The video is to prove a point really fast, but, cows actually do only eat proteins. They have three stomachs that they use to feed grass to bacterial colonies, which they then pull into their fourth stomach to eat, with any of the grass that’s left un-eaten by the bacteria being shit straight out without being processed any further. They don’t eat the grass, the grass is there to feed what they do eat, which is supplemented by eating any large animal small enough to fit in their mouth. I read a study once that almost all cows when dissected had at least 1 animal in their digestive system at a time.
The notion that cows are good peaceful harmless herbivores who eat nothing but grass is nonsense. Here’s a video of a cow eating the corpse of a donkey. Of note: there’s grass right next to the body. And it isn’t just a result of cows being fucked up by human domestication, wild deer (who you cannot blame on humans malnourishing it or contaminating its feed or whatever) do it too.
constructing an elaborate worldview out of a kindergarten level understanding of biology and then getting extremely smug about it annoys me relentlessly. Cows would eat you if they had the chance
They’re opportunistic carnivores. So are horses. Not sure what the point is. Are we doing a vegan struggle session?
theres a struggle session elsewhere, this is just a PSA to let ppl know that kindergarten biology is not sturdy enough to build an ideology off of. Edit: and, they arent oppertunitist carnivores. I cant find the study rn but nearly all cows who are dissected have an animal in their digestive system
But biology tells you what is not what should be. You can’t base ethical decisions on science alone you must make judgements outside of science. You need to delve into the philosophy of science alongside science. Science alone is not the basis for a sturdy ideology either.
Lol you’re so full of shit. If there was some study that found a number of cows having meat in their stomachs, then that was something only specific to the population they dissected, and mostly to do with the fact that cows can’t fucking digest meat properly so meat just stays there for very long. This is so dumb and I don’t understand why you are doing it.
You’ve been posting this several times in the vegan struggle session thread but I’m not sure what point you think this makes. Eating meat is wrong, period; if the moral reasons are not enough / not a justification for you, then the environmental ones alone should be enough. Not dunking on you for eating meat, mind you, it’s understandable in western countries at least due to cultural reasons (I did it too before), but it’s still objectively bad and I encourage people to try going vegetarian at least.
This is the same structure of China Bad, but with cows instead of China. Yeah, sure, cows eat meat when they have the opportunity, they don’t run factory farms though…the comparison is framed asymmetrically.
so it’s just the unethical nature of industrial meat production that’s the problem? not the physical act of one individual animal eating another? I can understand that framing
I watched a squirrel eating a newly hatched baby bird one time, I still have the picture… it’s unsettling
I’m not vegan, I should be, but I’m not employed and live with other people so we eat what we can.
There was am issue recently in my town though with a vegan activist that ran a no kill shelter feeding all the animals vegan food and they all started getting really sick.
I guess my idea of veganism has always been that it should exist as as a resistance to the industrialization of meat consumption when human beings are able to avoid it. Other animals can’t necessarily be vegan and that’s just how it is. The fact that they aren’t institutionalizing their meat consumption makes it less of a problem lol.
So the primary issue is industrial meat farms, the secondary issue is introduction of invasive species to balanced eco systems (usually for the purpose of human consumption) that lead to an increase in animal deaths that didn’t exist before.
These two issues are on different scales, and I don’t think you can tackle the second issue without handling the first (except in cases like involving pets or plants that can be more easily controlled like how Australia does it).
Please tell me if I’m wrong about this if you know more about veganism than me. I only know a few vegans where I live and pick up bits and pieces.
The food chain is made up by humans for humans to justify our mistreatment of animals. It’s anthropocentrism dressed up as science.
Herbivores sometimes eat meat, carnivores eat plants from time to time.
Humans are in the unique position to not only be aware of the suffering that killing causes but have the means to avoid it and therefore have a moral obligation to at least minimise it.
true but the point of science is to at least try to be as objective as possible
Not really. It doesn’t work like that. Of course science is gonna be anthropocentric, we’re humans and we’re doing human science. Why would we waste as much time thinking about the behavioral science and social structures of groundhogs as we do for humans?
The food chain is made up by humans for humans to justify our mistreatment of animals. It’s anthropocentrism dressed up as science.
The purpose of a food chain is to understand how energy circulates between animals. That some cat ate a plant once and some cow ate part of a corpse doesn’t change what it is. I don’t understand denying the food chain, it’s weird.
Because it doesn’t accurately describe what’s happening and overly simplifies things.
It causes the same kind of misinterpretations that ‘survival of the fittest’ does.
It doesn’t “overly” simplify things, but it does simplify things because that’s the point of pretty much any model. Maybe somehow it made you think that herbivores will never ever eat meat for any reason or carnivores will never ever eat plant matter for any reason, but that is your misinterpretation, it’s not the fault of the model which accurately demonstrates the main relations.
thats why vegan cringe theorycrafting bothers me so much. There is a fucking good & indisputable reason not to eat meat, but they can’t advocate it bc they’re so far stuck up their own asses, which is that capitalism is incapable of doing humane animal-farming, but instead of just saying that they start engaging in measuring the skulls of animals bc they don’t talk to anyone else but other vegans
instead of just saying that they start engaging in measuring the skulls of animals bc they don’t talk to anyone else but other vegans
Except it’s you who is doing that. Veganism simply says avoidall animal exploitation as much as is possible; this applies to everything from cows to mice to bees. There is no "skull measuring"or hierarchy of life in veganism.
You’re the one whose worldview relies on using a pair of calipers to justify why you’ll torture Bessie the Cow to death to sate your lardass lusts, while simultaneously seeing murdering Rover the Dog or Free Willy as evil, murderous acts.
