They don’t have a brain really and kinda just float there. Do they even feel pain?
After having kept jellyfish as pets (Atlantic bay nettles), I wouldn’t really consider them to be vegetarian nor vegan. While similar to plants, seemed to have a greater sense of environmental awareness than my plants. Mine could sense light, have “off days”, and interact with their environment. It’s probably true that there’s not much going on there due to the small amount of nerves that control everything, but even when mine would accidentally get caught on tank cleaning tools or get bumped around they’d react in a protective way and to me it’s just similar enough to animalistic behavior that I’d not feel comfortable consuming them if I were vegan.
Plants feel a lot, they just can’t express their feelings in a way you can perceive. For example, they feel the difference between a human touching them and wind blowing.
Don’t most plants sense light and interact with their environment?
Tardigrades have been observed reacting defensively to danger, even offensively. I know they’re not plants, but do they feel pain? What about brine shrimp?
Jellyfish are super weird because they really blur the lines between plant/animal. It’s a really interesting question to ask honestly.
So is this theory of veganism to not cause pain to an animal? If so what about ethically sourced meat. Like bullet to the head/decapitation. Most of those creatures feel nothing, they just end.
Or is it to not eat anything that comes from the an organism from the Animalia kingdom because harming animals is immoral?
After proofreading, these sound more aggressive/argumentative than i had intended but they get the point across.
Veganism means to reduce the suffering and exploitation of animals as much as practically possible.
There is nothing ethical about killing a living being that doesn’t want to die.
I mean, sometimes its ethical. Its kind of unnecessary (and therefore immoral) at the scale of modern meat farms. But on a more individual level with like subsistence hunting/livestock, i dont feel like there are any ethical problems. Like if you need food or you will die, animals lives are worth less than humans lives…
The need to hunt for food to prevent dying yourself is not really a problem in today’s society unless you are indigenous and living outside of our society. So there is no real argument there.
I mean, yeah. Im also being pedantic with unqualified absolutes.
The fact remains sometimes it absolutely is ethical to kill stuff, even if they don’t want to die.
My general ethical foundation is based on my conscience saying “that would be bad” or “seems ok”. I fully admit that this is potentially a personal flaw, but I don’t feel bad about eating meat. I have a vague sense of guilt for the treatment of meaty animals, but honestly, it isn’t enough to offset the convenience of a burger.
Tldr sometimes its ethically okay to kill stuff, and I’m too lazy to do anything about benefitting from the majority of times when it isn’t ethical.
I respect the self-reflection in this comment. Sadly, I also feel a small need to ask you to think about ethics and morality slightly deeper. Imagine if your predecessors made similar comments about [insert moral failing of history]. How would you think about that?
I think most of us try to be good people, but it’s really hard to do the right thing if you never think about what is right and why (and yes, sometimes that includes not being lazy).
There is an assumption here that i don’t think of right and wrong. Which isn’t true, as evidenced by this entire comment chain. My morality is based off of my conscience, and it has a final say in how i act. But I still think and explore ethically difficult situations to determine what is right, wrong, or grayish.
I just didnt describe my entire ethical schema, because, as i said i am lazy. Lazy and self-aware enough to know that there is not much i can or will do to improve the morality of meat consumption. And honestly, that specific problem is pretty low on my list of ethical dilemmas. But it’s fun to talk about.
I thought it had less to do with suffering and exploitation (animals do this to each other, no way to stop that nor should we) but more to do with climate change. Cattle farms are causing massive climate change for instance.
Humans are moral agents, though. Just because something happens in nature, that doesn’t make it okay. There are lots of examples of rape among wild animals, but that doesn’t make it okay for humans to do it.
A lot of vegans are concerned about climate change, too, but it’s really tangential to the philosophy. Veganism came out of the animal rights movement, so it’s really concerned with exploitation and suffering. If there were no environmental issues with animal products, vegans would still be vegans.
Morals are a social construct
Just because something is a social construct doesn’t mean it isn’t real or important.
It can be either or both. Whether other animals or people cause suffering to animals isn’t a statement about whether it is ethical for people to do so (naturalistic fallacy).
In terms of strict definitions of what should or should not be eaten based on its suffering, I think that’s much harder to do. There’s always going to be some gray area. Plants respond to stimuli and try to protect themselves. Jellyfish and insects and cultures cells are on a spectrum where it may not be clear how to draw the line.
yeah but what if it tastes good
15 minutes of pleasure from eating doesn’t justify forcing an animal into existence to a life of suffering and premature death, especially when there are so many great alternatives - without even considering the the secondary effects of animal agriculture, including climate damage, antibiotic resistant bacteria, and the likelihood of bringing forward the next pandemic.
