Autonomy vs Dignity, Wildlife in Veganism and Ecology in the 21st century
05 August 2016 [link youtube]
vegan / vegans / veganism / ecology / animal rights / environmentalism / wildlife management / etc.
Youtube Automatic Transcription
you can learn a lot from failure but you
don't learn from failing you learn from the study of failure whether that's the study of an historical event you had nothing to do with disasters of communism the failure of democracy and Cambodia Laos or failure is right in front your own eyes in your own lifetime for me I learned a lot from looking at the failure of the Green Party in Canada failure of different ecological movements if you're old enough you can really remember a time when people were promising simple technological progress and things like solar power we're going to transform the world that's one reason why the way by I'm very skeptical about this idea that fake meat that meat produced in a laboratory is going to change the world so quickly very often we have a scientific solution for things in principle but getting them into practice in the free market scaling them up making them economically viable that is another matter where decades and decades later you may have seen no progress but the promises of simple technological solutions for profound ecological problems back in the 1980s very very few of them have materialized in in any way but I'm aware I say an intro to this video I'm aware that my own practical philosophy of veganism my own political philosophy of ecology is in many ways influenced negatively it's influenced by the failure of so many other paradigms before in many ways you know the fact that the Green Party of Canada is a pathetic failure as if what's the end it simple to be positively in a sense because I've drawn lessons from that we've done got some interesting feedback within patreon those of you pay the one dollar you get a lot of value for your money I do record many of these videos in direct response to things viewers have said to me you pay the one dollar per month support me on patreon thank you for your patronage one of my viewers asked wouldn't it be better to use the word autonomy rather than the word dignity when I'm talking about wild animals what I'm talking about the wildlife management paradigm wildlife management approach to vegan we can't ecology in animal rights um first of all there's a shallow sense in which you can respond to this just about the meaning of words we do not talk about autonomy in death we talk about dignity in death right the reason why dignity is so useful is that you can have dignity in suffering and this is related to my rejection of utilitarianism is a video on that that again was a direct response to a patreon supporter someone who paid the one dollar send me that question that day the same day they signed up I recorded the video same to join the groups that was satisfying a little uh little interaction with one of the viewers i do not think the meaning of life for human beings is happiness I do not think the meaning of life for animals is happiness nor even that we can structure how we live as humans or how we how we treat animals in terms of the reduction of suffering the life of a wild animal they have infinitely more suffering than a domesticated animal but as I've said before recently I think that a lion in a sense deserves to live for five years in the wild ie if its natural lifespan this particular eyes happens the only five years five years perhaps of sorrow hunger struggling suffering ending eventually in death in the wild in a sense a lion deserves that life rather than being domesticated castrated forced to perform in a zoo or a circus rather than existing as a toy for human entertainment or as one of the accoutrement for human civilization now I use the word dignity in talking about that contrast of values I talk about the dignity of a lion that gets to live and die in the wild on its own terms and I do not talk about its autonomy know why is that again I've already sat down one reason you can talk about dignity in suffering you can talk about dignity and death in other words dignity very much exists despite the framework set up for us by the utilitarians um but there is no such thing as autonomy in death or autonomy and suffering and um finishing the comments about the the the meaning of the word before we get into a little a little bit of a deeper look at this issue the real meaning of autonomy etymologically and politically autonomy is the ability to make your own laws and I actually do not believe that animals in this sense on our world on planet Earth in this century will ever really be autonomous first of all that's not the point I mean the point isn't that Lions should make their own laws nor that wolves or bears make their own laws so the word autonomy starts become meaningless when you look at it that in that sense and you know politically that really is the meaning of autonomy within Canada how much autonomy does Quebec AB does Quebec have the freedom to make its own laws to to differ from the rest of Canada to differ from the federal government what have you in reality and one of the profound differences between the wildlife management paradigm the approach I talked about on this channel and anarchism is that I do not actually fetishize the wilderness I do not hold up the wild as some kind of transcendental ideal of something outside of independent from and superior to human society I do not regard wilderness as a religious value I do not regard it as something human beings aren't entitled to touch or manage on the contrary the reality that