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this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2025
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Asklemmy
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Killing animals to eat their flesh. Murder is fucked up, human or not.
Farming can be ethical. You'd get a lot more agreeing by simply saying, "factory farming".
A good farm should be giving the animals a better life than quite a lot of humans currently get. A statement that should be damning to both sides.
I disagree, but i would be happier with better conditions. I still think murder is wrong, and I oppose it, but if you remove the torture aspect I admit you're doing dramatically less harm.
there's no way to avoid torturing an animal while taking their life when they don't want to die.
That's completely fair, I was thinking more of the day in day out torture when I wrote that. My bad.
That's kind of an absurd statement, isn't it?
If you murder me by shooting me in the back of the head while I'm not looking, that's not torture.
Obviously I still don't want you to kill me, but... It's still not torture, it's a different thing, and we have different words for that... it's murder, or killing, or slaughter.
Please keep in mind I'm not making a moral or ethical judgement, but a definitional one. Torture is a different thing.
If, as you say
How are you defining torture?
Did I torture my dearly beloved pets when they had cancer or infections bad enough that I had to have them put down? No! What an odd and cruel thing that would be for me to say!
But they still didn't want to die, and I didn't want them to either. That's not torture.
Nope. They all end up in the same place with a knife to their throat.
You'd get a lot more agreeing by saying "Fuck it do whatever you want animals aren't people" so fuck your entire argument.
Oh? You can ethically rape someone? You can ethically murder someone? What do you think animal agriculture entails?
Try telling that to the animals
Animals don't share our sense of morality and it would be ridiculous to expect them to.
We also don't typically arrest other species.
"typically"
I'm going to need the examples you're thinking of where we did please... they should be quite amusing with my morning coffee tomorrow :-)
I'm not them, but
https://www.weirdhistorian.com/a-few-cases-of-killer-pigs-facing-capital-punishment/
Note: I suggest you don't look up "(type of animal) arrested," because most of what pops up is horrible people arrested for doing terrible things to animals. (Although a couple cats have been "arrested" in modern times.) I just happened to remember the pig trials of yore.
Sadly this is not amusing as I had hoped at all ... I should have expected as much. :-(
not to mention that when sharks attack people, they often go and kill a shark in retaliation. same goes with dogs who attack people.
That means we don't have to have our own sense of morality 🤡
So let them out...?
this sounds like you are judging individuals based on their membership in a class. this sounds like paternalistic speciesism.
Absolutely. And I further submit that if we're to think of ourselves as an intelligent, enlightened, civilized, and technological species, moving beyond our predatory instinct is one of the first prerequisites. Only once we completely stop exploiting animals can we in good faith say we're actually materially better than any other animal species. Until then we're just lions with computers.
What's the first thing we claim sets us apart from every other animal? Oh right, how humans aren't beholden to natural instincts and have advanced beyond mindless killing machines. We say while buying another hamburger because we can't even get past the primal urge to keep eating animal meat as soon as we taste it because that urge literally evolved in a time where the only choices were to hunt or starve. With all our technology you'd think we'd embrace more efficient ways of nutrient delivery.
Step 1: stop the exploitation of other humans. This is gonna probably be the biggest roadblock not gonna lie.
Before we can tackle the exploitation of minorities, we need to completely end the exploitation of white people
🤡
You're right, and furthering the cause against exploitation of humans will help those values to be applied to animals as well. Both are exploitation and come from similar motives and perceived hierarchy. I'd say that a society that has completely ended exploitation of humans will most likely be one that has also ended exploitation of animals because the values that drive the former will also drive the latter. There are very few cases where it's human lives OR animal lives.
Couple issues with that. Murder is just illegal homicide. The homicide bit means it's definitively only dealing with humans, and the legal bit is only as fucked up (or not) as the law itself, and history is littered with examples of legality clashing with morality.
We have some really evil folks in this world and they're protected by the same laws as everyone else. Some of those evil people are doing things like running countries or mega-corporations or engaging in some other means of causing a massive scope of death and/or suffering. You find yourself in a position in which you could feasibly take their life - do you? It's illegal: very much murder. But allowing them to persist allows whatever evil they're inflicting on everyone else to also persist.
I know none of this is what you're talking about, but I see the word 'murder' pop up a lot in conversations like this, and it's just not the correct word for what you're trying to describe. You can make a solid case for the morality of veganism without relying on the connotation of buzzwords that aren't actually relevant.