My family took care of a small herd of dairy goats when I was growing up. They could definitely make their displeasure known if you tried to make them do something they didn’t want to (especially when they were very nearly your own weight). Milking time? Most days they were perfectly happy to jump up on the stand for us to relieve their udders for them, sometimes even before we’d gotten everything set up.
I am careful where I get my milk from because the big dairy institutions are rather problematic. And I agree that the broad disempowerment and incarceration inherent in farming is an issue on its own. But saying that milk is always, unequivocally, unwanted theft (and respectively that farms provide an unqualified worse life) is just the other side of the same human-exceptionalism coin – you’re removing their agency to say “yes”.
Ah, good to know you have a argument ready to allow you to move the goalposts, and that you won’t accept any solutions for achieving utopia that don’t come out of the gate already perfect.
To be equally blunt, my response wasn’t “all eight billion people should drink small-farm milk”, it was “you’re being anthropocentric in a very similar vein to saying all other animals are automata.” If you really do think humans are the only species which can have and express desires and dislikes, then enjoy your biological essentialism.
So you’re one of those people who think it’s impossible to have sex when you don’t share a language, then? Consent is a very good model to live by. Blind devotion to the form of consent while ignoring the actual purpose behind it (i.e. to simply make sure nobody regrets what’s happening, in the moment or later) twists it into something it was never meant to be.
And I wasn’t talking about sex. I was talking about two species learning to read each other’s body language, and to communicate despite the barrier. A goat freely jumping onto the platform where she knows she’ll be milked, without any fear of punishment if she doesn’t, is her agreeing to be milked. It might not meet some mythologized standard of “consent” where all parties involved practically have to sign a contract saying they know every minute detail of what might happen, and the exact likelihood of all potential future consequences years down the line, but that’s not what consent was designed to solve.
The tea model is consent. The tea model can be fulfilled without relying on any specific wording, or even words at all. Anything more complex than the tea model is either meant for risky kink (note: milking a goat is not risky kink) or is over-ritualizing the process for purity points.
Obviously language can be translated, even someone who can’t speak can use sign or give written consent. I suppose language itself isn’t even necessary, we evolved with the same social instincts that let us understand human body language and tone of voice and facial expression, we can figure out how to communicate across the barriers between us.
That’s why the only milk you should be drinking should come from a human who can meaningfully consent.
Goats can not meaningfully consent. I don’t care someone trained a goat to jump on a platform and accept milking, it absolutely wasn’t the goat’s idea. They had to learn to do this from the human that exploits them, and they think it’s normal because it’s the way things have always been. A wild goat would never let you touch her.
Besides, it’s not necessary anyway. No one needs to do this anymore. Just stop.
Yep, the “meaningful consent” bit is what I’m talking about as being pat-yourself-on-the-back overkill. It’s intellectualism trying to future-proof feelings, because people can’t get their heads around the fact that feelings changing in the future doesn’t affect the validity of their form in the past. And, again, it has nothing to do with goats.
And I do think I’ll be done with this thread soon. You’re a human supremicist, and don’t seem to be willing to challenge that. You can look at a dog bouncing and excited to go for a walk but whimpering and lagging behind to go to the vet and say they can’t communicate, they can’t have input into decisions. You think that any reaction a non-human expresses is just training and mental automation rules, because they certainly can’t come up with emotions and opinions themself. (Except when their reactions support your thesis of the moment, when you’ll temporarily forget all that to point gleefully at the same communication you dismiss otherwise to crow “See? They are so much happier in the forest glade than the cage!”)
This was the country; for fun we’d set up hay bales and plank bridges in the side yard, and see if we could communicate with the goats well enough to let them figure out how we were imagining the obstacle course going. Sometimes they were feeling playful or were just in the mood to climb on things, and they’d run the course beside us – sometimes with the human scrabbling to keep up. Sometimes they rejected the idea entirely, dug their hooves in, and told us in no uncertain terms to go see if anyone else was more willing to put up with our tomfoolery. Sometimes they were disinterested and just wandered off to graze aimlessly.
