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
I think we shouldn’t go vegan altogether, instead limit our meat consumption more, for health purposes too. that being said the evidence for cancer ties is not convincing at all and the WHO is freaking trippin balls for putting it together with plutonium.
This is a very important point. Eating some meat isn’t inherently bad for the environment. Eating TOO MUCH meat is TERRIBLE for the environment, and not very good for you.
Meat used to be a fancy treat for most families, an expensive meal for special occasions. Eating a heaping portion of meat for every meal is fucking ridiculous, but that’s exactly what many people do.
I went vegan. It was the best decision I’ve ever made. I’m healthier, happier, and I’m helping animals and the environment. I also eat better, because it forces me to be aware of what’s in my food and make more creative meal choices.
I don’t understand what you wrote about the WHO and plutonium.
basically iirc the who cathegorized meat as bad as plutonium in terms of cancer risk but like last time I ate plutonium my skin was liquefying before my eyes and that never happened with meat. that being said, the choice of going vegan is not for everyone. for some it will be dire on their mind and dire on their health. physiology changes from person to person.
Because it’s speciesism. If we started giving birth to humans to eat them, that would be absolutely outrageous, but to do that to animals seems perfectly fine to most people. Animals have the same desire as we do not to be killed or abused, and to live a happy life.
This argument also implies that “dominionism” is wrong, i.e. all life has a right to not be killed or abused. Yet human life is impossible without killing and consuming other living organisms, be it plants, animals og fungi. Thus it is unethical to continue living.
This argument is bad, because for human life to be possible, you must draw the line between life that you consider ethical to kill and life that you consider unethical to kill.
It’s not about “all life” but about “all sentient life”. Only beings that are able have pleasant and unpleasant experience should be considered. If something (living or not) cannot experience suffering then you can’t harm it, by definition.
Sentience is studied scientifically. It cannot be stated with absolute certainty but scientists have good sets of criteria and experiences that helps identify it. With the current knowledge it’s almost certain that all mammals are sentient, like us. Fishes and birds are also very likely to be sentient. Some species of insects are probably sentient while others may not be. And plants are likely not sentient.
But even if all living things are sentient, it doesn’t change very much. Speciesism means treating beings differently only because they belong to some specific species. There are good reasons to treat different beings differently but they should be based on the beings’ interests, not their species (and studying sentience helps identifying these interests). It’s very likely that we do less harm by growing plants than by breeding animals. And even if it was the same amount of suffering we would still do less harm by avoiding eating animals because breeding them to eat them actually requires more plants than just eating plants. We should seek to minimise suffering and avoiding eating animal is a good way to do that.
I don’t agree on your analysis of sentience. The term sentience has no concrete meaning, so how can you base your moral judgements on this? Plenty of plant life has senses and are able to “feel” things.
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.
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. If we do not follow speciest dogma, we might as well eat other humans.
This is kind of a straw man argument. I don’t feel guilty at all eating a carrot I pulled out of the ground.
And others don’t feel guilty for eating meat. Than you for recognizing that people have different feelings.
I don’t believe this is a straw man argument, I never claim that they believe these conclusions. Quite the opposite, I am showing how their argument, not their conclusion, is not good. As I understand their argument, it is basically this:
(i) If something does not want to be killed, it is morally wrong to kill it. (ii) Animals do not want to be killed. Thus, it is morally wrong to kill animals.
I do not agree with (i), which I try to explain by reductio ad absurdum, arguing that if (i) is true it leads to obviously incorrect conclusions, thus (i) must be false.
So we can all agree that it’s morally ok to eat a carrot, but not to eat a human. The difference is sentience. The hard part is where exactly to draw the line. Which side of the line is a cow on? A fish? A bug?
Sure, so then they should instead be arguing that sentience is the morally correct line to draw.
It is indeed about morality. Morality is about what is “good” and “bad”, so it’s perfectly in line with OP’s question “why is the consumption of meat considered bad”.
Religions have arbitrary morality so it doesn’t seem very interesting to discuss why these religions allow or forbid to eat their specific set of animals, unless you’re studying these religions.
