(January 19, 2014 at 9:34 am)jg2014 Wrote:(January 19, 2014 at 8:55 am)Bad Wolf Wrote: Sure, I value suffering, but do animals I eat suffer?
And have you thought through your plan for when everyone stops eating meat? What happens to all of the animals? Don't tell me you're one of those idiot activists who go around the country setting animals free. We are losing all of our Water Voles because some idiot released American Mink from their farms.
Hi Bad Wolf,
I'm always amazed how meat eaters will suddenly devalue the cognitive abilities of animals when their meat eating is challenged. Here's an interesting study which details the effect. http://www2.psy.uq.edu.au/~uqbbast1/Bast...0press.pdf
Now, can animals suffer? Yes, animals have a range of cognitive abilities that are suggestive of consciousness. This includes associative/non-elemental learning and episodic-like memory, the ability to remember the "what, where and when" of an event. This suggest animals such as mice can create new representations of the world in novel combinations, binding together different sensory modalities in the same way that consciousness binds together our experiences. Animals can feel pain, and feel emotion in response to that pain that affects their ability to learn in much the same way as in humans.
They also show signs of being able to be depressed, for example when a rodent pup is forcibly separated from the mother. These animals show a reduced performance in a forced swim test, ie they stop trying to tread water and escape from a tank of water and instead enter a state of despair. Another way of inducing depression in animals is the chronic mild stress model that involves the exposure of animals to a series of mild and unpredictable stressors and results in long lasting changes of behavioural and neurological function that can be reversed with antidepressants, just like in humans.
The next question is do farmed animals undergo painful experiences? Yes they do, take for instance the cow, forced to be almost continuously pregnant to produce milk. After just a day, her young is forcibly removed. Overfed to produce as much milk as possible, the mechanical suckling cause infections in her udders. Most dairy cows only live a five or six years, when they have a natural life expectancy is around 25 years. Why do you think this is? They have a short brutal life, and when there exhausted bodies stop producing large amounts of milk they are killed.
And how are dairy cows and beef cows killed? Usually a capacitive bolt is used to induce a state of unconsciousness before having their throat slit. However studies show this is frequently not effective, with 8% of cattle(15% for young bulls) showing signs of consciousness http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...4007001544 The fact is eating meat is cruel, and causes horrible suffering. An even if you could ensure a pain free life, they are still conscious beings whose life would be brutally cut short.
Your last point, would we do otherwise? The current animal population would be allowed to live out the rest of their lives in a safe environment, and the land would be allowed to return to being forests etc that could support a biodiverse population of wild animals and plants.
How does anything that you said matter in any way? Answer: It doesn't. The fact that animals have cognitive abilities, feel pain, or what ever else doesn't matter at all.
Now I don't advocate unnecessary pain or unethical treatment of them but they are food and they must die. Once they are in my belly all the pain and suffering is gone and is replaced by joy and a feeling of fullness.
They joined the great recycling process that all life is a part of. All life on this planet dies and is recycled into something else. We just decide when they get recycled.
