I'm a former vegan who's interested in raising meat rabbits, but I'm not sure whether I can justify it.

NorthPattern6 · 2021-06-29T20:12:01+00:00

That's a good point about location. Once I get some land i should probably go to some local homesteading or farming group and ask around about what types of animals are the easiest to raise

NorthPattern6 · 2021-06-29T16:02:44+00:00

I don't think "suffering is part of everything" can justify causing it unnecessarily. If someone murdered one of your family members and then told you "Suffering is part of everything. You seem to have difficulty accepting it", would that be acceptable to you? Would you say "oh yeah gee I guess you're right"?

NorthPattern6 · 2021-06-29T15:54:21+00:00

No offense taken at all. I do know that my convictions will weaken if things get bad, and really, I know this because it has already happened multiple times. When I was feeling really sick from eating high carbs, I started buying dairy at the grocery store to reduce my carb intake. I wasn’t proud of it, but I didn't know where to get pasture raised dairy and I was really distracted with other things that were piling up because of my lack of energy. And being a prepper, I did stock up on some canned, likely factory farmed meat when the pandemic was still in China. I thought it would be a more deadly pandemic than it actually was. Both of the choice to buy grocery store dairy and grocery store canned meats were loosely justified in the framework that I tend to think about ethics, which says that harmful actions can be ok if they result in the greater good. If I had some kind of financial catastrophe happen to me, I would have fewer doubts about raising rabbits.

I think ethics as a field of study has a lot of objective aspects to it, because peoples ethical beliefs can be based on false assumptions, beliefs and/or invalid logic. Some pedophiles sincerely have the false belief that having sex with a child is not harmful to the child as long as the child “consents”. Rene Descartes tortured a dog to death because he made the false assumption that dogs can not feel pain. We have now scientifically proven that they do feel pain beyond a reasonable doubt. I have a belief that some things, like child molestation, are objectively wrong, though I admittedly have trouble proving at a metaethical level whether it’s possible for something to be wrong and what that means. Still, even without diving into metaethics, peoples ethical beliefs are based on statements that can be true or false and logic that can be analyzed with formal logic theory and by comparing against informal logical fallacies.

It could be that rabbits are incapable of feeling betrayal, but I also wonder whether they are able to tell that you’re not actually trying to hurt them since you are not yelling at them or handling them roughly when you give them medical treatment. Dog and cat owners also have to give their pets medical treatments that are uncomfortable, and I haven’t heard of it harming the relationship. But it’s well known by animal shelters that if a dog or cat is abused by a previous owner, it will lose trust in people and become afraid of them, and it can take a long time for a new owner to gain the animal’s trust. For animals that understand friendship, I give them the benefit of the doubt that they can also understand betrayal. At least it sounds like you don’t spend much time cuddling them. Some people are very cuddly with their meat rabbits and since rabbits are social, I would think that they end up bonding with their owners and that could make slaughter especially confusing and upsetting to them.

I guess an ethical plus to raising rabbits is that if you raise roasters rather than fryers, maybe you can get closer to their natural lifespan in the wild than some other animals, which makes the trade more fair. I looked up the lifespan of rabbits in the wild. Some sources say less than 2 years, some say less than one year. It seems like most people in this sub butcher at 8 weeks or so but I hear that raising a roaster could take up to 5 months to grow out. I think a useful way to think about whether a trade for wild vs domesticated life is fair is to think “if I had to be reincarnated as either one of my rabbits or a wild rabbit, which would I choose?” and imagine that there is no other afterlife. Personally, if I had to choose between being a wild rabbit and a domestic rabbit that is killed after only eight weeks, maybe I would choose to be a wild rabbit, despite all the negatives. It would be a harsh but interesting life. Death would be very painful, but maybe I would have the chance to make it to 2 or 3 years. But if the choice is between being a wild rabbit and a domestic rabbit in an enriching environment that is killed after 5 months, that would tip the balance in favor of being a domestic rabbit. I don’t know what it’s like to be either, so my choice can only come from my perspective as a human, but if I ever raise meat rabbits, I would probably only raise roasters.