If any goat actually didn’t want to be milked on a given day, there’d be no way we’d get her onto the stand without an outright wrestling match, and no way she’d stay up there through the whole rigamarole. (We wouldn’t have bothered trying, just let her go back to the herd.) First-time mothers did have to learn the process, since it involves a number of non-obvious steps and an unfamiliar metalic ringing when the milk hits the bottom of an empty bucket. But you know what they almost universally weren’t, even the first few times? Distressed. They didn’t have to be “trained to accept milking”, they just had to familiarize themselves with the setup surrounding getting milked.
It’s your comparison to wild goats which seals the whole thing, though. Wild goats are prey, with limited interaction with humans because their instincts read humans as “predator”. These were goats who grew up from birth around humans, who were able to ignore the vague undercurrent of their instincts because they knew better that we were harmless – and in fact were often beneficial (and gave good shoulder scritches). Of course beings with entirely different life experiences will act differently! But, no, that shared understanding of another species is entirely the evil farmers exploiting the poor innocent goats, corrupting their poor natural instincts, which alone determine the entirety of non-human animals’ behavior, and which must be held sacred since those instincts are blessed by evolution and apply equally well to every domestic situation every non-human ever finds itself in. Except when they’re human instincts since we are the only species with the capacity for abstract thought and for rising above the mandate of our baser nature.
I’m tired of y’all. You position yourselves as abolitionists, and maybe you are – but only an abolition of the worst atrocities while enthusiastically perpetuating the idea of “inherent superiority” that underlies it, seeing the ideal goal being one of segregation, patronization, and autocracy.
But you do guess, because it’s a cow. You don’t know you aren’t a cow (I guess?).
60 years ago they thought that babies did not feel pain. I suppose we can always rely on our intuition to tell us what’s true or not.
Some people still think animals don’t feel pain, or have feelings at all. Anybody who has spent time with one of them will know that’s bs.
Why couldn’t cows have a concept similar to what we consider property? Just because they are “inferior” to you.
That’s not a justification for stealing the milk. It’s not yours.
My family took care of a small herd of dairy goats when I was growing up. They could definitely make their displeasure known if you tried to make them do something they didn’t want to (especially when they were very nearly your own weight). Milking time? Most days they were perfectly happy to jump up on the stand for us to relieve their udders for them, sometimes even before we’d gotten everything set up.
I am careful where I get my milk from because the big dairy institutions are rather problematic. And I agree that the broad disempowerment and incarceration inherent in farming is an issue on its own. But saying that milk is always, unequivocally, unwanted theft (and respectively that farms provide an unqualified worse life) is just the other side of the same human-exceptionalism coin – you’re removing their agency to say “yes”.
re: @queermunist@lemmy.ml
cc: @Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip
There’s no sustainable way to do this for 8 billion people, so frankly I don’t give a shit.
Ah, good to know you have a argument ready to allow you to move the goalposts, and that you won’t accept any solutions for achieving utopia that don’t come out of the gate already perfect.
To be equally blunt, my response wasn’t “all eight billion people should drink small-farm milk”, it was “you’re being anthropocentric in a very similar vein to saying all other animals are automata.” If you really do think humans are the only species which can have and express desires and dislikes, then enjoy your biological essentialism.
re: @queermunist@lemmy.ml
I believe in verbal consent and think your argument is uncomfortably similar to rape apologia - you can just tell she wants it!
So you’re one of those people who think it’s impossible to have sex when you don’t share a language, then? Consent is a very good model to live by. Blind devotion to the form of consent while ignoring the actual purpose behind it (i.e. to simply make sure nobody regrets what’s happening, in the moment or later) twists it into something it was never meant to be.
And I wasn’t talking about sex. I was talking about two species learning to read each other’s body language, and to communicate despite the barrier. A goat freely jumping onto the platform where she knows she’ll be milked, without any fear of punishment if she doesn’t, is her agreeing to be milked. It might not meet some mythologized standard of “consent” where all parties involved practically have to sign a contract saying they know every minute detail of what might happen, and the exact likelihood of all potential future consequences years down the line, but that’s not what consent was designed to solve.
The tea model is consent. The tea model can be fulfilled without relying on any specific wording, or even words at all. Anything more complex than the tea model is either meant for risky kink (note: milking a goat is not risky kink) or is over-ritualizing the process for purity points.
re: @queermunist@lemmy.ml
Obviously language can be translated, even someone who can’t speak can use sign or give written consent. I suppose language itself isn’t even necessary, we evolved with the same social instincts that let us understand human body language and tone of voice and facial expression, we can figure out how to communicate across the barriers between us.
