I heard something to do with Nitrogen and …cow farts(?) I am really unsure of this and would like to learn more.
Answer -
4 Parts
- Ethical reason for consuming animals
- Methane produced by cows are a harmful greenhouse gas which is contributing to our current climate crisis
- Health Reasons - there is convincing evidence that processed meats cause cancer
- it takes a lot more calories of plant food to produce the calories we would consume from the meat.
Details about the answers are in the comments
Because you need considerably more resources to grow meat than you need to to grow a nutritionally equivalent amount of vegetables.
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That field could be used to grow a different crop than grass, which would use less water per calorie of human food produced
Also, hardly any cows just eat grass these days. That’s not how you get a lot of meat as fast and as cheap as possible. Also, since cows need a lot of grass, I a lot less area would remain for other crops even if they did (since grass needs way more area for the same amount of calories than stuff like soybeans). So it’s actually a good thing, they aren’t just eating grass.
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Funnily enough, having cattle on that land only further fucks it up by causing erosion that can take decades to resopve even after the cattle is removed.
what kind of erosion?
are you thinking of “overgrazing”?
If that is the case, then they are more the exception than the rule. (Do you by chance have any source on that? Because I’m pretty sure here in Germany that’s not the case) Also, at least Switzerland produces less beef than it consumes, so that’s not exactly sustainable. I don’t know about the other two.
There are of couse exceptions and areas where cattle can graze all year, and the need to deforest areas isn’t as large as other places. However, for the majority of beef production, there are less enviornmentally friendly cattle food implemented. So maybe the solution should be that only the areas that can produce beef sustainably should be allowed to consume it? I would assume that that would be an unpopular policy, so I find it to be a much better solution to reduce the beef consumption even in the areas with sustainable producion and rather let those areas export the excess production.
Who waters the grass to feed cows? You farm them in a suitable region!
depends on the land. normally livestock are put on land which won’t grow anything else.
They actually graze in national forest land in the US. I spent a lot of time tracking wolves to prevent the ranchers and the forest service from shooting wolves so they could safely graze deep into national forest land, destroying the local ecosystem, just as the rivers and bears and caribou started to recover after the reintriduction of wolves.
I think extrapolating from poor US environmental regulations to say that no where in the world is it sensible to produce dairy or beef is a bit of a false equivalence. We also don’t have lead pollution in our water, but saying no one should drink tap water because it has lead in it in a certain part of the US is also silly.
I’m all for alternative protein sources and sustainable agriculture, but eliminating meat consumption likely isn’t the best approach. The US, Brazil, and a bunch of other countries using stupid practices like slash and burn agriculture really need to develop and enforce more sustainable practices via regulations and enforcement.
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as a Swiss, it is an issue. our glaciers are metling more and more every year and we rely on hydropower a lot, we need all the rain and water we can get, even if it seems like there is a lot.
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Jesus your downvotes. Seems facts hurt some real delicate flowers…
It’s a false choice. Land not used for grazing could be rewilded, which provides benefits in both biodiversity and carbon fixing.
Unless you are a small hobby farm, you’re not putting your cows out on pasture alone to raise them for meat. Most grasses are deficient in one or more vital nutrients that the cows need to grow. Most cows today are fed TMR (Total Mixed Rations). These are diets carefully mixed with different grasses, grains, hays, and mineral supplements. There are different metabolic diseases that cows can get when eating diets deficient in different nutrients. Cows that are sick don’t want to eat, and cows that don’t eat don’t grow. To a farmer, that’s like burning money.
that’s true in a few parts of the world. it may not be valid at all, depending where op is from. in general livestock is the most sustainable land use food.
Can I have a source for this claim?
I’d also like to know, but I imagine that at a small enough scale, it’s mostly letting a few animals live on otherwise unused land, and mostly just protect them. This imagined ideal would disappear extremely quickly, scaling even to village level, and not relevant to modern farming
This is exactly what happens. The highest quality land in a country is used for tillage. The less productive parts are used for grazing. This is how farmers make the most money. They’d be fools to use productive land for grazing and grow crops on poor land.
This is so wrong. I don’t even know where to begin. We grow so much alfalfa (huge waste of water) and soybeans in the US to support our own and other countries’ meat farming, then we ship it across the world. You could find this out with a simple Google search. This is willful ignorance.
Greenhouse gas emissions - Meat accounts for nearly 60% of all greenhouse gases from food production
Water usage - it takes over 1800 gallons of water to produce e just one pound of beef.
In order to help, you don’t even have to go vegan. Reducing meat consumption is helpful too with something like “meatless Monday”
I live in AZ. You know the desert state? The state that catches on fire a lot? Yeah. We’ve had Saudis taking our water, for FREE, to grow food for their cattle back home for YEARS. It’s SO infuriating to see them asking us to conserve water and then looking the other way as we get drained for nothing.
They’re not even the only ones dipping into our water either. It’s ridiculous.
greenhouse gases and water usage are different issues i didn’t address here.
the usa is one of the “few parts of the world” i was talking about, that it is a bad example of sustainable farming.
animals are fed parts of plants that people can’t or won’t eat. all of the studies about the ecological impacts ignore this fact and then attribute the water used to produce, say, cotton to beef.
