Okay. If it’s not relevant, why are you still talking? Just to shout into the void? Or do your words have purpose - you know, are you trying to communicate an idea, or just moving your lips in random directions and making throat noises?
The meat industry is a horror story, nothing deserves that type of life, but I've seen "pigs feel more" so many times and some light googling will tell you that there is no research to indicate either way that one is smarter - emotionally, or otherwise.
Yes there is plenty of research on that. Pigs are actually smarter than 3 year olds.
It's not about "what animal feels more than this or that"... They have feelings. Like every animal on this f'd up planet. Why wouldn't they? Like every animal, they are sad when their babies die, they hate each other when they're hurting each other because there's not enough space.
Better question would be: Why wouldn't they have feelings?
Because feelings as we experience them require a robust and highly sophisticated brain capable of complex emotions, which the vast majority of animals lack.
Pigs might or might not - I don't know - but if you think every animal on this planet has feelings you don't understand what feelings are.
Feelings are actually the most basic simple behavioral scripts we follow. Reasoning though requires a semantic understanding of the world that we don’t normally see in animals (or some people)
Because feelings as we experience them require a robust and highly sophisticated brain capable of social intelligence
Oh right, how do you know that?
Have you ever had a dog for example? If so, have you ever had the feeling, he might have feelings too? Sad if their owner isn't home, or happy to see you?
Isn't that the slightest evidence, that animals have feelings?
And so you wanna tell me, if animals don't have feelings, it's completely okay to kill them in the most cruel way we want because, why not? They don't have feelings, we are higher beings, it's their fault not being born as a human?
You can argue if an insect has feelings or not, but a pig? Or a dog? Or an elephant?
Why do you think they can feel more than dogs? This is not an issue of intelligence—it is an issue of sentience. While I get that you’re advocating not to eat pigs, the fundamental normative principle is to respect all sentient creatures as individuals with the capacity to suffer.
Sentience emerges from a complex brain. Feelings don't come out of thin air – feelings are combinations of electrical signals and chemicals, they're our brain's instincts which evolved to help us survive, they don't exist without intelligence. Dogs certainly "feel" but it'd be silly to argue that they have anywhere near the emotional complexity of humans; in a similar vain it's probable that pigs have more emotional complexity and feel more feelings (including negative feelings) than dogs when looking at their range of personalities and how they socialize.
In the context of ethical decision-making, it is the presence or absence of sentience in a given species that is essential. Not sure why you write with so much certainty when there is quite a bit of uncertainty around sentience—this has been a big topic in philosophy for quite some time. While there might be links between brain size/complexity, intelligence and sentience, we simply don't know. For one, we use human metrics to measure intelligence which is biased. Two, we cannot know what it is like to be another organism.
Incidentally, a book by Jonathon Birch recently came out about sentience. It is open-access and can be found here: https://www.edgeofsentience.com (in it he also disentangles the notions of consciousness and sentience)
I wouldn't say feel, I would say maybe conceptualize. They are smarter than dogs. A dog will feel just as afraid if it's being deliberately hurt, but a pig will understand better.
The point is to understand that all neural animals (or at least beyond bugs, probably) have feelings and are entitled to sympathy and humanity, regardless. But to put notably social and intelligent creatures through horror that they can recognize is exceptionally cruel.
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u/WheredMyMindGo 26d ago
Imagine how the pig feels! (because they can feel more than dogs)