For me, it wasn’t a global event, but a personal one. I had a conversation on reddit with a Texan piano teacher who had the fantasy of murdering and eating people. Her view was that if it was OK to kill any sentient beings, as there was no legitimate reason to draw a line between farmed animals and people. She argued her point well, and I couldn’t come up with a counterargument that didn’t also imply we shouldn’t eat animals.
It was a bizzare conversation, but it made me really reconsider my personal morals, and totally changed the path of my life.
pretty trivial counterpoint though: there are plenty of sentient animals that aren’t even remotely sapient, and animals like chickens frankly rather deserve to be eaten as they are quite terrible creatures who will blithely peck their flockmates to a slow and miserable death.
Chickens tend to get along OK if you don’t cram them in where they have no room to move. They actually make for quite affectionate companions if socialized properly. Nurture plays a huge role in animal behavior as well, and usually animals (including humans) simply tend to lash out when their needs aren’t being met.
If you spend some time looking into modern animal cognition research, you’ll notice the line around sapience is a very blurry one, with many animals routinely demonstrating that they are capable of complex spatial reasoning, theory of mind, and other traits we used to think only humans were capable of.
Also, you’ll find plenty of humans are quite terrible creatures as well. That doesn’t mean we can treat them indiscriminately. The capacity to suffer only requires sentience.
Anyways, I didn’t come here to argue. Just to share my experience.
For me, it wasn’t a global event, but a personal one. I had a conversation on reddit with a Texan piano teacher who had the fantasy of murdering and eating people. Her view was that if it was OK to kill any sentient beings, as there was no legitimate reason to draw a line between farmed animals and people. She argued her point well, and I couldn’t come up with a counterargument that didn’t also imply we shouldn’t eat animals.
It was a bizzare conversation, but it made me really reconsider my personal morals, and totally changed the path of my life.
So did you become a vegan or a cannibal?
Yes.
pretty trivial counterpoint though: there are plenty of sentient animals that aren’t even remotely sapient, and animals like chickens frankly rather deserve to be eaten as they are quite terrible creatures who will blithely peck their flockmates to a slow and miserable death.
Chickens tend to get along OK if you don’t cram them in where they have no room to move. They actually make for quite affectionate companions if socialized properly. Nurture plays a huge role in animal behavior as well, and usually animals (including humans) simply tend to lash out when their needs aren’t being met.
If you spend some time looking into modern animal cognition research, you’ll notice the line around sapience is a very blurry one, with many animals routinely demonstrating that they are capable of complex spatial reasoning, theory of mind, and other traits we used to think only humans were capable of.
Also, you’ll find plenty of humans are quite terrible creatures as well. That doesn’t mean we can treat them indiscriminately. The capacity to suffer only requires sentience.
Anyways, I didn’t come here to argue. Just to share my experience.