After having kept jellyfish as pets (Atlantic bay nettles), I wouldn't really consider them to be vegetarian nor vegan. While similar to plants, seemed to have a greater sense of environmental awareness than my plants. Mine could sense light, have "off days", and interact with their environment. It's probably true that there's not much going on there due to the small amount of nerves that control everything, but even when mine would accidentally get caught on tank cleaning tools or get bumped around they'd react in a protective way and to me it's just similar enough to animalistic behavior that I'd not feel comfortable consuming them if I were vegan.
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
1 points (66.7% liked)
No Stupid Questions
34964 readers
530 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Plants feel a lot, they just can't express their feelings in a way you can perceive. For example, they feel the difference between a human touching them and wind blowing.
So is this theory of veganism to not cause pain to an animal? If so what about ethically sourced meat. Like bullet to the head/decapitation. Most of those creatures feel nothing, they just end.
Or is it to not eat anything that comes from the an organism from the Animalia kingdom because harming animals is immoral?
After proofreading, these sound more aggressive/argumentative than i had intended but they get the point across.
Veganism means to reduce the suffering and exploitation of animals as much as practically possible.
There is nothing ethical about killing a living being that doesn't want to die.
I thought it had less to do with suffering and exploitation (animals do this to each other, no way to stop that nor should we) but more to do with climate change. Cattle farms are causing massive climate change for instance.
Humans are moral agents, though. Just because something happens in nature, that doesn't make it okay. There are lots of examples of rape among wild animals, but that doesn't make it okay for humans to do it.
A lot of vegans are concerned about climate change, too, but it's really tangential to the philosophy. Veganism came out of the animal rights movement, so it's really concerned with exploitation and suffering. If there were no environmental issues with animal products, vegans would still be vegans.
Morals are a social construct
Just because something is a social construct doesn't mean it isn't real or important.
Tell that to lions and eagles. They cause as much suffering as possible. It's just how nature works. It's why I really don't care about veganism.
cannibalism too exists in "nature". I don't see any of you meat justifiers treading that line of thought to its coherent end.
a lion or an eagle eats anything. Most (if not all) carcass eating humans make arbitrary choices: Dogs or cats shan't be eaten. Pigs or this or that is a sin. Eating humans are monstrous.
they cause very little suffering. the systemic factory farming of animals and the deforestation in the process of meat production causes unimaginable collective suffering.
you don't care about veganism because you are willfully ignorant.
I mean, sometimes its ethical. Its kind of unnecessary (and therefore immoral) at the scale of modern meat farms. But on a more individual level with like subsistence hunting/livestock, i dont feel like there are any ethical problems. Like if you need food or you will die, animals lives are worth less than humans lives…
The need to hunt for food to prevent dying yourself is not really a problem in today's society unless you are indigenous and living outside of our society. So there is no real argument there.
I mean, yeah. Im also being pedantic with unqualified absolutes.
The fact remains sometimes it absolutely is ethical to kill stuff, even if they don’t want to die.
My general ethical foundation is based on my conscience saying “that would be bad” or “seems ok”. I fully admit that this is potentially a personal flaw, but I don’t feel bad about eating meat. I have a vague sense of guilt for the treatment of meaty animals, but honestly, it isn’t enough to offset the convenience of a burger.
Tldr sometimes its ethically okay to kill stuff, and I’m too lazy to do anything about benefitting from the majority of times when it isn’t ethical.
I respect the self-reflection in this comment. Sadly, I also feel a small need to ask you to think about ethics and morality slightly deeper. Imagine if your predecessors made similar comments about [insert moral failing of history]. How would you think about that?
I think most of us try to be good people, but it's really hard to do the right thing if you never think about what is right and why (and yes, sometimes that includes not being lazy).
yeah but what if it tastes good
15 minutes of pleasure from eating doesn't justify forcing an animal into existence to a life of suffering and premature death, especially when there are so many great alternatives - without even considering the the secondary effects of animal agriculture, including climate damage, antibiotic resistant bacteria, and the likelihood of bringing forward the next pandemic.
would u even get anything out of eating it tho?
I don't think animals care about weird human ideologies like veganism
No Brain? For Jellyfish, No Problem
“I think sometimes people use its lack of a brain to treat a jellyfish in ways we wouldn’t treat another animal,” Helm says. “There are robots in South Korea that drag around the bay and suck in jellyfish and shred them alive. I’m a biologist and sometimes sacrifice animals, but I try to be humane about it. We don’t know what they are feeling, but they certainly have aversion to things that cause them harm; try to snip a tentacle and they will swim away very vigorously. Sure, they don’t have brains, but I don’t think that is an excuse to put them through a blender.”
