Convince me to go vegan

[vdofthegoodkind]

A temporary setback, not terribly relevant yet (if it lasted a long time, standards could be considerably out of date).
Imported food: that's a good question. It probably isn't, but most imports also come from large companies that use best practices anyway, and there are at least tolerance levels that are regulated:
https://www.epa.gov/safepestcontrol/food-and-pesticides

In setting the tolerance, EPA must make a safety finding that the pesticide can be used with "reasonable certainty of no harm." To make this finding, EPA considers the toxicity of the pesticide and its breakdown products, how much of the pesticide is applied and how often, and how much of the pesticide (i.e., the residue) remains in or on food by the time it is marketed. EPA ensures that the tolerance selected will be safe. The tolerance applies to food grown in the U.S. and imported food.

So, dousing them with a large amount or using banned pesticides would probably be counterproductive.

I skimmed your EPA link and as far as I gather it's just about the effects on endangered species (constantly mentioning "listed species"). It says nothing the effects of pesticides on innocent animals in general as far as I can see.

Can you provide some references? I can try to make a comparison for crops.

Google is your friend.

Also: you realize this does speak in favor of at least tentative veganism over any animal product consumption, right?

Not necessarily. Aside from the argument I already made about the negligeable probabilistic effects of me going vegan making it on par with 'sainthood', I can just as easily buy a farm in a cheap eastern european country and raise my own animals for food.

It doesn't include target species deaths for pest control. I don't think that data is as easily come by.

Exactly, that's one of the many reasons why I call it total horseshit

You're going to be in a panic, and terrified. There's no guarantee something like that knocks you out, and if it does, not necessarily for more than a few seconds.
Trauma is complicated.

You have obviously never experienced a huge blow to your head before When completely unexpected, as can be arranged in animal slaughter, panic and terror will overwhelmingly likely not be one of the responses an animal that experiences a miss like that will have.

That's like asking for an argument to just not rape women with penetration that doesn't also apply to a lesser degree to molesting them without penetration.
Any difference is a gradient of pragmatism.

That's exactly the point. Basic western vegans trying to get meat eaters to just adopt a standard western vegan diet are exactly like molesters who dont penetrate trying to get rapists to stop penetrating. It's absolutely absurd.

There may be an argument for a stopping point on pragmatic grounds, but expecting it to fall exactly on the vegan heuristic is very unlikely.

I'm arguing that people should go vegan, and probably do a bit more than that, but that those arguments are going to be sequential and the fact that I'm using veganism at all as a step is mainly due to the cultural capital.

If you want arguments *just* for veganism, you'd have to look to deontologists. I don't condone those arguments, they're fraught with logical problems.

I know that's what you are arguing, but like I said repeatedly, your attitudes are VASTLY different from the people that rustled my jimmies enough to engage in this debate in the first place. If all vegan youtubers were advocating veganism like you advocate veganism, this thread would have never happened.

OK, well can you please engage with the arguments in good faith, to the extent they can be engaged with given whatever assumptions are necessary to do so?

When asking me in that way I can somewhat agree with what you said yes. If I were to ever decide to hold self-improvement as a personal value, and decide to try to be someone who seeks to be as ethical as they can possibly be, I could see myself adopting a moral framework such as the one you described there to measure my progress against rather than any other framework.

I think there are correlations with education, and also people "thinking outside the box" and questioning cultural norms.

I thought this was common knowledge.
Here are a couple links I don't have time to read again now (I usually read everything I link to) but I think I've read in the past:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6180753.stm
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201005/why-vegetarians-are-more-intelligent-meat-eaters

Second article says "Interestingly, the strong association between childhood intelligence and adult vegetarianism is not replicated in the US".

Aside from that... the original point I made was this:
"Where do you get your data that the majority of vegans are like you, and not like the ones I see? As far as my life experience goes, pretty much 98% of ALL people are complete illogical, idiotic dogmatists in one way or another, and that's a universal truth for pretty much any group of people I've come across so far. Don't see why that statistic would be any different in the vegan community. A community that at its base has quite "dogmatic" roots at that..."

Your cited study from the UK does nothing to refute that. Vegetarians could be 5 IQ points above meat eaters because a shitload of slightly more intelligent than average people (let's say IQ of 110-115, which still allows for ENORMOUS retardation) are vegetarians and pull the average for vegetarians up, while still maintaining an overall 98% of complete illogical, idiotic dogmatists in their group. It's probably only when you get to a 125-130 IQ and up when you start to see people actually being capable of sound logic and reason


(sorry for the late response, I had my fill of writing heaps of text for a while )

[brimstoneSalad]

I skimmed your EPA link and as far as I gather it's just about the effects on endangered species (constantly mentioning "listed species"). It says nothing the effects of pesticides on innocent animals in general as far as I can see.

Listed species are unlikely to be affected much differently from the others.

Not necessarily. Aside from the argument I already made about the negligeable probabilistic effects of me going vegan making it on par with 'sainthood',

What?

I can just as easily buy a farm in a cheap eastern european country and raise my own animals for food.

You can just as easily do that as go vegan? Really?

Because that sounds like an incredibly large amount of work and a major life altering commitment.
Maybe you should read some homesteading blogs.

It doesn't include target species deaths for pest control. I don't think that data is as easily come by.

Exactly, that's one of the many reasons why I call it total horseshit

If the data is not easily come by for that, how is that horseshit?
We work based on the information we have.

You have obviously never experienced a huge blow to your head before When completely unexpected, as can be arranged in animal slaughter, panic and terror will overwhelmingly likely not be one of the responses an animal that experiences a miss like that will have.

If it creates a concussion it could be disorienting, but a facial injury is different, this is not just a blunt trauma, this is a penetrating bolt and these are large animals.
Adrenaline means there won't be as much immediate pain as you might expect, but it's still terrifying if it doesn't knock you out.

A bolt like that missing and blowing off part of your face is different from it striking your brain. It has more in common with a terrible injury to another body part.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_trauma#Epidemiology

Head and brain injuries are commonly associated with facial trauma, particularly that of the upper face; brain injury occurs in 15–48% of people with maxillofacial trauma.[28]

I don't know how this compares in horses and cows, but brain injury isn't always caused by facial trauma and you really can't say you know the immediate effects in terms of state of mind are harmless.
There are many reports of people being conscious following trauma.

That's exactly the point. Basic western vegans trying to get meat eaters to just adopt a standard western vegan diet are exactly like molesters who dont penetrate trying to get rapists to stop penetrating. It's absolutely absurd.

It may seem absurd from your perspective, and that's the same attitude abolistionists take against animal welfare. This is an emotionally charged and extremist either-or mindset that completely ignores pragmatic improvement.

Look into Rev. Jeffrey Brown, he brokered ceasefires between gangs for holidays.

what the youth said in response to that was that you’re not going to be able to get us to do that cold turkey, so why don’t you start with a period of time, like a ceasefire? So we created that between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, and we called it season of peace. They gave us the directions for what to do, you know?
I had them in a room, and I made the pitch for the season of peace and asked for their approval. And that’s when I got my first indication that this might work, because a young guy gets up, and he says, ‘All right, so do we stop shooting at midnight on Wednesday night? Or do we stop on Thanksgiving morning? And do we start shooting again on December thirty-first or on January first?
And it was a conflict for me, because I was like, ‘I don’t want you to start shooting at all.’ But I said, ‘Okay, you stop shooting Wednesday night and you can start again after New Year’s Day.’ Now, you know, ethically I was like, ‘I can’t believe you told them they could start shooting after the first of the year.’

Tobias talked about that some here: http://veganstrategist.org/tag/meatless-monday/

Calling anything short of perfection in your mind "absurd" is an attitude toward ethics that needs to die if we're going to make the world a better place on any faster time-line than the historical trend.

I know that's what you are arguing, but like I said repeatedly, your attitudes are VASTLY different from the people that rustled my jimmies enough to engage in this debate in the first place. If all vegan youtubers were advocating veganism like you advocate veganism, this thread would have never happened.

I seriously doubt this would come as a surprise or find any disagreement among most vegans (the silent majority), but that doesn't change the fact of the matter that I'm making a sound argument even if it would. Veganism is a step, one heuristic among many, and to be a better person it's something to take seriously. That doesn't mean other things aren't valuable too.

