[f3b5]

Not waking up earlier to the fact that the meat section in the supermarket is a product of systemic, gruesome torture of intelligent beings. Like probably many of you who read this, I usually felt a bit guilty when I was confronted with the ugly facts we are all vaguely familiar with. I justified my meat consumption with specieist arguments (humans are so much better than pigs, cows, etc). My wife challenged me to watch at least a little bit of a documentary, and if I still wanted to eat salami, so be it. Afterwards I didn't want to eat salami anymore. I now think that the extreme abuse of animals by the food industry on behalf of ignorant consumers is probably the worst evil of the 21st century. If you disagree, I challenge you - watch 15min and then post your reply: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko

[orange_fritter]

I think the "aha" moment was when I was thinking silently about how great this veggie wrap was, and someone expressed disgust. They said nothing compares to a meatball sub, and I realized that my palate had changed because I used to feel the same way. Like if you don't hork down a big chunk of meat, your meal is incomplete. But deliberate effort to be healthy and moral had changed my taste buds and gut. The sacrifice is not as big as you think. As for me, I will still eat a steak if I really crave it, but I typically feel heavy/slow afterward and it's just not as good as they say.

[jmkr]

A few minutes of skipping around Dominion for me too.

> I now think that the extreme abuse of animals by the food industry on behalf of ignorant consumers is probably the worst evil of the 21st century.

I agree, there's no comparison, billions of land animals a year, trillions including sea life. I can't count that high.

The pain has gotten worse year after year. You watch otherwise smart people give bad arguments, or complete ignorance. To maintain any kind of social life you have to deal with being uncomfortable with those around you.

Hopefully we can have small impactful moments upon other's lives.

[lumb63]

My stock response to assertions that eating meat is cruel: plants feel too. Many species are self-aware every bit as much as animals are. It’s only because wheat and corn don’t have big googly eyes that we feel no sympathy for them. Implicit in the act of consumption is the notion that our lives are worth more than the lives of whatever we eat.

[mahogany]

Even if it's true that plants feel and suffer, the pipeline of plants -> livestock -> food still kills many (an order of magnitude at least) more plants than the direct pipeline of plants -> food, so eating animals still causes more overall suffering.

In that sense, it seems to me that a plant-based diet is still the preferable choice if one wants to reduce unnecessary suffering.

[aussieshibe]

> Many species are self-aware every bit as much as animals are

Do you have any sources you could share which support this claim? A cursory search has turned up nothing approaching convincing evidence.

[drumttocs8]

Plants do exhibit environmental response; plants do not exhibit consciousness.

[sgentle]

I believe this is the strongest version of the argument you're making: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/23/the-intelligen... (prepend archive.is/ to get around the paywall)

It's an admittedly fun argument, but it has flaws that I think make it unsuitable as a strategy for destroying vegetarians with facts and logic. It relies on abstract, black-box constructions of notions like sensation, awareness or intelligence based on analogy and observation, whereas in animals we can also rely on arguments based on equivalent biological structures. The breadth of that construction also has some intriguing but pretty challenging implications: you might also need to accept sentient traffic jams and Kubernetes clusters that feel pain.

Beyond all that, though, I think the major flaw in your reasoning is it treats concepts like awareness or moral worth as binaries, with language like "every bit as much" and "only because". Of course, one reason we don't treat wheat with empathy or offer it moral equivalence is because wheat doesn't look like us, but that's far from the only reason. Wheat is simply a less complex form of life than a fly, and certainly less complex than Google Chrome, neither of which I feel much compunction about killing when they are consuming my resources.

If you're going to accept an incredibly broad definition of awareness, then that definition also needs to be nuanced and gradated or else you end up saying nothing only with more words. You can absolutely define feeling such that grass can feel, but if that's also "every bit as much" as what humans feel then you've arrived at a notion of feeling that's almost tautological and struggles to support any meaningful consequences. We and the grass are also carbon, I suppose... or energy? I'm not sure why it matters. I care about the version of feeling that made me cry at the end of Homeward Bound, and plants don't have that, no matter what you call it.

