[WaxProlix]

For me, the answer was yes. I stopped eating pigs first, and then cows and other mammals, and then octopi (octopodes?). I've been cutting back further on chicken and fish, too, though I eat a lot of eggs and some dairy still.

I don't know that it's morally right or something, but it doesn't cost much and the potential upside seems high enough to do it.

[throwaway5752]

It helps the planet, is good for my health, reduces deaths of sentient beings to feed me, has greater trophic efficiency... and the big thing is that vegetarian food and vegan food tastes good. I still eat meat periodically, but I feel much better and happier since I've reduced my meat consumption greatly.

[philipswood]

At some stage my son was wilfully damaging plants.

As part of the discipline to make him stop I showed him videos of plants sped up.

It becomes a bit harder to deny that they aren’t the inanimate objects we perceive them to be because they are slow when you see them react to stimuli and they show what seems to be intent.

Although it certainly isn’t a consensus opinion there is a real possibility that (given that the nervous system specialises what normal tissues can also do) plants are considerably more “conscious” than we give them credit for.

They have been proven to be able to communicate.

There are even suggestions that they could “see” without specialised eyes.

I’m not sure where this would leave moral vegans.

Besides attempting a diet of fruit - we clearly need to kill to survive.

PS: To clarify my own positioning on this - I eat meat. I occasionally go vegetarian for health or spiritual reasons. I do believe we can and should strive to minimise cruelty, waste and environmental damage and impacts.

The lives of some livestock are significantly better than that of many wild creatures and it can be a humane choice given that they would not exist without our intervention.

That said I don’t think that we are currently near the level of responsibility that we could be. Our levels of cruelty, waste and environmental impact are unacceptably high and will seem barbaric to our descendants.

[WaxProlix]

This is a lot of very commonly repeated speculative talking point soup when people are trying to rile up vegans. I'm not a vegan, and I'm not saying you're being disingenuous here, but if you use these lines to try and engage vegans at some point and don't get the level of engagement you're looking for, it's because this kind of both-sides moral equivalence between meat eating and plant eating is pretty common in the needling-vegans scene :)

That said, if we think there's a continuum with humans, dolphins, apes, and maybe octopuses on one side, and fungi & prokaryotes or something on the other, then plants (and maybe shellfish?) are certainly 'better' to kill and eat than cats, eg.

[philipswood]

I like the continuum idea.

Given that we cannot not kill something to live yet, the current local minimum would be to live by eating some kind of cultured microorganism?

Something like cultured algae or a genetically engineered organisms that expressed suitable proteins.

Fruit might be an acceptable minimal choice given that it’s “voluntarily given” to some point of views.

Strangely the thought of engineering an animal to make a meat fruit seems repugnant - imagine an animal modified to grow flesh that could be removed with little pain and no injury.

Vat grown meat is an interesting thought - if we can pull it off.

Ultimately only something like molecular nanotechnology could free us from killing to live.

Alternatively modified human beings.

[hackernewds]

What logic makes plants better to kill than cows, better than octopi, better than cats? because vegans might the argument uncomfortable doesn't render it invalid either

[dayglo]

If I gave you a live chicken, a head of broccoli, what would happen when you tried to cut up each one with a carving knife?

You instinctively know what fear and pain are, and minimising those things is the point of veganism.

If plants feel their fear and pain far slower, then much less of it is happening.

[FiberBundle]

It's also entirely implausible, from an evolutionary perspective, that plants should have developed the capacity to feel pain on a scale similar to other organisms given that they haven't developed the ability to move away from situations that might cause them pain (pain being a proxy for survival risk).

[throwaway98797]

if I starve you for a week, what would you do then?

ethics are always the privilege of the well to do

[FiberBundle]

> Although it certainly isn’t a consensus opinion there is a real possibility that (given that the nervous system specialises what normal tissues can also do) plants are considerably more “conscious” than we give them credit for.

Yes, that is a possibility, but it's also an entirely ridiculous argument to make to argue against veganism. If you want to argue that the nervous system is just a more specialized version of other tissue and consciousness could therefore, in principal, arise in any kind of organic matter, or inorganic matter even, then one obviously can't prove that statement wrong, but it also seems to entirely miss the point given our current scientific understanding. Obviously humans cannot live in a way that completely avoids any (theoretical) harm to our environment, but veganism is by far the dietary choice that minimizes suffering in this world (though there do exist differences in the kind of vegan diet with regards to its environmental impact).

[philipswood]

To be clear: I’m not arguing against veganism.

It’s a choice I respect even if I do not choose it myself.