I admit animals taste good but that’s still not a good enough reason to kill them. It’s simply unnecessary.
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cannibalism too exists in “nature”. I don’t see any of you meat justifiers treading that line of thought to its coherent end.
a lion or an eagle eats anything. Most (if not all) carcass eating humans make arbitrary choices: Dogs or cats shan’t be eaten. Pigs or this or that is a sin. Eating humans are monstrous.
they cause very little suffering. the systemic factory farming of animals and the deforestation in the process of meat production causes unimaginable collective suffering.
you don’t care about veganism because you are willfully ignorant.
So is this theory of veganism to not cause pain to an animal? If so what about ethically sourced meat. Like bullet to the head/decapitation. Most of those creatures feel nothing, they just end.
lots (propably most) animals used for farming meat are in pain during their lives.
That’s longer than the time they’re dying in any case.I understand that completely, death isn’t where the suffering usually occurs. This brings me to another question that i proposed in response to a different comment.
I had family that raised a cow to eventually become meat. It was named Tasty and lived up to its namesake. Tasty was treated well and killed quickly and cleanly. Is that, like, bad?
I’d say that’s a philosophical question.
And worse even, I’d say this is something that changes with the culture of people.
a while ago, gladiators killing & maiming each other for entertainment was considered fine.
Raping and Abducting during wartime was normal.Currently, I’d say the cultural moral compass has shifted enough, to consider these two examples rather bad behaviour.
But as Tasty seems to have had a nice life and didn’t suffer, so had it better than most cows which end up in a similar fate, I’d say that currently this would not be considered “bad” behaviour by most people.
Of course there is a viewpoint already out, that all killing of animals is equivalent, in other words equivalent to killing humans. From that point of view, what you did is rather horrific.
Maybe, in some time, when something like lab-grown meat without any nervous system is commonplace, killing animals for food becomes as horrific as we consider killing other humans for food.
Or, you know, it could also swing the other way, and an apocalypse makes Soylent from dead people completely normal food.I’m an oft-invisible lurker, however, your comment is amazing and I appreciate it. Cheers!
It’s the second one. In the first case, you unnecessarily kill an animal. A fair question would be if it was a natural death of the animal, like you stumbled upon a fresh carcass, is eating that still ethically or morally gray?
But that’s not the point, veganism makes sense in first world countries with factory farming. It’s very clear that mass produced animal products are no go’s.
No Brain? For Jellyfish, No Problem
“I think sometimes people use its lack of a brain to treat a jellyfish in ways we wouldn’t treat another animal,” Helm says. “There are robots in South Korea that drag around the bay and suck in jellyfish and shred them alive. I’m a biologist and sometimes sacrifice animals, but I try to be humane about it. We don’t know what they are feeling, but they certainly have aversion to things that cause them harm; try to snip a tentacle and they will swim away very vigorously. Sure, they don’t have brains, but I don’t think that is an excuse to put them through a blender.”
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No, just no
Ok, but the question was whether or not they feel pain. We can definitively say they display escape behaviors when presented with an aversive stimulus, so I’d say it’s likely they do feel some sort of pain, even if their perception of it is nothing like that displayed by animals with central nervous systems.
The morality of shredding them alive by the thousands is a different conversation, but I would say yes, nature is cruel, and yes, it’s possible for humans to mimic nature and kill animals in similar ways, but humans also have a knack for taking things too far, eg chickens bred to be so big they can’t even walk or jellyfish-murdering robots
This is one of those things that’s hard to define. If a popcorn kernel gets too hot, it pops and it’s almost like it’s trying to run from the heat. How is that different from a jellyfish reaction to pain? There’s a lot of good arguments on both sides.
Sometimes, I wonder how far away we really are from the popcorn kernel.
We can definitely say they display escape behaviours when presented with an adverse stimulus, so I’d say it’s likely they do feel some sort of pain
It’s ironic that your username is “protist”, since even many single cell organisms display escape behaviours when presented with an adverse stimulus.
But everyone and everything rather avoid pain, wouldn’t they? And if I would like to treat those the way I would like to be treated, then why not try to help mitigate that pain where possible?
The follow up question would be what us and isn’t pain.
