Eight-year-old boy discovers that wild pigs appear to grieve their dead

boing
21

Unless you know and trust your farmer that humanely raises and slaughters their animals. In which case you only have to deal with the moral dilemma of raising an animal solely to kill and eat it. But it’s no picnic for the rabbits, voles, mice, foxes, coyotes, martens, weasels, bobcats, dozens of bird species, etc. that scattered and died for ditch to ditch cultivation of food crops.

22

Right, there are some good ways to reduce the suffering of animals that are ‘used’ in food production:

  • One could leave the brunt of caring to nature and only eat animals that one hunted, or were hunted by someone who will try to reduce the suffering in those terminal minutes.
  • One could raise their own animals, and do the same, or buy meat from a someone who claims that they can strike a good balance between financial necessities and animal interests.
  • One could pledge to only eating the least sentient animals, those in which people make the guess that they ‘don’t really feel pain.’ I could see that possibly true for some seafood that isn’t mobile, so can’t escape either way, oysters, mussels and such, maybe crustaceans. People make this guess for fish, too. (Probably due to that false goldfish factoid, that they forget everything every 20 seconds)
  • One could start with small changes, don’t buy cage eggs, don’t buy veal, try to buy locally slaughtered meat, reduce consumption.
  • One should also find out more about the national, global, and strictly economic implications of (mainly) meat production. Plenty of uncomfortable truth to go around there.

It is of course true that animals get anywhere between displaced and purposefully killed for growing crops. One can hope that with more respect and a greater understanding of localized ecology, refuge areas will be provided for these, and that pests can be ‘managed’ without having to kill them off. Organic farming that tries ways of naturally controlling pests are a great start.

23

Does it help that the porcines would probably find you tasty as well?

Someday, we’ll be able to synthetically create meat so we can avoid all that killin’. I just wonder how long it will take someone to cook up some synthetic human.

What were we talking about?

24

Arthur C. Clarke, The Food of the Gods.

1 Like
25

This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.