You’re entitled to be vegan, going against every bit of our human evolution, without guilt-tripping the rest of us for doing what nature designed us to do. Lions don’t feel bad about eating other animals, and they don’t even care that it scares the prey or causes great pain and suffering. They’d happily gobble up a bunch of baby antelopes, feet first, with them screaming the whole way, if that’s what’s most convenient. Are lions evil?
For a long time humans did not breed animals for the sake of eating them, they used to hunt (just like a lion). No one was guilt-tripping anyone in those days (I hope), as we had to survive (not thrive).
The situation has changed completely in the modern world. We have created meat factories, forcefully torturing millions of animals daily, and have somehow agreed upon what animals to kill and not to kill.
A lion will kill anything that moves (as long as it is not poisonous), are you willing to kill (and eat) any animal under the sky?
What about pets? Do you think they suffer any kind of pain and suffering ? If yes, that's the same way any other animal you eat (regardless of intelligence) feels when being slaughtered.
One more question to think about:
A young child (in a modern urban world) will be more comfortable plucking and eating fruits from a tree ?
OR
killing a pig -> draining blood -> cutting it into pieces -> cooking it to eat it ?
Having seem children play I think many in would be quite comfortable killing a pig and draining it's blood if they could. You see children chasing pigeons - and I don't think it's just to hug them if they catch one.
I say this without commenting in favor of either side of this debate which I am undecided on and reading with interest.
But I think it's important not to shy away from the reality that cruelty and the desire to kill are very much a part of human nature from the beginning. And that applies no matter where or how we are brought up.
What you mention is a typical destructive behavior noticed in kids and a tendency of violence/killing which even adults have. Key point here is: will they also eat the bird after killing it? Is the killing done here for the sake of eating ? or for the sake of enjoyment/destruction (whatever other reason).
i spent part of my childhood on a farm. i watched rabbits and pigs being slaughtered. and of course we ate them.
recently our neighbors slaughtered a goat that my kids had seen alive just before, and we all ate it. we also eat the chicken from the kids grandparents village home that they saw being slaughtered there.
kids killing animals for no reason are an exception, as are kids refusing to eat animals that they saw alive.
if they weren't we'd all have become vegetarians centuries or even millennia ago.
(slightly related: it bothers me that some people think kids should be protected from experiencing how meat is produced. if you eat it, you should know where it came from)
There’s no such thing as “going against evolution.” Vegetarianism is as much a valid part of evolution as any other behavior any animal exhibits.
I think if lions regularly bred into existence billions of antelope, confined and tortured them for the entirety of their existence, and then ate them, yes, a lot of people would view that as pretty evil, even while acknowledging such a creature is probably incapable of the moral calculus that (some) humans are.
Open ocean sure but I can see orcas from my house. The average person is still going to know to swim to land and forage for food, even if they fail. But orcas won’t have the first idea how to navigate self checkout.
lions aren't consciously deciding against a rationally plausible alternative, they are eating what is available.
similarly human cannibalization stories generally center around the concept that the people driven to such actions are given no sensible alternatives (airplane crash in a snow mountain comes to mind) -- so we don't presume they were evil, we presume they were desperate.
lions lack the intelligence and forethought to see the consequences of long term decisions. We as humans have gauged and measured the effects of ranching on our environment, the effects of meat consumption on our physiology, etc.
so, to answer your question : If the lion was able to empathize and relate to the suffering of the prey, if the lion was able to relate its' actions to the destruction of its' environment, if the lion had sensible alternatives that avoided long term consequences while still satiating hunger, if the lion could accurately forecast the future and STILL decide upon the destructive course of action...
...yes, an argument could be made that that lion might be evil.
Do they? It’s city dwellers who never seen prey and feel guilt. Regular hunters just skin the carcass and think where to store it. Guilt is a social emotion that leaks into areas which are not clearly separated in an experiencing mind.
> do they?
Yes, it's plainly obvious that some people feel some guilt for eating meat.
Regular hunters != industrial-level slaughtering. There are plenty of "regular hunters" who only eat meat they kill themselves. This is like saying if I cut down a single tree on my property I should also support the clear-cutting of the rainforest.
Rainforest is not a good analogy, imo. It presumably is an important part of an ecosystem and also sort of a nature’s museum. Farm animals are absolutely synthetic and barely play any positive role in ecology. So if you cut a single farm animal, I don’t see why 8 billion others shouldn’t do that or should feel bad doing it.
All that said believing no animals should get slaughtered. If we do it to some, could as well do to many. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42642138 tld: I don’t believe in reducing numbers, because the reduced numbers mean nothing to the animal being slaughtered.
Guilt-tripping? We've got reasoning abilities and in the main can act on our decisions. Nobody guilt-trips any sentient being since they can't be guilty if under duress. If after all this we still do whatever it is we do that we conclude is reprehensible, we should not blame someone else for reminding us of the logic we ignored.
As others have said, there is no such thing as going against evolution. Unless you want to put paracetamol, central heating, microwaves ovens, sneakers and smartphones in that bucket too. Or even all of our modern food, given that the crops have been selected by our civilisation for centuries.
Usually the same ones who argue that we're separate from nature when it's about building motorways and single family homes to park two SUVs, are also the ones explaining that we should be more like lions in a savannah. Seems inconsistent, at best.
I have some possibly shocking news for you. Humans are animals. Pretending we're very special and that everything we do is automatically "bad" is silly. Some things that are very good for humans overall is bad for competing species. Everything in moderation, of course, but I'm not shedding a tear for cowkind that they get slaughtered a lot. Cows would undoubtedly set up a system much like this if they were smart carnivores and we were dumb herbivores. (And many of them would hand-wring (hoof-wring?) about it due to that smartness. It's just part of the package.)
on a global scale more affordable may be true. unfortunately on an individual level in many places it is not. where i am meat is cheaper than the nuts and other vegetables needed to replace it, and those here that can't even afford meat from time to time end up with a rather poor diet.
you're saying this typing on a _computer_ - how does that fit into human evolution?
IMO humans evolve in an ethical standpoint as well and tend to want to cause the least amount of suffering possible as we evolve. That is why we have medicine, don't usually own slaves, don't hit children, and don't abuse animals.
Life and predators are absolutely evil, because their mode of operation is not in any way related to ethics or doing what’s good. And what’s good is usually opposite to what’s convenient or naturally-obviously available to survive.
That said, you personally don’t add much to this global effing mess that the life is by eating some low mass meat per year. You also don’t subtract much by avoiding it. One predator out-eats you 20-50x easily on meat. And many humans can’t or barely can afford meat.
The ethical problem has systemic and economic roots and doesn’t relate to personal ideology. Being vegan but doing nothing systemic is pretty useless imo. The whole privilege of going vegan bases on living in a society that does all that to animals as a consequence and a requirement of its function.
