The inability to recognize the highly nuanced cognitive differences between different animal species is slightly putting me off of "strict" veganism

Hi /c/vegan,

I’m a baby “vegan”, just started about a month ago. I started watching the YouTuber MicTheVegan as my main influence.

I’ve been really working on and developing my belief system. The issue is, my belief system so far, while it is like 97% consistent with veganism, does have some conflicts with veganism, and I think some people would say that I can’t call myself a vegan because of that.

Basically, I think it’s too broad to simply lump all animals into one category and say that any at all exploitation of them is wrong. Instead, I like taking a very scientific approach about what we know about different animals’ cognitive and emotional abilities, and perhaps prioritize different groups of animals differently.

While I’m still developing my belief systems, here’s a basic rundown of it:

Tier 1: Primates, cetaceans (whales, dolphins), elephants, certain bird species (corvids, parrots), octopuses

These animals are highly intelligent and should never be exploited for any manner. They should not be kept as pets or in zoos (I suppose exceptions for if an animal is injured beyond repair).

Tier 2: Domesticated mammals (dogs, cats), farm animals (pigs, cows), other bird species, certain fish species (cleaner wrasse, groupers)

The only difference between these animals and tier 1 animals, is that I believe they can be kept in captivity (pets or in zoos). However, they need to be kept up to really high standards. They need a lot of space and a lot of enrichment. Yes, I currently believe that most people who keep dogs as pets do not treat them well enough, but I also believe that if you do treat them well that it is okay.

Tier 3: Reptiles, amphibians, remaining fish species.

The only difference between these animals and tier 2 animals is that I think the standard for keeping them in captivity can be slightly lowered. I say this as a reptile lover, I have a couple lizards as pets. These animals still need very high standards for treatment, but I believe it’s okay to keep them in “cages” (really terrariums and aquariums). Basically, the science we have says that these animals just don’t need the same level as enrichment. Some lizards will literally sit in one spot for days. And yes, I highly believe that these animals are abused in reality. Many people keep these animals in far too small enclosures, among other problems.

The discussion of whether or not it’s okay to breed these animals is highly nuanced, but I know with reptiles and amphibians, they really don’t have any connection to their offspring so I don’t think it’s unethical to separate them. Some reptiles who lay eggs will even lay eggs regardless of if they are fertilized or not. I haven’t made my mind up about it, but I think you could make an argument that you could ethically breed reptiles, maybe even argue that allowing them to breed let’s them live a more natural life.

Tier 4: Insects, arachnids

Okay this is where a lot of vegans will lose me. These animals should absolutely never be tortured, but I personally think that they can be ethically farmed and consumed. I think these animals have simple enough brains that their quality of life when in a farmed environment really isn’t that much different than their natural lives. I personally don’t eat bugs, but I feed them to my lizards. That being said, I still think they deserve a decent amount of space, some enrichment, and a cruelty free life up until their death.

Tier 5: Bivalves (clams, mussels), annelids (earthworms), sponges.

Once again will get some hate for it, but these animals I also believe can be farmed and with even less consideration than the tier 4 animals. I don’t really think these animals need any laws protecting them. They don’t have central nervous systems.

Animal I’m not sure about: Crustaceans (somewhere between tier 3 and tier 4), Many fish species need more research (but I do standby that some fish, like carp and goldfish, belong in my tier 3).

I’m curious what other vegan’s thoughts are about this. Can I not call myself a vegan because of this?

PuddingFeeling907,

The only animals that deserve to be in a lower tier are mosquitos and wasps.

ClockworkOtter,

I think there are interesting parallels to be drawn with non-animal beings, e.g. plants and fungi. They might not react in an immediately visible timeframe, but some reactions can be more complex than those of some animals.

ghostdoggtv,

If you’re vegan enough to affect your market decisions, welcome to the making things better club.

Nobody is the vegan police checking to see who’s doing the best. Decide why you want to be vegan or not and then live accordingly.

