this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2026
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Factory farming is the problem, not animal husbandry. If the whole world went vegan, do you think the vegetables we eat would not be altered to better serve yield rather than quality? Do you think pesticides would not be used in staggering levels? Do you think vegetables aren't alive so it's okay to eat them? If it doesn't have a face, it's cool to eat? Life is sustained by consuming other life, the world over. I agree that industrial farming is disgusting and cruel, but not just to animals.
Killing animals for taste pleasure is morally wrong, weather it happens in a factory farm or on that mythical uncles farm that tottaly loves and pets his animals to death.
And yes, it's ok to kill plants because they do not feel pain. They can't feel pain because they lack a nervous system to do so as well as an evolutionary reason for pain to exist.
And even if plants feel pain, it takes MUCH more plants to feed animals to then feed humans.
It isn't morally wrong, it goes against your morals maybe, but that doesn't make it wrong. We are allowed to disagree and you are free to choose the diet you prefer, as are the rest of us.
Nah, it's morally wrong and if you are honest you will actually agree. Let me explain:
Let's set a moral baseline that we both agree with. Shooting a random person that has done no harm to anyone in the head without their explicit consent is morally bad, yes?
Now, what is different about, say, a pig that makes it less than morally bad to kill the pig? If we then apply that difference to that random human again, is it now less than morally bad to kill them?
The honest answer (and one that I can at least accept) is: there is no such difference.
What is your answer?
The pig is food. I will eat the pig. I won't eat the human. The pig isn't indiscriminately murdered, it is slaughtered for food. We as a society still think it is morally right to kill someone convicted of a crime in some places. While I don't agree with that, those states do. If morals can be grey, it's because they are. Morality is a human construct. What's moral today can be immoral tomorrow.
So if someone declares you food, is it now moral for them to slit your throat and butcher you?
the "name the trait" argument is so well known vegans just call it "ntt". they're not here in good faith; they think they have a gotcha.
"what is different about a pig that makes it less than morally bad to kill the pig?"
oh, the classic rhetorical trap of "name the trait" which always devolves into a no-true-scotsman. on its face it's purely a spectrum fallacy. the inability to identify a singular trait or even a set of traits that differentiate humans from pigs doesn't change the fact that they are fundamentally different.
please, no one fall for this line of discussion. it's just an exercise in shaming and time-wasting.
"I can't answer this, so it must be a trick."
Ok then.
most of the plants fed to animals are parts of plants we can't or won't eat. a great example is soy: we run over 4/5 of the global crop through an oil press and extract what we want, and feed the leftover plant matter to animals. no more plants are harmed in this process, and we conserve resources by getting food back from the animals.
you can't prove this
what a gish gallop. you sure you didn't have any more righteous claims too stack in?
I was directly adressing the points brought up by the other person. What did you contribute?
no one does that, anyway. but even if they did, what is wrong with it? eating animals is fine.
Farming is already optimized for yield.
Not to the levels you can expect if it is all industrialized. You are correct though. A strawberry from 50 years ago tastes a million times better than the monstrosities we buy today as a quick example.
Plants don't have nervous systems, which appear to be what enables suffering
The smell of cut grass is the grass warning other grass that doom is upon them. Plants communicate in ways we can't understand in the same way as they don't make noise. They don't like being harvested anymore than an animal does.
And how do you suppose that warning response leads to qualia?
Yes?!
The band?
Did you mean to say plants instead of animals, or...?
Yep, sure did. Thanks for the correction
Trust me, the more explorations I do on the nature of consciousness, the more I wrestle with all of that.
I don’t believe that it is inherently wrong to kill in order to eat. But as a species we don’t. Which isn’t to say there aren’t members of our species who very much do still need to kill to eat.
But I don’t need to kill to eat, and I’ve outsourced that killing so it feels like more of an abstraction than it is. I can at the very least acknowledge this.
Which I think is almost worse... think about concentration/extermination camps (which I think our animal industry is basically)
And it's perfectly healthy to be vegan (maybe even more healthy at this point when done right, than meat consumption).
My main reason though for that is less moral than just wanting to be less wasteful, i.e. meat is just inefficient. I predict that we at some point will move past meat consumption, it's just not necessary, even when considering taste...