[tpfour]

You personally have the luxury of reflecting on food ethics. That doesn't make the whole of humanity "cruel" and "lacking empathy".

Raw, brutal hunger simply does not exist in advanced societies anymore. You have the privilege to be allowed to question your and others' eating habits. For most of our history that wasn't really a possibility.

[mfoy_]

I think the point was that if aliens are to us as we are to cows, then... well... you can draw your own conclusions.

[meiraleal]

And we might already be :) The same way the cow doesn't know it is going to be eaten.

[WhompingWindows]

That's a stretch...cows know of humans, they know specific humans, they fear the slaughterhouse in many cases. They may not understand their ultimate destiny, but it seems a vast stretch to imply our buried-in-the-ground corpses are being eaten by ultra intelligent aliens.

[meiraleal]

> but it seems a vast stretch to imply our buried-in-the-ground corpses are being eaten by ultra intelligent aliens.

That is exactly what I mean. We, the not ultra intelligent specie might not have even a clue about how they could benefit from raising and harvesting us :) Maybe that is what some people call faith/religion. Some believe it, some disregard it as low level primitive behavior.

[dspig]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Skin_(novel)

[kaesar14]

Almost every one in America has the "luxury" of examining food ethics, when 95% of people in this country actively consume a product made through what amounts to a holocaust.

Of course we all are part of some systemic oppression one way or another in the products we consume, but with the availability of information on how brutal and sadistic factory farming is, nobody has an excuse in the first world.

[anoncake]

No one has ever been convinced to eat less meat by being compared to a Nazi.

[kaesar14]

I didn't say consuming meat products made by the modern factory farming system/methodology makes anyone a Nazi. I'm saying that consuming those products means you're consuming the products made by a system that actively commits genocide and torture at the scale of billions of lifeforms. That doesn't make everyone doing it evil, and I hope that as people come to read more and become more aware of what's going on they choose to stop their consumption of animal products. Individual agency is all we can have.

[whatshisface]

>what amounts to a holocaust.

Hyperbole aside, I think we can all agree that farming and killing animals isn't as bad as mass executions of people.

[kaesar14]

Why is it hyperbole? We slaughter 25 million animals a day in the United States. That amounts to over 9 billion animals a year. Do you attribute 0 consciousness to those animals, a complete and total unawareness of their suffering? Almost every single one of those animals goes through torture and standards of living no one would deign as humane if they were done on their pets.

[JoeAltmaier]

8 billion of those are chickens. Not gonna get excited about a chicken. Used to take care of them as a kid.

Its not even apples-to-oranges to compare humans to chickens. Its apples-to-something-that-isn't-even-a-fruit. Apples-to-French-poetry...

[kaesar14]

Would you voluntarily clip the beaks of a chicken, pump them full of growth hormones, and pack them so tight they live on top of mounds of their own feces and degraded corpses of other chickens for a fraction of their natural lifespan before having their throats cut, often while not stunned?

Regardless of how you feel about chickens vs humans, I don't see why it's binary. Life is life. Suffering is suffering. There's plenty of inside footage of how chickens and turkeys are treated, no conscious being should be subjected to that.

What about the 121 million pigs slaughtered a year? The 29 million cows?

[whatshisface]

Some people don't put any weight at all on animal suffering as long as a human benefits. You can't really prove that killing a pig isn't worth the ham you get, how would you even begin to make that objective?

[meowface]

Of course. The Armenian Holocaust also wasn't as bad as the Jewish Holocaust, by numbers. I'd still consider all three a kind of holocaust.

[whatshisface]

I still think the Armenian Holocaust was worse than farming. In fact I would go so far as to say every human genocide was worse than farming.

[meowface]

It depends what value you attribute to a life. For example, is the life of one adult human more valuable than the life of one hundred million adult chimpanzees? These things are very hard to quantify.

It might be best to split human and non-human slaughter into entirely separate categories. You don't need to make comparisons between one and the other; you can just accept that both are unacceptable.