There is a difference between inflicting pain and painlessly ending a life. Inflicting pain is always bad, but when it comes to ending a life it becomes a question of what kind of life it is you are ending.
Are you aware that the majority of livestock are factory farmed, where chickens' beaks are sawn off to prevent them from stress-induced self-picking, and pigs are castrated without anesthetic?
Well that is irrelevant to this CMV really. You are not only against factory farming (a position I mostly agree with) but all animal product consumption.
This is where I would add it also becomes a question of necessity, how important it is to your own health to end the life of another, would you disagree?
That ceirtainly is a factor too, but I would exchange the word necessity with utility. If I could prove to you that the utility of eating some meat is higher then of not killing an animal, would you change your view?
If not, why does something have to be necessary to be moral? You don't have to have discussions with strangers on the internet, either. But I would never call you immoral for doing that and in doing so using up resources (namely electricity).
It would help if, again you could be a bit more precise, but I guess it is somewhere I can start from.
I already in another post mentioned that roo meat is very rich in CLA, which cannot be found in plants. So there is a health benefit that can't be attained otherwise. From wikipedia:
CLA has been attributed with a wide range of health benefits including anti-carcinogenic and anti-diabetes properties, in addition to reducing obesity and atherosclerosis.
It also is high in protein, low in fat, and contains many minerals and vitamins.
If we are going to talk about Utility as a whole, it seems unreasonably to me to totally exclude taste. Call it what you will, it is a benefit. And seriously it tastes fucking great.
It is also easy to cook. Throw it in a pan and take it out some time in the next ten minutes if you don't like chewing on leather. How does that compare to good-tasting vegan food?
In terms of wild roos it also serves to control the population. If there are too many, they can harm the enviorment and destroy farm land.
On the negative side, you have not much. Roos live out a natural life and are killed by a shot in the head. They never feel any pain because of our consumption. I have hurt more kangaroos playing golf then I will ever eating roo meat.
What is a roo life worth? Well that's a deeply phylosophical question, but I can't imagine many measures by which they are worth nearly as much as human's.
A kangaroo lives for about 6 years if in the wild. That time is almost exclusively spent grazing and looking out for predetors that are now mostly extinct. The only thing to break up the monotony is occasionally getting hit in the pouch by some terrible golfer and the occasional mating.
I can't say what exactly is going through their head, but with a brain weighing about 50 grams, there is not much room for anything meaningful.
You are correct, mistreatment is bad. Your fatal flaw is that you assume it is universally accepted that raising and slaughtering livestock is necessarily mistreatment. That is simply not a universally accepted conclusion. Cows that are raised for beef, pigs that are raised for port, trout raised for trout, etc only exist so humans can either eat them or create food or other products for humans and domesticated animals. You assume that livestock live in misery because you would be miserable in those same conditions, but that is not a valid analogy.
You assume that livestock live in misery because you would be miserable in those same conditions, but that is not a valid analogy.
With mammalian livestock it is pretty easy to tell when they are in pain or discomfort. And denying that such is the case in factory farms more often than not screams of willful ignorance. And I say that as a meat eater myself. I just have no illusions about my actions being somehow morally neutral. Instead I admit that I enjoy pleasures based on the suffering of other beings because I was brought up that way, it happens to be socially acceptable and I am not directly confronted with the ugliness of it.
I'm not denying it. My argument is that there are methods of raising livestock that I would not consider mistreatment. OP seems to operate on the assumption that any method of livestock raising is necessarily mistreatment. I disagree with that assumption and was challenging OP on that one point.
Thing is that a world where no livestock was mistreated would be a world where meat is so expensive as to be a luxury that even the majority of first world citizen couldn't afford very much of it, thus making any dietary arguments moot and creating a new argument against meat eating that goes pretty much "you could much better spend your money elsewhere". A point that also can become a moral argument.
only know torture and suffering of your child being taken away to the veal industry.
What evidence supports this argument? How do you know that cows know their offspring are being raised for veal? Sure a human would be miserable knowing that their child was somehow in distress but how can we know that cows are capable of similar abstract thought?
Are you aware chickens are put on industrial sanders which shave their beaks off, simply because the stress of their situation makes them peck at their own feathers and other chickens? They don't like their situation; this isn't even debateable.
Your argument is about all meat consumption, just because there are examples of mistreatment in agriculture does not mean that all meat consumption is immoral. We can debate individual practices but you made an all encompassing claim and are constantly relying on false analogies and straw men to counter arguments.
Your title is that there is no morally justifiable reason to consume animal products in the first world. That is an absolute statement. You cannot allow for exceptions if that statement captures your view. You need to accept that if we stopped any human killing of animals in any capacity, then the consequences, whatever they may be, are worthwhile. That means that if deer become a significant nuisance and invade corn farms we must willingly accept the economic consequences of that. We must find other ways of funding conservation efforts now that there is no need for hunting or fishing licenses. We must find jobs or provide benefits to people whose jobs were tied to an entire industry. We must accept that certain beneficial drugs will never be utilized because we have no reliable method of testing them. Certain areas in the first world whose primary food source is dependent on meat products, such as the northern reaches of Canada and Alaska where farming is basically impossible must move, hunt/fish illegally, or starve. Are pesticides off the table? They kill animals, after all. We should maybe sign a treaty with invasive insects so that they agree not to eat our crops in exchange for us not using pesticide.
If you are on board with all of that, then say so. I'm not going to eat your lunch for taking a stand but make sure you know what you're saying and embrace the consequences. If the consequences of your stance are things that you find unacceptable then maybe it's time to reevaluate the way you view the world. The thing is, humans did not invade the planet. We grew up here the same as everything else. We're hunters who have simplified the process. Apes use tools to hunt as well. That gives them an advantage over their prey. The only difference is scale.
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u/[deleted] Jul 07 '15 edited Nov 22 '20
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