I have always found the sentience argument a bit flawed in general; something about "well I won't eat the SMART animals" leaves a bad taste in my mouth, namely because a) cognitive research on animals is in its infancy as a science, and if we've learned only one thing so far, it's that virtually every animal continues to reveal greater depths of mental ability than we once believed b) it's a really arbitrary thing to base moral decisions on, as compared to a capacity for suffering, environmental impact, socioeconomic factors, etc. and c) if you're speaking in terms of a defensible ideological argument, it has fewer legs to stand on than say, an anti-exploitation argument, which if nothing else is at least consistent and not based on factors that are still pretty open to debate - which sentience/intelligence in most species quite definitely is.
IF this is how you plan to base your dietary ethics, I will say one thing: do a lot of reading in a lot of cognitive ethology and behavioral science journals if eating intelligent/aware/suffering creatures bothers you - and set some extremely specific criteria for yourself for where you're drawing the lines. It is increasingly popular opinion in the scientific community that most animals are thinking, feeling beings - so if that bothers you but you are committed to this type of eating, it may be better to accept that you will indeed be eating things that are intelligent and that suffer not just physical but mental anguish in modern food production systems.
On your topic, were I an omnivore, I would probably be basing what I would or wouldn't eat less on the species and more on things like, What is the impact of this item on the environment? On human rights? On my health? On my finances? - this is how I base my choices as a vegan. I would not, for example, buy industrially farmed animal products (for environmental, health, and human rights reasons), nor fish species that are markedly declining in number or harvested using methods that have significant bycatch. I would avoid fish species known to have high levels of pollutants. Were I selecting terrestrial flesh, I might go for something like grass-fed bison steak over corn fed ground beef due to a combination of environmental and health reasons. I may decide to raise my own chickens for eggs and meat - I might even elect to hunt, especially if I lived in a state were deer were overabundant and CJD risk low.
As a vegan, there are some foods I avoid for a myriad of reasons. I won't eat anything with palm oil in it, because the methods producing the VAST majority of palm oil at present are extremely unsustainable. I do not buy chocolate unless I am certain it is fair trade, because there are a *ton* of human rights issues surrounding chocolate production. I forage and/or grow a good deal of my produce because I quite frankly can't afford most local and organic produce, but don't particularly like the thought of my food being shipped vast distances from countries with even poorer regulations than this one. I have been recently avoiding gluten-heavy products because I find they seem to contribute to my joint pain. And so fourth.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2011-09-18 08:04 pm (UTC)IF this is how you plan to base your dietary ethics, I will say one thing: do a lot of reading in a lot of cognitive ethology and behavioral science journals if eating intelligent/aware/suffering creatures bothers you - and set some extremely specific criteria for yourself for where you're drawing the lines. It is increasingly popular opinion in the scientific community that most animals are thinking, feeling beings - so if that bothers you but you are committed to this type of eating, it may be better to accept that you will indeed be eating things that are intelligent and that suffer not just physical but mental anguish in modern food production systems.
On your topic, were I an omnivore, I would probably be basing what I would or wouldn't eat less on the species and more on things like, What is the impact of this item on the environment? On human rights? On my health? On my finances? - this is how I base my choices as a vegan. I would not, for example, buy industrially farmed animal products (for environmental, health, and human rights reasons), nor fish species that are markedly declining in number or harvested using methods that have significant bycatch. I would avoid fish species known to have high levels of pollutants. Were I selecting terrestrial flesh, I might go for something like grass-fed bison steak over corn fed ground beef due to a combination of environmental and health reasons. I may decide to raise my own chickens for eggs and meat - I might even elect to hunt, especially if I lived in a state were deer were overabundant and CJD risk low.
As a vegan, there are some foods I avoid for a myriad of reasons. I won't eat anything with palm oil in it, because the methods producing the VAST majority of palm oil at present are extremely unsustainable. I do not buy chocolate unless I am certain it is fair trade, because there are a *ton* of human rights issues surrounding chocolate production. I forage and/or grow a good deal of my produce because I quite frankly can't afford most local and organic produce, but don't particularly like the thought of my food being shipped vast distances from countries with even poorer regulations than this one. I have been recently avoiding gluten-heavy products because I find they seem to contribute to my joint pain. And so fourth.