• kingofthezyx@lemmy.zip
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    9 days ago

    I know this is kind of a joke but this is legitimately one of the reasons I went vegetarian. Felt very “icky” to build my body out of other dead bodies.

      • yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de
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        9 days ago

        Plants can feel pain the same way a machine can learn. Which means not at all outside of marketing.

        In reality they simply have mechanisms to react to damage. But that’s not pain.

        Pain is the processing of injury in a nervous system. Plants lack the nervous system required to feel anything.

        Just like a brain dead human, sponge or bacteria plants cannot feel pain in any meaningful way.

          • yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de
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            9 days ago

            It’s more the processing that’s relevant for pain. No processing, no pain.

            For instance, some humans have very specific genetic mutations that do not allow them to feel pain. The peripheral nerves still send the pain signals to the brain but it cannot process them. Therefore, no pain.

            There could be a discussion on whether very simple nervous systems (like in jellyfish) without a central component (brain) can process pain. But I’m not a biological researcher or philosopher so that’s outside my Lemmy paygrade.

            And what makes them different from any other chemical reaction is a little disingenuous. Might as well ask what’s the difference between burning a human on a stake and melting glass? Both are just chemical reactions involving heat from a certain perspective.

            There is simply no organ comparable to the brain in plants that would allow for plant pain. That’s pretty much it.

            • WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today
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              9 days ago

              Aren’t we just like Quarks on the most basic level? So why would one arrangement of Quarks, produce feeling people and not another?

              Maybe objects feel pain, but can’t remember it, or react to it.

              • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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                9 days ago

                Why does one combination of quarks produce a shiny, malleable solid that’s conductive and stable, and yet another produces a highly reactive liquid at room temperature

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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      9 days ago

      That’s also a bit of a peculiar feeling after being vegan for a while. My whole body consists out of plant matter and the occasional mushroom. I’m practically a plant at this point.

      (Obviously irrational, though. Meat, dairy, eggs etc. are also just pre-digested plants. We’d all be practically plants by that logic.)

  • bcgm3@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    They stopped being “their” gains when they ceased to live, and became “your” gains when you ate them.

    The same statement is true for plants, too.

    (Saying this as someone who eats very little meat for animal rights reasons, and merely wishes to be padantic right now for some reason)

      • bcgm3@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        like the point is that is should be theirs?

        But the “gains” weren’t really “theirs” either, since they previously belonged to an organism lower in the food chain. It’s the circle of life.

        For the plants part, it’s worth mentioning that it takes more plants for animal products than it does to eat them directly

        I’m not arguing for or against eating anything, I’m saying that no matter what you eat, you’re “getting their gains.”

      • Auli@lemmy.ca
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        8 days ago

        But that is not entirley true since humans don’t eat grass. And not all land is good for crops.

        • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.mlOP
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          8 days ago

          Important to note: “grass-fed” doesn’t actually mean grass-fed, they use plenty of supplemental grain almost everywhere. Trying to scale a pure grass-fed system up works rather poorly and even increases methane emissions

          We model a nationwide transition [in the US] from grain- to grass-finishing systems using demographics of present-day beef cattle. In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates

          […]

          If beef consumption is not reduced and is instead satisfied by greater imports of grass-fed beef, a switch to purely grass-fed systems would likely result in higher environmental costs, including higher overall methane emissions. Thus, only reductions in beef consumption can guarantee reductions in the environmental impact of US food systems.

          https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401

          Cropland use goes down on plant-based diets, so we don’t need all land to be usable for crops

          we show that plant-based replacements for each of the major animal categories in the United States (beef, pork, dairy, poultry, and eggs) can produce twofold to 20-fold more nutritionally similar food per unit cropland. Replacing all animal-based items with plant-based replacement diets can add enough food to feed 350 million additional people, more than the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food loss.

          https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1713820115

        • Applejuicy@feddit.nl
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          8 days ago

          Maybe open the article, you’re not the first person to consider this. Hint: “human-edible”

  • Anon7394@sh.itjust.works
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    9 days ago

    How’s that messed up? This is literally how the natural world works. Predators eat prey. We are the apex predator species.

    • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.mlOP
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      9 days ago

      Natural does not mean we should do something? Cannibalism is also natural, but we rightly find that horrible

      • Anon7394@sh.itjust.works
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        9 days ago

        Brushing aside moral considerations, cannibalism leads to things like kuru, so that’s a no go either way.

        I have no qualms eating animals, provided they weren’t factory farmed.

        • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.mlOP
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          9 days ago

          On a related note, it’s worth mentioning that factory farming is the vast majority of global meat, dairy, egg, etc, production

          We estimate that over 90% of farmed animals globally are living in factory farms at present. This includes an estimated 74% of farmed land animals (vertebrates only) and virtually all farmed fish.[1]

          https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/global-animal-farming-estimates

          We estimate that 99% of US farmed animals are living in factory farms at present. By species, we estimate that 70.4% of cows, 98.3% of pigs, 99.8% of turkeys, 98.2% of chickens raised for eggs, and over 99.9% of chickens raised for meat are living in factory farms. Based on the confinement and living conditions of farmed fish, we estimate that virtually all US fish farms are suitably described as factory farms, though there is limited data on fish farm conditions and no standardized definition.[1] Land animal figures use data from the USDA Census of Agriculture[2] and EPA definitions of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations.[3]

          https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estimates

          • Anon7394@sh.itjust.works
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            9 days ago

            That’s why I prefer New Zealand or Australian lamb. Just lamb living their best lamb lives out on pastures.

            Can’t wait for deer season this year so I can restock on venison.