Speciesism

[kitschyduck]

I can't pinpoint the time or moment when I thought there was something to the argument, so it was a kind of accumulative process. But once there was a tipping point... When you come out the other side intellectually, I'd almost say it's crippling. You're immediately confronted with a holocaust, that is occurring everywhere at all times and

Comments

[jaelle_n_gilla]

You continue to live as you do because that's what every species we descend from has done for millions of years.

We live off other species. We are biomass and we need other biomass to live, to grow, to procreate, to move, think, and work. This biomass can be other mammals, intelligent and thinking, other vertebrates, much less intelligent, but still with basic instincts. They could be insects that only think as a group, or mollusks that don't have much of a nervous system to speak of, or it could be plants which are said to be non-sentient, but they are alive nonetheless and they grow, procreate, react to stimuli, in short, they live. Just as we do.

Turn it as you will - to survive, we need other living things to die so we can digest them. It's what makes an animal an animal and not a plant. There is nothing to excuse. It's nature and natural. What we can do with the brains we have is to keep that other life in a responsible and not harmful way, out of mass production, as natural as possible.

[kitschyduck]

I agree with you to an extent. Unlike a couple of vegans I'm friends with, I admit that humans have evolved to be able to digest meat (via figuring out we can cook it to break it down) and have been eating animal products for at least 2.5 millions years. We have adapted to being able to obtain nutrients that animals have eaten, second hand through their flesh, eggs and milk when times have been hard and we wouldn't have survived otherwise

[jaelle_n_gilla]

I think we've degenerated rather than evolved when we managed to cook our meat to make it more digestible. And we've certainly grown soft when we stopped hunting our own meat (and as a result only eating it once in a while, rather than as a main course with every meal). I do agree that it makes sense to eat more veggies and I'm still hoping for artificial sources of animal protein that tastes like burgers, steak, and seafood

[kitschyduck]

Yeah, I think that if there wasn't such prevalent and unquestioned trend towards speciesism then we may have already found a way to synthesise meat. Or maybe scientists would have found a way to make sure mostly only female chickens hatch so grinding up billions of male chicks wouldn't be necessary. But why would they bother? It's cheap and easy to just kill them as soon as they're sexed and their suffering is of no consequence to us