The Truth About Animal Farming

[vibv]

On the topic of hard to swallow truths about ourselves, I want to share this video with all of you.

In it are discussed, amongst other things, the 6 signs of a moral catastrophe:

1. It's not a surprise—it has been known about for a long time
2. It's framed as inevitable—it's said to be the 3 N's: Normal, Natural & Necessary
3. We look away
4. Dissent is ridiculed
5. It's hard to explain to children
6. It's pretty clear, that it will be seen as barbaric in hindsight

What's your views on this topic? Do you eat meat? Do you investigate where your meat comes from?

And most importantly: Do you think this way of treating animals is sustainable and if not, what can be done to change this?

[Lila9]

14 minutes ago, vibv said:

What's your views on this topic? Do you eat meat? Do you investigate where your meat comes from?

And most importantly: Do you think this way of treating animals is sustainable and if not, what can be done to change this?

This is low-conscious, unloving, and untruthful behavior. We share the planet with other species, and we should treat them with dignity and respect. I don’t eat meat and never will.

This way of treating animals is unsustainable.

 

[carterfelder]

There is no right way to exploit and kill nonhuman animals for a diet that no human needs to eat.

Veganism is the solution, not vegetarianism, which is arguably even worse than nonveganism.

[vibv]

2 minutes ago, carterfelder said:

which is arguably even worse than nonveganism.

How so?

[Wilhelm44]

Some body types need meat to maintain health. 

[carterfelder]

8 minutes ago, vibv said:

How so?

Vegetarians consume more eggs and dairy than nonvegans. While meat is the end product of animal farming, eggs involve killing half the chicks (males) because they can't lay eggs, and dairy involves killing young male calves because they don't produce milk. The meat and dairy industries are inextricably linked, but there is far more death and suffering involved in dairy and eggs than meat alone.

https://www.peacefulprairie.org/humane-myth02.html

[vibv]

6 minutes ago, Wilhelm44 said:

Some body types need meat to maintain health. 

May be, but does it have to be produced under those circumstances?

On the other hand there's certainly an issue of overconsumption.

Edited 21 hours ago by vibv

[carterfelder]

No one needs meat to maintain health, that's nonsense. There's nothing in animal products we cannot get from plants and man-made ingredients (which nonvegans consume all the time).

[Wilhelm44]

3 minutes ago, vibv said:

May be, but does it have to be produced under those circumstances?

On the other hand there's certainly an issue of overconsumption.

Of course those ways of farming are disgusting, and yes there is overconsumption. But we need to let go of this vegan myth that no one needs to eat meat, because some people actually do. Ayurvedic medicine states this clearly.

[carterfelder]

"Ayurveda tho," pseudoscience bro. Of course there's certain truth to Ayurveda, but there is nothing in meat all humans cannot get from plants.

[Wilhelm44]

1 hour ago, carterfelder said:

"Ayurveda tho," pseudoscience bro. Of course there's certain truth to Ayurveda, but there is nothing in meat all humans cannot get from plants.

Pseudoscience is calling something pseudoscience when you probably have very little first hand experience. 

I just asked Google: Can you get all the nutrients in beef liver from plants ?

"While you can obtain many similar nutrients from a well planned plant based diet, you cannot get the same concentration, form, and bioavailability of all nutrients found in beef liver from plants alone. Beef liver is considered a superfood because it is an exceptionally dense source of vitamins and minerals that are rare or poorly absorbed in the plant kingdom."

[carterfelder]

This is the appeal to consequences (or pragmatic fallacy / appeal to necessity) fallacy, sometimes phrased as "argument from necessity" in nutritional debates.

The presence of advantageous nutrients in one food source does not logically prove that source is required for health or survival.

It sidesteps the actual question of whether those same nutrients can be obtained adequately through other means (plants + fortification + supplements), which mainstream nutrition bodies (e.g., Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, WHO-aligned positions) state is possible with proper planning.

It conflates "better/more efficient in one food" with "impossible or inadequate without that food."

