Comment by dr_dshiv
8 hours ago
Would it make the meat industry more ethical if happy drugs were made available to animals? If I had to choose between a meaningful (even if I didn’t know it when living), blissful unnatural life and none at all, I’d choose the former.
It’s the negative affect and suffering (stress, pain, boredom etc) that is the bad part of eating animals.
(I think— I know others have thought more than I on this topic)
It just seems like an easier tech solution might be promising
What I find interesting about this whole discourse is that the lived experience of animals matters to people. At all.
Just a hundred, two hundred years ago we made the Elephant rifle, because a normal gun couldn't bring it down, but it was a fun sport to go out and kill just for the heck of it. No one cared about the animals.
It seems like we are living in an age of suicidal empathy and I'm not sure how we got here.
You're mistaken that nobody cared about animals.
Throughout history there have always been people who were vegan or plant based who cared about animals.
We live in a society which has traditionally silenced those voices. The USA, especially, screams about how killing and stealing is a righteous/earned right. Not exercising that right is leaving much on the table. Americans gotta keep up with the Joneses, and that historically included excess cruelty to animals(this includes "savage" people like blacks and browns).
Lots of religious groups advocate for less animal cruelty and consumption.
> We live in a society which has traditionally silenced those voices. The USA, especially
It's a fascinating point of view, especially since it seems to me that this suicidal empathy originates from the USA. South Korea only recently stopped torturing and eating dogs due to international pressure. Japan still hunts whales. So does Norway. The Chinese couldn't care less, neither does anyone on the African continent. Muslims outright refuse to eat any meat that isn't "halal", which is a short way of saying torturing animals to death. There's this rumor going around the USA that India is full of vegetarians, which gets vehemently denied by Indians each time it gets brought up.
Of course, you can find a bunch of nutjobs talking about all kinds of nonsense in any society, see for example Scientology. But institutionally we didn't care for animals hundred of years ago. Cowboys used spores, which is kinda like using a blunt knife. Horses and elephants were used in wars. Dogs had to stay outside in their little dog house and weren't allowed inside. The list goes on and on.
The problem is that the happy drugs will, in some detectable concentrations, end up in meat.
(A smaller problem is that humans will start using the drugs if the distribution is not tightly controlled.)
I too could, theoretically be thrilled to be drugged to the gills when I'm killed. I however, can consent. Animals cannot. But we know that animals can think. Regardless of debating the ethics of consuming them, this adds an additional ethical quagmire of is it ethically sound to drug non-consenting, thinking species.
Ha yes the blissful experience of drug addiction
solve the land use problem for growing cattle feed if you want it to be maximally ethical.
Not really. Similar to giving drugs to lower class people so they can bear the unbearable life. For an indiviual, sure, life probably feels better in a narrow sense, but is it more ethical? No.