CADmonkey,

Question about the teir 2: What if someone keeps a chicken or two as a pet? Say they get to run around the yard and eat bugs, but their eggs are found and eaten or used for baking?

Because I’ve got four pet chickens and they’re a riot, always running around and getting into everything. And they do an awesome job keeping the bugs and ticks under control.

weastie,

So the major problem with this, is that only hens produce eggs. So what do you do with all the roosters? You really don’t need that many roosters to breed hens. Since there is a roughly 50/50 split of roosters/hens, and only a couple roosters are used for breeding, what do you think happens to the rest of them? So the idea is that you can’t buy or own hens without them being a product of a massive amount of roosters being murdered.

CADmonkey,

I hatched mine and ended up with three hens and a roo. I didn’t realize I needed to kill the rooster, and I’m kind of attached to him at this point.

Or did you miss the part where they were pets?

Audacity9961,

This is a common question. I think this video summarises the backyard egg question quite nicely. www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YFz99OT18k

JubilantJaguar,

Intellect is a red herring.

Jeremy Bentham understood this 200 years ago: “The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”

As a thought experiment, ask yourself if you would be happy to harm a mentally-disabled human being simply because of their cognitive deficiency.

Cethin,

There’s a large gap between mentally-disabled human and a worm, for example. There’s also humans literally born without a brain.

Intellect is correlated with ability to suffer. For example, a human can experience ongoing trauma from something that happened to them in the past, but that’s likely not possible for creatures with low intelligence. Also, you have to consider if reacting to impulses is the same as feeling pain. If they aren’t complex enough for it to be pain, than just a reaction to something isn’t necessarily suffering.

PoliticalAgitator,

For example, a human can experience ongoing trauma from something that happened to them in the past, but that’s likely not possible for creatures with low intelligence.

For context, many people did (and still do) make exactly the same case for babies, often performing painful surgical procedures on them with no kind of anaesthetic. Nevertheless…

Caterpillars that are exposed to a stimuli shortly before pain is inflicted on them still react negatively to the stimuli after becoming butterflies.

While the original goal was to see how much of a caterpillar was still in a butterfly, the result was a basic trauma response; something in the past hurt them and it now induces fear.

Sure, maybe they don’t get PTSD from seeing other caterpillars maimed for science, but simple trauma is still trauma.

Also, you have to consider if reacting to impulses is the same as feeling pain. If they aren’t complex enough for it to be pain, than just a reaction to something isn’t necessarily suffering.

Do you have any basis for this beyond it being personally convient? Pain is essential for survival, especially without intelligence. It plays a greater role than even vision or hearing, both of which the creatures you’re talking about clearly have.

Is it morally justified to inflict pain and fear on a creature that outwardly reacts to it, simply because it can’t be proven its “true” pain and fear inside their minds, according to your arbitrary standard?

Asserting “their pain is not like our pain” without actual proof, it’s equally likely that they physical pain beyond what humans are capable of experiencing.

But that’s never proposed, likely because it makes things less morally convient.

JubilantJaguar,

That last point sounds like the pure speculation it is. The point is that we don’t know. In this situation, I personally would prefer to err on the side of no suffering.

I agree that humans (and presumably a small handful of other species) are fundamentally different in one way: their ability to project and to imagine the future. And that this adds the question of psychological suffering. But for the purposes of the question, physical suffering surely trumps the mental variety.

IoSapsai,

My personal belief system is that no animal, regardless of how simple of a nervous system it possesses, deserves exploitation and suffering. It’s not so much about the animal’s feelings, which definitely also plays a role when we talk about the more “sentient” beings, but the effect that has on the rock we live on.

Keeping animals in captivity because “it’s cool” or for public amusement is not something I agree with. Keeping them in a sanctuary is one thing, capturing them from the wild, breeding them, and displaying them in enclosures far smaller than their natural territory is another thing. Animal breeding for profit is also something I have a problem with. Keeping them in cages is not ok. You do not have a reason to keep a living being enclosed because “it’s cool”. Invasive animal species often came to be because the said species are “cool”, not to mention the way they got into the breeding system in the first place.

