[chimprich]

I think there's a moral imperative not to kill animals for food that are above a certain level of intelligence; we can use intelligence level as a proxy for capability for suffering.

To take an example ranking of potential food animals: fish, chickens, cows, pigs, great apes, humans.

There's a question about where you draw the line, but most people agree there is one. Few people think it's OK to eat chimps.

It's not clear on this hierarchy where octopuses fit in.

[fireant]

Is this what the whole argument about intelligence is about? That you don't want to cause suffering and only species of certain intelligence can suffer and others can't, thus you are not feeling guilt when killing and eating things that are not intelligent?

That just seems so bizarrely naive to me. Every living thing suffers when hurt. Suffering is a feeling of not wanting to die, or to be hurt. I'm pretty sure that it is one of the primary mechanisms of evolution of living things, it is a strive for self preservation. Human suffering is fundamentally the same as that of an octopus, an insect or a tree.

[onethought]

It’s not clear where in the hierarchy any of those animals fit, because we can’t ask them how much they are suffering, and they can’t conceptualise their experience as Suffering, because we invented that concept to describe a certain state we experience.

No, intuitively, most people do not agree there is a line… people just buy meat and eat it, and the main consideration is taste. Can you provide any evidence suffering factors into the majority of peoples food decisions?

[nefitty]

There’s research to try to get closer to an objective demarcation of suffering. The latest measures place even shrimp at some level of intolerable suffering, due to some of the farming techniques, eg removing they eyeballs of females to make them more fertile.