Jack Symes

My suspicion is yes. Why? It slows down the heart. You can't see them struggling in a sense of like they don't exhibit features that look like they're in pain or they're fighting. So it's better for you? The heart slows down, the brain slowly shuts down. Well, you'd expect them to resist in some certain way. Maybe there's not much difference between them.

It's more of like a cultural thing that we don't want our pets shot rather than have injections. Yeah. I mean, we see it's less.

Yeah, no, definitely. Still, I think we both agree on this, right? That the factory farming is the overwhelming amount of meat we're consuming is that. And people feel, and we think this, we know that non-human animals are morally valuable. I love this thought experiment by the philosopher Tom Reagan.

He asks you, imagine you're on a lifeboat with, let's say, a golden retriever and another human being. And you've got to throw one out and you get to keep the other one in. Right. And so everyone throws out the golden retriever. Depends on who the person is. What if it's Hitler?

I would do that, right? It's random default. But wouldn't you do that?

100%.

I might eat him. You don't know who this guy is. Me and the dog might eat him. It's not your, it's not martial arts, it's some random golden retriever. I love all golden retrievers. I'm killing Hitler over every fucking golden retriever that's ever been born.

And then, Tom, I went on a date with this girl in London once, and I asked her this law experiment. I said, what would you do? And then she said, I'd kill the golden retriever. And then I did the Tom Reagan thought experiment and said, well, how about if it was five golden retrievers, 10, 100, 1,000? Tom Reagan goes, I'll kill a million of them. And you kind of go like, that's not cool.

Yeah.

Exactly. Well, this girl I was on a date with, she said she'd kill an infinite number of golden retrievers because she was Catholic. And I think an infinite number of suffering in the ending of life. You say that. You say that. I think after you get through like 50, you go, I made a real mistake.

The interesting thing is as soon as you pick a number, as long as it's not infinite, then you recognize that non-human animals have a comparable value to human beings. And you have to draw the line somewhere. There's going to be a rough number. It's like how many leaves make a pile of leaves or water droplets make a cloud.

It's not going to be clear exactly how many, but as long as you pick something. I think everyone, well, minus a few people. I think if someone says infinite, something's gone wrong in their thinking. I think that's absurd.

Yeah.

Kill that guy. You know, I've got great sympathy for people who, like, you've probably heard this before, people give, like, health reasons for why they still consume non-human animals. Yeah. And, you know, they say, I have to eat this much meat, or maybe they just eat me and nothing else. That's me. And you just eat meat? Yeah. You don't eat anything apart from meat?

I eat very little other than meat. Okay, this is good. I eat fruit and I eat meat. Okay.

So those people who, like yourself, who maybe it's like whatever health reason it is, they still, some people use that argument as if it gets them off the hook, like as if they, because their value as a human being outweighs so many cows and pigs and the like.

But I think, again, once you run this thought experiment and you have to kind of put a rough number on it, you sort of have to ask yourself an honest question and go, like, is what I'm doing like morally right? Is this something I should reconsider? And I think given the if you pick a number, then you have to you have to make a call on that.

What's that? Is it a bow, a crossbow?

Yeah, I bet.

Well, okay, here's a couple of things, right? So I think you're probably, well, it speaks to your own experience, right? That you feel like maybe it's spiritual or it taps into our histories when you hunt, especially with a bow. Like 10,000 years ago, the first bows come about and I imagine it was thrilling for them now and it's then and it's thrilling still now to do it.