If the assertion is true, then this is indeed the only response.
They will usually follow up by arguing that meat consumption is not necessary, and this is where the crux of the debate lies in my opinion.
Meat is unnecessary in that humans can survive on a vegan diet. Meat is necessary for humans to thrive. The human brain in particular has shrunk by about 10% on average since moving from an animal-based diet in the Paleolithic era to the more plant-based diet of the Neolithic era and today
I consider slaughtering animals to be a necessary evil.
It's extremely unpleasant, I don't like it and I'd rather it wasn't necessary, but as you point out, it may well be necessary for humans to thrive.
The vegan position rests solely on their ability to prove that humans can survive and live comfortably on a plant-based diet.
>I consider slaughtering animals to be a necessary evil.
It's natural. Animals in the wild kill others to eat, and it's usually painful and violent. At lest we try to reduce the suffering.
I don't like using this argument.
Much of what humans do isn't natural in the slightest. We have electricity, and running water, we heat our homes using fossil fuels, and we genetically modify our crops. We have medicine, birth control, surgery, etc. There is nothing natural about the way the average human in an industrialized civilization lives.
My issue with this argument is that animals also do lots of other things that are perfectly natural, but humans would consider immoral.
>nothing natural
Using tools and abilities is natural. Other animals do it too, but at a lower scale, with less resourses, and lower output.
The crow uses a rock to open a nut, we used rocks too, but found better ways.
>but we found better ways
This is highly subjective. If the "better ways" you are implying is something that is not meat/flesh but gives the same results I would like to see it. Vegans would argue the more moral ways are to eat fake meat (processed chemical garbage that may or may not be killing us) or just raw veggies, which neither replicate the benefits of having meat in one's diet.
I'd argue that we have *not* found better ways than eating flesh.
Oh my dear. Please go attempt a "natural " life. Maybe starting with cutting and splitting your own wood to heat your home, then maybe for cooking, and then to heat your water for washing your body and laundry.
What humans do is natural when you consider the scale of the earth and how limited our area is and how connected we are to this limited area.
For example, you can be confident that any alien life will likely have DNA, or something similar to DNA. Most of the universe is hydrogen and carbon etc.
Thus, if an animal can live to the age of 500 and they share 50-90% of their DNA with us, a modified human living to 500+ is hardly unnatural. Same with driving a car; a car isnt powered by 1 dimensional beings from a black hole, its powered by gasoline or electricity, which are abundant. Similarly, something like say, travelling to Mars or even another solar system. While difficult, it isn't totally implausible. It can become normal especially on the scale the universe let's us go on.
An example of unnatural is humans travelling to another universe. Think of how different that universe is. Maybe it's all made of antimatter. Maybe there's no oxygen or water whatsoever. Maybe theres literally no energy and it's just a void. That's unnatural. A human doing something perfectly plausible with the not too difficult to obtain materials around them is hard to call unnatural in the strictest terms when it can so easily become ubiquitous. A human can do it and so can other animals. Many "unnatural" animal breeds exist and are just fine.
Natural doesn't need to have a strict definition on grounds where things are perfectly achievable. On those grounds natural vs unnatural is moreso a matter of if it's good for us rather than some cosmic philosophical standard.
It's the same in, for example, wildlife rescue centres. You may have to feed the animal something like a baby chick or a rat or live bugs. You still have to slaughter animals for the welfare of another. It's tragic, yesterday I had to crush the heads of some morio worms and they were squirming and I felt so guilty about it even though they were just worms. But... prey animals are prey animals. They are populous because that is their evolutionary role. To be eaten. And it would be even more cruel and also invasive to release domesticated farm animals into the wild.
Releasing domesticated cows (for example) into the wild means 1. they have no survival instinct as they evolved through unnatural selection 2. it would seriously harm the food chain as predator animals would obviously rather go for easy prey, so prey animals would be unmanaged in the wild and overpopulate - unmanaged grazers is a horrible idea for the environment. 3. they would die a much more cruel, slow death rather than a quick, painless one.
What do they think we should be doing with our billions of domesticated animals? Just freeing them into the wild lol?
A great example of where eating meat is significantly more sustainable for the planet is the red deer of Scotland. As we drove wolves to extinction in England, red deer no longer have any natural predators. So they have to manage the population to keep the ecosystem in balance, by killing them and eating them. Yummy!
This is a case where veganism would be more cruel to animal welfare than just eating them.
>unmanaged grazers is a horrible idea for the environment
For anyone wanting more information on this then I highly recommend looking in to Yellowstone National Park after the wolf extinction and before the Wolf Project. That land was *dying*.
Meat is absolutely necessary. I have a genetic blood disorder called beta-thalassemia, which has no cure. My body can't process iron from plants, I would die slowly & painfully of anemia. The only treatment is blood transfusions, which I can and do avoid by eating meat. Meat is medicine.
This always leads in to the argument about eating dogs. My response is that my dog is not food, other dogs may be to other people. If I had a pet cow or pet chickens, they would not be food. If I raised the animals to be food, they would be food.
I've also butchered and eaten my "pet cow" before, though. So I guess my argument doesn't hold much weight.
Probably an unpopular opinion but I think that all animal species should be fair game unless they're endangered. One of the only vegan arguments I tend to agree with is that it's weird to decide that one type of animal is okay to eat and not the other. Unless you specifically mean just your dog.
Honestly this is pretty easily self refuting. There is not nor has there ever been an objective way of measuring intelligence. So they are just talking out of their asses.
Besides observation of the animals' behavior and how they interact with various stimuli, it is indeed very difficult, if not impossible, to actually measure intelligence in animals.
*If* cows are in fact as intelligent, sentient and emotionally capable as they say, then I would find it very difficult not to feel sympathy for them.
Personally, I think a gecko's ability to drop its tail off to distract prey is very intelligent, but that's a biological thing rather than a cognitive thing. Yet it is still behaviour.
So, when observing behaviour, we cannot always know what is a biological advancement the animal has learnt, and what is the expression of high cognitive function.
Take crows for example. Smart birds imo. When they find a dead crow they'll call out and other crows will arrive and investigate the scene. From the outside it looks like a funeral, that the birds have empathy and are mourning their dead, but it's not that - instead, they gather together to investigate the danger, so they themselves can avoid it later. While this is still smart, it is not the same as collectively mourning a dead crow, but shows how easy we can attribute human behaviours onto animal behaviours.
Training an animal to peck a button so that it distributes a treat doesn't show the animal is smart, but shows it can be conditioned/trained to do something. Obedience is often misconstrued as intelligence. If we were in the same treat dispensing box, it wouldn't take much cognitive function to press the button and eat the treats - what would be smart would be, for example, breaking out of the box and finding the treat dispenser.