The problem with consuming less sentient animals isn’t about the kill count or the pain they suffer. It’s about the way they’re “harvested” and the effects on the environment. A much larger portion of our agricultural output goes for the tier 2 animals than for feeding humans. (using your tier system for simplicity, I don’t want to lump animals into tiers myself). The emissions coming out of these animals amounts to at least 25% of our greenhouse gas output.

Farming insects is part of the above problem. You use more plant food for less calories. It’s much more efficient than beef, yes, but correct me if I’m wrong, I might be talking out of my ass here, escaped population can wreak absolute havoc on the local ecosystems.

And for clams and mussels, they might only be able to react to stimuli but trawling for them is an absurdly destructive practice that also needs to stop.

tekila,

On my end I’m what you’d call a sentientist. My moral criteria is based around sentience ( yes sentience as almost anything is not an on off switch but more of a gradient). I think most people who call themselves vegan and fight for animal rights (as opposed to welfarism) adhere to the sentientism philosophical argument. (See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiocentrism )

Many bivalves are probably not sentient ( think sponges) and I don’t really care what happens to them like I don’t care what happens to a rock. As they don’t have a subjective experience nobody is there to be harmed.

However, insects are definitely believed to be sentient which is why I wont kill them when not needed. This means a mosquito “attacking” me will get slapped just as I would kill a tiger trying to eat me, but I won’t eat insects as eating plants easily replaces it and plants are not sentient (even if they were, it’s always better to eat them directly rather than feed them to animals and then eat them)

For example with your classification how would you deal with animals (human or nom-humans) with impairments that would put them at the level lower than their respective species? If your answer is to keep them in the same group as their species it’s basically an indirect specist argument. If you agree to lower them in another category then this open the way to things that can look pretty disturbing to me. For example keeping certain humans in zoo.

Basically I believe every sentient beings should be afforded basic rights like the right not to be killed.

P.S. : I would strongly invite you to look at footage of how insects are raised when used for example as food source for humans and you’ll see that it differs enormously to what their natural environment would look like.

Audacity9961, (edited )

To be honest a lot of this stuff is pretty easily answered and has been discussed ad nauseum in spaces like /r/vegan. This is also not a great space to ask this question of vegans, as a lot of carnists (yes that includes vegetarians) come here to argue against veganism and upvote answers they agree with but that practicing ethical vegans are likely to reject. You are likely to get better answers from vegans in other spaces.

In terms of your above post there is nothing scientific in what you’ve described. It appears you are using a veneer of science to avoid adopting views you disagree with. To be frank there is a lack of research on almost all animals in terms of their sentience, intelligence and capacity to suffer, presumably due to the carnist nature of society. There is also the unavoidable philosophical problem of other minds, which we are unlikely to be able to readily solve with science; we will never truly be able to determine the experience of another non-homo sapien creature and can only work through analogy to the experience of homo sapiens.

The above notwithstanding, even if some creatures are more “intelligent” in some ways than other creatures, how does this impact their entitlement to the bare minimum of moral consideration, i.e. freedom from intentional harm and exploitation? How have you determined that each “tier” that you have created only deserves the rights you have designated? The assignment and exclusion of moral consideration is the province of philosophy and politics, not science. There are certain classes of humans who are alive, and through severe disability or illness, have intelligence arguably lesser than many of the animals listed above in your lower tiers. Would you therefore exclude them from moral consideration? Of course not, and this is why intelligence is irrelevant to moral consideration - it is not a morally relevant characteristic.

The morally relevant characteristic that stands philosophical rigour to determine if moral consideration should be granted is a capacity to suffer. It is pretty clear that all of the animals listed, apart perhaps from tier 5, have this, so it makes sense for these animals to have moral consideration.

