Animal products amid the 6th mass extinction

[aero]

I've been holding off on making a thread for this. For the past few years I've been reconsidering how I feel about the morality of using animal products, and a lot more in recent months. With the growth of plant based alternatives to animal products becoming available it doesn't seem like there's room for excuses I've used before to hold off on veganism. A lot of my reservations had to do with health, the sustainability of an animal free diet, and consistency but each of these I've found to be conclusively argued against. It has never been easier to maintain health without animal products, and with that it also makes it easier to sustain such a diet. With consistency I still have some hesitation, but clearly the more inconsistent position is in the defense of using animal products. I do take things to the limit and question why ethics of consumption should stop at animals and if we can separate them out as a special form of life because of an apparent capacity to suffer. For example, bacteria can't suffer and they are not even considered in everyday decision making. Killing them doesn't seem to be unethical because they can't suffer, but the consequences of killing bacteria certainly can. Bacteria like Prochlorococcus are responsible for much of Earth's oxygen and if they were to die off then all complex life would go with them. That seems immoral to me. Overusing antibiotics, mostly in factory farms, is leading to antibiotic resistance which can end modern medicine as we know it. The production of antibiotics also threatens other species like horseshoe crab which we use to extract their blood for their amebocytes and their numbers are declining to the point their conservation status is near threatened. Then there's more indirect consequences in that we're okay with killing bacteria, but if we were to kill the bacteria in the gut microbiome that may give some pause for unclear reasons.

So as far as consistency goes that's where my mind is on that. I don't think the only moral thing you can do is to get your energy through photosynthesis, and being born omnivorous is immoral either. What seems to me the responsibility of being a moral person is to be a good steward of the biosphere, not separate from it rather more consistent with it. With it getting easier and easier to remove animals from our supply chain, the most logical position seems to be to hasten and embrace that. I've cut a lot of meat out of my diet and do have serious plans to transition to a vegetarian diet and then ultimately a vegan lifestyle. It's the best thing I can do as an individual to prevent antibiotic resistance, fungicide resistance, accelerating loss of biodiversity in the 6th mass extinction event, future pandemics, high water usage, pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, suffering, hunger, habitat collapse, and so on. Ultimately it wasn't the animal products themselves but the interdependence of all life on earth that leads me to my conclusions, hence the brief focus on bacteria. The 6th mass extinction event is perhaps the most urgent moral emergency of the 21st century and it has to be looked at carefully.

I know this is a sensitive subject and I wanted to bring it up to see where everyone else is on these issues, so I'd like to see what everyone else's thoughts are.

[Marina]

My approach to this subject is to put a focus on a mentally positive mindset. We all know we're killing the planet by our unsustained existence, but I feel the more you pressure people into accepting these harsh truths, the more they shut off. With my vegetarian diet, I've managed to get myself into a mindset of "every day I'm not eating meat, it helps" as opposed to "every time I eat meat I'm actively being an immoral person", because that way it makes me want to try harder with my efforts of staying meat-less. A lot of people will try animal-free diets and then feel absolutely terrible about it because they beat themselves up for every moment they slip up and do something that they've been trained to do their whole lives, which I don't think is a sustainable approach at all. In order to get people to be meat-free, you have to get them to want to be meat-free.

The biggest contributor to a negative mindset with veggie diets I feel is what I call streak-thinking (like snapchat streaks, yknow). Usually when a vegetarian or vegan person eats animal-based products once, for any reasons, everyone will instantly have a go at them like "oh you're not vegetarian anymore, huh???" so what happens is we put a strain on ourselves to perfectly uphold a continuous diet, when really it doesn't work that way. If I eat vegetarian for 364 days a year and then have meat on one day, my diet isn't "broken". It doesn't undo the past year that I did not eat meat. So I think an important mindset to adapt is an accumulative approach to the topic. Every day you don't eat meat counts. Every thing you do to save the planet or better your health or whatever counts. Only that way can you garner positive reinforcement within yourself to continue.

