Gae Bolga Wrote:There's no need to defend the morality of your food purchases with me, lol.You didn't respond to my argument. You said that rich people in Africa being free to export food to people in other countries is to be blamed for poorer people not being able to afford buying food, right? I said that, by that logic, the fact that Apple is free to export its computers to people in other countries is somehow to be blamed for poor people in America not being able to afford computers.
By importing food from poorer countries, we are giving money to rich people there, and hopefully some of that money will trickle down to the poor people there.
Gae Bolga Wrote:We've got guys trying goats and sheep though.Well, that's obviously a bad idea, since goats and sheep take about 5 times as much food to grow as fast as cows do. That's the reason their milk is so expensive.
Gae Bolga Wrote:If their purchasing power is greater than some hungry persons, then it actually wouldn't matter whether or not a person could eat whatever they're feeding their livestock. That's the free market for you.I didn't say the free market was perfect. Capitalism is full of flaws. But government restricting economic freedoms generally leads to even worse results.
Even so, I am not sure whether blaming the free market here is fair, since animal agriculture, especially the milk industry, tends to be heavily subsidized.
Gae Bolga Wrote:I can tell you with certainty that fish feel pain. Anesthetizing them reduces that..but, more importantly, it makes them just that much easier to handle. That saves you time, and time is money.OK, let's see if we can agree on a few things:
1. If you don't care to study the issues, you shouldn't claim neuroscientists have been wrong for centuries that beheading is painless, you shouldn't claim that my biology textbook is wrong in saying that CO2 poisoning is exceptionally painful, and you shouldn't contradict most of the neuroscientists and ethologists who have studied this issue by claiming that fish feel pain.
2. If you are proposing some authoritarian plan that involves exploiting the animals, even if that's just increasing the subsidies, you need to consider the interests of both humans and those animals. If you don't, you are guilty of speciesism.
3. The quality of life matters more than the quantity of it.