My answer to #RandomQuestion on dietary preferences. CW: #LongText ( > 1000 characters)
Good #RandomQuestion, from the birdsite.
https://twitter.com/GadSaad/status/1036744139805782016?s=19
I'll attempt to answer where I stand. Consider the following:
1. It is generally considered bad (kinksters, kindly excuse me) to capture, enslave, kill, or eat humans.
2. Animals are much like us. In particular, their flesh and blood is like ours. They even die by same mechanisms as we do. To see an animal in pain invokes empathy in many of us.
3. Insects are not as much like us as animals. Many of their organ systems are totally different from those of animals. Their blood isn't even red!
4. Insects, alive or dead, provoke disgust (or fear, in many of us), rather than empathy. To see an insect in pain doesn't change that.
To summarize: Most vegetarians avoid eating animals because of empathy; but they avoid eating insects for different reasons - disgust and fear.
I come from a largely lacto-vegetarian community. Personally, while I occasionally consume animal meat, I find the idea of eating insects as disgusting even to consider.
re: My answer to #RandomQuestion on dietary preferences. CW: #LongText ( > 1000 characters)
re: My answer to #RandomQuestion on dietary preferences. CW: #LongText ( > 1000 characters)
@LWFlouisa I think you accidentally replied to the wrong message? @madhur
My answer to #RandomQuestion on dietary preferences. CW: #LongText ( > 1000 characters)
@freemo The empathy for insects is very weak, while the disgust is dominant by a big margin. Except for butterflies, I don't recall myself ever reducing the pain or suffering of an insect.
My answer to #RandomQuestion on dietary preferences. CW: #LongText ( > 1000 characters)
@madhur I think this is very individual. I know I have on multiple occasions tried to help an injured insect and my empathy for them is not "weak". But I don't expect my feelings to be the norm either.
Of course it varies from person to person, and culture to culture. Insects, etc feature in traditional Chinese diets, if I remember correctly.
@madhur For sure, wasn't a criticism. Just sharing my perspective. Thanks for sharing yours!
Animals and eating them... sustainable in terms of multifuctional happiness...
@madhur
Is interesting andin my current thoughts I see a benefit in animals or anything that can elongate life (make go longer without too much digging in, something more 'sustainable'; multifunctional to land / people / gives something more worthwhile to do than finance/ meaningful low-scale widespread etc.... IF people can care for animals and kiss them and then at the end of life in some way- when it feels right - and animal is ready or asking for it - to give it your sharpest blade as you might wish and be blessed in the process...
(prepare, ask gently, meditate, look at your knife if it's the day for it and as you prepare).
Then make it clean, least suffering. Ritual / Spiritual passage..
.....
giving a pause
.....
For me, taking machines out of the equation almost completely (will have to think but I would say say near everything as it will break anyway - to make us even more sustainable / true to nature.)
So If people can care for an animal or two and give each other care with their foods (to animals and humans), this takes care of many other things too :)
Call it diversity for now...
But it's a BIG "IF"...
Amazingly with a bit of thinking I think things can fall in line IF a pyramid of happiness can happen and when things are given meaning to it / them / everything else... even the salvation at the end from living too long or in suffering... solves that which I think is very just/meaningful... + the giving up your life to others can be (even should be!) a kind of passing of spirit from one into the next and has tangible regeneration as body to others also if people should wish it (not everyone, could be mainly veg as the taking care of nature but with forest letting wild pig and deer roam like they do still in many part of main europe and well everywhere I guess in various amounts).
Something like for old dogs but eating them after playing with, growing old together, using the blade to make food (worthy use of time and needed), and to enjoy their kids/off-spring though the memory of them and repeat the process!
Again the impersonal machine-care and mass-scale industrial, de-personalised contact and distanced-living with habitat, is not for me so this integrates all that
(if you read the paragraph making the opposites of some words you get what I prefer or more towards those spectrums of extreme than these ones).
I may have missed out something in this eco-system of happiness, but I'm happy to take advices or clarify (even to myself but I think that 'captures' the ideal spirit of life for me but letting things live and have ways to let them die! Nobody escapes this (and nothing necessarily needs to run away from it when it's their time).
My answer to #RandomQuestion on dietary preferences. CW: #LongText ( > 1000 characters)
@madhur Insects don't have blood at all actually. They have something diffierent called Hemolyph.
What i find interesting is that while I do react to most insects with disgust I also have a great deal of empathy if i see one in pain or suffering.