85% of soybeans are pressed for oil for human use.
and those water use stats include things like the water it takes to raise feed crops. it would make sense, except that we mostly feed livestock plants or parts of plants that people won’t eat. for example, we raise cotton for textiles, and the seed would be industrial waste if we didn’t feed it to cattle. why do we count the water used to make jeans in the water used to make beef? it’s just dishonest.
Woah dude, prime bullshit here.
https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2021/02/Global-soy-production-to-end-use-1536x1108.png
76% of soy production worldwide goes into animal feed.
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Most deforestation today is to grow animal feed.
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livestock production in the UK and Ireland is still linked to rainforests abroad since chickens, pigs and cows are often fed imported soybeans. Brazil is the world’s largest soybean exporter, and much of its crop is grown on deforested land.
Many people might also be surprised to learn that Ireland and western regions of Great Britain are home to rainforests: temperate forests sometimes called Celtic or Atlantic rainforests. And, like their tropical counterparts, UK and Irish rainforests are threatened by grazing livestock, particularly deer and sheep.
If it is anything like here they supplement the feed with a ton of soy beans, which is causing huge problems in Brazil. iirc 87% of soy is used for cattle.
Just globally. Not sure about specific countries. Virtually all of the Amazon deforestation, for example
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We can’t have more cows if they don’t have food. We need to cut down trees to grow other stuff to feed the cattle. Global demand for beef is rising, mainly due to increases of standards of living in Asia.
So how do we raise more cattle without more farmland to grow food for them?
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or at a stretch or could be an argument against beef. but the question was about meat generally.
You forget that most land was forested (even in Europe) before humans decided that grass was more useful than trees.
The basic problem is that to get 1000 calories of beef, you need to feed the cow something like 10,000 calories. So growing a cow is actually growing an entire field of wheat/corn/etc., then feeding it to the cow, then eating the cow.
Farming all of those crops for the animals takes up a lot of land, consumes fresh water, produces wastes, and uses oil/gas (for farm equipment directly, or to produce things like nitrogen fertilizers) which produces co2. Cows also produce methane (that’s the fart thing) which is a bad greenhouse gas.
You could just eat the wheat/corn/etc. directly (most of the time) and skip the meat step therefore saving a massive amount of environmental impact.
Meat sure is tasty though.
I remember driving through Iowa and seeing vast fields of corn and learning that the majority of that corn was not even destined for human consumption. That kinda blew my mind.
Luckily there is still enough left over to poison the population with high fructose corn syrup
If America was a food, it would be sugar and high fructose corn syrup.
You wanna know another fact? Not all corn can be consumed by humans. There is actually corn that can only be eaten by animals like cows.
Plus is the fact that not all plants have the right amount of vitamins and minerals necessary to maintain the human body like meat does. Although it is possible, it does require research and monitoring to ensure that your getting all the nutrients you need. And yes, meat just tastes good.
What kind of bullshit are you peddling?
If you’re discussing complete proteins then all it takes is rice and beans. Not particularly difficult given that about half the world population survives on that without much meat.
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It increases methane emissions and doesn’t scale
We model a nationwide transition [in the US] from grain- to grass-finishing systems using demographics of present-day beef cattle. In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates
[…]
If beef consumption is not reduced and is instead satisfied by greater imports of grass-fed beef, a switch to purely grass-fed systems would likely result in higher environmental costs, including higher overall methane emissions. Thus, only reductions in beef consumption can guarantee reductions in the environmental impact of US food systems.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401
Taken together, an exclusively grass-fed beef cattle herd would raise the United States’ total methane emissions by approximately 8%.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401/pdf
Further, plenty of the land that grazing takes place on is not naturally grassland, and the “grass-fed” that you’ll see anywhere are still getting grain as well
Most of the UK and Ireland’s grass-fed cows and sheep are on land that might otherwise be temperate rainforest – arable crops tend to prefer drier conditions. However, even if there were no livestock grazing in the rainforest zone – and these areas were threatened by other crops instead – livestock would still pose an indirect threat due to their huge land footprint
[…]
Furthermore, most British grass-fed cows are still fed crops on top of their staple grass
Places that have tried to scale grass-fed production up have all kinds of problems. For instance, New Zealand often likes to tout its grass-fed production, but the production levels are so high that it’s a heavy polluter. It would require a 12-fold reduction in size in one region to meet the bare minimum standards for drinking water safety
The large footprint for milk in Canterbury indicates just how far the capacity of the environment has been overshot. To maintain that level of production and have healthy water would require either 12 times more rainfall in the region or a 12-fold reduction in cows.
[…]
The “grass-fed” marketing line overlooks the huge amounts of fossil-fuel-derived fertiliser used to make the extra grass that supports New Zealand’s very high animal stock rates.
Who says that land couldn’t be used for much else? You could grow fruit, nuts, rice, whatever
Have you seen a ranch? They don’t use farmable land.
A lot of farmable land is used to grow animal feed, especially cattle feed.
We don’t have a food shortage.
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That’s like 3% of the cows. The rest is raised in factory farms.
This is nonsense.
‘Exception for male dairy calves, production is predominantly pastoral-based, with young stock spending relatively brief portions of their life in feedlots. ’
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6039332/
Almost all cattle spends some time on feedlots, as grain improves the meat close to slaughter. Ignore these sites that give the false impression that almost all cows are raised in feedlots. It is blatantly incorrect and obvious to anyone that drives outside the city and looks out of the window.
