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in a world where the ethical difference between taking an animal life and plant life had become blurred, whether you would double down on meat eating as you were now no longer the barbarous primitives eating the poor sentient animals, that in fact the vegetarians were now just as culpable as yourselves in causing suffering
Guessing I’d be absolutely mind-blown/disbelieving. I’d still be the ‘barbarous primitive’ (except now increasingly/universally/expansively)
Don’t think I would take any pleasure in the (recognised) increase in mortally-suffering lifeforms. Likewise would likely feel no pleasure in a widening of ‘culpables’?
Seriously, if in Hypotheticaland there truly was no doubt at all of a carrot’s sentient/emotional life being indistinguishable from that of an orang-utan’s - then I might instead go Apocalypse Now on everything. Laughing into the Great Nothing, raging red in tooth and claw. Because if everything is everything - then nothing is also everything. ‘Death is life, so more death equals more life’.
And now every rabbit eating grass is equivalent to a cat idly tearing the living head from a mouse (or a lion chewing a man-child’s living neck.
Take your hypothesis further? Imagine if every blade of grass or leaf or vegetable screamed (‘death scream/fear scream’) audibly, loudly as it was being munched on alive by their many insect/animal predators? As it was being stepped upon/cut by mower/squashed by mountain bicycle and hefty rider. A highly audible and constant grassy cacophony of terror heard always by us, all day and night?
Surely I’d need to source either less-sentient food, or else seek some strong kind of religion/drugs/philosophy/earplugs/brain-plugs in order to squash reality into a more easily-palatable situation? Other meat-eater’s mileages will vary, but you did ask.
As for ‘doubling down’? That’s one behaviour/reaction that although I understand the psychology of it, I genuinely dislike it (especially when I see it erupting from self). So no I probably wouldn’t kill more animals in order to ‘double down’.
I’d be totally mind-blown, trying to find a way to eat and live and yet retain my conscience/sanity.
ie not attempt to deny the facts, but to try and shape them into a more palatable philosophy (hopefully other than ‘Apocalypse Now’)
Eventually no doubt all of the endlessly screaming veg would either send us mad/psychotic or else we’d have to wear earplugs for life. New tech startups would develop human ear-defenders to filter out plant-scream frequency.
Another view: Yours is an interesting hypothesis because we already overwhelmingly ignore 72 billion land animals and over 1.2 trillion aquatic animals killed for food around the world every year. So what would be more difficult in ignoring zillions of veg?
One group says eating meat is so wrong, they are physically repulsed by it.
No, not a ‘group’. That was one person (Cougar).
And I didn't say that, even.
I have never said that I think it's wrong for other people to eat meat, I've said (repeatedly) that I couldn't care less what anyone eats. I sure as hell don't claim any moral superiority, when eating out I feel closer to embarrassed than smug.
Family and friends mealtimes are a quiz/interrogations/‘shaming’ session (delete as applicable) more often than not.
Yup. It starts to get tedious after the first 30 years or so.
It would never occur to me to interrogate someone (family or stranger) to their face over why they chose to eat/order meat. Yet the same thought rarely occurs vice versa.
And yet seemingly the world is full of preachy vegans and militant vegetarians. Can't move for them.
(OP, I'll get back to your lengthy post shortly, I'm playing catch-up.)
Mind you, you dont see me or any other meat eating member of the forum or public in general posting up threads about eating meat.
On the contrary, we do indeed see us always posting threads about eating meat.
