The idea that animals should be revered and never used as food is an opinion, not a fact. One can be sympathetic toward the treatment of animals raised for food, and advocate for better treatment while still consuming animal products.
The funny thing is that your comparison is also just flat-out wrong: the technology in question is also in part a product of empathy! Yes, there are efficiency and cost concerns around incubating eggs to maturity where the (male) chick will just be discarded, but there's also a strong empathetic argument that terminating an egg shortly after fertilization is much more humane than killing male chicks after birth.
Their biggest line of defense is "animals are alive and they have feelings and senses, we abuse them for food". That's sadly right. And they implicitly say that "eating plants are OK because, plants are not animals and they're just happen to grow. They don't feel, they don't understand".
On the contrary, there's a growing mountain of research revealing that plants can communicate, issue warnings about diseases and bug infestations. They so-called get stressed when it rains, and their metabolisms startle during fast light changes (like eclipses). More shockingly, they release all the nutrients they store when they sense they're going to die, so other plants can thrive from their remains and nutrient stocks (writing this really moves me).
This is complete opposite of "plants are well, just alive wood" hypothesis. When I share this research with vegans and vegetarians, their response is: crickets.
Moreover, most hardcore ones suggest that we don't ever need meat to thrive or live a healthy life however, we've evolved that far because we consumed meat. Meat made us and, same people are ignorant of this fact.
I can understand that we need to grow these animals more ethically. This is why I always try to buy ethically produced food. I understand that these animals are adding great amounts of greenhouse gases. I can understand that we may live well with less meat. However, we need to understand, some of these animals are evolved under our reign and they may not survive outside farms for long. The cattle are grass puppies now and are essentially "useful pets". We need to understand where we are to move forward. Ignorance and fight won't take us anywhere. We need to talk openly and need to put our prejudice aside. We need to learn and understand first.
My biggest lines of defense are:
* Dr. Kim Williams, former president of the American College of Cardiology, said "there are two kinds of cardiologists, vegans, and those who haven't read the data"
* Animal agriculture is responsible for 20-33% of all freshwater consumption globally
* Mass cultivation of animals increases the chances of pandemic
* 41% of mainland USA is used for grazing livestock, yet meat only provides 18% of our calories; feeding the world on a vegan diet could reduce farmland use by 75% or more
* Going plant-based for two-thirds of meals could reduce food-related carbon emissions by 60% (the way we produce, distribute, and refrigerate food is a huge contributor of global emissions)
* 70-75% of soybeans grown globally are for livestock, only 6% are used for human food products (meat eaters often try to claim that soy production is terrible for the environment; surprise, surprise, meat consumption is the main driver)
* most plastic in the ocean is made up of abandoned fishing gear (see https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/03/great-pacifi...)
But I do question how much of some the things you reference are actually problems.
We have plenty of fresh water. Distribution is often our problem when it comes to getting that water to humans everywhere, but stopping livestock production will not fix that.
Does it really matter how much of the USA is used for livestock grazing? Are we missing out on using that land for other things that are important to us?
I have no opinion on soybean production, but, again, does it matter that the lion's share of soybean production goes toward feeding livestock? And if soybean cultivation really is that bad for the environment, are there other things we could be feeding livestock that don't have such bad effects?
The carbon emissions suck, but are there ways to reduce these through better process?
I don't think any of these problems are unsolvable, but likely they're expensive, and there's no political will to tax the bad behavior to the point that it becomes financially better to do the right thing. Getting around that is likely easier than getting a significant chunk of the world to go vegan.
And that's the issue I have with most logical arguments around veganism. Meat production and consumption has a lot of problems, certainly, but vegans seem to believe that the only way to fix those problems is to throw the baby out with the bathwater, when there are almost certainly solutions or at least mitigations to those problems. I get that as an individual, you aren't going to fix those problems, so personally going vegan is a way for people to avoid being a part of the problem. That is a satisfying route for some people, but not for everyone.
Eventually, humanity will have to accept that going vegan is the only sustainable method.
An appeal to authority. I'm mean surgeon general once called for not wearing masks until he changed his mind completely.
"* Animal agriculture is responsible for 20-33% of all freshwater consumption globally"
Why would that be problematic? There is no shortage of water where they raise animals. On the other hand there is a shortage of water in California where they grow crops on a massive scale.
