By a strict definition, no. But most vegans don’t really care about scientific classification. Personally I don’t think they’re sentient and think it’s fine.
After having kept jellyfish as pets (Atlantic bay nettles), I wouldn’t really consider them to be vegetarian nor vegan. While similar to plants, seemed to have a greater sense of environmental awareness than my plants. Mine could sense light, have “off days”, and interact with their environment. It’s probably true that there’s not much going on there due to the small amount of nerves that control everything, but even when mine would accidentally get caught on tank cleaning tools or get bumped around they’d react in a protective way and to me it’s just similar enough to animalistic behavior that I’d not feel comfortable consuming them if I were vegan.
Plants feel a lot, they just can’t express their feelings in a way you can perceive. For example, they feel the difference between a human touching them and wind blowing.
So is this theory of veganism to not cause pain to an animal? If so what about ethically sourced meat. Like bullet to the head/decapitation. Most of those creatures feel nothing, they just end.
Or is it to not eat anything that comes from the an organism from the Animalia kingdom because harming animals is immoral?
After proofreading, these sound more aggressive/argumentative than i had intended but they get the point across.
15 minutes of pleasure from eating doesn’t justify forcing an animal into existence to a life of suffering and premature death, especially when there are so many great alternatives - without even considering the the secondary effects of animal agriculture, including climate damage, antibiotic resistant bacteria, and the likelihood of bringing forward the next pandemic.
I thought it had less to do with suffering and exploitation (animals do this to each other, no way to stop that nor should we) but more to do with climate change. Cattle farms are causing massive climate change for instance.
It can be either or both. Whether other animals or people cause suffering to animals isn't a statement about whether it is ethical for people to do so (naturalistic fallacy).
In terms of strict definitions of what should or should not be eaten based on its suffering, I think that's much harder to do. There's always going to be some gray area. Plants respond to stimuli and try to protect themselves. Jellyfish and insects and cultures cells are on a spectrum where it may not be clear how to draw the line.
Humans are moral agents, though. Just because something happens in nature, that doesn’t make it okay. There are lots of examples of rape among wild animals, but that doesn’t make it okay for humans to do it.
A lot of vegans are concerned about climate change, too, but it’s really tangential to the philosophy. Veganism came out of the animal rights movement, so it’s really concerned with exploitation and suffering. If there were no environmental issues with animal products, vegans would still be vegans.
That’s no necessarily true. It’s like saying “society is a social construct”. But I think there are more arguments to see morality as an inevitable result of human nature.
I mean, sometimes its ethical. Its kind of unnecessary (and therefore immoral) at the scale of modern meat farms. But on a more individual level with like subsistence hunting/livestock, i dont feel like there are any ethical problems. Like if you need food or you will die, animals lives are worth less than humans lives…
The need to hunt for food to prevent dying yourself is not really a problem in today’s society unless you are indigenous and living outside of our society. So there is no real argument there.
I mean, yeah. Im also being pedantic with unqualified absolutes.
The fact remains sometimes it absolutely is ethical to kill stuff, even if they don’t want to die.
My general ethical foundation is based on my conscience saying “that would be bad” or “seems ok”. I fully admit that this is potentially a personal flaw, but I don’t feel bad about eating meat. I have a vague sense of guilt for the treatment of meaty animals, but honestly, it isn’t enough to offset the convenience of a burger.
Tldr sometimes its ethically okay to kill stuff, and I’m too lazy to do anything about benefitting from the majority of times when it isn’t ethical.
I respect the self-reflection in this comment. Sadly, I also feel a small need to ask you to think about ethics and morality slightly deeper. Imagine if your predecessors made similar comments about [insert moral failing of history]. How would you think about that?
I think most of us try to be good people, but it’s really hard to do the right thing if you never think about what is right and why (and yes, sometimes that includes not being lazy).
There is an assumption here that i don’t think of right and wrong. Which isn’t true, as evidenced by this entire comment chain. My morality is based off of my conscience, and it has a final say in how i act. But I still think and explore ethically difficult situations to determine what is right, wrong, or grayish.
I just didnt describe my entire ethical schema, because, as i said i am lazy. Lazy and self-aware enough to know that there is not much i can or will do to improve the morality of meat consumption. And honestly, that specific problem is pretty low on my list of ethical dilemmas. But it’s fun to talk about.
