Animal Rights,Meat Consumption and lab grown meat

Apparently it does not taste very good. Another solution that people are talking about is insect meat since you can raise a lot more insects in a smaller space, and they tend to be very nutritious. Though most people (at least in the west) feel icky about eating insects.

Humans are designed to eat both meat and vegetables so it isn't taboo/evil to consume meat. I personally wouldn't eat lab grown meat. Just doesn't feel right to me.

Lamby, All animals are sentient? No. Insects are not sentient. It all depends on the size of the Neurocortex. The ability to 'feel' does not give one the ability to know Self, or personhood. If this were the case, Sociopaths would all be brain dead morons. Emotions are just chemicals mixed with instincts for most animals. Something hurts them or affects their ability to reproduce, they dislike, if it assists, they like. Simple Instinct and reaction. I don't eat domesticated animals due to my own personal Biases. But I'm not against other people eating either cats or dogs, as long as it's not a pet. I'd be pissed if someone killed someone else's pet spider. Pigs are very intelligent yes. But in the same ballrange as dogs. Which are not to the point I would give human right's to due to intellect. But you're right, it's not just Due to intelligence, it's Self Awareness. Personhood in other words. Saying all mammals are more intelligent than All fish or Reptiles is just as preposterous as saying all human's are Good People. So I'll continue to eat based on my ethics as my research and moral code aligns with.

Definition of sentient 1 : responsive to or conscious of sense impressions sentient beings 2 : AWARE 3 : finely sensitive in perception or feeling Sentients IS difficult to define, but most agree it comes down to the ability to understand and avoid danger. Self preservation. Which nearly all animals have (save, perhaps, some oysters, but even some vegans are ok with eating certain types of oysters that are believed to not feel pain). True, not all animals can recognize themselves in mirrors, but it is also true that all animals want to LIVE and that is the base of sentients. They realize they are alive and want to stay alive. Are humans so different as to work based on emotions and instincts? I'd say the only thing that makes a human different from the other animals is our ability to question our own existence. The intelligence of pigs is only recently been investigated, but already its a 1:1 comparison on intelligence. They may not be as willing to do tricks as dogs are, not they are intelligent enough to process the fear of being in a cramped truck on the way to the slaughter house. The higher the intelligence, the high the quality of suffering. This included, that pigs tails are clipped before being shipped to the slaughter house, as they have been known to eat the tails of other pigs out of stress. They also have jumped out of those trucks and tried to jump over the railings of the slaughter house to escape. They are sentient enough to know that death awaits them and aware enough to try and escape. Slaughterhouse workers often have mental and emotional scars due to what they have to do and witness. The process is brutal and nothing like the cutesy little commercials of the farms. Even animals that get the freedom of a farm life (which is about 5% of the meat thats produced) have to one day, in the prime of their lives, endure the suffering of a slaughterhouse. It's because of this that i actually respect people who hunt, as long as they use every part of the animal and it isn't for sport. If you can kill an animal with your bare hands and accept that weight, well then i'd say you deserve that meat. But the truth is if we had to kill our own dinners, most of the world would be vegetarian. And this isn't even touching the ecological side of things. Hilarious that people in California get pissy when someone drinks almond milk because of the drought, then goes home to eat a steak. Cracks me up. I'd apologize for going into a vegan rant, but this thread was bound to have something like this. I know i nor anyone else will not change your eating habits, only you can do that, but i hope that you can take something positive away from this conversation.

