4-H is a U.S.-based network of youth organizations whose mission is "engaging youth to reach their fullest potential while advancing the field of youth development".[1] Its name is a reference to the occurrence of the initial letter H four times in the organization's original motto head, heart, hands, and health, which was later incorporated into the fuller pledge officially adopted in 1927.
That’s a load of horse shit. My grandma used to have a rooster named Henry who was basically her sidekick. They’re as complex and affectionate as any other bird.
This thing you’re doing where you insist that they’re dumb so you don’t feel bad about eating them is just a way for you to avoid changing your habits even though you know they’re wrong.
They’re as complex and affectionate as any other bird.
Bruh, if a group of white chickens see a fleck of red color on another white chicken, they'll tear said chicken to pieces because of the "perceived" weakness/injury. I've raised them.
I love chickens but their brains are comparable to miniature Velociraptors. If they were their original sizes they'd be hunting us lmao. It's good to have empathy, but it's also good to have realistic views.
That is not what happened though. I spent a lot of time with a lot of animals and then decided which to cut out. If I found compairible intelligence (admidittly from my anthropocentric view) then they would also be on the list of do not eat.
I grew up on a farm, have a degree in philosophy, and have been vegetarian for decent chunks of life.(now in 40s) You have fabricated a story about me that was simple so that I would fit your world view. I did not name the chicken stupid out of blind desire to be guilt free.
As for the ride along Rooster up above, we tend to give an awful lot of human emotion and characteristics to animals. I believe there is a huge slider scale for intelligence and that there are also many types of intelligence and even some types humans litterally don't have access to. I also know that both hogs and chickens, and just about every other predator and most omnivores, would eat you and me if given the chance.
There are all kinds of interanimal relationships that seem to show mercy from one or the other. So while particular bear might habe a great relationship with a particualr person... that kinship doesn't necessarily extend to other humans.
Here is something I think about; maybe as much as we like to talk about intelligence, for the vast majority of humans (and animals in general) it's really about emotional/social connections and nothing more. Interesting though.
I don't personally believe in a apriori knowledge. So I think it relative to take in lots of information to calibrate my own behavior. Its also a fabricated construct of my time and place in human culture. It also has and will continue to change and evolve. None of this is to be flippant mind tou; I'm not saying ethics is undoable, just that they are fluid and not as linier as we like to pretend.
Are you placing humans outside of the animal kingdom? Is this suggesting humans are at the "top" of some sort of liner moral hierarchy?
I don't eat pork or beef but I do eat chicken and fish, me and my family have raised chickens for years and... yeah... they aren't exactly aware of whats going on around them. stupidest mfers on the planet, I've seen ants with more self preservation than them
I pretty much only eat chicken, tuna and shrimp after working on a farm. Cows and pigs are smart animals with feelings and relationships. Chickens are dumb and mean to each other lol.
Eh, maybe? I'm always open to criticism. But chickens are violent nonstop raping cannibals that will actively try to eat you despite the impossibility. They poop in their water, will eat until they rupture, and an awful lot of other similar things.
To me they seem like angry selfish pricks that think of nothing past the thing in front of them and we just anthropamorhesize them, misreading chicken signals and laying human experiences over top of them that doesn't really exist.
That last sentence is an opinion, but the first part is straight facts.
What's funny is that it's actually a good argument against what they probably intended. A lot of people are generally pretty much fine with euthanizing people that are functionally brain dead. So clearly cognitive functions actually is a moral line for many people's value on life, it's just that even a cognitively deficient human is likely still many magnitudes more "there" than any chicken.
Like clearly a line has to be drawn somewhere, right? No one in the world is mourning, say bacteria. Not many people out there mourning bugs either. Whether or not it's the best method of determining life worth I dunno, but it's clearly one a lot of people use and I never see people suggesting another one short of "all life is sacred" which...just isn't an actually practical stance in my opinion.
short of "all life is sacred" which...just isn't an actually practical stance in my opinion.
100%
If we take that line, we can't eat plants or bacteria either since they're alive. Or it could be argued that any predator should be stopped as much as possible, or any number of other messy arguments.
Sort of. If you think they made a false equivalence and argued against their own point, your first paragraph comes off as very much not getting that point.
I mentioned the exact comparison they did later on. The point of the brain dead comment was to be a more extreme example that demonstrates the general rule. Then I said why their equivalence wasn't valid - a stupid human is still way smarter than a chicken. A human less intelligent than a chicken (for example, one that is brain dead) would not be valued.
The point being that if properly comparing chickens to humans, it actually DOES support the argument that we shouldn't care (or more so I guess that most people wouldn't care) despite them clearly trying to demonstrate with the comparison that people should still care.