Rereading the chain I see misread the original comments, my bad.
Lazy and self-aware enough to know that there is not much i can or will do to improve the morality of meat consumption.
You can stop eating meat? That seems to be a fix that puts you squarely into better moral territory. Unless you think the killing, torturous treatment and rape is moral. It’s your choice whether you want to do something, but it I object to the word can here.
In general, just having conscience as a guiding ethical compass leaves you open to many logical inconsistencies. Would you agree?
I wouldnt completely agree. I think using something other than your conscience is somewhat disingenuous. For the most part, any inconsistencies have been from personal growth/change. I live my life so that i can sleep at night.
As far as stopping meat consumption. Yes that is something that i can do. I believe the moral implications of doing that are minimal, simply because animals and humans have different ethical considerations. But this is getting off topic.
I claimed there wasn’t much i could do to improve the morality of meat consumption (ie Ethical living conditions, reduced scale etc.) . It’s like i wanted to make cars more fuel efficient and you told me to ride a bike. It sidesteps the claim and proves a point i wasn’t arguing.
I as a single person, with limited time and limited funds can’t change how large companies mass butcher livestock, not without sacrificing other things i value more.
cannibalism too exists in “nature”. I don’t see any of you meat justifiers treading that line of thought to its coherent end.
a lion or an eagle eats anything. Most (if not all) carcass eating humans make arbitrary choices: Dogs or cats shan’t be eaten. Pigs or this or that is a sin. Eating humans are monstrous.
they cause very little suffering. the systemic factory farming of animals and the deforestation in the process of meat production causes unimaginable collective suffering.
you don’t care about veganism because you are willfully ignorant.
It’s the second one. In the first case, you unnecessarily kill an animal. A fair question would be if it was a natural death of the animal, like you stumbled upon a fresh carcass, is eating that still ethically or morally gray?
But that’s not the point, veganism makes sense in first world countries with factory farming. It’s very clear that mass produced animal products are no go’s.
So is this theory of veganism to not cause pain to an animal? If so what about ethically sourced meat. Like bullet to the head/decapitation. Most of those creatures feel nothing, they just end.
lots (propably most) animals used for farming meat are in pain during their lives.
That’s longer than the time they’re dying in any case.
I understand that completely, death isn’t where the suffering usually occurs. This brings me to another question that i proposed in response to a different comment.
I had family that raised a cow to eventually become meat. It was named Tasty and lived up to its namesake. Tasty was treated well and killed quickly and cleanly. Is that, like, bad?
And worse even, I’d say this is something that changes with the culture of people.
a while ago, gladiators killing & maiming each other for entertainment was considered fine.
Raping and Abducting during wartime was normal.
Currently, I’d say the cultural moral compass has shifted enough, to consider these two examples rather bad behaviour.
But as Tasty seems to have had a nice life and didn’t suffer, so had it better than most cows which end up in a similar fate, I’d say that currently this would not be considered “bad” behaviour by most people.
Of course there is a viewpoint already out, that all killing of animals is equivalent, in other words equivalent to killing humans. From that point of view, what you did is rather horrific.
Maybe, in some time, when something like lab-grown meat without any nervous system is commonplace, killing animals for food becomes as horrific as we consider killing other humans for food.
Or, you know, it could also swing the other way, and an apocalypse makes Soylent from dead people completely normal food.
Don’t most plants sense light and interact with their environment?
Tardigrades have been observed reacting defensively to danger, even offensively. I know they’re not plants, but do they feel pain? What about brine shrimp?
Jellyfish are super weird because they really blur the lines between plant/animal. It’s a really interesting question to ask honestly.
“I think sometimes people use its lack of a brain to treat a jellyfish in ways we wouldn’t treat another animal,” Helm says. “There are robots in South Korea that drag around the bay and suck in jellyfish and shred them alive. I’m a biologist and sometimes sacrifice animals, but I try to be humane about it. We don’t know what they are feeling, but they certainly have aversion to things that cause them harm; try to snip a tentacle and they will swim away very vigorously. Sure, they don’t have brains, but I don’t think that is an excuse to put them through a blender.”
