My last cat would not play with colorful toys. He was a stray I took in. The first toy I got him that he was interested in was a brown mouse toy that would squeak when jossled.
He didn’t start just batting it around. He got into a stalking position, and pounced. Then get bit hard on its neck for about fifteen seconds. Like it was real and he was hunting it. He then looked up at me as if to say “It is done”. When he was a stray he’d bring me birds and stuff and this was like that. I nudged it and it squeaked. He jumped into the air and I always imagined him yelling “BLACK MAGIC!”. He started batting it around almost like any other overexcited cat. After that he’d play with the colorful toys too.
BLACK MAGIC! Long cat has the ability to make my prey more resistant, I must kill it harder! Wait… does that mean the colorful things are just enchanted prey?! I MUST KILL THEM TOO!
Both of my cats were barn cats. They both freaking love the toy mouseys that look like real mice in the dark and that’s really the only toys they play with.
They also will hunt the 1-2 mice that make their way into the old house every fall when it starts freezing at night. Actually come to think of it I’m due to be woken up with a mouse carcas pretty soon…
Nobody believes this. I refuse to accept it. There are no serious vegans who think we should should prevent wild animals from eating other wild animals. It must only be a joke.
Edit: I stand corrected. They are here among us.
Of course not. What we should really do is kill all carnivores. Then there would be no other natural predators of herbivores, and it would become ethical to eat them again.
Eating animals is the real veganism.
No, it’s not. 🙄
There was a swedish girl on radio saying animals should have the exact same rights as humans. Like the whole book of laws.
Guess they’d have to obey the law too? Prison full of elks playing on the motor way one time too many and birds not stopping stealing.
I still wonder if she was trolling or not because she was super sincere.
The only time I ever hear about this, is when it’s coming from dishonest critics of vegans. Source?
This was a child?
Adolescent I think.
Yeah I’ve never heard this before and
Nature should be as nature is, I just think we should reduce our effect on it as much as possible. Also animals shouldn’t be held to human standards of morality though our behavior toward them should be governed by it etc etc unequal power relations or something.
sharkfucker420, the vegan has spoken
Am also vegan, and there are a fair amount of other vegans who do think we should intervene in wilderness areas and essentially do everything possible to reduce and eliminate every possible type of suffering.
I lean somewhat against it because not only would it be a staggeringly gargantuan project, but ecologically it would be grossly irresponsible. We need to focus on our own issues first, get our own environment in order.
But on the other hand, “nature” has been many things over the course of the planet’s history. Radical transformations do happen. Trying to alleviate wild animal suffering is at least better intentioned than polluting the planet with microplastics and bringing bugs to the brink of extinction without worrying about whatever consequences those are going to have. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I am not vegan, but I am very familiar with veganism as a philosophical position, which is why I was unwilling to give this any real credibility.
Just because you’re vegan as an ethical position, doesnt mean someone¹ isn’t vegan for tribe membership and trying to virtue signal¹ with this.
¹crucially: someone very very stupid
Never underestimate people’s ability to be stupid.
I mean, if one has an ethical issue with animal death in general, or at least for the fairly intelligent ones, it makes sense. It’s just the kind of position that we have nowhere near the technological capacity or infrastructure to do anything about, so it wouldn’t really come up most of the time.
What coherent ideology is concerned with the general idea of animal death?
A suffering-minimizing ideology. Given that animals are capable of suffering, and suffering is bad, it would be morally good to save an animal from being mauled to death.
This is what I meant by coherent. Maybe a very short* sighted hedonism could arrive at this conclusion, but if we prevented all carnivores from mauling all prey animals, can we say for certain it would not lead to a geater suffering? What happens to an ecosystem with no predators?
I think the idea is that you don’t really have a true ecosystem at that point. The idea basically contemplates turning the entire biosphere into something more like a managed garden than a wild space. Which is one of the reasons I brought up being nowhere near the technology required among other things, because to give the idea more than idle speculation, you’d essentially have to be able to artificially run the whole planet’s life support system without requiring a functional ecology to do it for you.
Hmm, if I stop one wolf from mauling one deer that’s less suffering for sure.
If we have to extend it to all such cases, it leads to interesting questions. How would we manage animal populations? How would we feed predators? Can these two goals be reached without suffering?
While the suffering is in some sense “natural”, it’s not clearly necessary. There was a time when some humans thought society couldn’t function without slaves, or with worker’s rights, or with women voting. But if we keep our minds open to ways of reducing suffering, we can find ways to make the world better.
Whether we have in mind a comprehensive and certain remedy, is independent of whether a problem exists though. If someone objects generally to suffering and/or death in a way that goes beyond only what’s directly in front of them, to be intellectually honest with themselves they would have to contend with the scale of brutality of the natural world and our existence.
“We must change everything to not work this way” seems like a very straightforwardly coherent conclusion. What end result would actually be ideal, and the issues of getting there, could be considered separately.
You artificially manage it, I guess? The whole world like some zoo.
Anyways, it seems like a pretty natural and normal thought to not want others to be murdered. Actually being able to do anything to prevent that without introducing all kinds of other ethical problems (in addition the technological and resource impracticalness of such), but if you don’t think, it makes sense.
What is your idea of a coherent ideology?
An ideology that establishes its own rules based on some sort of guiding principles and attempts to follow them are not self-defeating or incompatible with existence when pragmatically applied. When I say pragmatically applied, I mean I don’t consider magical hypotheticals, like a bunch of hedonists on a boat demanding to torture me, trolly cars, or quantum hotels, as a meaningful critisism to real world applications. Philosophically based veganism, without agreeing with it, is a well developed and coherent ideology, as an example. If a person walked veganism out beyond just a diet, it demands major changes to how one live their lives and doesn’t even require magically managed global ecosystems or animal prisons.
Thanks for answering, I broadly agree. But what about consistency?
A vegan might argue that eating meat is bad because it causes animal suffering. They would be morally required to save an animal from the butcher’s blade if given the chance (assuming they didn’t have to cause more suffering to do that).
But an animal doesn’t know the difference between being killed by a butcher and being killed by a predator. So is the vegan not also morally required to save an animal from a predator? If not, how is that consistent with the basis of their veganism? It sounds like an arbitrary distinction to me, hardly an element of a coherent ideology.
Of course, once extended from the single animal to all animals, there are nuances to consider. If the whole world went vegan this instant, that would have enormous ramifications on the meat industry, and what would we do with all those animals? It might not be moral to instantly turn the world vegan and just free all industrial animals due to the chaos that would ensue. But surely it would be moral to explore what processes could turn the world vegan in a less destructive way.
I’m actually surprised there aren’t a bunch of downvotes and "well actually"s in the comments.
I’m not getting the downvotes, but more than one person has pitched me a globally managed garden fantasy world.
I love how it seems to be so easy to write an authentic Cave Johnson style dialogue, as I can almost always hear him saying it in my head.
Maybe it’s the bat shit insanity or maybe it’s J.K. Simmons sweet voice.
Stephen Merchant and J.K. Simmons in the same game. Portal 2 was the perfect storm.
Feels like someone should read how yellow stone improved when wolves were introduced, or the whole Lyme issue with deers, or i dk watch lion king and learn about the circle of life.
I will participate in this. Either production or daily re-fits.
