[ganafagol]

Things can't be further detached from reality. Once you ever spend a few days with a herd of cows, you get a feeling for their personalities, their joy, their pain. Comparing to a group of humans, be it kids on a playground or some factory worker, you really start to wonder why in one case we allow ownership, life-long suffering and death under excruciating pain, while in the other case those things are punished by lifelong imprisonment or even the death penalty.

You can't claim "but we don't know what conciousness is" to justify how we treat animals while at the same time have the strongest protections for fellow human beings. Well, usually only those of your own backyard, since we westerners also tend to treat third world country populations like sh*.

[nojokes]

Did you know that when you cut grass it sends out distress signal - the lovely smell of fresh cut grass. In principle it is the grass screaming out loud in horror. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/30573/what-causes-fresh-... Unfortunately we can't survive without hurting other species.

[scoopertrooper]

Humans are also great at personifying non-person things. The grass isn't 'screaming out in horror', rather it's emitting a chemical that its evolved to emit in response to certain stimuli.

[6510]

Its one giant organism, we are awfully hung up on that its parts are not touching and imagined some fringe type of individualism like covering your eyes with your hands makes you invisible. We are nothing without context.

We are slaughtering, maiming and torturing people (plants and animals) all of the time, non stop, since the beginning. We build ever more sophisticated machines to do it. I cant even look at the butcher robots that feed me.

Chimeras might actually improve the situation. It would force us to question our holier than thou, my shit don't stink attitude. I for one welcome our chimera underlings. It will be a revolution of philosophy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape_language

[yesenadam]

> Chimeras might actually improve the situation

Stopping supporting the animal-killing and animal-experimentation industries as far as you easily can, would improve the situation.

i.e. Stop eating "meat". And imagine the oceans without humans fishing them lifeless.

[yesenadam]

> we can't survive without hurting other species.

I'm not sure about the purpose of your comment, but it sounds like your conclusion is "therefore can do whatever we want to other species." As if ethics doesn't apply. As if we shouldn't try to minimize that hurt. Maybe I'm wrong about that.

Paragraph speculating about such arguments and why people use them:

Hopefully one day soon people aren't still offering "plant=animal" justifications of eating animals, like this. I find them very depressing. It's as if suffering is a joke to these people. Or something, I don't understand. Just repeating pro-meat arguments they've heard, I guess. Maybe it's a positive sign, and such comments try to bury unease from their growing sense of ethical responsibility to other species.

[nojokes]

I would like to interpret it as do least harm as reasonably possible.

I would also like to see artificial meat to appear. Then the large number of current captive animals could be "retired".