Jellyfish do have neurons. Fewer than an insect. Much fewer than ChatGPT. But still something. A better example is sea sponges, which don’t have any neurons at all.
Meh. If it's invasive and killing them benefits the environment than who am I to complain about how they're discarded if I'm not going to do anything about it? I hate his mentality. Suffering, pain, and a gruesome end are all very natual parts of the natural world. I'm pretty sure gazelles don't like being eaten ass first while alive, yet it's perfectly natural.
But everyone and everything rather avoid pain, wouldn't they? And if I would like to treat those the way I would like to be treated, then why not try to help mitigate that pain where possible?
The follow up question would be what us and isn't pain.
If a bacterium swimming in one direction encounters a toxin and changes direction to avoid dying, did it experience pain? If a tobacco plant reacts to attacks from insects by producing more nicotine and alerting its neighbours to do the same through signals sent through both rhizomes and airborne pheromones, does it experience pain? What about a worker ant, whose behaviour can be perfectly simulated by an algorithm simple enough that you can simulate hundreds of ants interacting?
Personally, I'd say none of these organisms are capable of feeling pain. Or if they are with the help of some definitions of what constitutes pain, it's just a signal like an automated assembly machine getting a signal from its sensors that a human entered its work space and it needs to slow down its robot arm to snails pace. So still incapable of suffering.
Also, if you set the threshold for what constitutes the ability for suffering too low, you quickly collide with the ethics of even early term abortion.
Ok, but the question was whether or not they feel pain. We can definitively say they display escape behaviors when presented with an aversive stimulus, so I’d say it’s likely they do feel some sort of pain, even if their perception of it is nothing like that displayed by animals with central nervous systems.
The morality of shredding them alive by the thousands is a different conversation, but I would say yes, nature is cruel, and yes, it’s possible for humans to mimic nature and kill animals in similar ways, but humans also have a knack for taking things too far, eg chickens bred to be so big they can’t even walk or jellyfish-murdering robots
This is one of those things that's hard to define. If a popcorn kernel gets too hot, it pops and it's almost like it's trying to run from the heat. How is that different from a jellyfish reaction to pain? There's a lot of good arguments on both sides.
Sometimes, I wonder how far away we really are from the popcorn kernel.
Vegan is a very wide array of things ranging to not eating red meat all the way down to not doing anything that could hurt a plant (only scavengering fallen fruit).
Veganism is LITERALLY an ethical stance regarding exploiting/harming/killing non-human animals.
Finding a random blog online that states otherwise means nothing. Anyone who ate a salad last Tuesday these days thinks they can simply decide what Veganism is.
THIS is the actual definition of Veganism, directly from the people who coined the term:
“Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals."
It's mainly about intention, not coincidence. You did not kill those extinct animals, nor did you ask or pay someone else to do it. It was not your nor someone elses intention that was involved in their extinction. It could still be seen as exploiting one of earths limited resources though, but that's not directly related to veganism.
I know some vegans consider it fine to consume animal products that did not cause harm or are not exploitative, or even meat from animals which were not killed or harmed intentionally.
jains are considered vegans but vegans don’t have the same considerations.<br> a vegan is simply somebody who avoids consuming any animal product including leather, honey, wool &c
I once read a very good argument for Vegans who want to justify eating honey. Bees can’t be caged; they are free to simply fly away. Bees can (and do) leave bad beekeepers who don’t take proper care of them, or if they aren’t satisfied with their living conditions.
There are some animal that you can eat that are vegan.
The fig wasp for example is a tiny wasp that climbs into fig flowers to lay their eggs in them, polinating them in the process. Once the flower turns into a fruit, the eggs hatch and climb out of it. The dead mother wasp stays behind.
Since the wasp dying in the fig is required both for the plant and the wasp to reproduce they are considered vegan to eat.
So the next time you eat a fig, take a closer look. Maybe you’ll see the dead wasp (or maybe you’ve already swallowed it)
Do vegans generally accept that figs are okay to eat?
I grew up with a crazy vegan mother who dragged me to the outings of her crazy vegan club and they were all vehemently against eating figs. We don’t even live in a place where figs are common import, but they were so mad about it.
There’s actually a lot of interesting science around plant “mentation” for lack of a better term, stuff that’s actually super scary if you stop to think about it.