And unless I'm mistaken, you asked somebody to convince you to go vegan, not to convince you to only go vegan and then stop there and never lift a finger to do any more good (or reduce any more harm) in the world.

When asking me in that way I can somewhat agree with what you said yes. If I were to ever decide to hold self-improvement as a personal value, and decide to try to be someone who seeks to be as ethical as they can possibly be, I could see myself adopting a moral framework such as the one you described there to measure my progress against rather than any other framework.

It's not about being as ethical as possible, it's just about not being complacent.
It's like anything that has ANY value at all in life. If you care about it, even in the smallest way, you work on it.

To reference a cliche: You want to finish that novel? Well, one page a day. A paragraph a day, even. A word a day. The proof is in the doing; if you're working on it you show your intent and value. When you don't, you demonstrate that it doesn't really have any practical value to you, and you're not a writer. A writer who writes a word a day is still a writer, but one who writes nothing is not.

In order to demonstrate any commitment at all to the value of being a good person, you just have to make the smallest quantum of effort to being a better one. It doesn't mean trying to be a saint; maybe if you lived a million years you'd get there, but not ever reaching that point doesn't mean you weren't a good person.

Being a good person doesn't mean you don't have any other interests or goals aside from that which have to share your time, just like being anything (a writer) doesn't mean you don't spend some time and energy on other things too.

Vegetarians could be 5 IQ points above meat eaters because a shitload of slightly more intelligent than average people (let's say IQ of 110-115, which still allows for ENORMOUS retardation) are vegetarians and pull the average for vegetarians up, while still maintaining an overall 98% of complete illogical, idiotic dogmatists in their group. It's probably only when you get to a 125-130 IQ and up when you start to see people actually being capable of sound logic and reason

Come on, you don't really think that's probable, do you?
A random camel hump at 110-115 and then a dip back down to baseline at 125?
A more reasonable assumption is a bell curve that's shifted a tiny bit right.

That aside, even if it were true, critical thinking itself is probably a matter of probability. There may be something to threshold theory as a fuzzy boundary, but we'd still see an increase in the number of critical thinkers at a mere 110-115 IQ (just a much more modest one).

[vdofthegoodkind]

Listed species are unlikely to be affected much differently from the others.

That's an assertion that needs to be backed up. By definition the population of an endangered species is lower than the population of other species, which arrants a reasonable suspicion of it being likely to increase the risk of ill effects. Not to mention differences in habitat distribution...
Aside from that, it says on the site of the EPA that the risk assessment itself involves "Considering sub-lethal, indirect and cumulative effects.", which can mean just aswell that they don't necessarily care if it harms the animals, as long as that harm isn't affecting their reproductive success adversely.
Moreover another thing I immediately noticed was this "In April 2016, EPA released the first-ever draft biological evaluations of three chemical pesticides Search EPA Archiveas a pilot test of a new process to analyze the nation-wide effects of pesticides on endangered and threatened species and designated critical habitat.".
Seems to me this whole thing is barely in it's infancy and you are gonna tell me that they can confidently say pesticides barely kill any animals that they haven't even taken into consideration when making their calculations?

What?

That whole thing we discussed about how me going vegan has "literally" no effect on the amount of animals that get killed. You taking my figuratively intended "literally" literally and then saying how probabilistically it DOES have an effect, and me then responding with how that probability is low enough to put me on par with a saint if I'm gonna take it seriously.

You can just as easily do that as go vegan? Really?

Because that sounds like an incredibly large amount of work and a major life altering commitment.
Maybe you should read some homesteading blogs.

Given my personal priorities, financial status, and general interests, yes, I personally could do that just as easily as going vegan, if not MORE easily.

If the data is not easily come by for that, how is that horseshit?
We work based on the information we have.

The "exactly" was actually just directed at the first part of what you said "It doesn't include target species deaths for pest control". The part about that data not being easy to come by I dont agree with at all. A while ago I did some digging into this kind of data and without too much of an effort I came across some papers that investigated like worm and other insect populations and whatnot in cropfiels treated vs not treated with certain pesticides.
If I remember correctly it was something like treated with the best pesticides that was investigated, the population dropped to like give or take 2 worms per square meter versus 8ish when untreated. That's a shitload of worms that are being killed. There were similar results for the other investigated insect populations.
As for the mammals that are being killed, that indeed is a little more difficult to determine. But.. even if we only took the not easy to obtain data into account it would still be horseshit those graphs. If you have a good reason to believe loads of animals are being killed, which you do when spraying around POISON intentionally, and you have no way of determining how many are being killed, not even a reliable ballpark figure, it's kind of stupid to just ignore the existence of this practice and go around using other readily available data to make an estimate of how many animals are killed per given number of calories.

If it creates a concussion it could be disorienting, but a facial injury is different, this is not just a blunt trauma, this is a penetrating bolt and these are large animals.
Adrenaline means there won't be as much immediate pain as you might expect, but it's still terrifying if it doesn't knock you out.

A bolt like that missing and blowing off part of your face is different from it striking your brain. It has more in common with a terrible injury to another body part.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_trauma#Epidemiology

Head and brain injuries are commonly associated with facial trauma, particularly that of the upper face; brain injury occurs in 15–48% of people with maxillofacial trauma.[28]

I don't know how this compares in horses and cows, but brain injury isn't always caused by facial trauma and you really can't say you know the immediate effects in terms of state of mind are harmless.
There are many reports of people being conscious following trauma.

I see an entry wound on the top of the horse's head, I would consider a concussion likely. Plus "there are many reports of people being conscious following trauma"... I never said they wouldn't be conscious, I said panic and terror are unlikely.

Aside from that, my whole point about "I sure as fuck wouldnt put it back in a barn for a photo-op" stands. Animals when slaughtered are restrained, traumatic experience can be avoided/minimized by just immediately shooting again.
Not to mention, again the original point was that I'm quite sure the suffering during slaughter is due to lack of welfare regulations in the industry, and you claimed that it's intrinsic to the industry. That's just bullshit. Even IF you happen to be right about boltguns in this discussion, there's nothing stopping the industry from adopting regulations that require inert-gas sedation or something before applying the boltgun and/or slitting the throat. With these new types of regulations (or a million potential other ones like them) you are for all practical purposes 100% sure that there will be no suffering involved.

It may seem absurd from your perspective, and that's the same attitude abolistionists take against animal welfare. This is an emotionally charged and extremist either-or mindset that completely ignores pragmatic improvement.

Look into Rev. Jeffrey Brown, he brokered ceasefires between gangs for holidays.

what the youth said in response to that was that you’re not going to be able to get us to do that cold turkey, so why don’t you start with a period of time, like a ceasefire? So we created that between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, and we called it season of peace. They gave us the directions for what to do, you know?
I had them in a room, and I made the pitch for the season of peace and asked for their approval. And that’s when I got my first indication that this might work, because a young guy gets up, and he says, ‘All right, so do we stop shooting at midnight on Wednesday night? Or do we stop on Thanksgiving morning? And do we start shooting again on December thirty-first or on January first?
And it was a conflict for me, because I was like, ‘I don’t want you to start shooting at all.’ But I said, ‘Okay, you stop shooting Wednesday night and you can start again after New Year’s Day.’ Now, you know, ethically I was like, ‘I can’t believe you told them they could start shooting after the first of the year.’

Tobias talked about that some here: [veganstrategist][/veganstrategist]/meatless-monday/[/clickylink]

Calling anything short of perfection in your mind "absurd" is an attitude toward ethics that needs to die if we're going to make the world a better place on any faster time-line than the historical trend.

Let me first start with saying that I was wrong in responding to your post in the way I did. Because per se, your analogy was wrong to begin with. It's not a matter of raping them with penetration versus molesting them without penetration. It's a matter of raping them with a green dildo (slitting throats), versus raping them with a blue dildo (poisoning).

Second, your Jeffrey Brown analogy could just as easily be an argument for certain forms of reducetarianism instead of just veganism. So again we fall into the 'arbitrary' category.

