Richard McDickface

Speciesism? I can’t tell if you’re just a troll at this point so I’m not going to continue this discussion, sorry.

The decision is not between killing a million stalks of wheat or a cow, but between a million stalks of wheat or a cow AND a million stalks of wheat, it’s just that in the latter case the wheat was fed to the cow instead.

I disagree. Everyone who eats meat should be able to reflect on that fact and if you can’t defend your behavior in a debate, maybe you should change it.

What does the cow eat?

He goes to elite universities and interviews people his age. Where the hell do you think he should go to find more equal debate partners? Maybe he just has the better arguments?

That is true, but there are statistical trends that you can observe in scientific studies. How else would you rate how healthy something is? Just because some person is allergic to nuts doesn’t mean they’re not generally a healthy snack.

How about accepting that your argument was wrong? Your first paragraph had nothing to do with it. I agree with your first paragraph, but we must still ask the question whether it is moral or not to kill animals for food even if they didn’t suffer. It’s not clear and people have different opinions on it and that’s okay. In any way, a lot would have to change compared to the status quo.

I’m not humanizing animals. I just acknowledge the fact that they are sentient beings that are capable of feeling pain, physically and emotionally. That enjoy certain things and dislike other things. Is it okay to torture a dog because wild dogs get into fights where they get hurt terribly?

Of course animals in nature are killed brutally, but so are humans. It’s totally natural for bears to kill humans. Does that mean we can also kill humans? See how this doesn’t mean anything for the question whether it’s immoral to kill animals or not? I wouldn’t even necessarily disagree that it can be morally okay to kill an animal, given certain circumstances. The argument “in nature, animals are killed brutally” just has absolutely no implications for human ethics. Animals and “nature” have no concept of morality. Humans do.

From a knowledge standpoint, I simply don’t know enough about nutrition to understand whether or not humans can be ‘maximally healthy’ on a vegetarian or vegan or pescatarian or w/e diet.

According to science, a whole-food, plant-based diet is basically the healthiest way to eat. You would need to supplement vitamin B12, but that’s it (and it’s very easy to do that). So from a health perspective, there is really no point against a vegan diet.

If you are interested in the morality of meat / veganism I highly recommend the debate videos by Ed Winters on Youtube where he talks to people about why they’re not vegan and it’s very respectful and also insightful. Like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdqAyFhWL2s (some are way more controversial though, this guy is already quite “vegan-positive”, still an interesting discussion)

I hope we will. Also because it might mean that as a society we’ll have met human needs enough to have capacity to address animals’ needs as well.

I’m putting a lot of hope into synthetic meat. It would come with all the benefits of real meat but without all the downsides like animal suffering, climate and environmental cost, overuse of antibiotics, harmful hormones etc. I guess if synthetic meat gets cheap enough, it will at some point be the norm, and eating real animal flesh will maybe become a weird delicacy for the rich.

This is pathetic.

I used to eat meat and love it, then I learned about how animals are treated in the meat industry and stopped. I probably would have been totally okay with looking at this picture about 10 years ago. Now looking at it makes me think of the poor sentient being that probably went through a life that was hell just to get cut up into pieces and be sold in a grocery store and it makes me a bit sick. We should really stop and take a step back and think about whether what we do to animals is right. Imagine someone would raise a dog confined in a tiny space, never letting them see the daylight, then after about 2 years cut them into pieces like that. You wouldn’t like that, would you?