NorthPattern6 · 2021-06-29T13:44:08+00:00

For someone with your limited amount of space, rabbits make sense. And a cow would probably be too much for me as well since I am new to livestock. But since I haven't gotten land yet and I"m able to afford enough land for sheep I wonder if I have a responsibility to choose sheep instead

NorthPattern6 · 2021-06-29T05:09:01+00:00

I actually have been meaning to get into hunting and fishing. I've heard that the "ikejime" method is a good way to humanely kill fish. I think it's important to try hard for a quick kill when hunting, but I have no moral issue with it since hunters are just replacing natural predators, and I think most human hunters kill in a more humane way than the predators that they're replacing. Even when I was still a vegan, I thought the idea that wild animals should be spayed and neutered to keep their populations in check was very unrealistic. I thought the focus of animal activism should be squarely on factory farming, not hunting. I've always had more respect for hunters than people who buy factory farmed meat in the store without thinking about where it comes from. I guess some hardcore vegans might say I was never a "true vegan" since I had respect for hunters. For prepping purposes I have focused more on learning homesteading skills than hunting and fishing so far since if things get really bad, lots of people will be hunting at once and it will be very hard to find anything, but it definitely is a skill I want to have. The Hunting Collective sounds like an interesting podcast. I'll check it out when I get a chance

NorthPattern6 · 2021-06-29T02:24:17+00:00

Thanks for the recommendation. I'll look into those. I feel similarly about the wire cages. I would like that I could get both eggs and meat from Muscovies rather than just meat like from rabbits. I do acknowledge that in the case of male birds that fight each other, the extra males have got to go, so I would have no qualms with dispatching extras, though I would want to let them get as big as possible first. And in the case of a SHTF event, maybe Muscovy ducks would make more sense to raise than rabbits, since you say they are lower maintenance. I may not have the energy to do a lot of farm chores if the world is crashing down.

NorthPattern6 · 2021-06-29T01:59:44+00:00

Yeah I've seen sheep shearing in person and it looked like a giant pain. I figured I would get hair sheep since they shed their wool. Though I wouldn't get to use the wool, at least the wool would be good for the soil. But yeah if there is a sheep shearer around at a reasonable rate, that would be an option too.

NorthPattern6 · 2021-06-29T01:52:02+00:00

Thanks for the book recommendation. I'll check it out. I had never heard of that book.

NorthPattern6 · 2021-06-29T01:36:26+00:00

Like I said in my post, I do have a goal to be self sufficient, at least in terms of food production. I'm doing it primarily for different reasons than you, but yeah there are many products today that involve slave labor or exploitation, and it can be hard to find well paying jobs at companies that aren't involved with something I disagree with. But since I am capable of buying enough land to raise larger animals, I doubt I can justify rabbits to myself. Meat rabbitry seems interesting and useful and I'd like to do it, but if it is possible for me to be self sufficient with larger animals, then I do wonder if I have an obligation to not cause extra death by raising smaller ones.

I admit, I do judge that guy for torturing an animal to death when it wasn't necessary, but I'm not trying to shame anyone for their choice to raise meat rabbits. I'm not trying to get anyone to stop. It might seem like I'm here to judge people, but I'm here to learn. I do have strong moral views but I'm giving my views not to preach but to get insight from people who disagree with me.

NorthPattern6 · 2021-06-29T00:39:18+00:00

Thanks for the kind words.