The number of cattle that can be raised this way is so small it isn’t a valid option to meet demand.
Also, that land could be used for other things like goat farming which would be far more energy efficient than cattle.
that land could be used to house millions of humans
No no no, we pack humans into polluted, crowded, vermin ridden cities with slums and ghettos, didn’t you get the memo?
But growing a cow that eats the grasses makes it for I get the meat and the vegetables all at once and it tastes great /s
- Ethical reasons: hundreds of billions of animals are killed every year (not counting fish), after living a miserable and short life.
- Environmental: greenhouse emissions (CO2 and methane), deforestation for pastures, water pollution, are all caused by animal agriculture. If everyone went vegan we’d need only 25% of the land we currently use for agriculture.
- Health: there is some evidence that meat causes cancer, and convincing evidence that processed meat causes cancer. Also, the use of antibiotics for animals can lead to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Cow farts are methane, which are a more aggressive form of greenhouse gas, though with shorter lifespan.
For the cancer risk, this is the pertinent info:
An analysis of data from 10 studies estimated that every 50 gram portion of processed meat eaten daily increases the risk of colorectal cancer by about 18%.
That’s about half a hot dog. Seeing as the news isn’t exploding, this means that this is relative risk. Meaning your current chances of getting colorectal cancer is X. Eating a hot dog every other day continuously multiples your chance by 1.18. American Cancer Society states that over their lifetime, 1 in 23 men (4.35%) of men will develop colorectal cancer. This means if you ate 1 hot dog every other day continuously, a man’s odds of contracting colorectal cancer changes from 4.35% to 5.13% over their lifetime.
That’s just for colorectal cancer. It also affects other types of cancer (like breast cancer) and increases the chance of dying from heart disease considerably.
But there weren’t any good numbers on those I saw in there. Which is why I ignored the entire “meat” claim as it didn’t list useful metrics. “Might cause cancer” doesn’t really help anyone. There only seemed to be useful data about processed meat and colorectal cancer.
Your edit is actually missing the biggest reason–all the energy and water it takes to raise the meat. It’s just not sustainable.
A lot more water to make the food for cows than what humans consume.
A lot more food to feed a cow than what it would take to feed the human the same type of food.
And the growth of that food to keep feeding these animals in large batch is pretty much creating dead areas of land that gets ruined if it’s not carefully monitored. And the run off into the water supply is a problem. This is why industrial level of farming is really really bad for the environment.
You’re supposed to move cattle around in pastures for regrowth and not entirely decimate it. The capitalists do not care about that until a court summons tells them to care about that.
Currently there’s some better methods however the consumption stays high.
Health wise : all meat diets (meat at every meal) can produce issues in your body.
Cured meat or heavy salted meat can lead to heart issues and kidney stones.
You should mix in some fruit and vegetables and maybe even substitute some entire meals so that meat is consumed only a few times a week if only for your body’s sake. Your taste buds aren’t the same organ as your heart. They aren’t the organs that make your body stay alive.
animals are fed parts of plants that people can’t or won’t eat. all of the studies about the ecological impacts ignore this fact and then attribute the water used to produce, say, cotton to beef.
~This is false. Cows in the US are primarily fed corn. Not the can’t/won’t eat stuff.~
Edit: I am wrong. They said only fed about 8% human edible grain.
most cows eat mostly grass most of their lives. they also eat silage. and yes there is corn, but that’s not the bulk of any cows diet
Not in industrial farms. There is no grass there. They don’t bring hay.
It’s literally a sales pitch in the US to disambiguate corn fed and grass fed cattle.
you just don’t know what you’re talking about. cattle are raised in the field and then finished on feed lots.
grass fed just means that the cattle were only fed grass. but all cattle eat grass
Only until they are weaned. Then onto the feed lot they go and corn they eat.
so you are now admitting that literally all cattle eat grass, but trying to pretend your akshully still right. I guess plenty of toxicity flowed off of reddit.
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95% of all cattle feed is corn in the US. Raised to 600lbs or so before being put on the feed lot. Finishing in this case can be the final 400-600lbs fed on 95% corn.
About 40% of all corn grown in the US is grown exclusively for feed nearly all of which is used within the US.
won’t eat
Is not the point of the argument when we’re taking about what humans shouldn’t eat. We can’t cater to wants anymore when growing percentage are starving.
can’t eat
Which is bullshit. We didn’t invent their diet. we substituted it. They might eat grass but we eat plenty of other green substitutes. The amount we consume of it doesn’t come close to their needs though.
cows eat mostly grass but, for instance, poultry are fed a lot of soy. that soy is usually (almost always) in the form of so-called “soy meal” or “soy cake”, but that is actually a waste product from pressing soybeans for oil. it would be industrial waste if we didn’t feed it to livestock.
Soy oil is only one form of oil that humans can use. One of many. none of this argues the points put forward. It still requires much more water than if we stuck to humans eating less meat. And it not even requiring for people to completely cut out meat. Which has more pros for both humans and cows than cons.
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The point is that you can grow a plant based diet for a human for much less resource cost than you could for a cow.
Multiplied by the amount our current meat industry runs at and you get decimation of large swaths of lands, much higher emission of greenhouse gasses, etc…
animals are fed parts of plants that people can’t or won’t eat. all of the studies about the ecological impacts ignore this fact and then attribute the water used to produce, say, cotton to beef.
