Most people in animal husbandry would argue that artificial insemination is better for the health of the animals involved, for both the cow and the bull. Animals don't really follow the concept of consent, and the cow or bull could get seriously injured, or worse, otherwise.
Though the argument could easily be made that it would be better not to breed cows at all, and that would be the best health outcome.
Yes, as a vegan, my stance is we should stop breeding cows.
By the way, I've heard the argument "oh, it's better for the health of the animal to do ... whatever" in quite a few contexts that I think are just plain wrong. Such as, for example, farrowing crates. Apparently it's "better" for the sow and her babies if she is stuck in a crate so small she can't even turn around. I don't buy that farrowing crates are good for pigs and I don't buy that artificial insemination is good for cows either.
Hey we're not better people, we just have better habits. Nothing intrinsic. I encourage you to try and reduce your animal consumption. I'd learned about farmed animal suffering years before, and when I went vegetarian it was a weight off my shoulders that I hadn't even realized was there.
I don't think you do, but I think it's a contradiction to be sure. I'll say that I think it's fine to eat animals, but also I think it's not okay to have sex with them, and somewhere in between those two beliefs is artificial insemination of pigs and in practical terms that's a practice that just makes me shrug, so I suppose that my belief that it's not okay to have sex with animals is weaker than my belief that it's fine to eat them.
You have to take up a finger-wagging "how dare you" stance and strawman my argument because you can't offer any coherent defense of your actions
I'd tell you to watch Dominion, but you clearly have no interest in examining the reality behind your decisions
Honestly if you'd just said "Yes, I know my decision to eat meat is predicated on horrific suffering on an industrial scale, but I don't care" I'd have at least a modicum of respect for you for acknowledging the choice you're making rather than acting like other people are beyond the pale for bringing it up
Honestly if you'd just said "Yes, I know my decision to eat meat is predicated on horrific suffering on an industrial scale, but I don't care" I'd have at least a modicum of respect for you for acknowledging the choice you're making rather than acting like other people are beyond the pale for bringing it up
oh my god you fucking pieces of shit can't get it through your head that not everyone who doesn't like you isnt the same copy paste reactionary. Get a grip and get a life.
yes, you do. Your diet requires humans to breed animals on factory farms: collecting semen from male animals and inseminating female animals. Those actions are mechanically the exact same thing as people committing the crime of bestiality. This is why most bestiality laws (and animal cruelty laws, for that matter) read something like "you can't fuck or mutilate animals, unless it's for a farming purpose".
This is why most bestiality laws (and animal cruelty laws, for that matter) read something like "you can't fuck or mutilate animals, unless it's for a farming purpose".
Well OBVIOUSLY that doesn't count because flails arms wildly
Getting sexual gratification from an act is not the crime here lol. Is this protestant brainworms or something? If now on starting tomorrow via some magical means, all humans started orgasming after biting into a steak, would it then now suddenly be morally wrong to consume steak?
I would argue there is a distinction between the two because bestiality is performing these actions for sexual gratification. Your overall point I do agree with, that the way we interact with animals in factory farms is sexual violence, but it is a different sort
Sure and that's how the law categorizes it: your "purpose" when committing the act is what matters. I personally think the particular categorization of different purposes (so that economic reward is valid, gustatory sensual pleasure is valid, and sexual/sensual or sadistic pleasure is not) is arbitrary in a nakedly self-serving way. I have never seen any moral reasoning that one specific kind of sensory pleasure should justify sexual contact with animals but another should not; carnists usually fall back to arguments that eating animals is one way to satisfy a physical need. (Such arguments are of course inadequate to explain harm done simply to make food taste better, like restricting animal movement or gavage). In general we do give weight to purposes when people commit acts that they thought were good, or did not expect to result in negative consequences, so in theory intention is a valid thing to consider.
I personally reject the "we didn't explicitly want this subset of results, but we took this action knowing full well it was going to cause these results" liberal apologia that we see for military collateral damage and such.
I don't think all of this is wrong, but there's a blending between discussing concepts and actual practice. "Is it wrong to harm animals for pleasure?" is a useful question, but separate from "is it wrong to fuck animals for sexual pleasure?" and both of these are distinct from "can certain kinds of pleasure justify harm generally?" I don't think you're necessarily wrong to put them together because you are making a good point about complicity in atrocity, but it is not the kind of conversation I want to have.
mhm. all reasonably different questions. I hew consequentialist, so I don't really see why one's state of mind (anticipating gustatory pleasure or experiencing sexual pleasure) while fucking the animal makes a moral difference. I think that the distinction you see between the first two questions is largely informed by custom: in pre-modern times a function of what was "normal", and today a byproduct of how industrial agriculture sanitizes the process of raising animals for food to give us neat blocks of commodity on the grocery store shelf.