[Uranus]

Stuff about animals and extinctions are interesting, but only add up to how crappy our society is today.

I have a feeling this generation will be the last good generation, of course there are opportunities to come back, but the last generation are so ignorant and rather watch the world burn for money. In about 10-20 years, I really hope that this generation can build on the crapshow of today.

But as Marina said, we need to stay positive, everything we do helps and slowly we can rebuild the natural enviroment, we have a massive planet and a massive job, but I'm sure we can do it. Humans are smart. It will take a while, But it will happen, not can. Plus nature likes rebuilding so we have outside assistance. We are giving Earth it's medication like it's mother.

[ShadowStarX]

As long as the health effects, the taste and the purchase costs are the same, or just mildly worse, I am all supportive.
Just don't force people to cut out meat out of their diet, especially fish and chicken, which have a much smaller ecological footprint than red meat. (however, overfishing and animal cruelty are a big problem, so cultured meat should come as an alternative for these as well) For medicine, we should also aim to increase the degree of plant-based pills and syrups, but only if it doesn't cause a humanitarian crisis in itself.

Also nobody must ask people in unfortunate positions to consume even less (i.e. don't ask people to stop eating chicken) but make the upper class pay the price. They're the ones ruining the biosphere, so they are the ones that should be held accountable.

This wasn't meant as an argument against anybody who has posted so far, it's more of a precautionary message.

Overall, we should aim to stop the profit-centric and hierarchical mindset ruling our civilization, at all costs. That's the source of the 6th mass extinction, climate change, material inequalities and many other problems we are facing in the 21st century.

[aero]

Half of the plastic in the ocean is from fishing nets, and people have been more willing to ban plastic straws than regulating fish consumption. There's a lot of dead zones in the ocean largely due to overfishing, and more boats are being sent out bringing back less fish. Bottom trawling alone is responsible for about as much GHGs as the aviation industry. As for chicken there's fewer GHG emissions associated with that, however it's probably at the height of the cruelty argument if you look at what happens to baby males and the chickens that get to be adults typically go insane from the conditions. Now with antibiotics about 80% of the demand in the US, and a similar case is found in other countries, is for animal agriculture mostly with pigs who have a more similar biology to us than chicken and cows. Antibiotic resistance is already a problem, and would end modern medicine which if we're concerned with human welfare would be a huge threat to modern civilization. This is something people participate in when they use animal products because 99% of the time it's sourced from factory farms. And I don't need to get started on how animal waste is handled and how that effects the local habitat.

I don't shame anybody living in poverty, living in remote areas, living in food deserts, and so on. On the global scale developed nations are where the bulk of the demand is, and if you are in a position where you can reduce or outright eliminate consumption of animal products I really think there is an ethical obligation to do so. Prices are coming down for plant-based meats like the Beyond and Impossible burgers which I think will be key for getting animals out of the supply chain, but this is something everyone should be looking at. Going just one day without animal products does have a tangible effect from everything to changing demand signals, to cutting a significant amount of equivalent transportation emissions. The land that can have their biodiversity restored when it's not being used for animal feed will also have a major tangible effect even if a small percentage of the population stops consuming animal products. About 90% of the soy beans being grown in the Amazon is for animal feed and not humans, so if people were to reduce their animal product consumption that'd be a huge step to preventing the Amazon from being a carbon source like it seems to be becoming right now and back to a carbon sink. About 1/3 global GHGs can be attributed to the world's food system so it will need to be addressed in any serious attempt to avoid mass extinction and the most catastrophic effects of climate change.

Again every bit helps, so this is just something to reflect on when making decisions about buying animal products. I can't go into the animal cruelty issue, nor the most severe consequences of unchecked ecological collapse for obvious reasons but this needs to be a broad and lasting effort. There are more former vegans than vegans, so the sustainability of the decisions everyone makes also needs to be taken seriously as rushing everyone to that lifestyle won't work.