They don’t have a brain really and kinda just float there. Do they even feel pain?
They are alive, so no, not vegan.
Plants are alive.
So plants are not vegan??
It depends on the definition of Veganism.
There’s is a popular school of thought that the diet‘s sole purpose to reduce suffering. If a living thing has no central nervous system (or brain), it has no thoughts and cannot experience pain or harm. It’s not much different than a fruit or vegetable. I know vegans that make exceptions for oysters - for example.
Others schools of thought are about avoiding animal products altogether, it doesn’t matter if it suffers or not - there’s no way to know. Therefore, it’s immoral to eat them if you can knowingly choose an alternative.
Veganism is not only a diet. It’s an ethical stance and lifestyle.
Edit: clarifications
Others schools of thought are about avoiding animal products altogether, it doesn’t matter if it suffers or not - there’s no way to know. Therefore, it’s immoral to eat them if you can knowingly choose an alternative.
But why animals in particular? Is there any more reason to think a sea sponge would be sentient than a tree?
There’s is a popular school of thought that the diet‘s sole purpose to reduce suffering. If a living thing has no central nervous system (or brain), it has no thoughts and cannot experience pain or harm.
What about instant death? Like a farmer putting down a well-treated cow with a bullet to the head. In this scenario, the cow never suffered. In all likelihood it probably never even had much mental distress, let alone fear of death. Would that meat be ethical/vegan friendly?
Suffering is a broad definition. One would argue that prematurely ending sentient life without their consent would fit that definition.
Often, it’s not suffering on an individual level - but the suffering of a species. Cows live in bondage and we benefit from their labor and chose to end their lives for our benefit.
Sometimes Vegans extend this philosophy to pets and service animals - even if they’re treated exceptionally well.
The point is that Veganism is less monolithic than folks tend to believe. A person’s diet can be deeply personal and it’s up to them to draw lines.
I’m a meat eater. I don’t have an issue eating cows. I don’t have an issue eating rabbits, which I know people also keep as pets. I don’t have an issue eating lobster - whereas they’re boiled alive. But I know I couldn’t eat a cat or dog. Realistically, I have trouble with veal. So ya know, where I draw the line might not be the same for other people. My diet is informed by my culture, health, experiences and personal feelings - as is everyone’s.
Yeah, i completely agree that i am painting with broad strokes. I knew a guy that ate vegan because he believed it was healthier, not for any moral considerations at all.
I am mostly trying to strike up some conversation about the ethics of eating meat. I think your answer is as correct as any could be. It really is up to the individual to make their own determinations.
Ah.
Well in that case…
I used to go fishing with my dad when I was younger, but as an adult I don’t think I have the heart to do it.
I don’t want to be the one to chose who lives and who dies. Even bugs, I have a hard time swatting flies. I try to capture them and let them outside. But some of the time, I kill them - and end up feeling really guilty after - sometimes for days.
When it comes to eating meat, I’d rather live in a world where meat is grown in a lab, rather than raised. I think stuff like Impossible Burgers have gone a long way in terms of reproducing flavor and texture… but not there yet.
I guess I reconcile the fact that the animal is dead before it gets to my plate/kitchen. Someone’s going to eat it. Why not me? Or I make up some funny idea like, “well - if this cow was human, they’d probably be an Andrew Tate listener - so screw ‘em!”
More often, I just try not to think about it and just enjoy what I’m eating.
I don’t know. Maybe my ethics will change one day to a point where I actually change my diet drastically. But knowing myself, it could take a health scare before I do that.
Replace cow with human and see if it passes the test.
Is it ethical to give a human a scarf? Yes. Well it’s also ethical to give a cow a scarf.
Is it ethical to shoot a human in the head? No? Well it’s also unethical to shoot a cow in the head.
I value every other species as worth less than a human and therefore they have different ethical considerations.
But, far down are you willing to go? How small? Rabbits? Rats, mice? Insects? Is squishing a spider ethically identical as murdering some one? I would say no, what would you say? There is a line, be it soft or hard, somewhere.
