this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
835 points (97.8% liked)

World News

32297 readers
867 users here now

News from around the world!

Rules:

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 78 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (40 children)

I would highly recommend the recent Freakonomics Radio series about whaling. It's Episodes 549-551 and the bonus episode from 2023-08-06. If you're firmly against killing any living creature (or at least sentient creatures), I highly doubt it will change your mind (and I don't think that it should or that it tries to), but I also think it is really fascinating learning about the history of the whaling industry and hearing the perspective of a modern whaler in the bonus episode. Putting aside the obvious ethical issues with killing sentient creatures, it's interesting to consider things like whether there's a sustainable level of whaling, what a sustainable quota would look like, and how much we're in competition with certain whale species for harvesting fish as food for our own species. I personally appreciated how unbiased Freakonomics tried to be in their discussion of the topic.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago (8 children)

There's a sustainable level of eating dogs, cats and drink human blood too. Should we open dog farms to create more jobs?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There is no inherent difference whatsoever from eating cats and dogs to eating cows or horses or sheep. Meat is meat.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Eating predators is supposedly less healthy than plant eating animals for a few reasons. As I understand it, carnivores have a notably higher level of parasites, they share diseases with other carnivores more readily than herbivores, and they’re more lean and the meat is more tough/stringy.

There’s also a realistic level of sustainable effort to farm raise a carnivore vs a herbivore. https://www.britannica.com/science/trophic-level

load more comments (6 replies)
load more comments (37 replies)