Third, IF it was a matter of standard rape vs lesser degree molestation without penetration, then it's not absurd, which is why I granted you the point of tentative veganism being morally superior in the absolute sense. (for the majority of normal people, not me, considering the whole easy potential for a cheap farm in eastern europe thing in my specific case)

I seriously doubt this would come as a surprise or find any disagreement among most vegans (the silent majority), but that doesn't change the fact of the matter that I'm making a sound argument even if it would. Veganism is a step, one heuristic among many, and to be a better person it's something to take seriously. That doesn't mean other things aren't valuable too.

And unless I'm mistaken, you asked somebody to convince you to go vegan, not to convince you to only go vegan and then stop there and never lift a finger to do any more good (or reduce any more harm) in the world.

That was a mistake on my part then for not specifying that I meant JUST going vegan. (although tbh I think if you read between the lines, it's kind of implied in my original post)

It's not about being as ethical as possible, it's just about not being complacent.

It's like anything that has ANY value at all in life. If you care about it, even in the smallest way, you work on it.

To reference a cliche: You want to finish that novel? Well, one page a day. A paragraph a day, even. A word a day. The proof is in the doing; if you're working on it you show your intent and value. When you don't, you demonstrate that it doesn't really have any practical value to you, and you're not a writer. A writer who writes a word a day is still a writer, but one who writes nothing is not.

In order to demonstrate any commitment at all to the value of being a good person, you just have to make the smallest quantum of effort to being a better one. It doesn't mean trying to be a saint; maybe if you lived a million years you'd get there, but not ever reaching that point doesn't mean you weren't a good person.

Being a good person doesn't mean you don't have any other interests or goals aside from that which have to share your time, just like being anything (a writer) doesn't mean you don't spend some time and energy on other things too.

I said "TRY to be as ethical as possible", in other words having that ideal as a core value to strive towards, and indeed working towards it one step at a time as you said.

Come on, you don't really think that's probable, do you?
A random camel hump at 110-115 and then a dip back down to baseline at 125?
A more reasonable assumption is a bell curve that's shifted a tiny bit right.

That aside, even if it were true, critical thinking itself is probably a matter of probability. There may be something to threshold theory as a fuzzy boundary, but we'd still see an increase in the number of critical thinkers at a mere 110-115 IQ (just a much more modest one).

I actually totally think that's probable. I can totally see how people who are slightly more intelligent than average would be more susceptible to the vegan/vegetarian message, while it falling completely on deaf ears on the truly intelligent for the most part. Not to mention that I could also see how extremely stupid people have a far lower chance of becoming vegetarian, considering they are pretty much incapable of generating an original thought themselves and likely live in assisted living facilities and so have an overwhelmingly lower chance of coming into contact with vegan/vegetarian people, let alone activists. Thus pulling the average IQ up within the vegetarian community in this way without a bellcurve shift being the case. (Although tbh I think for these kinds of studies, they don't necessarily include people from either of the extreme sides of the bell curve, and if so this whole side-discussion becomes useless for obvious reasons)

Anyway... you're just asserting that the bell curve being shifted a tiny bit right is a more reasonable assumption. Unless you have evidence to back up this claim there's no reason to assume you're right.
Aside from that I recommend you read the abstract of the actual study (http://www.bmj.com/content/334/7587/245). There's some funny things in there, including that the IQ points of vegans (note there were only 9 of the 366 vegetarians that were vegan) in the study were 10 points lower than vegetarians (and thus 5 points lower than the general population).
I don't know how far your knowledge on multivariate statistics goes, but as you can see principal component analysis was used to obtain the results. With n=366 (243 in fact, because 123 'vegetarians' reported to eat fish or chicken on occasion, which puts THOSE people in the extreme reducetarian camp, aka MY camp), it doesn't back up AT ALL that your assertion is a more reasonable assumption.
First of all nothing is said about the distribution of IQ following a multivariate normal distribution over the two groups. I highly doubt they wouldn't just continue on with PCA regardless of the normality assumptions not being satisfied when doing a 30 year long study involving humans, given how PCA is generally used in practice.
Second, even IF multivariate normality was in fact satisfied between the two groups, the null-hypothesis IS normality when performing that test for PCA. (normally in statistics your null-hypothesis is the antithesis of what you're trying to prove, i.e if you're trying to prove correlation between two variables, you assume no correlation as H0 and when that gets rejected by the data you conclude correlation, not the other way around)
With 243 data points and the fact that we're talking about the 2% highest on the IQ curve, that means only 5ish data points of these people were available. It's highly likely that the null-hypothesis of normality would hold up to p=0.05 (definitely p=0.01) even if the data was skewed in the way I said it might be (higher number of people slightly more intelligent than average). Not to mention the potential for random chance adding 1 or 2 extra high IQ people to those expected 5. (as you for instance see when looking at the vegan group coming out 10 IQ points short when there were only 9 data points available for them)

Another very important thing to note is not all the people in the original study responded to the follow up study where it was determined whether or not they're vegetarian. There's like 4000 people's answers missing.(72% of 11k respondends had IQ scores at age 10 available and there were 17k participants total originally, so I got that 4k number by taking the difference of 72% of that original 17k with the 8k of respondents with IQ scores available) The skewed results could be solely explained by the fact that intelligent vegetarians are more likely to respond to research like this because they want vegetarianism to be painted in a good light and they know their participation will help with that.
Also it would be instructive to take a look at the described limitations of the study in the abstract. Puts the whole thing even more in a whole different perspective. On top of that I could make some other objections, but I think all of the above kinda already more than suffices.
Either way, one thing is 100% certain, this study is utterly useless in the argument we're having about that '98% idiotic dogmatists' thing. Even in the best case that you're right here, despite all the objections I just raised, and the bellcurve is in fact just shifted right, then it at best becomes 95-97.5% instead of 98%. Which means my original point still stands, considering I was talking about an "overwhelming majority" and just said 98% as an estimate. 95% is still an overwhelming majority.
Hell, even if you were to shift it right an entire standard deviation (which as far as I'm aware when it comes to IQ is 15 points) you would still have give or take over 80% being an idiotic dogmatist, which still kinda qualifies as an overwhelming majority. In politics such numbers would definitely be called a landslide victory

[brimstoneSalad]

That's an assertion that needs to be backed up.

So does every claim you make, like you saying pesticides are poisoning large numbers of sentient animals.
Can you prove it?
If not, then it's really not relevant right now.

We know animals are harmed in animal agriculture, and even hunting (although to a lesser extent I would agree). If the other option is a black box, it's morally necessary to choose the unknown harm over the known harm.

Trolley problem:
On one track, an open box filled with victims of this thought experiment (babies, kittens, whatever you don't want to kill), on the other track a closed box the contents of which are unknown.

You're trying to shift the burden of proof here where the default behavior given an unknown is to avoid the known harm, and I feel like I'm the only one doing any digging here to debunk your speculation.

By definition the population of an endangered species is lower than the population of other species, which arrants a reasonable suspicion of it being likely to increase the risk of ill effects.

Pesticides act primarily on the CLASS level. There is some variation in toxicity from species to species, but it's rare to find something that really targets a species or even a genus. If it makes bird eggs thin, it's probably making all of the bird eggs thin and not just those of this particular species (although other species may be resilient despite that).

There are endangered species in every class, so if it's harmless to those species it's likely to be harmless to the others too.

Not to mention differences in habitat distribution...

Was DDT only banned in areas where it threatened endangered species, or was it banned nation-wide?

Pesticides tend to have a greater effect on aquatic life, because that's how they run off, but the EPA looks into that as well as buildup in the food chain.

Aside from that, it says on the site of the EPA that the risk assessment itself involves "Considering sub-lethal, indirect and cumulative effects.", which can mean just aswell that they don't necessarily care if it harms the animals, as long as that harm isn't affecting their reproductive success adversely.

Anything that harms animals is likely to affect reproductive success, even "stress", which can cause vulnerability to illness.
There are some cases of hormonal activity that may change expression of secondary sex characteristics without harming the animals (a non-hamrful effect), but I'm not that worried about "turning the frogs gay" if they're still reproducing enough.

Seems to me this whole thing is barely in it's infancy and you are gonna tell me that they can confidently say pesticides barely kill any animals that they haven't even taken into consideration when making their calculations?

