Comment by kseistrup
6 months ago
I perceive suffering as unnecessary pain and/or fear. I can certainly know when I suffer myself. And while it's true that I cannot directly measure the pain or fear of other organisms, to some extend I can extrapolate my own experience to that of other beings. Empathy. First and foremost “higher” animals. E.g., if a dog is screaming when somebody treads its tail, I lend from my own experience when somebody steps on my toe and conclude that the dog is screaming in pain. I could be wrong, of course, but that's how the reasoning goes. And don't we all behave based on our conscious or unconscious evaluations?
The further away, phylogenetically, we come from the human species, the more difficult it is for me to assess if a being is suffering (i.e., experiencing unnecessary pain or suffering), but based on my observations of plants, and my knowledge of their anatomy and physiology, I have concluded that yes, they may feel something — even pain — but it doesn't look much like they do. But I could still be wrong. It's still how my reasoning goes. If one day I am faced with more tangible evidence, then I will obviously have to evaluate my behaviour. Until then I choose what seems to be the road of less suffering.
40+ years ago I worked for several months at a “chicken farm” where chicks were raised from “Easter chickens” to fullgrown chickens in roosts of 10_000 chickens each. It was a waking nightmare. It is _the_ most horrible experience I have had in my life because of the obvious and extensive suffering of the animals, and the experience made me choose to become a vegetarian because I didn't want to contribute to that specific suffering. Later evidence has shown that pigs and cattle and other farmed animals are experiencing suffering too because of the way humans are raising them. I simply don't want to be a part of that. Period.
My choice of diet doesn't change my value as a human being even one iota (the same way the value of any other human being isn't measured by their choice of diet). I could be very very wrong about the whole thing, and in that way making things unnecessarily complicated for myself (and my fellow human beings), but I cannot live on Earth without making decisions, and I try to make the best I can — just like all other humans do. All other humans could be right, for all I know. I could be the fool here. Who am I to judge.
Eating meat doesn't mean the consumed thing suffered. Factory farming might. The farming and slaughter process may be more efficient when causing suffering, but it doesn't have to.
I find a more compelling argument that it is generally awful to end something's joyful existence and experience. But apparently not compelling enough to dramatically alter my diet much. But enough to cause me to save/relocate some bugs in some cases rather than kill them.
So in short you're just guessing.
That poster seems to have thought things through. A first hand account of an industry of suffering, and our best evidence on how plants work and a well reasoned conclusion.
A 'guess' is less than accurate.
I think it is a huge reach to assume the lettuce head isn't suffering when you pluck it. It is pure anthropomorphising at its finest where you can use some in built cognitive dissonance to see a plant as some other not worthy of life whereas something that bleeds red fills one with dread. I hazard a guess that if most people didn't spend a childhood ripping leaves off trees and throwing sticks at plants that they would have similar feelings towards the harvest process of most crops when exposed to the first time like they might with the harvest process for animal crops.
If there are opportunities to do things with more respect and dignity, for either plants or animals, they should be done. But at the same time we shouldn't feel so morose about the reality of the situation of life on this planet where literally everything eats something else, usually in a very brutal manner.
1 reply →