hip hop bunny hop

I hunt, I fish, and I've worked on a factory farm on the dairy side before (3 thousand, 1,500 pound dairy cows 3 times a day). The reality of the situation differs from your propaganda.

Because healthy, socialized individuals internalize their society's standards on most issues. Breaking these standards triggers an emotional response.

If you're referring to American culture; our culture tells us that not all animals are equal. Kindness to animals depends on the animal; we don't even have a consensus on what constitutes "cruelty" to animals.

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Have mercy on the poor.

VEGANGELICA

My point is that our culture says people should not be cruel to animals. Being kind to animals is considered a "good" thing. I agree with you completely that there isn't consensus on what constitutes "cruelty," and not just toward non-human animals, but also toward humans.

Perhaps, bunny hop, you and I agree that people should not be cruel to animals, but a main reason I am vegan and you are not is that we disagree on what constitutes "cruelty."

What makes you feel those pictures I showed, real scenes from the livestock industry, are propaganda...pictures of downer cows, a rabbit slaughterhouse, and a person pulling a sheep by her or his leg?

If those scenes seemed too isolated to you, then consider the following common practices within the livestock industry. Tell me why these widespead industry practices aren't "cruel":

(1) Killing the male calves of dairy cows. All of them. You should be familiar with this practice, since you worked in the dairy industry.

The treatment of male calves and other cattle at New York's largest dairy factory farm is shown in an undercover video from 2009 at the link below. How did your dairy factory farm differ from this one?

Dairy Investigation | Mercy For Animals


(2) Killing all the male chicks of egg-laying hens, millions per year, often by maceration (grinding them while alive and conscious).

Undercover Investigation at Hy-Line Hatchery in Iowa shows the grinding of male chicks
Ground Up Alive: Baby Chicks Suffer | Care2 Causes



(3) "Thumping" ill or small piglets (bashing their heads against the floor), castrating piglets without anaesthetic, and confining sows in gestation crates.

The following 2011 article, including a video, describes and shows these practices at an Iowan hog factory farm:

Undercover activist draws attention to pork producer's questionable practices | abc7news.com

This 2008 pamphlet, "On-Farm Euthanasia of Swine: Recommendations for the Producer," published by the National Pork Board (from Iowa), describes that the accepted way to kill piglets who weigh up to 12 pounds is by blunt trauma:

http://www.aasv.org/aasv/documents/SwineEuthanasia.pdf

^ All three practices that I list in bold above are standard in the animal industry in the U.S., although a few states have outlawed sow gestation crates thanks to activists and voters, including meat-eaters, concerned about cruelty toward animals.

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MoonlitSunshine

Vegangelica, at the risk of falling into cultural stereotypes, there are certain areas of the world and indeed certain personalities all over the world who have an over-extended sense of self-entitlement and righteousness. I know very, very few people who don't show compassion to animals, and I would trust that none of my friends or family would ever do anything so thoughtless. It's like religion - I have no problem with someone being religious (meat-eating, in this analogy), and I would have absolutely no problem whatsoever if they wanted to say grace before they ate (provided they did not expect me to pray to their god) (had meat in their own food), but I would object if someone tried to perform a full blown mass that included a sermon that spoke out against my way of life in my living room (brought a dead animal home, slammed it on the table in front of you, and proceeded to skin and eat it). It's a question of respecting other people's choices and beliefs in ways which allow both of you to live the way you want.

My own personal views on the subject of veganism/vegetarianism are well documented earlier in this thread, I don't really feel the need to readdress them, but on the subject of moral obligation, I believe there are things I haven't said, or rather didn't really think about the first time.

To invoke the moral righteousness of a choice, one really needs to define morality. The problem is, there is no one set of choices that is unilaterally considered "moral". What are morals? That in itself is a subjective question. Personally I have a rather cynical view of morals - I think their are an entirely societal construct that formed as an extra set of rules, existing to guarantee security within societal groups. Why is it immoral to kill your neigbour? Because if you will happily kill your neighbour and take his things, there is nothing stopping him from doing the same to you. People band together for protection, for security, for prosperity. As societies got bigger, as people wanted to avoid more and more "immoral" things in order to ensure their way of life, more and more things were added to the list of morals.

There is a certain amount of circumstantial proof for my theory - babies can be fairly easily proven to have no morals they haven't been taught through their interactions with others. We have to teach children not to be selfish, we have to teach them to be patient. Teach a child early enough that it is moral to kill in order to get something they want, they won't have any hesitations (at least, until someone or something plants the seeds of doubt). Obviously there is more to morality than what we are taught (people can discard teachings, can decide that something is wrong, based on their own experiences, but I can extend this theory to cover those, it just takes a lot more time :P The basis of my belief of the source of morals is there. If that makes sense to you, well and good. If it doesn't, well, we have differing views, and I'll respect that provided you have your own reasoning!