That’s why the only milk you should be drinking should come from a human who can meaningfully consent.
Goats can not meaningfully consent. I don’t care someone trained a goat to jump on a platform and accept milking, it absolutely wasn’t the goat’s idea. They had to learn to do this from the human that exploits them, and they think it’s normal because it’s the way things have always been. A wild goat would never let you touch her.
Besides, it’s not necessary anyway. No one needs to do this anymore. Just stop.
Yep, the “meaningful consent” bit is what I’m talking about as being pat-yourself-on-the-back overkill. It’s intellectualism trying to future-proof feelings, because people can’t get their heads around the fact that feelings changing in the future doesn’t affect the validity of their form in the past. And, again, it has nothing to do with goats.
And I do think I’ll be done with this thread soon. You’re a human supremicist, and don’t seem to be willing to challenge that. You can look at a dog bouncing and excited to go for a walk but whimpering and lagging behind to go to the vet and say they can’t communicate, they can’t have input into decisions. You think that any reaction a non-human expresses is just training and mental automation rules, because they certainly can’t come up with emotions and opinions themself. (Except when their reactions support your thesis of the moment, when you’ll temporarily forget all that to point gleefully at the same communication you dismiss otherwise to crow “See? They are so much happier in the forest glade than the cage!”)
This was the country; for fun we’d set up hay bales and plank bridges in the side yard, and see if we could communicate with the goats well enough to let them figure out how we were imagining the obstacle course going. Sometimes they were feeling playful or were just in the mood to climb on things, and they’d run the course beside us – sometimes with the human scrabbling to keep up. Sometimes they rejected the idea entirely, dug their hooves in, and told us in no uncertain terms to go see if anyone else was more willing to put up with our tomfoolery. Sometimes they were disinterested and just wandered off to graze aimlessly.
If any goat actually didn’t want to be milked on a given day, there’d be no way we’d get her onto the stand without an outright wrestling match, and no way she’d stay up there through the whole rigamarole. (We wouldn’t have bothered trying, just let her go back to the herd.) First-time mothers did have to learn the process, since it involves a number of non-obvious steps and an unfamiliar metalic ringing when the milk hits the bottom of an empty bucket. But you know what they almost universally weren’t, even the first few times? Distressed. They didn’t have to be “trained to accept milking”, they just had to familiarize themselves with the setup surrounding getting milked.
It’s your comparison to wild goats which seals the whole thing, though. Wild goats are prey, with limited interaction with humans because their instincts read humans as “predator”. These were goats who grew up from birth around humans, who were able to ignore the vague undercurrent of their instincts because they knew better that we were harmless – and in fact were often beneficial (and gave good shoulder scritches). Of course beings with entirely different life experiences will act differently! But, no, that shared understanding of another species is entirely the evil farmers exploiting the poor innocent goats, corrupting their poor natural instincts, which alone determine the entirety of non-human animals’ behavior, and which must be held sacred since those instincts are blessed by evolution and apply equally well to every domestic situation every non-human ever finds itself in. Except when they’re human instincts since we are the only species with the capacity for abstract thought and for rising above the mandate of our baser nature.
I’m tired of y’all. You position yourselves as abolitionists, and maybe you are – but only an abolition of the worst atrocities while enthusiastically perpetuating the idea of “inherent superiority” that underlies it, seeing the ideal goal being one of segregation, patronization, and autocracy.
re: @queermunist@lemmy.ml
Your arguments can and have been used to justify bestiality.
Good riddance.
Weren’t these species selectively bred to have excess milk for us?
Cows don’t have a concept of property.
Cows have to be tricked into letting their milk down. They won’t let you steal it otherwise.
Do you have a source for that or are you just guessing because it’s a cow?
I don’t need to guess. Because it’s a cow.
But you do guess, because it’s a cow. You don’t know you aren’t a cow (I guess?).
60 years ago they thought that babies did not feel pain. I suppose we can always rely on our intuition to tell us what’s true or not.
Some people still think animals don’t feel pain, or have feelings at all. Anybody who has spent time with one of them will know that’s bs.
Why couldn’t cows have a concept similar to what we consider property? Just because they are “inferior” to you.
Cows are not sapient. This isn’t 60 years ago