There's zero evidence so far that plants feel pain, heck we don't have any solid evidence that insects, mollusks etc feel pain, yet there's incontrovertible evidence that pretty much all vertebrate animals feel pain, this is common sense to most people and they don't need technical proof that say a cow, or a pig, or even a fish feels pain, on the contrary you'd need pretty groundbreaking evidence to argue that they don't feel pain, or that their experience of pain is completely different to ours.

Anyway, a good response to the plant argument:
http://unpopularveganessays.blogspot.co … 0sentience

zachandhobbes wrote:

I don't understand other arguments though. Animals eat each other - there is a whole set of them called carnivores. This event is essential to food webs. Ecosystems are BASED on this idea.

I still like Francione's theory of animal rights:
http://www.vimeo.com/4808525

Should give you a basic understanding of one animal rights perspective (if you manage to sit through the whole thing).

Forests are cut down to feed cattle, to graze cattle, and cattle generally destroy the land they occupy, your argument doesn't make sense.

Last edited by thecite (2011 March 20, 10:00 pm)

This is all based on the idea that there is some predefined set of 'ethics' that determines what is 'natural' survival and 'human abuse' survival.

Eventually, some group of animals would evolve to have the brain capacity that we have, to have critical and analytical thought, and to make their lives enjoyable and beyond just 'survival'.

If we are going to live beyond just 'surviving' (moving forward, advancing), we are going to need to consume more than just 'surviving'.

One way or another, whether we destroy land to make room for cows or destroy land to make room for corn, we are going to need to address the root problem of waste not from what we eat, but how we eat.

Animals raised for meat productions by humans do typically live out a hellish existence, but on the other hand animals that get raped and killed from their habitats to make room for farms which don't even provide arable soil would also do that. Then there is the argument that if you are going to protect animals from this hellish existence, you should protect plants which are also living beings. Unless you are going to say one life form is greater than the next one, which this argument overall does kind of make considering with every step you are destroying thousands of microorganisms.

It's all a very complex thing that honestly, switching to vegetarianism will not solve.

I've seen the movie "food inc." I know what Smithfield, Tyson, and friends do to their animals and truthfully it's sickening and disgusting. But how do you guys propose that we feed the billions of people on the planet? It is our natural instinct to eat as much as we can because before we got to this point, food was scarcer and we were hunters and farmers who needed to store fats, sugars, and proteins in order to survive harsh winters. now that we have taken that out of the equation we can't just magically go back on thousands of years of evolution by saying, "It's your fault you're fat, stop eating burgers, eat plants now ONLY." It just doesn't work that way, we have the natural tendency to want to eat both meat and plants because we are omnivores.

Therefore, yes it is inhumane the way they process animals for the mass market. But is that an issue with eating habits, or the excessive capitalism that our economic industrial overlords force upon us?

If you want to make a difference then purchase free range meat and organic eggs. Go to your farmer's market, not Wal-Mart. You have the power of the consumer - what you buy has incredibly more power than any billions of dollars that the huge abusive corporations have.

Last edited by zachandhobbes (2011 March 20, 10:21 pm)

I'm not doubting you thecite but would you like to show some data or something

Plus, on top of my whole argument if we force everyone to be vegetarians there will be riots.

at least in my household

thank you bodhi.

Anyway, it is difficult to look at the matter in a comparative way because humans aren't nomadic like animals, we set up farms and raise crops and livestock. That's just what we do and what we've learned to do.

I don't know, I just think it's weird to say that we should all move to a vegetarian diet for the sake of anti-consumption. Seems to go against nature.

I think that we should eat meat, but we should only eat meat that we raise naturally, on free range, with good farmers, and without mass production.

Saying that land gets ruined by livestock is only true when you look at huge corporations who stick cows in their poop 24/7. If land got ruined by normal livestock, then the earth wouldn't be here anymore because we wouldn't have a cycling system of carbon (which we do). Basically, land does recycle and there is a system for all of this, it's just that we need to make sure we don't let corporations blind us from the problems.

There are little guys, like this guy : ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Salatin ) who still practice proper farming technique and treat the animals right. You can find them yourself at the local farmers market.

So yeah I do not see the argument for 'inhumane treatment of animals by eating meat' when you have available options for humanely brought up animals everywhere.

bodhisamaya wrote:

Angeldust,
You stated, "God has clearly said in the Bible..."
That is a religious belief, not a fact.

Depends on who you're talking to, does it not? This is a debate that could go in circles. And it's not really conducive to this topic (I think), so here's my short answer. If you want to talk more, feel free to email me.
In many places the Bible says it is the Word of God. Then Jesus came and basically said, "yeah I'm God and the Bible is the Word of God." So ultimately your disagreement with me stating that as fact is with the Bible and God. Not me. Though I will gladly point you to where He's said things.

