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banx comments on Open thread, 3-8 June 2014 - Less Wrong
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Effective animal altruism question: I may be getting a dog. Dogs are omnivores who seem to need meat to stay healthy. What's the most ethical way to keep my hypothetical dog happy and healthy?
Edit: Answers Pet Foods appears to satisfice. I'll be going with this pending evidence that there's a better solution.
I don't have a full answer to the question, but if you do feed the dog meat, one starting point would be to prefer meat that has less suffering associated with it. It is typically claimed that beef has less suffering per unit mass associated with it than pork and much less than chicken, simply because you get a lot more from one individual. The counterargument would be to claim that cows > pigs > chickens in intelligence/complexity to a great enough extent to outweigh this consideration.
I'm curious: are there specific reasons to believe that dogs need meat while humans (also omnivores) do not? A quick Google search finds lots of vegetarians happy to proclaim that dogs can be vegetarian too, but I haven't looked into details.
My understanding is that pigs > cows >> chickens. Poultry vs mammal is a difficult question that depends on nebulous value judgments, but I thought it was fairly settled that beef causes less suffering/mass than other mammals.
Pigs on top surprises me, given that I thought pigs had more intelligence/awareness than other meat sources (as measured by nebulous educated guessing on our part).
From his last sentence, Ben agrees with you. He has just reversed the meaning of the inequality sign.
You're right, I failed a parse check. Thanks!
Huskies love fish (for obvious practical reasons), and fish are just dumb. (Though the way we achieve that is to mix fishy cat food into our husky's dog food, which is random tinned dog food.)
Here's a quick citation: http://pets.webmd.com/features/vegetarian-diet-dogs-cats
tldr: Dogs are opportunistic carnivores more than omnivores. They eat whatever they can get, and they'll probably survive without meat, but they'll be missing a bunch of things their bodies expect to have.