Tangential but you might find Why I'm Not a Negative Utilitarian interesting. I was gonna write something about utilitarian view of pleasure types but it's not really important.
Good luck in the posting war against anti-intellectualism. Honestly I'm kind of surprised by the comments here. Since the issue affects almost nobody directly I feel like everybody should be able to dispassionately debate-bro about it even though it's taboo.
Honestly could apply to the majority of comments in this thread. People here have seriously lost touch with reality with some of the arguments in here. Reading this makes me want to never comment on general hexbear again. No one should seriously debate what Peter Singer says. He's been a crank for longer than I've been alive.
For myself, I think, where else would I be corrected? If I'm really up in the air with my thoughts, I'd appreciate and hope comrades could correct or work with me to educate and change my beliefs.
Genuinely curious, how do vegans think of indigenous diets and their consumption of animals? Many of the critiques I see here apply to industrial consumption of meat.
And how would you respond to the argument that vegans are propagating an unscientific belief in the supercession of nature by humans in a way similar to Christian dominionists, that sees us as unique actors capable of transcending a mutual relationship with nature whereas our inferiors (all other animals that eat animals) are incapable of moral action?
Also I've heard people argue that consuming plants also causes them distress and should be avoided. Would you reply to that in any way or is it silly?
Not here to argue, genuinely just want to know how vegans think about these questions. If you want.
The plants thing is entirely silly and based off a headline that says "grass screams when you cut it" and people took that literally. There's a big difference between "releases chemicals when disturbed" and "exists as a being with ganglia, nerves, a functioning brain, and everything else we understand to facilitate the experience of suffering". The ions in my phone battery vibrate when its charging, but I don't say that its excited.
I've seen vegans disagree on the matter of indigenous diets. I'm not sure what most agree on, but I can say vegans are way more focused on ending animal-eating in the context of industrialized society.
Not a vegan but we crossed that bridge the moment agriculture was invented. As for animals incapable of moral actions... I have yet to see a vegan seriously propose the end of natural predation. You're fighting ghosts or I'm misunderstanding.
You can check the r/vegan threads from when that was making the rounds. Plants don't feel pain. Even if they did, you'd cause more beings pain eating meat cause animals eat plants.
I have yet to see a vegan seriously propose the end of natural predation
This is what they were saying, humans eating animals is natural predation, or at least could be in a deindustrial setting, like wolves eating deer or whatever. Vegans, they were suggesting, believe in a very Eurocentric/Christian way that humans aren't animals when our engagement with them as predators is as natural as predators eating us. As long as you minimize the industrialized suffering, that is, they were envisioning small holder communal farming and hunting as their counterexample.
We won't "return to nature" that would be fascist. Humans will not eat "natural" food. Humans eat industrial food. Thinking "but what if they wouldn't" is fictional.
I think you can agree to the idea that humans are not superior to animals in any meaningful capacity and that, like other animals, have their own novel tendencies (like the ability to create food which has no animal involvement, as some worker ants like those of Harpegnathos saltator can turn into queen ants when there is none can be a novel tendency)
Indigenous people get trotted put in defense against veganism all the time. The defense treats indigeneity like some kind of monolith, it's very off-putting.
Indigenous people in the US are vegan more often than white people, same with most BIPOC people. I would recommend asking a vegan indigenous person these questions, or even just imagine yourself doing so, and consider whether it comes across as stereotyping.
Anyways, vegans are generally not focused on going after indigenous diets. They're focused on the vast majority of people who consume animal products because they were simply socialized to do so and never had to question it growing up, but have no sacred attachment to their sloppy joes or slightly more durable shoes or whatever. It's just food or products consumed out of habit and folks pitch an absolute fit when you point out that, say, it's a contradiction to say you're an animal lover because you love your pets but you go absolutely apeshit on someone that asks you to not eat or otherwise consume (entirely as a luxury, a form of entertainment) pigs that are just as smart and cuddly.
Industrialized agriculture produces sufficient vegan food such that animal products are no longer necessary dietarily. Same for materials and other animal products. The question is whether it continues to be acceptable to harm animals because the products have entertainment value.
