Wait. The pig is sentient?
Yes. It is not sapient however. This is a common vegan tactic to make us bloodmouths feel bad.
Pigs could well be sapient too. It really depends on where you draw the line for “sapience.” If you mean “able to think” or even “self aware” then pigs almost certainly are sapient. If by sapient you mean “of or relating to the human species” then obviously they aren’t, but that latter definition has no bearing or point in this discussion. You bloodmouths (that’s your wording!) keep trying to find some line you can draw in the sand that makes the torture of non-humans acceptable, but every time that line is examined it turns out it doesn’t exist, or at best, it turns out to be such a fuzzy boundary that it consigns tonnes of humans to the same status that’s used to justify the treatment of the beings tortured and killed as treats for carnists.
i think we mostly care about people, and place humans, sometimes other animals (usually pets), childrens’ toys, and occasionally some machines or fictional characters into the “person” or “not person” buckets depending on our personal attachment and a bunch of arbitrary social norms.
If the pig isn’t a person, then it doesn’t matter what you do with the lever and people with that conclusion might pull the lever because the beans will make less of a mess, because the pig will create a more expensive accident, or they might have an empathy response that finds gratuitous suffering distasteful and pull the lever but go home and eat some venison.
Anyone who thinks the pig is a person is puling the lever unless the pig wronged them in some way personally.
I have deliberately not defined any of these terms because they are not rigorously defined by the social norms.
A less circle-jerking version of this bait post might be a pig versus terry schaivo’s corpse being kept “alive” by a heap of medical devices.
if we’re going to use maximally inflammatory language everyone here is ok with abortion, and some of us drink pepsi so…
I eat meat and I don’t get why people cope this hard, of course all animals are sentient. Arguably even other organisms too
plants, bacteria, fungi, and light switches all react to stimuli
sentience is an arbitrary line anyway. There are debates among vegans about whether some bivalves or whatever, lacking a nervous system, actually feel pain or whatever standard they’re trying to use.
