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0 pointsslothtrop5y ago0 comments

> There is a whole lot of citation needed on this reply, not to mention you’re talking about consciousness as something that can be clearly defined and measured.

With sentience it's speculation, and that's part of the point I'm making. I responded to an ethical claim on the basis of sentience (no citation) by bringing to question what it means to be sentient when some beings e.g. insects demonstrate it.

Notwithstanding immeasurability, our perception of this level of sentience is relied on to determine our moral standing. We see this through actions we take for granted.

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dzolob5y ago

It might be regarding insects, but I don’t think it is that much regarding farm animals. Also, not being able to nail it in a materialistic framework does not put it in the nothing can be known/fair game territory.

But let me set this aside since it might obscure our dialog. What surely can be measured is the degree of immune system depression this animals experience, how far do their life cycles deviate from control, and what health an behavioral consequences they experience from being forced to live the way we make them live. We can also measure the impact this ways have on ourselves and the environment.

Would we put the family dog trough this experience just because it is not clear (to us) if it fully understands or experience what is happening, ignoring all the fairly obvious signals that it will experiment a great deal of suffering?

I once witnessed an organic cow’s sacrifice and no one in its right heart can argue it didn’t experience an great deal of distress and suffering.

I don’t judge people from being meat eaters, I’m no vegan myself, but I won’t play conceptual games to ease people’s minds. If you have the heart to kill this animals and eat them (and I don’t mean this pejoratively or disrespectfully), go ahead. Just don’t pretend there is a gray area in what this animals will be experiencing and what does this means in terms of their lives. I mean, we eat calves that have been kept all their short lives strained in cages just for the taste, and we do this in mass scale.

This is not something to run from.

(To clarify, I’m not trying to make it personal, english is not my native language. On the contrary, I’m very open to talk about this topic with an open mind and a warm heart).

slothtropOP5y ago

> Just don’t pretend there is a gray area in what this animals will be experiencing and what does this means in terms of their lives.

To reiterate, this is a fair assessment as per pain, stress. This is easily detected in the animals. Where a gray area exists to me is commodification, i.e. there is no reason to believe captivity in a safe environment would lead to some sort of existential crisis for the animals. There's a persistent argument from a sizable base that holding animals in captivity is inherently immoral, with sentience as the basis. This is the usual response to the notion that animals can and should be killed fairly painlessly/quickly without persistent stress.

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