I think for most people the answer is pretty obviously no, but they reeeeaally don't want to self-crit, so they fight for a while first.
Yeah it does kinda seem like weaponizing indigenous experiences to defend a boutique consumer choice. I think he aspires to hunter-gathering or considers it to be the superior way for humans to live, which I think contributes to trying this approach.
He also said he would starve to death if the revolution happened and meat was abolished. I guess vegetables are really that bad to some people.
plants can suffer but it's not an argument against veganism since every animal also eats plants, you are killing more plants (by like 10-100x) by eating meat
Factory farming has not been around as long as homo sapiens. Hell, animal husbandry and domestication of animals has only been around for at most 15000 years. Sure we've been eating meat for millions of years, but aside from some edge cases (arctic peoples are the first example that comes to mind) meat made up very little of the average diet.
If you're still driving predators off their kills so you can scavenge some meat or persistence hunting antelope then you can say you're doing the same thing that we've been doing since before we were homo sapiens sure, but I would argue even the modern practice of raising animals as opposed to hunting drastically alters the amount of animal products we consume.
Apologies for the rambling post but early hominid diets is something that interests me deeply
I'm also someone who isn't vegan (yet) but fully admit they're basically always right
it's been over a decade, and maybe the laws were changed in response, but i remember some news story about specifically necrobestiality not being illegal in several US states.
![[CW: bestiality] Professional "moral philosopher" ponders whether it's OK to sexually assault animals, featuring AI art](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/f26b2dce-7254-4537-acd1-5de623b591e0.png){kind=link}
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Most people in animal husbandry would argue that artificial insemination is better for the health of the animals involved, for both the cow and the bull. Animals don't really follow the concept of consent, and the cow or bull could get seriously injured, or worse, otherwise.
Though the argument could easily be made that it would be better not to breed cows at all, and that would be the best health outcome.
Yes, as a vegan, my stance is we should stop breeding cows.
By the way, I've heard the argument "oh, it's better for the health of the animal to do ... whatever" in quite a few contexts that I think are just plain wrong. Such as, for example, farrowing crates. Apparently it's "better" for the sow and her babies if she is stuck in a crate so small she can't even turn around. I don't buy that farrowing crates are good for pigs and I don't buy that artificial insemination is good for cows either.
Always have admitted vegans are correct and much better people than I am
Hey we're not better people, we just have better habits. Nothing intrinsic. I encourage you to try and reduce your animal consumption. I'd learned about farmed animal suffering years before, and when I went vegetarian it was a weight off my shoulders that I hadn't even realized was there.
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I will but only if the parent commenter I replied to also moves their self flagellation from here with me
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huh what the hell does this bullshit have to do with anything
so carnists also condone bestiality?
what the fuck
What fucking solar system are you living in
Functionally, yes. Do you know how the beef industry keeps getting more cows?
what the actual fuck is wrong with you
god yall are fucking gahhhh
WHAT THE FUCK
hexbear is great but this is a very bad moment from them
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so that means I fucking support this weirdo who wants to fuck animals? What the fuck does this have to do with this?
fucking weirdos
I don't think you do, but I think it's a contradiction to be sure. I'll say that I think it's fine to eat animals, but also I think it's not okay to have sex with them, and somewhere in between those two beliefs is artificial insemination of pigs and in practical terms that's a practice that just makes me shrug, so I suppose that my belief that it's not okay to have sex with animals is weaker than my belief that it's fine to eat them.
i have only ever heard vegans extend the definition of bestiality to include actions that are not for the sexual gratification of the person.
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Yes, how dare I point out the material realities that make your consumption choices possible
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You have to take up a finger-wagging "how dare you" stance and strawman my argument because you can't offer any coherent defense of your actions
I'd tell you to watch Dominion, but you clearly have no interest in examining the reality behind your decisions
Honestly if you'd just said "Yes, I know my decision to eat meat is predicated on horrific suffering on an industrial scale, but I don't care" I'd have at least a modicum of respect for you for acknowledging the choice you're making rather than acting like other people are beyond the pale for bringing it up
oh shut the fuck up you nerd
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/
Hi I eat meat but yo calm down
yes, you do. Your diet requires humans to breed animals on factory farms: collecting semen from male animals and inseminating female animals. Those actions are mechanically the exact same thing as people committing the crime of bestiality. This is why most bestiality laws (and animal cruelty laws, for that matter) read something like "you can't fuck or mutilate animals, unless it's for a farming purpose".
Don't eat em, don't fuck em.