It’s a ecologically sound choice and does clearly minimise “suffering” according to some measures (given the choices available today).

I’m personally not fully convinced that it is a healthy choice for humans over their whole lifespan, but I realise that this is something that can be debated.

I’m genuinely interested in the idea that we don’t “get” plants yet.

I’m curious as to the personal response of vegans if plants we’re to be shown more aware than we give them credit for.

I’ve also hounded my “moral” vegetarian friends (i.e. those who choose it as a moral stance) with questions about what they would do if vat-grown meat where to become viable.

People are fascinating: I know someone who is against eating “wild animals”. For some reason, to her, farmed crocodile and ostrich are still wild animals.

[hackernewds]

one could argue the need to displace grazing landmass, that could support free-range animals, with endless fields of low-throughput vegetables that need more land and water per capita-calorie/nutrient is far more damaging to the planet.

https://www.paesta.psu.edu/podcast/how-much-water-does-it-re...

[undersuit]

What do the humans eat in the first world?

[ComputerGuru]

> though I eat a lot of eggs and some dairy still.

See, I feel like this just erodes from your argument. There’s not necessarily any trauma at all to the chickens or the cows involved in the production of eggs or milk. Trying to group that with the consumption of meat feels just very irrational.

[ornornor]

Yes there is.

Egg farms grind male chicks alive. They burn off the tip of the hens beak without anesthesia (which we know is high in nerves) so they don’t fight each other in captivity; which they don’t do nearly as much in nature because surprise surprise they’re not as stressed. Hens laying eggs every single day of their lives (because they’re taken away daily) live much much shorter lives and develop physiological issues more often. When they’re finally exhausted after a few short years and stop producing as much, they’re turned into chicken nuggets or broth cubes.

Cows producing milk are constantly inseminated. Maybe they don’t care or maybe it’s a form of rape. Nevertheless, their calves are taken away from them shortly after they’re born (so they don’t eat the milk instead of the factory) and slaughtered. Cows call for their missing baby for several days. Dairy cows are also living much much shorter lives (imagine how long a human that does nothing but give birth would live) and are turned into hamburgers afterwards.

Not to mention cheese which need casein to be made and that can’t be obtained without killing cows as it’s the acid in their stomach, basically.

So, yes, eating milk or eggs doesn’t directly require the animal to die. But it’s so close and it enables such a cruel, abhorrent, and revolting meat industry that it’s impossible in my opinion to ethically justify eating eggs and milk (let alone meat or fish)

[cheese_goddess]

> Not to mention cheese which need casein to be made and that can’t be obtained without killing cows as it’s the acid in their stomach, basically.

Casein is not the acid in animals' stomachs. Caseins are one group of proteins in milk, and the main component of cheese.

You're probably thinking of rennet, the enzymes in animals' stomachs that help them digest their milk.

Rennet is used to coagulate milk to make cheese, but in modern cheesmaking practice the vast majority of it is produced by bacterial or fungal fermentation. Rennet taken from the stomachs of young ruminants is used only by a minority of "artisanal" or traditional producers.

Since you got this one completely wrong, is there a chance that the rest of the information in your comment is also slightly off, do you think? Would you find it very hard to re-examine the source of what you know about animal agriculture and try to find out how much of it is really true?

[ornornor]

My mother tongue isn’t English and I indeed mixed up rennet and casein because they sound completely different in my language.

Natural rennet cheese may be “artisanal” in your corner of the world, it’s 99% of cheese where I live —just in case, 99% might not be totally accurate, it’s an exaggeration to mean “the vast majority”

[cheese_goddess]

My mother tongue isn't English either and I live in a corner of the world that has many traditional cheesemakers and a proud cheesemaking culture that goes back centuries if not millenia. Most cheese where I live as in the rest of the world is made with microbial rennet simply because it's cheaper, more available and easier to store and handle.

I'm sorry but I don't believe that 99% (or "the vast majority") of cheese where you live is made with animal rennet. If that's true, please let me know how you know this.

[ornornor]

> how you know this

https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empr%C3%A9surage

“ En France, l'utilisation de présure d'origine animale est une des conditions des cahiers des charges pour prétendre aux dénominations de protections fromage fermier, appellation d'origine contrôlée et la marque de l'Union européenne, Label rouge.”

Loosely translated, it means that for a French to cheese to have one of the protected names (Roquefort, Brie de Meaux, Camembert de Normandie, etc) they must use animal rennet. Since farms making these want the protected names because they sell so much better, they use animal rennet.

In the supermarket you can also buy industrial cheese which doesn’t have to use animal rennet. But at the fromagerie they mostly (only?) sell artisanal cheeses, all using animal rennet.