If a bacterium swimming in one direction encounters a toxin and changes direction to avoid dying, did it experience pain? If a tobacco plant reacts to attacks from insects by producing more nicotine and alerting its neighbours to do the same through signals sent through both rhizomes and airborne pheromones, does it experience pain? What about a worker ant, whose behaviour can be perfectly simulated by an algorithm simple enough that you can simulate hundreds of ants interacting?
Personally, I’d say none of these organisms are capable of feeling pain. Or if they are with the help of some definitions of what constitutes pain, it’s just a signal like an automated assembly machine getting a signal from its sensors that a human entered its work space and it needs to slow down its robot arm to snails pace. So still incapable of suffering.
Also, if you set the threshold for what constitutes the ability for suffering too low, you quickly collide with the ethics of even early term abortion.
If you care about brainless animals, you might as well care about plants.
Jellyfish do have neurons. Fewer than an insect. Much fewer than ChatGPT. But still something. A better example is sea sponges, which don’t have any neurons at all.
Are we not supposed to care about plants?
No.
They have no brain but aren’t they like almost entirely nervous system? That’s all you need to feel pain; the brain just makes it more complicated than “ouch, move away from that.”
If having a reaction to physical damage (like moving away) is enough to be qualified as pain, then some plants feel pain too. We studied in biology a plant that when cut/eaten by animals releases chemicals that warn plants around it and triggers them to release another chemical that interferes with animal’s digestive system and make them starve (I don’t remember the name of the plant unfortunately). So should we consider this as pain too ?
there are many other examples here too:wikipedia
man I hate philosophy
Tobacco and tomato plants do something similar. They produce more nicotine to poison the insects eating them and also warn their neighbours.
(Yes, tomatoes also produce nicotine, and it is technically possible to become slightly addicted to tomatoes if you have a very tomato-heavy diet)
moral of the story: if you have an addiction, replace it with tomatoes
nicotine in the tomato too (which the plant produces for the animals to eat and spread its grains) or rather in the leaves, flowers and stem?
As far as I know it’s in the fruit as well to some snall degree, but I’m no expert
Yes. It’s literally how pain is defined in an anatomical sense.
If reaction to physicals damage is enough to qualify as pain, a brick wall feels pain. If you damage it, it will start having holes, and eventually fall over completely.
I think at the very least you’d need some kind of learning. Pain is the stuff you learn to avoid and pleasure is the stuff you learn to do more. Without that, it’s impossible to say whether an instinctive response to stimuli is a negative or positive feeling.
They’re animals, so no.
I suppose jellyfish fishing is bad for the environment. I know nothing about it though.
Not sure, I heard some species of jellyfish are super invasive
but then by fishing you may catch other fishes I think
we need an expert
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Vegan is a very wide array of things ranging to not eating red meat all the way down to not doing anything that could hurt a plant (only scavengering fallen fruit).
https://theminimalistvegan.com/types-of-vegans-and-vegetarians/
Don’t forget the ecosexuals.
I’m not making that up, it’s apparently a thing.
now that i’ve read the wikipedia article about them, i prefer to forget the ecosexuals.
This is not at all what Veganism is.
Veganism is LITERALLY an ethical stance regarding exploiting/harming/killing non-human animals.
Finding a random blog online that states otherwise means nothing. Anyone who ate a salad last Tuesday these days thinks they can simply decide what Veganism is.
THIS is the actual definition of Veganism, directly from the people who coined the term:
“Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals."
all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals
Plastics that encapsulate microprocessors in computers come from fossil-fuel chemicals which are extinct animals buried millions of years ago.
So it’s not vegan to use a computer check-mate vegans.
It’s mainly about intention, not coincidence. You did not kill those extinct animals, nor did you ask or pay someone else to do it. It was not your nor someone elses intention that was involved in their extinction. It could still be seen as exploiting one of earths limited resources though, but that’s not directly related to veganism.
I know some vegans consider it fine to consume animal products that did not cause harm or are not exploitative, or even meat from animals which were not killed or harmed intentionally.
jains are considered vegans but vegans don’t have the same considerations.<br> a vegan is simply somebody who avoids consuming any animal product including leather, honey, wool &c
I once read a very good argument for Vegans who want to justify eating honey. Bees can’t be caged; they are free to simply fly away. Bees can (and do) leave bad beekeepers who don’t take proper care of them, or if they aren’t satisfied with their living conditions.
