Unethical vegetables

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Unethical vegetables

Postby spindoctor on 2012-01-21T08:59:00

Many of us draw a bright line between eating vegetables and eating meat/milk/eggs.

But this essay by conservative Ward Davis http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-myth-of-the-ethical-vegan/ floats the pretty plausible idea that some vegan foods cause much more suffering than some meat via collateral damage. One moving image is the "green waterfall" he describes of dead frogs and anoles produced when organic rice is harvested by a combine.

Certainly, yes, let's make agricultural harvest practices more humane (is there anyone engaged in that issue?). But failing that do some vegan foods deserve to be dropped from the diet of the ethical vegan? And if so, which ones? (A Vegan.com article suggests rice and sugar are offenders http://vegan.com/blog/2011/10/24/the-co ... gan-foods/).

Or, do we keep the bright line for the sake of simplicity/PR/the wider cause?
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Re: Unethical vegetables

Postby rehoot on 2012-01-22T01:29:00

I'm not sure if I should thank you or curse you for this. I hadn't heard of the rice or sugar issues, but I had thought of some foods that require lots of pesticides (like some nuts). Jains (the religion) sometimes avoid root plants because eating a root plant implies killing the entire plant as opposed to other types of plants that produce fruit or vegetables.

I suspect that there is a large amount of potential error in these estimates. If there are 10,000 frogs per acre, they must grow back pretty quick or else perhaps most aren't harmed during harvesting (I don't know). The real answer would take some serious research. I guess the point of the article was to get people to consider things that they haven't previously considered. Maybe wheat or oats are better than rice -- but should somebody drain a rice patty to grow wheat thereby exterminating all the frogs? Maybe the best anser is to use machines that produce less adverse impact to frogs.

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Re: Unethical vegetables

Postby RyanCarey on 2012-01-22T02:21:00

I don't know the answer, but it rather seems as if these are the right questions to ask. How much suffering do these practices cause and is it better to keep a firm 'be vegetarian or, better, vegan', policy for the sake of influence? I'm inclined to say yes.
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Re: Unethical vegetables

Postby Daniel Dorado on 2012-01-22T02:25:00

Hi spindoctor. Interesting issue!

I'm vegan, but I'm sure that there are some vegan products that cause more suffering than some animal products.

Could we promote a better moral diet guide than veganism? It's not clear for me. I think veganism is good as a rule of thumb.

Of course there are a lot of articles that attack veganism without a better alternative for promote moral consideration to animals. I see very often authors of pieces that only want to eat all that they want without moral matters. Of course it's not your case, spindoctor.

The Vegan.com article that you linked is very interesting though.
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Re: Unethical vegetables

Postby Brian Tomasik on 2012-01-29T05:49:00

Thanks, spindoctor! What an interesting series of articles. (The author is Ward Clark. The other author you're thinking of is Steven Davis.)

If you get past Clark's vitriol, he provides some useful data. The "two vertebrate deaths per square foot" figure seems almost certainly on the high end for most crops, but others are probably not orders of magnitude less.

My first reaction was the typical one that vegetarians raise: That it takes many times more soybeans to feed livestock than to eat tofu directly. However, Clark is probably correct that "A pound of wild venison (net cost in animal death: about 1/120th of one animal) almost certainly causes less 'death and suffering' than a pound of rice (net cost in animal death: including rodents, insect, reptiles and amphibians, number of deaths may range into the hundreds)." (That's his own "suffering per kilogram" -- or rather "deaths per pound" -- type of calculation. :)) Maybe vegans should start eating venison if it's not too expensive.

As others suggested, I would love to see a table of animals killed per kilogram of different types of food. I'm not aware of anyone working on the issue, but someone really should be! I guess rice was on the list of candidates because of the "green waterfall" of frogs. Any ideas why sugar was suggested as one of the worst offenders? And of course, the severity to animals in the field may depend a lot on where the crop was grown, time of year, harvesting equipment employed, etc.

I never used to eat much rice, but now I think I'll make an effort to steer clear to the extent possible. :!:

Killing wild animals is plausibly a bad thing. For example, here's one simple model of why. Suppose a habitat has a carrying capacity to support a fixed number of frogs. If we kill a frog, then a new one replaces it sooner than if we had let it die naturally later. Suppose frogs have hedonically neutral lives until the point of death, and then death is significantly negative. Then killing a frog sooner means that it's replaced sooner, which means more total deaths per unit time, which is bad. For example, if we consistently kill frogs at half the age whereat they naturally would have croaked (sic), then we double the amount of deaths and, in this model, double the amount of suffering.