If the spider is in your home without consent I support trapping it and kicking it out.
If the spider or mosquito is trying to bite you, then I support your self defense actions much like if a human was trying to bite your arm you’d be in the right to use force.
Even in your examples you are treating animals as less than human. Why? Again, where is the line that involuntary trespassing is punishable by immediate death? If a person bit you, yeah you could fight them off and use force. But, to be compare fairly, you would have to kill the person that bit you. Even then this is still an unfair argument because
- That is not typical human behavior
- A human bite can do substantially more damage than a mosquito bite.
So tell me where you can treat animals ethically identically as humans, and where you can’t. Where is the line?
At the end of the day, there’s probably nearly as many slightly different philosophies as there are individual vegans in the world.
I’ve definitely seen vegetarians/vegans who don’t really have an issue with ethically sourced meat if the animal was treated well and lived an otherwise good life, but actually ensuring that the animals receive that level of care is nearly impossible unless you raise them yourself and that’s an undertaking that many people are not up to for many different reasons. I’ve also met some who think that keeping an animal in captivity for any reason at all is unnecessary suffering, and to that end I’ve also seen some who don’t have an issue with hunting provided that it’s done in accordance with good conservation guidelines and the hunter makes a genuine effort to make sure they get a quick, clean kill because the animal was able to live a wild and free life up to the end.
I’m not saying those are at all mainstream vegan philosophies, they’re definitely in the minority, they’re just ideas that I’ve seen a small handful of people who identify themselves as vegans or vegetarians express at different times.
Basically every vegan has to draw the line somewhere, the modern world was built in party by using animals and short of wandering off to start a new life naked into the woods foraging for plants, it’s nearly impossible to totally decouple yourself from that, and where to draw that line can sometimes be a little murky.
Jellyfish belong to Cnidaria, which is a phylum under kingdom Animalia
TLDR: Jellyfish are biologicly animals
There are some animal that you can eat that are vegan.
The fig wasp for example is a tiny wasp that climbs into fig flowers to lay their eggs in them, polinating them in the process. Once the flower turns into a fruit, the eggs hatch and climb out of it. The dead mother wasp stays behind.
Since the wasp dying in the fig is required both for the plant and the wasp to reproduce they are considered vegan to eat.
So the next time you eat a fig, take a closer look. Maybe you’ll see the dead wasp (or maybe you’ve already swallowed it)
Do vegans generally accept that figs are okay to eat?
I grew up with a crazy vegan mother who dragged me to the outings of her crazy vegan club and they were all vehemently against eating figs. We don’t even live in a place where figs are common import, but they were so mad about it.
would u even get anything out of eating it tho?
In China, it can be served as a salad, and I believe it is quite good.
Once, at the gwailo table of a wedding, I saw a picky eater mistake jelly fish for noodles, try them and like them.
Their face when they found out was…
More duck tongues for the rest of us.
China is so weird
I’d say when it comes to veganism it’s basically up to what you personally want to eat. I personally have no moral quandary with eating animals but if you do, I wouldn’t call you a hypocrite for eating jellyfish. Plants feel pain too, in a similar way, I could see it being justified. Taxonomy shouldn’t decide your morality.
Plants do not feel pain as in the way pain is understood. People who claim that plants feel pain interpret the reaction to stimuli as feelings, but that’s not the same thing as having a feeling.
Of course there could always be something that we do not know about yet, but up until now there really is no indication that suffering is something plants experience in any way. The same way you could claim fire feels pain since it also reacts to stimuli, connects with other fire, even procreates, eats and dies.
Vegan is a very wide array of things ranging to not eating red meat all the way down to not doing anything that could hurt a plant (only scavengering fallen fruit).
https://theminimalistvegan.com/types-of-vegans-and-vegetarians/
jains are considered vegans but vegans don’t have the same considerations.<br> a vegan is simply somebody who avoids consuming any animal product including leather, honey, wool &c
I once read a very good argument for Vegans who want to justify eating honey. Bees can’t be caged; they are free to simply fly away. Bees can (and do) leave bad beekeepers who don’t take proper care of them, or if they aren’t satisfied with their living conditions.
