News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
I don’t get what’s so horrifying about eating dogs that wouldn’t be just as horrifying when applied to other animals. Why can’t we love other animals just as much as we love dogs?
I agree with you on principle. However, it shouldn't surprise you that people draw a distinction since dogs are often pets and people develop strong emotional bonds with them, whereas very few people have interacted with pigs or cows.
It doesn’t surprise me, but it does disappoint me. You’d think people would apply the logic they use for dogs to other animals as well, or at least see the hypocrisy.
I am truly and honestly trying to wrap my head around why I feel (as a meat eater) that cows and chickens are okay to eat, but not dogs or cats. For me, I think It's part social conditioning, part perceived intelligence of the animals, part eating habits of the animals themselves (dogs and cats are predators, cows and chickens are prey; pretty consistently, humans will eat the animals that don't eat meat).
As with very many things in humans, the logic doesn't match the emotional decision. I personally don't think there is anything morally wrong with eating meat and I understand that if I'm okay with eating cows, I should also be okay with people eating dogs. But I just can't seem to change that opinion.
What I absolutely can't support is the mistreatment of animals in farming. At the very least, we can respect their lives and respect the things they provide us when we kill them.
I've worked with pigs on an organic farm, and I'm convinced that if people in general spent any amount of time with a happy, relaxed pig, they'd swear off pork altogether. Pigs are extremely smart and sociable, and even have a sense of humor.
That being said, I'm with you, it's the unnecessary suffering that I can't abide. And it's not even a matter of intelligence; chickens are pretty dumb (though they're a lot smarter than people credit them for), and I wouldn't want to see one suffer either. They're sensitive animals all the same, as any basic interaction quickly illustrates. The idea that it's fine to torment an animal because they're dumb is borderline inhuman to me.
i respect your ability to self-reflect and assess yourself rationally and logically. It’s fine to feel the way you do, as long as you’re aware that your choices may not be rooted in inherent rationality or morality of an action.
Hypocrisy might be the most human trait out of all of them.
Should we love mesofauna and other invertebrates as much too? Because plenty of those are killed in the process of growing vegan food.
Feeding animals plants is responsible for 3/4 of the agricultural land. The goal of veganism is to reduce suffering as much as possible. There is no illusion of living on earth with zero impact, the goal is a minimize the impact. We could reduce the land use to 1/4 with a plant based diet. And obviously stop the intentional killing and abusing of sentient beings.
Then don't eat animals you have to feed. If you really want to reduce animal suffering as much as possible, then you should try to survive via hunting and fishing as much as possible.
In fact, if you consider that a wild-caught fish was likely about to kill other fish, then catching a fish may be as morally necessary as flipping a switch on a runaway trolley.
Why is it that you insist on killing others? My plant based diet is cheaper, healthier and creates less suffering. Do you think everyone could or should just kill wild animals when they don't need to? https://xkcd.com/1338/
The fish has no alternative and if you catch one you steal it without the need for it from other animals. Are you trying to make lions vegans? We have options, we have moral agency.
Killing animals is inevitable regardless of diet. Your plant based diet requires growing crops, but tilling soil and harvesting plants kills millions or billions of invertebrates. They are so small that they escape everyone's attention, yet they are still animals killed to make your food.
Fishing and hunting kills animals too, of course. But it does not require literally uprooting an ecosystem.
Finally, a trolley has no moral agency either. That doesn't mean nobody should interfere with it, or even destroy it if it threatens enough other lives.
Are you a concern troll or do just don't know that we could reduce with a plant based diet the land use, the tiling of soil and the killing of those billions invertebrates? The intentional killing of 90 billion land animals and trillions of fish aside
Sure, you could reduce land use for farm raised animals.
But I'm not talking about eating those, I'm talking about eating wild caught animals. Unlike vegetables, wild caught animals require no land use at all.
Alright, abolish animal farming then. All wild animals in the world would last less than 2 months. We don't have to kill others.
Animal farming isn't going to be abolished in my lifetime. And I can't make decisions for everyone.
So the relevant question is what I should do, personally, to reduce my personal impact. A purely vegan diet is not the answer.
Elaborate please?
Well, since farming vegetables kills more animals than killing a wild fish, it makes sense to include wild fish in my diet.
A purely fish based diet is not the answer. It destroys the hole ecosystem.
So neither pure fish based nor pure plant based, but rather a combination of the two. Also one could occasionally eat other wild animals obtained via hunting, like deer.
Or dog, to stay on topic. https://www.elwooddogmeat.com/meet-the-dogs
Dog meat is farmed. The whole point is to avoid farmed food when possible, whether it's plant or animal.
Right, but you got to acknowledge that dogs and cats are a far more available in cities. Just because you have the privilege of easy to kill fish you can not blame others for killing wild dogs and cats. Cats kill so much birds, it is much better for the environment to kill them instead of fish.
