Juan Calavera

Recent Activity

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  Juan commented on the article | over 3 years ago

  Your Dog versus Your Dinner

  Alex, I might not express myself that well in English and therefore be misunderstood. I agree with you on "Causing a cow to suffer because you like the taste of his flesh isn't ethical"  -I never implied the opposite- as it is to cause a plant to suffer, or a third world country peasant. It appears that the satisfaction of our everyday needs involves different amounts of suffering, whether it is other animals', other people, or life in general. So yes, there is an ethical limit to what we should eat and how we should get it, having minimal possible sufferance as the standard. It is not very ethical to eat veggies that have traveled 20,000 miles just because they wont grow around one's area; vegetarianism/veganism isn't automatically ethical.
  I don't get the difference between direct and indirect harm. To me, if you slash and burn a number of acres of rain forest, where endemic species live, so you can grow a particular crop, you are killing those animals (driving many species to extinction) and not even feeding one single soul. And also, what about the direct harm suffered by all beings (human, animal, vegetable, bacterial, etc), because of global warming (erosion of land is one of the many man induced factors)? Besides eating, other needs that we have cause suffering, for example child labour employed in Asian sued shops that produce the cheap clothes poor people can afford (and also the ridiculously expensive designer rags), and also there's the need to heat shower water, heat houses in the winter, take planes, buses, etc. Of course it is debatable whether traveling (faster) is a basic need, if showering is, if dressing is...
  I return to my first conclusion: the problem is what we produce and how we produce it, materially and symbolically. What we need is not to put a thousand patches, but an entire new paradigm of social (and material) reproduction. The paradigm in which we reproduce now, capitalism, produces all these contradictions. But if I have to put mine it'd be "responsible consumption".
  Quoting Peter Singer, "Who can say with confidence that all his or her attitudes and practices are beyond criticism?" Well, not even vegans...

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  Juan commented on the article | over 3 years ago

  Your Dog versus Your Dinner

  It makes total sense. On my part, I care for all living beings because i believe that to neglect some is to neglect all. Also, I wasn't talking about minimal collateral damage but massive envirnomental destruction to satisfy market demands for vegetables. Of course there is responsible vegetarianism/veganism as there is responsible carnivorousness. To be a wal mart vegetarian is as awful as being a mcdonald's regular. Please don´t (in case you did) take my first comment personal, but i really think that these issues should be discussed with cool heads and without using the guilt trip card. That's it. (BTW I don't think there would be a wal mart vegetarian among the people responding here...)

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  Juan commented on the article | over 3 years ago

  Your Dog versus Your Dinner

  I'd like to quote an earlier response from Connor: "The cognitive dissonance involved here is not about eating meat per se. It's about the way that meat was raised" which is my point as well. So let's also discuss how veggies are grown. Thousands of acres of rainforest and cloud forest are being destroyed in order to produce veggies, thus killing many species who live in those fragile ecosystems, contributing to climate change, floods, etc. Also, the labour that that grows those veggies is often semi-enslaved (no I don't support slavery, Alex, nice low blow attempt). For example, a local producer in my state makes 1 mexican peso or less (10 US cents) for each kilo of coffe beans. Is that any less cruel than massive slaughterhouse cow killing?
  We should respect all forms of life because our existence is possible because there are many other forms of life around along with wich we have evolved to be what we are now. Do you spray roaches with insecticide? To me that's worse than eating carcass.
  We should eat living beings to survive, plants, animals, insects (here in Oaxaca we eat lots of them), mushrooms, and we even need some bacteriae to stay alive. Why should we treat a plant different thatn we treaty a cow, dog, pig, fish, poisonous mushroom, person, rat, snake, alligator, scorpion, locust...? Because they are different.

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  Juan commented on the article | over 3 years ago

  Your Dog versus Your Dinner

  I personally think that this comment is based on a fallacious premise: by asking rhetorically if "pigs (and cows and chickens) are truly that different from domestic cats and dogs in any way except how we think of and treat them" it ignores that it is precisely the way in which we think and act what makes up culture, and ours was built upon agriculture and the domestication of animals, both for nurturing and  as company and labor. Originally there were none of the horrors of modern-day meat and dairy industry, where the moral strife resides. But to pet a dog while munching a 2lb rib eye steak is not a cognitive dissonance, unless being sons of our context is. The problem, industrial meat and dairy, belongs to a broader discussion involving the very nature of the system in which we reproduce...