good and bad days; life; experience; struggle it lost to me. It doesn’t stop me from eating meat. I wish I had the ability to hunt for what I need. I know my own ethics, like when to take a clean shot, and only taking what I need. Animals in industrial livestock facilities are mostly managed by unethical criminals. None of us asked to be born in such an overpopulated world. Unfortunately, this is the impossible problem. If you are smart enough to see the issue of overpopulation, that is great, but even if you avoid having children, those that are not so bright will always enumerate.
That’s the paradox though isn’t it?
If smart people were “too smart to reproduce” then we have a whole generation being raised by people who weren’t
I once stayed off red meat for 1 year and my health improved tremendously, and then returned to it and my health deteriorated in record time. I’m now back off red meat and feeling better than ever. Maybe at one time red meat was good for you, but the way they raise cattle for profits it would not surprise me they are butchering sick animals as well.
Red meat, and processed meat, and processed red meat, etc. certainly aren’t great for you - cancer risk and such. Limiting their consumption makes sense for (long-term) medical reasons, often for economical, ethical and environmental reasons as well. In terms of acute food safety, most “developed” countries will do a good enough job to make sure you don’t catch a pathogen from it. Can’t assume everyone plays fair, but you also can’t really assume they don’t.
If you feel ill or have measurable changes to your health just from eating red meat, though… you might want to see a doctor.
I’ve been off red meat this year; no noticeable changes to health. I’ve gained a few pounds, but there might be confounding.
The point at which it could collaborate with others and fight back.
Until then, it looks like meat is back on the menu, Boys!
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Cows could launch a spaceship past Warp 1 and I would still want a cheeseburger. I could make do with a well marinated portabello burger at the same price.