Also, I believe evolution is a religious belief, not fact. So who really has the facts if we both believe we have the facts and the other holds a religious belief? It sort of seems it ends in a stale mate at that point.

Angeldust wrote:

Also, I believe evolution is a religious belief, not fact. So who really has the facts if we both believe we have the facts and the other holds a religious belief? It sort of seems it ends in a stale mate at that point.

Aside from the irrelevant comment about evolution, Angeldust is certainly justified in citing the Biblical implications of eating meat as long as he/she is not claiming that we should all conform to that world view, which I don't think he/she is.

Any argument that debates good vs. bad assumes values that are not based in rationality and in many cases, are based off of religious values that have been filtered through national cultures.  I have little doubt that your opinioins, bodhi, are based off of your own religious beliefs. So I think Angeldust's statements are pretty much as valid as anything the rest of us can come up with.

Last edited by JimmySeal (2011 March 20, 11:43 pm)

bodhisamaya wrote:

JimmySeal wrote:

I have little doubt that your opinions, bodhi, are based off of your own religious beliefs.

I was very anti-religion when I became vegetarian 18 years ago.   The only religion I had been exposed to until that point was Christianity.  Contemplating the suffering of animals was kind of a spark that led me to explore other paths.

Then on that point, I stand corrected.  Beg yer pardon.

That's not practical though, considering we eat way more than we could raise as pets.

Blahah wrote:

IceCream wrote:

But these kinds of arguments seem much much less strong now in the face of the neurobiological understanding we have.

We may not know "how" parts of the brain, and the nervous system give rise to experience, but we certainly know that there are at the very least extremely strong correlations between one thing and another. We know what types of impairment occur from certain types of damage, and a whole host of things about the physical properties of the brain under different circumstances.

Well, it's quite possible that I'm behind the times here. I'm making an argument by attempting to rationalise from the information I have, but have made no attempt to keep up with the current literature. I read whatever comes into the major interdisciplinary journals and I've read books on the philosophy of mind by Daniel Dennett, John Searle etc. I've also read all of Oliver Sacks' books (so I'm familiar with the kinds of insights which can be gained from analysing impairments), but I am by no means completely up to date with philosophy of mind, neuropsychology or neurobiology. I asserted that we don't understand the physical basis of consciousness because it's been one of the biggest questions in science since the beginning, and I'm sure I would have heard about it if we'd had a major breakthrough

So, perhaps I should reconsider my position based on a more thorough understanding of current neurobiology. I'll delve into the literature and get back to this thread in a couple of months with a more thorough perspective. It may take me longer than that since I'm currently working out a PhD research proposal, for Cambridge Plant Sciences , and it's consuming my entire being.

Niiiiiiice!!! Good luck, though i think you don't need it

The people you're talking about are philosophers, and from a philosophical perspective, the argument is still very much alive, as is solipsism, etc. There has been no major breakthrough in what is known as the "hard problem" of consciousness, and is unlikely to be at any point in the near future. We can't dismiss qualia just yet.

However, there have been many smaller breakthroughs in the neurosciences that to me clearly tip the balance. In terms of other neuroscience, for example, memory, this has been studied in great detail in rats, birds, and other animals for instance. So, for instance, if we're talking about what it is to have a memory, we don't have to just go on an external feature, such as "the rat found it's way back through the maze much more quickly to find it's food this time", we also have, "the rat has a hippocampus like ours", "the neurons in the hippocampus fire in this specific way on learning and what would in humans be memory retrieval", "rats and humans have the same types of neurotransmitter that works in this process", "if the hippocampus is damaged in humans, it leads to loss of memory", "if the hippocampus is damaged in rats, it can no longer find it's way back through the maze", etcetc. Although one is on a much smaller level than the other, the systems are so similar that it becomes difficult to justify the position that rats don't have some form of memory in the same way that we do, scientifically, but not philosophically. Philosophically, the problem is still there at this point, and it may be that they don't have the "qualia" of memory. But given the evidence we have, from both behavioural and physical properties, there's no good reason to not believe that they don't either.

Saying that, some progress has been made into the neural correlates of consciousness itself also, especially using illusions, but also with the differences between consciousness and attention.
This section is a good introduction: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Neu … Perception
and this video is a good introduction too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJA5NYoDeO4 for when you're feeling lazy...

Blahah wrote:

vileru wrote:

I don't think brain structures and nervous systems give the entire picture of how we attribute sensations to other humans. Language is key to this attribution, which is what I think Blahah is pointing at. Even assuming similar brain structures and nervous systems, we don't share a language with any animals in the same way that we do with humans.

Exactly, language is the crux of the difference. Language allows me to probe the similarities between myself and other humans far more deeply than I can with other species. In doing so I can see that solipsism is not practical or likely to be true when applied to other humans, but the fact that I can't even inquire of non-human minds is a big indicator of a large difference.