will we live in is that the only way for wild animals to survive now and in the next hundred years is for human beings to be actively engaged in wildlife management the site used this term so much what does wildlife management involve ultimately involves men with guns who are paid by taxpayers to defend the forest against other human beings who want to cut the trees down this is only one element of it but managing the populations of wild animals like bears involves very active human intervention all the time given the example if a bear leaves it's a sign habitat ultimately human beings have drawn a square on the map and said that's the forest we're going to preserve that's the area where wild bears are protected species where human beings don't hunt them where human beings are not allowed to cut down the trees but if their leaves that area if the bear for example wants to eat garbage from human homes wants to eat from a dump wants to go downtown in the city human beings hopefully will tranquilize the bear and relocate it back to the wilderness unfortunately reality very often we just shoot and kill the bear but let's be idealistic for a minute here so that is not autonomy in any sense right we're actually we're not talking about the autonomy of the wild animals we're not talking about reducing the suffering in the world i know i'm done with the happiness of all animals we're talking about a human-centered conspiracy if you like to try to allow these animals to live and die with dignity even if their lives are miserable not as our house pets not as entertainers in a zoo and and what have you now other viewers are think within patreon some of my other viewers have written to me saying that there is one book that agrees with me to some extent I think partly because my my approach fundamentally is human centered and it's even legal said it's based on the existence of the modern bureaucratic tax collecting state of not an anarchist and most of the people who agree with me up to a certain point they are vaguely vaguely an artistic anti-establishment vegans deep ecologists etc etc there's a book by a guy called Edward o Wilson called half earth our planets fight for life so the main title is just half earth and I believe the reason why some of my viewers think I have a lot in common with this guy is that he also says look fundamentally the challenge here is of human being sitting down with a map drawing a line and saying on one side of this line you're allowed to cut down the trees you're allowed to exploit the environment for profit for human use and on the other side of this line you can't it's illegal it's preserved its habitat conservation wildlife management etc now I have not read this book and I looked into buying a copy here in China it would cost me more than 40 US dollars to order it on paper and there is not available as an e-text it's not available as a digital book as a kindle book and it's only about 250 pages long so I'm going to with this video put in a request anyway especially if you're on patreon but anyone can have my email if you own a copy of this book and you're done with it you've already read it you want to get rid of it please email me I would like to arrange for someone to send me a copy of this because I can't justify the cost well Mira China and with anything you buy like that here in China it's possible it will never arrive you know like you can pay the money and it's just going to disappear in the mail so only do this if you've already read it and you're finished with the book I would be interested get a copy of that it may be I have nothing in common with a guy it's I think it's most likely i'll read it i'll agree with it up to a point but then i'll come on youtube and review it and complain that it doesn't talk enough about veganism and the difference between animal agriculture culture some of that but i am interested here anyone has some some views and come with me because certainly it's it's a very unusual approach to veganism animal rights ecology etc um so look dignity the fact that i use this word dignity at all many people criticize this very short comment here i'm going to read one of the viewers on YouTube comments dignity is only subjective how does want to objectively talk about our measure dignity I understand the concern whether it's philosophical political or what-have-you some people feel this is a great weakness in the web present my views here on YouTube that I talked about the dignity of animals and the dignity of human beings because I've said recently when it comes to drinking cow milk I both think this is beneath the dignity of a cow to be to live its life in captivity to produce milk for human consumption but I also think it's beneath the dignity of human beings I do not think it's dignified for human being to get down on their hands and knees and suck the milk out of a cow's breast um it doesn't matter if you take the milk out of the cows breasts and then put it in a bottle it doesn't fundamentally change things for me so to me their questions of both humans and animals igni involved under this under this category under this heading um is dignity subjective is this a great weaknesses it's problematic I have to refer this to the issue of calibration in the social sciences in political science we actually talked a lot about calibrating the instrument to measure problem it sounds like medical science but it's not this is political science it was a hilarious example this recently when Donald Trump or Donald Trump's representatives I think this wasn't directly from done trumpet the politician Donald Trump complained that