Are insects and mollusks sentient? The question vegans can't have answered.

When it comes to trying to educate people or to debating the validity of people's views, there is one important adage we must always remember:

If you are arguing, you are losing.

If the people you want to debate with or teach happen to be vegans, there is a problem: Vegans love to argue. They will gladly turn any statement, any word into an argument. Even the word diet when referring to the vegan diet is reason enough to start an argument. Their desire to argue goes so deep that it transcends any sense of group loyalty.
Recently I felt compassion for a vegan who kept making a total fool of himself by trying to argue that the total amount of calories from a slaughtered cow could be calculated simply by calculating the calories from the lean cuts from that cow. After explaining numerous times that his calculations were flawed, I retracted myself from the conversation, but the guy, in his eagerness to continue arguing, kept trying to pull me back. At that point, I didn't know what to do, block him, mute him, try to patiently explain why he was wrong until he finally realized his error? Or do I practice hard loving and go all in? I ran a little poll, asking my twitter friends what to do. Now, this is where things got interesting, I don't have a huge following on Twitter and the sentiment was that I should mute or block the guy until the vegan brigades discovered my little poll.

Rather than sharing my compassion for this vegan, their peer, that kept making a fool of himself, they started flocking to my poll, telling me to go all in on their poor comrade.

Apparently vegans love the smell of senseless argument so much, they would gladly expose one of their own to being made to completely lose face, just so they can watch the argument and augment it with their own silly gifs.

But back to the premise:

If you are arguing, you are losing.

I'm staying away from arguing vegans, I want my contribution to be valuable, maybe change some people's minds with facts and solid reasoning.

Arguing with those for who arguing is like their favorite sports is not going to aid in that. A debate is great, but I'm yet to meet a vegan on Twitter that has any interest in debating rather than arguing silly semantics such as veganism is not a diet. Seriously, how does that argument even make sense? It is just arguing for the sake of being able to have something to argue about. So enough about Twitter and about arguing for its own sake, let us look at the central thesis that I want to discuss in this post. A thesis that underlies the debate I was trying to have earlier.

Are insects and mollusks sentient?

We are not going to actually answer this question, we are going to explore what it would mean if they are, what it would mean if they are not, and what it would mean if we can't tell if they are. The dilemma: insects and mollusks are a potential food for humans, one with a tiny ecological footprint that on many fronts combines the macro- and micronutrient advantages of animal-based foods with the ecological advantages of plant-based foods. Depending on the species of insects though, the equivalent of a single burger patty could be made up of hundreds if not thousands of creatures, so if these creatures turn out to be sentient, this would pose a major moral dilemma for adopting an entomophagous lifestyle. But sentient insects don't pose a moral problem for entomophagy alone, they also pose a huge problem for the concept of veganism.

If we assume insects and mollusks are sentient

Agriculture of any kind comes at a great price to insect lives. Insects, rodents, and mollusks die by the millions in the production of soy, grain, vegetables and a really wide range of plant-based foods. Most of these deaths can be ascribed to insects and mollusks that arguably may or may not be sentient. If for a moment we assume they are sentient, we need to look at what that means in terms of the moral implications of eating plant-based foods versus eating meat. When it comes to industrially produced meat using grains and soy, there is no question of its moral inferiority to eating the soy or grain ourselves, but there are other ways met can be produced, at least on a small scale, that doesn't use any agricultural feeding.

With growing awareness of the importance of land allocation to nature preserves comes the realization of the importance of complete and functional ecosystems. Many nature preserves now reintroduce animals that have gone locally extinct in order to add one more piece to the puzzle of an ecosystem comparable to the one that existed in prehistoric till bronze- or iron-age times. Large grazing animals like the Wisent are reintroduced, and apart from ancient predators, the ecosystem arising is as close to authentic as we can get without reintroducing dangerous predators. Now instead of the predators, caretakers take the role of the predators.
While our more distant primate ancestors were undoubtedly mainly entomophagous, our more recent ancestors can be traced to mainly carnivorously living omnivores. As such, just like entomophagy, eating meat makes sense biologically. Thus humans taking up the predatory role makes sense in this context.
The killed animals are slaughtered and sold and the money made from the sale goes back to the upkeep of the preservation. We now have a fully authentic ecosystem producing moderate amounts of meat at zero bykill. One kill produces a million kcal at least and compared to the hundreds if not thousands or insects and slugs killed for the same amount of calories from many plant-based foods, the moral superiority of choosing plant-based foods when functional-ecosystem meat production is available becomes highly questionable.