[marliechiller]

im sorry, but you cant dismiss the rest of his valid points purely because he got 1 out of many incorrect. I detect a hint of bias might be present on your side from your username also...

[cheese_goddess]

Where did I dismiss any of "his valid points"? I asked if they thought they might want to re-examine where their information comes from. How is that a dismissal of any point, valid or not?

> I detect a hint of bias might be present on your side from your username also...

What bias do you mean? I make cheese so I know a couple of things about how it's done.

[ornornor]

Thank you

[ComputerGuru]

Great job arguing something I already agree about and similarly abhor while also completely missing the point: I specifically said “necessarily.”

We have family friends that provide eggs and milk from their free range chickens and cows and that’s certainly not how they do it. Your fight is with greed enabled by capitalism leading to these animal abuses, not people who want to eat/drink their eggs or dairy.

[hackernewds]

you're generalizing quite a bit here, perhaps driven by emotion. it's possible given the movement for compassion for animals to purchase local, free-range, cruelty-free sourced eggs at any decent grocer.

[ornornor]

You can’t make eggs without killing male chicks, shortening hens lives, and killing them off. Free range, organic, local, or factory. The specifics of it may vary depending on the mode of production but not the reality: it enables animal exploitation and suffering.

[cheese_goddess]

> You can’t make eggs without killing male chicks, shortening hens lives, and killing them off.

Yes, you absolutely can. Hens lay eggs whether there's a rooster around or not.

I live in a farm (not mine, I'm a guest) and we get a few eggs each day from the hens in the coop outside my window. We don't kill the male chicks off. I don't think anyone on the farm can even tell which chicks are male befor they grow up. We occasionally slaughter a rooster when there's too many of them and they start to fight each other. We also slaughter a hen once in a while. Last year, we slaughtered four animals, altogether, one rooster and three hens.

In factory farms, male chicks are killed off, but there's no reason for that other than the industrialisation of production and consumer demand for plump birds with big breasts (at least in the US as far as I can tell). The birds in our farm are lean, their meat is dark, chewy and wiry because of all the muscle fibers and it has to be coooked for several hours before it is edible. Their bones are also hard and impossible to snap with your fingers, like you can the bones of factory chicken. The taste also doesn't compare. Real free-range chicken (not "free range" as in growing up in a factory with a 2 x 2 concrete yard outside) actually has taste and it tastes of game bird, not what supermarket chicken tastes like. Chickens and factory chickens could as well be a different species. Tasting the flesh of the farm chickens has put me off eating the supermarket birds, just because it makes me think that it can't be healthy eating something that was raised to be degenerate and fat like that.

So you're talking about factory farming but there are other kinds of farming that have very different effect on the animals farmed. Maybe you should try to learn more about that?

[ornornor]

My point of view is that exploiting animals for food is wrong. No brand of “ethical” farming can change that fact for me. Raising animals to kill them for food before the end of their natural life is something I refuse to partake in.

Male chicks aren’t ground at birth in your farm, that’s better in my book. But they’re still raised to be eaten. I’d still argue that hens laying eggs every day shortens their lifespan because it puts strain on their system. As far as I know, hens don’t naturally lay eggs every day, all year. They lay an egg and keep it around for a while to see if it’s growing or not. After a while they eat it and start over. They also don’t produce eggs all year but only part of it. But because farm hens are there for their eggs and later their meat, we take their egg every day and they have to lay another the next day. Some farms also use lights and heaters to trick the hens into thinking the season never ends and have then lay all year long.

[eulenteufel]

You (kind of) can by now. Killing male chickens after hatching is outlawed in Germany since the beginning of this year. From [1] it reads like Germany subsised research into preselecting female eggs and only hatching these ones. This is still killing male chickens in some way, but arguably less gruesome than how the industry has dealt with male chickens before.

[1] https://www-bmel-de.translate.goog/DE/themen/tiere/tierschut...

[prteja11]

Do you believe that there’s no trauma involved in the dairy and egg industry? Spend a few minutes watching this about dairy. https://youtu.be/roIWg4ntj9k

Earthling Ed also has videos about egg industry, but the gist is make chicks are crushed in a meat grinder alive.

[ComputerGuru]

That’s greed enabled by modern capitalism and general “don’t ask don’t tell” apathy. That’s not how milk and eggs were produced for the majority of mankind’s existence after the transition from hunter/gatherer to farming.

[WaxProlix]

There isn't necessarily, but there is in practice nearly 100% of the time - enough so that it doesn't matter.