Do plants deserve a moral status as "animal"?

[Sculptor1]

Ideally, the pig should be tortured for an extended period, filled with growth hormones, and live in its own excrement so the growers can add lots of lovely antibiotics.

Mmm mmm.

If you like that sort of thing, go for it.
I'd rather have some meat that has taste.

[Pattern-chaser]

My personal feeling is that there is little point in complaining about the eating of other living creatures when most living creatures do this, and always have done this, to survive. It is a fact of the world, and to complain about it is to complain about the sun being too bright, or too dim. It just is.

This might seem like an obvious point, but the sun doesn't have a brightness control.

No, it's just the example I chose of something that is part of life, the universe and everything; it just is. If we make moral value judgements on it, we're wasting our time. It's not subject to our whims or wishes; it won't change because we want it to. It does what it does regardless of us. That's why I chose it as an example.

Our diet does. We can choose what we eat.

Yes, but we don't choose NOT to eat. We need to eat something or we'll die. What does it matter if we choose to eat other living things, animal or plant, when most other living things do the same? Can we really get on our moral high horses and condemn the consumption of other living things, when this very practice is a basic feature of nearly all the life on our planet? That would be arrogant, and pointless too, IMO.

I think we should be honest and say: I am willing for other animals to live lives of misery because I enjoy the taste of their flesh, not because of any argument as to what is or is not the natural way of things.

Ah, now you introduce how we treat the animals we eat, before we kill and eat them. A different but related issue, just as important. I prefer to be honest and say: I am willing for other animals to be humanely kept and killed, so that I can eat their flesh, so that I can survive and thrive. This is in accord with "the natural way of things".

The pictures Sy Borg posted are horrible. There is no need to treat our food animals in this way. Only our greed for profit causes us to act so. If we could only address the greed and the profit, I suspect all other issues might right themselves.

[Belindi]

Food is too cheap.

Yes, meat particularly. Like a lot of things it's artificially cheap in the sense that the economics of it treat certain things as cost-free. The trouble is, it's very difficult to fight against economics, particularly when it's global. If you tell a poor hard working family that food (or specifically meat) is artificially cheap they'll probably, quite reasonably, fight back against that.

I wanted to write about how there is too much difference between rich and poor but I have no real solution other than a religious one.

I wonder if popular culture can come to the rescue with poor people rebelling against the conspicuous consumption of the rich, instead of trying to imitate it. What went wrong with communism?

[Sculptor1]

There is a massive ecological crisis, not much talked about, but as you might imagine, caused mostly by humans.
And that is the lack of SH1T.
Since the end of the Iceage there is an estimated reduction in the amount of 90% of excrement. Excrement is one of the essential pathways by which the natural cycles all must pass. It is a choke point, through which nitrogen passes and represents a significant food supply for trillions of bacteria, worms (from the mocroscopic to the macroscopic), and a host of invertebrates.
This reduction is by land and sea.
It was once thought that the massive holocaust in the whale population might lead to an increase in Krill. Sadly this has not happened, as whale **** once supplied a massive ecological pathway upon which the Krill themselves were utterly dependant. So along with the drop in whale numbers os a parallel drop in the number of krill and an entire biome who that was dependant on the ****/krill/whale sequence.
The large mammals that were common at the end of the iceage ranged from bears, european rhinos, elephants, big cats wolves, several species of deer, even beaver were present in Britain. The natural landscape offered a bewildering number of **** making creatures who enriched the soil and made the carbon collecting plants grow.
All that has fallen under the sentence of extinction, under the plough or under urban developement.
Now the spaces between the Cities, towns and villages, where not turned to plough are wretched remnants of their former glory.
This destruction is across the face of the earth. Even in places that seem wild or untouched, the numbers of species has plummeted, squeezed into ever more small areas.

Wee need more ****. The land needs to return to at least a simulation of the natural world, and that means plants and ANIMALS too.
Arable land is the ecosystem's worst nightware. Deep ploughed, reliant of agro-chemicals from pesticides, herbicides, and fertilisers. Soil has washed awas and been replaced by the annual innundation of nitrates which pollute the water supply and clog waterways with weeds, choking the fish.

We need more naturally grown meat; and horticulturally grown, rather than agriculturally grown, vegetables.

[Pattern-chaser]

There is a massive ecological crisis, not much talked about, but as you might imagine, caused mostly by humans.
And that is the lack of SH1T.
Since the end of the Iceage...

This is interesting, and it sounds plausible. Why haven't I heard of this before? Are there links, or whatever, that you know of?

[Steve3007]

The pictures Sy Borg posted are horrible. There is no need to treat our food animals in this way. Only our greed for profit causes us to act so. If we could only address the greed and the profit, I suspect all other issues might right themselves.

