Philosophical Vegan Forum

brimstoneSalad wrote:As Humane Hominid pointed out in his blog (anybody have a link?), it's actually a myth that nature is a very brutal and dangerous place. Most animals are not killed by predators.

Unless you only want to consider killing as a brutal act I have to disagree. It is true that most animals in the wild are not killed by predators, but it is still a brutal life for most. I don't want to find examples but let's say there's a very good reasons humanity has created homes and agriculture.

Monolith wrote:It is true that most animals in the wild are not killed by predators, but it is still a brutal life for most.

There's a difference between brutal, and hard work. Wild animals are constantly busy, but this does not equate to brutality. From a psychological standpoint, it's actually important to keep busy; a common example most people see would be the depression cats face from being kept indoors, despite it being safer, and them being fed without any effort.

When one's input into living is much less than one evolved for, one quickly develops agonizing boredom.

Monolith wrote:I don't want to find examples but let's say there's a very good reasons humanity has created homes and agriculture.

You don't have examples. Most macrofauna don't have it particularly bad in the wild. Farmed animals have much more miserable lives in captivity in every meaningful respect.

And you're comparing farmed animals to humans in their comfortable houses and with freedom to come and go, roam, and engage in recreation? Really? We are the masters, they are the slaves. Obviously it's good to be king.

Human slaves were unhappy in captivity too, despite having roofs, and food, and being protected from predators and rival tribes. Or did the slavers do a good thing, bringing those Africans out of the wild of tribal life and into civilization to serve as slaves?

Humans developed agriculture and permanent settlement because it gave them more leisure time (particularly in environments they weren't well suited for -- you do understand that humans didn't evolve in the cold environments they proliferated in, don't you? Wild animals do not expand into regions for which they are not suited, unlike humans.), not because they had to. It is now and always has been possible to survive by foraging naked in the wild; it's not easy, but neither is it necessarily miserable, even for us poorly adapted humans. Some people choose that life (minus the being naked part usually).
After development of agriculture, then humans quickly had to (actually had to) develop sports, arts, culture, and all manner of entertainment to compensate on all of the effort they weren't spending on survival to avoid dying of boredom. These may be good things, but they're not anything that farmed animals have.

What exciting activities do captive farmed animals get up to? Well, pastimes like self mutilation of course.

Another worrisome situation is self-mutilation which I even more horrible than feather pecking – can you imagine that a chicken would start eating its own flesh? Yes, under the behavior of self-mutilation the chicken tends to eat own breast flesh – and many times they eat their own feet. This leads to severe infections in the later stage. This behavior usually occurs when birds get bored, feel loneliness, fear and anxiety as well especially the caged birds such as parrots.

That's a pro-farming source, so they show pretty pictures. I can link you to some less pretty pictures that will make you toss your cookies if you need me to. They do that to themselves because they're miserable beyond their capacity to cope with it.

Farmed animals are not happy. This behavior is common in captivity, but very rare in the wild.

As a thought experiment, it may be possible to imagine a farm in which animals are not miserable and the environment is not damaged. And that's fine -- but that's just a thought experiment. If some day such a farm is created that genuinely raises happy animals and gives them long and fulfilling lives, and mitigates against all of the negative environmental consequences of its operation, then that day you can argue it's OK to eat meat from that particular farm. Today is not that day, and that farm does not exist.

Today farmed animals are miserable. Today animal agriculture directly causes 1/6th of climate change, and indirectly much more (which makes humans miserable, and is only getting worse) .

There's no reason to eat meat today, and every reason not too. Who knows what the future will hold, but in the present, it's wrong, and that's where we live, and where we remain morally accountable for our choices.

brimstoneSalad wrote:You don't have examples. Most macrofauna don't have it particularly bad in the wild. Farmed animals have much more miserable lives in captivity in every meaningful respect.

And you're comparing farmed animals to humans in their comfortable houses and with freedom to come and go, roam, and engage in recreation? Really? We are the masters, they are the slaves. Obviously it's good to be king.

I was comparing animals living in the wild with humans. Relatively humans have it better than most animals in almost every way. They have better standards of livings, live longer with less diseases, with less suffering, less death. We developed agriculture not solely to gain time but to gain security, to assure that we don't starve, hospitals to cure diseases and science to better understand our surrounding and better ways to exploit it.

Our way of life has always been improving over time, less and less death and more and more comfort. To the detriment of the animals we eat and sometimes humans too. But overall our way of life is better now than it was 10'000 years ago.

Now if we compare this with living in the wild, where meals are irregular, diseases are not cured and wounds are not tended you can say that a human life is safer and calmer than the life of a wild animal. This does not in any case question the lives of animals in captivity and I never talked about animals in captivity nor their suffering.

Monolith wrote: I was comparing animals living in the wild with humans.

I don't know why. The original claim was:

'Life in the wild is so horrible, humans are doing animals a favor by protecting them and killing them for food because they have better lives on farms.'

I was arguing against that. Then you argued against what I said, which I took as implicitly supporting the original claim.

Being a wild animal is not hell. It's not heaven either, but it's a life worth living. Being a farmed animal is the closest thing to hell on Earth right now, but being free and wild is not that.

I also don't support radicals who want to wipe out all animal life on Earth, because 'life is suffering'. See here for a bit of discussion on that: http://theveganatheist.com/forum/viewto ... 6363#p6359

Of course, being human in our modern world (the first world) is usually much better (although there are issues with psychological stress and depression due to certain exploitative activities).

Monolith wrote: We developed agriculture not solely to gain time but to gain security, to assure that we don't starve, hospitals to cure diseases and science to better understand our surrounding and better ways to exploit it.

These things came a bit later. Agriculture isn't necessarily more secure than foraging, particularly because it supports a larger population and is very vulnerable to natural disaster and war.

It's hard to speak to the motivations of early humans, of course, but convenience is usually prime among any human motivations.

Monolith wrote: Our way of life has always been improving over time, less and less death and more and more comfort. To the detriment of the animals we eat and sometimes humans too. But overall our way of life is better now than it was 10'000 years ago.

Of course. But I don't think that's an argument for the case of being a wild animal being hell on Earth. Humans have it much better, and have it better all the time, to the detriment of others, but aside from having your habitat routinely destroyed by humans, the existence of predators and disease doesn't necessarily completely spoil a good thing (life, freedom, etc.).

Monolith wrote: This does not in any case question the lives of animals in captivity and I never talked about animals in captivity nor their suffering.

Sorry, I don't know what your point was. I didn't contradict the idea that modern humans in the first world have it pretty good. Farmed animals do not share in that comfort and happiness, however, and that's a crucial point.