Source?
poore, nemecek 2018
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your argument- as that publication back what we are saying about the beef industry having a massive impact on the environment
read the methodology and you will see cottonseed is fed to cattle, and the water to grow that cotton is attributed to cows instead of the textile industry.
~This is simply false. Cows are often fed all or nearly all corn diets.~
Only once they are on the feed lot, then they are fed usually 70-80% corn based diets.
Most tree and forest loss is from making land for grazing.
Not for grazing but for crops that are fed to animals in animal agriculture.
over 80% of soybeans are pressed for oil for human uses.
Without a source this is just a bogus claim.
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76% of soybeans world wide are used as animal feed as per your own source. I’m not sure what you are trying to argue with your original comment to me?
the bulk of what’s fed to animals is industrial waste from making soybean oil.
Care to quote the relevant parts of your sources? I’m not going to read everything from that just to find this claim.
The core issue is soil quality. Without sufficient organic content in the soil, all our food, whether it be plant or meat, has drastically reduced nutritional content meaning we need to consume more for the same effect. We’re heading for a global food shortage because of the one key issue. Healthy soil also sequesters an enormous amount of carbon from the atmosphere. So instead of fighting the beef vs tofu wars, we should be focusing on encouraging agricultural practices that enrich soil rather than destroy it. We have about 50 years of crop cycles left before the majority of arable earth turns to sand.
Shifting your diet to be more plant-based is a good idea, but it’s not the crux of the issue.
Bam!
Ask the cow what she thinks?
She said moo
Try asking the pig in the slaughterhouse. They are smarter than cows and absolutely know someone is dying at the end of the line they are on
Pig says oink
To learn more about the environmental impact of meat consumption, I recommend this Our World in Data article: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
I would highlight this chart: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-per-protein-poore?country=Pig+Meat~Beef+(beef+herd)~Eggs~Lamb+%26+Mutton~Grains~Milk~Other+Pulses~Poultry+Meat~Tofu+(soybeans)~Peas~Nuts~Groundnuts~Fish+(farmed)~Cheese~Beef+(dairy+herd)~Prawns+(farmed)~Tofu
For example, getting 100 g of protein from beef emits ~ 50 kg of CO2. Getting 100 g of protein from tofu only emits ~ 2 kg of CO2.
animals are fed parts of plants that people can’t or won’t eat. all of the studies about the ecological impacts ignore this fact and then attribute the water used to produce, say, cotton to beef.
This is simply not true. Globally, 77% of the land area that’s used for agriculture is used either by livestock or to grow food to feed to livestock (such as corn and soy). Only 23% is used for crops for direct human consumption (1): This makes sense intuitively: If I feed a cow 1 kcal of energy, it will create way less than 1kcal of energy to be consumed. In fact, beef has an energy efficiency of 1.9%. This means, for every 100 kcal the cow eats, you only get out 1.9 kcal (2). Otherwise, cows would defy the laws of physics. Do you really think that the 74 billion chicken, 620 million sheep and 330 million cattle that we slaughter each year for meat just are fed human-food leftovers? (3)
1: https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture 2: https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production#energy-conversion-efficiency 3: https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production#livestock-counts
but cows are pastoral animals an eat mostly grass, not crops. and soy is a great example of what I’m saying: over 80% of soy is pressed for oil, and the industrial waste from that process is most of the soy that is fed to animals.
I think everything has been addressed. I just wanted to clarify that the methane is from cow burps, not farts.
One other thing I think is worth mentioning: meat is good, but it’s not even that good. As a child I was a very picky eater and largely carnivorous, having to purposefully supplement the occasional vegetable. Now I’m essentially pescatarian because honestly, most meat isn’t really good. It can be low quality, bland, and boring. Innovative chefs seem to be realizing that, and I personally agree that Eleven Madison’s food is better now that it’s fully plant based.
Meat can be such a crutch, and when it’s not, it requires quality cuts and good preparation. And yet many people would rather eat a tough, poorly seasoned mediocre steak than a vegan dish, even if it’s genuinely a bad experience, but I’m pretty sure it’s a misplaced pride thing.
Finally, working with meat can be a lot harder than vegetables, especially chicken. Dominique Crenn has a wonderful cookbook featuring incredible plant based dishes, and of course Atelier Crenn is one of the most convincing arguments of plant superiority.
I find that, for those who simply don’t care about the world around them, an appeal to taste and ease is far more effective than trying to introduce humanity. It also prevents the knee jerk reaction to plant based diets— “sure, I like my meats too, but it’s just too boring/doesn’t taste good enough” shifts the discussion from tribalistic hatred of vegans to something that directly impacts them, largely the only way to actually get some people to listen.
Because the amount of resources required to raise the livestock required to support the free market of meat is unsustainable. Also the impact of all that livestock is a huge contributor to climate change. So besides the moral argument of it being wrong to eat another living beings there is a very real danger to ourselves in the future.
Feeding cows takes up a lot of land, which often requires deforestation.
I’m going to piggyback off of this too since i havn’t seen it mentioned as much, cows need a LOT of water. They are literally walking bathtubs (the average cow stomach is the size of a tub, i have a bachelor’s in animal science and actually have seen in one ><) and this is why it baffles me when someone talks about the water need for plants or things like almond milk. It’s not even comparable as far as efficiency is concerned, and honestly, plant producers have actually worked to be better at water conservation since it’s important to them, but most cow production doesn’t even consider it into the equation.