You have also completely ignored the well established link between commodification and carnism in the above, which is a key reason, as to why exploitation and commodification of animals is ethically unacceptable and should be eschewed - the commodification of animals, or relegation of them to zoe, is fundamentally how we as a society and as individuals justify their ongoing torture, mistreatment and slaughter in most ways throughout society. This is without even going into other issues regarding exploitation, such as an inability for an animal to provide meaningful consent, and respect for bodily autonomy that we grant other individuals, regardless of intelligence.

This doesn’t mean that vegans would generally be opposed to adopting animals to care for them, or opening sanctuaries - most people I have encountered and literature I have read understand that we operate within the internal logic of a carnist society, and that while it is unethical to engage in the support of further breeding, it is ethical to care for adopted animals (or animals you had prior to going vegan) that have already been brought into existence through this system.

In terms of your tier 5, due to the lack of research here, the problem of other minds, and the lack of necessity here for people to engage in the exploitation or harm of these creatures, I am of the view that the default position should be erring on the side of caution.

tekila,

I’ve posted another answer to OP but I feel like yours expresses my position much better than I could. Thanks for that!

Knusper,

I just find it easier to err on the side of not harming these animals. There’s so many criteria, you may want to consider for morality when you do go into that.

For example, insects are currently rapidly dying and this will likely fuck humanity over in a decade or two.
Breeding+farming insects presumably won’t impact that. Squatting singular flies basically won’t impact that. It’s climate change and pesticides that are the culprits here.
But it’s an example where your metric of mental complexity doesn’t reach far enough. We do need to protect simple animals, too.

Of course, on the other side of that discussion, if we don’t use pesticides, we may not be able to feed all humans. There’s a lot of nuance to that discussion and there may not be an easy side to pick after all, but yeah, that complexity is why I prefer to err on the morally simpler side.

I should also add that this is what I live by, I generally don’t impose it on others, because of this incompleteness in my reasoning.

Haggunenons,
@Haggunenons@lemmy.world avatar

Imagine a level 0 species that is as much more intelligent and aware than the level 1 species that you listed as the level 1 are from the level 2 animals. For example, maybe level 0 species are capable of trapping level 1 creatures into geographic and economic situations, sometimes even without the level 1 species being aware that this is happening, and limiting the freedom that they otherwise could have had, and preventing them from expressing their natural desire to see and explore as much as they are naturally driven to do. Now imagine a -1 level, -2, -3, etc. Would you be ok with being treated increasingly worse so long as the one doing the abuse was a succifiently high enough intelligence/capability/rank above you? Just because some people really want to trap other animals in little boxes for their own amusement doesn’t mean the animals want it. In almost all cases, if you leave the cage open, even the level 3 and below animals will naturally choose to wonder off and take advantage of their newly acquired right to freedom of movement and exploration.

I think the original position argument is valid here. If you knew that you had a 50/50 chance of being 1)a lifelong pet who will never get to experience the natural freedom that your genes have evolved for over billions of years, or 2)a human with a pet, would you still vote for this pet-having system? Or is your decision to deprive animals of their natural habitat and curiosity just one that you’ve come to after realizing that you are a human who would like to have an extra interesting thing to look at when you are bored?

solivine,
@solivine@sopuli.xyz avatar

I find it kind of funny that you’re sitting there and arbitrarily deciding the rights of different species based on what brain you think they have. The truth is, at this point in time, no one knows to an exact science how any species thinks, or feels for that matter regarding pain, and so the idea that you’re taking a scientific approach here should be met with skepticism at best.

I don’t really understand what’s so hard to understand about “cause no animal harm”. The act of segregating species and giving different ones different rights because you maybe feel like eating insects isn’t any different to why people aren’t vegan today. I mean look at how religion justifies eating fish when no other meat should be eaten for example.

electric_nan,

Almost 25 years vegan here. I don’t really gaf about bugs. I murder ants by the thousand when they invade my house, I slap mosquitos without remorse… but I will save spiders from the bath.

JesusLikesYourButt,

Might wanna be careful about all that bug murder, seems there is a limit if you wanna go to heaven.

electric_nan,

O shit o fuck

CountVon,
@CountVon@sh.itjust.works avatar

What you describe sounds like a flexetarian or semi-vegetarian diet, Wikipedia has a handy comparison of the various types. Pescatarianism looks to be the closest to what you describe.