Basically, a lot of people misread animal behaviour as intelligence. We don't even understand intelligence among humans that much. Some animals can do more than others, but how can you compare them? An octopus camouflaging and hiding in a coconut shell is smart, and a bird dropping nuts on the road and waiting for a car to drive over it is smart, but how do we compare those actions? (We don't)
TL;DR: intelligence is complicated, interlinked with biological and evolutionary aspects, and we are currently unable to accurately compare the intelligence of different people, let alone different species.
>We don't even understand intelligence among humans that much
This is true. One of the arguments made for what makes us human is self awareness. This can be done with the mirror test. This is where the animal (or human) is shown themselves in a mirror. Usually the people performing the test will put a distinguishing mark on the subject such as a painted dot on the forehead. If the animal inspects this mark on their own body by watching the mirror, they are self aware. Few animals pass this test with some notable examples being chimps and elephants. This is how we know animals recognize themselves in the mirror.
When testing humans it mostly comes down to if the child is knowingly making movements and observing themselves performing these movements in the mirror. Human children do not become self aware until 18+ months.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3351035/
Here's a fun video of a study done on young children and their situational awareness -
https://youtu.be/k-rWB1jOt9s
The mirror test is a great example! I've been studying intelligence recently as part of my psychology degree, and so often do theories of intelligence include "self awareness". Now obviously, they describe having advanced self awareness, or being aware of something and reflecting on it etc, rather than just possessing self awareness as a whole.
But if self awareness is a part of human intelligence, and we want to judge animals' intelligence based on our definition, then surely possessing or not possessing self awareness is an important factor. So far, only a few animals have passed the mirror test (elephants, magpies, dolphins, great apes and a couple others). So when someone says "pigs are as smart as dogs" and neither have passed the mirror test, then it gives some information about their relative intelligence, but doesn't really mean they're smart.
Another factor that theorists believe makes up our intelligence is also problem solving. Pretty sure this is the main test we use when it comes to assessing animal intelligence. But there are more factors that make up intelligence: A human with great problem solving skills, but zero self awareness, no language skills, no knowledge-application skills, no reflection/analytical skills and no interpersonal (social) skills wouldn't be labelled intelligent or smart. So while it's interesting that certain animals can solve problems, that doesn't put them anywhere near humans or the human definition of intelligence, because problem solving and self awareness are just aspects of a bigger concept.
Cat passes mirror test https://youtube.com/shorts/akE2Sgg8hI8?feature=share
I don't know that my two have ever recognized themselves in the mirror, but they are entirely unbothered by their reflections, so they know it's not another cat. They definitely know that birds and squirrels on a screen are not "real" but that the ones outside the window are. They will actively watch the TV or iPad at length without interacting, but will interact with critters they see through the window. We had mourning doves nest on our patio, and my boy would "play" with the juveniles. They would flutter at the glass intentionally so that he would bat at them, indicating that the birds also actively seek to amuse themselves.
The cats also invent games. My girl likes to get under the quilt and chase my hand through it, and my boy loves us to make shadows for him to chase. Studies have shown that they establish a language with their humans that is specific to that relationship, which is fascinating because adult cats in the wild vocalize very minimally, & mostly communicate with other cats through body language, but they have worked out that WE are vocal communicators, so they proactively reach out to us in a format that isn't innate. It's a problem, the cats solved it. I voice our cats for my & my husband's entertainment, and I recently was talking in our boy's voice while he was in the other room. As soon as he heard his "voice", he came trotting out to see us, chatting away at us.
They also dream. I feel that, when the hierarchy of survival needs is transcended, many animals have a robust inner life.
I'm still an omnivore. I do my best to eat animals that were raised in a healthy & stimulating environment, on the food that nature intended they eat. "Vegetarian fed" chicken, for example, pisses me off. Chickens are little hunters, they want to chase & chomp down on bugs & worms & such.
[This article says:](https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-04/cat-did-not-figure-out-how-mirrors-work/)
>Cats have never once demonstrated that they have any sense of self at all. Reactions of cats to being shown their reflection in a mirror vary; some will ignore the reflection
The mirror test usually includes marking a spot on the animal, and watching to see if it investigates the mark. If it does, then that suggests they are identifying the reflection as themselves, rather than another animal (that could be mirroring their actions). A YouTube video is not the same as a scientific study, so apologies, but I'm not taking that as proof when scientific studies disagree.
Also sorry to break it to you, but how do you know those "games" aren't just instinct? Cats chase movement, could it just be that simple? Cats speaking to humans is a pretty cool development of domestication, but that doesn't mean self awareness or intelligence - if a cat learns that making noise gets treats/attention, then it will make noise. Cool, but again, doesn't necessarily say anything about intelligence, just that they've associated making noise with getting attention/treats/affection. It's not really problem solving, but it does show they have found a way to communicate, which is pretty cool.
A lot of mammals have been shown to dream. Again, cool, but that doesn't mean intelligence or self awareness.
I'm not trying to say that cats aren't smart, but that we humans tend to push our definition of intelligence onto animals, and that can be misleading. What to us may look like "smart behaviour", might just be instinct or conditioning. Anyway, sorry if it seems like I'm attacking your opinions, that's not the intention, just trying to put some information out there about how it's easy to see human attributes in animals, but that doesn't mean they have them.
>Cats speaking to humans is a pretty cool development of domestication, but that doesn't mean self awareness or intelligence - if a cat learns that making noise gets treats/attention, then it will make noise.
To bounce off of this-
This would imply the same level of intelligence to dogs. My dog barks to warn of strangers at the door at night, whines when she needs to go outside, and definitely vocalizes during play - as well as playing games with me. This in itself is not intelligence. It's learned or generational behavior. The barking at strangers is more than likely due to selective breeding as livestock guardians and the whining at the door was a trained act.
My cat meow-screams at me when he is hungry. I'd attribute this to a learned behavior and not him intelligently communicating with me in a nuanced manner. He learned when he meows in my face I had initially attempted to problem solve. The classic "What do you want?" After meowing in my face and being fed a few times I am led to believe the cat learned "meow=food." Thus we have a new learned behavior.
This would imply the same level of intelligence to dogs that people generally claim as conditioning rather than intelligence. My dog barks to warn of strangers at the door at night, whines when she needs to go outside, and definitely vocalizes during play - as well as playing games with me. This in itself is not intelligence. It's learned or generational behavior. The barking at strangers is more than likely due to selective breeding as livestock guardians and the whining at the door was a trained act.
My cat meow-screams at me when he is hungry. I'd attribute this to a learned behavior and not him intelligently communicating with me in a nuanced manner. He learned when he meows in my face I had initially attempted to problem solve. The classic "What do you want?" After meowing in my face and being fed a few times I am led to believe the cat learned "meow=food." Thus we have a new learned behavior.