All these contradictions disappear if you're willing to say that different forms of life have different levels of awareness, and different degrees of moral worth. Intuitively, I care less about the death of an animal than the death of a person, and I care less about the death of a plant than an animal. That exact mapping from being to moral worth is going to be pretty tricky to define, but I think it's pretty hard to argue that animals should have none at all.

If animals have non-zero moral worth, then there is some area between the curves of your enjoyment and their suffering within which it is okay to eat them, and outside of which it isn't. I don't have any desire to tell you what your curves should be, but as a matter of my own observation, I haven't found vegetarian food in general less enjoyable than food with meat in it. There are exceptions, of course, and I still eat meat sometimes, but as a practical matter I found the exchange rate from dining enjoyment to animal wellbeing very favourable. You might too.

[ryankrage77]

Just watched the whole thing. I have never conceived of suffering on such a scale before.

[BowBun]

I can think of worse evils than the animal consumption industry: child sex slave trade, starvation and death of millions, genocide.

I get your point and don't disagree that animal suffering is terrible, but I wish people were more moderate in their language and not so quick to jump to hyperbole. No one can care about everything, and everyone's thing is 'the worst thing'.

[f3b5]

Have you watched at least 15min of the linked documentary? I am asking because I actually chose my language deliberately. I might be ignorant about extremely atrocious evils that happened on a large scale over the last 22 years, but at least to my knowledge and my subjective feeling, the systemic animal torture that is inflicted unto many millions of intelligent beings every day as shown in the documentary Dominion is the worst.

But I don't need people to share my opinion, you are right in that this is an important topic for me. What I just would like to happen is that people realize that eating animal products is evil enough to change their diet.

[gardenhedge]

This is something I am guilty of ignoring. My excuse is protein. How do you get enough?

[harpratap]

Tofu, Tempeh, beans, peas, Fu [1] (found in Japan but you might see local variants of this). If you are living a sedentary lifestyle you are bound to overeat if you want to reach anywhere near recommended protein levels. So it's just inevitable you will want to supplement your food with Protein powders. Soy Protein is a complete protein and much cheaper than Whey or Casein.

[1] - https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%BA%A9

[jcul]

You would be surprised how much protein is in certain vegetables, though most are not "complete" proteins so need to be combined with each other. So just eating a balanced mix of vegetables helps a bit (along with the obvious stuff like beans, nuts, pulses, tofu etc).

[ornornor]

We generally eat too much proteins anyway and they’re not the challenge when quitting animal products.

Beans, tofu, peas all are excellent sources of proteins.

[KMnO4]

Curious, do you still eat meat? And if you do, do you prefer small farm butchers?

[f3b5]

No I'm completely vegan by now (though I was vegetarian for a long time because cheese had a strong hold on me). Regarding small butchers / organic farms: a long time ago, I spent two days at a tiny organic farm that was run by a local politician of a European Greens party. By meat industry standards, this farm was an absolute animal paradise. I helped around the farm, including with slaughtering a pig. My job as the guy from the city was to just herd it into the kill room. The pig seemed intelligent to me, it was confused and didn't want to die. A crew of men dressed in wifebeaters stunned the pig with an electroshocker, lifted it up with a chain, sliced its arteries to let it bleed out, all while cheerfully drinking beer. They made crude remarks while blood and guts was spilling everywhere. Needless to say, there was way more chopping to be done after that. The scene had a surreal quality to me - what had just been alive a moment ago was now dangling in halves in front of me like in a horror movie. The pig probably didn't suffer, but the experience still felt deeply wrong to me. But here's the kicker: even after this close-up slaughter experience I still continued to eat meat for years, because I just was so used to it. Back in the city, in the gleaming supermarket, meat again stopped being something that lived, and was again a yummy product to buy.

Long story short: even the best farm and the best butcher (which are getting exceedingly rare) are still using, abusing, and ultimately killing intelligent beings. This also does something to the people that do the killing: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-50986683

[mixmastamyk]

Age-restricted login required. That's a shame.

[monospaced]

You can also watch it outside of YouTube here: https://watchdominion.org

Download and archive links are provided here: https://www.dominionmovement.com/watch

[high_byte]

you would probably love Cowspiracy and the less gruesome and more wholesome The Game Changers. both on Netflix.