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Comment by beagle3 | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people rationalize eating meat by discrediting the intelligence and “soul” of the animals they eat. As a friendly vegetarian myself (I don’t ever try to convince anyone or inconvenience anyone - just avoid products myself), I sometimes get “attacked” along the lines of “oh, so you're vegetarian? But you know animals have no awareness/intelligence/sentience/soul/etc right?

Also, some languages use the same word for “meat” and “flesh”, maybe that’s the same in the alien language? After all, they don’t seem to have any fresh anywhere.

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This rationalisation seems to go a long way. Like, how science about animal cognition and behaviour for a long time took utmost care not to compare any behaviour or thought processes of animals with those of humans - because after all, we can never know whether or not an animal experiences things the same way as a human does, so we must not jump to conclusions assuming that they do.

Oddly, jumping to the opposite conclusion - that they don't - is perfectly acceptable and is used to justify all kinds of horrible treatment.

So how do you deal with the fact that plants clearly display varying levels of intelligence?

Personally, my response to that is: "We can't live without harming anything else. I draw my line at plants, you draw your line at non-human animals, cannibals draw their line at human animals. We have different philosophies and preferences".

(And a Simpson's quote comes to mind: "Ha! I'm a level 5 vegan. I don't eat anything that casts a shadow")

It's a much simpler, broader, different intelligence and not much embodied in the part destroyed for food. In many cases consumption of the plant (fruit) is the plant's method of reproducing and sustaining life.

Or intelligent slime (aka the Blob)?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YWbY7kWesI

> But you know animals have no awareness/intelligence/sentience/soul/etc

Those people clearly don't know anything about animals then. Animals are incredibly aware and intelligent, anyone who doesn't recognise that is just, IMHO, lazy. I'm not vegetarian, I think we owe it to the animals we eat to recognise that they're not some inanimate object without awareness.

Paraphrasing Upton Sinclair, "It is very hard for a person to realize something, when continuing to enjoy their favorite food depends on not realizing it".

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