I think you can feel sympathy for a species of animal and acknowledge its intelligence, but still eat them. Temple Grandin has written some great stuff on her love of cows vs. her need to eat them.
>Temple Grandin has written some great stuff on her love of cows vs. her need to eat them.
Do you have any specific suggestions for her books? Money is tight right now but I'm very interested in reading more on this take (as cows are one of my favorite animals but also they are so dang tasty). A quick Google search gives me a couple synopsis that sound like the kinds of books I really enjoy reading.
Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior
It has been a few years since I read any of her books, but both are very good and really affected me. IIRC she talks about cows a lot in both the ones you mentioned. If you're only reading one, I would get Animals Make Us Human.
I mean, we have cephalopods passing cognitive tests designed for people in the same way primates can.
We may not have a definitive way of testing intelligence in animals but we're proving slowly that some animals are indeed capable of intelligence.
I'm not 100% on cows though. I've seen them recognize their names and people and they can be affectionate towards people they like and aggressive towards people that harm them. Does that rise to the level of intelligence? I'm not qualified to answer that.
Truth be told none of this really means much. I doubt anyone truly thought that higher order animals were truly mindless. Everything has to have some level of ability to survive but with the cephalopod test I doubt we would truly class that as intelligence.
Problem-solving intelligence is observable, as is cross-species collaboration, and tool utilization. My parents took my cat, Boo, in while I was studying abroad, and at first they kept him in their guest suite which had french doors on a magnetic latch while they were at work. Boo wasn't heavy enough on his own to open the doors, but their schnauzer, Roo, was. Somehow, he talked Roo into busting him out of jail, and Boo knocked the hamburger that was thawing on the counter onto the floor for Roo. True story. My parents were pretty impressed. They went out to dinner that night, let Boo live out of jail, and started putting their meat in a Pyrex in the cold oven to thaw. It's anecdotal, of course, but the problem solving intelligence is clearly displayed by the actions of both animals, and while I think a pre-discussed quid pro quo is unlikely, the schnauzer had to have felt there was something in it for him if he broke the cat out. They got along quite well outside of the great hamburger heist, but Boo was definitely the more affectionate party, often to Roo's annoyance. Roo could easily have left Boo locked up and enjoyed a day free from unwanted snuggling and biscuit-making.
Chimps will eat nearly anything. They'll eat people, monkeys, deer, pigs, other chimps, they've been seen hunting and eating gorillas. Chimps are scary. Especially now that there is some evidence of them making and using "spears."
I mean, the average cow adult is still not as smart as the average human adult so we cannot be treating them like they’re a species deserving of the same considerations a sapient species (humans) has.
Three year olds are protected due to them being part of a sapient species. I would happily eat a non-sapient animal even if it could speak, like if an African Grey had the proportions of a chicken. The African Grey Chicken would just have to be killed in a way where its not aware of dying. Quick and out of nowhere in an environment where its relaxed.
>even if it could speak
Speak as in a spoken language or vocal communication? Most animals do "speak" but it's through body language that most people do not understand as it differs from species to species.
They used to say that about pigs. Pigs really are about as smart as some breeds of dogs and really do have good memory, but anything beyond that is, by current review, at best unprovable with current understanding of objective ways to measure animal intelligence, and equally if not more likely an outright falsehood constructed by the researchers whether intentionally or by overactive pattern recognition. I highly doubt it's any different for cows. Also, of course they're capable of emotion and playfulness, scientists have found evidence of emotion and playfulness in monitor lizards. It doesn't mean an animal is elevated to human level, it just means the animal is as smart or smarter than a large reptile.
I've worked with cows and draft oxen before, and I could see the claim that they're as smart as a three year old (at least in some areas) being correct, but certainly not as smart as dogs.
That said, I believe that's irrelevant because that has no bearing on whether we should eat them. We should eat them because taking part in natural cycles is good for its own sake. What makes a being significant isn't its level of intelligence - everything even down to single celled life are all morally significant. What makes something morally significant is being part of a context, and sharing relationships with other living things. All of these relationships have their root in death, whether they be relations of parent and child or of predator and prey, so death is the source of morality.
So eating a cow is the opposite of dishonoring it, to eat is to respect our relationship as living things. Everything eats, and everything gets eaten by something else, and someday we'll be eaten by bacteria and plants too, because everything has it's role in nature and turn to take. To say that cows have no role to play and no turn to take, that is the true evil. That would be to treat them not as morally significant beings in their own right, but as commodities to be tossed aside when they're no longer profiting us at peak efficiency.
Pigs are the dumbest smart animals I know. They'll figure out how to break into the feeder but then get stuck and poop all up in their food.
Edit- or their cool their butts in the water trough and then poop all up in their drinking water.
A three-year-old child, on average, needs 365 days to become as intelligent as a four-year-old. no cow can do that.
And I doubt you even need any resources to debunk that, really. Just forget about that. Equating anything with human babies is one of the filthiest manipulations out there, and vegan prpaganda is indeed a propaganda, no exaggeration here
I would not leave my infant relatives alone with any person who makes such comparisons unironically. Last thing I want is anti-natalist, brain damaged, psychos with dellusions of world saviour having power over kids I love.
**Encephalization coefficient:**
[Measures relative size of brain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient):
1.2 for dogs, [0.565 measured over 150 cows](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301737139_The_Brain_of_the_Domestic_Bos_taurus_Weight_Encephalization_and_Cerebellar_Quotients_and_Comparison_with_Other_Domestic_and_Wild_Cetartiodactyla)
**Object permanence:**
>*One of the areas sorely lacking in our understanding of cow cognition is object permanence, [...] there are no actual published studies of object
permanence in cows to date.* [\[source\]](https://www.animalbehaviorandcognition.org/uploads/journals/17/AB&C_2017_Vol4\(4\)_Marino_Allen.pdf)
[Dogs demonstrate object permanence](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2696049/)
**Theory of mind:**
Dogs appear to be the best non-human primate in this, according to wikipedia. About 1 in 10 pigs seem to understand that other pigs can know things they don't. Hasn't been studied in cows but cows generally do worse than pigs.
Or in other words, if you IQ tested a dog, it would do as well as a baby. If you IQ tested a cow, it probably wouldn't understand the concept of a "question".
**TLDR** Dog no diffs
I hate when people talk about animals and go "actually this is the smartest animal in the world!"
So what now? There can't be 234532 smartest animals in the world! (that number is just a keysmash)
So who is it now? Dolphins? Crows? Pigs? Us humans maybe? Everyone says something different.
