You show a great deal of perfectionism, it is a fallacy to use that in your rebuttal on the grounds that the plan cannot be perfect.
Under the status quo you are right about most of what you said. Your right that at their current population animals would stand to overpopulate and destroy the ecosystem. Animals are given drugs in order to make them grow faster and bigger. This would contribute to overpopulation if this practice was continued. This would no longer present a problem because animal farmers would no longer have any reason to mass produce animals.
This would be a HUGE change and it couldn’t happen without the approval and help of most people as well as the government. People would be free to keep animals on their land if they so chose. But again, changes would be needed. Animals could be integrated into new ecoststems.
Big change takes time, ie: slavery did not end overnight. and just because it is impossible to push a magic button and make the killing stop now does mean that we should not try. Any reasonable proponent of this would rather have 2 more years of killing than another 1000.
As for being “bred to be prolific breaders” and “bred to pig out”:
If that is the case then they could be re-bred if you will to be scant breaders, and abstaining eaters.
For starters, all animals that are factory farmed have nervous systems. It sounds like you have been brain-washed into liking fast food. If you want real flavor, cook organic vegan meals in your own home. If you are going to eat meat, then at least eat organic. It is better for you and the animals for a lot of reasons I won’t get into right now.
Certainly humans range from very high to very low in their levels of self-awareness. “Self-awareness” is not a property one can either posses or not posses, it varies in degree. Just as if I were to start handing you one dollar bills one at a time, there is no precise dollar that would make you “rich”. Thus, self awareness varies and we can’t say that a certain line may be drawn which disqualifies you from fair treatment and a right to not be tortured.
wrong things are wrong by tautology?!? and which tautology is that? your claim of wrong reasoning is not valid. the rapist thinks what he is doing is the correct thing to do.
Very few farmer or ranchers if any are going to keep useless animals, Serious about this, they will turn them all loose and remove them from their land. These animals would eat any grains vegatables etc. that is planted on the land. They would have to remove them onto state parks, govt’ land etc… whose resources do you plan on using to rebreed animals? I am not sure if you are even thinking in the right numbers. Each pig is capable of bearing 15 piglets several times a year, sheep are highly prolific and can have twins or triplets once a year. Cows can have one or more calves a year. goats are the same, and poultry? Well jeez the numbers sky rocket.
We are talking millions of creatures and that is just on commercial ranching and farming. Add to that the people that keep smaller amounts for private use. Out in the country a 5 to 15 head herd of cows is normal for a family, 5 to 10 pigs, small herds of goats or sheep and countless poultry. And you outlawed the slaughter of them. They are now turned loose throughout the country.
Rebreed? with what resource? No one is going to pay to feed or breed useless animals. Americans are not going to vote a tax in to pay for it. There is no natural niche here. You do realize farm animals are all imports? Sheep and goats alone will decimate a forest and ruin wetlands. Pigs will also. Cows have no real natural enemy and the herds will take over lands that fed deer, elk etc…
Want to to talk about disease? Releasing farm animals into the wild will cause diseases to animals that have no immunity to the diseases that the farm animals naturally carry. So besides destroying habitat they kill with disease.
If you want to be serious about changing the farm animals I would not outlaw it but, go to eugenics. Breeding for less destructive gases would be the best and least expensive way to go. Animals could even be innoculated with what ever is discovered to cut down on it. Science and changing their, um, gas would be the best chance to cut down on greenhouse. Not outlaw the breeding and eating. I sympathize with Vegans wanting to stop omnivore habits but, that bird just won’t fly, at least not in this century.
Animals rights are whatever rights humans allocate to animals. In your view this is nothing, animals have NO rights; in other views they have different rights, but are allocated more than their own instincts.
If humans allocate rights to animals and enforce them on the animals behalf then the right would exist, would it not?
And feasibly all rights to some extent cannot be enforced: you have the right to life but cannot enforce it if I kill you, so does the right not exist because you can feasibly not enforce it?
Just because animals are raised for food and clothing (and a million other products) doesn’t mean we have to torture them which is what Americans do.
No quantity of pets absolves a person for being a part of this. Being a vegetarian and donating to animal cruelty groups, etc. is perhaps more meaningful, but still, it probably doesn’t impact the inhumane treatment of animals very much.
We can barely reach agreement on the inhumane treatment of people (the death penalty for example).
Animals have more rights in the USA then children do. If you abuse, torture or kill an animal out of hunting season , you spend more time in prison on the average than a child abuser does or a child murderer does.
The sentences for animal protection, on the average, are far stiffer. Don’t you think that is wrong?
While many of you are sensitive to this, perhaps there’s a key distinction here that needs to be brought into this discussion. That distinction is between use and abuse.
With both use and abuse, there is almost always a moral claim attached, usually something along the lines of: if you are ‘using’ something, this is ‘good,’ it is ‘valuable’; when you are ‘abusing’ something, this is ‘bad’ or even ‘evil,’ it is violence, theft, rape or other exploitative action.
But this isn’t necessarily so: ‘use’ in and of itself is neither good nor evil. It is, what you would say the American way of life, that is: a monstrous and hedonistic egocentrism, a sole concern for the ‘use-value’ of a commodity, the quantity of pleasure I can derive from it.
We cannot consider life in such a fashion. For the development of life finds its basis in suffering: here, suffering finds its terrible use, in the formulation of morality itself. Even our notions about the (moral!) categories of ‘use’ and ‘abuse’ are artificial, constructed from a non-moral and irrational basis…
Do we have to protect animals? Do we have to harm animals? It seems we’ll always do both, and always at once. There’s no getting around the fact that ‘use’ and ‘abuse’ are tied so thoroughly together owing to our generic way of life… that to affirm a social adaption is already to demand the impossible, that people discover something new about themselves which cannot be found in culture or nature.
The truth of this ethical question is a conflict, and is fought on both an individual level and a social level. There are shades of fascisms, micro-textures of repression and violence. We have to examine the fetish of domesticating animals at least as hard as the violence we expend upon them in order to produce large quantities of human food…
I agree with Felix, the reality is that there is no easy solution but that we take consideration for the animals.
Impenitent— I seriously doubt you would be so flippant of morality if you were faced with being tortured, and not given the guarantee of death at all, never mind a quick one.
To the original post, people are stubborn bastards who ultimately care only about themselves(in the majority, the vast majority), if it weren’t true then we’d all be vegan’s in africa helping the poor, but this is not down to cold-heartedness, it’s just survival, the same thing every living organism on the planet does.
We humans are all shitty little leeching organisms too, intelligence means nothing, the same way morality doesn’t(I know what I said above), it’s just a circumstance of intelligence, and all other things we have created mean less.
If you can’t reconcile with people who live like this, become a hermit, but you may find it difficult to survive on fruit and cereals without your local organic food store, though, and little rex who you took along for the ride starts to smell like chicken.
I will look for net links, I am sure there are things to compare but, sadly you can watch things like this on the news and just pay attention to the sentencing stories of both. They are out there almost everyday. Alot of sick people inhabit this world. One of the biggest reasons we moved away from the city was to get away from the invasive violence of the city. Thanks to 300 channels of crap you can’t, but at least its not on our back porch anymore.