Where do you stand on eggs and dairy products? The unborn egg may not suffer, and cheese and milk cannot suffer, but the animals that produce them can and do suffer immensely under factory farming conditions.

I personally couldn’t lump chickens in with domesticated mammals. I’ve encountered a fair number of animals that clearly had significant intelligence and capability to form emotional attachments (i.e. many dogs and cats of course, but also cows and horses), and I’ve never seen anything to indicate a similar level of cognition in chickens.

weastie,

I don’t support egg or dairy. As I said in the post, my view on the “tier 2” animals is basically that I think it is possible to ethically keep them in captivity. That doesn’t mean keeping them in captivity is ethical in general, but that if you really do it right I think it is okay. I think it’s okay to keep a dog or a cow or a pig as a pet, but I think you really have to make sure you give them lots of space and enrichment. I don’t believe you should be able to use them for resources though.

The difference being that tier 1 animals, even if you really try to give them a good life, I don’t think should ever be kept as pets or in zoos. Like I don’t care if you built the coolest ever whale terrarium, sorry, not allowed to put an animal like that in captivity.

pinchcramp,
@pinchcramp@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

I’ve been vegan for 12 years and my position on this has changed somewhat over the years. Although, that’s mostly philosophical and doesn’t really affect my actions.

I agree that our moral consideration should be based on the subjective experience of a being rather, instead of which biological category they belong to.

This is why nowadays I believe that the consumption of an organism from the animal kingdom, that can be reasonably considered not an individual, is not a matter of moral good or bad. I think certain bivalves like scallops or oysters don’t have brains. Therefore it would be reasonable to assume they don’t have an individual experience that would be affected by killing/harvesting them.

For me veganism is about respecting the desires of a non-human individual to not feel harm, not have their body exploited, their children taken away, and not have their life taken from them. It is about treating animals as individuals, not commodities. I don’t care about biological taxonomy.

If that does not make me vegan, I don’t mind. I will still call myself vegan in everyday situation for two reasons:

  1. it is important to show representation, especially if you don’t “look like a vegan”. I’m just a (arguably) normal person who doesn’t want to exploit someone who doesn’t want to be exploited.
  2. my actions won’t dilute the definition of veganism in non-vegans’ eyes. What I mean is, that I don’t eat bivalves (salty goo sounds pretty gross) or wear animal products and therefore won’t be caught in a “gotcha” moment by non-vegans who may or may not care about why I think it’s okay to eat some animals but not others.

So to (not) answer your question: at the end of the day it’s up to you if you want to call yourself a vegan or not. If you don’t fully align with the moral views that are held by most ethical vegans but still eat a vegan diet, maybe go with the term plant-based. If you think your views won’t really be subject of discussion or scrutiny in your everyday life and you mostly agree with a vegan worldview, call yourself vegan for the sake of simplicity and representation. If none of those answers feel right, don’t call yourself either and explain your dietary choices every time you eat in a social situation without using the words “vegan” or “plant-based” :D

I hope that was somewhat helpful. Good luck!

weastie,

I totally agree with the representation part. I understand I might not technically be 100% vegan, but calling myself vegan spreads awareness of veganism within my friend and family circle.

lemmy_99c4zb3e3,
@lemmy_99c4zb3e3@lemmy.world avatar

It looks fair enough. I am not entirely sure about 4th point. But who cares when animals like pigs, are mass murdered now. Overall veganism is about minimalising suffering and on this point insects are probably per mil of current animal suffering suffering, totally not important.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • uselessserver093
  • Food
  • aaaaaaacccccccce
  • test
  • CafeMeta
  • [email protected]
  • testmag
  • MUD
  • RhythmGameZone
  • RSS
  • dabs
  • TheResearchGuardian
  • KbinCafe
  • feritale
  • Socialism
  • oklahoma
  • SuperSentai
  • KamenRider
  • All magazines
    •