The core error is treating superior nutrient delivery in one category of food (without taking into account the long-term harm involved in consuming animal products) as proof of dietary necessity, rather than evaluating whether the overall nutritional requirement can be met through alternative, ethically/environmentally preferable routes.

[Scholar]

I think the topic is approached in a bit of a ineffective manner. Veganism as a moral philosophy often tries to focus on consequentialist sort of reasoning "Animal agriculture causes so much harm, therefore it is immoral to contribute to it!".

But consequentialist frameworks are profoundly ineffective in motivating behavior change in individuals, because people don't feel responsible for down-the-line consequences. They are just consuming a product, they don't want the animals to get harmed, so they view it, at most, as a sort of character flaw.

It becomes similar to buying cheap products from the third world, where some people on the other side of the planet work in terrible conditions to produce them. People recognize those conditions are bad, but they don't feel personally responsible for them.

 

The way animals are treated, with the degree of torment we inflict on them, is fundamentally rooted in human supremacist ideology. Treating it from the point of view of a consumerist paradigm has been, in my view, a profound mishap on counts of the original activists who laid out the groundwork for veganism.

The problem with consuming animals is not merely that, as a result, we inflict suffering on animals. The fundamental issue is that, to consume animals, you had to "dehumanize", to objective, them to such a degree that you feel no qualms about consuming their tortured body parts or their excretions.

 

We don't judge people who buy Iphones, at best they are morally flawed. We would judge, however, individuals who would eat the flesh of another person, or who would wear the hair of a special breed of humans, who are considered subhuman.

Even if both of them caused the same exact harm, the second person would horrify us. We would rightfully be repulsed by them, and recognize that something was deeply wrong with them.

This is because human beings are not consequentialists, in practice we mostly care about virtues. To us, if a human being is capable of buying the milk of another human being, who was kept enslaved their whole life, forcibly impregnated, that person demonstrates a lack of recognition of the common humanity we all share. Drinking that glass of milk and taking joy in it would be a repulsive act of objectification, no matter the consequences, even if there was no consumer-consequence effect.

A healthy human mind should feel horrified at the idea of drinking that glass of milk, because a healthy human mind does not view other human beings as objects.

 

Slavery was not a consumerist problem, it was a problem of supremacist thinking, of the objectification of an entire other class of individuals. We resolved slavery through the recognition that all humanity is equal, that it is inappropriate to ever view another human soul as an object. That we always ought to view a human being as a means in and of themselves, not merely a means to an end.

The same has to happen with animals. The appropriate reaction to seeing pieces of body parts of individuals who have been enslaved and tortured their whole life is horror and disgust. The focus of activism has to be to instill in others a recognition of the "humanity" in animals. Once the self is recognized in the other, the battle between self-indulgence and consumer-responsibility is no longer meaningful.

Edited 14 hours ago by Scholar

[Wilhelm44]

13 hours ago, carterfelder said:

This is the appeal to consequences (or pragmatic fallacy / appeal to necessity) fallacy, sometimes phrased as "argument from necessity" in nutritional debates.

The presence of advantageous nutrients in one food source does not logically prove that source is required for health or survival.

It sidesteps the actual question of whether those same nutrients can be obtained adequately through other means (plants + fortification + supplements), which mainstream nutrition bodies (e.g., Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, WHO-aligned positions) state is possible with proper planning.

It conflates "better/more efficient in one food" with "impossible or inadequate without that food."

The core error is treating superior nutrient delivery in one category of food (without taking into account the long-term harm involved in consuming animal products) as proof of dietary necessity, rather than evaluating whether the overall nutritional requirement can be met through alternative, ethically/environmentally preferable routes.

I guess the only way to know is to test it out. Force everyone to go vegan, and then find out for yourself that certain body types actually require some meat to maintain health. Ideally we'd like to be aiming for optimal health based on individual needs. I think there are some Ayurvedic online quizzes that help you determine your specific body type, and whether you need some meat or not.

15 hours ago, carterfelder said:

 

 

[Wilhelm44]