The whole “bovine” joke was hilarious on one hand and a little horrifying on the other. It got me thinking: how would I feel if an animal I was about to consume came up to me enthusiastically conveying its consent for being eaten? I will be horrified, just like Arthur! But why?
Will it be better to eat against its consent instead? Why?
Then… what about salad’s consent?! Interesting thought experiment…
I am presenting the joke in the form of three extracts from the text:
Extract 1:
"A large dairy animal approached Zaphod Beeblebrox’s table, a large fat meaty quadruped of the bovine type with large watery eyes, small horns and what might almost have been an ingratiating smile on its lips. “Good evening,” it lowed and sat back heavily on its haunches, “I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in parts of my body?” It harrumphed and gurgled a bit, wriggled its hind quarters into a more comfortable position and gazed peacefully at them. Its gaze was met by looks of startled bewilderment from Arthur and Trillian, a resigned shrug from Ford Prefect and naked hunger from Zaphod Beeblebrox. “Something off the shoulder perhaps?” suggested the animal, “Braised in a white wine sauce?” “Er, your shoulder?” said Arthur in a horrified whisper. "
Extract 2:
“‘You mean this animal actually wants us to eat it?’ whispered Trillian to Ford. ‘Me?’ said Ford, with a glazed look in his eyes. ‘I don’t mean anything.’ ‘That’s absolutely horrible,’ exclaimed Arthur, ‘the most revolting thing I’ve ever heard.’ ‘What’s the problem, Earthman?’ said Zaphod, now transferring his attention to the animal’s enormous rump. ‘I just don’t want to eat an animal that’s standing there inviting me to,’ said Arthur, ‘it’s heartless.’ ‘Better than eating an animal that doesn’t want to be eaten,’ said Zaphod. ‘That’s not the point,’ Arthur protested. Then he thought about it for a moment. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘maybe it is the point. I don’t care, I’m not going to think about it now. I’ll just . . . er . . .’”
Extract 3:
“I think I’ll just have a green salad,’ he muttered. ‘May I urge you to consider my liver?’ asked the animal. ‘It must be very rich and tender by now, I’ve been force-feeding myself for months.’ ‘A green salad,’ said Arthur emphatically. ‘A green salad?’ said the animal, rolling his eyes disapprovingly at Arthur. ‘Are you going to tell me,’ said Arthur, ‘that I shouldn’t have green salad?’ ‘Well,’ said the animal, ‘I know many vegetables that are very clear on that point. Which is why it was eventually decided to cut through the whole tangled problem and breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am.’ It managed a very slight bow. ‘Glass of water, please,’ said Arthur.”
The take on this I received from a yoga teacher:
It is a fact of being human that something must die for us to live. Be it plant, animal or Fungi. Each person must decide what life they are willing to take to continue living and be respectful of and thankful to those lifeforms that allows you to continue living.
I mean plants to our knowledge are not sentient, so no harm done to “someone” when killing them, in the same way as there are no harm done to the rock when you throw it on the ground. Animals we eat on the other hand are sentient so there is clearly someone that is harmed. I really think non-human animals should be included in our sphere of moral consideration.
Even if plants were somehow found to all be sentient, by eating them directly instead of feeding them to animals then eat the animals you would minimize the harm done.
I mean plants to our knowledge are not sentient, so no harm done to “someone” when killing them
The same thing was said about animals for decades as well…
I am not making a value judgement on what life is more important but you are.
Our lives continue because other lives must end and that is the case if you are a full carnivore or vegan.
Full disclosure, I am not a vegan.
However, I do know that not all plants we eat die as a result of being eaten, for example, eating apples from an apple tree does not kill anything - I suppose I can see that this is like eating eggs from a chicken.
Another example could be eating the leaves of rocket lettuce (but choosing not to uproot it), or the stalks of celery or rhubarb is another example, in both cases the plant can return to complete health over time.
Then there are some plants, such as grasses that require the ends of their blades to be eaten in order to be healthy.
Are you sure about the grasses and do you have some particular species in mind? As far as I know, they tolerate grazing, but it’s preferable for them to not be parcially eaten. Apple, on the other hand, are so delicious because they’re meant to be eaten (to spread the seads with the poop). Rocket lettuce definitely prefers not being eaten. The flavour we find nice was meant to deter us from eating the leaves.
As I’ve stated above, even if we found plants to be sentient, you’d be killing less sentient beings by eating them directly rather than feeding them to other animals and eating these animals. Just because lives must end for us to live does not mean you have to maximize the suffering caused.
I’m clearly making a judgement on which life is more important, because something non sentient literally cannot have a judgement on life and thus cannot miss its life or be wronged when its life is taken.
Plants can think and likely feel pain. There’s a whole field of research on it.
I don’t know why all the downvotes. This is at least partly true! Plant senses and communication research had been a taboo among scientists for many decades, but there was a breakthrough recently and we finally have some interesting results. It was proven that plants can sense soundwaves (like insect buzzing, they don’t care about music), light of different colors, carnivorous plants can taste (and decide whether they really caught their prey and should start digesting), they sense when they are harmed (a sense that serves the same purpose as our pain), they smell other plants and they have a sense of time and rythm. They can react to signals from other plants. Whether they think and feel pain depends on your definition of thinking and feeling pain (and to what degree your definition is anthropomorphic).
Plant sensing is well established scientific fact, but that’s not all. Experiments show they can learn from experience and remember things. Their intelligence is mostly hormonal so their reaction times is about 1 or 2 orders of magnitude lower than animals. Information processing happens in their system of root apexes, so that’s their “brain”
And communicate. You know that smell of a fresh cut lawn? Yeah, that’s grass screaming about being cut.