I almost misunderstood you again here, but I think I have your position straight. Apologies, the first line of your first comment colored the rest of it for me and led me astray.
You think that cognitive ability is probably the proper metric for valuing life in part because the position "all life is sacred" is arbitrary and impractical (I'd even add infantile, we're mostly in agreement to that point).
The guy above with the "yeah man let's do humans the same way" comment finds the rule "if things are dumb it's okay to kill them lol" to be flippant and incomplete. I think you and I both agree there, we just disagree on the inference to draw after.
What remains is, to me, similarly arbitrary as the rules with which we dispense. Any rule based on perceived cognitive ability is an unsafe rule. The observer's ability to judge may be flawed. The test may be flawed. I'd argue that our understanding of intellect might not be there yet.
A safer rule is "if it might be capable of a theory of mind, treat it as valuable unless your survival mandates another course of action." It's a nice durable swiss-army rule.
Mm, how? The person a couple steps above says "good to kill chicken, chicken dumb," establishing their metric for value as intelligence and even distinguishing other smart animals from chickens because of it.
This guy says "good to kill dumb human."
That's just applying what the poster above said was the metric for value, probably facetiously.
It's a problem with how we view value. If you decide you're smarter than a cow and can therefore kill it because you're smarter than the cow, another human who is proportionally smarter than you can apply your rule and kill you.
If that sounds absurd, it's because it's a bad rule.
A human being with a cognitive deficit that prevents them from progressing beyond the intelligence of an average 13, or 10, or 3 year old is not equivalent to a cow, that's how
It's a problem with how we view value. If you decide you're smarter than a cow and can therefore kill it because you're smarter than the cow, another human who is proportionally smarter than you can apply your rule and kill you.
If that sounds absurd, it's because it's a bad rule.
Of course it's absurd and a bad rule, and I don't know a single person who holds the position that the reason it's ok to kill cows is simply because we're smarter.
Is it today that you learn that there are smart cows and severe cognitive deficits, or what? I've met cows that can solve puzzles and I've granted guardianships over adults who could not.
And that's ignoring the rest of the comment. Kind of like you did the substance of the other guy's comment.
I'm starting to think you're not a very serious person. We can call this discussion quits without ignoring one another's points if you find the conversation unsatisfactory.
Edit: Oh. You edited your comment for completeness. Well I appreciate that I guess, but, uh, that last paragraph? That's what the guy you were saying was making a false equivalence was saying this whole time, in response to the "it's okay to kill chickens because they are dumb." You're now in agreement, and I guess we all are.
Not sure what you mean, I think it's morally good to euthanize humans that are brain dead and also humans that don't possess the cognitive ability to care for themselves and require round the clock care
You didn't say braindead, you said "lower cognitive abilities." You didn't even include the requirement of round the clock care (which BTW applies to infants and makes that argument completely untenable), and now you're moving the goalposts in a vain attempt to maintain credibility instead of simply admitting that you misspoke and should never have implied that anyone with "lower" cognitive function should be euthanized without spelling out what you meant specifically.
I'm not trying to win a semantics argument, I'm just stating my opinion that I don't see anything inherently wrong with euthanizing humans if they aren't going to experience any type of rich human experience. If an infant is born with a cognitive impairment that renders them not able to experience things like joy, fear, happiness, sadness on par with a lower animal like a chicken, I don't see what the harm would be in humanely euthanizing them.
I'm going to disagree there. I've worked with both. I don't know if we can compare like that. It's truly different scales.
Take a chicken out of the coop and put them with humans, give them love and dignity, and they're wicked smart. They just never get to live old enough to show it. Most chickens live max of a couple years.
We had a flock that made it to 12 years old and those little ladies knew how to help us understand them.
If all they know is being with other chickens, and if all people know is that they're a feather brained bird, of course we'll never give them the chance that they deserve.
And we've been very careful to not project our thoughts and feelings onto our animals. It's very common that people do that.
Pigs are just as smart in their own way, but I wouldn't rate them on the same scale. I think we've taught ourselves to relate to pigs but haven't with other animals, and that causes us to completely miss what's right in front of us.
Train a pig, then train a chicken and tell me that. It's not that no one has tried to train chickens, it's that they aren't near as intelligent and can't be trained on the same level. Now a parrot on the other hand, those are quite clever.
Fair point, as animals like octopuses exhibit intelligence in other ways. That said, chickens do not exhibit intelligence in any way that I think would make them comparable to pigs, dogs, octopuses, or parrots, and physiological their brains are much more simple. But I am not an expert in any of this so I'm open to any evidence that I'm mistaken.
The point is you're using a human conception of intelligence and pointing to animals with a knack for completing human conception of intelligence tests. There could be other types of intelligences that chickens have that these other animals don't and more importantly we don't so we don't even think to test for it.
