Post Punk Kitchen Forum

A fish market in MA caught a 21lb lobster and was going to auction it off to people but there was public outcry that they should release it back into the ocean...because it's big. As if that alone didn't make much sense, the fish market has agreed to release it back into the ocean and is instead auctioning off "the opportunity to choose to receive 21 pounds of retail size lobsters or to accompany the release team and participate in the lobster’s release*."

http://bostinno.com/2012/07/21/after-pu ... -the-wild/

Obviously larger animals have sentience and smaller animals don't. Duh. But not if the animal has hooves or feathers. Then size doesn't matter.

then only age matters. if it's cute and young, it should be spared!

animals of average adult size and weight deserve to be slaughtered and consumed!

Vegansaurus recently covered this concept: http://vegansaurus.com/post/21215499962

I can't wrap my head around why and how omnis think this way, but I think that it is a glimmer of empathy that provokes wanting to "save" an "exceptional" creature because it is "special." Its easier to extend that empathy to one than to many. I think its positive in that sense, but still really forked up at the same time.

Yeah. It's like when cows manage to escape en route to slaughter and omnis rally to spare them because they're heroic or something.

I was opposed to eating veal and anti-fur even back in the days when I ate meat. It sounds messed up now, but somehow it seemed worse to slaughter a calf than a full grown cow, or to trap and kill an animal for its fur. Over the years my knowledge and sense of compassion grew, and was extended to not consuming other animals. I don't really have an explanation for the disconnect I felt back then, but for some people the process takes longer.

I think that's exactly what it is. It also makes a lot of sense to me. Same thing with omnis wanting to save the cow that got away. Or preferring to save baby cows over adults. Or not wearing fur, but still eating meat. Or not eating dog when they eat other meat. I don't think it's that people aren't connecting dots to see an obvious conclusion that meat is bad. I think most people that eat meat have given it some thought and determined that the importance of meat to them is more important than animal rights issues. For most of us, when we were omnis, maybe we hadn't yet thought about it, but when we did, we realized out desire for meat/animal products was less important than our views on animal rights, so we become vegan. Most omnis do have empathy for animals, but it is selective empathy, and it is based on what creatures people feel most close to. (I also have selective empathy, as I have my house sprayed to kill cockroaches.) I think it is human nature to seek out special situations (heroes, miracles, fascinating stories), so if there is a really big lobster, that's kind of exciting. It is a special find. And people want to protect that. Same with baby cows, cute fuzzy animals (fur), or household pets.

Selective empathy is a good way to put it, kimba. I'm guilty of it too because I will kill ants if they're in my kitchen, etc. I know it makes me a hypocrite, and I don't know what the answer is. Let the ants get into my food because I value their lives? If it were practical, I'd find a way to escort them out, but that never works, and the forkers always have a hundred of their friends right behind them.

I guess the difference is that we are not breeding bugs with the specific intent to kill them. If I had an overcrowded ant farm in which I raised, abused, and then killed my ants, that would be more analogous to people eating meat. Until a hundred cows invade my house and try to live there and eat my food, it's not the same.

I'm super tired so please excuse my rambling.

Rambling excused! I don't think killing ants makes you a hypocrite. There is a difference in both the fact that we aren't breeding them as you said and the fact that they are ants. I don't think it is hypocritical to say animals are different than each other and different than us. We all have to choose where to draw our lines.

I've had a couple of conversations about this with my omni partner lately. He was curious about why I won't wear silk but am perfectly ok with killing mosquitos. My answer to him was that to me, among other things, it's about commoditizing animals. Once an animal becomes a commodity, its interests and well-being becomes secondary to its profitability. It's also a question of necessity and scale. Silk is a luxury good and one I don't need to survive. Why should I buy it knowing that animals (even "just insects") are killed in its production. One could argue that I don't actually have to kill mosquitos that bite me (we don't live in an area where mosquito-born parasites thrive), but they do make my life miserable and the one or two I kill per summer can't be compared to the numbers of silk-moth catepillars destroyed in the process of silk production.

On the other side, we walked past a yard with chickens recently, and he had a nice moment of connection with them, and then proceeded to talk about the chicken kebab he'd just eaten. I asked him about that disconnect between the animals he knows personally and those he eats, and he basically acknowledged that he's able to make that distinction and that he considers that simple human nature. We talked about the lobster and the escaped calves/cows and how people cheer them on and then go on eating their surf and turf, and he agreed that it's completely hypocritical, and he thinks it stems from people attributing "human-like" qualities to these exceptions. I still don't get why people aren't able to extrapolate those qualities to the other individual animals that do go on to slaughter. I guess that's the difference between vegans and omnis. Omnis see escaped individuals as exceptional, we see them as just the ones who got lucky.

Side note, because I feel like some people in this thread aren't aware: Lobsters are a very rare creature who's body cells do not age. Scientists have no way to tell a lobsters age other than vague guesses from it's size, if it is very large, it is likely that it's decades old, and potentially even older, some scientists speculate.

That does not change any of these arguments though, they are still 100% spot on even with this knowledge.

D'oh! Darned the no-editing-posts function! I just saw a typo. Make that "mosquito-borne" parasites.

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?! That is so interesting! I've never heard of anything with cells that don't age that isn't a vampire. So I guess Edward was a lobster?

it doesn't make sense to me either. Warning, long rambling inner monologue coming up, feel free to ignore:

I just experienced it first hand in my office. We have had a mouse sighting for a couple of days now, I watched it run across the floor and under my desk into the next row of cubes just yesterday morning. A building management guy came in and set some snap traps late yesterday but by then several people in my office had begun a naming game to determine what we should call the guy or gal (under the likely false assumption that there is just one).

As they set the snap traps several of my coworkers were looking my way (as the only vegan I am apparently the face of compassion for animals for my office mates) and kept making these audibly pitying statements and apologizing for having called the building manager etc - they obviously realized that this animal was likely going to die, and mistakenly associated the tragedy of it's impending death with my pain vs the animals.

I brought in a tin cat this morning to see if I could beat the snap traps at their own game, but before my trap had a chance to work one of the coworkers had trapped the mouse in their trash can and proceeded to escort it out and leave it near in the grass on the treeline away from the building. Much cheering ensued. Again people looked to me for reaction.

To sum up that long and tedious retelling of accounts, the positive is that a mouse that would likely be dead soon got a lease on life because people took the time to project their emotions onto him (i.e. giving him a name). The down side is that lunch time came around and everyone around me ate some other animal that never got a name. I guess it's all about little victories, regardless of the rational, maybe we can at least start by slowing the mouse culling in my workplace as a start.

I've thought about this topic before too - and one thing I have heard, is that a lot of people most likely don't kill their own "food"...?

"Meat" is just another "packaged item" - If they actually had to take a life and hold down a struggling animal and slit its throat, or whatever, it might seem more disgusting or sad to them.

Of course we know some people do actually still do that - but for those that don't, I wonder if that might be part of the "disconnect"......

I can understand the mouse thing, having spent time on my grandparents' farms. We wouldn't arbitrarily kill an animal just because we killed some animals for food. Killing animals for food has a purpose, killing rats because they get into and breed in the feed has a purpose, killing anything when there is another option is not necessary. Not that we were "ethical" meat eaters, just that you didn't kill just because you could.

The big/blue lobster things usually comes up here at least once during lobster season and it ticked me off even when I was a meat eater.