Well OBVIOUSLY that doesn't count because flails arms wildly
i don't get sexual gratification from my food
Carnists stop misrepresenting our arguments challenge (rating: impossible)
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Carnists are werechuds and vegans are their full moon
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Getting sexual gratification from an act is not the crime here lol. Is this protestant brainworms or something? If now on starting tomorrow via some magical means, all humans started orgasming after biting into a steak, would it then now suddenly be morally wrong to consume steak?
no it's the common usage of "bestiality." outside of vegan standard english i guess.
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Find a better argument other than "Torturing and exploiting animals is okay as long as you're not horny while doing it"
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I would argue there is a distinction between the two because bestiality is performing these actions for sexual gratification. Your overall point I do agree with, that the way we interact with animals in factory farms is sexual violence, but it is a different sort
Sure and that's how the law categorizes it: your "purpose" when committing the act is what matters. I personally think the particular categorization of different purposes (so that economic reward is valid, gustatory sensual pleasure is valid, and sexual/sensual or sadistic pleasure is not) is arbitrary in a nakedly self-serving way. I have never seen any moral reasoning that one specific kind of sensory pleasure should justify sexual contact with animals but another should not; carnists usually fall back to arguments that eating animals is one way to satisfy a physical need. (Such arguments are of course inadequate to explain harm done simply to make food taste better, like restricting animal movement or gavage). In general we do give weight to purposes when people commit acts that they thought were good, or did not expect to result in negative consequences, so in theory intention is a valid thing to consider.
I personally reject the "we didn't explicitly want this subset of results, but we took this action knowing full well it was going to cause these results" liberal apologia that we see for military collateral damage and such.
I don't think all of this is wrong, but there's a blending between discussing concepts and actual practice. "Is it wrong to harm animals for pleasure?" is a useful question, but separate from "is it wrong to fuck animals for sexual pleasure?" and both of these are distinct from "can certain kinds of pleasure justify harm generally?" I don't think you're necessarily wrong to put them together because you are making a good point about complicity in atrocity, but it is not the kind of conversation I want to have.
mhm. all reasonably different questions. I hew consequentialist, so I don't really see why one's state of mind (anticipating gustatory pleasure or experiencing sexual pleasure) while fucking the animal makes a moral difference. I think that the distinction you see between the first two questions is largely informed by custom: in pre-modern times a function of what was "normal", and today a byproduct of how industrial agriculture sanitizes the process of raising animals for food to give us neat blocks of commodity on the grocery store shelf.
Tangential but you might find Why I'm Not a Negative Utilitarian interesting. I was gonna write something about utilitarian view of pleasure types but it's not really important.
Good luck in the posting war against anti-intellectualism. Honestly I'm kind of surprised by the comments here. Since the issue affects almost nobody directly I feel like everybody should be able to dispassionately debate-bro about it even though it's taboo.
hexbear moment
Honestly could apply to the majority of comments in this thread. People here have seriously lost touch with reality with some of the arguments in here. Reading this makes me want to never comment on general hexbear again. No one should seriously debate what Peter Singer says. He's been a crank for longer than I've been alive.
I think he should be dunked on, but I don't like the idea we shouldn't question why things we think are wrong are wrong.
For myself, I think, where else would I be corrected? If I'm really up in the air with my thoughts, I'd appreciate and hope comrades could correct or work with me to educate and change my beliefs.
Genuinely curious, how do vegans think of indigenous diets and their consumption of animals? Many of the critiques I see here apply to industrial consumption of meat.
And how would you respond to the argument that vegans are propagating an unscientific belief in the supercession of nature by humans in a way similar to Christian dominionists, that sees us as unique actors capable of transcending a mutual relationship with nature whereas our inferiors (all other animals that eat animals) are incapable of moral action?
Also I've heard people argue that consuming plants also causes them distress and should be avoided. Would you reply to that in any way or is it silly?
Not here to argue, genuinely just want to know how vegans think about these questions. If you want.
The plants thing is entirely silly and based off a headline that says "grass screams when you cut it" and people took that literally. There's a big difference between "releases chemicals when disturbed" and "exists as a being with ganglia, nerves, a functioning brain, and everything else we understand to facilitate the experience of suffering". The ions in my phone battery vibrate when its charging, but I don't say that its excited.
I've seen vegans disagree on the matter of indigenous diets. I'm not sure what most agree on, but I can say vegans are way more focused on ending animal-eating in the context of industrialized society.