https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/barbecuetrackworld-meat-n-charcoal-content/
https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/horse-meat/
https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/bacon/
https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/bacon-express/
https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/bacon-butties-how-hard-is-it/
https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/massive-slab-of-topside-advice/
https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/elk-meat/
https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/animal-lovers-and-eating-meat/
https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/pork-pie/
https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/goat/
https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/what-is-the-weirdestmost-exotic-creature-you-have-ever-eaten/
https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/whats-your-manliest-recipe/
https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/steak-bloody-lovely-steak/
https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/steak-mmmmmmmm/
https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/becoming-a-vegetarian/
That’s as many as I can manage in the 15 min edit window (you have to past each the link in the link popup otherwise it twkes uo the whole page with previews of each link)
Obviously we (meat-eaters) do, but why do you think it’s weird us (meat-eaters) posting threads about meat/s? (sourcing of, eating of, prepping of, feeling of, and cooking of, and curing of and tasting of and ethics of different meats, etc)
Same as we also post threads riding certain bikes/not riding certain bikes, riding bikes in general, growing apples, driving cars/not driving cars, making love/dating, taking out a mortgage, renting a tent, curing a hangover/not curing a hangover?
I dont know how Id react if science demonstrated the ability of fish to suffer pain and suffering at a level equivalent to that of mammals.
Come again?
So yeah. As above,
It’s complicated, then.
I simply don't have the same reaction to eating a carrot as I would a chicken nugget. Would that change in your hypothetical scenario? I honestly don't know but I don't expect so. A few other things to consider though:
Some things are grown explicitly to be be eaten. Many plants reproduce by dropping tasty fruit which gets eaten by animals, then the seeds get pooed out half a mile away. We're back to H2G2's cow again.
If an apple falls from a tree then - sentient or not - it's dead or dying by that point anyway. Are we not in fact putting it out of its misery? And surely even if we accept some sort of neural 'web' of plant life, it's now disconnected.
By extension, what if we applied that back to animals? Would a typical vegetarian eat meat from a sheep that had lived a good life and died of natural causes? What about sausages from a pig whose leg had spontaneously just fallen off? The animal may be sentient but its leg ain't.
Lab-grown meat is becoming a reality. Would many vegetarians eat that? It's an easy question for me (🤒🤮) but must be a moral quandary for those who are vegan / veggie for ethical reasons. If your only reason for not eating or using animal-based products is welfare, well, this stuff has never seen an animal. Happy days, vegan-friendly beefburgers with actual beef, right?
The flipside to that, people like Beyond Burger are striving to create veggie products that are as close to meat as possible. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that. It must be great for people who don't eat meat but miss it, or for omnivores who want to eat less meat but can't quite bring themselves to do so (and believe me, there's a lot of those). But for me personally I can't honestly say that I've ever thought that although my veggieburger was great I just wish it bled a little more, and even knowing that it's red food colouring it's kinda still a bit boak.
I don't think there are any simple answers here, certainly not that can be applied to an entire demographic en masse.
I am also aware I am able to digest meat so it must be evolutionarily important to my species, which means it must be a benefit historically.
AIUI our evolutionary superpower isn't that we're carnivores, it's that we're omnivores. We can life off a lot of different foods, we can adapt. We could survive on nuts and berries when Uncle Thag's hunt was unsuccessful, and on roasted megabadger during winter when all the crops are dead.
There are some deep trenches on this thread!
I eat meat, but do care about animal welfare. I am reassured that we have good animal welfare standards in the UK, even if some aspects of food production are distasteful. I also care about the environmental impact of our diets, and wince every time my wife buys blueberries that are flown in from Uruguay.
I found The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter by Singer and Mason a good place to start. All consumers are not equal, and not all choices are available to all. Sometimes it is about finding our own, least bad way.
To the OP's 1st question I would have to answer
fungi, bacteria, and protists, the latter including all the single-celled forms that are not bacteria. Plus non living stuff like minerals. That would have been a rather short thread. But the aim of the question was to lure in non meat eaters to hit them, and only them, with a pseudo-philosophical question loaded to provoke those of a non meat eating persuasion. I eat meat so can't answer that one but boy did it work.
Brilliant couple of posts back there @p7eaven . Very thought provoking, although I don't really need that.
I was a non-meat eater for the best part of thirty years and eventualy went back to eating a little meat occasionally. It was the smell of bacon that did it, that old cliche. And to answer the OP, I would most likely carry on exactly as I do now. Sourcing my food as responsibly as I reasonably can.