At this time it is impossible to know if they feel pain. They're a living creature.
Plants are also living creatures, but don't tell the Vegans.
If you want to minimize plant death, going vegan is still the right move.
Most of the crops we grow go to feeding animals that people eat.
I don't really care about minimizing plant death. I'm not Vegan or Vegetarian, nor will I be in the future. I just made a joke.
They told me Lemmy would be more leftist, why am I still seeing 0 IQ vegan jokes
That's lemmy.ml. I think most of us just want this to be a place with less politics and extremism on either side because it's exhausting.
What's more extreme: not wanting to harm and exploit animals or killing and exploiting them to use them as products?
I think it's pretty clear.
We may be able to tell if they are stressed, which could be related to pain, depending on your viewpoint.
Here is a recent study of audible reactions plant can have to stress: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(23)00262-3
Do plants react to stress and harmful situations like infestation? Absolutely. Do they actually feel pain as we understand it? Probably not since they lack a nervous system.
This boils down to the question: What is pain?
Pain is reaction to stimuli. One of those reactions can be suffering, if we assume lobsters and dandelions, who have wildly different biology, experience and perceive reality in the same way humans do. There is no evidence that they do. A belief in something without evidence is called religion.
A lot of Jelly fish are immortal? Just leave a few cells and wait for it to come back to life. Death-free food for the win
I mean, milk could also easily be death-free, but it's not vegan. It's also not suffering-free. So this suggestion kind of misses the point.
You think milking cows causes suffering?
Jellyfish eat animals and animal byproducts, so no, they are not vegan.
Jokes aside, often vegans follow dietary restrictions for reasons other than an ethical or moral belief against causing pain. Many vegans don't even eat honey, so I imagine jellyfish is pretty safely in non-vegan territory.
Are carnivores plants vegan? Genuinely curious, never looked into it.
I have heard there are vegans who won't eat figs since there's a decent chance of a dead wasp in a fig due to how fig wasps procreate.
Figs you buy in stores don’t have dead wasps in them. But yes, there varieties of figs that do and there aren’t vegan.
It depends on the definition of Veganism.
There’s is a popular school of thought that the diet‘s sole purpose to reduce suffering. If a living thing has no central nervous system (or brain), it has no thoughts and cannot experience pain or harm. It’s not much different than a fruit or vegetable. I know vegans that make exceptions for oysters - for example.
Others schools of thought are about avoiding animal products altogether, it doesn’t matter if it suffers or not - there’s no way to know. Therefore, it’s immoral to eat them if you can knowingly choose an alternative.
There’s is a popular school of thought that the diet‘s sole purpose to reduce suffering. If a living thing has no central nervous system (or brain), it has no thoughts and cannot experience pain or harm.
What about instant death? Like a farmer putting down a well-treated cow with a bullet to the head. In this scenario, the cow never suffered. In all likelihood it probably never even had much mental distress, let alone fear of death. Would that meat be ethical/vegan friendly?
Replace cow with human and see if it passes the test.
Is it ethical to give a human a scarf? Yes. Well it's also ethical to give a cow a scarf.
Is it ethical to shoot a human in the head? No? Well it's also unethical to shoot a cow in the head.
I value every other species as worth less than a human and therefore they have different ethical considerations.
But, far down are you willing to go? How small? Rabbits? Rats, mice? Insects? Is squishing a spider ethically identical as murdering some one? I would say no, what would you say? There is a line, be it soft or hard, somewhere.
If the spider is in your home without consent I support trapping it and kicking it out.
If the spider or mosquito is trying to bite you, then I support your self defense actions much like if a human was trying to bite your arm you’d be in the right to use force.
Even in your examples you are treating animals as less than human. Why? Again, where is the line that involuntary trespassing is punishable by immediate death? If a person bit you, yeah you could fight them off and use force. But, to be compare fairly, you would have to kill the person that bit you. Even then this is still an unfair argument because
- That is not typical human behavior
- A human bite can do substantially more damage than a mosquito bite.
So tell me where you can treat animals ethically identically as humans, and where you can’t. Where is the line?
I believe that it is not, since scientifically it is an animal. However, some vegetarians (not vegans) will eat fish or certain animal products.
I thought that people who would eat fish but not other animals were pescatarians.
Yes, but fewer people know that word, so it's less useful. And if you want to have a word to describe every specific version of "meat is bad" diets, you'd need as many words as there are people who avoid meat.
We use the word vegetarian to mean that we don't eat animals. Fish is an animal. we, vegetarians, don't eat fish and "vegetarian" is a useful word to mean exactly that. we don't stop using precise words just because "fewer people know that word"! What kind of a reasoning is this 🤦
view more: next ›