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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   25097 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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advocating to redirect the malaria net funding (which saved 100,000+ lives) to saving chickens instead.

Precisely how much more does OP value one unit of a human's welfare than one unit of another animal's welfare, just because the former is a human? How does OP derive this tradeoff?

That's actually a good question. Maybe the actual root of the vegan vs carnist bloodmouth divide.

I have a very easy confident answer for myself. My family raised chickens when I was a kid. They hold, to within roundoff error, no moral worth. I watched a long vegan propaganda movie focused partially on chicken farming and heard Sam Harris' claim that chicken farming is an unrelenting moral travesty. I am unmoved. Chickens are such mean, spiteful little animals. To the degree they have any social awareness, it is to needlessly harm their fellows. Any injured chicken got relentlessly pecked on it's injury by it's fellows. They are demons, or the most Hollywood version of velociraptors, but real.

There's some enormous failure in empathy here. People wrongly projecting their human awareness and intellect onto chickens. Which I think to them feels like empathy, but is simply false.

Family also raised (and raises) chickens and I disagree your characterization of them as mean, spiteful demonic creatures. That's projecting human characteristics onto a rather dim animal species from the other direction.

Maybe your bunch was raising them en masse in tight battery conditions? In unrestricted free range conditions they form little distinct packs that wander around and roost together in a separate locations from other packs, some hens have stronger intelligence and better maternal skills than others, they'll readily adopt biddies from other species like guineas or ducks as well as orphaned chicken biddies. Some of them have noticeably different levels of fear or openness towards humans and other animals, they'll fight and form a pecking order, etc. Nothing like a dog, cow or goat but they definitely have some social awareness beyond killing their own wounded. Typical domesticated animal behavior, nothing I'd call nefarious. The phenomena of attacking wounded members of the same species, particularly during the initial injury when they're flailing about, is something I've witnessed in dogs and cattle as well - I think it's some kind of evolutionary quirk about silencing something that will attract predators or may be ill.

I honestly think we can blame Disney for a huge portion of this problem.

Antromorphism is a hell of a drug.

Let's call this the "Bambi's mom" problem.

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