Sadly you missed a very important point in your argumentation: Cats are being kept as pets. They usually have a good life for simply being cute and easy to handle.
Keeping them to eat them is a downgrade (nothing changes except that they live shorter - assuming you butcher them in a normal way, not with a baseball bat which might cause a slower and painful death). When doing nothing, that downgrade doesn’t exist, so on average the life of cats will become better.
Pigs for example either are being kept in mass-production factories (really the most fitting word for those, animals there only exist for their materials) or they are being kept in a more ethical way where they can go outside whenever they want, get better food, can run around, are much healthier, … .
This is an upgrade (they live longer, healthier and happier). When doing nothing, that upgrade doesn’t exist (as commonly), so on average the life of pigs will become worse.
As customers we have the power to show the mass production industry that we don’t agree with their actions - you also do that by not buying any meat / milk / eggs / … . But while this decreases the amount of miserable lifes it does not offer an alternative - animals either get born under those conditions or not at all. Meanwhile when supporting farmers who care about their animals, you offer an alternative - farm animals finally get to live a happy life.
Hold on, let me get my B12 deficient brain around this with a basic hypothetical example…
100 cows are killed each year at an evil factory farm for 10 people. One person suddenly develops a conscience and decides to change their lifestyle by not eating their cow products, switching to a purely iceberg lettuce based diet, reducing demand by 10% outright and causing 10 fewer cows to be bred for the evil factory farm.
But actually this is WORSE than someone developing only a bit of a conscience and deciding that instead of giving the evil factory farm money for 10 dead cows a year, they’ll give their farmer best friend who they know personally and trust and who gives the cows pedicures and lets them drift away quietly in their sleep money for 10 dead cows a year? And this is better and more moral because in this world it is a universal constant that a set amount of cows must be killed each year, and by abstaining from meat entirely you are giving the evil factory farm a greater proportion of the cosmically allocated dead cow quota?
Because if so, this is great news for my ethical cat steak business.
Instead of 10 in prison it’s either 1 (or even 10 if you don’t reduce the amount of meat you eat) with a good life or 0 with a good life.
But we’re talking around each other, the question we’re actually discussing, and where our fundamental disagreement lies, is: Is a happy life with an earlier death better than no life at all? If you don’t say so that’s valid, I’m not stopping you from being vegan.
Not existing, or spending your entire short life “happily” being literal livestock existing only to have products extracted from you on the 0.00001% of farms that both don’t abuse their animals (more than is “necessary” for livestock farming) and stimulate them beyond dropping them in a field where they can catch a glimpse of a car every so often.
Sadly you missed a very important point in your argumentation: Cats are being kept as pets. They usually have a good life for simply being cute and easy to handle.
Keeping them to eat them is a downgrade (nothing changes except that they live shorter - assuming you butcher them in a normal way, not with a baseball bat which might cause a slower and painful death). When doing nothing, that downgrade doesn’t exist, so on average the life of cats will become better.
Pigs for example either are being kept in mass-production factories (really the most fitting word for those, animals there only exist for their materials) or they are being kept in a more ethical way where they can go outside whenever they want, get better food, can run around, are much healthier, … .
This is an upgrade (they live longer, healthier and happier). When doing nothing, that upgrade doesn’t exist (as commonly), so on average the life of pigs will become worse.
As customers we have the power to show the mass production industry that we don’t agree with their actions - you also do that by not buying any meat / milk / eggs / … . But while this decreases the amount of miserable lifes it does not offer an alternative - animals either get born under those conditions or not at all. Meanwhile when supporting farmers who care about their animals, you offer an alternative - farm animals finally get to live a happy life.
Hold on, let me get my B12 deficient brain around this with a basic hypothetical example…
100 cows are killed each year at an evil factory farm for 10 people. One person suddenly develops a conscience and decides to change their lifestyle by not eating their cow products, switching to a purely iceberg lettuce based diet, reducing demand by 10% outright and causing 10 fewer cows to be bred for the evil factory farm.
But actually this is WORSE than someone developing only a bit of a conscience and deciding that instead of giving the evil factory farm money for 10 dead cows a year, they’ll give their farmer best friend who they know personally and trust and who gives the cows pedicures and lets them drift away quietly in their sleep money for 10 dead cows a year? And this is better and more moral because in this world it is a universal constant that a set amount of cows must be killed each year, and by abstaining from meat entirely you are giving the evil factory farm a greater proportion of the cosmically allocated dead cow quota?
Because if so, this is great news for my ethical cat steak business.
Instead of 10 in prison it’s either 1 (or even 10 if you don’t reduce the amount of meat you eat) with a good life or 0 with a good life.
But we’re talking around each other, the question we’re actually discussing, and where our fundamental disagreement lies, is: Is a happy life with an earlier death better than no life at all? If you don’t say so that’s valid, I’m not stopping you from being vegan.
Not existing, or spending your entire short life “happily” being literal livestock existing only to have products extracted from you on the 0.00001% of farms that both don’t abuse their animals (more than is “necessary” for livestock farming) and stimulate them beyond dropping them in a field where they can catch a glimpse of a car every so often.
Hmm hmm hmm. What a conundrum.
(check their username they’re a troll, but you raise some very good points.)
On vegancirclejerk, the trolling is a core part of the experience. Walked into that myself when I first saw the community.
Eight comment in and twelve hours later and I finally realize this is vcj and not c/vegan.
fuck.