Moral philosophy on the contrary tries to study morality with real arguments. In almost all cases they agree it’s bad to harm others while it’s not necessary. Even with our intuitive morality most people would agree with that. And in most cases eating animals products contributes to harming them and is not necessary. It was not necessarily the case in the past, but today it is. So eating animal products nowadays is immoral.
The environmental problems only adds additional harms on top of that by causing harms to even more animals, including humans.
Unless it’s meat synthesized in a lab, it requires the forced breeding, enslavement, abuse, and eventually murder of sentient animals which don’t jive too well with the golden rule.
I personally could give a hoot about it’s negative impacts on environment. Gd bacon memes, humanity can go extinct good riddance
you know wild animals are suffering and dying and whole species are going extinct as a result of climate change and deforestation, right? how does that jive with the golden rule in your book?
Meat animal farming contributes to climate change and abstaining makes the demand for meat lower. It’s actually perfectly consistent.
animals are fed parts of plants that people can’t or won’t eat. all of the studies about the ecological impacts ignore this fact and then attribute the water used to produce, say, cotton to beef.
No… No… The studies account for that. Most cattle in the US are fed human quality base ingredient feed… It’s much cheaper to feed them corn meal than anything else. (I say base ingredient because the standard on cattle feed as a whole is not human grade, but the bulk of the food, the corn, could be human grade if it had been processed for humans instead of cattle.)
The water numbers are pretty well understood.
Not trying to be a dick here, but do you honestly think that you, a non-expert who likely doesn’t even practice in ecology or environmental sciences, are the authority here on whether any studies have attempted to account for the water consumption based on the feed variety and sources?
Because if you thought of it as a way to shoot down a random internet comment, then the experts who work in the field have certainly done so and followed through with those calculations already. Have you ever met a professor? They fucking love to tear apart arguments because it gets their names into publications and that’s how they earn tenure and notoriety for grant funding.
I read your other post using poor and nemeck and even that article shows it.
A lot more water to make the food for cows than what humans consume.
A lot more food to feed a cow than what it would take to feed the human the same type of food.
And the growth of that food to keep feeding these animals in large batch is pretty much creating dead areas of land that gets ruined if it’s not carefully monitored. And the run off into the water supply is a problem. This is why industrial level of farming is really really bad for the environment.
You’re supposed to move cattle around in pastures for regrowth and not entirely decimate it. The capitalists do not care about that until a court summons tells them to care about that.
Currently there’s some better methods however the consumption stays high.
Health wise : all meat diets (meat at every meal) can produce issues in your body.
Cured meat or heavy salted meat can lead to heart issues and kidney stones.
You should mix in some fruit and vegetables and maybe even substitute some entire meals so that meat is consumed only a few times a week if only for your body’s sake. Your taste buds aren’t the same organ as your heart. They aren’t the organs that make your body stay alive.
The point is that you can grow a plant based diet for a human for much less resource cost than you could for a cow.
Multiplied by the amount our current meat industry runs at and you get decimation of large swaths of lands, much higher emission of greenhouse gasses, etc…
animals are fed parts of plants that people can’t or won’t eat. all of the studies about the ecological impacts ignore this fact and then attribute the water used to produce, say, cotton to beef.
animals are fed parts of plants that people can’t or won’t eat. all of the studies about the ecological impacts ignore this fact and then attribute the water used to produce, say, cotton to beef.
~This is false. Cows in the US are primarily fed corn. Not the can’t/won’t eat stuff.~
Edit: I am wrong. They said only fed about 8% human edible grain.
most cows eat mostly grass most of their lives. they also eat silage. and yes there is corn, but that’s not the bulk of any cows diet
won’t eat
Is not the point of the argument when we’re taking about what humans shouldn’t eat. We can’t cater to wants anymore when growing percentage are starving.
can’t eat
Which is bullshit. We didn’t invent their diet. we substituted it. They might eat grass but we eat plenty of other green substitutes. The amount we consume of it doesn’t come close to their needs though.
cows eat mostly grass but, for instance, poultry are fed a lot of soy. that soy is usually (almost always) in the form of so-called “soy meal” or “soy cake”, but that is actually a waste product from pressing soybeans for oil. it would be industrial waste if we didn’t feed it to livestock.
