Did Priscilla also want to be living in absolute misery every single day of her life? The way animals are treated while they are alive is my main objection to our farming practices and the reason why i don’t eat meat.

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JK-Swizzle 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I believe you are missing the forest for the trees. It is bringing up the question of what defines self will. It is unrelated to veganism in all but text.

An easy example is dogs. We have bred dogs for centuries to love doing work for us. If they hated doing the work, it would be easy to call it cruel. If they loved it by nature, it would be easy to call it kind. But since we created them into a thing that loves the work we need them for, where do the ethics fall?

Should we prevent them from doing what brings them joy? Should we make use of this win-win situation? If it is the latter, we are quickly approaching the ability to morph every species into something that gets joy from doing our work.

Dogs we changed by accident. The next one will not be an accident. Is it still a beings free will if the game was rigged from the start?

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protocolture 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Depends on the dog tbh. Keshonds are bred to yell at anyone getting on your barge. A lot of humans would probably like that job if it paid enough. Just chilling out and yelling at anyone you dont recognise.

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the_af 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Dogs we changed by accident

(I know your point wasn't about dogs either, it just reminded me of something).

I love Neil de Grasse Tyson's line in Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey:

"This wolf has discovered what a branch of its ancestors figured out some 15.000 years ago... an excellent survival strategy: the domestication of humans."

	▲	oooyay 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		There's also another animal/dog documentary that I've watched recently that puts a finer point on this realization. The secret to survival and evolution is cooperation. For instance, not all dogs evolved the same way in this documentary. Some were more nuturing, some were more problem solving. For the focus of the documentary the challenge was to match the dog with a human that had a need they could address. I think somewhat egotistically humans underappreciate how we have also been goaded by our "pets" into our own evolutionary journey. Most of the subjects of that documentary would not be alive if it were not for those dogs.
	▲	rcxdude 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		It's much like how many plants have accidentally found that a great means of propagation is to produce a compound that is both a great chemical warfare agent against other plants and microbes and also tastes interesting to humans or makes them feel funny.
	▲	moondance 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		An amusing quip, but since you brought Neil up- his takes on veganism are generally disappointing and facile.

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noosphr 37 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We can easily blast pure pleasure every second of every day of her life with direct brain stimulation. She would be so deliriously happy our lives will be inhumane by comparison.

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krater23 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Just thing about, whats better, being treated the way some of the animals treated or being locked up in a server room all your life, seeing only doom dungeons and run to not get killed ingame? I would be happy to be the animal when I need to choose between Priscilla and the brain tissue in a biological computer.