Um, maybe you should look up, why cows give milk in the first place? It’s not like it’s an animal that just randomly produces milk…little hint: why do human mothers produce milk when they gave birth, but don’t do it randomly their whole life 🤔
But is the cow you’re drinking milk from living a decent, happy life? What about the male calves that are born as a result of reproducing milk cows? What happens to them?
This thinking could extend to virtually every choice you make and is completely impossible to systematically justify for an ethical system without going completely and utterly insane.
It is the “Butterfly Effect” of ethics. A select path has impacts beyond the initial obvious moral consideration and then more considerations beyond that.
So where is the line? I don’t know that there is one, but I know that its a waste of energy to follow this line of thinking. One initial intuitive layer of moral consideration is more than the average person even remotely considers, and sometimes not even that much. The way elections have gone in the US over the past few years is a good example of this.
I agree that the line can seem or be arbitrary. I’m just pointing out that the specific example that you gave: “happy cow”, is more a figment of your imagination than a reality. It’s not so much “butterfly effect” as simply “effect”. I’m not judging you. I’m just saying you gave a bad example.
Is the immigrant working in the fields with no healthcare and fleeing ICE living a happy, healthy life? Is the slave worker in Myanmar making the trowel you use in your home garden living a happy, healthy life?
It’s impossible to exist without benefiting from suffering somewhere. At a certain point, you just have to try and do what you can to make it better. In my case, that involves supporting legislation to make the world better, because that will have more impact than a fringe group of people deciding not to wear wool socks.
I don’t understand this line of reasoning, especially as applied to the original context of “vegetarians are right, but vegans go too far”. Nobody here is pretending they avoid any part in any suffering. Indeed, we all determine for ourselves how much we can live with. For many of us, that line shifts with our needs, wants, knowledge and understanding. I just pointed out that the example of a happy cow, living life and providing milk is a fiction, masking the same realities that leads many people to vegetarianism.
If you care about those things, and if you consider those necessary to produce crops, then they are also 30-80% necessary to produce a corresponding amount of milk protein.
10-20% of cattle diets are soybeans, corn, or another industrial crop. 25-35% of their protein intake gets converted to milk protein.
Factor in the additional slave labor and worker exploitation involved in all of the other dairy ranching workflows, and it likely makes up the rest of the difference.
As a Vegetarian I disagree. We’re the most schizophrenic when it comes to animal welfare. No meat as we don’t want to kill for our food, but milk and cheese is only possible when we kill calves and eggs are only possible when we shredder 50% of the baby chicks.
Yes, alternatives are starting to pop up, but they are still in the minority here.
If it’s not about animal welfare, but sustainability Vegans also win, because dairy is pretty bad in this aspect too.
You can’t have mass milk products without killing many calf. I use lots of cow cheese but you need to know all process to have milk and cheese needs to kill calfs, as cow stop usual doing milk after something like a year, after a few month of reduced milk production.
In this sense, animals also would die anyways, so eating meat is sometimes justified aswell (would you eat a cow that would die soon anyway or just let it suffer a natural death? And then waste its meat?)
If I was would I eat beef from a cow that was euthanized just before dying painfully and feel ethically consistent? Sure. If someone wants to argue that would make me not a vegetarian in that case I’m not going to give a shit. That’s just arguing about definitions.
Vegans are not correct.
Vegetarians? Arguably yes. Not vegans.
If the cow I’m drinking milk from is living a decent happy life its not immoral for me to drink it.
I’m not even a vegetarian though, so I will say that the spirit of this tweet at least makes sense to me. I get it.
Cows need to be pregnant to make milk.
Um, maybe you should look up, why cows give milk in the first place? It’s not like it’s an animal that just randomly produces milk…little hint: why do human mothers produce milk when they gave birth, but don’t do it randomly their whole life 🤔
But is the cow you’re drinking milk from living a decent, happy life? What about the male calves that are born as a result of reproducing milk cows? What happens to them?
This thinking could extend to virtually every choice you make and is completely impossible to systematically justify for an ethical system without going completely and utterly insane.
It is the “Butterfly Effect” of ethics. A select path has impacts beyond the initial obvious moral consideration and then more considerations beyond that.
So where is the line? I don’t know that there is one, but I know that its a waste of energy to follow this line of thinking. One initial intuitive layer of moral consideration is more than the average person even remotely considers, and sometimes not even that much. The way elections have gone in the US over the past few years is a good example of this.
I agree that the line can seem or be arbitrary. I’m just pointing out that the specific example that you gave: “happy cow”, is more a figment of your imagination than a reality. It’s not so much “butterfly effect” as simply “effect”. I’m not judging you. I’m just saying you gave a bad example.
Is the immigrant working in the fields with no healthcare and fleeing ICE living a happy, healthy life? Is the slave worker in Myanmar making the trowel you use in your home garden living a happy, healthy life?
It’s impossible to exist without benefiting from suffering somewhere. At a certain point, you just have to try and do what you can to make it better. In my case, that involves supporting legislation to make the world better, because that will have more impact than a fringe group of people deciding not to wear wool socks.
I don’t understand this line of reasoning, especially as applied to the original context of “vegetarians are right, but vegans go too far”. Nobody here is pretending they avoid any part in any suffering. Indeed, we all determine for ourselves how much we can live with. For many of us, that line shifts with our needs, wants, knowledge and understanding. I just pointed out that the example of a happy cow, living life and providing milk is a fiction, masking the same realities that leads many people to vegetarianism.
If you care about those things, and if you consider those necessary to produce crops, then they are also 30-80% necessary to produce a corresponding amount of milk protein.
10-20% of cattle diets are soybeans, corn, or another industrial crop. 25-35% of their protein intake gets converted to milk protein.
Factor in the additional slave labor and worker exploitation involved in all of the other dairy ranching workflows, and it likely makes up the rest of the difference.
Again, if you care about those things.
As a Vegetarian I disagree. We’re the most schizophrenic when it comes to animal welfare. No meat as we don’t want to kill for our food, but milk and cheese is only possible when we kill calves and eggs are only possible when we shredder 50% of the baby chicks.
Yes, alternatives are starting to pop up, but they are still in the minority here.
If it’s not about animal welfare, but sustainability Vegans also win, because dairy is pretty bad in this aspect too.
You can’t have mass milk products without killing many calf. I use lots of cow cheese but you need to know all process to have milk and cheese needs to kill calfs, as cow stop usual doing milk after something like a year, after a few month of reduced milk production.
In this sense, animals also would die anyways, so eating meat is sometimes justified aswell (would you eat a cow that would die soon anyway or just let it suffer a natural death? And then waste its meat?)
Well, I’m not a vegetarian anyway.
If I was would I eat beef from a cow that was euthanized just before dying painfully and feel ethically consistent? Sure. If someone wants to argue that would make me not a vegetarian in that case I’m not going to give a shit. That’s just arguing about definitions.