Trouble is, if you look into it a bit, you find that it's a picture of pregnant sows in a thing called a "gestation crate" and then you find arguments on both sides. For example, you even find people claiming that studies have shown that the pregnant sows choose to go into those little spaces when given the chance to go somewhere bigger. I'm not saying I believe them. But one of the many issues in the moral maze which is animal rights/welfare is the one of anthropomorphism. It's difficult for us not to look at pictures and simply think "how would I like it if I were in that situation?". If taken to extremes, this kind of anthropomorphic empathy leads to the craziness of thinking that blades of grass consciously concern themselves with human agricultural habits.

[Sculptor1]

There is a massive ecological crisis, not much talked about, but as you might imagine, caused mostly by humans.
And that is the lack of SH1T.
Since the end of the Iceage...

This is interesting, and it sounds plausible. Why haven't I heard of this before? Are there links, or whatever, that you know of?

It's a thing that came up on recently QI on the BBC. I've not dipped into the evidence ytet, but you can be sure it has some basis. I'll let you know when I find out more.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0380136/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

[Sy Borg]

The pictures Sy Borg posted are horrible. There is no need to treat our food animals in this way. Only our greed for profit causes us to act so. If we could only address the greed and the profit, I suspect all other issues might right themselves. 🤔

Trouble is, if you look into it a bit, you find that it's a picture of pregnant sows in a thing called a "gestation crate" and then you find arguments on both sides. For example, you even find people claiming that studies have shown that the pregnant sows choose to go into those little spaces when given the chance to go somewhere bigger. I'm not saying I believe them. But one of the many issues in the moral maze which is animal rights/welfare is the one of anthropomorphism. It's difficult for us not to look at pictures and simply think "how would I like it if I were in that situation?". If taken to extremes, this kind of anthropomorphic empathy leads to the craziness of thinking that blades of grass consciously concern themselves with human agricultural habits.

The lies about gestation crates may be based on the same faulty claims about hens choosing to stay in barns, even after the door is open. By the same token, inmates who have been incarcerated since youth will often commit crimes to go back to environs to which they have been conditioned.

If pigs preferred to spend their lives within tiny cages, why do they not live even remotely like that in the wild? Wild pigs could simply find a niche or dig a hole and spend their lives the way pig factory farmers claim they like it. Instead, they run around, scavenging, hunting, fighting, playing and trying to have sex. You know, like any other intelligent mammal will do - even humans!

Sadly, if you suggest that an intelligent mammal with a complex nervous system has any emotions or displays any creative intelligence, there will always be someone to claim anthropomorphism, as if humans were the only beings ever to experience their lives. That was a respectable idea about a century ago. So were the ideas that the Milky Way was the only galaxy and that black holes did not exist.

[Belindi]

Pigs need environmental richness to be happy even or especially when they are pregnant. They are at least as intelligent as dogs. We who eat bacon have no moral superiority over those Chinese peasants who eat dog meat.

If you are going to eat meat you should regard it as an occasional luxury and if possible insist it is outdoor bred, reared, and naturally fattened, and killed within twelve miles of its field.

What went wrong with communism that was supposed to distribute luxuries equally?

[Steve3007]

What went wrong with communism?

What went wrong with communism that was supposed to distribute luxuries equally?

Sounds like a queue for a new topic.

[Steve3007]

Sadly, if you suggest that an intelligent mammal with a complex nervous system has any emotions or displays any creative intelligence, there will always be someone to claim anthropomorphism, as if humans were the only beings ever to experience their lives.

Humans are of course not the only beings to experience their lives, but I think instances of inapplicable anthropomorphism still do exist. I think this from personal experience of my own attitudes, apart from anything else. I think empathy is a mixed blessing. On the plus side, I believe it's the key emotion that we use in creating the moral codes that we believe in and aspire to live by. Without it, we're psychopaths. On the downside, as with any analogy, it can be overstretched. I've definitely found myself overstretching it when trying to assess the wellbeing of family pets (goldish, rabbit, cat). It's particularly difficult to use empathy to figure out whether a goldfish is living a fulfilling life, I've found.


But I accept the points you make in the rest of the post about those "gestation crates".

[Steve3007]

Error: "Sounds like a queue for a new topic." should be "Sounds like a cue for a new topic.".

[Pattern-chaser]

Error: "Sounds like a queue for a new topic." should be "Sounds like a cue for a new topic.".

Your wish is my command! Follow the link to the new topic:

What went wrong with communism?

[Steve3007]

Your wish is my command! Follow the link to the new topic:

Thanks! I suppose I should say, form an orderly cue. I mean queue.

[Pattern-chaser]

Your wish is my command! Follow the link to the new topic:

Thanks! I suppose I should say, form an orderly cue. I mean queue.

For those who aren't used to following those little tiny up-arrow links, here is a 'normal' link. Having said that, I hope it works, as I won't be able to edit or delete this post. []