However, there were a lot of "ifs" in that previous paragraph. Maybe killing a frog by rice farming -- by disrupting the soil and plants -- prevents its replacement frog from arising until later than the delay for the replacement frog when the previous one died naturally. And how painful is death by harvester compared with death by parasites or death by bird? And are frog lives hedonically neutral, or are they negative, in which case we should kill them sooner?

And how do different plant crops affect the carrying capacity of the habitats themselves? Do pesticides keep down wild-animal populations on the crop lands, such that they support less life than if they were wild? Or does the cultivation of fast-growing and energy-rich food plants allow for more animals than before the land was used for farming?

These seem like daunting questions, but the answers are quite important. I'm sure we could make some good first-pass guesses using a little ecological theory combined with field reports of population densities in various settings. There's a wealth of ecological studies of those sorts of parameters.

While we're at it, there's no reason to limit ourselves to the impacts of food production. What other human operations have big animal impacts? Agriculture probably is near the top of the list, but other candidates include
  • Construction: This is probably good in my book because, even though it kills animals in the short term, it prevents habitat for decades/centuries afterward.
  • Building roads and paving paradise to put up parking lots: Probably good because many animals are prevented from existing on that land. However, road kill is an unfortunate side-effect; based on Merritt Clifton's statistics quoted in the Wikipedia roadkill article, I would guess each person in the US kills about ~0.5 vertebrates via roadkill per year. (This seems even possibly low, but I used to live in a rural area where I saw roadkill all the time.)
  • Climate change (partly due to farming, of course): Most likely bad if it increases wild populations, though I'm not 100% sure of the net impact on wild-animal abundance.
  • Clearing forests: Probably good due to reduced animal habitat despite massive short-term suffering and death. Maybe bad if they're temperate forests with small animal populations to be replaced by faster-growing fiber.
With our public face, I think we should avoid overemphasizing harvester-killed frogs and continue to focus on animals in factory farms, because (1) the moral clarity of the latter concern makes it easier for people to latch on, and (2) animals in factory farms is more viscerally compelling. Also (3) until we learn more about the different harvesting impacts of different types of foods, our expectation of those impacts cancels out in either direction, and we're still left with the major harm of factory farming that doesn't cancel out. Moreover, (4) factory farming (unlike venison) almost certainly causes more killed frogs and mice than most plant foods because farm animals needs to eat many times their weight in plant crops during the course of their lives.

Once people have begun to care about animal suffering, though, I think we should begin to raise awareness of harvest massacres, just like we should raise awareness of the more general issue of wild-animal suffering of all types.

[Edit: Here's one possible downside of venison. If we kill big deer, then maybe it increases the population of smaller animals that can now eat the former deer food. Those smaller animals probably have worse lives and will die sooner, which implies more total suffering. This is just one speculative scenario...]

When I first became vegetarian in 2005 after reading Peter Singer, my sister told me I was crazy because I killed all sorts of animals in numerous other ways (e.g., buying clothes). Rather than becoming discouraged with the whole enterprise and wallowing in apathy, I decided that she was right! I soon became concerned with the suffering of all kinds of animals in nature. I hope at least some fraction of vegans follow this path, for the sake of preventing directed panspermia and lab universes.
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Re: Unethical vegetables

Postby Ruairi on 2012-01-29T13:37:00

Alan Dawrst wrote:Killing wild animals is plausibly a bad thing. For example, here's one simple model of why. Suppose a habitat has a carrying capacity to support a fixed number of frogs. If we kill a frog, then a new one replaces it sooner than if we had let it die naturally later. Suppose frogs have hedonically neutral lives until the point of death, and then death is significantly negative. Then killing a frog sooner means that it's replaced sooner, which means more total deaths per unit time, which is bad. For example, if we consistently kill frogs at half the age whereat they naturally would have croaked (sic), then we double the amount of deaths and, in this model, double the amount of suffering.


this seems plausible, maybe eating wild animals and otherwise vegan food could be best. but im concerned that ones diet might not really make much difference at all, everyway theres going to be massive suffering until we intervene in nature. also i was thinking about how we've had (and still have unfortunately) sexism and racism, now we're tackling speciesism, and perhaps if we make artificial sentients there will be prejudices against them D: "organic-ism" ? or would that be a prejudice against organic life? but in the same way that Alan thinks maybe donating to VO might be a good way to promote concern for animals in general and maybe wild animals from that maybe the more anti-speciesists there are the more easy it will be to promote concern for artificial sentients if they ever come to exist

still i think its probably definitely bad to eat factory farmed animals given the suffering and the pr, i think free range farming is pretty ok, at least under eu law, id say these animals are at least as happy as wild ones, of course they have to be fed loads but then maybe not with the case of grass fed cattle? i presume grass fields arnt sprayed with pesticides?
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Re: Unethical vegetables

Postby Brian Tomasik on 2012-01-30T01:11:00

Your replies are always so much fun to read, Ruairi.