Very funny
Animals are not someone they are something; something delicious!
I would argue that it is quite disingenuous to equate eating a plant with eating an animal. This makes the waters intentionally muddy, allows excuses to be made for how many animals one consumes, and does not take into account anything past the killing of the animal such as industry impact on climate, etc. This also shows some genuine misunderstanding of plants. With fungi for example, only the “fruiting bodies” are typically eaten as mycelium is often throughout healthy soil, and consuming a single mushroom does not kill the entire organism. Slaughtering a genetically engineered chicken that can’t stand up anymore is not the same impact or “killing” as eating a mushroom.
Lastly, animals also eat vegetables, plants and grains. Are these deaths somehow not on your hands when you eat meat? Arguably this would involve even more death and killing even if we do abide by the above flawed definition.
There’s the part about making a decision that takes care of most of your concerns. There’s no lesser life. Life is valuable in itself, even if it’s just one cell. But you have to decide on which one you’ll take to survive. You can base your decision on environmental factors or total number of dead creatures or anything that makes sense to you.
Isn’t spiritual centrism great? It lets you feel comfy about the greatest enslavement and slaughter of sentient beings in history.
Sentience is a spectrum. Grubs and worms are barely more sentient than some plants, if at all. I think the yoga instructor’s take handles this well, since each individual decides on their threshold and it’s a personal choice. I like that, because it encourages people to consider it, without forcing an agenda. I doubt many people who then think about where their own threshold really lies would go the wrong way, i.e. from vegan to steaks for lunch. Merely reflecting on the suffering you may cause is likely to have a positive effect. Anyone who tries to be ethical in their choices has had this talk with themselves or with someone else. It’s getting people to actually think that’s the struggle. As usual.
Thanks for the excellent reply.
I hope you actually read @crapwittyname reply to you. As it encapsulates what a good approach to changing someone’s mind on an issue actually is.
If you are trying to change someone’s attitude to eating animals, your snarky response will simply provoke a defensive ego reaction on their part and allow the person you are talking to to dismiss you out of hand as a bit of an arsehole.
The world is not a TV show where a snarky gotcha reply means you win and the audience applauds.
Lemmy would be 1000x better if people understood this. Honestly I genuinely feel like reddit was less toxic on the whole because people on Lemmy tend to be elitist assholes. Including myself on occasion.
If you think about it, it makes sense - we were all the ones who left due to a sense of duty, an awareness of the problems at hand. We need more normies.
I agree. So many threads here feel like ideological purity threads. Say anything that is not 1000% in favour of Open source, veganism etc etc etc and you are crucified in the comments.
The responses I received to my original comment are a perfect example. All of them were upset that I had dared to equate eating plants, fungi and animals in any way. I did not 100% back veganism so therefore they must show how wrong the comment I made was.
What makes the whole situation so perverse to me, is that - in my opinion anyway - it’s implied that the cow is in some way genetically engineered to be this way.
That’s explicit, not implied!
it was eventually decided to cut through the whole tangled problem and breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly
Ah, so did remember that correctly. Must’ve skimmed over that when rereading just now.
Same here. I would say that if the animal is bred to give consent then the consent is not really valid. In any case I would prefer to eat my meat which is not capable of talking to me.
So what you’re saying is you would eat a mime?
To be fair, given the amount of suffering that mimes inflict on the population at large, making a mime suffer in return would probably be considered a good thing.
How marbled is the back strap? Mimes usually seem to be pretty fit, I think they would be mostly chewy.
Lol. I guess eating talking creatures seems uncomfortable because it makes them obviously sentient probably? 🤷
I mean, explaining your own joke is crass. Explaining a joke from somebody who is actually funny is… worse, somehow, but…
…it’s because in the joke the cow is sentient. The cow is anthropomorphic and speaks, so it reads like cannibalism.
Which is deployed both for the laughs and to make a point.
In real life cows are sentient as well.
I believe the correct word here would have been “sapient”, not “sentient”.
Sentient: able to perceive or feel things.
Sapient: 1. wise or wanting to appear wise 2. relating to the human species, of the species Homo sapiens.
I would have used this definition, though apparently used mainly in literature:
Of a species or life-form, possessing intelligence or self-awareness. [source: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sapient]
Since it makes a lot more sense in this context to be weirded out by the cow talking, rather than it possessing feelings.
I was replying to Tekila’s comment about ‘real life’ cows which I think are best thought of as ‘sentient’ but I appreciate your point.
And silence fell
For a while. Because the planet is a sphere and sometimes people sleep, or go to work. And then they stop doing those things and it gets loud again.
Cows do have feelings, and they’re mostly indolence and contempt.
They don’t normally tell you that unless they decide to kick you or headbutt you, though, so that makes them significantly easier to eat than when they’re anthropomorphic and talking to you about it.
Which is the joke.
We can pedant this all the way to the ground. I have no more chores left for a while.
I think it’s so gross because actively consenting to being slaughtered and eaten implies the cow has an S&M and Vore combo deal going on
The cow is a suspiciously wealthy furry going past the point of mere commissioning alone to satisfy its darker urges.
I just hope Peter Singer doesn’t read the book. He makes us meat-eaters guilty enough.
I don’t think that should be a problem. (I don’t know who is Peter Singer). But if you read through the whole sequence, another interpretation (in my opinion) can be that if you are going to worry about eating living creatures, you would be left with nothing other than water to consume!
You could keep licking salt too!