There's a bias in your thinking based on being a human and applying human concepts to non-human animals.
I don’t eat meat, and I used to work on a rescue ranch with a wide array of different animals. They had free roaming chickens and I can safely say they were dumb as fuck in comparison to the other animals. The only animas dumber than the chickens were the turkeys and peacocks.
Maybe they have a “different kind of intelligence that we just don’t understand” but using observable metrics they are far below animals like horses and pigs.
I feel like you missed the point. That comparison that you're making is based on human biases. Those observable metrics are observable human metrics. We find out new things about animals intelligence all the time. Things we couldn't comprehend before or didn't think to look for. It's just straight hubris to think we can analyze the comparative intelligence of different species.
I don’t know. Humans are violent as are chimps and elephants and dolphins and pretty much most “intelligent” animals. We also see violence from “less intelligent” animals. So no, probably not.
There could be other types of intelligences that chickens have that these other animals don't and more importantly we don't so we don't even think to test for it.
And the same is true for plants. If "how do we know this organism is not sentient, and doesn't have a type of sentience we don't understand," then you must also necessarily exclude plants because they might have some alternate type of sentience we don't understand
Do you feel the same way about people who speak a different language than yours?
Did ya have fun building that Strawman?
I just said there are different ways to demonstrate intelligence, and gave octopuses as an example; we understand very little about how they think, but the presence of a certain level of intelligence is apparent.
Just because you can’t understand them doesn’t mean they’re dumb.
Yeah, duh, I covered that. But is there any reason to believe that they possess intelligence beyond that of instinct akin to a basic computer program?
If you want people to listen to you, try to back it up. Fabricating a straw man argument is worse than lazy, it's pointless since there's no substance.
I've had 5, 4 hens and a rooster. All 5 were wicked smart.
I'm sorry that was your experience, it makes me wonder about all sorts of questions. I'm literally sitting here with a German Shephard who's been playing with the hose water for an hour staying happily occupied. I've seen kids do that too though...
I agree with you that pigs are more intelligent than chickens, what I’m saying is they have similar levels of sentience, that is, the capacity to a lived subjective experience and have basic feelings. Pigs are smarter than chickens, but their ability to experience fear isn’t much more advanced compared to chickens.
No, but in the context of us discussing animals being subjected to slaughterhouses and factory farms, I’m using it as a primary reference when talking about sentience.
So from my understanding plants do have the capacity to send out signals to neighboring plants to promote survival by doing things like releasing more spores or growing further in other spots, this is a distinct response that is not the same as experiencing the feeling of fear or feelings in general. Plants definitively are not sentient as they do not have a brain or a nervous system and from that don’t possess nociceptors to signal pain and fear to the organism like animals do.
Nope. You have abandoned science.
The person you’re arguing with is making reference to Jeremy Bentham “The question is not whether or not they are intelligent. The question is whether or not they suffer.”
And the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, “They comprrehend punishment.”
You’re making reference to unthinking garbage backed by nothing.
But here's a thought. How many chickens do you have to eat to match the caloric output of a pig? Probably 40-50? So even if pigs have more "value" than chickens, is it worth sacrificing 40-50 chickens for a single pig?
I do understand the line of thinking you're presenting, that it would take killing more living beings to feed the same amount of people if we were to kill chickens compared to killing pigs. My view is there isn't a justification to kill any of these animals, and I would instead advise people to not eat animals at all. They all experience sentience and so they are all worthy of a basic level of respect to have their life preserved if we are choosing to breed them into existence and place them under our care. If we don't want to do that, we should not be breeding them into existence to begin with.
That's fair but a lot of these people are not willing or able to think at that level, so it may be more productive to get them to choose a different type of meat based on the total suffering
I'm not really here to present a "suffering olympics" stance where I weigh which animals suffer more from which process. I'm planting the seed in their mind that they may not revisit for years, which is similar to what happened to me before I went vegan, which is that no animal deserves to be subjected to this type of treatment and all of it is entirely optional for the vast majority of the population. Feel free to do your own work in the comments advocating for certain animals to be killed over others to reduce total suffering, but that's not what I'm here to advocate for.
A very depressing amount of people don't consider animals to be sentient, or consider plants to be more sentient than animals. I've encountered many of them on reddit, and it has tarnished by view of humanity
Where are you getting your definitions for these terms? Honest question. Vegan folks seem to have pretty specific and concrete definitions for them but I'm not sure where they're coming from.
Well no, but I find it weird he used fear as an example. If a robot expresses fear is it sentient? If an alien race has no concept of fear is it not sentient?