Don’t forget the ecosexuals.
I’m not making that up, it’s apparently a thing.
now that i’ve read the wikipedia article about them, i prefer to forget the ecosexuals.
This is not at all what Veganism is.
Veganism is LITERALLY an ethical stance regarding exploiting/harming/killing non-human animals.
Finding a random blog online that states otherwise means nothing. Anyone who ate a salad last Tuesday these days thinks they can simply decide what Veganism is.
THIS is the actual definition of Veganism, directly from the people who coined the term:
“Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals."
THIS is the actual definition of Veganism, directly from the people who coined the term:
That definition is from 1988, so it’s questionable whether it came “directly from the people who coined the term” in 1944. Here is a re-publication of the 1951 Leslie Cross definition:
“The object of the Society shall be to end the exploitation of animals by man” and “The word veganism shall mean the doctrine that man should live without exploiting animals.”
Allegedly someone read The World Peace Diet (by Will Tuttle) to Donald Watson on his deathbed, and Donald Watson said that the book encompassed everything that he intended when he founded the Vegan Society. Make of that what you will.
all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals
Plastics that encapsulate microprocessors in computers come from fossil-fuel chemicals which are extinct animals buried millions of years ago.
So it’s not vegan to use a computer check-mate vegans.
It’s mainly about intention, not coincidence. You did not kill those extinct animals, nor did you ask or pay someone else to do it. It was not your nor someone elses intention that was involved in their extinction. It could still be seen as exploiting one of earths limited resources though, but that’s not directly related to veganism.
I know some vegans consider it fine to consume animal products that did not cause harm or are not exploitative, or even meat from animals which were not killed or harmed intentionally.
I don’t think animals care about weird human ideologies like veganism
Ah, the old Lemmy switch-a-roo
Hold my jelly, I’m going in!
A lot of Jelly fish are immortal? Just leave a few cells and wait for it to come back to life. Death-free food for the win
I mean, milk could also easily be death-free, but it’s not vegan. It’s also not suffering-free. So this suggestion kind of misses the point.
You think milking cows causes suffering?
I mean, what cow wouldn’t want to have sperm shoved up it’s apparently not privates to be continuously impregnated. Sounds like a party
It doesn’t have to be that way
But it mostly is. And calves likely get shot afterwards (or worse) both for population control and, well, you can’t have them drinking all the milk now, can you? Same as eggs could be cruelty free, if we ignore the literal shredding of male chicks thats happening on a massive scale.
If you want to mass produce these things, which are both produced by females exclusively as part of their reproduction cycle, you basically have no other choice but to get rid of most males or even most children in the case of milk.
And even if you somehow solve this, I still would argue that its morally wrong to even have these breeds of e.g. chickens who lay this many eggs. Their bodies were never ment to do this and they suffer from sever health problems because of this.
Milk that we can buy in supermarkets is produced by special super breed cows that produce around 30000 liters (ca.8000 gallons) of milk per year. After 6 years these animals die out of complete exhaustion or as soon as they don’t produce enough milk anymore. Their udder are so big they can barely move, due to the frequent milking they are also usually infected (yummy goo, goes straight into the milk- luckily it’s boiled)
If you ever talked to woman that is breast feeding, you probably found out how exhausting it is to produce a highly nutritious food for a new born.
Yes milking cows for mass producing milk is animal abuse and it is really hard to find milk that is not produced in this way. I am telling you this as a person who isn’t vegan or vegetarian. I think that veganism is the way to go, eating animal products is shit, there is no way to produce them in a “good” way for 7billion people. I am just too weak.
deleted by creator
I’ve known people who chose not to eat mammals, birds, fish, decapods (lobsters, crabs, prawns), or cephalopod mollusks (e.g. octopus, squid); but who were okay with eating bivalve mollusks (clams, mussels, oysters) on the grounds that they did not have enough brain to experience pain.
