There's really nothing to say if the person gets his meat exclusively from hunting, and eats only meat and consumes no dairy or eggs. But if he's eating plants as well, then he's more or less in the same boat as any vegan in terms of killing critters, insects, and worms. That would be a really exceptional person, though. And worms don't rate high on the sentience scale. The suffering of a worm that gets chopped up by a roto-tiller in a minute or two is nowhere near as acute or as prolonged as the lifelong suffering of a dairy cow.
The only way to not contribute to any animal suffering whatsoever is to not exist at all. But since we didn't cause our own existence, that one's on our parents, not us. It's true that if we followed the vegan thread of logical consistency to its end, we'd commit suicide. But we don't. The best argument I've heard against veganism is that vegans shouldn't drink alcoholic beverages or prepare their food with spices, since we don't need those things to survive, and they're made from plants from tilled fields, &. That one surprised me, but I can't see anything to refute it. I guess that's the notch above suicide on the vegan purity scale: living on tasteless gruel and water.
I don't see how plants themselves can suffer, though, in any meaningful way that we know of. They lack a brain and a nervous system.
Yet they live, and breathe, and grow. They need nutrients, they eat, they sleep, they seek out water, they seek out sun, and space. If treated badly, they die.
Trees are very sensitive, to the extent that even minorly damaging the outer bark can be enough to inadvertently kill them.
Sone trees, some hemlocks and evergreens and firs, do very poorly if you plant one alone, yet positively
thrive if planted near each other and if placed near one another in a group, say of at least three or four.
They like it.
I can’t believe there are people who have no problem at all believing in other dimensions, in other planes of existence, in energy and in energy in the form of our spirit as being every sentient creature’s dominating life force, and who acknowledge that science in its currently evolved state does not provide adequate explanation for so many wonders of the universe, including answers to the great prevailing questions around our origin, and questions around death.
Yet these same people, exactly as you have just stated, would have a hard time admitting that plants and trees as living things can feel or suffer at all.
This is fascinating to me, and I completely disagree.
This line of thinking puts humans at the very forefront of anything and everything around us, and yet our thinking is flawed, and directionless, and our understanding of the world around us is also still so limited. In my eyes, this line of thinking shows us to be the presumptuous creatures that we are.
I don’t think lack of a central nervous system is enough to refute the possibility that plants and trees may very well also suffer, and feel pain. That’s like saying black holes don’t exist based on the fact that some given person has never physically been in one or seen one for themselves, which is basically on the way to approaching something akin to flat earther arguments, in essence.
It’s also like that woman in that post you made somewhere else that I read somewhere earlier today, but i can’t remember where because I didn’t comment on it at the time that I read it. Was it also in this thread? I’m typing on my dinky phone screen so it’s not worth the trouble to check, but somewhere you were chatting earlier today about a woman who was trying to convince I don’t know who, that she was still a vegan, even if she fed her cat meat.
And people like that, really I genuinely hold in such disdain. It’s like, literally
everything that’s wrong with the entire human race - in one single sentence.
In a nutshell, cats are
obligate carnivores. Therefore, any person who feels the need to
self-soothe by finding some additional
construct of a justification for the reasons
why or for the reasons
how, they would or could feed an animal
its own natural diet, is literally the thought process, and the need for justification, of an imbecile.
Someone,
anyone, who prioritizes the
semantics of their own
self-identification (vegan or otherwise) label above the natural,
obligate diet of another species they’re purporting to
care for - is some kind of low IQ moron mentality of someone who doesn’t deserve to have cats, or any other animals to look after.
To me, people that place more value on self-assigned labels that describe their lifestyle than they place on the well being of other creatures in their care are just flouting their stupidity for all to see, with the internet being their preferred megaphone of choice.
Wow i guess i really felt like doing some typing on this dinky phone screen right now, lol!
My point is, if current scientific theory totally ignores the fact that negative rhesus factor antigen basically negates the entire theory of evolution, then I certainly wouldn’t expect our limited scientific knowledge to be “proof” that trees and plants don’t suffer, just because they don’t have same physical mechanism to transmit the sensation of pain to their pain receptors by the same mechanism we do, or because trees and plants don’t have the same mechanism by which to evidence and embody tortuous pain they might feel, like we do.
Interesting food for thought though, in some respects. Thanks for letting me add my chit chat to the collective ramble.