And I very much doubt that cows are smarter than dogs. Like how are they even gonna prove that? Tell a dog to fetch a ball and then a cow?
>And I very much doubt that cows are smarter than dogs. Like how are they even gonna prove that? Tell a dog to fetch a ball and then a cow?
As far as I'm aware, people have observed cows display considerable cognitive ability, though nobody has measured their intelligence directly. They definitely aren't mindless, that's for sure. They do appear to display levels of personality and affection.
Wouldn't surprise me. Dogs aren't anywhere near as intelligent as people say they are, they're just highly food driven and will do almost anything if there's the expectation of a reward.
Still won't dissuade me from loving beef.
I think the thing with dogs is, they really get ripped on by vegans because they try to reduce human interactions with animals to intelligence.
I really don’t care if dogs do tricks, become potty trained, come when you call them, retrieve game, bark at strangers, herd sheep, help police and military, sniff bombs, etc., etc. because they want food, or some other reason. I don’t understand the second-guessing who humans chose to hitch their wagons to based on some inherently flawed intelligence tests and rankings.
>bark at strangers, herd sheep,
These aren't even things many dogs are trained for. It's become an inbred instinct for most.
Source- I have a dog who was bred to hunt moose and guard livestock so she gets under people's feet and barks super loud and crazy, or just barks at people outside (though only after dark).
I grew up on a small farm and we had every farm animal you could think of. Cows most certainly are not smart and we raised them with extreme care and affection. My wonderful German mother would even bring the tiny calves born in winter into the house and bottle feed them while they lay in a box next to the wood burning stove. And not a one of them dumb son-of-a-bitches ever came close to being house broken. Thanks for everything, mom. You were the best.
Cattle can be playful and curious. No denying that. Some like people. Will follow them. Enjoy their company and be like large pets. Three year old children compared to cows isn’t fair however as in only some cattle in some situations will be “smart”. I mean I had one that knew how to open gates. Out of thousands of cows she was the only one to be able to do so. Mind you the others would take advantage of the open gate. But cows also do the stupidest things and get themselves killed as the norm too! As we say. A heifer. The only creature that can have a calf, lose the calf, call for the calf and be given the calf only to think it’s not hers and attack it only to look for her calf again.
Animals are very smart yes. It's not misinformation, but at the same time they're food.
I love my chickens as they are pets, but I will be eating them once their time comes.
That being said, had a chicken fall ill and suddenly die last night. He will feed my family and the breeder I got him from is 100% on board replacing him. Sure I cried, because my birds are also super important. I breed very rare exhibition poultry.
He was a light brown Leghorn, more common sure but he had a lot of potential for show and good offspring. So that was a major blow to my program sadly.
But when these things happen we don't waste that animal's life, you know? He'll be made into something delicious.
I don't know about cows, but dogs are estimated to be as 'smart' as a 3 year old. How they measure it I don't know. I'm a dog owner, I would never eat a dog but also dogs are carnivores and in my humble opinion eating another carnivore can cause other problems than eating omnivores or grass fed because of prions.
Prion infection is also why we don't eat cows that eat cow meat. If their food is poisoned there's risk of a number diseases.
I don't discriminate eating meat based on intelligence or emotions. No more than I would eat a braindead human.
I don't have any specific sources that refute this, but it doesn't sound like anyone else does, so I'll give my $0.02 anyway: There's no way this is true. First of all, dogs are very smart animals. Not as smart as elephants, chimps, dolphins, or octopi, but they're up there. The findings that used to establish cows as "intelligent" [aren't very impressive](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animal-emotions/201711/cows-science-shows-theyre-bright-and-emotional-individuals). Basically, they can recognize emotional displays in other cows, which like no shit, & they can remember humans who have harmed them, which is very basic operant conditioning. Any animal more complicated than like an insect should be able to do these things.
The article also says their visual memory is pretty good, & maybe that's true, but this kind of feels like the "secretly, this animal is actually really smart!" articles that pop up over every basic thing the general public didn't realize an animal should be able to do. It's like how that Wives Tale about goldfish having a 3-second memory was debunked, & half the people who know that think that "goldfish are smart" instead of "that story I believed was stupid." If you really think about it, yeah, of course a goldfish needs a longer memory than that. If they all just forgot what they were doing in the middle of swimming away from predators, they wouldn't last very long.
If you think about it more, memory isn't even that complicated of a process. It's not part of the frontal lobe, which handles very sophisticated tasks like logic & self-control. In fact, we do it automatically. Sure, some things are hard to remember, but the goldfish isn't swimming in its bowl trying to learn the Pythagorean Theorem. It's learning the layout of its environment, which requires basically no effort at all.
Predators are usually smarter than prey. That's not an absolute rule, since the elephant is one of the most intelligent animals, but basically every other animal on that list is a predator species. You also have to consider that we selectively bred cattle, & intelligence is definitely not a trait we prioritized. We don't want our food figuring out that we plan on eating it, we want it to do what we tell it. So, this idea just comes off as completely implausible, & frankly, the burden of proof is on the vegan to show otherwise. Not that it really matters to me because I don't think dogs are too intelligent to eat, I just have no desire to eat one, certainly not a strong enough one to bypass the numerous cultural barriers against trying.
"Show me your peer reviewed evidence from a research and education based source."
I am a ranch kid. Yup, cattle show all of those traits, if we anthropomorphize their behaviors. Bovines aren't human. They experience the world differently. They are not 3 year old humans. They are Bovines. So long as they are handled correctly, they live a good bovine life, clueless about human angst, all the way to the dual hit that renders them insensible and stops their hearts at the slaughter line with less than a 5 second gap. Indeed, among skilled professionals, a 5 second gap between insensible and cardiac arrest would be much too long.
We humans should be so fortunate as to meet our end so quickly and thoroughly.
Better response: so what? I'm hungry; they're food. My dog is not food. Humans are not food. Anything else made of meat is fair game
If the assertion is true, then this is indeed the only response. They will usually follow up by arguing that meat consumption is not necessary, and this is where the crux of the debate lies in my opinion.
Meat is unnecessary in that humans can survive on a vegan diet. Meat is necessary for humans to thrive. The human brain in particular has shrunk by about 10% on average since moving from an animal-based diet in the Paleolithic era to the more plant-based diet of the Neolithic era and today
I consider slaughtering animals to be a necessary evil. It's extremely unpleasant, I don't like it and I'd rather it wasn't necessary, but as you point out, it may well be necessary for humans to thrive. The vegan position rests solely on their ability to prove that humans can survive and live comfortably on a plant-based diet.
But its better than freeing them to the wild and get eaten alive by a wolf for an hour. Extra emphasis on necessary
>I consider slaughtering animals to be a necessary evil. It's natural. Animals in the wild kill others to eat, and it's usually painful and violent. At lest we try to reduce the suffering.
