My personal limit is recreation, or having fun. So no cows, or pigs, horses or dogs or cats, mostly no mammals really. But also i wouldnt eat like a crow, or octopus.
Asklemmy
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
I wouldn't eat a dog, a monkey, an octopus, a dolphin, a whale, a cat, a parrot, a crow, or a donkey. Pretty much everything else is on the table unless I'm missing something.
I don't think it's entirely to do with intelligence. Pigs for example are apparently of similar intelligence to dogs, but I love eating pork. Obviously the dog has the advantage of a unique domestication where they can read and react to our emotions better than virtually all other animals.
So it's an interesting question you ask. Because while intelligence isn't the primary reason it has to certainly be a motivator because all of those I listed are intelligent animals.
To actually answer your question, they would have to be pretty damn smart for me to stop eating them because they are delicious.
I think people forget that nature is quite brutal. If humans stopped eating meat, millions of animals would still be killed by predators, illness, parasites, old age, accidents, etc.
If cows became intelligent enough to participate in society but we had lab grown beef, I'd eat it.
So you would also eat humans?
Why don't we eat humans?
Well I don't eat meat at all, and part of the reason is the video on YouTube of the little girl who snuck her pet cow onto her indoor porch and is holding it in her lap and scratching it while it sighs contentedly.
I've seen some cows that I feel are smarter than some humans I've met.
They'd have to be on one level with pigs, basically.
They would have to be able to hold a conversation. Octopi are much, much smarter than cows, I will still happily eat them... though I feel a little guilty about that. Cows, though? No guilt.
That said, there is much tastier red meat to be had, if only we diversified our livestock. Kangaroo and Ostrich, in particular. And both of those animals are cold-blooded killers who deserve to be eaten.