You can appeal to uncertainty all you want to muddy the waters, but what matters is what we reasonably know.

Pesticide concentrations outside the field are far lower, and modern pesticides are chosen for their short half-lives so that they don't build up in the environment.
I don't think it's credible to believe that there are vast unseen effects of modern pesticide runoff that the EPA is completely blind to. That seems to me to be conspiracy level belief.

That whole thing we discussed about how me going vegan has "literally" no effect on the amount of animals that get killed. You taking my figuratively intended "literally" literally and then saying how probabilistically it DOES have an effect, and me then responding with how that probability is low enough to put me on par with a saint if I'm gonna take it seriously.

First, the probability is not low when you add up your entire lifetime's actions. You will probably make that purchase that triggers a new order a few times.

Second, you have to remember that even if these probabilities of direct outcome from your actions are low, they are for proportionally large effects (ordering an extra case of something, increasing production by a certain amount), so we're still dealing with an overall probabilistic share of you killing slightly more animals than you're eating (due to waste).

Third, either way you should understand that ethically you are responsible whether you have the bad luck of triggering one of these larger events or not.
A drunk driver who gets lucky and kills nobody is equally responsible compared to a drunk driver who has some bad luck and kills somebody.
If there's a one in ten thousand chance of killing somebody, both are 0.01% guilty of reckless homicide.
Obviously in law they are currently treated differently (because of the victims' family wanting people to blame), but ethically they are identical if they engaged in the same risky behavior.

Taking that seriously doesn't make you a saint.
Even with radical reducetarianism, we're talking about the moral responsibility of killing of many hundreds of animals over your lifetime (and I doubt that all of the meat you're eating is of the type you're talking about here that would have a speculatively low impact vs. some imagined high impact of plant agriculture).

Given my personal priorities, financial status, and general interests, yes, I personally could do that just as easily as going vegan, if not MORE easily.

Can you go into more detail on this?

What would it mean for you to go vegan, and what would be your plan for making your own food that you think would be that much lower impact to make it easier?

A while ago I did some digging into this kind of data and without too much of an effort I came across some papers that investigated like worm and other insect populations and whatnot in cropfiels treated vs not treated with certain pesticides.

There's some data on that, looking at soil biodiversity.
You know worms probably aren't sentient, though, right?
And most loss of insect populations has to do with eggs and larval death of small soil insects. Adults tend to be more resistant, which is why you have to apply pesticides in phases or use slow release to get multiple generations.

If I remember correctly it was something like treated with the best pesticides that was investigated, the population dropped to like give or take 2 worms per square meter versus 8ish when untreated. That's a shitload of worms that are being killed. There were similar results for the other investigated insect populations.

I don't think most vegans are concerned about worms. But are they being killed, or are they just not being born? That isn't even clear.

Also, it's not clear if it's not better to have lower insect populations, because all they do is crawl around and eat things and eat each other and get eaten alive by other things; an insect's life doesn't compare to that of larger animals in terms of complexity and survival. They reproduce by the thousands and survival for them is more of a lottery than for any of the animals humans eat (aside from aquatic crustaceans).

As for the mammals that are being killed, that indeed is a little more difficult to determine.

That's what we want to know. Mammals and birds. And to a lesser extent reptiles and amphibians.
We're not very concerned with animals of no or uncertain sentience, or with insect eggs not hatching. It's also much less clear that it's wrong to kill off the horror show of insect life in soil even if that's what's happening.

If you have a good reason to believe loads of animals are being killed, which you do when spraying around POISON intentionally, and you have no way of determining how many are being killed, not even a reliable ballpark figure, it's kind of stupid to just ignore the existence of this practice and go around using other readily available data to make an estimate of how many animals are killed per given number of calories.

If you understand how these pesticides work, and what they target, and a little about their biological half-lives, it's not that unreasonable.

I'm not even worried about adult aphids, which I also doubt are sentient due to the small size.
Ants seem to be, but they only manage it at that size by having a ridiculous brain to body mass ratio.

As things become smaller and simpler, the probability of sentience reduces, and the degree of sentience (if they are at all) also reduces, probably exponentially.

You can't only count quantity and ignore quality.

I agree that these visuals would be better if they accounted for that, and maybe looked at the number of neurons destroyed (scaled exponentially at the brain level to account roughly for intelligence). That's not something that's easy to do, though.

I see an entry wound on the top of the horse's head, I would consider a concussion likely. Plus "there are many reports of people being conscious following trauma"... I never said they wouldn't be conscious, I said panic and terror are unlikely.

It doesn't matter how unlikely these things are if they happen, they can't be completely discounted. Whatever proportion of them that end this way is what you'd be responsible for, for supporting the practice, unlikeliness just reduces that burden.

Aside from that, my whole point about "I sure as fuck wouldnt put it back in a barn for a photo-op" stands. Animals when slaughtered are restrained, traumatic experience can be avoided/minimized by just immediately shooting again.

They may not have been able to if the horse was thrashing around. If it fell on the ground unconscious, then that would make sense. Kind of lends more credence to the horse having gone into a panic.

Even IF you happen to be right about boltguns in this discussion, there's nothing stopping the industry from adopting regulations that require inert-gas sedation or something before applying the boltgun and/or slitting the throat. With these new types of regulations (or a million potential other ones like them) you are for all practical purposes 100% sure that there will be no suffering involved.

CO2 stunning is torture. With something like nitrogen sedation, then it's pretty much guaranteed they just pass out, yes.
That's not how it's done now, though, and that's not how the meat you eat was killed.

Vegans should support welfare like this. Some oppose it on the grounds that if animal agriculture is less horrible fewer people will go vegan... which seems a little nuts. That's a rare opinion of extremists, though, from what I've seen.

Let me first start with saying that I was wrong in responding to your post in the way I did. Because per se, your analogy was wrong to begin with. It's not a matter of raping them with penetration versus molesting them without penetration. It's a matter of raping them with a green dildo (slitting throats), versus raping them with a blue dildo (poisoning).

If you think the same qualitative amount of harm is being done either way, that's an empirical belief that needs to be corrected.

There's no evidence of that degree of harm, and even with the meat you're eating you'd probably admit that's not the case.

You can't use some future hypothetical where animals are raised on fields without pesticides and without being fed crops and are stunned with a nitrogen environment to justify current practices and call veganism worse. We could also invent hypothetical plant farming practices that were less harmful still (and substantially, because they're better for the environment).

If you expect animal farming to go that way, there's no reason to not expect plant farming to as well.

Second, your Jeffrey Brown analogy could just as easily be an argument for certain forms of reducetarianism instead of just veganism. So again we fall into the 'arbitrary' category.

Yes, and I've covered that. A good person is one who works on being better. Veganism isn't necessarily something you'd achieve today or even this year if you were working on moving in that direction.

Third, IF it was a matter of standard rape vs lesser degree molestation without penetration, then it's not absurd, which is why I granted you the point of tentative veganism being morally superior in the absolute sense. (for the majority of normal people, not me, considering the whole easy potential for a cheap farm in eastern europe thing in my specific case)

I'd like to hear more about your farming hypothetical.

I actually totally think that's probable. I can totally see how people who are slightly more intelligent than average would be more susceptible to the vegan/vegetarian message, while it falling completely on deaf ears on the truly intelligent for the most part.

Anecdotally, if you'll look at some of the greatest minds in history (like Einstein), that doesn't seem to be the case. We don't have any comprehensive studies that I know of looking at Mensa members or anything, but the most reasonable assumption is a bell curve shift.

Anyway... you're just asserting that the bell curve being shifted a tiny bit right is a more reasonable assumption. Unless you have evidence to back up this claim there's no reason to assume you're right.

I think that would be the default assumption unless you have evidence to the contrary.

Either way, as I said, thresholds like that (critical thinking etc.) aren't hard lines. We'd still be looking at a higher probability of more critical thinkers even if there were just a hump at 110.
Of course some kind of study on critical thinking rather than IQ would probably be more helpful. I know that study wasn't very large, as you said it's possible it was affected by self reporting bias in the followup, but stupid people tend to think they're smart anyway, so I'm not sure.