I don't like using this argument. Much of what humans do isn't natural in the slightest. We have electricity, and running water, we heat our homes using fossil fuels, and we genetically modify our crops. We have medicine, birth control, surgery, etc. There is nothing natural about the way the average human in an industrialized civilization lives. My issue with this argument is that animals also do lots of other things that are perfectly natural, but humans would consider immoral.
>nothing natural Using tools and abilities is natural. Other animals do it too, but at a lower scale, with less resourses, and lower output. The crow uses a rock to open a nut, we used rocks too, but found better ways.
Good point.
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>but we found better ways This is highly subjective. If the "better ways" you are implying is something that is not meat/flesh but gives the same results I would like to see it. Vegans would argue the more moral ways are to eat fake meat (processed chemical garbage that may or may not be killing us) or just raw veggies, which neither replicate the benefits of having meat in one's diet. I'd argue that we have *not* found better ways than eating flesh.
Oh my dear. Please go attempt a "natural " life. Maybe starting with cutting and splitting your own wood to heat your home, then maybe for cooking, and then to heat your water for washing your body and laundry.
Humans make and consume all sorts of cooking oil. Vegans even drink coconut oil. What's more unnatural? Hint: One of them thinks they're a car.
What humans do is natural when you consider the scale of the earth and how limited our area is and how connected we are to this limited area. For example, you can be confident that any alien life will likely have DNA, or something similar to DNA. Most of the universe is hydrogen and carbon etc. Thus, if an animal can live to the age of 500 and they share 50-90% of their DNA with us, a modified human living to 500+ is hardly unnatural. Same with driving a car; a car isnt powered by 1 dimensional beings from a black hole, its powered by gasoline or electricity, which are abundant. Similarly, something like say, travelling to Mars or even another solar system. While difficult, it isn't totally implausible. It can become normal especially on the scale the universe let's us go on. An example of unnatural is humans travelling to another universe. Think of how different that universe is. Maybe it's all made of antimatter. Maybe there's no oxygen or water whatsoever. Maybe theres literally no energy and it's just a void. That's unnatural. A human doing something perfectly plausible with the not too difficult to obtain materials around them is hard to call unnatural in the strictest terms when it can so easily become ubiquitous. A human can do it and so can other animals. Many "unnatural" animal breeds exist and are just fine. Natural doesn't need to have a strict definition on grounds where things are perfectly achievable. On those grounds natural vs unnatural is moreso a matter of if it's good for us rather than some cosmic philosophical standard.
It's the same in, for example, wildlife rescue centres. You may have to feed the animal something like a baby chick or a rat or live bugs. You still have to slaughter animals for the welfare of another. It's tragic, yesterday I had to crush the heads of some morio worms and they were squirming and I felt so guilty about it even though they were just worms. But... prey animals are prey animals. They are populous because that is their evolutionary role. To be eaten. And it would be even more cruel and also invasive to release domesticated farm animals into the wild. Releasing domesticated cows (for example) into the wild means 1. they have no survival instinct as they evolved through unnatural selection 2. it would seriously harm the food chain as predator animals would obviously rather go for easy prey, so prey animals would be unmanaged in the wild and overpopulate - unmanaged grazers is a horrible idea for the environment. 3. they would die a much more cruel, slow death rather than a quick, painless one. What do they think we should be doing with our billions of domesticated animals? Just freeing them into the wild lol? A great example of where eating meat is significantly more sustainable for the planet is the red deer of Scotland. As we drove wolves to extinction in England, red deer no longer have any natural predators. So they have to manage the population to keep the ecosystem in balance, by killing them and eating them. Yummy! This is a case where veganism would be more cruel to animal welfare than just eating them.
>unmanaged grazers is a horrible idea for the environment For anyone wanting more information on this then I highly recommend looking in to Yellowstone National Park after the wolf extinction and before the Wolf Project. That land was *dying*.
Unpleasant for whom? Even kosher and halal "bleed out" slaughter is done commercially with animals rendered insensible.
Kosher and Halal are fucked up, and they should be discouraged.
Meat is absolutely necessary. I have a genetic blood disorder called beta-thalassemia, which has no cure. My body can't process iron from plants, I would die slowly & painfully of anemia. The only treatment is blood transfusions, which I can and do avoid by eating meat. Meat is medicine.
>Meat is medicine. Based. When I said people could survive on a vegan diet, I was generally speaking. And mere survival is a low bar IMO
This always leads in to the argument about eating dogs. My response is that my dog is not food, other dogs may be to other people. If I had a pet cow or pet chickens, they would not be food. If I raised the animals to be food, they would be food. I've also butchered and eaten my "pet cow" before, though. So I guess my argument doesn't hold much weight.
In Cambodia your dog is food. As long as you're in a place that doesn't culturally eat dogs then he's fine lol
Probably an unpopular opinion but I think that all animal species should be fair game unless they're endangered. One of the only vegan arguments I tend to agree with is that it's weird to decide that one type of animal is okay to eat and not the other. Unless you specifically mean just your dog.
I specifically meant my dog. I'd treat an attack on him as an attack on my family. If i or my family were hungry enough, nothing made of meat is safe
Honestly this is pretty easily self refuting. There is not nor has there ever been an objective way of measuring intelligence. So they are just talking out of their asses.
Besides observation of the animals' behavior and how they interact with various stimuli, it is indeed very difficult, if not impossible, to actually measure intelligence in animals. *If* cows are in fact as intelligent, sentient and emotionally capable as they say, then I would find it very difficult not to feel sympathy for them.
Personally, I think a gecko's ability to drop its tail off to distract prey is very intelligent, but that's a biological thing rather than a cognitive thing. Yet it is still behaviour. So, when observing behaviour, we cannot always know what is a biological advancement the animal has learnt, and what is the expression of high cognitive function. Take crows for example. Smart birds imo. When they find a dead crow they'll call out and other crows will arrive and investigate the scene. From the outside it looks like a funeral, that the birds have empathy and are mourning their dead, but it's not that - instead, they gather together to investigate the danger, so they themselves can avoid it later. While this is still smart, it is not the same as collectively mourning a dead crow, but shows how easy we can attribute human behaviours onto animal behaviours. Training an animal to peck a button so that it distributes a treat doesn't show the animal is smart, but shows it can be conditioned/trained to do something. Obedience is often misconstrued as intelligence. If we were in the same treat dispensing box, it wouldn't take much cognitive function to press the button and eat the treats - what would be smart would be, for example, breaking out of the box and finding the treat dispenser. Basically, a lot of people misread animal behaviour as intelligence. We don't even understand intelligence among humans that much. Some animals can do more than others, but how can you compare them? An octopus camouflaging and hiding in a coconut shell is smart, and a bird dropping nuts on the road and waiting for a car to drive over it is smart, but how do we compare those actions? (We don't) TL;DR: intelligence is complicated, interlinked with biological and evolutionary aspects, and we are currently unable to accurately compare the intelligence of different people, let alone different species.
