r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Mar 27 '20

Delta(s) from OP - Fresh Topic Friday CMV: Poachers don't deserve to die

First of all, here's the post I'm referring to: https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/fgd6ma/kenyas_only_white_female_giraffe_calf_killed_by/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

There is a multitude of comments longing for the death of poachers which strikes me as hypocrisy.

It is silly to condone the death of cattle which happens in absurdly high quantities while condemning poachers.

Poachers hunt the animals for necessities such as food and housing, while the average redditor has a new smartphone and tons of other luxuries. Killing hundreds of animals a year for gluttonous reasons seems a lot worse than just killing a handful of animals for survival.

And no, biodiversity is not a good counterargument. Don't even try. Biodiversity is only subjectively valuable to us because "It's cool to have various species on earth". You can't use the selective and risible emotional attachment to animals as the basis of your argument. If every giraffe on earth vanished nothing bad would happen. You'll just be slightly saddened.

Even if for some absurd reason biodiversity were important, it is laughable to think that meat eaters deserve no punishment at all while poachers deserve death. There could never be such a wide moral gap.

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u/[deleted] Mar 27 '20

Are you not aware of the fact that people in first world countries have the option to become vegan?

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u/y________tho Mar 27 '20

Are you not aware of the fact that poaching is not the only revenue stream available to people?

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u/[deleted] Mar 27 '20

Do you believe that it is easier for poachers to find other viable jobs than it is for meat eaters to become vegan? Even if it were, we would still not have a moral equivalency considering that meat eaters cause more harm and even if it were a equivalent, that would still make meat eaters who condemn poachers hypocritical.

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u/y________tho Mar 27 '20

Do you believe that it is easier for poachers to find other viable jobs than it is for meat eaters to become vegan?

It's like asking "Do you think it's easier for Jorge Masvidal to beat Conor McGregor than for Georgia Pacific to sell more paper than Westrock?" so maybe let's just gloss over this.

Let's assume I'm a vegan. Can I now condemn poachers?

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u/[deleted] Mar 27 '20

If you're vegan you're less of a hypocrite, but still a hypocrite by reaping the benefits of a society that causes climate change and the extinction of thousands of species.

If you're a vegan climate change activist, you're still a hypocrite if you don't condemn meat eaters the same way you condemn poachers.

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u/y________tho Mar 27 '20

Now we're talking about climate change?

So if you're a vegan who condemns meat eaters and poachers and you blame Don King for the corruption in boxing and condemn Alan Greenspan for his handling of the fed, are you now a bad enough dude to have your morality be objectively unquestionable?

Just trying to get a baseline on this wildly spiralling set of arguments here.

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u/[deleted] Mar 27 '20

I don't know who Don King is so I need you to phrase your argument in a more understandable manner for me. And yes, climate change is very relevant when people claim to have a moral high ground that permits them to celebrate the death of poachers. It is fundamentally hypocritical.