Jeff Robinson
Marxist-Lentilist: Jackboots and Jackfruit
Complete dodge.
Bye bye MEAT! How will the post-meat future look?
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Complete dodge.
Jeff Robinson
Marxist-Lentilist: Jackboots and Jackfruit
Cringe.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Nope. It's your reasoning, not mine. That's my point.
And as I've said before, people from all cultures have taken in pets. Traditional peoples in the Amazon take in pets that they don't eat, sometimes from the same species that in other contexts they eat. Are they hypocrites? Or is something else going on? Something messier and more human.
Jeff Robinson
Marxist-Lentilist: Jackboots and Jackfruit
It's a question, not 'reasoning'. Is your answer that you're not okay with it then?
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
I suspect that my answer would be the same as the answer of an indigenous Amazonian if you attempted to take away their pet tapir or parrot, which they've taken in as family members.
Jeff Robinson
Marxist-Lentilist: Jackboots and Jackfruit
I'm not asking about taking away, I'm asking about 'owners' making the decisions themselves.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Right. So we're veering rather far from reality here. People don't tend to do that to their pets.
Jeff Robinson
Marxist-Lentilist: Jackboots and Jackfruit
So when you said:
'Would it be better if a dog had never lived than rather than lived a decent life then been swiftly dispatched? Makes no difference to the question'
you didn't mean it?
Let's face it, if you knew somebody who bought dogs from a breeder, slaughtered them and turned them into ornaments around his house, you'd think he was doing something wrong. And if he sought to justify himself by saying the dogs were humanely treated before being 'quickly dispatched' and wouldn't exist anyway if he wasn't creating demand for them, you'd still think he was doing something wrong. His arguments are nothing but a bullshit rationalisation. But they are no different to your arguments about chickens, pigs and cows.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
You're inserting all kinds of things here without realising it. When you say 'dog', you mean pet dog, it seems. When talking about whether or not this or that is better, you seem to adopt some kind of god-like view. Why would any god give a shit either way?
Jeff Robinson
Marxist-Lentilist: Jackboots and Jackfruit
That god shit is a red herring.
So it's okay to kill dogs to turn them into ornaments as long as the owner doesn't consider them pets then?
Jeff Robinson
Marxist-Lentilist: Jackboots and Jackfruit
The cognitive dissonance of meat defenders would almost be funny if it wasn't responsible for so much death, misery and suffering.
WouldBe
Dislicksick
Some people have their pets stuffed when they die including when they have had to put them down.
Jeff Robinson
Marxist-Lentilist: Jackboots and Jackfruit
Some people have their pets stuffed when they die including when they have had to put them down.
True, but I was talking about killing them for the purpose of stuffing them (or some other similar purpose), not stuffing them after they've been put down for other reasons.
friedaweed
Me and me girl named Jane
It would save a lot of money in the long run and you'll get 90 years out of the dog.
WouldBe
Dislicksick
You'd need to treat them for moths.
friedaweed
Me and me girl named Jane
Would we have to kill the moths if discoveredYou'd need to treat them for moths.
WouldBe
Dislicksick
Probably.Would we have to kill the moths if discovered
Funky_monks
Neo-Rustic
Good to see this thread hasn't suddenly been diverted down a giant non sequitur then. 
Its quite simple: Dogs are pack animals, they incorporate us into their pack. Humans have had millions of years of a mutualistic relationship with dogs. There is evidence of certain prehistoric dogs/wolves having ornate burials. Those wolves we were able to tame became dogs and they worked with us to hunt stuff.
That's the reason the animaniacs use that argument. They know that our two species have been linked for millenia and somehow think it's equivalent to livestock, because few people these days understand that relationship.
Its quite simple: Dogs are pack animals, they incorporate us into their pack. Humans have had millions of years of a mutualistic relationship with dogs. There is evidence of certain prehistoric dogs/wolves having ornate burials. Those wolves we were able to tame became dogs and they worked with us to hunt stuff.
