I heard something to do with Nitrogen and …cow farts(?) I am really unsure of this and would like to learn more.
Answer -
4 Parts
- Ethical reason for consuming animals
- Methane produced by cows are a harmful greenhouse gas which is contributing to our current climate crisis
- Health Reasons - there is convincing evidence that processed meats cause cancer
- it takes a lot more calories of plant food to produce the calories we would consume from the meat.
Details about the answers are in the comments
The term sentience has no concrete meaning, so how can you base your moral judgements on this?
It does have a concrete meaning. Scientific papers usually define what they are studying. For example the Review of the Evidence of Sentience in Cephalopod Molluscs and Decapod Crustaceans has a definition. It also has criteria to evaluate it.
Plenty of plant life has senses and are able to “feel” things.
Having reactions to external stimulus is different from having feelings. Feelings require consciousness, or sentience.
Even having nociceptors doesn’t mean you can experience pain (see the above review in the “Defining sentience” section).
If something (living or not) cannot experience suffering then you can’t harm it, by definition
This follows no definition of harm that I am aware of, and I do not agree with it. If you are not aware that you have been harmed, you are still harmed. So you should also be able to be harmed even when you could not be aware of it. Therefore, I do not accept this sentiocentric (just learned this word) argument.
Yes you can be harmed without knowing it, but it still must have a negative effect on you. If something can’t have negative (or positive) experience then how can you say it’s being harmed?
If I throw a rock to the ground, it doesn’t make sense to say I harmed the rock, because a rock can’t experience being harmed. Being sentient is having this ability to experience being harmed. That’s why I meant it’s by definition that non sentient beings can’t be harmed. The word exists to distinguish what can and cannot experience harm (among other feelings).
There are good reasons to treat different beings differently but they should be based on the beings’ interests, not their species
And this is one of those reasons. A human’s (or any other animal’s) continued existence is mutually exclusive with the food’s continued existence.
But having food doesn’t necessarily mean harming something. And even if it does, different foods have different level of harm. We can choose the foods that minimize harm.
If we do not follow speciest dogma, we might as well eat other humans.
Indeed meat eaters don’t really have good reasons to exclude human meat.
Scientific papers usually define what they are studying.
When I say concrete meaning I mean that sentience is an abstract concept of which we can observe evidence of, but we cannot define clearly what it is. In the report you mentioned, you will see that they give 8 criteria for scientific evidence of sentience, i.e. these do not define what sentience is, but they are criteria that we presume sentient beings should satisfy. They even require several pages to explain the complications of how to define sentience and how to observe it.
I do admit that the extent of study on sentience of animals is greater than I initially thought, and I can see that one might have reasonably sufficient knowledge to judge, with some certainty, which life organism might be sentient (under definitions such as the one used in the report). But it seems to me nearly all animals fall under this umbrella of “some level of sentience”, I found this paper highlighting that many insects seem to have cognitive abilities, and might be capable of feeling harm. So to what extent must this go, can you not swat a mosquito in fear of its suffering?
If I throw a rock to the ground, it doesn’t make sense to say I harmed the rock, because a rock can’t experience being harmed
But a rock is not alive, there is no evolutionary force driving its interest, as with all other living organisms. A sea cucumber has no proper nervous system (as I understand from a quick search), and thus could not “feel” pain. Yet, if you cut one in half, I would say that you have harmed it. But this is really just discussing the semantics of the word “harm”, the real point is that you are doing something to the organism that goes against its natural interests.
If we do not follow speciest dogma, we might as well eat other humans. Indeed meat eaters don’t really have good reasons to exclude human meat.
Yes they do, speciesism. A quite natural reason.
But it seems to me nearly all animals fall under this umbrella of “some level of sentience”, I found this paper highlighting that many insects seem to have cognitive abilities, and might be capable of feeling harm. So to what extent must this go, can you not swat a mosquito in fear of its suffering?
Swatting a mosquito generally doesn’t induce suffering, if it’s done quickly. And since they are not social animals other mosquito probably won’t suffer from the loss.
But yes, if an animal is probably sentient you should avoid inflicting pain to it, for the same reason you should avoid inflicting pain to humans: because they can suffer.
But this is really just discussing the semantics of the word “harm”, the real point is that you are doing something to the organism that goes against its natural interests.
Indeed, but going against natural interests or not is not the point. The point is about suffering. And more specifically the fact that the amount of suffering we inflict to animals to eat their meat would be inacceptable if it was done to humans.
If we do not follow speciest dogma, we might as well eat other humans. Indeed meat eaters don’t really have good reasons to exclude human meat.
Yes they do, speciesism. A quite natural reason.
That’s like saying people have a good reason to beat people who don’t look like them: racism.
Swatting a mosquito generally doesn’t induce suffering, if it’s done quickly. And since they are not social animals other mosquito probably won’t suffer from the loss.
This is like saying it is okay to kill a lonely person with no friends and family, as long as it is an instant death.
The point is about suffering.
I don’t agree with you that suffering is the single center concept to base your moral judgement on these issues. Not all living things that i care about are able to suffer, and I do not care about all living things that do suffer. I do not care that i cause a mosquito suffering by killing it (wounding it), if it is sucking my blood, or even just being annoying when flying around me, because I value my comfort above its existence (and suffering). I expect you do the same? This is speciesism.
That’s like saying people have a good reason to beat people who don’t look like them: racism.
Except we both agree that racism is wrong. We do not both agree that speciesism is wrong.