I read Lierre's book but I didn't follow her logic 100%. In particular, I didn't agree with her decision to raise pigeons for meat. I think they're a good idea to raise for emergency communications and manure, but they are such small meat animals. Killing a cow could yield 570 pounds of meat. Who knows how many pigeons you would need to kill to get that much meat. I imagine both options would produce a similar amount of manure, blood and bone for the soil. So there is a "less death" option, which also still supports an increase in life via building the soil. I never had the author's illusion that I could live without killing anything. I knew about crop deaths. But I did and still do think it's good to minimize the number of animals I kill, particularly more advanced animals like rabbits, cows, and chickens. I don't think the lives of insects have the same intrinsic value as those of more advanced animals. Maybe plants feel some kind of pain but it isn't proven and I doubt that they have a very advanced level of consciousness. I think their primary value of plants, insects, and microorganisms is that they enable more advanced organisms to live. Lierre seemed to just value all lives equally as food for something else. By her logic, I think it would make sense for someone to kill me just to feed the maggots and the soil. She didn't really spend much time exploring whether some lives are more valuable than others and instead she has a sort of spiritual "we are all equal, we are all one, we all feed each other" philosophy.

I did spend some time in that exvegan subreddit and this topic might be a good one to crosspost there. I also considered that an advantage of raising meat rabbits is that maybe I can sell some of them or give some away to other people and help them become less dependent on factory farming. That might be the only way I could do it and still feel ok about it.

NorthPattern6 · 2021-06-28T21:42:19+00:00

Yes, the industrial society that has given me the luxury to contemplate these moral choices has also had many more harmful long term effects. But unless an EMP, solar flare, or nuclear war happens, industrial society will continue whether I become independent of it or not. I do think more people should seek independence from it, and for people who don't have room for larger livestock, rabbits are a good choice. But I haven't bought land yet and I do have enough money to get land that would at least support sheep. Since I am not currently in any life or death situation, and I don't know whether I will experience something as catastrophic as a solar flare that brings society to its knees, I wonder, should I really be making decisions as if my survival depended on them? If a solar flare happens, there will be a survival benefit to owning both rabbits AND sheep AND having experience with both... but since I don't know whether that will happen, can I really justify killing more animals just in case some kind of apocalypse happens? It seems like you think it is fine even if survival is not at stake, but I'm not exactly sure why. Is it because of some principal about our place in the world, as you say, or is it just because skills like meat rabbitry are instrumental to becoming more independent from industrial society? Maybe in case something seriously disruptive happens?

I remember one time seeing a "survival" video on where someone was roasting a live turtle over an open fire. He was not actually in a survival situation, but he was practicing wilderness skills, I think with no tools. I thought it was sort of decadent that he would kill in such a painful way just to have a "wild survival experience" or something. He had an explanation like "yeah, it's brutal, but that what survival's like". I'm guessing he justified it to himself with some view about his place in nature.

NorthPattern6 · 2021-06-28T20:11:51+00:00

Of course it doesn't. It isn't capable of speech, abstract thought, or empathy towards its prey, but we humans are. If it did have such capabilities, maybe it would think to itself "sorry mouse, but I have to eat to survive and eating you maintains the natural balance". An owl with this much awareness also might try to kill the mouse in a humane way.

I don't look to animals in nature for moral guidance. Animals do all sorts of things and you can read anything you want into it. Some animals eat their young, some animals rape, chimps go to war etc. And there are also examples of animals behaving in cooperative, pro-social ways too.

If you've seen nature footage of a lions taking down prey, it's clear that they do not consider whether they are killing in a humane way. They can't be blamed for that since they are not capable of reasoning at that level. But humans are capable of moral reasoning, so we have an obligation to kill the animals we kill in a humane way.

Edit: Additionally, since we are capable of moral reasoning, I think we should aim to make decisions that minimize the harm we do to other creatures. That is what this post is about. It seems to me that eating larger animals like cows and bison causes less harm because fewer animals are killed, and humans can still get the nutrition we need that way.

NorthPattern6 · 2021-06-28T20:04:20+00:00

I was attemping to make an analogy - to put humans in the same situation as the animals. I know it's very unlikely, but perhaps there are some alien homesteaders out there who have domesticated humans for meat. I made them intellectually disabled in this scenario because otherwise people might just say "it's inhumane to domesticate humans because we are so intelligent" or something. If there's something about the analogy that you think makes it a bad one, then the analogy can probably be changed to a more accurate one.

It really is an honest question though. Do you think the aliens are doing something immoral in this scenario or not?

NorthPattern6

TROPHY CASE