I think those folks would be okay with eating jellyfish.
Rather than asking, “Is X vegan?” it might be more useful to ask, “What is person P trying to accomplish by ‘being vegan’? Is eating X in conflict with that?”
this 👆
No Brain? For Jellyfish, No Problem
“I think sometimes people use its lack of a brain to treat a jellyfish in ways we wouldn’t treat another animal,” Helm says. “There are robots in South Korea that drag around the bay and suck in jellyfish and shred them alive. I’m a biologist and sometimes sacrifice animals, but I try to be humane about it. We don’t know what they are feeling, but they certainly have aversion to things that cause them harm; try to snip a tentacle and they will swim away very vigorously. Sure, they don’t have brains, but I don’t think that is an excuse to put them through a blender.”
removed by mod
No, just no
But everyone and everything rather avoid pain, wouldn’t they? And if I would like to treat those the way I would like to be treated, then why not try to help mitigate that pain where possible?
The follow up question would be what us and isn’t pain.
If a bacterium swimming in one direction encounters a toxin and changes direction to avoid dying, did it experience pain? If a tobacco plant reacts to attacks from insects by producing more nicotine and alerting its neighbours to do the same through signals sent through both rhizomes and airborne pheromones, does it experience pain? What about a worker ant, whose behaviour can be perfectly simulated by an algorithm simple enough that you can simulate hundreds of ants interacting?
Personally, I’d say none of these organisms are capable of feeling pain. Or if they are with the help of some definitions of what constitutes pain, it’s just a signal like an automated assembly machine getting a signal from its sensors that a human entered its work space and it needs to slow down its robot arm to snails pace. So still incapable of suffering.
Also, if you set the threshold for what constitutes the ability for suffering too low, you quickly collide with the ethics of even early term abortion.
Ok, but the question was whether or not they feel pain. We can definitively say they display escape behaviors when presented with an aversive stimulus, so I’d say it’s likely they do feel some sort of pain, even if their perception of it is nothing like that displayed by animals with central nervous systems.
The morality of shredding them alive by the thousands is a different conversation, but I would say yes, nature is cruel, and yes, it’s possible for humans to mimic nature and kill animals in similar ways, but humans also have a knack for taking things too far, eg chickens bred to be so big they can’t even walk or jellyfish-murdering robots
We can definitely say they display escape behaviours when presented with an adverse stimulus, so I’d say it’s likely they do feel some sort of pain
It’s ironic that your username is “protist”, since even many single cell organisms display escape behaviours when presented with an adverse stimulus.
This is one of those things that’s hard to define. If a popcorn kernel gets too hot, it pops and it’s almost like it’s trying to run from the heat. How is that different from a jellyfish reaction to pain? There’s a lot of good arguments on both sides.
Sometimes, I wonder how far away we really are from the popcorn kernel.
If you care about brainless animals, you might as well care about plants.
Are we not supposed to care about plants?
Jellyfish do have neurons. Fewer than an insect. Much fewer than ChatGPT. But still something. A better example is sea sponges, which don’t have any neurons at all.
They are animals, so no.
They have no brain but aren’t they like almost entirely nervous system? That’s all you need to feel pain; the brain just makes it more complicated than “ouch, move away from that.”
If having a reaction to physical damage (like moving away) is enough to be qualified as pain, then some plants feel pain too. We studied in biology a plant that when cut/eaten by animals releases chemicals that warn plants around it and triggers them to release another chemical that interferes with animal’s digestive system and make them starve (I don’t remember the name of the plant unfortunately). So should we consider this as pain too ?
there are many other examples here too:wikipedia
man I hate philosophy
If reaction to physicals damage is enough to qualify as pain, a brick wall feels pain. If you damage it, it will start having holes, and eventually fall over completely.
