The difference is in the scale of the slaughter and the actual slaughtering being dissociated from the eating for many of these animals, such that a disproportionate minority takes on the task of killing for a majority of meat consumption. This has recorded known harmful effects on the people doing the killing as well as the community in which the killing is done, in a way other large industrial processes do not.
As an aside: this is a gotcha question and doesn't fundamentally address the position that animal slaughter is cruel. It relies on an obviously false rhetoric that something performed by non-sapient creatures in an environment where the only way to survive for some creatures is largely through the personal killing of other creatures is morally equivalent to an environment where sapient creatures who have wide dietary availability make the choice to consume the flesh of another creature that has been usually killed for them.
I don't understand. You're saying the problem with eating animal meat is not that an animal has to die, but in who does the killing? So it'd be better if each person had to kill their own food, even though it would almost surely result in a lot more waste, and thus a lot more killing?
>As an aside: this is a gotcha question and doesn't fundamentally address the position that animal slaughter is cruel.
I don't think so. If you think killing animals is cruel in itself, then you have only two logically consistent options: you either a) change your lifestyle to ensure you don't kill any animals whatsoever, or b) accept that some cruelty is inevitable and set some standard of acceptable cruelty for yourself. Anything else is a symptom of cognitive dissonance.
> If you think killing animals is cruel in itself, then you have only two logically consistent options: you either a) change your lifestyle to ensure you don't kill any animals whatsoever, or b) accept that some cruelty is inevitable and set some standard of acceptable cruelty for yourself.
Neither of these are addressed by equivocating this to wild animals predating.
> I don't understand. You're saying the problem with eating animal meat is not that an animal has to die, but in who does the killing? So it'd be better if each person had to kill their own food, even though it would almost surely result in a lot more waste, and thus a lot more killing?
I don't know if it's better if each person had to kill their own food. I'm not making a prescription on what people should do. I am only pointing out that there are real consequences to the current way we consume meat in a way that damages people and communities in a way that could be described as cruelty.
>Neither of these are addressed by equivocating this to wild animals predating.
Yes, because the question is about how "cruelty" is defined. You can either say killing in the wild is cruel or not cruel. If it's not cruel, then how is industrial slaughter cruel? If it is cruel, then one can pose the question of whether it's possible to slaughter industrially humanely.
>I am only pointing out that there are real consequences to the current way we consume meat in a way that damages people and communities in a way that could be described as cruelty.
Umm... Sure, but I think avalys was asking about cruelty to the prey, not to the predator.
> it'd be better if each person had to kill their own food, even though it would almost surely result in a lot more waste, and thus a lot more killing?
That's only true assuming people would keep up their meat consumption levels, which I seriously doubt.
These are still gotcha questions that don't fundamentally address the concerns of the original poster. Either address my points in good faith or just say you disagree with the position and provide your own reasoning; these questions feel clever but they're intellectually shallow.
They are genuine questions. You want to stop all animal slaughter and insects are animals so we need to stop killing insects but I have no idea if that's achievable.
Humans don’t have to do it. Just like widespread rape in the animal kingdom and in human history doesn’t give me moral justification to do it today.
Though even before getting that far, humans are participants in one of your scenarios and not the other. What other animal behaviors justify your human behaviors? Can any of them? Does another intelligence have moral justification in farming humans on the same basis?
There are some absurd reductios here that you’d have to sign off on.
This is kind of an old discussion. I'm perfectly happy eating meat but equally recognise that vegan diets are perfectly feasible for almost everyone. If not vegan, then vegetarian (preferably with a premium on animal products to reflect their impact etc).
A nice example of this is omega 3 and similar: it is actually synthesised in kelp and works its way through the food chain to us with fish as an intermediary. It doesn't have to be that way, it just is right now. B vitamins are a similar story.
"Animal products" yes (with the caveat we're getting good at genetic engineering and also vat-growing meat cells); "flesh" no; "poke their eyes out and boil them alive" absolutely not.
Whichever nutrient is required for smug satisfaction of beating nature at its own game and being so far beyond the food chain that it might as well not be a thing.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you meant 'a humane execution'. Requiring a human execution before eating meat is a little extreme.
hahaha, man, I need a new keyboard. Yes. Humane. I'm not demanding a human sacrifice. I'm just going to leave the typo up for posterity, hopefully more folks get a kick out of it.
Humans have moral agency whereas animals have little or none. Animals must listen to their instincts, whereas humans get a choice.
That choice is more important to some people, less important to others.
This depends on which animals people consider to be moral subjects and therefore worthy of moral consideration, rights, and protections.
Some people (vegans) consider all animals as moral subjects. Some people (pescatarians) may consider most animals as moral subjects, but not certain ones like fish.
Most people consider some animals like dogs, cats, and horses, as moral subjects, and not others like cows, chickens, and pigs.
These definitions are unconsciously arrived at by sociocultural factors, but some people consciously arrive at them.
Animals are pretty brutal as well. My neighbor has free range chickens. The other morning, I woke up and looked out in my backyard, and there were 7 dead chickens strewn about my property. They were all over the place, it was a mess.
So, I checked my cam for the next couple nights, and found a fox strolling across the property with a chicken in its mouth. I figured they'd eat one, but nope... 7. And he's been back for more since.
