[dilap]

Here's a question: Is it immoral for lions to eat zebras?

Here's another question: Imagine the entire Earth is actually a factory farm for aliens. Every time someone dies, their body is actually secretly used for alien food. Would you want Earth to cease to exist?

Or perhaps a closer analogy, imagine super-powerful aliens take over Earth and terraform Mars and Venus, which they use as human farms. Maybe 30 billion humans live on Earth, Mars, and Venus, leading full lives with everything provided to them that a human wants, but killed at 18 years of age.

Alien human-rights activists wish to stop the humans from breeding, and let the population fall to several thousand. They will devote the planets to instead growing Alien Corn.

Do you want this to happen?

[est31]

Have you seen how an industrial farm looks from the inside? I'm a meat eater and I love the taste and stuff, but you need to admit that many animals didn't have a great life at all. So beyond meat solves a real problem. Some folks want all meat production to be banned, I disagree. There are forms of farming which are better for animals, make their lives worth living. They are just more expensive regarding resources as well as money, so can't scale as well as industrial meat production. In the ideal world we've done away with industrial meat production but still keep a limited number of animals for meat production, real meat still being available but most people don't buy it for everyday consumption because it's expensive.

[dilap]

Totally agree; animals should be raised in humane conditions. Ideal would be something like

https://www.instagram.com/slowdownfarmstead/

or

https://stemplecreek.com

Driving down I5 seeing the Harris Ranch finishing lot is pretty awful. The ways chickens are housed here in Chinatown is also awful...

I think in my ideal world we have a balance between humans and animals so that such intensive techniques are not necessary.

[buzzy_hacker]

> Here's a question: Is it immoral for lions to eat zebras?

Lions must eat meat to survive. We can choose not to eat meat and still survive. That's a morally relevant distinction. If you are arguing that because meat-eating is natural then it must be moral, I would direct you to the appeal to nature fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature

> Here's another question: Imagine the entire Earth is actually a factory farm for aliens. Every time someone dies, their body is actually secretly used for alien food. Would you want Earth to cease to exist?

No, but I fail to see how this runs counter to the moral claim that humans eating meat is bad. The correct analogy to your hypothetical would be to imagine that all animals live their full lives and are only consumed upon their death. It would not be morally wrong to eat them then.

> Or perhaps a closer analogy, imagine super-powerful aliens take over Earth and terraform Mars and Venus, which they use as human farms. Maybe 30 billion humans live on Earth, Mars, and Venus, leading full lives with everything provided to them that a human wants, but killed at 18 years of age. Alien human-rights activists wish to stop the humans from breeding, and let the population fall to several thousand. They will devote the planets to instead growing Alien Corn.

This analogy is not close at all. Animals do not lead full lives with everything provided to them that they could want. The vast majority of farmed animals live horrific lives that are not worth living and are killed very young. Chickens, for example, are artificially grown to reach a large size very quickly and then slaughtered shortly after.

The correct analogy to this hypothetical would be a so-called "humane" or "ethical" farm where the animals are free to live in a close-to-natural environment before being slaughtered. I would agree that that is much better than factory farms, and perhaps even morally acceptable if the animals' lives are worth living and they would not have existed otherwise. But, this is not how most farmed animals live. Not even close.

[jojobas]

Still, would it be morally preferable to genetically engineer lions to eat grass and replace normal lions with herbivore ones?

[dilap]

I agree; I don't think we should be raising animals inhumanely.

[gizmodo59]

I don’t think lions eating zebras is a good comparison.

We have evolved and flourished with agriculture and so we don’t have to consume meat unless the agricultural produce has gone way down.

I also think the general argument is how animals are treated with so many horrific videos out there which are just torture in my opinion and not a clean kill.

If someone is doing a clean kill without the animal suffering and making sure it’s living in good conditions, that’s a right step in many ways.

[jojobas]

We can't survive without Vitamin B in various forms, which is not found in plants at all (some fermented soy products do contain some, but it's incorrect to say we evolved to not eat meat).