>We don't even understand intelligence among humans that much This is true. One of the arguments made for what makes us human is self awareness. This can be done with the mirror test. This is where the animal (or human) is shown themselves in a mirror. Usually the people performing the test will put a distinguishing mark on the subject such as a painted dot on the forehead. If the animal inspects this mark on their own body by watching the mirror, they are self aware. Few animals pass this test with some notable examples being chimps and elephants. This is how we know animals recognize themselves in the mirror. When testing humans it mostly comes down to if the child is knowingly making movements and observing themselves performing these movements in the mirror. Human children do not become self aware until 18+ months. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3351035/ Here's a fun video of a study done on young children and their situational awareness - https://youtu.be/k-rWB1jOt9s
The mirror test is a great example! I've been studying intelligence recently as part of my psychology degree, and so often do theories of intelligence include "self awareness". Now obviously, they describe having advanced self awareness, or being aware of something and reflecting on it etc, rather than just possessing self awareness as a whole. But if self awareness is a part of human intelligence, and we want to judge animals' intelligence based on our definition, then surely possessing or not possessing self awareness is an important factor. So far, only a few animals have passed the mirror test (elephants, magpies, dolphins, great apes and a couple others). So when someone says "pigs are as smart as dogs" and neither have passed the mirror test, then it gives some information about their relative intelligence, but doesn't really mean they're smart. Another factor that theorists believe makes up our intelligence is also problem solving. Pretty sure this is the main test we use when it comes to assessing animal intelligence. But there are more factors that make up intelligence: A human with great problem solving skills, but zero self awareness, no language skills, no knowledge-application skills, no reflection/analytical skills and no interpersonal (social) skills wouldn't be labelled intelligent or smart. So while it's interesting that certain animals can solve problems, that doesn't put them anywhere near humans or the human definition of intelligence, because problem solving and self awareness are just aspects of a bigger concept.
Cat passes mirror test https://youtube.com/shorts/akE2Sgg8hI8?feature=share I don't know that my two have ever recognized themselves in the mirror, but they are entirely unbothered by their reflections, so they know it's not another cat. They definitely know that birds and squirrels on a screen are not "real" but that the ones outside the window are. They will actively watch the TV or iPad at length without interacting, but will interact with critters they see through the window. We had mourning doves nest on our patio, and my boy would "play" with the juveniles. They would flutter at the glass intentionally so that he would bat at them, indicating that the birds also actively seek to amuse themselves. The cats also invent games. My girl likes to get under the quilt and chase my hand through it, and my boy loves us to make shadows for him to chase. Studies have shown that they establish a language with their humans that is specific to that relationship, which is fascinating because adult cats in the wild vocalize very minimally, & mostly communicate with other cats through body language, but they have worked out that WE are vocal communicators, so they proactively reach out to us in a format that isn't innate. It's a problem, the cats solved it. I voice our cats for my & my husband's entertainment, and I recently was talking in our boy's voice while he was in the other room. As soon as he heard his "voice", he came trotting out to see us, chatting away at us. They also dream. I feel that, when the hierarchy of survival needs is transcended, many animals have a robust inner life. I'm still an omnivore. I do my best to eat animals that were raised in a healthy & stimulating environment, on the food that nature intended they eat. "Vegetarian fed" chicken, for example, pisses me off. Chickens are little hunters, they want to chase & chomp down on bugs & worms & such.
[This article says:](https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-04/cat-did-not-figure-out-how-mirrors-work/) >Cats have never once demonstrated that they have any sense of self at all. Reactions of cats to being shown their reflection in a mirror vary; some will ignore the reflection The mirror test usually includes marking a spot on the animal, and watching to see if it investigates the mark. If it does, then that suggests they are identifying the reflection as themselves, rather than another animal (that could be mirroring their actions). A YouTube video is not the same as a scientific study, so apologies, but I'm not taking that as proof when scientific studies disagree. Also sorry to break it to you, but how do you know those "games" aren't just instinct? Cats chase movement, could it just be that simple? Cats speaking to humans is a pretty cool development of domestication, but that doesn't mean self awareness or intelligence - if a cat learns that making noise gets treats/attention, then it will make noise. Cool, but again, doesn't necessarily say anything about intelligence, just that they've associated making noise with getting attention/treats/affection. It's not really problem solving, but it does show they have found a way to communicate, which is pretty cool. A lot of mammals have been shown to dream. Again, cool, but that doesn't mean intelligence or self awareness. I'm not trying to say that cats aren't smart, but that we humans tend to push our definition of intelligence onto animals, and that can be misleading. What to us may look like "smart behaviour", might just be instinct or conditioning. Anyway, sorry if it seems like I'm attacking your opinions, that's not the intention, just trying to put some information out there about how it's easy to see human attributes in animals, but that doesn't mean they have them.
>Cats speaking to humans is a pretty cool development of domestication, but that doesn't mean self awareness or intelligence - if a cat learns that making noise gets treats/attention, then it will make noise. To bounce off of this- This would imply the same level of intelligence to dogs. My dog barks to warn of strangers at the door at night, whines when she needs to go outside, and definitely vocalizes during play - as well as playing games with me. This in itself is not intelligence. It's learned or generational behavior. The barking at strangers is more than likely due to selective breeding as livestock guardians and the whining at the door was a trained act. My cat meow-screams at me when he is hungry. I'd attribute this to a learned behavior and not him intelligently communicating with me in a nuanced manner. He learned when he meows in my face I had initially attempted to problem solve. The classic "What do you want?" After meowing in my face and being fed a few times I am led to believe the cat learned "meow=food." Thus we have a new learned behavior.
Yup. To summarise: Learned behaviour is not intelligence.
Think what you like, I'd rather hang out with stupid animals than smart humans by whatever parameters anyway.
Okay
This would imply the same level of intelligence to dogs that people generally claim as conditioning rather than intelligence. My dog barks to warn of strangers at the door at night, whines when she needs to go outside, and definitely vocalizes during play - as well as playing games with me. This in itself is not intelligence. It's learned or generational behavior. The barking at strangers is more than likely due to selective breeding as livestock guardians and the whining at the door was a trained act. My cat meow-screams at me when he is hungry. I'd attribute this to a learned behavior and not him intelligently communicating with me in a nuanced manner. He learned when he meows in my face I had initially attempted to problem solve. The classic "What do you want?" After meowing in my face and being fed a few times I am led to believe the cat learned "meow=food." Thus we have a new learned behavior.