Hell, even if you were to shift it right an entire standard deviation (which as far as I'm aware when it comes to IQ is 15 points) you would still have give or take over 80% being an idiotic dogmatist, which still kinda qualifies as an overwhelming majority. In politics such numbers would definitely be called a landslide victory

I agree that most people are idiots if that's your only point, I was responding to this, with respect to the 98% claim:

"Don't see why that statistic would be any different in the vegan community. A community that at its base has quite "dogmatic" roots at that..."

[vdofthegoodkind]

So does every claim you make, like you saying pesticides are poisoning large numbers of sentient animals.
Can you prove it? If not, then it's really not relevant right now.

We know animals are harmed in animal agriculture, and even hunting (although to a lesser extent I would agree). If the other option is a black box, it's morally necessary to choose the unknown harm over the known harm.

Trolley problem:
On one track, an open box filled with victims of this thought experiment (babies, kittens, whatever you don't want to kill), on the other track a closed box the contents of which are unknown.

You're trying to shift the burden of proof here where the default behavior given an unknown is to avoid the known harm, and I feel like I'm the only one doing any digging here to debunk your speculation.

Of course I can't prove that pesticides are poisoning large numbers of sentient animals, because there's no incentive for any organisation whatsoever to do the research in question. There's however reasonable enough suspicion of it being the case and that is why your black box trolley problem analogy is absurd.

A more fitting analogy would be the following:
On one track, an open box filled with a quite low known number of victims (give or take 2 animals/1million kcal for beef in benign grass-fed animal agriculture for example) of this thought experiment (babies, kittens, whatever you don't want to kill), on the other track a closed box the contents of which are unknown with a random number between 1 and an unknown number x being generated and an unknown outcome of fatalities per million kcal for every disinct number that the randomly generated number might turn out to be, and a reasonable enough common sense suspicion that that number will be greater than 2 animals per 1 million kcal.

You say the moral imperative is to choose the closed box until you know for certain what's in the closed box, I say the exact opposite.

Pesticides act primarily on the CLASS level. There is some variation in toxicity from species to species, but it's rare to find something that really targets a species or even a genus. If it makes bird eggs thin, it's probably making all of the bird eggs thin and not just those of this particular species (although other species may be resilient despite that).

There are endangered species in every class, so if it's harmless to those species it's likely to be harmless to the others too.

Obviously, and how exactly does this relate to anything you quoted me saying? Me saying what I said wasn't me implying that because they're a different species it's maybe toxic to them. How the hell did you manage to interpret it that way?
The point is the EPA allows the registering of pesticides which DO affect endangered species and then subjects those pesticides to certain geograpic limitations as to minimize the risk of exposure to the species that are endangered. And as you said here yourself, pesticides act on the class level, aka non-endangered species who live in areas where those pesticides CAN be used, given those geographic limitations, those non-endangered animals will still be caused major suffering, and those effects are not taken into account in any study, which is one of many reasons why there is reasonable suspicion to assume plants grown by use of pesticides are more harmful than benign grass-fed animal agriculture.

Was DDT only banned in areas where it threatened endangered species, or was it banned nation-wide?

Pesticides tend to have a greater effect on aquatic life, because that's how they run off, but the EPA looks into that as well as buildup in the food chain.

Why do you ask about DDT? Did I ever imply ALL pesticides can be used under certain restrictions? Of course I didn't imply any such thing. That SOME pesticides cant be used anywhere, doesn't mean the EPA doesn't allow ANY pesticides that do adversely effect certain animals to be used under certain restrictions as to alleviate the threat to critical habitats.
You are the one who linked me to the website in the first place... Did you even read it? Because tbh this is starting to piss me off. I highly recommend you click on the 'About the Endangered Species Protection Program' link.

Anything that harms animals is likely to affect reproductive success, even "stress", which can cause vulnerability to illness.
There are some cases of hormonal activity that may change expression of secondary sex characteristics without harming the animals (a non-hamrful effect), but I'm not that worried about "turning the frogs gay" if they're still reproducing enough.

Agree that anything that harms animals is likely to affect reproductive success. However you make it out to be that reproductive success can only be affected negatively. If you for example have a chemical that has a neurological impact on a species and increases agression, that might just aswell increase their reproductive success, given the complexities involved in population dynamics. And that's just one example of many.
Then again, on second thought, it seems highly unlikely that the EPA would investigate it in this manner, so you can pretty much ignore this particular point and forget I brought it up.

You can appeal to uncertainty all you want to muddy the waters, but what matters is what we reasonably know.

Pesticide concentrations outside the field are far lower, and modern pesticides are chosen for their short half-lives so that they don't build up in the environment.
I don't think it's credible to believe that there are vast unseen effects of modern pesticide runoff that the EPA is completely blind to. That seems to me to be conspiracy level belief.

As I already said, the EPA allows for some pesticides to be used that affect animals negatively, given certain geographic restrictions. => reasonable suspicion

First, the probability is not low when you add up your entire lifetime's actions. You will probably make that purchase that triggers a new order a few times.

Second, you have to remember that even if these probabilities of direct outcome from your actions are low, they are for proportionally large effects (ordering an extra case of something, increasing production by a certain amount), so we're still dealing with an overall probabilistic share of you killing slightly more animals than you're eating (due to waste).

Already addressed these point that your sketch of the situation is ridiculous because of the huge amount of layers of indirection between you and the actual livestock cultivation, making your assertion of the probability not being low completely absurd.

Third, either way you should understand that ethically you are responsible whether you have the bad luck of triggering one of these larger events or not.
A drunk driver who gets lucky and kills nobody is equally responsible compared to a drunk driver who has some bad luck and kills somebody.
If there's a one in ten thousand chance of killing somebody, both are 0.01% guilty of reckless homicide.
Obviously in law they are currently treated differently (because of the victims' family wanting people to blame), but ethically they are identical if they engaged in the same risky behavior.

Taking that seriously doesn't make you a saint.
Even with radical reducetarianism, we're talking about the moral responsibility of killing of many hundreds of animals over your lifetime (and I doubt that all of the meat you're eating is of the type you're talking about here that would have a speculatively low impact vs. some imagined high impact of plant agriculture).

In my opinion that totally makes you a saint. That kind of fucks given is completely on par with not buying iphones, clothes, etc, because they were made by exploitative industries, not buying drugs because they're produced by a violent industry, etc. Aka pepper your anus for minimalism incoming

Can you go into more detail on this?

What would it mean for you to go vegan, and what would be your plan for making your own food that you think would be that much lower impact to make it easier?

I'm quite well off financially and I work completely from home (and can do that anywhere in the world), I have not that many ties to people in general because I'm quite the misanthrope, and the idea of farming appeals to me to a certain extent just from a hobby-perspective. Aside from all that I really enjoy eating the foods I'm used to eating and that's one of the major joys in my life to me.
So all that combined would more likely lead me in the direction of producing my own meat rather than becoming vegan.

Anyway I'm getting kind of tired of this. I was going to say I'll respond to the rest later, but I ended up skimming through the rest of your post and my eye caught the CO2-stunning red herring part and that literally killed all remaining motivation I had left for this discussion.
You can respond to what I said so far if you want for "completeness" for other readers, but I won't be coming back here after this, so for me you don't have to go through the effort.
Best of luck man! At least we can agree on the fact that Ask Yourself is a dipshit

[brimstoneSalad]

I was going to say I'll respond to the rest later, but I ended up skimming through the rest of your post and my eye caught the CO2-stunning red herring part and that literally killed all remaining motivation I had left for this discussion.

I said nitrogen stunning would probably be painless. I don't know what you think an "inert gas" is, nor do I know what other people reading think that is.
Industry likes to use CO2, I was just clarifying that I wouldn't consider that gas a good method since it isn't always biologically inert (although it's not used for respiration and will ultimately stun animals after some amount of suffering), but others can be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inert_gas_asphyxiation#Animal_slaughter

Interestingly, it's pretty species specific. Even a nitrogen or argon atmosphere could be torture for some animals like rats, something I wasn't aware of.

You can respond to what I said so far if you want for "completeness" for other readers, but I won't be coming back here after this, so for me you don't have to go through the effort.