I’m not sure it can be answered; it depends on the person.
Some people go with the lack of a central nervous system.
So Oysters are okay by that standard
So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Given a choice, if they run away from a stimulus all the time, it is very much “painful”.
Nope. Animal product. Would be ok for pescatarians, however.
The problem is if you do this, you have to come up with a word for people who don’t eat fish, but do eat insects and crustaceans, and people who don’t eat them, but do eat jellyfish, and people who don’t eat them, but eat (or more realistically, use the corpses of) sea sponges. And then there’s people who never eat it, people who eat it but only if otherwise it would get thrown away, people who eat it but only if they’re sure the animal was raised ethically, people who will never eat meat but only eat animal products if it was raised ethically, etc. It’s really not worth having overly specific words like that, and nobody is going to remember them.
Man, you’re gonna be really pissed when you open up the dictionary…
“Man, you’re gonna be really pissed when you open up the dictionary…” 👆🤣
Yeah, bro decided to rant against half the English language and pretty much all scientific terminology. I’m just sitting back here with the popcorn watching him dig his own grave.
sorry, jerboa is a new app. i posted a laughing smiley under a previous comment and deleted the message while editing it to include the original one.
i left it as it is thinking that it doesn’t matter. If i knew you needed it for your popcorn, i would have tried harder.
this one made me laugh: Man, you’re gonna be really pissed when you open up the dictionary…
Definitions are approximate. Defining “man” as “featherless biped” is good enough for most situations, but a plucked chicken isn’t a man and someone who lost a leg still is.
just stop! Go read that lesson again. You misunderstood the moral of that story
Sorry. I thought the problem was that definitions are ultimately approximations to help you understand the meaning of the word. Checking it again, the moral was actually that Plato forgot to add “with broad nails”, and once he had that he had the perfect definition of a human that everyone can always use.
🤦
By a strict definition, no. But most vegans don’t really care about scientific classification. Personally I don’t think they’re sentient and think it’s fine.
Jellyfish are not sentient either. OP may be on to something here
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Are you outing yourself as vegan?
I own a crowbar, we can test for pain.
So tough online. Joke’s on you. I like that shit.
did you eat them?
Apparently removing other people’s comments you don’t like is a thing here. They can eat shit
i thought your comment was silly, but there was nothing that needed a removal. I’m sorry to read that
is one of your mentioned friends a mod here? 😅
Must be. My comment was made lightheartedly but it seems that power tripping crybabies are in charge here already. Sad. I had real hopes for lemmy.
I thought this post was about whether jellyfish had a vegan diet. I had no idea being vegan meant it’s ok to eat non-sentient animals as well.
I’ve known people who chose not to eat mammals, birds, fish, decapods (lobsters, crabs, prawns), or cephalopod mollusks (e.g. octopus, squid); but who were okay with eating bivalve mollusks (clams, mussels, oysters) on the grounds that they did not have enough brain to experience pain.
I think those folks would be okay with eating jellyfish.
Rather than asking, “Is X vegan?” it might be more useful to ask, “What is person P trying to accomplish by ‘being vegan’? Is eating X in conflict with that?”
this 👆
I believe that it is not, since scientifically it is an animal. However, some vegetarians (not vegans) will eat fish or certain animal products.
I thought that people who would eat fish but not other animals were pescatarians.
Yes, but fewer people know that word, so it’s less useful. And if you want to have a word to describe every specific version of “meat is bad” diets, you’d need as many words as there are people who avoid meat.
We use the word vegetarian to mean that we don’t eat animals. Fish is an animal.<br> we, vegetarians, don’t eat fish and “vegetarian” is a useful word to mean exactly that.<br> we don’t stop using precise words just because “fewer people know that word”! What kind of a reasoning is this 🤦
Words are approximate. You can get a general idea of what a human is by saying “featherless biped”, but you’re not going to go around saying that a plucked chicken is a human but someone who had a leg amputated isn’t. If someone generally doesn’t eat animal products, but is okay with jellyfish, saying they’re vegan will give a better understanding of them than saying they’re not vegan.
We define vegan as someone who doesn’t eat meat, in the sense that if you ask someone what it means that’s what they’ll say, but we don’t strictly use it that way. There’s just too many details to make a word for every possibility.
i remember reading about that plucked chicken. My understanding of it was rather the necessity for a less “approximate” communication.
where did you get this idea about words being “approximate”? did you rather approximately mean “différant”?