“Plants emit volatile organic compounds (VOCs) as a means to warn other plants of impending danger. Nearby plants exposed to the induced VOCs prepare their own defense weapons in response.”
“Lilach Hadany, a professor at Tel Aviv University’s School of Plant Sciences and Food Security, wanted to better understand whether plants use the acoustic realm of communication, too.
In a study published this year, her team put tomato and tobacco plants in an acoustically isolated box and then recorded any ultrasonic sounds produced between 20 and 150 kilohertz. They experimented with cutting stems or leaving them without water as if to simulate drought.
The researchers found that the plants emitted popping and clicking sounds at around 60 decibels, approximately as loud as human chatter. These sounds were at an ultrasonic frequency that humans cannot naturally hear, however.”
“Plants are able to sense and optimally respond to so many environmental variables—light, water, gravity, temperature, soil structure, nutrients, toxins, microbes, herbivores, chemical signals from other plants—that there may exist some brainlike information-processing system to integrate the data and coördinate a plant’s behavioral response. The authors pointed out that electrical and chemical signalling systems have been identified in plants which are homologous to those found in the nervous systems of animals. They also noted that neurotransmitters such as serotonin, dopamine, and glutamate have been found in plants, though their role remains unclear.”
What you are describing is reaction to stimuli. You also describe gas releasing from tomatoes. Plants definitely have some form of biological intelligence but Vegans don’t care about that and that’s my point. Your comment doesn’t address OP’s question because what you are talking about has nothing to do with Veganism. This is why I got so dang frustrated. So many of these commenters were not in a position to answer OP’s question because they don’t know what Veganism is or what Vegans value.
Biological intelligence is not the same as having a subjective experience. If there is no subject, there is no one to grant rights to. There is no one ever experiencing pain or pleasure etc. You could at best take an agnostic position on plant consciousness. As we understand it today, consciousness is an emerging property of life with brains/nervous systems. In any case you are probably and hopefully wholly uncaring of tomatoes being harvested, and in that respect it’s hard for me to discern your point of discussion as good faith.
Yeah it’s totally fine to be fascinated with the chemical interactions of plants. This just wasn’t the thread to bring it up if we’re addressing OP’s question in good faith.
I was responding to your (rather snide, now deleted) comment regarding “idiots in the thread posting about plant intelligence.”
There is more going on with plant communication than we give them credit for. Can it be called “intelligence”? Well, not as we currently comprehend it, no. But at the same time, it’s not as easily dismissed either.
Yeah, I think derailing the thread with bad faith intentions to redefine Veganism and not answering OP’s question is pretty idiotic. Mod thought my comment was mean, but idc.
Ecological Vegans: A pound of animals tends to take 10 lbs of plants to sustain. Also other animals need these resources so using the smallest lowest impact sources to supply ourselves with food makes it more “ecologically vegan”
That said I don’t think jellyfish have any kind of intelligence we can sympathize with so anti cruelty vegans as far as we know can eat jellyfish unless some scientific breakthrough is made.
There’s a great old radiolab that covers and critiques ‘plant intelligence’ but afaik plants are no more intelligent than your immune system - they have some kind of stimulus memory but nothing resembling human logic or sensation
Jellyfish are consumed as food in some parts of the world. I think the question may come from the fact that there’s always some articles around about how jellyfish may be the food of the future, since they can be grown at sea (reducing land use) and don’t require feed beyond algae, which is great from both an environmental and resource management perspective. I’m not sure it’s entirely a cynical gotcha question :)
I’d say when it comes to veganism it’s basically up to what you personally want to eat. I personally have no moral quandary with eating animals but if you do, I wouldn’t call you a hypocrite for eating jellyfish. Plants feel pain too, in a similar way, I could see it being justified. Taxonomy shouldn’t decide your morality.
Plants do not feel pain as in the way pain is understood. People who claim that plants feel pain interpret the reaction to stimuli as feelings, but that’s not the same thing as having a feeling.
Of course there could always be something that we do not know about yet, but up until now there really is no indication that suffering is something plants experience in any way. The same way you could claim fire feels pain since it also reacts to stimuli, connects with other fire, even procreates, eats and dies.