I might do that later.

[brimstoneSalad]

Of course I can't prove that pesticides are poisoning large numbers of sentient animals, because there's no incentive for any organisation whatsoever to do the research in question.

That's bullshit, there are organizations specifically formed to do just that and complain about pesticides and other environmental problems and even sue when the EPA doesn't act.

For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_Defense_Fund

That, and pretty much every investigative journalist in the country who wants to make a name for his or herself. These people are going after ridiculous speculative connections between cell phones or power lines and cancer, they'd be glad to bite on something like this if it were a problem.

It wouldn't be that hard to do the research or come up with the data if it were a threat to animals outside the field (we know fertilizer can be, through algal blooms). If there's any harm, it's probably de minimis.

DDT is a good example, since it show us how these things act and where animals are most vulnerable: reproduction.
If eggs fail to develop, that might be an ecological concern for endangered species, but it's not a major moral concern for non-threatened species.

There's however reasonable enough suspicion of it being the case and that is why your black box trolley problem analogy is absurd.

You think it's reasonable, I think it's conspiracy level stuff. You admit there's no evidence.

I talked about biological half-lives. Those are assessed for soil and aquatic environments. With the exception of predation, the concentrations of these substances drop drastically when they leave the fields.

give or take 2 animals/1million kcal for beef in benign grass-fed animal agriculture for example

Assuming you can find a way to compensate for the greenhouse gas output, it's possible that could be relatively benign compared to modern methods of some plant agriculture, but again, there's no evidence of that. You can't just call it benign and have it be so.

We'd also need to compare the moral value of the animals killed in plant agriculture to cows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons

It probably wouldn't be that hard to find data to estimate from given the minimum deaths we know of.

and a reasonable enough common sense suspicion that that number will be greater than 2 animals per 1 million kcal.

If you're counting bugs, I'm sure it is. That says nothing of quality, though. We're not talking kittens/babies in this other box, we're talking pests: mostly insects, maybe some aquatic crustaceans as casualty of runoff, maybe some broken eggs, and some rodents.

No common sense suggests equal moral harm from plant and animal agriculture, even the nicest form you could conceive of. By no means is it obvious.
The only case common sense prefers is oysters because they're so likely non-sentient (that's the black box one chooses).

You say the moral imperative is to choose the closed box until you know for certain what's in the closed box, I say the exact opposite.

If you place equal value on insects and cows for some reason.

I mentioned this as a shortcoming of those diagrams. We need qualitative depth to these analyses.

Obviously, and how exactly does this relate to anything you quoted me saying? Me saying what I said wasn't me implying that because they're a different species it's maybe toxic to them. How the hell did you manage to interpret it that way?

It wasn't clear what you meant, so I responded to multiple interpretations of what you might be saying.

The point is the EPA allows the registering of pesticides which DO affect endangered species and then subjects those pesticides to certain geograpic limitations as to minimize the risk of exposure to the species that are endangered.

Then can you give me an example of one you think is causing suffering so I can look into it?

And as you said here yourself, pesticides act on the class level, aka non-endangered species who live in areas where those pesticides CAN be used, given those geographic limitations, those non-endangered animals will still be caused major suffering,

Like thin eggs? There are reproductive effects that don't necessarily cause suffering.
I would need an explicit example.

Most pesticides that target chordates are distributed as poisons, such as for mice. This becomes an issue for predators, but that's a known issue and pretty limited.

and those effects are not taken into account in any study, which is one of many reasons why there is reasonable suspicion to assume plants grown by use of pesticides are more harmful than benign grass-fed animal agriculture.

No, the lack of evidence itself is not a reason to assume that. Using a lack of evidence to prove something is conspiracy theory level talk.

We COULD extrapolate from studies on endangered animals if you'd give a few specific examples.
I'm glad to look into this together, but I'm seriously not doing all of the work myself. This is a research project.

Why do you ask about DDT? Did I ever imply ALL pesticides can be used under certain restrictions? Of course I didn't imply any such thing.

The really bad ones, particularly that are persistent or build up in the environment, tend to be banned like that nationally.

I'm skeptical that there is anything really bad on the market (there are a few things the EPA is working on banning, which is something that will be sorted out in time). Localized effects on endangered animals are probably limited to runoff risk for crustaceans in sensitive water areas, very nearby endangered insect populations (like within a mile), and birds of prey which may eat poisoned rodents.

You are the one who linked me to the website in the first place... Did you even read it? Because tbh this is starting to piss me off. I highly recommend you click on the 'About the Endangered Species Protection Program' link.

I didn't read every link to every page on the EPA site, no.
It seems like I'm the only one who has been trying to address this with evidence rather than with speculation for lack of evidence.

You can see their bulletins here:
https://www.epa.gov/endangered-species/bulletins-live-two-view-bulletins

Mostly about prairie dogs and some falcon that might be affected that eats them. Looks like one about an insect.

We could look at a bunch of bulletins, categorize them, figure out what evidence the EPA is going on, and then extrapolate them to non-endangered species. Rodenticides are the most important to look at, because they have effect on the most important classes of animals (affecting mammals and birds both).

This article notes a few studies, and gives a specific case of collateral damage from extreme application:
http://www.audubon.org/magazine/january-february-2013/poisons-used-kill-rodents-have-safer

Then in 2008 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and its partners (The Nature Conservancy and Island Conservation) deployed two helicopters to saturation-bomb 6,424 acres with 46 metric tons of brodifacoum bait. Cost: $2.5 million.

There can be no better example of the deadliness of second-generation rodenticides than collateral damage on Rat Island. Found dead along with the rats were 46 bald eagles, at least 320 glaucous-winged gulls, one peregrine falcon, and 53 other birds representing 24 species. Despite the heart-breaking nontarget mortality, the project succeeded from a species perspective. Today the island (renamed Hawadax) is rat free, and native species rarely, if ever, seen are surging back—among them burrow-nesting seabirds, giant song sparrows (found only in the Aleutians), black oystercatchers, pigeon guillemots, rock sandpipers, common eiders, red-faced cormorants, and gray-crowned rosy finches.

Aside from the rats, 420 birds. Which seems pretty small for 6,424 acres, which were infested, being bombed with that much poison.
0.065 birds per acre.

Perhaps tragic for those endangered predatory birds, but otherwise a pretty low death count even for that.

I'm going to let Washington post do my math for me here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/in-defense-of-corn-the-worlds-most-important-food-crop/2015/07/12/78d86530-25a8-11e5-b77f-eb13a215f593_story.html

In the calorie department, corn is king. In 2014, average yield in the United States was 171 bushels per acre. (And the world record is an astonishing 503 bushels, set by a farmer in Valdosta, Ga.) Each bushel weighs 56 pounds and each pound of corn yields about 1,566 calories. That means corn averages roughly 15 million calories per acre. (Again, I’m talking about field corn, a.k.a. dent corn, which is dried before processing. Sweet corn and popcorn are different varieties, grown for much more limited uses, and have lower yields.) If you had taken our 2014 corn harvest of 14.2 billion bushels and used it to feed people, it would have met 17 percent of the entire world’s caloric needs.

By contrast, wheat comes in at about 4 million calories per acre, soy at 6 million. Rice is also very high-yielding, at 11 million, and potatoes are one of the few crops that can rival corn: They also yield about 15 million (although record corn yields are much higher than record potato yields). Other vegetables, while much more nutritious than corn, wheat or potatoes, are far less energy-dense. Broccoli yields about 2.5 million calories per acre, and spinach is under 2 million.

Even if we assumed an epic poisoning on the scale of Rat Island for every single harvest, this adds 0.033 bird deaths per million calories for the worst case of spinach, and for better cases of wheat 0.017, 0.011 for soy, 0.006 for rice... all very small compared to the two deaths per million you proposed for grass fed beef.

We could add in other collateral damage, but beyond the target species for the pesticide birds of prey are probably the most morally significant (likely comparable to a cow in sentience despite the small brains, since birds have high large numbers of neurons in their forebrains https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303949504_Birds_have_primate-like_numbers_of_neurons_in_the_forebrain and apparently more efficient brains somehow), and that's the most extreme case and it's not that substantial. It seems reasonable to believe in every day farming practice that there are fewer deaths per acre than there were on Rat Island.