"* Mass cultivation of animals increases the chances of pandemic"
That is a true, but the same can be said of large fields of monoculture crops where disease can quickly spread and destroy everything resulting in hunger.
"* 41% of mainland USA is used for grazing livestock, yet meat only provides 18% of our calories; feeding the world on a vegan diet could reduce farmland use by 75% or more"
Only if that 41% of mainland is suitable for plowing and you don't mind destroying other habitats for food production. Live stock can graze, humans cannot. Plus we don't need pesticides and insecticides on grasslands which are destroying our fresh water supplies.
"* Going plant-based for two-thirds of meals could reduce food-related carbon emissions by 60% (the way we produce, distribute, and refrigerate food is a huge contributor of global emissions)"
That is already true for vast majority of people on this planet. Think of the food pyramid.
"* 70-75% of soybeans grown globally are for livestock, only 6% are used for human food products (meat eaters often try to claim that soy production is terrible for the environment; surprise, surprise, meat consumption is the main driver) "
I don't know how real the numbers are, regardless it is not an ideal situation and we should strive towards less monulture.
For example, freshwater consumption is important in regions which lacks freshwater. Crop agriculture is however the most common source for water pollution, occurs in all regions, and is not only a major environmental problem but also harms the supply of fresh water even if its not responsible for the primary consumption. Fertilizers and pesticides being the main culprits here. Sadly there is very little food in stores that do not have a direct link to fertilizers and pesticides except for wild fish, shellfish and seaweed.
In quite a few times I have seen studies showing that the lowest carbon emission in any food group would be either shellfish, seaweed, or insects. No fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, minimal land usage and sustainable. Vegan would exclude two of those, and seaweed is pretty rare in non-asian diets.
In general I try to look for marks of sustainability when buying food. Small producers, non-factory farm operations, local, crops that are in season, and so on. The article here focus on the issue of sex determining the eggs, but my primary priority is the area that the hen has. In EU you can have 16 hens located in a small box the size of 0.2m². That is plain cruelty and so I choose eggs under the mark that require 4m², a requirement for outside area, always access to natural lighting, and given crops grown without chemical fertilizers, pesticides or herbicides.
Is it perfect? No. Not using fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides is still being debated and researched if they are better for the environment or worse since land usage increases from it, but since I regularly dive in the Baltic sea I am constantly reminded by the harm done already by the revolution of chemical fertilizers produced primarily by natural gas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxW-JKLeu1k
Blog version w/ reference links: https://www.sapien.org/blog/why-we-should-be-eating-more-mea...
But what percentage of our protein?
If you care about the well being of plants, you should still prefer to eat plants rather than animals. The trophic level of animals in the food chain necessitates that they will eat more calories of plant matter than would provide calories of food upon being eaten.
Secondly, you should look at the sorts of plants being consumed and where they fall in the plant's life cycle. Fruits and nuts have been evolved to be eaten by animals. Staple crops such as grains and pulses are generally harvested from plants that have already lived to maturity and died off. Really it's only fresh greens and tubers that require the damage or destruction of a living plant.
Lastly, it's important to recognize the evolutionary purpose of sensing pain and suffering from it. Animals use pain and suffering to detect harmful situations and learn how to avoid them in the future. This process consists of sensations, memory and adaptive behavior. Plants may have "reflexive" responses to stimulus, but these responses aren't adaptive and aren't affected by previous experience (mostly... there are some exceptions). There would be no evolutionary purpose for plants to develop a sense of suffering if they have no practical use for that sensation.
To put this into more laymen's terms, meat cultivation dramatically increases the total amount of plants that we need to grow.
As mentioned in my other comment:
> 70-75% of soybeans grown globally are for livestock, only 6% are used for human food products (meat eaters often try to claim that soy production is terrible for the environment; surprise, surprise, meat consumption is the main driver)
So, it's a bit counterintuitive, but globally switching to a plant-based diet would actually dramatically reduce the total amount of plants that we are raising, and therefore would dramatically reduce overall suffering of plants (if they suffer)
You've made interesting points, but I think the most important point here isn't one of biology but of moral philosophy: animals presumably outrank plants in terms of moral standing.
Torturing a person is presumably worse than torturing a mosquito. A person has more capacity for pain than a mosquito, and in turn the mosquito has more capacity for pain than does a heap of sand.