I did not know this; thank you for enlightening me. I should go back to being a vegetarian…
Np! And I’m going to say something controversial to my fellow vegetarians and vegans. Giving up meat can be very very hard depending on your personal circumstances. I grew up 30 minutes away from any groceries in cow country. I’m also autistic with mild food issues. It’s taken me a long time, work, and circumstances changes (i live in a nice vegetarian friendly city now) to get where i am now. I think the “do or you are a utter failure” that is rampant in anti meat spheres is honestly to its harm. Instead of encouraging everyone to do their best while we fight for better systematic changes, there is scorn and fingerwagging if someone isn’t perfect.
That’s an excellent point! I totally agree harm reduction is the goal here.
However and alas, I have absolutely no excuse living where I live and having the extensive cooking skills I gained over the years. No excuse at all. It’s on my mind a lot lately.
Because it’s speciesism. If we started giving birth to humans to eat them, that would be absolutely outrageous, but to do that to animals seems perfectly fine to most people. Animals have the same desire as we do not to be killed or abused, and to live a happy life.
This argument also implies that “dominionism” is wrong, i.e. all life has a right to not be killed or abused. Yet human life is impossible without killing and consuming other living organisms, be it plants, animals og fungi. Thus it is unethical to continue living.
This argument is bad, because for human life to be possible, you must draw the line between life that you consider ethical to kill and life that you consider unethical to kill.
It’s not about “all life” but about “all sentient life”. Only beings that are able have pleasant and unpleasant experience should be considered. If something (living or not) cannot experience suffering then you can’t harm it, by definition.
Sentience is studied scientifically. It cannot be stated with absolute certainty but scientists have good sets of criteria and experiences that helps identify it. With the current knowledge it’s almost certain that all mammals are sentient, like us. Fishes and birds are also very likely to be sentient. Some species of insects are probably sentient while others may not be. And plants are likely not sentient.
But even if all living things are sentient, it doesn’t change very much. Speciesism means treating beings differently only because they belong to some specific species. There are good reasons to treat different beings differently but they should be based on the beings’ interests, not their species (and studying sentience helps identifying these interests). It’s very likely that we do less harm by growing plants than by breeding animals. And even if it was the same amount of suffering we would still do less harm by avoiding eating animals because breeding them to eat them actually requires more plants than just eating plants. We should seek to minimise suffering and avoiding eating animal is a good way to do that.
I don’t agree on your analysis of sentience. The term sentience has no concrete meaning, so how can you base your moral judgements on this? Plenty of plant life has senses and are able to “feel” things.
If something (living or not) cannot experience suffering then you can’t harm it, by definition
This follows no definition of harm that I am aware of, and I do not agree with it. If you are not aware that you have been harmed, you are still harmed. So you should also be able to be harmed even when you could not be aware of it. Therefore, I do not accept this sentiocentric (just learned this word) argument.
There are good reasons to treat different beings differently but they should be based on the beings’ interests, not their species
And this is one of those reasons. A human’s (or any other animal’s) continued existence is mutually exclusive with the food’s continued existence. If we do not follow speciest dogma, we might as well eat other humans.
I’ve heard this tired argument that plants and sentient mammals have the same capacity for suffering so many times. I think it is a disingenuous way of excusing the suffering your choices support.
A plant does not grieve when it’s offspring is removed from it. It does not have fear, or joy. Plants don’t play with each other and bond.
Yes. They communicate, and react to stimuli. So does a computer, but neither are sentient
I don’t think it is disingenuous at all. You may draw the line at sentience, but you have provided no argument for why this is correct. Why must we consider the harm exactly up to sentience? Why must we only consider conscious pain resulting from harm, and not nociception? It is easy to dismiss people as disingenuous, especially if you don’t really have any arguments for your case.
I don’t see how there can exist any good arguments for where to draw the line, which is why it bothers me when people claim the moral high ground, but cannot offer any arguments on why their behaviour is most morally correct. You can say “reduce suffering of sentient beings”, and most people probably agree, but I think it is completely natural to prioritise yourself, your family and friends and your species above other animals. So how much suffering of yourself is as important as the suffering of a chicken. Probably substantially less. I don’t think you will ever convince anyone of your beliefs by simply denying that their weightings of human-to-animal suffering is wrong and yours is right.
That’s a lot of rationalization with no facts to back it up.
I’m getting a “well ackchually” vibe from your comment. If I put a mouse on the ground next to a flower and told you to stomp one of them to death, You would be comfortable with either option equally?
Yes plants respond to negative stimuli, that doesn’t imply suffering on the level of a conscious being.
You’re making a lot of assumptions about my beliefs in your comment. I do not believe any animal has more right to life than any other animal. With that said if you are in the woods trying to survive like our ancestors then your biological needs take priority, you can’t survive on plants in winter. The thing is that is not our reality. We are wolfing down red meat giving ourselves colon cancer needlessly. Trading suffering for joy, not suffering for survival
That’s a lot of rationalization with no facts to back it up.
I, honestly, have no idea what you are talking about. Which facts would you find relevant in a philosophical discussion on morality?
I’m getting a “well ackchually” vibe from your comment.
I am sorry you feel that way, that was not my intention.