The ability to know danger doesn't require intelligence. A fly know's it's in danger when a hand is coming towards it. Few things don't have self preservation, It's instinct. Instinct doesn't require intelligence, at least not to any special degree. everything WANTS to live. again, a cockroach doesn't "want" to die. But there's a difference between wanting to live due to personhood, and The ability to define oneself, and instinct. That's the whole point. Yes they are different, They're different due to the fact they understand their actions, more than "This bad because it hurt me" ,More than instinct. It's why we're having this discussion to begin with, because humanity has personhood, They have Morality. Most animals don't. I already stated pigs are as smart as dogs. I knew this before this discussion, I don't know why you're continuing to speak of it. Animals on the scale of awareness of dogs, evolved to understand danger by the behavior of other animals, Hence why when you are stressed, your dog can be stressed, or when a group of dogs are rowdy, it can cause the same behavior in your own, if not trained out of it. And I already stated I don't mind other people eating dogs. I just don't due to growing up with them, I'd be the same with pigs if I had. I don't eat them for different reasons why I don't eat things like Elephant or dolphin. The latter two, having an argument on where the scale is on their ability to think is. I doubt as many people would be vegetarians as you think. If people had to grow their own food, far less people would eat plants based diets aswell. Because food would be harder to come by. We weren't vegan for the first few hundred thousand years of our existence, if we had to make our own food again, odds are we'd go back to what we were like beforehand. Hunters and Gatherers. California get's pissy over everything let's be honest. I don't mind your being Vegan, I don't mind you wanting more people to be it. But as someone who constantly reads scientific articles, on both psychology, and the workings behind "consciousness", I have found little to believe that 90% of animals, especially the one's we eat, have any level of intellect or in turn, personhood compared to humanity. Infact, I've found the opposite more often than not. It's good to speak with people of differing opinions however, whether your mind is swayed or not, Understanding each other is incredibly important. So have a happy new year.

I'm with Beherit on that one. I'm wary about long term consequences of a drastic diet change. If I replace meat, the replacement need to be nutritious and tasty, and also not being too much pricier than meat. Looks good on paper and I'd be ok with it but I need to be sure.

I'd like to start out with the fact that i'm not vegan, just vegetarian, though i was vegan and plan to go back to that in the future. On the dog issue, i was simply charifying my point that pigs are extremely intelligent, you said 'ball range' and i wanted to make it clear that its not an estimation so to speak. On the "personhood" issue, again, that isn't the point. If animals could look in the mirror and say "that's me" but had no will to live or capability to suffer, i wouldn't mind killing them. But the fact is that they do suffer immensely and it's undoubtedly cruel to cause suffering and harm to a creature for the sole purpose of taste pleasure. By your ethics as you stated, kicking and harming a dog would be alright because the dog isn't self aware? Because according to you they aren't self aware and don't meet your standards for considering its well being. Veganism existed thousands and thousands of years ago. Leonardo Da Vinci himself was a vegan, who detested even the use of beeswax as it was stolen from the bees. “Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds them. We live by the death of others. We are burial places! I have since an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men will look upon the murder of animals as they look upon the murder of man.” Just because the term vegan or vegetarian wasn't around thousands of years ago doesn't mean people didn't forgo meat and animal products for ethical reasons. Pythagoras was another vegan along with Plutarch, both very famous philosophers who were outspoken against eating animals or animal products. I highly doubt that we would go back to being hunters and gathering lol. One, the population is too great to be able to support all of humanity to be hunters and gatherers. Early humans only were able to do it because the animals outnumbered them, but we STILL were able to hunt certain animals like the wooly mammoth to extinction! Early settlers hunted the America buffalo to extinction ffs. So no, that would not be sustainable. Also, through our evolution we began to farm because it's the smarter form of living. Instead of wasting the calories to hunt down a deer and pick some berries, why not just raise a cow and farm some vegetables right next to your home? It would be a step back in evolution to become hunters and gatherers again, we might as well stop using fire and just eat shit raw too. When i said that i was implying that modern people who grew up eating from grocery stores would not have the stomach to cut the throat of a chicken and hang it upside down, or shoot a cow in the head with a nail gun. Not only are animals affected by slaughterhouses, but as i mentioned before humans themselves are suffering from what they have to do to those animals. People have PTSD from those places. You look at a a screaming pig (pigs scream when afraid) and think that that creature isn't suffering? That it isn't frightened? Or the chickens that have been artificially breed so large that their legs break from under them? Living there entire lives in cages that they couldn't move in even if they were capable? Or the male chicks that are deemed worthless and thrown, alive, down a meat grinder to make yummy yummy nugs? Is this all moral because they can't pass the mirror test? By your logic animal cruelty is fine because self awareness means the suffering is non existent? I suppose i don't fully understand your position on this. Ant's, for example, can recognize themselves in the mirror, so are they on the same levels of humans? The majority of animals have the cognition for pain, and i'm not sure how that's not enough for you to see that meat consumption cruel. Might i add that "free ranged" has no legal definition, and therefore is meaningless. Even if it was, to live your life outside just to have your neck slit while your hung upside down doesn't seem much more "cruelty free". Let's go to the classic aliens example. If aliens came to earth and they were much more intellectually superior to us and deemed us the lesser species as you do animals, would farming us be justified?