I can’t remember where I saw it (I hope it wasn’t on here), but someone recommended that someone with vegetarian sympathies could do some good just by switching from chicken to beef. The idea is that if you’re eating a constant amount of meat by weight, you have to kill a couple hundred chickens to get the same amount of meat as killing one cow. If you don’t believe there’s a significant “personhood” difference between cows and chickens, that’s cutting your death toll by orders of magnitude.
I’m not sure what I think of this argument, because small differences in intelligence can have major differences in “personhood”—for example, I can’t even name a number of cows it would take such that I would be equally comfortable killing X cows as one person. That means that even a small intelligence difference between cows and chickens could more than cancel out the gains from extra weight.
Really, what we need is some sort of animal which is both very large and very stupid. If only a stray prehistoric asteroid hadn’t killed off our ideal food source.
I switched the other way. Not only does raising chickens have a lesser ecological impact by mass, chickens are already so witless that if you cut their heads off, they don’t get any dumber.
chickens are already so witless that if you cut their heads off, they don’t get any dumber.
It’s a good link, but there is no call to say this. Chickens are not particularly stupid, have a reasonably advanced social hierarchy and can be trained.
I sometimes suspect my family’s chickens are smarter than our cat. Bird’s brains are organized differently, and while I haven’t studies it or even though about it all that deeply so I could be dead wrong, birds seem vastly better at things humans tend to associate with smartness (presumably the things there is the most variation in between humans) than mammals relative to their total intelligence.
It was probably that, but note that that page is not concerned with minimizing killing, but minimizing the suffering-adjusted days of life that went into your food. (Which I think is a good idea; I’ve used that page’s stats to choose my animal products for a year now.)
Unfortunately, it seems that the best choices for which animals to eat are opposite depending on whether your goal is killing fewer animals or minimizing your carbon footprint.
I’m not sure what I think of this argument, because small differences in intelligence can have major differences in “personhood”—for example, I can’t even name a number of cows it would take such that I would be equally comfortable killing X cows as one person.
I believe you—for as long as you are typing at a keyboard. Once we put it to the test and you are forced out into a field with a knife and blood pouring down your arm your ‘comfort’ would become far more measurable.
Really? I would have gone the opposite way—utilitarianism seems to tell me that if cows have nonzero value then a certain number of them must add up to one human, but I have much stronger mental conditioning against killing humans than cows.
Even as a vegetarian, if I was forced to kill some arbitrarily large number of cows or a single human, I’d probably find a way to rationalize the cows as non-people pretty quickly. Mostly, I’d get sick of having to do the manual labor of killing them all by hand, if that’s the route we’re going.
I can’t remember where I saw it (I hope it wasn’t on here), but someone recommended that someone with vegetarian sympathies could do some good just by switching from chicken to beef. The idea is that if you’re eating a constant amount of meat by weight, you have to kill a couple hundred chickens to get the same amount of meat as killing one cow. If you don’t believe there’s a significant “personhood” difference between cows and chickens, that’s cutting your death toll by orders of magnitude.
I’m not sure what I think of this argument, because small differences in intelligence can have major differences in “personhood”—for example, I can’t even name a number of cows it would take such that I would be equally comfortable killing X cows as one person. That means that even a small intelligence difference between cows and chickens could more than cancel out the gains from extra weight.
Really, what we need is some sort of animal which is both very large and very stupid. If only a stray prehistoric asteroid hadn’t killed off our ideal food source.
I switched the other way. Not only does raising chickens have a lesser ecological impact by mass, chickens are already so witless that if you cut their heads off, they don’t get any dumber.
It’s a good link, but there is no call to say this. Chickens are not particularly stupid, have a reasonably advanced social hierarchy and can be trained.
I was being facetious. Chickens are not literally that stupid, but they’re a lot dumber than many of the things we could be eating instead.
Crows for example. ;)
I sometimes suspect my family’s chickens are smarter than our cat. Bird’s brains are organized differently, and while I haven’t studies it or even though about it all that deeply so I could be dead wrong, birds seem vastly better at things humans tend to associate with smartness (presumably the things there is the most variation in between humans) than mammals relative to their total intelligence.
Here maybe?
It was probably that, but note that that page is not concerned with minimizing killing, but minimizing the suffering-adjusted days of life that went into your food. (Which I think is a good idea; I’ve used that page’s stats to choose my animal products for a year now.)
Unfortunately, it seems that the best choices for which animals to eat are opposite depending on whether your goal is killing fewer animals or minimizing your carbon footprint.
The obvious solution is to stop eating all those kinds of animal/animal products. That would satisfy CO2 concerns and killing concerns.
Of course, it might not satisfy things like fun of eating meat, ease of eating meat, health etc.
I believe you—for as long as you are typing at a keyboard. Once we put it to the test and you are forced out into a field with a knife and blood pouring down your arm your ‘comfort’ would become far more measurable.
Really? I would have gone the opposite way—utilitarianism seems to tell me that if cows have nonzero value then a certain number of them must add up to one human, but I have much stronger mental conditioning against killing humans than cows.
Even as a vegetarian, if I was forced to kill some arbitrarily large number of cows or a single human, I’d probably find a way to rationalize the cows as non-people pretty quickly. Mostly, I’d get sick of having to do the manual labor of killing them all by hand, if that’s the route we’re going.