I think at the very least you’d need some kind of learning. Pain is the stuff you learn to avoid and pleasure is the stuff you learn to do more. Without that, it’s impossible to say whether an instinctive response to stimuli is a negative or positive feeling.
Yes. It’s literally how pain is defined in an anatomical sense.
Tobacco and tomato plants do something similar. They produce more nicotine to poison the insects eating them and also warn their neighbours.
(Yes, tomatoes also produce nicotine, and it is technically possible to become slightly addicted to tomatoes if you have a very tomato-heavy diet)
nicotine in the tomato too (which the plant produces for the animals to eat and spread its grains) or rather in the leaves, flowers and stem?
As far as I know it’s in the fruit as well to some snall degree, but I’m no expert
moral of the story: if you have an addiction, replace it with tomatoes
No.
After having kept jellyfish as pets (Atlantic bay nettles), I wouldn’t really consider them to be vegetarian nor vegan. While similar to plants, seemed to have a greater sense of environmental awareness than my plants. Mine could sense light, have “off days”, and interact with their environment. It’s probably true that there’s not much going on there due to the small amount of nerves that control everything, but even when mine would accidentally get caught on tank cleaning tools or get bumped around they’d react in a protective way and to me it’s just similar enough to animalistic behavior that I’d not feel comfortable consuming them if I were vegan.
Don’t most plants sense light and interact with their environment?
Tardigrades have been observed reacting defensively to danger, even offensively. I know they’re not plants, but do they feel pain? What about brine shrimp?
Jellyfish are super weird because they really blur the lines between plant/animal. It’s a really interesting question to ask honestly.
Plants feel a lot, they just can’t express their feelings in a way you can perceive. For example, they feel the difference between a human touching them and wind blowing.
So is this theory of veganism to not cause pain to an animal? If so what about ethically sourced meat. Like bullet to the head/decapitation. Most of those creatures feel nothing, they just end.
Or is it to not eat anything that comes from the an organism from the Animalia kingdom because harming animals is immoral?
After proofreading, these sound more aggressive/argumentative than i had intended but they get the point across.
It’s the second one. In the first case, you unnecessarily kill an animal. A fair question would be if it was a natural death of the animal, like you stumbled upon a fresh carcass, is eating that still ethically or morally gray?
But that’s not the point, veganism makes sense in first world countries with factory farming. It’s very clear that mass produced animal products are no go’s.
So is this theory of veganism to not cause pain to an animal? If so what about ethically sourced meat. Like bullet to the head/decapitation. Most of those creatures feel nothing, they just end.
lots (propably most) animals used for farming meat are in pain during their lives.
That’s longer than the time they’re dying in any case.I understand that completely, death isn’t where the suffering usually occurs. This brings me to another question that i proposed in response to a different comment.
I had family that raised a cow to eventually become meat. It was named Tasty and lived up to its namesake. Tasty was treated well and killed quickly and cleanly. Is that, like, bad?
I’d say that’s a philosophical question.
And worse even, I’d say this is something that changes with the culture of people.
a while ago, gladiators killing & maiming each other for entertainment was considered fine.
Raping and Abducting during wartime was normal.Currently, I’d say the cultural moral compass has shifted enough, to consider these two examples rather bad behaviour.
But as Tasty seems to have had a nice life and didn’t suffer, so had it better than most cows which end up in a similar fate, I’d say that currently this would not be considered “bad” behaviour by most people.
Of course there is a viewpoint already out, that all killing of animals is equivalent, in other words equivalent to killing humans. From that point of view, what you did is rather horrific.
Maybe, in some time, when something like lab-grown meat without any nervous system is commonplace, killing animals for food becomes as horrific as we consider killing other humans for food.
Or, you know, it could also swing the other way, and an apocalypse makes Soylent from dead people completely normal food.I’m an oft-invisible lurker, however, your comment is amazing and I appreciate it. Cheers!
Veganism means to reduce the suffering and exploitation of animals as much as practically possible.
There is nothing ethical about killing a living being that doesn’t want to die.
