350
Amends (2018-05-23)
(discuss.online)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2025
350 points (85.1% liked)
Perry Bible Fellowship
646 readers
96 users here now
This is a community dedicated to the webcomic known as the Perry Bible Fellowship, created by Nicholas Gurewitch.
https://www.patreon.com/perryfellow
New comics posted whenever they're posted to the site (rarer nowadays but still ongoing). Old comics posted every day until we're caught up
founded 5 months ago
MODERATORS
A tiger has every right to kill an antelope as a human has to kill a cow. The real ethical problem for me lies not in the killing of animals, but rather the conditions they live in prior to execution, and the method of execution. There is a way to ethically consume meat, and it is non industrial and requires each person to do the kill so as to not be alienated from the significance of killing an animal to feed oneself.
I agree, but a tiger doesn't breed antelope into being, and feed them at the expense of all life on earth just so they can have a nice meal.
If you're hunting, fine. They were eating grass and stuff from the ecosystem.
If you're farming then you're creating massive amounts of waste to generate meat.
That's basically the same thing as what they said though.
And let's be honest, if a tiger was capable of farming livestock, it probably would.
Tigers are big cats, hence they are like their little domestic cousins, lazy as fuck. I doubt tigers would enjoy having a job.
Tigers aren't as smart as you think.
If they were smart, they'd do what their domestic counterparts do - make themselves masters of a family of human slaves. They'd be much better off at the price of a few purrs.
The smart ones found their way into Disney, the rest are dumb.
Tigers are too big and dangerous to humans to be good candidates for domestication. Cats are just the right size to not be much of a threat.
Sure, but that right is in question. Being a part of the ecosystem is fine, animal or human (which is an animal). It's when we destroy the ecosystem to satisfy ourselves where I question the right to do so. It doesn't matter what the animal is, except we're the only animals capable of doing so.
We are destroying our only home for fake shit. The only reason we do anything is for fake made up money.
Maybe in the past humans had to, but thats not the case anymore, as we have more thenen enough different sources.
But thats not even the issue. The issue is the gross amount of meat most people eat, that is not backed up by any kind of "but we allways did it this way"
I agree with you 100%. It baffles the mind how many chickens we kill so that some fatass can order a bucket of KFC every night.
And you know the thing, most people when shown the conditions of these animals and how abhorrent it is do create a consciousness about it and often try to do things better, though it almost always fails because our society is kinda set up in this way. But I do think that’s one day, maybe a millennia in the future we will look at how we treated animals today with the same sort of apprehension that we think of slavery.
But again my argument is that killing animals is not wrong, that is a right that every animal has. What is wrong is at the scale, and sheer barbarism in the way we do it.
This seems like a lot of work (both practically to do this and mentally to make this argument) when you could just...not eat meat? Seems a lot easier and more ethical.
The easiest path is not necessarily the best or right path. Though I do agree that in the context of modern industrial meat production the more ethical thing to do is not consume meat. But that is not the same thing as saying that eating meat is wrong, or immoral. The immoral thing is the way the animals suffer before being killed.
What is the difference between a human an an animal that means in one case there's nothing wrong with killing a vulnerable individual who doesn't want to die as long as they don't experience physical pain, but a big problem in the other case?
I will leave this notification on so I can answer later. The reason I can’t answer now is that I want to publish the full framework first, because it does answer that question but it is extensive.
The short answer is that in absolute terms there is no difference, but because everyone says says it is worse then it is worse.
It's also unethical because it destroys the planet, harming everyone and everything on it. That is baked in. Producing meat will always take several times more resources than an equivalent amount of plants. Since our society refuses to limit usage of water, ground nutrients, etc, to sustainable levels, eating meat will harm the environment. Every bite of meat you take steals from future generations.
And a male lion after defeating and taking over the pride has every right to kill the children of the former leader, because they're animals and act on instinct and can't make moral decisions. Humans can.
You can make other arguments about eating meat but appeals to nature like this don't work in a modern enlightened era where we have more decisions and understand the consequences of them.
Who says that the lion isn’t just needlessly cruel? You can only assume that it lacks the ability to make moral decisions, but then again humans kill children all the time for incomprehensible reasons. How are these lions and humans different except your perception that one has moral agency and the other doesn’t based on absolutely no empirical evidence except your belief in your own superiority.
Again this entire thing hinges on the notion that animals lack rationality, but the evidence increasingly dies not support that. But that’s neither here nor there, the nature of a lion is different to the nature of a human. And even then, we still do what you have described all the time. It may be wrong but we do it, and we will still do it a thousand years from now if we are still around. Now the argument is not because “it is part of your nature, you’re allowed to do it”, the argument is that all animals have a right to kill other animals in order to defend or feed themselves.
The other part of the argument is that unless you think for example another omnivore like a chimp (which fyi we have absolutely no reason to believe are any less rational than us ) is immoral if they decide to eat meat having plant based foods available then you shouldn’t think that about human beings.
If you want to improve animal welfare, you need to start believing that all animals, including human animals are equal. While society continues to believe humans are superior in any way to animals we will not be able to create a world in which all species are equally respected.
This line of reasoning is very flawed. Lions regularly commit infanticide and dolphins rape, therefore these must be ethical things to do? It's a classical appeal to nature fallacy.
"Yes I killed those people my honor, but tigers kill people too, and even my fellow humans kill other humans all the time, so it's perfectly ethical if I do it too. It's just my way to connect with nature!"
Would it be ethical in your view to cut the throat of a dog from time to time and eat the body parts, even if alternatives are readily available? The tiger has no other choice, and no moral capacity, but we do.
I don't think that serious violence against animals without necessity to do so can be justified, and taking a life is one of the worst things you can do to a sentient being that doesn't want to die.
I already have stated a thousand times that this is not an appeal to nature, the claim is not universalist it is strictly related to the killing of animals in the context of subsistence. All animals have a right to live and as part of the right to live there is a right to kill in order to live and substist. Furthermore part of the scaffolding that I do not want to get into because then I have to write even more is that death itself absent pain is of no moral significance because the subject cannot be present for their own death and therefore cannot suffer it. Suffering is the only universally significant moral concept because all beings share in it and actively avoid it. Therefore we have a moral responsibility to not inflict suffering, but suffering ==death.
Yes it is ethical to kill a dog to eat it. I mean I wouldn’t do it but it is ethical. Just because I emotionally have a response to it doesn’t change the logic of the matter. I never justified violence against animals fyi, I’m absolutely against that because it inflicts suffering. So in this case you would need to kill the dog without it suffering.
But yeah the line of thinking in order to convince others requires a lot more elaboration than Im willing at this point to give here.
Maybe I’ll put it to paper and tag everyone here, it would at least make for some interesting discussion.