Vegans and the morality of meat

[Boyish-Tigerlilly]

Darth Wong Wrote:

So Elfdart, do you feel that all animals should be treated equally, from bacterium right up to gorillas? If not, and if you disagree with the intelligence criterion, then why not?

His reasoning is simple, Darth Wong: It is ok to kill other animals and eat them when practical, yet feels it is morally wrong to kill humans and eat them not because of any intrinsic characteristic of humans, but simply because the other animals are not human. There is no other criterion.

Non-humans get different treatment because they aren't human.

Oddly enough, this logic means it would probably be perfectly ok with people eating creatures smarter and more intelligent than humans if it were practical to do so just because they aren't human.

[Lord Zentei]

OT: Surlethe nailed it early on. The whole point of veganism is to choose a lifestyle that causes the least death and suffering to animals. If they choose to say "I can't help the deaths caused by combine harvesters" they are employing a double standard, i.e. being hypocritical. Logically, if you use the postulate that animal suffering is bad and should be minimized, eating beef produced by free-ranging cattle is less bad than eating foods produced by grain, since far fewer animals die by such a lifestyle. If not, one has to quantify the value of creatures such as rabbits, voles etc versus cattle, and no such attempt was made in the article.

As for myself, I deem that the critical issue is the level of sentience in the animal, i.e. the level to which it can abstractly conceive of itself as an entity, and its ability to detect and know its own thoughts and feelings rather than its learning ability. I agree that this is rather harder to measure than learning ability, but that's just too bad.

On our latest troll's spat, good grief. What is it up with all these cry babies signing up here? And when is this being moved to PS?

[Lord Zentei]

On our latest troll's spat, good grief. What is it up with all these cry babies signing up here? And when is this being moved to PS?

And GR has acted. (linksky)

(Just in case anyone is wondering what that little blurb of mine was all about...)

[wolveraptor]

Hamlet the pig is a computer wiz. He gets a reward every time he uses a joystick designed for a chimp to move a cursor into a blue area on a computer monitor. A Jack Russell terrier couldn't achieve such a task after a year of trying.

In other words, pigs are smarter than dogs.

So because one Jack Russel terrier, of unknown age, health and lineage (which determines the level of inbred retardedness) was unable to learn a trick as fast as a pig of unknown age and health, all pigs are smarter than dogs? We don't even know how long the pig took to learn the trick, which would be a vague indicator of how much smarter the pig is supposed to be. The last sentence is nothing but the author's opinion, not stated by any of the quoted researchers in the article.

A simple answer is "yes", most experts believe that pigs are smarter than dogs.

Nothing but the author's own, unsupported opinion. He doesn't cite any specific studies, facts or anything. I'm not going to believe him just because he's the illustrious Salvatore Cullari, whom everybody knows and loves.

[Akhlut]

The dog family is an even better example. Cape hunting dogs, jackals, coyotes, dholes and most wolves range from difficult to impossible to tame or train.

Wow, tell me something I don't know. Tens of thousands of years ago, certain members of the canine family were smart enough to learn that if you're smart, you learn to work with the most dangerous predator around: us. Those canines eventually evolved into a separate species, ie- dogs.

Sort of a nitpick: dogs are generally considered to be the same species as wolves. Most would just consider them a subspecies, at best.

National Geographic had an interesting documentary about how domestic dogs are essentially inbred, retarded wolves. They also pointed out that dogs pick up on human body language better than wolves or chimpanzees, and do better at finding food hidden by humans. Yet nobody in his right mind would say a dog is smarter than either.

I would. A dog is obviously smarter than a wolf, because it can pick up, adapt to, and work with cues from humans. Since when is an inability on the part of wolves evidence of superior intelligence? If you ran into a human who was very good at foraging for food but lacked the ability to communicate or learn man-made rules, would you conclude that this makes him smarter than, say, Albert Einstein, who wasn't as good at foraging food but was vastly superior at communication and complex learned tasks?

This is completely a theory that I just thought of, so, I don't have any studies to back it up. So, if you tell me that you require proof, then I auto-conceed the point.

Anyway, dogs have been bred long enough to be very submissive toward humans (for obvious reasons). Wolves, however, haven't been. This would likely mean that wolves are far less likely to be submissive and extremely attentive toward humans and likely think of humans as either pack equals or pack inferiors instead of pack superiors. This means they'd be far less likely to try and do what a person wants. A sergeant doesn't take orders from a private, right? That's my theory on it.

[Darth Wong]

Human children have been bred to be submissive to adults; this makes them able to learn from their parents and the school environment. If a human child refused to listen to anyone, and was unable to pick up language or mathematics as a result, would we say that he's really smart? Or would we say that he's learning-disabled?

[wolveraptor]

Mike, I had to disagree with you when you said that dogs are smarter than wolves because wolves are nearly extinct, while dogs flourish. The more intelligent species doesn't automatically become the most successful one. Primates are among the least successful creatures on the planet, barring us, and even then, dumber animals that breed prolifically tend to be more numerous (which is the evolutionary definition of success for a species). Bacteria flourish the most of any set of species on Earth.

The scavenger theory of dog evolution is outlined pretty well here. According to it, wolves that were more willing to hang around human encampments and just scavenge did better than wolves that chose to hunt for their food.
Hunting is not an easy thing to do. It takes coordination among the alpha members (who, in reality are the real driving force behind the hunt; other pack members are superflous: see this PDF*), which requires intelligence. Hunting, arguably, favors mind power over scavenging from human camp remains, which favors docility, and a lack of fear of humans. I'd say that dogs didn't so much learn to cooperate with humans as much as take advantage of an obvious food source. Cooperation with humans only occurred much later in the dogs evolutionary history. Dogs were at first scavengers, then pack hunters.

Of course, more recent trends have been towards dog intelligence, as they tend to make more reactive and enjoyable pets, but these have not had enough time to really take effect. Most of man's best friend's history was spent scavenging for what we dropped on the forest floor.

*To summarize the article: a wolf packs effectiveness in terms of hunting increases with more members up to the number 2. Beyond that, it has no effect. A pair of wolves (the alphas) are able to take down and kill moose, deer, and whatever else they want to eat all by themselves. However, in doing so, they would lose substantial meat to scavenegers. They can't really eat all their meat fast enough to prevent this from happening. The result is that smaller packs of wolves are forced to hunt and kill more to satisfy their needs than larger ones. Extra, non-hunting members of the pack are just there to help finish the meal fast, so that scavengers like ravens can't get to it. It is better for a wolf's genetic relatives to recieve the left over food than another species, right?