If I put a mouse on the ground next to a flower and told you to stomp one of them to death, You would be comfortable with either option equally?
Honestly I find this example a little comical because I think most people would definitely choose to rid themselves of the pest and keep their pretty flower. However, I do understand your sentiment. I don’t think my personal views really matter, but I have some rough hierarchy of living organism ordering how highly I value their interests. For example, I think a human is more important than a mouse to me, so I would rather kill a mouse than a human, if I had to choose. Similarly, I think a hare is more important than a flower, so I would rather kill a flower than a hare.
You’re making a lot of assumptions about my beliefs in your comment.
I am sorry, I have incorrectly conflated your comment with that of the original.
I do not believe any animal has more right to life than any other animal. With that said if you are in the woods trying to survive like our ancestors then your biological needs take priority, you can’t survive on plants in winter.
These to statements are completely contradictory. You are more important than other animals, thus you sacrifice them for you own survival. If you have no more “right” to survival than a hare, how is it ethical to kill it to ensure your own survival?
The term sentience has no concrete meaning, so how can you base your moral judgements on this?
It does have a concrete meaning. Scientific papers usually define what they are studying. For example the Review of the Evidence of Sentience in Cephalopod Molluscs and Decapod Crustaceans has a definition. It also has criteria to evaluate it.
Plenty of plant life has senses and are able to “feel” things.
Having reactions to external stimulus is different from having feelings. Feelings require consciousness, or sentience.
Even having nociceptors doesn’t mean you can experience pain (see the above review in the “Defining sentience” section).
If something (living or not) cannot experience suffering then you can’t harm it, by definition
This follows no definition of harm that I am aware of, and I do not agree with it. If you are not aware that you have been harmed, you are still harmed. So you should also be able to be harmed even when you could not be aware of it. Therefore, I do not accept this sentiocentric (just learned this word) argument.
Yes you can be harmed without knowing it, but it still must have a negative effect on you. If something can’t have negative (or positive) experience then how can you say it’s being harmed?
If I throw a rock to the ground, it doesn’t make sense to say I harmed the rock, because a rock can’t experience being harmed. Being sentient is having this ability to experience being harmed. That’s why I meant it’s by definition that non sentient beings can’t be harmed. The word exists to distinguish what can and cannot experience harm (among other feelings).
There are good reasons to treat different beings differently but they should be based on the beings’ interests, not their species
And this is one of those reasons. A human’s (or any other animal’s) continued existence is mutually exclusive with the food’s continued existence.
But having food doesn’t necessarily mean harming something. And even if it does, different foods have different level of harm. We can choose the foods that minimize harm.
If we do not follow speciest dogma, we might as well eat other humans.
Indeed meat eaters don’t really have good reasons to exclude human meat.
Scientific papers usually define what they are studying.
When I say concrete meaning I mean that sentience is an abstract concept of which we can observe evidence of, but we cannot define clearly what it is. In the report you mentioned, you will see that they give 8 criteria for scientific evidence of sentience, i.e. these do not define what sentience is, but they are criteria that we presume sentient beings should satisfy. They even require several pages to explain the complications of how to define sentience and how to observe it.
I do admit that the extent of study on sentience of animals is greater than I initially thought, and I can see that one might have reasonably sufficient knowledge to judge, with some certainty, which life organism might be sentient (under definitions such as the one used in the report). But it seems to me nearly all animals fall under this umbrella of “some level of sentience”, I found this paper highlighting that many insects seem to have cognitive abilities, and might be capable of feeling harm. So to what extent must this go, can you not swat a mosquito in fear of its suffering?
If I throw a rock to the ground, it doesn’t make sense to say I harmed the rock, because a rock can’t experience being harmed
But a rock is not alive, there is no evolutionary force driving its interest, as with all other living organisms. A sea cucumber has no proper nervous system (as I understand from a quick search), and thus could not “feel” pain. Yet, if you cut one in half, I would say that you have harmed it. But this is really just discussing the semantics of the word “harm”, the real point is that you are doing something to the organism that goes against its natural interests.
If we do not follow speciest dogma, we might as well eat other humans. Indeed meat eaters don’t really have good reasons to exclude human meat.
Yes they do, speciesism. A quite natural reason.
But it seems to me nearly all animals fall under this umbrella of “some level of sentience”, I found this paper highlighting that many insects seem to have cognitive abilities, and might be capable of feeling harm. So to what extent must this go, can you not swat a mosquito in fear of its suffering?
Swatting a mosquito generally doesn’t induce suffering, if it’s done quickly. And since they are not social animals other mosquito probably won’t suffer from the loss.
But yes, if an animal is probably sentient you should avoid inflicting pain to it, for the same reason you should avoid inflicting pain to humans: because they can suffer.
But this is really just discussing the semantics of the word “harm”, the real point is that you are doing something to the organism that goes against its natural interests.
Indeed, but going against natural interests or not is not the point. The point is about suffering. And more specifically the fact that the amount of suffering we inflict to animals to eat their meat would be inacceptable if it was done to humans.
If we do not follow speciest dogma, we might as well eat other humans. Indeed meat eaters don’t really have good reasons to exclude human meat.
Yes they do, speciesism. A quite natural reason.
That’s like saying people have a good reason to beat people who don’t look like them: racism.
