Slavery Vs. Eating Meat

Where do you draw the line? Maybe 200 years from now, people will look at us the way we look at slaveholders from 200 years ago.

What's the difference between slavery and eating meat?

 

Human slavery and the consumption of animal meat are to me 2 completely different things. Maybe the keeping of consumption animals seems like slavery to certain people (and that is why you made this thread), usually when there's some kind of mistreatment going on, but the eating of animals is something slightly different. If you want to compare it to an overall condemned human practice I'd suggest cannibalism.

 

I'd say keeping horses, donkeys and so on as beasts of burden is more like slavery. Or all those mice in labs.

 

Yeah I don't think actually eating meat is wrong or in any way like slavery. Factory farming is bad, but still not like slavery, more like concentration camps....

 

Animals arent people. I doubt cows kept behind a fence dream of going out into the big world and finding themselves. Theyre just content to have a field to roam and food to eat.

Factory farms are disgusting but i have visited a few local free range farms and their animals live quite nicely.

I have given up seafood for the most part because a portion of america's seafood supply is actually caught by slaves. I eat the occassional wild salmon and in the summer a girl from the coast of my state makes a 3 hour trip every saturday to sell locally caught shrimp at my town's farmers market so i'll be eating hella shrimp this summer. Otherwise it is too hard to trace the origin of seafood (not to mention the radiation still leajing into the ocean in japan) so i've given up on it.

 

To be fair: factory farms also come in gradations.

 

I'm halfway expecting somebody to start a movement to push for respecting the rights of vegetables. Political correctness seems to have no limits.

 

To be fair, plants do make up a lot of the bio-diversity on earth, so whilst they don't exactly have rights, they still have to be treated with respect. But I mean more in the sense of preserving natural environments. If we stared to scruple about how we treat potatoes (other than in cooking) I think we'd be lost.

 

Fortunately, very little in the Amazon rain forest is edible.

 

Yet people have lived there for a very long time, so there is edible stuff there - and of course, some of them were made into slaves right up into the 20th c. to work rubber plantations etc.

 

There are so many other reasons to stop eating seafood that isn't sustainably caught too. Overfishing is ruining the ecosystem in the oceans. Dragnets are destroying miles and miles of coral reef every day. Dragnets are also really undiscerningand kill basically everything caught in them. They then pick out the fish they want and can catch and throw everything else back in dead or alive. That's just the tip of the iceberg really.

 

The Samantha, are you in an Ethics class?

 

No, why?

 

I see what you are getting at, but don't think it's quite the right conclusion. Maybe using animals to drive plows or do other hard labor is closer to "slavery."

But by the definition of slavery, you have to be a "person":

slave noun: slave;
1.
a person who is the legal property of another and is forced to obey them.

I suppose some animal rights groups would like to see animals counted as "people", at least in some sense. But that isn't the case at this time. I think most people would draw the line of slavery before non-human animals.

With disgust and horror? As a product of their time? I've heard that theory before, some people think that humanity is moving towards a plant-based diet. I could see meat consumption being more limited in the future, perhaps due to environmental concerns. But I can't imagine most people making such a change in the foreseeable future.

 

This is a very insightful comment.

I used to hold the view that eating meat of beings was akin to raping them.

Animals or birds or fish are treated as mere matter, and used for their flesh and then disposed off. You use the flesh to tickle the taste buds, ignoring the pain that the animal or bird expresses.

In retrospect, it seemed quite ugly to me and that is why I decided to turn vegetarian.

The golden rule, when applied in this matter, also confirms that vegetarianism is the right thing. You obviously don't want to get eaten by other animals or predators. So you do to them, what you wan't them do to you -- live and let live.

 

Animals are not sentient beings as far as our scientific understanding is concerned however it is obvious that we as humans have always sought ways to differentiate ourselves from animals so perhaps we as a species are just too big headed. The native American people believed that all beings including animals had a spirit and they honored that spirit when they had to kill

 

You're not supposed to eat them alive.

 

Man likes to eat corpse parts of dead animals......mmmmmmmmmmmm

of course animals are just as sapient as we are. what makes us any better? I am still trying to figure that out.

 

this really is a pretty lame question/comparison as the two are not even remotely comparable. maybe a few less bong hits before you post these ideas.

one is the forced imprisonment and labor of HUMANS, the other is survival.

hate to break it to all you vegetarians and vegans out there, but Humans are omnivores, which means we have the teeth and digestive system to process both plant and animal matter.
further our guts are NOT suited to a complete vegetarian diet and haven't been for many, many millions of years because with the discovery of how to control/use fire and cooked meat, our digestive systems altered radically and we lost many yards of intestine and the organs that hold vegetable matter while it ferments prior to being digestible. What do you think the appendix is? it's the remnant of that portion of our digestive tract that is now obsolete thanks to fire and cooked foods.
further the ease of digesting cooked proteins and the calorie and nutrient rich meats/organs had the net result of giving humans more "free time" to pursue other endeavors beyond daily sustenance.
also the nutrient rich organs from animals kick-started the evolution of our brains to a high degree. Never could have attained the needed calories and nutrients for humans to develop the brains we currently have without eating meat.
If human species never learned to use fire or remained primarily vegetarians, we would still be living in the trees picking tics off of each other.

 

uhhmm, did you forget that humans are animals as well, mammals to be exact. So us eating meat really isn't odd or immoral or any such nonsense, it just is what some animals consume for food, humans included.

sometimes in these discussions I think folks forget the we are animals.