gumba

Any time a meat eater succeeds in preserving the species to continue hunting it they are treating that species as a resource to be exploited, and in fact saying that any individual member of that species can be destroyed for purely selfish purposes, as long as the resource as a whole is stewarded for future generations.

But you are treating it primarily as a resource to be exploited, rather than a group of beings that have some right to pursue their own goals free of interference.

I'm not saying this is bad, but again, think of how it would be if you treated a group of humans like this.

"Anybody who regularly kills and eats Frenchmen doesn't care about the French." strikes me as... just obviously true.

And I think it would be fundamentally absurd to go, "Uh, actually I only hunt and eat Frenchmen sustainably, in fact I have donated a lot of money to the Louvre and various efforts to preserve French culture, so what right do you have to say that I don't care about the French."

And vegans are arguing that the same analogy is true of animals.

If you treat people purely as a resource to be exploited for your own gain, I think it's proof that you don't care about them, even if you treat them as a resource to be stewarded and preserved rather than a resource to be destroyed in a one-time orgy of greed.

A lot of vegans feel that this logic should be extended to animals as far as is practical.

The "stewardship" model is *better* than the "destroy the resource in a short-sighted orgy of personal greed" model, I agree, but I still think there's a strong case to be made that it's not really "caring" about animals in the way that Vegans mean.

I would never eat my friend's pet cats. I would never eat them even if they had kittens and I could eat one of his cats while sustaining the population of cats that live in my friend's apartment.

Now, personally, I think that's a pretty clear indication that I care about those cats more than I care about, say, the cow who died for the burger I ate yesterday.

I think it's the defensiveness I find really sort of irritating and, honestly, a little bit perplexing.

Again, it just feels like the cannibal above getting really irritated when you claim he doesn't care about the people he eats, and explaining that he actually does a lot of cultural preservation work, and he's donated way more to museums than most non-cannibals, so how can you sit there and act like the non-cannibals care more about French people than he does?

I guess I don't understand why you want credit for caring deeply about something you'll happily destroy and eat even in cases where you really aren't required to do so.

It’s trivial to imagine a character who “cares about” the French but routinely killed Frenchmen! “The French” is a group, and the character desires the group continues to exist. There is no contradiction between wanting a group to continue to exist and killing individual group members. If a vampire particularly likes eating Frenchmen, they are going to want Frenchmen to continue to be available for them to eat, and so may take action to preserve the French collectively.

And the Vampire gives a speech about all the efforts he's made to protect kings and empires, that's not... like... a heroic moment where we're proving the Vampire is a moral good guy and the guy getting his blood drained is a short-sighted fool who doesn't understand morality.

My real problem is not that I think it is immoral to care only about conservationism; it's that when a Vegan says people who eat meat don't care about animals it's very clear that they aren't talking about conservationism, and pretending that they are is just an obnoxious form of question-begging.

If a vegan says, "I don't think it's enough to merely conserve animal species, I think we need to start thinking of individual animals as being worthy of moral consideration beyond the question of what use a human might put them to."

Then, "Actually I contribute a lot to species conservation" is just... meaningless. It's not a retort to their position, it's not an argument for your own position, it's just going,

Yes, the immortal vampire who picks strays and homeless people off the streets of Paris while working to preserve the French Republic is demonstrating an internally consistent morality.

But like... When the crying person asks him if he has no pity or compassion for people, and he gives a monologue about his vast regard for empires and cultures, that's a villain monologue, right?

Because that tramp is obviously not talking about that. He's not concerned with whether the Vampire cares about the consistency of the French Republic, he's concerned with "How on earth can you think it's okay to eat me, personally".

And the vampire's decision to deflect from that obvious question, and instead airily address a different question which he can more easily justify himself from is part of what makes it a villain monologue.

He's not actually asserting a moral case for eating that tramp, he's simply declaring that "Is it okay for me to eat random tramps" isn't even a question he has to think about or answer.

It also works as a sketch of how a vegan would begin an argument that mere conservationism isn't sufficient. After all, for people, there is no amount of cultural or species-wide preservation that you can do which makes it okay to just kill and eat random people, and at least some animals seem to be analagous to people in the sense that they have brains, independent goals, the ability to feel pain and fear, etc.

That argument is, to me, obvious and sensible enough that it deserves more than a fart noise as a rebuttal.

Instead of actually justifying their position that animals shouldn't be treated like people in this particular way, people elaborately go out of their way to not understand the point these vegans are making, and that's a form of argumentation that deeply irritates me.

Second, I think you're missing the point? It's not actually about whether eating meat is right or wrong. It's about the definition of 'care', and who gets to decide what it is. You have to be aware that 'I care about animals and you dont' is an incredibly powerful statement. It's nuclear grade rhetoric; whoever gets to deploy this has made a major victory as far as optics go. (See also: abortion debate and how hotly contested it is to be the side that cares about the children)

And what you're doing is saying 'Okay I accept the vegan definition of caring about something meaning not killing it, so definitionally meat-eaters dont care about animals. Why not admit that? Why are you so defensive?'. But like we all know the asterisks here will get scraped away; what will spread around social media is 'meat-eaters dont care about animals'. This is a major loss for meat-eaters so they don't roll over and allow it. They get defensive. They point out that not killing something is a literal non-action while conservation represents a real material investment into animal welfare so maybe care should mean something different in the first place, and so on and so forth.