the tax forms the tack the the form see Phillip government were not calibrated to measure the wealth of someone as extremely wealthy as he is so he was suggesting that these these are set up to measure how much money middle-class people have but that once you're into millions of dollars they don't accurately reflect how wealthy he is now I've worked at the opposite extreme of calibration and the social sciences when I was in Cambodia I did social science research on poverty where we were calibrating our measurements just to investigate the difference between people who are extremely poor were desperately poor who were a little bit better off than that people who were poor uh you know like it stopped if you if you had enough money to own a motorcycle we didn't measure anything above that basically you know it was like are you are you so poor that when when you've had your leg cut off you can't afford to go to a hospital or you poor but you could borrow money from your family to go to the hospital in those circumstances we were looking at degrees of poverty way down on the on the scale and then you know once you were into someone even if it was a wooden house in a poverty-stricken communities the people who objectively maybe by United Nations standards who would be poor but they have a house with more than one bedroom made of wood maybe that house has no electricity but they have a motorcycle and they can drive that motorcycle to work even if their work is an incredibly poor job at a factory or working in a farmer's field or what have you a lot of farmers that part they go back and forth to the farm on their motorbike once you were above that point we were not measuring it anymore so calibration for how we measure and describe a problem Social Sciences it basically you know defines what you see and what you don't see right in Cambodia we were not measuring the upward mobility of middle-class people which would be another interesting question you could look at middle class people and wealthy people you could calibrate what you're studying to say well i'm interested in cambodia how do people who are wealthy or above a certain level how do they educate their children what kind of schools that you would be a totally different set of social science measurements this issue of dignity on the upper end of the scale if you are a human being living in Canada do you have more dignity if you get a job working at a nurse in a large hospital or in a small medical practice in a remote village in Canada that's a very different set of measurements for dignity right we're talking about the upper end of the scale calibrating we're measuring we're investigating what what is a better way for a human being in a hospital to die understood is there more dignity in giving them certain type of painkillers or in refusing to give them those painkillers and taking a different treatment options these are the upper you have to calibrate a different set of questions that task about dignity in that way in that mode but what I'm talking about with dignity in in this context in reference to veganism animal rights the future of this movement I think we have no problem at all calibrating the concept of dignity to question is it better for a whale to live in the ocean or to live in a swimming pool is it better for a dolphin to live and die in the wild free or to be captured put into a swimming pool and forced to perform tricks for human beings I don't think anyone watching this video said well gee I just don't know I just don't know how we would define dignity objectively to recognize the difference between you know a dolphin in SeaWorld or some other Park Marineland performing tricks to entering human beings and a dolphin that lives in the ocean that lives and dies in the ocean again with dignity we're not just talking about happiness and freedom when I example good things dolphin may starve to death dolphin may be killed by predators dolphin may live a miserable life and may die after only a few years in the in the wild and it might have a much longer life in captivity and it might you know get fed every day it's not going to struggle to find food I do not see how anyone sincerely can say at that at that low level we have trouble measuring or talking about dignity now certainly the debates in this channel have gotten into some gray areas where people say well you know what if it's a error in the wild and the bear breaks its leg if you leave the bear in the wild it's going to die even though it only has one broken leg if you rescue the bear whether to put it into a zoo or something else you know is that more of a life of dignity okay we can talk about that you know problem can we can have a philosophical debate about what the right thing to do is if a wild bear has broken its leg fine but let's be real the challenge we're all looking at in the next 200 years is convincing our fellow human beings to stop wearing leather boots out of a combination of vanity stupidity and traditionalism to stop murdering millions of animals on an unbelievable scale every day to stop exploiting the last of the world's resources to the point where all wild animals are endangered status a threat to disappear from earth except for rats any large mammal you can think of absolutely now requires you know the active intervention of government and concern people what governments donors like Bill Gates or what have you to prevent the last of their habitats from disappearing so to use the concept of dignity in this limited sense calibrated just to recognize yes you know there's a profound difference between when we as vegans look