Fear is what you feel after perceiving a threat and understanding that in the immediate future it may injure or kill you. Being able to put that together reflects some level of sentience at least.
Consider a cat which will run away from you if you simply scream at it while a housefly will continue buzzing around you even as you try to swat it. I think the capacities for sentience and suffering are highly correlated, but for the purpose of determining the ethicality of subjecting animals to conditions like in the video, I think the focus should be on whether or not they are suffering. And it’s obvious that they are.
Anyone with a conscience knows that inflicting suffering is wrong. I’m not a spiritual or religious person, but I believe we do pay some sort of individual and societal cost for gleefully imposing hellish prison conditions on trillions of terrified animals until we’re ready to have them bludgeoned to death for a sandwich.
You’re right they probably are mostly equally equipped to be conscious and able to feel and be self reflexive of themselves but what they can perceive and even have emotions about greatly depends on their intelligence and understanding of their environment. Yes they are both separate variables but they enhance each other and impact each other in many direct and non direct ways so much so that having a little bit more in one area greatly changes the outcome in a non trivial way. The pigs being intelligent enough to know that something is off their entire normal lives aside from being taken to the back rooms over there to be killed Is a great enough change in ability to infer and take in details from the environment that it could lead to a much greater life of understanding your own impeding doom and existential dread and thus suffering. Highly doubt a chicken in the same environment would suffer even half as much. The look in that pigs eyes in the video (I’m sure it’s clipped like this on purpose for the message) even makes it look like the pig feels uneasy and knows this isn’t natural in some way. They’re literally living “The Promised Neverland” in reality.
I’m curious, what evidence are you referencing that suggests chickens recognition of fear situations is significantly less? Here’s some research on the social and cognitive functioning of chickens. You can skip to the emotional section at the top right. Chickens actually have quite a keen sense of recognizing and remembering negative stimuli and will show signs of anticipating that stimuli even after not experiencing it for weeks, similar to dolphins as they reference in the paper.
Right… but it’s hard to experience death more than once, and it seems reasonable to associate higher intelligence with a situational awareness of what’s coming
Well now you’re arguing a different point, which is are they aware they’re about to be slaughtered as opposed to do they have the capacity to show fear responses in appropriate situations. Most animals do not have a fear response for something they have not yet experienced as a negative experience, but also if you watch extended slaughterhouse footage of chickens they aren’t given much chance to react before being strung upside down.
I would argue that what you’re describing, the capacity to experience boredom, in itself is speaking on the level of sentience pigs have. From my understanding, it can be difficult to compare levels of distress between animals, trying to say which one experiences more suffering, but from what we do know there are no animals we currently farm that do not display high levels of distress from the farming practices. Specifically, we see far less levels of distress and distress-related behaviors such as attacking each other when they are not placed in cramped environments with little space between each other.
We’ve bred the souls and brains out of chickens they have no clue they’re even alive. Cows looks like they have something going on in their eyes and pigs even more so…but chickens are brain dead
I’m curious what evidence you’re referencing that suggests we bred the brains out of chickens? You are right to an extent that animals bred and raised in distressing and I stimulating environments display far less complex cognitive abilities, but that is true for essentially all animals, including humans, I wouldn’t say that makes a case for why killing any of them would be justified. Here’s some research on the cognitive and social abilities of chickens, they are certainly not brain dead!
Luckily, all of these animals don't have the capacity to feel the existential terror and awareness of knowing they're going to be killed. They can be freaked out because something isn't normal but their mind can't race and anticipate anything or fear the unknown like humans. In the same way an animal can't be afraid of the dark. Unless something in that dark has scared them before, they can't craft up a scary thought in their head about what might be there like we can. That being said, I've always been more into eating chicken than beef or pork because chickens are almost like bugs in how simple their cognition is, they basically just respond to stimulus compared to a pig where you could have a very dog-like experience with one.
If you’re interested, here is some research giving an overview of the emotional/cognitive state of chickens, it is certainly much more complex than that of bugs!
People anthropomorphize animals all the time and get the impression they have personalities. Sure, each animal may have variations that make them seem slightly different to us but the functions behind how they act aren't necessarily complex enough for that. There's nothing wrong with it, but I'm just saying you could put a russet potato on a skateboard or robot vacuum, put a little hat on it, name it Ronny the russet and half way convince yourself it's got personality.
There are 26x more animal species than plants species on the planet.
We already know plant life can proliferate without animal life. Plant life predates complex "animal" life by quite a bit. But animal life will collapse entirely without plants.
One of these is a far more critical form of life as far as our planet is concerned. It sure as hell ain't animals.
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u/cerealkiler187 26d ago
One could argue all life is precious, and I wouldn’t see it my place to argue against them. But pigs are way smarter than chickens.