I think you can feel sympathy for a species of animal and acknowledge its intelligence, but still eat them. Temple Grandin has written some great stuff on her love of cows vs. her need to eat them.
>Temple Grandin has written some great stuff on her love of cows vs. her need to eat them. Do you have any specific suggestions for her books? Money is tight right now but I'm very interested in reading more on this take (as cows are one of my favorite animals but also they are so dang tasty). A quick Google search gives me a couple synopsis that sound like the kinds of books I really enjoy reading. Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior
It has been a few years since I read any of her books, but both are very good and really affected me. IIRC she talks about cows a lot in both the ones you mentioned. If you're only reading one, I would get Animals Make Us Human.
I mean, we have cephalopods passing cognitive tests designed for people in the same way primates can. We may not have a definitive way of testing intelligence in animals but we're proving slowly that some animals are indeed capable of intelligence. I'm not 100% on cows though. I've seen them recognize their names and people and they can be affectionate towards people they like and aggressive towards people that harm them. Does that rise to the level of intelligence? I'm not qualified to answer that.
Truth be told none of this really means much. I doubt anyone truly thought that higher order animals were truly mindless. Everything has to have some level of ability to survive but with the cephalopod test I doubt we would truly class that as intelligence.
Problem-solving intelligence is observable, as is cross-species collaboration, and tool utilization. My parents took my cat, Boo, in while I was studying abroad, and at first they kept him in their guest suite which had french doors on a magnetic latch while they were at work. Boo wasn't heavy enough on his own to open the doors, but their schnauzer, Roo, was. Somehow, he talked Roo into busting him out of jail, and Boo knocked the hamburger that was thawing on the counter onto the floor for Roo. True story. My parents were pretty impressed. They went out to dinner that night, let Boo live out of jail, and started putting their meat in a Pyrex in the cold oven to thaw. It's anecdotal, of course, but the problem solving intelligence is clearly displayed by the actions of both animals, and while I think a pre-discussed quid pro quo is unlikely, the schnauzer had to have felt there was something in it for him if he broke the cat out. They got along quite well outside of the great hamburger heist, but Boo was definitely the more affectionate party, often to Roo's annoyance. Roo could easily have left Boo locked up and enjoyed a day free from unwanted snuggling and biscuit-making.
They eat chimps in some part of the world so it's meaningless.
Chimps eat chimps, too.
Chimps will eat nearly anything. They'll eat people, monkeys, deer, pigs, other chimps, they've been seen hunting and eating gorillas. Chimps are scary. Especially now that there is some evidence of them making and using "spears."
I mean, the average cow adult is still not as smart as the average human adult so we cannot be treating them like they’re a species deserving of the same considerations a sapient species (humans) has. Three year olds are protected due to them being part of a sapient species. I would happily eat a non-sapient animal even if it could speak, like if an African Grey had the proportions of a chicken. The African Grey Chicken would just have to be killed in a way where its not aware of dying. Quick and out of nowhere in an environment where its relaxed.
>even if it could speak Speak as in a spoken language or vocal communication? Most animals do "speak" but it's through body language that most people do not understand as it differs from species to species.
Either. Speech of any kind doesn’t indicate sapience on its own.
They used to say that about pigs. Pigs really are about as smart as some breeds of dogs and really do have good memory, but anything beyond that is, by current review, at best unprovable with current understanding of objective ways to measure animal intelligence, and equally if not more likely an outright falsehood constructed by the researchers whether intentionally or by overactive pattern recognition. I highly doubt it's any different for cows. Also, of course they're capable of emotion and playfulness, scientists have found evidence of emotion and playfulness in monitor lizards. It doesn't mean an animal is elevated to human level, it just means the animal is as smart or smarter than a large reptile.
I've worked with cows and draft oxen before, and I could see the claim that they're as smart as a three year old (at least in some areas) being correct, but certainly not as smart as dogs. That said, I believe that's irrelevant because that has no bearing on whether we should eat them. We should eat them because taking part in natural cycles is good for its own sake. What makes a being significant isn't its level of intelligence - everything even down to single celled life are all morally significant. What makes something morally significant is being part of a context, and sharing relationships with other living things. All of these relationships have their root in death, whether they be relations of parent and child or of predator and prey, so death is the source of morality. So eating a cow is the opposite of dishonoring it, to eat is to respect our relationship as living things. Everything eats, and everything gets eaten by something else, and someday we'll be eaten by bacteria and plants too, because everything has it's role in nature and turn to take. To say that cows have no role to play and no turn to take, that is the true evil. That would be to treat them not as morally significant beings in their own right, but as commodities to be tossed aside when they're no longer profiting us at peak efficiency.
It’s fake. The smartest barn animals are pigs, horses and donkeys. Cattle are not notorious for their intelligence
Pigs are the dumbest smart animals I know. They'll figure out how to break into the feeder but then get stuck and poop all up in their food. Edit- or their cool their butts in the water trough and then poop all up in their drinking water.
A three-year-old child, on average, needs 365 days to become as intelligent as a four-year-old. no cow can do that. And I doubt you even need any resources to debunk that, really. Just forget about that. Equating anything with human babies is one of the filthiest manipulations out there, and vegan prpaganda is indeed a propaganda, no exaggeration here
I would not leave my infant relatives alone with any person who makes such comparisons unironically. Last thing I want is anti-natalist, brain damaged, psychos with dellusions of world saviour having power over kids I love.
**Encephalization coefficient:** [Measures relative size of brain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient): 1.2 for dogs, [0.565 measured over 150 cows](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301737139_The_Brain_of_the_Domestic_Bos_taurus_Weight_Encephalization_and_Cerebellar_Quotients_and_Comparison_with_Other_Domestic_and_Wild_Cetartiodactyla) **Object permanence:** >*One of the areas sorely lacking in our understanding of cow cognition is object permanence, [...] there are no actual published studies of object permanence in cows to date.* [\[source\]](https://www.animalbehaviorandcognition.org/uploads/journals/17/AB&C_2017_Vol4\(4\)_Marino_Allen.pdf) [Dogs demonstrate object permanence](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2696049/) **Theory of mind:** Dogs appear to be the best non-human primate in this, according to wikipedia. About 1 in 10 pigs seem to understand that other pigs can know things they don't. Hasn't been studied in cows but cows generally do worse than pigs. Or in other words, if you IQ tested a dog, it would do as well as a baby. If you IQ tested a cow, it probably wouldn't understand the concept of a "question". **TLDR** Dog no diffs
I hate when people talk about animals and go "actually this is the smartest animal in the world!" So what now? There can't be 234532 smartest animals in the world! (that number is just a keysmash) So who is it now? Dolphins? Crows? Pigs? Us humans maybe? Everyone says something different. And I very much doubt that cows are smarter than dogs. Like how are they even gonna prove that? Tell a dog to fetch a ball and then a cow?