at a pig that has been castrated and that it's had its fangs torn out of its its heads or fang is not the correct term anyway um you know a pig that has been surgically modified so that it can be a house pet this is commonly done so-called pot-bellied pigs a breed created only to entertain human beings and they have to have their teeth torn out when they're still young they have to be castrated and then they have to have their will broken be trained be constantly handled in her ass try to get them to behave like a toy instead of behave like a free road ranging proud independent competitive assertive wild animal I have I just do not see how we can really say boy it's it's hard to see the difference in dignity between a wild boar living in the wild reproducing in the wild competing struggling to survive etc has a pack of other members of its species it has fealty to that pack it competes to mate it explores the wilderness it may starve to death it may it may die a long slow painful death eventually in its life but before it dies it at least has lived and it has lived in this sense on its own terms in a way that's appropriate for its own species yes in a capacity it's evolved for in an ecological niche it's evolved for in habitat it is evolved and adapted for the type of dignity we see in that in contrast to a pig that lives its entire life on a concrete floor in a steel cage so that it can have its throat cut and provide meat for human beings or a pig even rescued from those conditions to be turned into a house pet for the entertainment of human beings so again a lot of my discussion of this started by trying to alert my fellow vegans to the real ideological danger of fetishizing the cute piglet of taking the cute piglet as the symbol of what veganism is about as if the point of veganism was to say we love our house pets we love dogs and cats and now we want to extend that love to include all animals to include pigs to include dolphins where I'm saying no actually the moral baselines the most overused phrase and veganism no the moral baseline for me is not an animal that's been castrated defamed had its will broken and turned into a decoration your carpet my standard for how humans ought to treat animals is not how you personally may treat your dog that sleeps next to you while you watch television okay my standard is to say you know you look at a map you decide there's some area not because it's sacred this is not based on a religious fetishization of the wilderness it's not based on any kind of in this sense appeal to nature fallacy human being sit down they draw lines around a map and they say okay in that area it's illegal for a human being to shoot a bear it's illegal for a human being to cut down trees and for myriad reasons that ultimately our human reasons we are going to preserve the dignity of animals there that live and die on their own terms not for our expert and not for exploitation not for entertainment etc
don't learn from failing you learn from the study of failure whether that's the study of an historical event you had nothing to do with disasters of communism the failure of democracy and Cambodia Laos or failure is right in front your own eyes in your own lifetime for me I learned a lot from looking at the failure of the Green Party in Canada failure of different ecological movements if you're old enough you can really remember a time when people were promising simple technological progress and things like solar power we're going to transform the world that's one reason why the way by I'm very skeptical about this idea that fake meat that meat produced in a laboratory is going to change the world so quickly very often we have a scientific solution for things in principle but getting them into practice in the free market scaling them up making them economically viable that is another matter where decades and decades later you may have seen no progress but the promises of simple technological solutions for profound ecological problems back in the 1980s very very few of them have materialized in in any way but I'm aware I say an intro to this video I'm aware that my own practical philosophy of veganism my own political philosophy of ecology is in many ways influenced negatively it's influenced by the failure of so many other paradigms before in many ways you know the fact that the Green Party of Canada is a pathetic failure as if what's the end it simple to be positively in a sense because I've drawn lessons from that we've done got some interesting feedback within patreon those of you pay the one dollar you get a lot of value for your money I do record many of these videos in direct response to things viewers have said to me you pay the one dollar per month support me on patreon thank you for your patronage one of my viewers asked wouldn't it be better to use the word autonomy rather than the word dignity when I'm talking about wild animals what I'm talking about the wildlife management paradigm wildlife management approach to vegan we can't ecology in animal rights um first of all there's a shallow sense in which you can respond to this just about the meaning of words we do not talk about autonomy in death we talk about dignity in death right the reason why dignity is so useful is that you can have dignity in suffering and this is related to my rejection of utilitarianism is a video on that that again was a direct response to a patreon supporter someone who paid the one dollar send me that question that day the same day they signed up I recorded the video same to join the groups that was satisfying a little uh little interaction with one of the