Not a vegan but we crossed that bridge the moment agriculture was invented. As for animals incapable of moral actions... I have yet to see a vegan seriously propose the end of natural predation. You're fighting ghosts or I'm misunderstanding.
You can check the r/vegan threads from when that was making the rounds. Plants don't feel pain. Even if they did, you'd cause more beings pain eating meat cause animals eat plants.
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When the last vegan subthread dies on this website, Yog-Sothoth emerges from their million year slumber to devour our world.
This is what they were saying, humans eating animals is natural predation, or at least could be in a deindustrial setting, like wolves eating deer or whatever. Vegans, they were suggesting, believe in a very Eurocentric/Christian way that humans aren't animals when our engagement with them as predators is as natural as predators eating us. As long as you minimize the industrialized suffering, that is, they were envisioning small holder communal farming and hunting as their counterexample.
We won't "return to nature" that would be fascist. Humans will not eat "natural" food. Humans eat industrial food. Thinking "but what if they wouldn't" is fictional.
Okay, that ship has sailed in other words. I think he would just object, he's kinda a Graeber guy, but that makes sense to me. Thanks!
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Dunno, I told people I was curious and wasn't here to argue, I could argue anyway but I'm trying to engage in a way that encourages folks to respond.
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I think you can agree to the idea that humans are not superior to animals in any meaningful capacity and that, like other animals, have their own novel tendencies (like the ability to create food which has no animal involvement, as some worker ants like those of Harpegnathos saltator can turn into queen ants when there is none can be a novel tendency)
Brian Tomasik considers it, but he's a wingnut. There is very little literature on wild animal suffering.
Indigenous people get trotted put in defense against veganism all the time. The defense treats indigeneity like some kind of monolith, it's very off-putting.
Indigenous people in the US are vegan more often than white people, same with most BIPOC people. I would recommend asking a vegan indigenous person these questions, or even just imagine yourself doing so, and consider whether it comes across as stereotyping.
Anyways, vegans are generally not focused on going after indigenous diets. They're focused on the vast majority of people who consume animal products because they were simply socialized to do so and never had to question it growing up, but have no sacred attachment to their sloppy joes or slightly more durable shoes or whatever. It's just food or products consumed out of habit and folks pitch an absolute fit when you point out that, say, it's a contradiction to say you're an animal lover because you love your pets but you go absolutely apeshit on someone that asks you to not eat or otherwise consume (entirely as a luxury, a form of entertainment) pigs that are just as smart and cuddly.
Industrialized agriculture produces sufficient vegan food such that animal products are no longer necessary dietarily. Same for materials and other animal products. The question is whether it continues to be acceptable to harm animals because the products have entertainment value.
I think for most people the answer is pretty obviously no, but they reeeeaally don't want to self-crit, so they fight for a while first.
Yeah it does kinda seem like weaponizing indigenous experiences to defend a boutique consumer choice. I think he aspires to hunter-gathering or considers it to be the superior way for humans to live, which I think contributes to trying this approach.
He also said he would starve to death if the revolution happened and meat was abolished. I guess vegetables are really that bad to some people.
plants can suffer but it's not an argument against veganism since every animal also eats plants, you are killing more plants (by like 10-100x) by eating meat
oh just morally bankrupt as satan because we've been doing THE SAME THING AS ALL FUCKING HUMANS SINCE BEFORE WE WERE HOMO SAPIENS YOU HAOLE ASS BITCH
Factory farming has not been around as long as homo sapiens. Hell, animal husbandry and domestication of animals has only been around for at most 15000 years. Sure we've been eating meat for millions of years, but aside from some edge cases (arctic peoples are the first example that comes to mind) meat made up very little of the average diet.
If you're still driving predators off their kills so you can scavenge some meat or persistence hunting antelope then you can say you're doing the same thing that we've been doing since before we were homo sapiens sure, but I would argue even the modern practice of raising animals as opposed to hunting drastically alters the amount of animal products we consume.
Apologies for the rambling post but early hominid diets is something that interests me deeply
I'm also someone who isn't vegan (yet) but fully admit they're basically always right
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it's been over a decade, and maybe the laws were changed in response, but i remember some news story about specifically necrobestiality not being illegal in several US states.
Perhaps the assumption was that you shouldn't need a law against intercourse with animal corpses? Because holy fuck
yeah you have to think of something to ban it.
TW: bestiality, honestly just some really rotten humor
Technically the rules don't band him fucking a dog's corpse on the basketball court
something awful airbud fanfiction be like:
that's what I was going for
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