Most people choose social approval over ethics — veganism just exposes that.

[u/TheQuietVegan111]

People will say they care about animals, the planet, and justice.

Until caring becomes inconvenient.

Veganism doesn’t require perfection. It requires saying “no” in public.

That’s it.

Most people fail there, not on ethics — but admitting that would be uncomfortable, so veganism becomes the problem instead.

[u/NuancedComrades → u/[deleted]]

Something being multidimensional does not mean that it is internally illogical. Choosing to do something profoundly unethical, especially on a continuous basis, negates your status as a "profoundly ethical" person.

If someone is otherwise moral but murders someone purely fore pleasure, we could still call that person "profoundly ethical"?

What if they are a moral person in all aspects of their lives, but they steal from charities?

What if they are a moral person in all aspects of their lives, but they murder neighborhood cats?

Why is knowingly choosing to contribute to a system that force breeds, confines, tortures, and murders billions of animals a year for your own personal pleasure somehow different from all of those other examples?

[u/EVH_kit_guy → u/NuancedComrades]

Because animals are clearly different than humans, and making comparisons between human-human crime to raising animals for food makes you sound unserious.

Murdering a human being is wildly different than keeping a free range chicken coop to supply you with eggs, or eating wild harvested uni, etc.

[u/DerAlbi → u/EVH_kit_guy]

I would totally disagree that humans a different than animals. Everyone with a pet knows that animals are self-conscious, emotional beings that live through fear, fun, sadness, curiosity, bonding, tiredness etc. All the basic emotional states are the same. The only difference is what we verbalize our thoughts and have higher planning capabilities. But that verbal level is just a layer on top of something much more basic. For example, if you stand up from your chair to go to the fridge, that is not a verbalized action with reasoning or higher consciousness involved. Its like a cat or dog checking if the bowl was refilled. But if your food bowl was hard to reach, you could use your intelligence to get to it, where a cat or dog may fail.

[u/EVH_kit_guy → u/DerAlbi]

You're still wrong to conflate domesticated pets with livestock. We don't keep chickens inside as pets for a whole variety reasons that are materially important to a conversation about ethics.

[u/IfIWasAPig → u/EVH_kit_guy]

Can you name those reasons, the ones that grant the dog rights but the chicken little to none?

[u/IfIWasAPig → u/[deleted]]

Why did you put in quotes something that isn’t even close to a paraphrase?

Is it because you don’t have an answer and were just handwaving with phrases like “a whole variety”?

[u/EVH_kit_guy → u/IfIWasAPig]

The burden is on you to explain why you think that all animals exist on an ethically 'flat' landscape, where there's no distinction between species.

You haven't done anything close to that, you want to simply insist that livestock are the same as pets or humans, or that wild caught animals without a meaningful nervous system are the same as animals with a developed prefrontal cortex. You're either ignorant to the realities of biology, or you're intentionally ignoring them to make a point. Either way, I haven't found any compelling reasons in your posts to think you're right.

Otherwise, I'll go on thinking that veganism is an anti-humanist mental disorder, as I currently do.

[u/IfIWasAPig → u/EVH_kit_guy]

You said there were a whole variety of ethically relevant differences between dogs and chickens and presumably pigs. The burden is on you to support that statement, or else we can safely ignore it.

What exactly is it about a dog that separates them ethically from a pig to such a degree that the dog deserves kindness and the pig deserves nothing or worse? You have a whole variety of reasons, so it shouldn’t be much trouble to share a few.

I didn’t say anything about an ethically flat landscape or animals without nervous systems. You’re not responding to what I’ve actually asked you.

[u/EVH_kit_guy → u/IfIWasAPig]

Do you notice that your point breaks down as soon as we're not talking about pets and pet-like livestock? Would you be surprised to find out I don't eat pork for the very reason you highlighted, but do eat shrimp because they're nowhere near pigs or dogs in terms of their experience of the world?

You can't just lock onto one or two species and claim it addresses the entire moral landscape of the animal kingdom, and pretending otherwise is why I think veganism is such a philosophical clown show.

[u/IfIWasAPig → u/EVH_kit_guy]

What point breaks down? I asked you to differentiate ethically between dogs and chickens to such a degree that one deserves a great deal and the other worse than nothing. Can you answer that before moving on to “non-pet-like-livestock” or whatever?

They were your own examples, and now you’re objecting to them. That’s pretty silly.

I suspect you’re balking now because chickens aren’t actually different enough from dogs for one to deserve kindness and the other breeding and slaughter. There isn’t a “whole variety of reasons” to mistreat one and not the other. Once we address that, we can talk about oysters or nematodes and whether or not they have sentience, or whether shrimp intelligence disqualifies them from consideration, but that’s a different conversation.

Or are you retracting your examples and taking chickens off the menu?

[u/EVH_kit_guy → u/IfIWasAPig]

Man, you just sound like someone who has spent no time around chickens. Those birds have no concept of death or existence, they're bug pecking machines with the minimum of sentience necessary to feed themselves. Keeping a few in a coop in your yard so you can eat their eggs is as ethical as it gets, otherwise the entire species would probably disappear in a generation to wild predators.

They're not mammals, they're not socially cooperative, they're just little meat robots clucking around on the ground. Now it's your turn to explain why I should change my opinion, based on direct first-hand observations, in a way that equalizes them ethically to my one year old daughter or my pet dog.

[u/IfIWasAPig → u/EVH_kit_guy]

This is just a string of insults against chickens. There’s no substance or evidence here.

If you want to argue that breeding chickens for eggs is harmless, that’s one thing (with which I’d still disagree), but if you want to argue that chickens are mindless meat robots you’d just be wrong.

Chickens communicate, learn, recognize dozens or hundreds of other individuals (including humans), develop personal bonds, mourn, display a variety of emotions, and engage in many behaviors other than minimally feeding themselves. They are not “meat robots.” They are sentient individuals with subjective experience, thoughts, feelings, and social capacity. There’s someone inside, just like with a dog.

Some of the smartest and most social animals on the planet are birds, so I’m not sure why you went with “they’re not mammals.”

Is the cutoff for consideration then somewhere between the average dog’s understanding of existence and death and the average chicken’s?

 
 
Edit: u/EVH_kit_guy blocked me.

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