viewers i do not think the meaning of life for human beings is happiness I do not think the meaning of life for animals is happiness nor even that we can structure how we live as humans or how we how we treat animals in terms of the reduction of suffering the life of a wild animal they have infinitely more suffering than a domesticated animal but as I've said before recently I think that a lion in a sense deserves to live for five years in the wild ie if its natural lifespan this particular eyes happens the only five years five years perhaps of sorrow hunger struggling suffering ending eventually in death in the wild in a sense a lion deserves that life rather than being domesticated castrated forced to perform in a zoo or a circus rather than existing as a toy for human entertainment or as one of the accoutrement for human civilization now I use the word dignity in talking about that contrast of values I talk about the dignity of a lion that gets to live and die in the wild on its own terms and I do not talk about its autonomy know why is that again I've already sat down one reason you can talk about dignity in suffering you can talk about dignity and death in other words dignity very much exists despite the framework set up for us by the utilitarians um but there is no such thing as autonomy in death or autonomy and suffering and um finishing the comments about the the the meaning of the word before we get into a little a little bit of a deeper look at this issue the real meaning of autonomy etymologically and politically autonomy is the ability to make your own laws and I actually do not believe that animals in this sense on our world on planet Earth in this century will ever really be autonomous first of all that's not the point I mean the point isn't that Lions should make their own laws nor that wolves or bears make their own laws so the word autonomy starts become meaningless when you look at it that in that sense and you know politically that really is the meaning of autonomy within Canada how much autonomy does Quebec AB does Quebec have the freedom to make its own laws to to differ from the rest of Canada to differ from the federal government what have you in reality and one of the profound differences between the wildlife management paradigm the approach I talked about on this channel and anarchism is that I do not actually fetishize the wilderness I do not hold up the wild as some kind of transcendental ideal of something outside of independent from and superior to human society I do not regard wilderness as a religious value I do not regard it as something human beings aren't entitled to touch or manage on the contrary the reality that will we live in is that the only way for wild animals to survive now and in the next hundred years is for human beings to be actively engaged in wildlife management the site used this term so much what does wildlife management involve ultimately involves men with guns who are paid by taxpayers to defend the forest against other human beings who want to cut the trees down this is only one element of it but managing the populations of wild animals like bears involves very active human intervention all the time given the example if a bear leaves it's a sign habitat ultimately human beings have drawn a square on the map and said that's the forest we're going to preserve that's the area where wild bears are protected species where human beings don't hunt them where human beings are not allowed to cut down the trees but if their leaves that area if the bear for example wants to eat garbage from human homes wants to eat from a dump wants to go downtown in the city human beings hopefully will tranquilize the bear and relocate it back to the wilderness unfortunately reality very often we just shoot and kill the bear but let's be idealistic for a minute here so that is not autonomy in any sense right we're actually we're not talking about the autonomy of the wild animals we're not talking about reducing the suffering in the world i know i'm done with the happiness of all animals we're talking about a human-centered conspiracy if you like to try to allow these animals to live and die with dignity even if their lives are miserable not as our house pets not as entertainers in a zoo and and what have you now other viewers are think within patreon some of my other viewers have written to me saying that there is one book that agrees with me to some extent I think partly because my my approach fundamentally is human centered and it's even legal said it's based on the existence of the modern bureaucratic tax collecting state of not an anarchist and most of the people who agree with me up to a certain point they are vaguely vaguely an artistic anti-establishment vegans deep ecologists etc etc there's a book by a guy called Edward o Wilson called half earth our planets fight for life so the main title is just half earth and I believe the reason why some of my viewers think I have a lot in common with this guy is that he also says look fundamentally the challenge here is of human being sitting down with a map drawing a line and saying on one side of this line you're allowed to cut down the trees you're allowed to exploit the environment for profit for human use and on the other side of this line you can't it's illegal it's preserved its habitat conservation wildlife management etc now I have not read this book and I looked into buying a copy here in China it would cost me more than 40 US dollars to order it on paper and there is not available as an e-text it's not available as a digital book as a kindle book and it's only about 250 pages long