I hate this planet. I wish there wasn't so much misery. I wish we could all go somewhere safe and happy. I just want to cry and scream 'make it stop'. If some angel or benevolent alien is listening: Please help us, idk if we can save ourselves.
Richard Adams got me thinking along these lines by commenting that if anything a lack of abstract thought and ability to imagine futures and conterfactuals meant that pain filled an animal's entire consciousness, making (say) the pain of a broken leg worse than that of a human who could (say) comfort themself by knowing the bone will eventually set and things will be better.
I've looked at a macerator video just now and it honestly seems like a pretty good death. The nerve system is differentiated into Aδ nerves that give a quick shallow pain, while the slow group C nerve fibers deliver a much stronger pain, but later. This is also known as first pain and second pain. Furthermore, the adrenaline and endorphin release during the fall may numb a lot of the pain. The cockerels seem to suffer immense trauma in a fraction of a second, so the level of pain multiplied by the length of suffering is almost certainly fairly low compared to the 10/10 pain you describe.
Frankly, if you consider that an unacceptable level of pain, which seems far below the average level of human end-of-life suffering, then I don't see how you can't be anti-natalist and/or prioritize worse human suffering over saving cockerels from the macerator.
The other examples aren't very persuasive either. What is even the mechanism by which a chicken would have broken legs for her entire life due to growing fast? It makes no sense. If you actually mean that some break their legs upon reaching a certain age, you should provide statistics. You imply that all chickens break their legs, which is untrue.
The claim that chickens are drowned alive seems to refer to a single slaughterhouse in the US that violated the law by running their line when their electrified baths were broken down. It's implied that this is routine and accepted, and presented as evidence for the thesis that a lot of people don't care about animal welfare, even though it shows such a thing no more than the existence of (illegal) murder shows that a lot of people don't care about human life.
Ultimately, this post rather strongly triggers my animal activist BS detector... It is very far away from a rational discussion about the prevalence of various issues and the costs/benefits of certain measures/laws.
A chicken has much, much, much less consciousness than a human. When a human experiences pain it’s in the context of a huge structure called “human consciousness” and the pain in humans takes up a lot of existential space, as it were. The amount of consciousness an animal has in the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness (which I think is on the right track) is its “phi-value”. And chickens, if they have any at all, have probably very low phi-values. So, we really can’t anthropomorphize them too much. Subroutines can do a lot of the work unconsciously that in humans is conscious.
Not to mention supernatural possibilities, where animals, incapable of reason, are denied souls by God. Maybe as an act of existential mercy, since perhaps animal consciousnesses are existential states that are better void than existing. After all, the more a person is described as “an animal” or a “brute” the more evil he is deemed to be. Consciousness absent reason might be evil, though in the case of animals not in a “guilty” way, just in an existential mode.
If I can ask, what was the experience that gave you 10/10 pain? My worst pain was cluster headaches, and while it was the worst moment-wise experience in my life, I certainly can't describe it as _nothing but_ agony.
I hate this planet. I wish there wasn't so much misery. I wish we could all go somewhere safe and happy. I just want to cry and scream 'make it stop'. If some angel or benevolent alien is listening: Please help us, idk if we can save ourselves.
Richard Adams got me thinking along these lines by commenting that if anything a lack of abstract thought and ability to imagine futures and conterfactuals meant that pain filled an animal's entire consciousness, making (say) the pain of a broken leg worse than that of a human who could (say) comfort themself by knowing the bone will eventually set and things will be better.
I've looked at a macerator video just now and it honestly seems like a pretty good death. The nerve system is differentiated into Aδ nerves that give a quick shallow pain, while the slow group C nerve fibers deliver a much stronger pain, but later. This is also known as first pain and second pain. Furthermore, the adrenaline and endorphin release during the fall may numb a lot of the pain. The cockerels seem to suffer immense trauma in a fraction of a second, so the level of pain multiplied by the length of suffering is almost certainly fairly low compared to the 10/10 pain you describe.
Frankly, if you consider that an unacceptable level of pain, which seems far below the average level of human end-of-life suffering, then I don't see how you can't be anti-natalist and/or prioritize worse human suffering over saving cockerels from the macerator.
The other examples aren't very persuasive either. What is even the mechanism by which a chicken would have broken legs for her entire life due to growing fast? It makes no sense. If you actually mean that some break their legs upon reaching a certain age, you should provide statistics. You imply that all chickens break their legs, which is untrue.
The claim that chickens are drowned alive seems to refer to a single slaughterhouse in the US that violated the law by running their line when their electrified baths were broken down. It's implied that this is routine and accepted, and presented as evidence for the thesis that a lot of people don't care about animal welfare, even though it shows such a thing no more than the existence of (illegal) murder shows that a lot of people don't care about human life.
Ultimately, this post rather strongly triggers my animal activist BS detector... It is very far away from a rational discussion about the prevalence of various issues and the costs/benefits of certain measures/laws.
This changed my moral weighting on the relevance of animal suffering in favor of caring more about it. Thanks!
A chicken has much, much, much less consciousness than a human. When a human experiences pain it’s in the context of a huge structure called “human consciousness” and the pain in humans takes up a lot of existential space, as it were. The amount of consciousness an animal has in the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness (which I think is on the right track) is its “phi-value”. And chickens, if they have any at all, have probably very low phi-values. So, we really can’t anthropomorphize them too much. Subroutines can do a lot of the work unconsciously that in humans is conscious.
Not to mention supernatural possibilities, where animals, incapable of reason, are denied souls by God. Maybe as an act of existential mercy, since perhaps animal consciousnesses are existential states that are better void than existing. After all, the more a person is described as “an animal” or a “brute” the more evil he is deemed to be. Consciousness absent reason might be evil, though in the case of animals not in a “guilty” way, just in an existential mode.
If I can ask, what was the experience that gave you 10/10 pain? My worst pain was cluster headaches, and while it was the worst moment-wise experience in my life, I certainly can't describe it as _nothing but_ agony.