Comment by somenameforme
2 days ago
It's just the circle of life. Live in a remotely rural area with animals around and you're going to see pretty regular death. For instance foxes are beautiful, extremely intelligent, and amazing animals. They'll also systematically and sadistically kill literally every single chicken inside a henhouse, one by one, if they get in. In another instance a dog I loved more than anything as a child to young adult was killed by a wild boar - tusk straight into the lungs.
The same, by the way, applies to vegetarian stuff. The amount of critters being killed to keep them away from the veggies would probably shock you, especially in the rather inhumane way its sometimes done in industrial farms. Shooting, for some baseline, is considered one of the most humane ways of dealing with large pests.
I simply see nothing wrong, at all, with eating meat. It's a natural and normal part of life and also, by far, the easiest way to ensure you hit all your necessary nutrients without going overboard on calories - especially if you live an active life and/or are into things like weight training.
Murder is also part of the “circle of life”, whatever that may mean, given that it’s pablum that means nothing. As is disease.
We rightfully find these immoral and don’t engage in them.
That’s not a defense of the immoral act. It’s just words to describe the immoral act.
Try this then: every animal eats other living things to survive. We have been doing it for a billion years. Is a basic drive built into it DNA. After that, is just a question of which living things you are going to eat.
The key difference between humans and every other animal that has ever existed is our ability to reason about systems and the morality of actions.
Some birds will abandon weaker chicks to focus on the ones most likely to survive. Others will allow siblicide. That these behaviors exist and have existed for billions of years is a fact orthogonal to morality because birds don’t have the capacity to reason about systems and the mortality of actions.
“Living things” is a sleight of hand, logically. When it comes down to it, everything is just atoms in the end. So why not murder? Why not steal? Why not exploit the poor? Reductionism leads us down some very dark paths indeed.
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That's factually incorrect. You don't have to kill a plant to get the fruit and/or the seeds it produces.
Do you follow every basic drive built into DNA?
Killing is part of the "circle of life". Murder is not. They are two very different concepts.
You skipped a step. Immoral acts are immoral because we deem them so. Animal slaughter in itself is not generally thought as such. Unless you think aboriginal / hunter-gatherer tribes who maintain their traditions are immoral for not modernizing.
> It's a natural and normal part of life
So is dying of smallpox.
Wikipedia:
> Smallpox is estimated to have killed up to 300 million people in the 20th century and around 500 million people in the last 100 years of its existence.
Completely natural, and completely normal.
That doesn’t mean we should be engaging in it in 2025.
The naturalistic fallacy is not justification for killing living things.
Ease cannot be used to ethically justify an action. But even so, you ignore that, according to research, people who eat meat have worse health than people who don't.
It's not that simple. High consumption of animal saturated fat can raise total blood cholesterol, but animal consumption in and of itself does not necessitate that. Notwithstanding, with a balanced diet high in vegetables and fiber, omnivores do not fare any worse than vegans in acm.
While that’s true in theory, we don’t observe a sufficient fiber intake for most human omnivore. That is Erfgh point : the classic diet don’t meet nutrients goals when studied on the field by researchers.
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