That's the reason the animaniacs use that argument. They know that our two species have been linked for millenia and somehow think it's equivalent to livestock, because few people these days understand that relationship.
Jeff Robinson
Marxist-Lentilist: Jackboots and Jackfruit
Delightful news.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Not sure what you think you're showing the rest of us with these lines of reasoning. I'm not keen on killing any animals to make ornaments personally. You seem to think killing animals for food is somehow trivial. I don't. I think it's pretty fundamental to how humans have always lived, to what we have evolved to become - omnivores.
As FM says, we're very much like dogs, an animal with which we have long had a close affinity. May well be that humans and dogs first teamed up, pre-domestication, in order to hunt together. May even be that humans learned from dogs various aspects about how to hunt as a pack. That's a theory that's taken seriously by some - personally I find it more convincing than the alternative 'wolves as scavengers' hypothesis, which doesn't match well with evidence from the behaviour of modern-day wolves or with ethnographic evidence of human-wolf/dog traditions (I recommend Pierotti & Fogg on that subject). And of course that is going to change how we view and value dogs. Is it consistent? Well consistent with what and for whom? It's clearly not consistent with how you view things. But so what?
Well, I would find it odd, I wouldn’t welcome it and I would find it indicative of someone that has worrying traits, given its incompatibilities with cultural norms. But when you ask would it be “okay” then, in and of itself, I suppose so. I don’t see that it is inherently something that requires some kind of action to be taken against the individual doing it. It wouldn’t be illegal, which indicates that this opinion is not out of step with society. You have to treat a dog well when it’s alive, but you have the absolute right to euthanise your own dog whenever you want.
Jeff Robinson
Marxist-Lentilist: Jackboots and Jackfruit
They’re not lines of reasoning, they’re lines of questioning. Their purpose is to test whether your justification for meat-eating a few pages back works. The justification was, to summarise, ‘giving an animal a good life and then killing them is at least as good as never bringing them into existence in the first place’. But in the case of breeding dogs to turn them into ornaments, you don’t like the implications of that position, it sounds kinda icky right?
So now you’ve adding several qualifications to the justification to handle the counter-example: the reason for the killing should be non-trivial and dogs may well be excluded from exploitative killing anyway, because of our shared co-evolutionary history.
We can interrogate further whether these qualifications actually work, but should note at least for now that your need to confide in them indicates that your initial justification is doing less work than you may have thought.
The reason I do this? In my experience animal eaters tend to justify their consumption of animals by appeals to things they’d never say other contexts, indicating that they are simply offering rationalisations rather than actual justifications. Like, consider your current appeals here to human nature, tradition and evolutionary history as the justificatory bases for our existing hierarchical attitudes to animals for example. Notice how similar they are to rightwing arguments you’d usually be very hostile to.
Jeff Robinson
Marxist-Lentilist: Jackboots and Jackfruit
So you’d find it odd, wouldn’t welcome it and think it indicative of worrying character traits. Sounds like you’re quite far from thinking it would be okay tbh.
Depends what you mean by “okay”. People do all kinds of things that I personally find odd, don’t welcome and find indicative of worrying traits. Vote Tory, for example. A quarter of the country do that. But just because I personally don’t like it, doesn’t mean it is “not okay” to do it.
Jeff Robinson
Marxist-Lentilist: Jackboots and Jackfruit
It seems like from this and your previous post you’re equating ‘okay’ with ‘having a (legal) right to do something’ (please correct me if I’ve misconstrued you). So let’s imagine a scenario in which a small group in society start breeding dogs to kill them to turn them into ornaments. Would it be wrong on your view if the government passed a law prohibiting this practice?
I’m not equating it with legal rights. I’m saying that “okay” is a difficult term to pin down, because it encompasses a vast spectrum from personal endorsement to cultural norms to not-actually-illegal-yet. As a whole, I don’t see it as my job to police what is “okay” for other people, although this obviously has hard limits at the point that lives are being harmed. From this perspective, I actually find it less “okay” to vote Tory than to euthanise your pet dog for no good reason.
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