You're appealing to these unknowns and you're imagining these huge numbers -- probably because that's what you want to imagine because it coincides with your beliefs -- but that's not what the limited evidence seems to suggest. You can't just claim it's reasonable to assume what you were clearly already predisposed to assume without any kind of evidence to extrapolate from.
Of course quite a few animals die in the process, but you have to understand that the number of acres being farmed and the number of calories being produced on each of those acres (even for broccoli) is also extremely large.

Agree that anything that harms animals is likely to affect reproductive success. However you make it out to be that reproductive success can only be affected negatively.

Given these animals have evolved in these environments, and reproductive success is the strongest pressure there is? Yes, it's likely that it will only be affected negatively.

If you for example have a chemical that has a neurological impact on a species and increases agression, that might just aswell increase their reproductive success,

Unlikely, since they probably already evolved optimal aggression for reproductive success for their species.

Then again, on second thought, it seems highly unlikely that the EPA would investigate it in this manner, so you can pretty much ignore this particular point and forget I brought it up.

Sure? Although the EPA is probably looking mainly at population numbers. A positive effect could mask harm in theory, it's just not very plausible.

As I already said, the EPA allows for some pesticides to be used that affect animals negatively, given certain geographic restrictions. => reasonable suspicion

They're on the bulletin. They mostly have to do with birds of prey, so I covered that above.
I'm not that worried about the butterflies of marginal sentience.

Already addressed these point that your sketch of the situation is ridiculous because of the huge amount of layers of indirection between you and the actual livestock cultivation, making your assertion of the probability not being low completely absurd.

There aren't that many layers. It obviously depends on what you're buying, but there's the store you're buying from, probably a distributor, the producer, and depending on the product maybe one more middle-man and a farm, but the slaughtering and rendering plant is pretty much straight-through. I don't think they sit on inventory much there, and farms respond to demand (they CAN sit on live animal inventory if they don't have any orders).

The relevant parties are pretty much the manufacturer making the sausage which may scale up or down production by certain integers with new equipment or by taking days off or closing plants/liquidating assets if demand is consistently low.
Minimum orders aren't that enormous, though. I see one that's 25 tons, but that's for an international shipment (local companies probably have smaller minimums). Whatever waste buffer your distributor or store has though, all you have to do is cross that threshold to trigger another order based on their calculations.

If your grocery store regularly gets 25 kg of sausage, and a package is half a kilogram, you have a 1/50 chance to trigger an additional order of sausages, which in itself has a 1/1000 chance to trigger scaling up for the distributor. Nothing about the different layers dissolves your odds.
A one in 50,000 chance for each purchase is not small if you're buying sausages a couple times a week. In this scenario you have a 1/6 chance of personally triggering the purchase of 25 tons of sausage and the killing/rearing of some 383 pigs if you do that for 80 years.

If you think it makes you a saint to avoid a 1/6 chance of doing something really bad, do you think only a saint would have a problem with picking up a six chamber revolver and playing Russian roulette with somebody else's head?

And you conveniently ignored my second point:

Second, you have to remember that even if these probabilities of direct outcome from your actions are low, they are for proportionally large effects (ordering an extra case of something, increasing production by a certain amount), so we're still dealing with an overall probabilistic share of you killing slightly more animals than you're eating (due to waste).

In my opinion that totally makes you a saint. That kind of fucks given is completely on par with not buying iphones, clothes, etc, because they were made by exploitative industries,

There are a few threads on these issues. Jobs like these are usually the best these people in developing countries have; you are benefiting them by giving them jobs. We are not breeding them into a dismal existence.

not buying drugs because they're produced by a violent industry, etc.

I agree that it's morally problematic to buy illegal drugs. You are feeding the drug war if you buy them.
It doesn't take a saint to decide not to support drug cartels or terrorists producing opiates to fund their jihad, it takes a decent human being.

That said, some people suffer from severe addiction and they don't have the kind of choice you or I have (where it's probably a question of recreation), so this is nothing like choosing to buy meat. You get a bit of a pass if you're hooked on opiates, not so much for hamburgers.

[vdofthegoodkind]

Couldn't resist to at least refute this part of your bullshit..

5 things:
- Those dead birds were found by a survey party of SEVEN people whose main objective was establishing that there were no more rats (https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/article/island-has-dead-birds-no-rats/2009/06/13/), do you think they even remotely covered the entire 6k acres? I HIGHLY fucking doubt it bro. The actual number of dead birds on that island was likely to be loads more. (and keep in mind you're not even taking sublethal harmful effects into account here, which DEFINITELY matter when comparing it to benign animal agriculture)

- They bombed the ENTIRE island, which probably includes loads of areas not particularly hospitable to either rats or birds, so the density of animals per acre is likely much higher in cropfields.

- Ever made the effort to find out WHY they poisoned the island? It was because these nonindigenous rats had decimated the bird population for years, so in normal places the population of birds would likely be MUCH, MUCH higher. Leading to much, much higher fatality rates.

- You sort of implied this is an extreme case of poisoning, especially when compared to normal agriculture. On what grounds exactly? Do you not think farmers intend to kill every single rodent present in their cropfields?

- You propose first that we should take every animal's relative difference in moral value into account when attempting to counter one of my points, but then fail to do so when defending yours (10 rodents add up to 1 pig according to your little list of amount of neurons per animal)


All these factors combined make the case that there is no real reason to assume the 2 animals per million kcal for benign animal agriculture would be higher than the number of animal deaths for plant agriculture, even when adjusting for relative differences in moral value based on neuron count.
And fyi, that's not even counting milk. If you incorporate milk into the equation, the number of animal deaths per million kcal would be WAAAAAY less than 2 in benign animal agriculture, given that cows produce about 4 million kcal worth of milk per year.
http://www.moomilk.com/faq/1-cow-faqs/5-how-much-milk-do-cows-produce
2300 gallons = 9000 liters and there's about 45kcal/100ml in milk => 9000 *450 = 4050000
(granted that that 4 mill would be reduced a little in benign animal agriculture, because keeping a cow pregnant without rest like in the current industry is kind of abuse in a way itself, but still, even at their natural rate of reproduction, it stands to reason that this 2 deaths/million kcal would be reduced significantly)

/lawyered #overandout

[vdofthegoodkind]

Even if we assumed an epic poisoning on the scale of Rat Island for every single harvest, this adds 0.033 bird deaths per million calories for the worst case of spinach, and for better cases of wheat 0.017, 0.011 for soy, 0.006 for rice... all very small compared to the two deaths per million you proposed for grass fed beef.

Ps: earlier in the discussion, when attempting to defend your wheat consumption, you said it would be too hard to estimate the relative differences in animal deaths between crops such as wheat, potatoes, and rice, etc, and/or even asserted that they were negligeable...
Despite your numbers being an absolute shit lowballing estimate in the absolute sense, you now seem to have made a pretty convincing case in the RELATIVE sense against wheat and potatoes in favor of rice here, given that we're talking almost HALF the amount of kills by pesticides alone for rice (which I assume will be further decreased when taking into account harvesting fatalities etc).

What's the excuse now for not eliminating wheat from the vegan diet in favor of rice?

If the entire world was vegan, and just using your utterly absurd conservative estimates, it means about 4 billion birds alone would be saved over the course of all those vegans' lifetimes if those vegans decided to cut wheat in favor of rice. Is that number not high enough to be taken seriously?

math used: (2500kcal/day * 365days/year *78years/life * 6 billion lives / 1M kcal) * (0.017 - 0.006)


Now imagine how large that number would be if you actually used accurate estimates and incorporated other animals like rodents, moles,... into the equation. (adjusting for neuron based moral value estimates of course)

[brimstoneSalad]

Either you're here to have an intellectually honest discussion, or you aren't.
You made this post. Was it just to shit-post and mock people, or was it to engage in a real discussion? Because I think you got more than you bargained for.
Your dismissal and complaints, backing out of the conversation repeatedly, is very reminiscent of Isaac's behavior.

Maybe more argument, less shit talk? If you don't mind. I appreciate this conversation, and I like being challenged, but you're not being very gracious here.