I figure plants lie further down the ranking than mosquitoes, for the reasons you've just explained. They're certainly further down than farmyard animals. It would be considerable moral progress to switch from torturing billions of chickens and pigs, to torturing billions of plants (and that's ignoring that a plant in a farm environment is likely 'happier', in its own terms, than a livestock animal).
A vaguely related TED talk on how brains ultimately exist to orchestrate movement, and essentially nothing else: https://youtu.be/7s0CpRfyYp8?t=15
The only logical endpoint is that humans should just off themselves so we don't participate past one cycle of reabsorption into the Earth's environment.
One way or another, everything is going to die and be consumed by another living organism.
That's why it's absurd. You can arbitrarily pick your own resolution, but it's only arbitrary until you exit the cycle completely.
If 800 rats and fluffy squirrels die violently & painfully for the equivalent amount of veggie nutrition of one cow who is killed ethically, eating grass grown naturally, are their lives worth less? What is the ratio?
The fact that plants can have subconcious reactions to stimuli does not mean they are sentient beings. These reactions are more akin to when you subconciously kick when a doctor hits a hammer on your knee.
Plants do not have a central nervous system nor do they feel pain in the same way animals do. In an evolutionary sense, pain is useful for animals because it tells us to deliberately move and avoid that pain, plants are obviously not able to do this.
Plants don't feel as much animals do. They don't feel the torture animals do. They don't grief. They don't show responses that they don't want to be killed.
The fact is at the end we have to draw lines even though we don't want. For vegans its probably in bacteria. Vegans don't care about bacteria even though they are living.
Its the situation where vegans cannot go beyond right? Are you going to say vegan eat bacteria so eating meat should be justified? Nope.
"When I share this research with vegans and vegetarians, their response is: crickets."
I'm suprised the vegetarians you're talking to would suggest crickets, even though that's one of the leading animal protein replacements in the form of insects.
Do vegetarians/vegans have similar ethical objections about eating crickets for food? I suspect so, but I don't know if crickets have the same type of cognition/emotions as vertebrate animals.
In a less facetious sense, I do believe that insect neurology is substantially different. Crustaceans have a nervous system web, which is why you have to cut crabs and lobsters in half to kill them rather than just stabbing them in the head.
If you do have a moral problem with eating humans, then you probably have moral hierarchy - humans' lives are the most important, and every other life is less important.
Some vegetarians have a different moral hierarchy - animals' lives are most important, then plants' lives. You can value plants' lives, and treat plants with respect, and still decide that you're morally okay with eating plants.
> Moreover, most hardcore ones suggest that we don't ever need meat to thrive or live a healthy life however, we've evolved that far because we consumed meat. Meat made us and, same people are ignorant of this fact.
That's just flat-out untrue. Meals would be less delicious and you'd have to plan a bit better to get certain nutrients (B12) but healthy life is absolutely possible on a vegan diet. And even more so on a lacto-vegetarian diet (one of the most ripped guys I know is lacto-veg).
The TV show Cosmos with Neil deGrasse Tyson discussed this "Mycelium Network" on Season 3/Episode 7, "The Search for Intelligent Life on Earth," that aired Nov. 17th. It was quite fascinating. It starts about the 5 minute mark.
Also, we evolved without living in stone structures and sewn clothes. I don’t see you asking people who wear jeans and tshirts to defend themselves.
I’m neither, but you’re arguing a straw man version of what either vegetarianism or veganism is.
There is a big moralizing streak in veganism, and a lot of vegans are into it from ethical, moralizing or emotional reasons, which leads to activism and trying to ban, tax and reduce meat eating. We see where the puck is heading.
That’s a ironic contradiction. If you witness the conditions in which animals are born, raised, harvested and culled by the millions, and still be okay with it, you really don’t have a claim to empathy.
[I enjoy meat]
First when you grow you drink mom's milk and you are under impression drinking milk is good for health which indeed is. So people start consuming milk everywhere.
And there are advertisements which shows happy cows, chocolates made from milk. Vegetarians are under impression that its ethical. And many farmers advertises as if their cows are happy they are grass fed etc. In some religion they even worship cows etc giving impression that cows are respected etc.
And the other thing you often hear is cows babies get enough milk and farmers only sell excess milk. So from religion, society people are brain washed so much they don't even see how animals are tortured, left on road after buffalo/cows stops giving milk.
I wish media would cover this subject more especially in India which is probably top 3 vegetarian country in the world.