Swatting a mosquito generally doesn’t induce suffering, if it’s done quickly. And since they are not social animals other mosquito probably won’t suffer from the loss.
This is like saying it is okay to kill a lonely person with no friends and family, as long as it is an instant death.
The point is about suffering.
I don’t agree with you that suffering is the single center concept to base your moral judgement on these issues. Not all living things that i care about are able to suffer, and I do not care about all living things that do suffer. I do not care that i cause a mosquito suffering by killing it (wounding it), if it is sucking my blood, or even just being annoying when flying around me, because I value my comfort above its existence (and suffering). I expect you do the same? This is speciesism.
That’s like saying people have a good reason to beat people who don’t look like them: racism.
Except we both agree that racism is wrong. We do not both agree that speciesism is wrong.
why should sentience matter at all?
Because if something is not sentient it cannot have negative experiences, so it can’t be harmed.
so?
The question was “why is eating meat bad?”, my answer is something like “because to have meat you must harm animals”, and someone answered that “we always harm something when we eat” and my answer is “no, there are foods that you can’t harm because they are not sentient”.
first, you can’t prove plants aren’t sentient. second even if you could, why should sentience matter? what ethical system even accounts for sentience as a factor of right behavior?
The line you mention is sentience, for many
Sure, so then they should instead be arguing that sentience is the morally correct line to draw.
You’ll find plenty of vegan debates about whether oysters are ethical to consume. It’s not some definite line in the sand drawn by a 2000 year old scripture, but rather it’s an ongoing debate that considers new evidence that results from advances in science and morality.
This is kind of a straw man argument. I don’t feel guilty at all eating a carrot I pulled out of the ground.
So we can all agree that it’s morally ok to eat a carrot, but not to eat a human. The difference is sentience. The hard part is where exactly to draw the line. Which side of the line is a cow on? A fish? A bug?
This guy thought about that question, if you wanted to see that perspective.
https://reducing-suffering.org/how-much-direct-suffering-is-caused-by-various-animal-foods/#Summary
Yeah, I see he’s thought it through and generated numbers, but it’s counter-intuitive to say we should give up fish for beef, or that milk causes more suffering than beef
why should sentience matter?
We could certainly discuss that, but it appears to, regardless of whether there is a good reason.
I disagree that it matters in any obvious sense.
I’m not a meat eater personally.
But I don’t understand why people who like to eat meat don’t eat human.
I think there are, or have been, some who do. It’s seems cultural, and a bit of a luxury to be wasteful.I don’t think there’s any socially agreed line between “good” and “bad”.
I reckon people mostly do what their culture prefers or tolerates.
Different cultures have different ranges of acceptable behavior from different people fulfilling different roles within them . Most people are members of many sub-cultures going right down to small family groups , professional associations, work-teams, sports teams and so on. There’ll be some sort of consequence for transgression, maybe verbal shaming, spitting in someone’s beer, withheld services, exclusion from jobs, or expulsion from the group.Sometimes people (in power) agree to put in laws and expend resources on enforcement instead of cultural norms; probably because the clashes within or between (sub)cultures and the inconsistent treatment of transgressions becomes too costly or disruptive.
That’s when you get a “line” that says “wrong”, once its been put into an enforced law. Even then the law, and enforcement, is always still a bit blurry. partial, and biassed so it’s really just a formalisation of the process for administering the consequences of transgression.i think it is possible to find things that look similar in other social animals too like, other apes, wild dogs, things with pecking orders , rats and so on. I wonder if there are even roles similar to " police" in some non-human cultures?
The difference is sentience
no. it’s not. the difference is that one of them is human.
I don’t believe this is a straw man argument, I never claim that they believe these conclusions. Quite the opposite, I am showing how their argument, not their conclusion, is not good. As I understand their argument, it is basically this:
(i) If something does not want to be killed, it is morally wrong to kill it. (ii) Animals do not want to be killed. Thus, it is morally wrong to kill animals.
I do not agree with (i), which I try to explain by reductio ad absurdum, arguing that if (i) is true it leads to obviously incorrect conclusions, thus (i) must be false.
The straw man argument comes from your point about combining plants and animals as food, and stating that they were both living. If you compare a cow to parsley, it is silly to say that we shouldn’t eat parsley for the sake of it being a living organism. With cows in the same argument, they get dismissed since they’re in the same group as plants.
Plants are the straw man in this case because it’s easy to dismiss the argument that we shouldn’t eat plants, for some reason. Animals are conscious creatures that experience suffering. Plants don’t experience the same pain.
A straw man argument is when the other person believes A and you act like they in fact believe B, so you argue against B.
I am not claiming they believe it immoral to kill plants. Quite the opposite, I don’t think anyone believes this in general. Therefore, it is not a straw man.
Not quite. From https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Strawman-Fallacy:
- Person 1 makes claim Y.
- Person 2 restates person 1’s claim (in a distorted way).
- Person 2 attacks the distorted version of the claim.
- Therefore, claim Y is false.
With this in mind:
- Someone spoke about the ethics of food.
- You claimed that plants are food like meat (both living), and it is unethical to eat them: “[…] all life has a right to not be killed or abused. Yet human life is impossible without killing and consuming other living organisms, be it plants, animals og fungi. Thus it is unethical to continue living.”
- It’s silly to say that it’s unethical to eat plants.
- Therefore, the claim about food ethics is silly.
