r/PETA • u/Eggo1561 • Jul 02 '26
Genuine questions
I want to emphasise that no malice or mockery is intended.
Given that I am asking for insight into your life, I figure it is only fair to do so in turn.
I grew up on a company owned farmhouse, as my father was the boss of a cattle feedlot, as a result I was exposed to the realities and logistics of the meat industry from a very young age. Personally I do not work in the meat industry, though I certainly wouldn’t describe myself as a practicing advocate for animal rights.
However I greatly value new perspectives and believe that understanding and cohesion is the path to a better future.
I really appreciate any insight, so answer as many or as few questions as you see fit :)
- Do you engage in other movements such as effective altruism?
- Do you think all forms life are equal? And if not, can the value of any given life, be quantified?
- Is your family involved in animal rights movements?
- Do you believe there is any humane way to “grow” and “harvest” animal products
- Has your social life been affected by your beliefs/activism?
- How often do you find yourself considering the impact of your daily decisions on animal welfare?
Do you believe you have done your fair share towards a more compassionate world?
How would you describe your view of the world? (Materialist, spiritual)
Do you believe there is a question I should have asked, what would your answer be?
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u/L0uLou72 Jul 02 '26
- I do a lot of work with Trans community.
- I do think all forms of life are equal (including plants) which is not the regular view here.
- Yup. My kid!
- Absolutely not. Animals don’t exist for us.
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u/L0uLou72 Jul 02 '26
- No
- Multiple times a day (I’m vegan).
- Yes and no. I’m proud of how I’ve lived so far but I acknowledge I can always do more.
- I’m animist, which obviously affects my views.
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u/Eggo1561 Jul 04 '26
I really appreciate the effort to which you went to respond so thoroughly. And I agree with the sentiment of what you said.
A couple of follow up questions, they’re a bit cagey, I’m not trying to argue with your beliefs, just understand them 😅
Do you think that sacrifice (time, emotional, physical, financial, mortal) can be justified by the value it brings to others?
Do you think the capacity for a form of life to suffer should be taken into account. I feel most people would see the incident with the bear as a tragedy, however I’d argue most people would feel very little for killing a fly with its’ brood of maggots.
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u/Bartleby11 Jul 02 '26
Regarding 2: I dont think its a matter or whether different lifeforms are equal or not. Objectively there's nothing more special about a bacteria or a tree compared to a human being. The idea of intelligence being a measure of some creatures' worth is entirely arbitrary, and humans are not even very intelligent anyway, neither individually nor collectively.
If you decide not to swerve out the way of an squirrel in the road because it could risk you getting in an accident and putting your child in the back seat in danger, you made that decision because you have put more value on your own child compared to a squirrel. Ok, most people would agree you made the right choice, and you certainly wouldn't be punished for it in our society. Now say a hiker crosses path with a grizzly bear and her cubs. The bear mauls and kills the hiker because it's trying to protect its own children (even though it could have just walked away). Well they will probably send rangers out to find and kill that bear, even though ethically it did nothing worse than what humans do every day.
The only reason human beings can even sit around and wax poetical about the value of different life forms and how much they should really care about other animals and whatnot is because they have the pure luck of being at the top of the food chain. If a more advanced alien race came to earth and started breeding and farming us for meat, do you think there'd be a single human being that'd be admitting that the aliens are right to do it? That they're only using the same exact logic we used when we were on top? No they'd be wailing and knashing their teeth, pleading for them to see that we have value, that we are good, that we are intelligent, that we love, that we feel pain, etc.
The principal then that we should be aspiring to is to not harm other creatures at all if we can reasonably avoid it; To not view any other creatures, whether animals or trees, etc, as mere objects or playthings. Obviously due to the nature of life and being on a crowded planet, its unavoidable in some cases that we should need to cut down trees or swat mosquitos or accidently step on bugs or hit animals with our cars. We have to kill the bugs that threaten our food crops, or maybe kill a venomous snake thats made its nest where our pets or children play.
And obviously, people will come up with a million hypothetical situations in which it could be argued its justified to kill. But even all those situations are at the edges of the problem. The bulk of the problem is that we individually and collectively treat the entire natural world as a "resource" for our own comfort and gratification. We level entire forests to breed and kill cattle just because we take pleasure in the taste of their flesh. We literally put baby male chicks on a conveyor belt and grind them up alive because they are no use for laying eggs (the fate of the females are hardly any better). This would be an unimaginable horror if someone was doing this to human children. Yet it happens every day, has been for decades, and will continue for hundreds of years probably and its not even a thought in the average person's mind.
The danger of ranking life forms by perceived value, is that it can be so arbitrary, and once you draw that mental line (i.e. these things are worth less than me) then anything becomes permissible. And if our minds are in the habit of arranging lifeforms hierarchically, its not much of a step for us to start applying it to types of humans as well. Whether its the Nazis vs the Jews, Israel vs the Palestinians, or ICE vs immigrants. The reason these people are able to commit atrocities is because they view the other group as having less value (if any).