- Those dead birds were found by a survey party of SEVEN people whose main objective was establishing that there were no more rats [...] do you think they even remotely covered the entire 6k acres?

That would be about a thousand acres per person, but nobody had to walk every square foot of the island. Depending on their lines of sight, they could have visually covered the whole thing in a few days, spotting predatory bird carcasses. The intent in this case was to be as rigorous as possible so they could look for signs of rats. And it doesn't look particularly difficult to do given the environment:
https://www.fws.gov/refuge/alaska_maritime_multimedia/rat_island.html
Mostly mosses and some low lying grasses.
It would be relatively easy to spot bird carcasses, even from the air. There's not a lot of plant-cover there.

Nine months after blanketing the island with compressed-grain pellets of Rodenticide, a seven-member survey team this week collected 186 glaucous-winged gull and 41 bald eagle carcasses. Most were juveniles, many in advanced stages of decomposition.

It would be interesting to see what their survey methods were, but it sounds like they walked pretty much the whole thing. I'm not sure where higher estimates (over 420, and 46 bald eagles) came from, but there was apparently quite a bit more investigation into this case beyond that survey walk.

"So far, no living rats have been observed," said Woods, who noted that seven observers walked the island looking for signs of survivors. "We're cautiously optimistic, but it's a big island. It would be presumptuous to assume that we would have noticed rats if only a few were left."

It's a big island and a few rats may have been missed hiding in cracks and crevasses, but not a stretch for seven people to cover over a few days and collect the vast majority of bird carcasses which would have been out in the open. But apparently other carcasses were added in for the 420 number.

I HIGHLY fucking doubt it bro.

Well, if you doubt it that HIGHLY that's just your own bias showing up because you want to believe more birds die than there's any evidence for.
Even the original survey collected over half relative to the latter numbers.
Again, look at the environment of the island: does it really look like a dead bald eagle wouldn't be easy to spot there?
If they needed to use more than seven people for a good survey of the island they probably would have.

The actual number of dead birds on that island was likely to be loads more. (and keep in mind you're not even taking sublethal harmful effects into account here, which DEFINITELY matter when comparing it to benign animal agriculture)

What exactly are sublethal harmful effects of an anticoagulant?

No, I don't think those are typically relevant for this kind of poison, or even most.
There are some pesticides that affect eggs and fertility, but I don't think those are very relevant either.

I don't think there are pesticides just making animals depressed or giving them chronic pain without affecting their populations. We know the effects, for example, of anticoagulants in humans because they're used medicinally. It doesn't make sense to speculate on these implausible hypotheticals without evidence; it could just as easily be making animals bleed out faster when they are killed by predators to lessen total suffering.

- They bombed the ENTIRE island, which probably includes loads of areas not particularly hospitable to either rats or birds, so the density of animals per acre is likely much higher in cropfields.

There's no evidence of that. In fact, it appears that the gulls actually ate the rat poison because there was so much of it.
https://www.nature.com/news/2011/110118/full/news.2011.24.html

The contractor dumped more than they were supposed to. The gulls came and ate it, and their corpses attracted the eagles from neighboring islands (more eagles died there than lived on the island).

Proper application may not have seen this level of deaths, no bird deaths were found on the test island done prior to the main event (although a much smaller test).

- Ever made the effort to find out WHY they poisoned the island? It was because these nonindigenous rats had decimated the bird population for years, so in normal places the population of birds would likely be MUCH, MUCH higher. Leading to much, much higher fatality rates.

The populations effected do not look like they're the same ones as the birds that died. Deaths were mostly gulls (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glaucous-winged_gull not a threatened species) and predatory and scavenging birds which came from other islands. The fact that they were attracted there increased the numbers.

- You sort of implied this is an extreme case of poisoning, especially when compared to normal agriculture. On what grounds exactly? Do you not think farmers intend to kill every single rodent present in their cropfields?

Obviously they do not intend to kill every rodent, because their fields are not isolated. There is no point in killing every last one (which requires enormous applications) when rodents will come from neighboring fields anyway. They just need to control the population to within a margin of acceptable losses. AND they don't let populations build up that high in the first place (with the past exception of mouse plagues in Australia before better monitoring and control).

Typical application seems to be 6 lb per acre up to to a max of 20 lb per acre for some of these per year (spread out over time, and some much lower maximums). Here's the first link I found:
http://www.hacco.com/other_pdf/rodenticidetechnicalcatalog.pdf

Do you know how much was applied on rat island?

https://www.nature.com/news/2011/110118/full/news.2011.24.html

The advisory group characterized Island Conservation's proposed poison applications as "prodigious", noting that on New Zealand's Campbell Island, which was said to have had the highest density of rats in the world, only 6 kilograms per hectare of brodifacoum-laced bait was used on flat terrain.

Island Conservation, however, decided to apply 12 kg ha-1 of the bait on coastal areas during its first application and 6 kg ha-1 during a follow-up several days later. The Ornithological Council report, commissioned by the organizations involved in the eradication programme and led by pest-control expert Terrell Salmon, recently retired from the University of California, Davis, noted that the reviewers "found no documentation explaining this decision".

The plan was 18 lb per acre over a few days, where 5.3 lb / acre was enough for New Zealand's Campbell Island, supposedly the highest density of rats in the world and implicitly a good comparison to this island.

The first application on the coast was largely under the legal limit of 18 kg ha-1 set down on the pesticide label. However, the second application, which effectively included all of the contingency bait, was estimated to be between 17 and 22 kg ha-1, around twice the label limit of 9 kg ha-1 for this application and three times the target rate, according to the report.

Yes, it is an extreme case. It looks like they exceeded not only what was necessary, but also the label limit. Possibly up to 40 kg/ha total or over 35 lb/acre if I'm reading this right.
It might not have been that much, but the point of that article is basically that they over applied.
It's ridiculous to think that farmers normally apply those levels of rodenticides.

- You propose first that we should take every animal's relative difference in moral value into account when attempting to counter one of my points, but then fail to do so when defending yours (10 rodents add up to 1 pig according to your little list of amount of neurons per animal)

I don't know what you're talking about, that I "fail to do so". You will have to explain how you think I'm doing that. The question is how much moral harm is done per calorie.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting we literally just count neurons (value is probably more exponential than linear), but even just naively counting neurons would be more reasonable than what you're trying to do in counting life per life. Insects, the most numerous deaths, are very nearly without value.

A pig probably has a value somewhere over ten rats (a mouse has around a third of a rat, and smaller rodents less). A hundred? A million? Not clear.
How many pigs is a human life worth? That might give us some indication of a practical scale. 40 pigs would be linear.

That's not always that useful, though, because there's a lot of low-level stuff that neurons do too, and smaller animals have fewer resource for cognition; much like economies of scale. A more useful measure may be looking at how much brain matter is used for higher level cognition.

Just looking at the cerebral cortex may be more useful. A rat is 18 million, a pig is 425 million, a human is 16 billion.
A pig would be worth 23-24 rats, and a human would be worth 37 - 38 pigs.
I don't even think a linear scale here is appropriate, but I'd be willing to humor it for the sake of conversation.

All these factors combined make the case that there is no real reason to assume the 2 animals per million kcal for benign animal agriculture would be higher than the number of animal deaths for plant agriculture, even when adjusting for relative differences in moral value based on neuron count.

No they don't. As I showed, rat island was an extreme case in terms of infestation and application, and I think there's good reason to believe that the population of birds (particularly the gulls and eagles which came to the island) was substantial, and that the deaths were fairly well accounted for.

And fyi, that's not even counting milk. If you incorporate milk into the equation, the number of animal deaths per million kcal would be WAAAAAY less than 2 in benign animal agriculture, given that cows produce about 4 million kcal worth of milk per year.

It is true that milk is more efficient. Cows can also be milked longer and not killed or re-impregnated as soon as production drops.

There may conceivably be a vegetarian diet with grazing cows (using some ahimsa system in particular) that has a lower death toll. We don't know how to mitigate the climate effects of that, though.
If we ignored the environmental impact of the greenhouse cases, that would be more plausible to analyze.

EDIT: I just caught your second post, I'll reply to it in a few hours.