I wouldn't call cows stupid. Sure, they aren't as smart as humans, but they're capable of learning, thought, curiosity, even friendship. And when they get thrown through the meat grinders, they're capable of pain.

i assume you have a pet cow then?

and to retread a stale argument, all this talk about empathy i'm going to counter with is do the animals really want us to care for their suffering?

it seems to be like some sort of set chain of life in the animal kingdom that herbivores are the staple diet of carnivores and omnivores, of course it's not that clear-cut that animals are meant to be eaten by us, but some of them do need to be devoured by carnivores anyway, i don't see any of you talking about empathy for wild gazelles and zebras horribly devoured by lions or take action to stop it

should we then corral all the wild carnivores and herbivores and then wait for the herbivores to die naturally then feed them to carnivores?

if it is so in the animal world, surely we can breed meat-intense herbivores for our consumption

My argument isn't about stopping natural meat consumption. It's about accepting our limits and understanding just how much meat we should be eating.

What value does something being on a "lower" or "higher" level of evolutionary development have? A cockroach or a bacteria is relatively low on the evolutionary scale, and yet they will likely outlive us since they are much more resilient than us. And isn't that the whole point of evolution? To make organisms more capable of surviving. So aren't they more "highly" evolved than us?

Are you even a highly evolved organism at all? You percieve yourself as being just one being. But in reality you are just your consciousness, which is just one part of a collective of organisms (skin cells, muscle cells, brain cells, and even bacteria) that share DNA, living space, and self interest (if an organism without consciousness can be said to have self interest). They live together symbiotically because it is more conducive to their survival to combine their efforts, but they are not really one single organism. In fact, your consciousness is a result of chemicals reacting with your brain cells (as far as we can know scientifically at this point in time), so YOU aren't even really alive at all. You (your consciousness) are really just a mechanism created by a collective of organisms to coordinate their efforts to collect resources, reproduce, and avoid danger.

So I ask you, what real value does evolutionary complexity or consciousness (or self-determination or whatever) even have as a criteria for deciding whether or not an animal should or should not be eaten. I'm not really trying to sway you one way or another, just trying to get you to question your curent position of what constitutes...life deserving of not being killed for food, or whatever. And it's also an excuse for some philosophical wankery.:thumb:

I had read that if you enter a cow field, yell, and lie down abruptly, the cows will all come over and stare at you in fascination, because their curiosity knows no bounds.

I attempted this experiment last night. I screamed for my friend to pull the car over at a pasture. I climbed out through the tall grass, and yelled "MOO" and flailed a little, and then I laid down in the grass whilst my friend wailed with laughter in the car. Only one cow looked up.

I may not have been close enough to the cows to receive a reaction, so I'm considering attempting the experiment again.

...


Now who sounds stupider here? :laughing:

^Just out of curiousity, how high were you?

Not at all. Mary Roach wrote that she did this experiment twice with positive results on two different continents, in her book Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife.

I had to know.

EDIT: Though, she may have been high when she wrote it. Didn't think of that.

Perhaps you should be high then. This experiment sounds like it would be perfect to do while baked out of your skull.

That doesn't sound very scientific.

And yelling in the middle of a cow field and falling to the ground is? At least if you get caught trespassing while high, people will be like, "Oh she was just high", instead of, "She was yelling and laying down in a cow filed for no reason!" "Was she high?!" "NO!!!" "What the ****?"