I’ve heard this called the “one bad day” approach. The animals have a good life with only one bad day. In my opinion it’s probably the most ethical way to keep animals if the intent is to slaughter them at some point.
In a way, it applies to dogs too. I have the privilege of giving my dog a way out of pain: I can put them down. That decision rests with me, and ultimately, one day, I will have to make it. I may choose every day to feed my dog the best diet I can afford, I'll give her massages, I'll snuggle her, care for her when she's sick, but ultimately, one day, I know I will have the choice to spare her the pain of dying a painful death. In some ways, I'm jealous of that choice, as a man who has faced his own mortality before.
I have had to put 2 pets down due to illness. It was hard to do, and seeing them struggling not to fall asleep was heartbreaking.
In just about every way possible that death is a world apart from what we do to most animals we eat. What we have deemed "humane" slaughter is really nothing else than an attempt to make the word humane devoid of all meaning. I stopped eating meat after seeing how a cow and some pigs from the local organic farm (held as a poster child by the meat industry in my country) were slaughtered.
They were afraid from the first second. The pigs lost consciousness while grasping for air in panic in a co2 gas chamber.
It was awful and nothing short of a disgrace.
New laws and policies promoted by the meat industry has now made inquisitions like mine impossible. All of this happens behind closed doors. I will never trust the industry to fix this. They will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into treating animals with respect.
It's such a disgrace they use CO2. The one gas that the body can detect and percieve as danger and do anything to avoid and get rid of. They use it only because it's cheap.
They could have used argon, helium, maybe even nitrogen. Anything else that can lower oxygen concentration without the body noticing bacause it doesn't detect low oxygen levels, just high CO2 levels when you suffocate.
The jury is still out which gas is the best. I hope it'll be resolved before it's my time to go.
I stopped eating any animal products after that ordeal and realized I don't need to. There are so many problems with the meat industry anyway, so I am pretty much relieved to not have to think about it.
One of my great regrets in life so far is shirking that responsibility and selfishly allowing a dog to last too long. I’ve learned from it and since had to make that decision again and actually made a decision this time but the guilt remains. It’s a dreadful responsibility.
While I don't know you or your dog - imagine for a moment if you could talk to your dog one last time and tell them the regret you feel. Do you think they would want you to regret the end, or remember all the love before that day?
In all my experience with dogs (and animals in general), one of the many lessons they have taught me is forgiveness. Both of others and myself.
I felt this way with the first dog I raised outside of my parents house. Things were slow but fast. One day I found a boil on her neck, rushed her to the hospital only to walk out with no answers a mountain of bills. I spent months seeking more answers with new testing. She was still the same old dog, playing with my other dog constantly. She'd do silly things, demand walks and pets, and stomp/parade around the house with her toys. I begged every night that she make it to her tenth birthday. She did, then shortly after her birthday she'd struggle to eat for days at a time and was acting sleepy. On the third day I brought her to the vet and did the deed.
It still hurts remembering her sleepily lay in my lap one last time and watching the life quietly slip away. That was the life I nurtured and the life that guided me to be more of a man every day. A life that demanded evolution and growth out of me in the most compassionate way possible. The vet felt her stomach and said, "Her liver is covered in tumors. You did the right thing." Then I began to reflect; had I been selfish? When I found the boil, was that when I should've done it? What about after all the testing? What about when she'd protest her food for a day? Two? Inevitably, I decided somehow the magical number was three.
The only thing that gives me solace is that I consulted the vet constantly on when was the right time. She'd never directly answered me; that choice was mine, a choice I absolutely feared. The advice that sticks out was, "When the dog you know stops being the dog you know." I know in my life I'll have to do this again and I don't think it'll ever get any easier. There's no right answers to this intersection of life, only wrong and less wrong ones. Love is a very tricky thing, especially with a friend that can't say much.
You made a decision to give that animal the best life you could.
Note the "you could" part.