Language is also talked about in the video lecture that i gave above, but i don't think it's necessary to have language to probe the similarities. In fact we can probe in a much deeper way by using neuroscience nowadays. Almost certainly, language affects our consciousness in various ways, at least as a basic classification system, and how we classify the world into different objects and pieces, as well as how we perceive our own emotions. And in that sense, it's going to make some parts of our conscious experiences significantly different from any other animal.
But it doesn't make it more "objective" in any sense. We also have ways to find out how and to what extent other animals classify objects naturally... just by using simple catergorisation tasks, for example, with colours, sounds, or objects. Often we find that it's stunningly similar to the graphs we find from asking humans to perform the same experiment. With others experiments, it's significantly different. Pretty much all animals lack the same degree of classificatory ability that humans have, which is one reason why real language experiments have been limited.
But the essential point, i guess is that language ability doesn't limit our ability to enquire from animals, and even without any classificatory ability at all, we can still find out about animals perceptual experiences. The ability to classify doesn't have much impact on something being conscious, only the way that consciousness is perceived.

sorry if that's too rambly...

I'd feel differently about if it wasn't such an essential thing as our dietary choices.

I see the argument you are trying to make. "Turn off the faucet while you brush your teeth, turn off the light when you leave the room, choose something instead of meat once a week," but there is a vital difference in these 3 things. Turn off the faucet saves valuable water that can be directed to someone else who needs it. Turn off the light saves valuable energy so more doesn't need to be burned from the limited supply of coal we already have. However, cutting back on meat doesn't really achieve anything in the system. Or if it does, I don't know what it achieves.

If this were about "taking the bus VS driving cars" then I'd be all for taking the bus. I take the bus every day instead of driving, and carpool if I have to drive, because I don't like wasting gasolene and creating excess fossil fuels emissions.

However, this is our DIETS we are talking about. It effects my health, my energy, my mood, and of course my happiness because I want to eat good food. Meat isn't the only delicious thing in this world, but it's one of my favorite delicious things be it fish meat or beef or ribs or whatever.

I can replace meat with pasta, noodles, fruits, rice, cereal (All of which I eat on a regular basis), or even dreaded veggies (YUCK). But even then, I would still be missing on Omega 3 Fatty Acids, Vitamin B12, and be lacking iron absorbtion.

I'm trying to see your point but I feel this is an extremely complex issue. Is limiting the meat in my diet the right way to battle against excessive consumption in the world? We could go back and forth on the advantages of vegetarianism, low meat diets, normal meat diets, but that wouldn't really address the real problem right?

I don't know. It seems strange and nigh-impossible that we are somehow, with cattle farming, doing some irreversible process in the carbon cycle that is causing permanent damage to our ecosystems. Then again, I haven't done all the research. I know cows sit in their own manure and suffer, but that's an ethical issue, not a scientific ecological issue.

So what I'm trying to say is I'm just trying to make sure - are we trying to discuss cutting on meat so that cows feel better, or are we trying to discuss cutting on meat so we don't end up covering our whole planet in poo? because it's two different arguments.

If it's the former, the ethical issue, then I'm out of here. Ethical issues are waaay too subjective for me to even begin to partake in or claim to understand. I haven't even studied religion which is the basis of ethics so I don't really know. Also I don't know if cows feel bad about sitting in their poo, or if it even matters because they will die in a couple months anyways, or so I hear from watching movies like "Food Inc."
Things like that can't be solved in a simple manner... problem isn't our eating habits, it's our excessive human population on this earth as a result of our intelligence, that will not be fixed by a couple people going vegan.

If it's a scientific issue, I'd like someone to bring up the research that shows that this excessive farming of cows (Rather than crops, or should I say more crops since the animals do eat crops themselves) is actually damaging ecosystems beyond repair.

Sustainability is an issue but I feel like if we cut farming out of the equation, we are just going to replace those farms with crop fields, which basically doesn't solve anything anyway since we're just replacing the cows with crops, destroying habitats and land anyway.

I think the main thing I'm having a problem with is what exactly the issue is. But then again, it's 1AM on monday morning.

Last edited by zachandhobbes (2011 March 21, 3:38 am)

It almost feels like a debate over whether or not climate change is real.  Cutting back on meat consumption will improve your health and the environment.   I never realized there was an opposing view except  from those who practice the Atkins diet and haven't  suffered their first heart attack yet.

Reducing how much you eat can indirectly make the world a better place if you incorporate a little wisdom into it.  Meat is expensive, other than the pseudo-meat products you find in lunch meat or hot dogs.  If you dedicate the money you save from your food bill every month towards sponsoring a child in SE Asia, it will make you healthier and other lives meaningful.