They don’t have a brain really and kinda just float there. Do they even feel pain?
At this time it is impossible to know if they feel pain. They’re a living creature.
It is impossible to know anything for sure. You can just go with what is the most plausible within our current knowledge. Jellyfish posses a very simple nervous system, even less complex than that of insects. Personally I don’t think it’s possible for them to suffer but since there is no reason to be cruel to them why should I endorse it?
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.”
If you care about brainless animals, you might as well care about plants.
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.
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 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
That’s no necessarily true. It’s like saying “society is a social construct”. But I think there are more arguments to see morality as an inevitable result of human nature.
A lot of Jelly fish are immortal? Just leave a few cells and wait for it to come back to life. Death-free food for the win
I mean, milk could also easily be death-free, but it’s not vegan. It’s also not suffering-free. So this suggestion kind of misses the point.
You think milking cows causes suffering?
Milk that we can buy in supermarkets is produced by special super breed cows that produce around 30000 liters (ca.8000 gallons) of milk per year. After 6 years these animals die out of complete exhaustion or as soon as they don’t produce enough milk anymore. Their udder are so big they can barely move, due to the frequent milking they are also usually infected (yummy goo, goes straight into the milk- luckily it’s boiled)
If you ever talked to woman that is breast feeding, you probably found out how exhausting it is to produce a highly nutritious food for a new born.
Yes milking cows for mass producing milk is animal abuse and it is really hard to find milk that is not produced in this way. I am telling you this as a person who isn’t vegan or vegetarian. I think that veganism is the way to go, eating animal products is shit, there is no way to produce them in a “good” way for 7billion people. I am just too weak.
I’d say when it comes to veganism it’s basically up to what you personally want to eat. I personally have no moral quandary with eating animals but if you do, I wouldn’t call you a hypocrite for eating jellyfish. Plants feel pain too, in a similar way, I could see it being justified. Taxonomy shouldn’t decide your morality.
Plants do not feel pain as in the way pain is understood. People who claim that plants feel pain interpret the reaction to stimuli as feelings, but that’s not the same thing as having a feeling.
Of course there could always be something that we do not know about yet, but up until now there really is no indication that suffering is something plants experience in any way. The same way you could claim fire feels pain since it also reacts to stimuli, connects with other fire, even procreates, eats and dies.