If insects are indeed sentient, the only reason for people to be 100% plant-based would be the cuteness factor. Sure, a cow has big brown eyes that make it look much cuter than the alien looking eyes on a stick of a slimy slug, but how much of a moral argument is that if the slug is sentient?

More calories, from single-kill functional-ecosystem large grazers reduce the number of calories you need to get from food sources with known bykill of produce and other plant-based food sources. This means the total number of sentient animals killed on an ethical omnivorous diet is lower than that of a purely plant-based diet. Add to that the environmental advantages of fully functional ecosystems, we may claim that if insects and mollusks ARE sentient an ethical omnivorous diet is morally superior to a purely plant-based diet.

If we assume insects and mollusks are NOT sentient

We as humans are primates. Some primates may have specialized to eating a largely fruitarian style of diet while others might have specialized to a more carnivorous omnivore diet, one thing is undeniable that at its core primates have an entomophagous heritage. In fact, apart from the relatively insignificant Anglo-Saxon subgroup of Homo Sapiens, there seem to be no primates in existence that aren't at least partially dependent on the consumption of insects and/or mollusks for their diet. Insects and mollusks are an environmentally friendly energy efficient source of fat, protein and, depending on species, many important micronutrients. They can be produced locally, often using waste products as source of food. The floor space of an average attic is more than enough to produce enough buffalo worms to get a whole family with a daily dose of insect-based protein equivalent to a burger patty each. Given the amount of food waste most families produce, this food production would be virtually free from any ecological footprint whatsoever. No bykill in the form of rodents, any alternative source of protein is arguably inferior from a moral perspective, at least, given the assumption that insects aren't sentient. When you grow your own veggies in your backyard, keeping the slugs and snails away can be quite a challenge. But what if you don't. What if you capture and or trap the slugs and snails your veggies attract and eat them? Depending on the crops involved, you might actually gather more calories from animals you capture than from for example the lettuce you grow. Again, zero justification for NOT eating these slugs and snails instead of trying to fight them off in another way in order to protect your crops. Yes, you will lose more of your crops, but in the end, the number of calories produced by your garden is higher.

More calories, free calories from non-sentient insects and mollusks will reduce the number of calories you need to get from food sources with known bykill of produce and other plant-based food sources. This means the total number of sentient animals killed on an entomophagous diet is lower than that of a purely plant-based diet. Add to that the environmental advantages of entomophagy, we may claim that if insects and mollusks are NOT sentient an entomophagous diet is morally superior to a purely plant-based diet.

As long as we don't know

The reality is, we really don't know if insects and mollusks are sentient. It is my hypothesis that this, in fact, may be the root cause of the argumentative culture amongst the vegan community of Twitter. A vegan diet (yes diet), is morally superior to the two alternatives described below by virtue of us not knowing if insects and mollusks are in fact sentient. The culture of being argumentative about just about everything about the vegan diet (including if a vegan diet is a diet or not) allows the vegan community to argue that insects are sentient whenever anyone brings up entomophagy, to turn non-sentient the moment someone mentions bykill and ethical medium-yield meat production.

Again, this blog post is not meant to start an argument. Neither is it meant as a plea to vegans to change to a more ethical diet. Instead, it is meant for those vegans that find it necessary to become abrasive and abusive towards people who actually make their dietary choices based on ethical considerations not that much different from their own.

I myself have been an ovo-ento vegetarian for years in the past and have added ethically sourced meat (mostly offal) and dairy (mostly sheep) back to my diet for health reasons. I've been called a rapist a serial killer and a few things even worse that I won't repeat on this blog. While I'm 100% convinced my diet is both more healthy (at least for me) and more ethical than a vegan diet, I will never resort to using any such wording for a fellow human trying to do the right thing. I hope thus, that this blog can help some vegans to understand enough about the ethical considerations for choosing a non-vegan diet for very much vegan reasons to abstain from the verbal abuse of those that mean well. Or better yet, stop using that type of abusive language altogether. You aren't winning any hearts to your cause by calling people rapists or serial killers. Seriously, you won't.