You are misunderstanding my argument. I am not arguing against their conclusion, “it is morally wrong to kill animals”, I am arguing against the validity of their argument, “If something does not want to be killed, it is morally wrong to kill it”. Therefore, I am not restating their claim, I am saying that their argument leads to this absurd conclusion, thus it must be wrong. I have already explained this in a previous comment. You appear to be ignoring what I am writing.
That is not an example of a straw man argument as that consists of them creating a point tangential to the ones you are making but did not make, and then arguing against that falsely constructed position.
It could be a false equivalence. That would be the more apt fallacy.
I’d call it a non sequitur.
I don’t feel guilty at all eating animals. Kind of a subjective point, no?
And others don’t feel guilty for eating meat. Than you for recognizing that people have different feelings.
And others don’t feel guilty for eating meat.
Carrots are incapable of feeling anything: they can’t be affected in a morally relevant way. Animals have emotions, preferences, can experience suffering and can be deprived of positive/pleasurable experiences in their lives.
Than you for recognizing that people have different feelings.
Obviously this isn’t a sufficient justification for harming others. “I don’t care about people with dark skin, please recognize that different people have different feelings.” The fact that I don’t care about the individuals I’m victimizing doesn’t mean victimizing them is okay.
Isn’t it funny how everyone becomes a subjectivist when trying to defend meat eating?
That contains an element of religious/moralistic thinking that doesn’t address the core question. If you believe you are designed intentionally to eat meat, as the Abrahamic faiths directly state, then you will not agree with the notion of speciesism.
Factually it is that factory farming and the industrialization of meat production has both enabled humans to consume vastly more animal protein than their body “needs”. The resulting overproduction as well as the concentration of the waste streams causes significant environmental harms
It is indeed about morality. Morality is about what is “good” and “bad”, so it’s perfectly in line with OP’s question “why is the consumption of meat considered bad”.
Religions have arbitrary morality so it doesn’t seem very interesting to discuss why these religions allow or forbid to eat their specific set of animals, unless you’re studying these religions.
Moral philosophy on the contrary tries to study morality with real arguments. In almost all cases they agree it’s bad to harm others while it’s not necessary. Even with our intuitive morality most people would agree with that. And in most cases eating animals products contributes to harming them and is not necessary. It was not necessarily the case in the past, but today it is. So eating animal products nowadays is immoral.
The environmental problems only adds additional harms on top of that by causing harms to even more animals, including humans.
I think you are assigning a moral value to “bad” that I am not. Things can have negative outcomes that are considered not ideal aka bad but do not carry a moralistic element to them. For example “the weather outside is pretty bad” does not contain a moral judgement which is how Im reading OP’s question
In your example the “bad weather” means “bad for me/us” (a farmer would probably disagree, for example, as would some animals). Indeed morality is about what’s “bad to others” or to everyone. But since OP didn’t specify to whom, I considered it meant “bad in general”, for the one eating and for the others.
OP included “Ethical reason for consuming animals” in the accepted answer, so answering about morality doesn’t seem wrong.
IMO what’s bad is not meat consumption itself, which we were able to do sustainably for millennia and it was never really a problem. The problem is that now you’re getting too much of it way too easily. Eating too much meat is a problem because it perpetuates demand for unethical mass-production of meat and livestock are made to suffer as a direct result.
Take a look at the global human population chart over the last few millenia. Things can seem sustainable when there are a million people on the planet. When there are 8 billion things are a bit different.
You’re not getting many answers yet regarding nitrogen.
As a preface: When it comes to climate and environmental concerns with respect to agriculture, the word “nitrogen” does usually not refer to the completely harmless atmospheric nitrogen (N2). Instead, it refers to various compounds that contain nitrogen.
Nitrogenous pollution from cattle comes in two shapes:
The first is methane (NH3). A single cow burps and farts out about 100kg of methane each year. Methane is a greenhouse gas that’s 28 times as potent as CO2. This means a single cow is responsible for as much as 2800kg equivalent in CO2 each year due to burps and farts alone. For reference, the CO2 per capita emissions globally are about 4 tons (4000kg) per year, for all sources combined. Cows, relatively speaking, therefore produce a huge amount of CO2 equivalent.
The second is all the nitrogenous compounds in their excrements. This acts as a fertilizer on soil and in the water. While that sounds good, it leads to various unwanted effects. One is that agricultural runoff causes algal blooms in water that then ends up killing a significant amount of marine life. Another is that nutrient-rich soils tend to seriously decrease plant species diversity. Many native and wild plants actually need nutrient-poor soils to thrive. Those plants will get outcompeted by a small group of fast-growing plants that do well in all the cow-poop-infested soil. These compounds also tend to travel far, via agricultural runoff or even via the air, so ecosystems far away from farms are also impacted.
Is there a way to absorb methane from the atmosphere? Ie like a plant absorbing CO2 is there a substance which does something similar for methane?
Also for runoff, I assume there are no ways to contain this issue. Or is there perhaps a more sinister answers that it is possible but farms have not invested into such structures due to economical reasons.
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There is no solution to capture methane in the air. Its lifespan in air is 12years, so if we stop emitting, it will go away by itself. Until then, it’s quite bad. Capturing it at the source is also challenging (can you hemetically seal a cow’s ass without impacting its health?!).
The best solution is… less farms, less cows but that means less meat!