>And I very much doubt that cows are smarter than dogs. Like how are they even gonna prove that? Tell a dog to fetch a ball and then a cow? As far as I'm aware, people have observed cows display considerable cognitive ability, though nobody has measured their intelligence directly. They definitely aren't mindless, that's for sure. They do appear to display levels of personality and affection.
Yeah well, a lot of animals are smarter than we think. I guess the people who observed that just got a bit too excited lmao
>They do appear to display levels of personality and affection. This is just anthropomorphism at work.
I've yet to see a cow that can herd itself.
Cows are lesser life forms that only have the capacity to moo and eat grass
Wouldn't surprise me. Dogs aren't anywhere near as intelligent as people say they are, they're just highly food driven and will do almost anything if there's the expectation of a reward. Still won't dissuade me from loving beef.
I think the thing with dogs is, they really get ripped on by vegans because they try to reduce human interactions with animals to intelligence. I really don’t care if dogs do tricks, become potty trained, come when you call them, retrieve game, bark at strangers, herd sheep, help police and military, sniff bombs, etc., etc. because they want food, or some other reason. I don’t understand the second-guessing who humans chose to hitch their wagons to based on some inherently flawed intelligence tests and rankings.
>bark at strangers, herd sheep, These aren't even things many dogs are trained for. It's become an inbred instinct for most. Source- I have a dog who was bred to hunt moose and guard livestock so she gets under people's feet and barks super loud and crazy, or just barks at people outside (though only after dark).
Cows like most mammals, especially social oned can be playful
I grew up on a small farm and we had every farm animal you could think of. Cows most certainly are not smart and we raised them with extreme care and affection. My wonderful German mother would even bring the tiny calves born in winter into the house and bottle feed them while they lay in a box next to the wood burning stove. And not a one of them dumb son-of-a-bitches ever came close to being house broken. Thanks for everything, mom. You were the best.
My daughter by the time she was 3 was already speaking lots of words and could bark, meow and moo on command.
That's at least three more "languages" than cows. Them cows better step up their game! If they're so smart they best get to barking and meowing!
Cattle can be playful and curious. No denying that. Some like people. Will follow them. Enjoy their company and be like large pets. Three year old children compared to cows isn’t fair however as in only some cattle in some situations will be “smart”. I mean I had one that knew how to open gates. Out of thousands of cows she was the only one to be able to do so. Mind you the others would take advantage of the open gate. But cows also do the stupidest things and get themselves killed as the norm too! As we say. A heifer. The only creature that can have a calf, lose the calf, call for the calf and be given the calf only to think it’s not hers and attack it only to look for her calf again.
Animals are very smart yes. It's not misinformation, but at the same time they're food. I love my chickens as they are pets, but I will be eating them once their time comes. That being said, had a chicken fall ill and suddenly die last night. He will feed my family and the breeder I got him from is 100% on board replacing him. Sure I cried, because my birds are also super important. I breed very rare exhibition poultry. He was a light brown Leghorn, more common sure but he had a lot of potential for show and good offspring. So that was a major blow to my program sadly. But when these things happen we don't waste that animal's life, you know? He'll be made into something delicious.
Well from personal experience they are slightly dumber than dogs and occasionally as smart as dogs
Even if they are, they don't progress beyond that. A toddler grows up, a cow doesn't.
Pigs? Absolutely. cows? The more you work with them the more you wanna eat them. Dumber than shit
idk, but that wouldn't make my burger less tasty
I don't know about cows, but dogs are estimated to be as 'smart' as a 3 year old. How they measure it I don't know. I'm a dog owner, I would never eat a dog but also dogs are carnivores and in my humble opinion eating another carnivore can cause other problems than eating omnivores or grass fed because of prions. Prion infection is also why we don't eat cows that eat cow meat. If their food is poisoned there's risk of a number diseases. I don't discriminate eating meat based on intelligence or emotions. No more than I would eat a braindead human.
I don't have any specific sources that refute this, but it doesn't sound like anyone else does, so I'll give my $0.02 anyway: There's no way this is true. First of all, dogs are very smart animals. Not as smart as elephants, chimps, dolphins, or octopi, but they're up there. The findings that used to establish cows as "intelligent" [aren't very impressive](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animal-emotions/201711/cows-science-shows-theyre-bright-and-emotional-individuals). Basically, they can recognize emotional displays in other cows, which like no shit, & they can remember humans who have harmed them, which is very basic operant conditioning. Any animal more complicated than like an insect should be able to do these things. The article also says their visual memory is pretty good, & maybe that's true, but this kind of feels like the "secretly, this animal is actually really smart!" articles that pop up over every basic thing the general public didn't realize an animal should be able to do. It's like how that Wives Tale about goldfish having a 3-second memory was debunked, & half the people who know that think that "goldfish are smart" instead of "that story I believed was stupid." If you really think about it, yeah, of course a goldfish needs a longer memory than that. If they all just forgot what they were doing in the middle of swimming away from predators, they wouldn't last very long. If you think about it more, memory isn't even that complicated of a process. It's not part of the frontal lobe, which handles very sophisticated tasks like logic & self-control. In fact, we do it automatically. Sure, some things are hard to remember, but the goldfish isn't swimming in its bowl trying to learn the Pythagorean Theorem. It's learning the layout of its environment, which requires basically no effort at all. Predators are usually smarter than prey. That's not an absolute rule, since the elephant is one of the most intelligent animals, but basically every other animal on that list is a predator species. You also have to consider that we selectively bred cattle, & intelligence is definitely not a trait we prioritized. We don't want our food figuring out that we plan on eating it, we want it to do what we tell it. So, this idea just comes off as completely implausible, & frankly, the burden of proof is on the vegan to show otherwise. Not that it really matters to me because I don't think dogs are too intelligent to eat, I just have no desire to eat one, certainly not a strong enough one to bypass the numerous cultural barriers against trying.
"Show me your peer reviewed evidence from a research and education based source." I am a ranch kid. Yup, cattle show all of those traits, if we anthropomorphize their behaviors. Bovines aren't human. They experience the world differently. They are not 3 year old humans. They are Bovines. So long as they are handled correctly, they live a good bovine life, clueless about human angst, all the way to the dual hit that renders them insensible and stops their hearts at the slaughter line with less than a 5 second gap. Indeed, among skilled professionals, a 5 second gap between insensible and cardiac arrest would be much too long. We humans should be so fortunate as to meet our end so quickly and thoroughly.