Tell that to lions and eagles. They cause as much suffering as possible. It’s just how nature works. It’s why I really don’t care about veganism.
cannibalism too exists in “nature”. I don’t see any of you meat justifiers treading that line of thought to its coherent end.
a lion or an eagle eats anything. Most (if not all) carcass eating humans make arbitrary choices: Dogs or cats shan’t be eaten. Pigs or this or that is a sin. Eating humans are monstrous.
they cause very little suffering. the systemic factory farming of animals and the deforestation in the process of meat production causes unimaginable collective suffering.
you don’t care about veganism because you are willfully ignorant.
yeah but what if it tastes good
15 minutes of pleasure from eating doesn’t justify forcing an animal into existence to a life of suffering and premature death, especially when there are so many great alternatives - without even considering the the secondary effects of animal agriculture, including climate damage, antibiotic resistant bacteria, and the likelihood of bringing forward the next pandemic.
I admit animals taste good but that’s still not a good enough reason to kill them. It’s simply unnecessary.
I thought it had less to do with suffering and exploitation (animals do this to each other, no way to stop that nor should we) but more to do with climate change. Cattle farms are causing massive climate change for instance.
It can be either or both. Whether other animals or people cause suffering to animals isn’t a statement about whether it is ethical for people to do so (naturalistic fallacy).
In terms of strict definitions of what should or should not be eaten based on its suffering, I think that’s much harder to do. There’s always going to be some gray area. Plants respond to stimuli and try to protect themselves. Jellyfish and insects and cultures cells are on a spectrum where it may not be clear how to draw the line.
Humans are moral agents, though. Just because something happens in nature, that doesn’t make it okay. There are lots of examples of rape among wild animals, but that doesn’t make it okay for humans to do it.
A lot of vegans are concerned about climate change, too, but it’s really tangential to the philosophy. Veganism came out of the animal rights movement, so it’s really concerned with exploitation and suffering. If there were no environmental issues with animal products, vegans would still be vegans.
Morals are a social construct
Just because something is a social construct doesn’t mean it isn’t real or important.
That’s no necessarily true. It’s like saying “society is a social construct”. But I think there are more arguments to see morality as an inevitable result of human nature.
I mean, sometimes its ethical. Its kind of unnecessary (and therefore immoral) at the scale of modern meat farms. But on a more individual level with like subsistence hunting/livestock, i dont feel like there are any ethical problems. Like if you need food or you will die, animals lives are worth less than humans lives…
The need to hunt for food to prevent dying yourself is not really a problem in today’s society unless you are indigenous and living outside of our society. So there is no real argument there.
I mean, yeah. Im also being pedantic with unqualified absolutes.
The fact remains sometimes it absolutely is ethical to kill stuff, even if they don’t want to die.
My general ethical foundation is based on my conscience saying “that would be bad” or “seems ok”. I fully admit that this is potentially a personal flaw, but I don’t feel bad about eating meat. I have a vague sense of guilt for the treatment of meaty animals, but honestly, it isn’t enough to offset the convenience of a burger.
Tldr sometimes its ethically okay to kill stuff, and I’m too lazy to do anything about benefitting from the majority of times when it isn’t ethical.
I respect the self-reflection in this comment. Sadly, I also feel a small need to ask you to think about ethics and morality slightly deeper. Imagine if your predecessors made similar comments about [insert moral failing of history]. How would you think about that?
I think most of us try to be good people, but it’s really hard to do the right thing if you never think about what is right and why (and yes, sometimes that includes not being lazy).
There is an assumption here that i don’t think of right and wrong. Which isn’t true, as evidenced by this entire comment chain. My morality is based off of my conscience, and it has a final say in how i act. But I still think and explore ethically difficult situations to determine what is right, wrong, or grayish.
I just didnt describe my entire ethical schema, because, as i said i am lazy. Lazy and self-aware enough to know that there is not much i can or will do to improve the morality of meat consumption. And honestly, that specific problem is pretty low on my list of ethical dilemmas. But it’s fun to talk about.
