[Voultapher]

Who are you fooling here? Yourself? Imagine your children being born into one of these farms. There is no self determination. Only because we are not overtly cruel doesn't mean we don't treat them like slaves. "Look at my slave, now that I impregnated her she gets to have a couple more square meter to walk around in until her children are taken away from her." Not all farms are equally bad, but there is no farm where if you applied the same treatment to humans it would not constitute human rights violations. You might argue non human animals are different, but why does that matter? Black and white people are different, why would that difference justify enslaving one group?

[short_sells_poo]

Are there bad actors in farming even in Switzerland? Sure. But the majority of the farms I've been to have treated their animals with respect and kindness. The cows actually spend most of their time out on the pastures grazing freely. They are only taken indoors when the weather gets too cold for them in winter. It's very far from what people picture when talking about industrial farming in the US. It is true that there's an ultimate cruelty to keeping farm animals: we do it so eventually we can kill and eat them.

So if you argue against all meat consumption by humans, then it is true: no keeper of animals can be considered "fit for keeping humans". Even a small farm purely for the owner's own consumption places restrictions on the livestock's freedom and ultimately keeps them so they can be eaten. Even animals that we keep as pets could be considered to live in inhuman conditions, because we restrict their freedoms.

[sweetheart]

Treating an animal well sometimes does not mean that the animal was treated well. It's nice that the cows you're talking about are given lots of access to pastures, but that doesn't mean that anything else can be done to the animal without it qualifying as disrespectful or unkind.

I can't think of another situation in which one could choose to kill an animal for pleasure at 10% it's lifespan, and think that this was kind or respectful. Can you?

[blendergeek]

When a lion kills a gazelle on the savannah, is that "kind and respectful"?

No, it's just part of the "circle of life".

Humans also interact with their environment and eat non human life forms (plants, cows, etc).

If we prove that trees have consciousness, will we need to stop killing them as well? Where does it end?

[sweetheart]

The morality of our actions isn’t determined by what lions do.

As for the tree hypothetical, why don’t we cross that bridge when we get there.

[toss1]

Where it should end is with humans creating engineered (whether genetic-engineered, or using fungi, etc. is irrelevant) foods and materials such that we don't need to be farming, brutalizing, and killing animals and plants on industrial scales, deforesting vast regions to graze cattle, etc.. We are likely generations away from that, but it does seem to be the direction we're headed.

[smogcutter]

The irony is that argument also ends in the effective extinction of most farmed animals, or at the very least a massive die-off.

[short_sells_poo]

Animals receive and give very little mercy or kindness in nature. In fact, nature is capable of stunning brutality - eg newly "crowned" male lions kill off the cubs of the old male.

Humans have a capacity of reasoning about their actions, which places a certain responsibility on us to do better than nature. But where do you draw the line?

Ultimately we shouldn't eat animals at all - we should eat lab grown meat. But lab grown meat is still far away. So what do we do in the mean time? Ban all meat consumption? Is that even realistic?

[sweetheart]

> So what do we do in the mean time?

Those with access to all the makings for a healthy plant-based diet should stop paying for animal products. It's that simple.

[bheadmaster]

If you start treating farm animals as humans, where do you draw the line?

Is growing vegetables also inhumane, since we're controlling every aspect of those plants' lives?

Is doing pest control in your own house a mass murder, because you're killing a colony of cockroaches or termites?

Is washing your hands a genocide, because you're killing millions bacteria and tiny parasites on your hands?

That kind of extremist empathy is fatal to humanity. I'd rather choose to be cruel than dead.

[Voultapher]

Respectfully, every comparison you made seems like a false equivalence to me. I'd argue extrapolating from the human perspective to a cow is much closer than to a cockroach. Personally I draw the line at "complex" emotions, somewhere between insects and fish. Yes, that line is arbitrary and I can't prove it. But so is drawing the line at, humans and nothing else that isn't cute. You can't prove the validity of that line either. So what are we left with? Is it so unreasonable to extrapolate from one mammal to another?

[bheadmaster]

The point of my comment is to point out the absurdity of the equivalences drawn in the grandparent:

> Imagine your children being born into one of these farms.

> You might argue non human animals are different, but why does that matter? Black and white people are different, why would that difference justify enslaving one group?

I don't claim to know where the exact line is, but thankfully, I don't have to, because the world doesn't run on ethical guidelines, it runs on power struggle. Grandparent was quick to draw the analogy to black slavery - I'd like to point out that black slaves were powerful enough to fight for their own freedom. Cows and chickens aren't. We're gonna eat them because that's just how the world works.

Of course, if someone very powerful becomes obsessed with animal rights, and uses political power to ban meat, I guess we'll stop eating them. I'd be very sad if that happens, but again, that's just how the world works.