You did the best you could, and you obviously learned from your mistakes. Don't be hard on yourself, that's everyone else's job and they don't need the help.
Do they actually live 25 years in the wild on average? My understanding was that wild animals have dramatically shorter lives than the same animals in captivity, as a general rule. The exact difference varies from species to species but typically the lifespan would be around half.
We generally don't kill animals "unnecessarily". We kill them to eat them. If we could eat them without killing them, we wouldn't kill them.
We also don't kill them "prematurely". We kill them when it's time to eat them, or else to relieve them of pain.
Also, since we're onto wolves, wolves will kill animals and not eat them (see "surplus killing" article on wikipedia). Conversely, wolves will often eat animals without killing them first. Humans at the very least kill our food before we eat it most of the time.
I don't know. Is it necessary to shower if you can sustain yourself without it?
I'm asking because your comment is about the meaning of the word "necessary" but the same meaning should apply to every other human activity, not just food. But the discussion about necessity crops up about food, in particular.
Also, I understand that the comparison to showers might sound irrelevant to the discussion about the ethics of eating meat, but it turns out it is anything but. I don't want to preempt your opinion, so I'll leave it at that, but I'm not just making a glib riposte to your comment. Despite appearances, this is an important question: how necessary is it to shower?
Perhaps not under your preferred moral system. But yours is not the only moral system. It should be obvious that there are plenty of moral systems where counterfactuals do indeed affect the morality of actions (e.g. any utilitarian system or compound system with a utilitarian component).
I think you're reading me more broadly than I meant you to. As I mentioned in my comment, at a minimum, any utilitarian system would consider an action's morality in light of what would happen in the absence of that action. Yes, people absolutely do subscribe to utilitarian systems, at least as a component of their overall moral stance.
There are also of course many moral systems that do not value the welfare of other species as highly as that of humans.
The general rule was my own synthesis from what little I know of this subject. This study is one of the main sources I used to drive my current understanding. You can also try this search term: "do wild animals die of old age?"
It’s not an issue to the animals. They aren’t made aware of their impending death and made to ponder what more of a life they could have lived. From their perspective they are alive and then suddenly, not.
a more equal comparison would be an adolescence to mature human... So 12-18 years? Food, shelter & protection provided? Blissfully unaware of my predetermined fate?
And if they don't eat me, I never exist in the first place?
I'd opt to be eaten.
Just seems like the aliens would be better off eating cows...
I’m not a vegetarian and I still really hate that “if I wasn’t farmed I wouldn’t exist at all” argument because it’s really just an excuse to be shitty to other life forms.
The fact is if you didn’t exist then you wouldn’t care either way, so it’s a moot argument. The fact that you do exist changes that, not excuses it. Or in other words: we are not doing other species a favour by eating them.
It’s also worth noting that many of the species we far isn’t the natural evolution of that animal. They’ve been bread to be fatter, or more docile etc. Many of the species suffer from health issues due to breeding that their natural cousins do not. The reason a lot of these animals seem suited to farming is because man has bread them that way. This isn’t doing these animals a favour either. It’s purely for man’s own benefit.
If farming result in the existence of happy animals then the process definitely favors them. If it results in their unhappy existence then it does not favor them.
The argument around doing them the favor of providing them existence relies on them having a nice life, until the day we eat them. It sounds like you are opposed to them coming into existence because it means they exist in existential agony.
Also that physical agony is a near certainty, by your last paragraph. But that does not seem to be the core of your objection.
>a more equal comparison would be an adolescence to mature human... So 12-18 years? Food, shelter & protection provided? Blissfully unaware of my predetermined fate?
So basically the plot of the Never Let Me Go. Except you can't really get the blissfully unaware of my predetermined fate thing if the organisms are intelligent.
If it can be proved that it really would be just one bad day, e.g. if the animals don't figure out that their friends are disappearing one by one and the same is about to happen to them any day.
Clearly the burden of proof is not on the animals.