so I'm going to with this video put in a request anyway especially if you're on patreon but anyone can have my email if you own a copy of this book and you're done with it you've already read it you want to get rid of it please email me I would like to arrange for someone to send me a copy of this because I can't justify the cost well Mira China and with anything you buy like that here in China it's possible it will never arrive you know like you can pay the money and it's just going to disappear in the mail so only do this if you've already read it and you're finished with the book I would be interested get a copy of that it may be I have nothing in common with a guy it's I think it's most likely i'll read it i'll agree with it up to a point but then i'll come on youtube and review it and complain that it doesn't talk enough about veganism and the difference between animal agriculture culture some of that but i am interested here anyone has some some views and come with me because certainly it's it's a very unusual approach to veganism animal rights ecology etc um so look dignity the fact that i use this word dignity at all many people criticize this very short comment here i'm going to read one of the viewers on YouTube comments dignity is only subjective how does want to objectively talk about our measure dignity I understand the concern whether it's philosophical political or what-have-you some people feel this is a great weakness in the web present my views here on YouTube that I talked about the dignity of animals and the dignity of human beings because I've said recently when it comes to drinking cow milk I both think this is beneath the dignity of a cow to be to live its life in captivity to produce milk for human consumption but I also think it's beneath the dignity of human beings I do not think it's dignified for human being to get down on their hands and knees and suck the milk out of a cow's breast um it doesn't matter if you take the milk out of the cows breasts and then put it in a bottle it doesn't fundamentally change things for me so to me their questions of both humans and animals igni involved under this under this category under this heading um is dignity subjective is this a great weaknesses it's problematic I have to refer this to the issue of calibration in the social sciences in political science we actually talked a lot about calibrating the instrument to measure problem it sounds like medical science but it's not this is political science it was a hilarious example this recently when Donald Trump or Donald Trump's representatives I think this wasn't directly from done trumpet the politician Donald Trump complained that the tax forms the tack the the form see Phillip government were not calibrated to measure the wealth of someone as extremely wealthy as he is so he was suggesting that these these are set up to measure how much money middle-class people have but that once you're into millions of dollars they don't accurately reflect how wealthy he is now I've worked at the opposite extreme of calibration and the social sciences when I was in Cambodia I did social science research on poverty where we were calibrating our measurements just to investigate the difference between people who are extremely poor were desperately poor who were a little bit better off than that people who were poor uh you know like it stopped if you if you had enough money to own a motorcycle we didn't measure anything above that basically you know it was like are you are you so poor that when when you've had your leg cut off you can't afford to go to a hospital or you poor but you could borrow money from your family to go to the hospital in those circumstances we were looking at degrees of poverty way down on the on the scale and then you know once you were into someone even if it was a wooden house in a poverty-stricken communities the people who objectively maybe by United Nations standards who would be poor but they have a house with more than one bedroom made of wood maybe that house has no electricity but they have a motorcycle and they can drive that motorcycle to work even if their work is an incredibly poor job at a factory or working in a farmer's field or what have you a lot of farmers that part they go back and forth to the farm on their motorbike once you were above that point we were not measuring it anymore so calibration for how we measure and describe a problem Social Sciences it basically you know defines what you see and what you don't see right in Cambodia we were not measuring the upward mobility of middle-class people which would be another interesting question you could look at middle class people and wealthy people you could calibrate what you're studying to say well i'm interested in cambodia how do people who are wealthy or above a certain level how do they educate their children what kind of schools that you would be a totally different set of social science measurements this issue of dignity on the upper end of the scale if you are a human being living in Canada do you have more dignity if you get a job working at a nurse in a large hospital or in a small medical practice in a remote village in Canada that's a very different set of measurements for dignity right we're talking about the upper end of the scale calibrating we're measuring we're investigating what what is a better way for a human being in a hospital to die understood is there more dignity in giving them certain type of painkillers or in refusing to give them those painkillers and taking a different treatment options these are the upper you have to calibrate a different set