We purposefully choose to torture animals that we breed and keep in captivity and that would otherwise not be alive if not for our intervention. And we could easily choose to limit their suffering at minimal expense to ourselves! But we choose not to, for reasons I simply cannot comprehend.
Animals in the wild obviously do not have any such choice.
1. Moral agency: Humans can reason morally, and (at least in theory) strive to act morally. Lions are not capable of that (afaik)
2. Necessity: Lions have no supermarkets. 95% of the people reading this can most definitely go vegan (and 99% vegetarian). Just like how self defense and murder are different.
3. Non-existence: 99% of the animals we slaughter we also artificially bred into existence. It's a false equivalence, because those animals wouldn't even exist
4. Practicality: Regulating wild animal feeding behaviour would be stupendously difficult. A vegan world on the other hand is not just possible, but also better for everyone. In zoos, where we can control "wild" animals, we already reduce suffering by not feeding live prey.
Surely there are nature murders more brutal than lobster boiling? Does the lobster even have overheating sensors? Seems pretty out of spec for range of lobster environment.
Humans aren't being boiled in their natural environment, yet our temperature senses react to it. Why do you suspect lobsters to work fundamentally differently? They are exposed to different temperatures in their natural habitat, just as we are.
Are land animals around fire much? Humans have been around fire a lot more since a short time ago, but aside from that fire is a very rare thing for most animals to encounter.
Well, for example, I believe that exposure to dangerous levels of nuclear radiation does not induce pain in humans. It would seem that mammals, at least, have encountered fire enough as an evolutionary pressure to develop a specific reaction to it. I’m having trouble finding a video of a lobster walking near an open fire, it would be instructive to see its reaction. Does anyone own a lobster as a pet and is willing to perform an experiment for us? You don’t need to hurt the lobster.
> It would seem that mammals, at least, have encountered fire enough as an evolutionary pressure to develop a specific reaction to it.
What specific reaction are you referring to? Fire isn't the only natural source of heat. Why is evolutionary pressure from fire required for animals to evolve a sense of "something is too hot"? Why is it not sufficient for animals to evolve this due to e.g. exposure to sunlight, with the same mechanism being triggered through fire?
Subjectively, as a human, it seems like the pain of being burned is qualitatively a different type of sensation from e.g. being warmed by sunlight.
So the lobster feeling that they should ideally move to cooler water makes sense. Evolutionarily it wouldn’t surprise me if they don’t feel like they are in an emergency situation in the same way that a human would if they are standing in a fire.
I think you misunderstood me, or I just wasn't explicit enough. I was talking about humans being burned by natural things other than flames. From my (admittedly limited) experience, being burned by a flame or by a hot surface or a hot liquid isn't qualitatively different. Even sunburn (the aforementioned exposure to sunlight) feels similar if bad enough.
Got it, yes-- I definitely agree that a sensation can be cross-triggered by conditions other than the evolutionary pressure conditions.
Is there a "dangerous heat" environmental candidate for lobsters that we can speculate could be sensory-cross-triggered by boiling water? Underwater lava?
My response is an attempt to summarize lobster-pain-experience info I just gleaned in this thread from a much more thought-provoking and lengthy article already linked to in another comment called "Consider the Lobster" by David Foster Wallace.
Lobsters definitely feel pain at least as a stimulus responding to extreme heat.
Lobsters have nociceptors, special pain-receptors that are “sensitive to potentially damaging extremes of temperature, to mechanical forces, and to chemical substanceswhich are released when body tissues are damaged.”
Humans have similar receptors. Consider if you touch an extremely hot stove and remove your hand before you even realized what happened. That (temperature) pain stimulus is sent to your spinal cord (not your cortex) and then responds by moving your hand before you are consciously aware (through the cortex) of what is going on.
Lobsters do not have anything like the cortex which is involved in pain interpreation for humans (and also pain supression like in extremely traumatic events where a person doesn't feel any pain immediately after losing a limb).
The lack of a pain suppression mechanism is a little scary to think about in the context of being boiled alive, but this could potentially be because lobsters' experience of pain is so radically different from our own that they may not even have use of a pain supressor.
There are interesting anecdotes about people who received frontal lobotomies experiencing pain as a neutral experience that is neither bad or good. As in they feel pain from, but it is not perceived or interpreted as "bad" by them.
Also in general, lobsters are unusually sensitive to temperature among invertebrates, responding to temperature changes in lab studies as small as 1°, and their seasonal migratory patterns also seem to highly motivated by finding their preferred temperatures.
If you drop a lobster in a container of room temperature sea-water, the lobster just kind of sits at the bottom looking for the darkest most isolated space if there is one (normal behaviour) vs boiling sea-water you will notice lobsters trying to use their claws to not be fully submerged, push off the lid, etc... in the 35-45 seconds it takes for boiling water to kill them.
p.s. I hope this response is useful, I wrote it partially to let the mentioned article I just read sink in for myself.
If I can jump in a cage with a wild tiger, or a giant pot of boiling water, hands down I'll die by tiger.
Nature has a lot of horrible deaths, don't get me wrong.
But boiling sensory wise (at least for humans) is similar to immolation (being burned alive) and it unfortunately takes longer to actually kill the person than burning them alive.
Tigers naturally kill prey quickly to avoid injury, often going for the neck.
Many animals will feed on dying preys that stay alive suffering for hours. Literally being eaten alive. I don't think boiling a lobster is even remotely comparable.