Ruairi wrote:but im concerned that ones diet might not really make much difference at all, everyway theres going to be massive suffering until we intervene in nature.

The second half of that sentence is definitely true, especially if you consider the suffering that happens independently of human involvement. That's why raising concern about wild animals is so important.

That said, as far as the animal impact of our diet, it's not as though eating tofu instead of chicken reduces our animal impact by just 1% or something like that. Supposing chickens are fed, say, 8 times their weight in grain, a naive calculation would suggest that we reduce our impact by 7/8 if we switch to soybeans, even ignoring the chicken suffering. Obviously reality is more complicated, but I don't know any better until I see more data.

Ruairi wrote:and perhaps if we make artificial sentients there will be prejudices against them D: "organic-ism" ? or would that be a prejudice against organic life? but in the same way that Alan thinks maybe donating to VO might be a good way to promote concern for animals in general and maybe wild animals from that maybe the more anti-speciesists there are the more easy it will be to promote concern for artificial sentients if they ever come to exist

Yes, exactly. I think it's possible that suffering subroutines or sentient simulations shall significantly supernumerate over snakes and spiders, but I suppose the same sort of stuff that surfaces support for salamanders and sunfish should spill over into swelling sympathy for synthetic minds. (Whew, that was a lot of s words!)

I'm less concerned about ethical consideration afforded to human-like robots, chatbots, or disembodied minds, because there's abundant conversation on these topics already, and as Kurzweil says, it seems natural that humans will treat with respect agents that can tell us on a deep level how they feel and what causes them pain. I'm more concerned about self-reflective reinforcement-learning programs that may not be able to reason or talk but that are still able to suffer. These could be at the level of minnows or insects (assuming the latter are indeed sentient).

Ruairi wrote:of course they have to be fed loads but then maybe not with the case of grass fed cattle? i presume grass fields arnt sprayed with pesticides?

Given my current knowledge, I think grass-fed beef is actually a net good thing because it involves an ecosystem with a few large herbivores that displace a lot of smaller animals who would live shorter, more miserable lives and have many more non-surviving offspring. I'm nearly certain that pesticides are not used for grass-fed beef.
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Re: Unethical vegetables

Postby Ruairi on 2012-01-30T19:33:00

hahaha thanks!:D! orginally i rambled some more about how it reminded me of the robots in the video game "ratchet and clank 3" hating the "squishies" (organic life) but it seemed too irrelevant...

thanks for the great reply especially the links on unhappy futures and the point on humans respecting artificial sentience that could speak, etc. i was talking to carl shulman last night and i think he was shocked that i was so pessimistic about the future wheras i was a little shocked he seemed so optimistic! but now im thinking really thats a massively important issue, i guess finding out the balance of happiness and suffering in the wild would be a start and then seeing if human utilitarian-ness increases with personal well-being, intelligence, etc.

anyway, sorry, back to vegetables....
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Re: Unethical vegetables

Postby Brian Tomasik on 2012-01-31T18:47:00

Ruairi wrote:i was talking to carl shulman last night and i think he was shocked that i was so pessimistic about the future wheras i was a little shocked he seemed so optimistic!

Same here. :) I would give maybe a 65% chance that survival is bad? But that estimate is subject to lots of variance with new arguments.
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Re: Unethical vegetables

Postby Ruairi on 2012-01-31T22:31:00

Alan Dawrst wrote:
Ruairi wrote:i was talking to carl shulman last night and i think he was shocked that i was so pessimistic about the future wheras i was a little shocked he seemed so optimistic!