People do kill feral dogs and cats. Even PETA does this. Morally, they should be eaten afterwards.
A wild fish can kill other animals every day. Cats do kill a lot of birds, but not quite at the same rate since they can also subsist by scavenging.
So while it's moral to kill and eat feral cats, wild fish are preferred. Even if you have to pay someone to catch them.
So you are all the way vegan but jump from time to time in a lake and grab some fish? Is this how you imagine the world will progress?
I don't need to jump in a lake for the same reason I don't need to operate a farm. It is equally moral if others do it for me, so I buy wild fish and vegetables from my grocery just like most people.
Also, pure veganism isn't necessary. For example, honey is not vegan but producing honey likely kills fewer animals than producing almonds. Beekeeping might even be a net positive given the benefits to the ecosystem at large
Ok, so you only eat the not farmed grocery shop fish and besides that you live vegan from the farmed grocery vegetables?
I think that is the best way to avoid unnecessary animal deaths (honey is also on that list).
It is something I often consider when shopping, but I don't always try to minimize unnecessary animal deaths. Just as I generally try to avoid big box stores and products made in certain countries, but sometimes buy those things anyway.
Why do I make exceptions? Because I don't believe that every single thing I do needs to be aimed at improving the world. It is simply an aspiration.
Maybe you would more of a impact on others if you decide to stop support the killing. I do shitpost sometimes, it be like that. But I also try to inform others. The point is not that you will change the world alone, but maybe convince others. If avoiding unnecessary deaths is your aspiration you can be a example to others.
What makes you think I'm shitposting?
I am perfectly serious when I say that I believe veganism is incompatible with the stated goal of reducing animal deaths.
And I am serious when I say that I have increased my intake of wild fish to support that goal, even though it is not my only goal.
To me, the unspoken goal of veganism is to protect appealing animals at the expense of unappealing animals. That is why they show pictures of farmed cows, but not flooded rice fields. I can't ever get behind that goal.
If there is some event that puts us all back to pre industrial times it will work.
A plant based diet would feed with the amount we grow 10 billion right now. How many would a forage and hunting society sustain? To give you a idea of the proportions: https://xkcd.com/1338/
I'm not sure why you linked me to a chart of mammals. Hunting mammals may be a good way to feed a small population, but as you point out it's not feasible for the entire world.
Three fourths of all animal biomass is aquatic (fish, crustaceans, and mollusks), together accounting for 30-40 times more biomass than humans. Mollusks are the smallest component, but they still have more biomass than all the mammals in your link put together. Fish by themselves account for seven times as much biomass as all animal livestock put together. And crustaceans have even more combined biomass than fish.
I'm not even suggesting that people eat only fish. Rather, by including some fish in our diet we would reduce our reliance on farm-grown vegetables.
Globally, humans currently eat an average of 20 kg of fish/crustaceans/molluscs per year. That might be a bit too much, but I have no doubt that we could sustainably eat 10-15 kg per year.
this is the kind of stuff that screams shitpost :) you do you.
Only if you assume that farm grown vegetables are more moral than any other food.
It's repeated so often that nobody even questions it. People assume you're joking if you don't take it for granted.
But if you think about it, the assumption does not hold up. Farms are not benign, no matter what they produce.
Then from that perspective, you’d be fine with people eating dogs right
I would never eat dogs. I like dogs.
More generally, I think it's perfectly ok to have emotions, and I think it's ok to make distinctions between those who I'm emotionally attached to and those who I'm not emotionally attached to.
For example, I have houseplants that I nurture and I don't want to see die, but I don't really care if see some other plant of dying in the wild.
On Mother's Day, do you give every Mom a present or just your own Mom?
So you admit that you, and everyone else who supports the killing of animals except a particular species, purely because you personally think that particular species is ‘cute’, are being irrational and only bigoted against the practice because you like that particular species. Good to know.
Also, that ‘Mother’s Day’ example is beyond ridiculous. I love my own mom above all else, of course, but I wouldn’t be apathetic to other moms out there being slaughtered.
Well, there are children dying in parts of the world. Is it morally ok to give your children birthday gifts, take them to movies, and help them pay for college, when that money could be used to save the life of a distant child?
Noted vegans like Peter Singer argue that it's not ok. If a distant child's life is at risk, then, you must prioritize all your gifts towards helping the distant child. He uses the same kind of reasoning for his vegan arguments: a child is equivalent to a child just as a dog is equivalent to a pig.
I think that's ridiculous. "Irrational" or not, humans will always prioritize those close to them, whether their own children over others or their own pet over random animals.
I totally understand valuing your own pet over random animals (I would too) but those dogs in Korea aren’t your pets; they’re random animals that you have no association with.
Fair enough.
I would never eat a dog, but it's not my place to tell Koreans what to do.
Well, then I guess we both agree with each other.