Cliff notes for the above: Morals are subjective. (I believe) They depend on your society, what you were initially taught, and how your experiences have affected you and effected your personality. So there will always be people who feel meat-eating is morally wrong, and those who have no problem with it. Neither one of them is being immoral, by their own definition of immoral, and I personally feel that I have no right to criticise their immorality, provided their set of morals don't impinge on the morals of another. There will inevitably be clashes, but that is what compromises are for, that is what democracy is for. Let the person who stands to be affected the most have the greatest say, but let everyone have a say. Balance this with the quantity of people who feel either way, and you have a system of judging "right" and "wrong" which is probably as close to fair as you're ever going to get.

The Moral (joke) of this post: I don't think it's immoral, personally, to eat animals. I think the example of nature and everything an ecological cycle entails shows that things will eat other things. It doesn't go against nature to do what we do, and... well, I love eating meat. There are some biological cases which state that there are certain blood types and certain people who have more of a need to eat meat (I have a friend who almost died from going vegetarian, due to an auto-immune disease she has - she would like to be vegetarian for her own reasons, but she would prefer to be alive). That said, I will always buy free-range animal products and meat whenever I can afford to, and I am wholly against the undue suffering of animals. It's all, again, a question of compromise. I love eating meat, and I wish it were cheaper, but I balance that wish with an unwillingness to support battery farming, because I feel that that is immoral.

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"I found it eventually, at the bottom of a locker in a disused laboratory, with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard". Ever thought of going into Advertising?"

- Arthur Dent

Guybrush

Morals are not entirely subjective. I think of that as a really an old fashioned idea (think Thomas Hobbes f.ex). Morals arise from behaviours and feelings that at large have helped increase our fitness in our (increasingly social) environment. It could come from something as simple as the "selfish" want to not share your lover with anyone else to an inbuilt willingness to cooperate with other people for the (fitness) benefit of all (including you!). Culture's been mixed into that as well, but our capacity for moral is still very much part of our DNA and we have a moral center in the brain. It may need to be stimulated as a child grows up, but that goes for everything else as well, like fine motor skills.

We're definetly moral beings which is why a person like Erica can feel so strongly about animals. Yet, to me it seems pretty clear that in our history, it's never been adaptable for us to care so strongly about animals that we won't eat them. What's happened in Erica's case is that a lot of empathic feelings most people have towards other humans, she also projects onto (non-human) animals. Just why that happened in Erica's case, I do not know, but I feel that in general, it is something that happens more as people are removed from a natural way of life. For a lot of people living modern lives in the city, living animals are not considered competitors or potential food. Mostly, they fill the role of pets. They meet pets like cats and dogs, they may see cute cows on the television etc. Animals are cute and friendly, never food, and so when they see the reality of meat production for the first time, they are repulsed by it.

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Something Completely Different

lucifer_sam

I won't lampoon you for this statement, but if you actually believe there is an "objective morality" then you're going to have much bigger issues grasping the ideas of right and wrong that people bandy about.

Read Nietzsche, specifically the Genealogy of Morals. It will give you a much better insight into what MoonLitSunshine is talking about. He isn't blowing hot air here at all.

The ethical is not the only way of viewing human experience, Tore.

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Guybrush

What issues and why?

Morals have evolved and evolution is predictable. Some strategies/behaviours help maximize fitness and so are rewarded and sustained through evolution while others are not. Rather than saying morals are objective, I'd say morals (unless you're one of the special few damaged people who don't seem to posess any) ultimately come from the same place in all of us.

There's a wealth of litterature you could learn a lot from as well. For example I'm sure you could learn a lot from reading Richard Dawkins' classic The Selfish Gene. And I'm not blowing hot air either.

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Something Completely Different

lucifer_sam

Nope. Morals are not evolutionary in design. They represent a higher level of cognition that follows from the recognition of other beings as disparate self-consciousnesses. Outside of primates, there are very few animals capable of making this distinction.

And in fact some "morals" that we've adopted today are completely anti-evolutionary: humanitarianism, for one. Humanitarianism is helpful when it allows for sustaining a genetic profile of a certain group of people, but there is no evolutionary reason why we should feel pity for humans who exist outside our sphere of genetic influence. When we sacrifice personal resources to the aid of peoples that are so far removed genetically, we create a situation in which evolution can stagnate.

Which is a dominating factor in why people have so much difficulty grasping subjective morality. Your morals are a product of your experience, nothing more. If rape was the only means by which people procreated in your society (as it is in some fundamentalist Muslim countries), chances are you'd be a rapist too.

I've read Dawkins, Hobbes, Darwin, Malthus, and plenty more. I still suggest reading Genealogy of Morals, or at least a criticism of morality that isn't written by a rabid believer in ethics, it might help normalize a lot of that frustration you seem to have with people that live outside that right-and-wrong box.

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Sansa Stark

This thread is full of wank

Goofle

Is meat murder? Yes. Do I care? Wait while I munch on some lamb chops.

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lucifer_sam

Right. We are predisposed to those behaviors because it ensures continued success of the species. But that doesn't mean that everyone has the same basis for determining those behaviors -- it is YOUR experience that lends you to them.

I almost feel like we're arguing the same thing, it's just a matter of interpreting those evolutionarily adaptive behaviors as evidence for an "objective" morality that I see as a logical fallacy.

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