Same here. :) I would give maybe a 65% chance that survival is bad? But that estimate is subject to lots of variance with new arguments.


he said that when it doesnt take much reduction in personally happiness at all to be ethical he thinks people will do it.

but im skeptical, it wouldnt be too hard to end poverty (ok maybe thats rash...) but people dont seem very interested,
but also not only do we need to convince people to be more altruistic, crucially we need to change what they think is good, if humanity had massively powerfull technology now people might make lots more wild, or wild simulations and think they were being great because they think wilderness is good D:!

i think what he thought of that though was that even if the earth was kept as a kind of nature reserve we'd have made so many ecstatically happy sentient minds that it would outweigh it, but if were blowing each other up now i dont see why that'll change (well maybe it will a good bit actually), but that doesnt address the problem of making more wild or wild simulations.

he had to go though so maybe he has a great counter to that
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Re: Unethical vegetables

Postby spindoctor on 2012-02-01T03:50:00

Thanks for your detailed reply Alan!

To go back to the rice issue...

Check out rice harvest videos like this one. The action of the combine harvester seems roughly comparable way to that seen during a wheat harvest. (Though there is great variability and in some Japanese videos the field is more or less "shaved bald", which never happens in a wheat harvest). Rice is planted in wetter, more fertile paddies, which would support more life, and therefore cause more suffering. However, much of that water dries up by harvest time. I'm a little skeptical that a field as relatively dry as the one in that first clip would support a green waterfall of dying frogs and lizards. That observation, though plausible sounding, does come from an anonymous Usenet posting and needs verification.

Of course in developing countries there is also widespread harvest by hand which looks much more humane to animals, although back-breaking to the humans who do it.

I wonder too about the environmental impact of rice planting, which involves large amounts of human-induced irrigation. Would it result in a net increase or decrease in total vertebrates supported by the land? I suspect the former.

Re: why sugar is problematic. I wondered initially whether the problem with sugar was the issue purist vegans raise that is it filtered with "bone char" from cattle, which is obviously no concern to us. But perhaps the issue is similar to rice: lush tropical pasture and destructive harvest = lots of death. Perhaps in light of that it is good news after all you Americans can't get sugar in your Cokes any more and must make do with nasty HFCS!
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Re: Unethical vegetables

Postby Brian Tomasik on 2012-02-01T09:27:00

Ruairi wrote:but im skeptical, it wouldnt be too hard to end poverty (ok maybe thats rash...) but people dont seem very interested,

Indeed. Moreover, is altruism even a convergent evolutionary strategy? Certainly empathy may not be. The species Homo sapiens seems to have empathy and altruism to some degree (especially to in-group members), but lots of other species don't.

This is relevant because when we preserve humanity from extinction, we're not just keeping around the "good guys," but we're also keeping around technology that can be used by any kind of agent to take power. As Bostrom explains in "The Future of Human Evolution," it's altogether possible that forces with entirely different values from current humans will win the evolutionary wars of the future. These agents may care little for their suffering subroutines or sentient simulations (much less for wild animals, although some think that the numbers of wild animals will be dwarfed by the numbers of artificial sentient minds).

Ruairi wrote:but also not only do we need to convince people to be more altruistic, crucially we need to change what they think is good, if humanity had massively powerfull technology now people might make lots more wild, or wild simulations and think they were being great because they think wilderness is good D:!

Yes, exactly. :cry:
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Re: Unethical vegetables

Postby Brian Tomasik on 2012-02-01T09:53:00

Fascinating videos, spindoctor. It's great how we can get at least a sketchy view of all kinds of agricultural operations just from YouTube. :)

spindoctor wrote:Rice is planted in wetter, more fertile paddies, which would support more life, and therefore cause more suffering. However, much of that water dries up by harvest time. I'm a little skeptical that a field as relatively dry as the one in that first clip would support a green waterfall of dying frogs and lizards.

Well, maybe the particular farm from the Usenet post wasn't dried up in time.

spindoctor wrote:Would it result in a net increase or decrease in total vertebrates supported by the land? I suspect the former.

Yeah, maybe, although the water had to come from somewhere, so would irrigation decrease populations in the places where the water would have gone? Or maybe uniformly spread water supports more total life than concentrated water, because you get more total plant life when the water is spread out. That's because sunlight is another limiting resource, so if there are areas that can't grow plants due to dryness, then the sunlight there goes to waste. (Of course, I prefer that case, because fewer plants in general means less suffering wildlife.)

spindoctor wrote:Perhaps in light of that it is good news after all you Americans can't get sugar in your Cokes any more and must make do with nasty HFCS!

Do you have real sugar in sodas Down Under?
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Re: Unethical vegetables

Postby spindoctor on 2012-02-01T10:35:00

Yes indeed we do have real sugar ... as I understand it sugar is intrinsically cheaper than corn syrup, but huge US corn subsidies keep the cost of corn down artificially.
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