But it mostly is. And calves likely get shot afterwards (or worse) both for population control and, well, you can’t have them drinking all the milk now, can you? Same as eggs could be cruelty free, if we ignore the literal shredding of male chicks thats happening on a massive scale.
If you want to mass produce these things, which are both produced by females exclusively as part of their reproduction cycle, you basically have no other choice but to get rid of most males or even most children in the case of milk.
And even if you somehow solve this, I still would argue that its morally wrong to even have these breeds of e.g. chickens who lay this many eggs. Their bodies were never ment to do this and they suffer from sever health problems because of this.
Milk that we can buy in supermarkets is produced by special super breed cows that produce around 30000 liters (ca.8000 gallons) of milk per year. After 6 years these animals die out of complete exhaustion or as soon as they don’t produce enough milk anymore. Their udder are so big they can barely move, due to the frequent milking they are also usually infected (yummy goo, goes straight into the milk- luckily it’s boiled)
If you ever talked to woman that is breast feeding, you probably found out how exhausting it is to produce a highly nutritious food for a new born.
Yes milking cows for mass producing milk is animal abuse and it is really hard to find milk that is not produced in this way. I am telling you this as a person who isn’t vegan or vegetarian. I think that veganism is the way to go, eating animal products is shit, there is no way to produce them in a “good” way for 7billion people. I am just too weak.
They are a living creature, so no, eating them is not vegan. It’s not about the capacity of the animal to feel pain, it’s about the capacity of humans to harm animals that most vegans take issue with, at least most that I know. Just because something can’t feel pain, does that mean we should hurt it? I’m not vegan myself, and I don’t think it’s inherently wrong for omnivores to eat meat, but I do think that it doesn’t matter if the animal can supposedly feel pain or not. We don’t need to go looking for excuses to hurt other living creatures needlessly.
Bacterias are living creatures as well, yet I doubt most vegans have an issue with them
edit: I don’t even know why I picked bacterias as an example when I could just have chosen plants, which are by definition alive too
Just because something can’t feel pain, does that mean we should hurt it ?
Maybe we don’t have the same definition of hurting, but I can’t see how “hurting” works with something that can’t feel pain. Like can you hurt a chair ?
I’m not sure what you expect vegans to eat then. They can only reduce the harm they cause so much. Drawing the line at creatures that move around and actively interact with their environment, including avoiding injury and reacting to negative stimulus, is easier than trying to subsist on, like, nothing. As for bacteria, we can’t like, see them, or avoid them. It’s literally impossible to not ingest them. Plus the only time we actually target bacteria is when it’s harming us, and it’s not like vegans don’t believe in enacting self defense against something that attacked you first. But we can pretty easily avoid eating jellyfish. It in fact takes more effort to eat jellyfish than it does to not eat jellyfish. I mean you can try to get pedantic about it, like whether plants avoid negative stimulus or whatever, but again, vegans have to eat something, or they’d, y’know, die. Jellyfish can have an observable avoidant reaction to harm. It’s a relatively simple line to draw when you have to draw one somewhere.
And no, you can’t hurt a chair, because a chair is an inanimate object. There are humans who don’t have the ability to feel pain, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be hurt, as in harmed. It also doesn’t make them the same as a chair.
If you decide you want to be vegan then yes. If you don’t want to be vegan then I guess it’s up to you whether you want to draw a line anywhere or not, or where that line is.
They didn’t say anything about feeling morally superior, they just explained where and why many vegans differentiate between plants, bacteria, and animals. And let’s not pretend that other people, including non vegans, don’t also draw these lines at any other point, and don’t only bring up these supposed areas of debate whenever veganism is brought up. It’s a personal choice based on personal motivations, just because someone holds a different view from you that doesn’t automatically mean they feel superior to you. This comment is giving me the feeling you’re just looking for an excuse to rag on vegans, when they’re not even the ones who started the discussion.
Ok but how are plants not being exploited? Also it could be said that you can get meat without exploiting animals, such as getting rid of invasive species. At a certain point it’s not a diet it’s an ideology, and I feel they should have separate names. Because let’s say you’re just against exploitation of living organisms, then you’d be fine with eating invasive species, or meat hunted yourself, but deny eating anything from a farm.
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