of questions that task about dignity in that way in that mode but what I'm talking about with dignity in in this context in reference to veganism animal rights the future of this movement I think we have no problem at all calibrating the concept of dignity to question is it better for a whale to live in the ocean or to live in a swimming pool is it better for a dolphin to live and die in the wild free or to be captured put into a swimming pool and forced to perform tricks for human beings I don't think anyone watching this video said well gee I just don't know I just don't know how we would define dignity objectively to recognize the difference between you know a dolphin in SeaWorld or some other Park Marineland performing tricks to entering human beings and a dolphin that lives in the ocean that lives and dies in the ocean again with dignity we're not just talking about happiness and freedom when I example good things dolphin may starve to death dolphin may be killed by predators dolphin may live a miserable life and may die after only a few years in the in the wild and it might have a much longer life in captivity and it might you know get fed every day it's not going to struggle to find food I do not see how anyone sincerely can say at that at that low level we have trouble measuring or talking about dignity now certainly the debates in this channel have gotten into some gray areas where people say well you know what if it's a error in the wild and the bear breaks its leg if you leave the bear in the wild it's going to die even though it only has one broken leg if you rescue the bear whether to put it into a zoo or something else you know is that more of a life of dignity okay we can talk about that you know problem can we can have a philosophical debate about what the right thing to do is if a wild bear has broken its leg fine but let's be real the challenge we're all looking at in the next 200 years is convincing our fellow human beings to stop wearing leather boots out of a combination of vanity stupidity and traditionalism to stop murdering millions of animals on an unbelievable scale every day to stop exploiting the last of the world's resources to the point where all wild animals are endangered status a threat to disappear from earth except for rats any large mammal you can think of absolutely now requires you know the active intervention of government and concern people what governments donors like Bill Gates or what have you to prevent the last of their habitats from disappearing so to use the concept of dignity in this limited sense calibrated just to recognize yes you know there's a profound difference between when we as vegans look at a pig that has been castrated and that it's had its fangs torn out of its its heads or fang is not the correct term anyway um you know a pig that has been surgically modified so that it can be a house pet this is commonly done so-called pot-bellied pigs a breed created only to entertain human beings and they have to have their teeth torn out when they're still young they have to be castrated and then they have to have their will broken be trained be constantly handled in her ass try to get them to behave like a toy instead of behave like a free road ranging proud independent competitive assertive wild animal I have I just do not see how we can really say boy it's it's hard to see the difference in dignity between a wild boar living in the wild reproducing in the wild competing struggling to survive etc has a pack of other members of its species it has fealty to that pack it competes to mate it explores the wilderness it may starve to death it may it may die a long slow painful death eventually in its life but before it dies it at least has lived and it has lived in this sense on its own terms in a way that's appropriate for its own species yes in a capacity it's evolved for in an ecological niche it's evolved for in habitat it is evolved and adapted for the type of dignity we see in that in contrast to a pig that lives its entire life on a concrete floor in a steel cage so that it can have its throat cut and provide meat for human beings or a pig even rescued from those conditions to be turned into a house pet for the entertainment of human beings so again a lot of my discussion of this started by trying to alert my fellow vegans to the real ideological danger of fetishizing the cute piglet of taking the cute piglet as the symbol of what veganism is about as if the point of veganism was to say we love our house pets we love dogs and cats and now we want to extend that love to include all animals to include pigs to include dolphins where I'm saying no actually the moral baselines the most overused phrase and veganism no the moral baseline for me is not an animal that's been castrated defamed had its will broken and turned into a decoration your carpet my standard for how humans ought to treat animals is not how you personally may treat your dog that sleeps next to you while you watch television okay my standard is to say you know you look at a map you decide there's some area not because it's sacred this is not based on a religious fetishization of the wilderness it's not based on any kind of in this sense appeal to nature fallacy human being sit down they draw lines around a map and they say okay in that area it's illegal for a human being to shoot a bear it's illegal for a human being to cut down trees and for myriad reasons that ultimately our human reasons we are going to preserve the dignity of animals there that live and die on their own terms not for our expert and not for exploitation not for entertainment etc