should i let my chickens die naturally?

[Araucana Nest]

You realize animals have NO sense of mortality, right? All they know is if they're content or suffering. By allowing an animal to suffer because YOU fear death is a sin so vile I can't believe you'd even defend it.

Just replying to one point in general here: Animals have a wide range of emotion. If they had no sense of mortality they would not show fear of predators or lightning or unpleasant humans getting close to their coop. But they defend themselves as best they can. They defend their families with all they have.
I believe however one cares for them, whether as economic units that are owned and subject only to one’s ideas, or as sentient beings with their own journey, will stay with you for a very long time since it is your own mind that creates these concepts of value along with whatever cultural momentum is streaming at the time.

 

[Araucana Nest]

Interesting, and also sounds like a totally rational way of looking at it. I can certainly relate as I used to be a vegetarian and even now I feel more karmic responsibility when I eat a piece of meat than when I eat a salad, because I do think the animal probably has *more* capacity for suffering (though not the monopoly on it).

Not meaning to disrespect anyone's religion, but since you're making the arument about moral heirarchy, one thing I disagree with Buddhists about is the precept that monks shoudln't take life themselves but have to be offered food from others. I'm skeptical that you can shift your karmic footprint onto others like that. If there's some amount of evil (or maybe karmic responsibility is a more accurate term than "evil" imo) in killing a plant, then that weight should transfer to eating the plant, no matter who killed it. Is it acceptable to receive a lion pelt as a gift if if was killed by some trophy hunter instead of you? Is it morally neutral to eat shark fin soup at a wedding where you're a guest, as long as you didn't personally kill the shark? Is it less of a sin to receive and eat a chicken breast at a soup kitchen, especially if that meat came from a CAFO, than to raise a chicken, treat it well, then butcher it humanely so you can eat it? I think if you're sustaining yourself on food that comes from living things, you're taking on the full karmic weight of whatever you're eating, regardless of who killed it so you could do so.

Buddhist monastics have an entirely different understanding of the world that would be impossible to explain in a post and takes years (decades) of Insight or Tranquility meditation for someone to understand by way of actual personal experience. That is actual experience and not conceptual rationalization which is what we are doing here. .

I totally agree about the suffering animal. I mean it's a judgement call, I don't think it's immoral to choose *not* to kill a suffering animal, whether because you think it might have a chance to live or because you don't feel comfortable taking a life. But taking a life to end suffering is certainly justifiable if the intention is there.

I know there are multiple schools of Buddhism and some different ideas about eating meat. I find some of them to be a bit more internally consistent than others, but then I'm not an expert on it so I could just be misunderstanding. But even in the vegetarian sects, if you're going to argue that killing a plant is wrong, then I feel like it's a bit of a cheat to say that it doesn't count to eat it if you didn't kill it yourself. I'm sure that in predominantly Buddhist communities, for example, there are people who buy or harvest extra food to give to the monks that they know will need to eat. If the monks weren't depending on the community for food, those plants wouldn't be killed, so they are still indirectly responsible for the killing of those plants. It's the same argument that people make against buying consumer goods that involve the exploitation of vulnerable people (or animals). As long as there's a demand for those products, suppliers will continue to produce them with no motivation to change their practices. You can't escape the bad karma by distancing yourself from the original action. In my opinion, anyway.

Just a disclaimer, I'm not trying to disparage Buddhism; I think most religions and philosophies are similarly valid prisms through which to view the world, mostly organized around the same central moral themes and mostly differing in the details. I have more of an a la carte approach that draws from many different belief systems because orthodoxies and organized institutions don't resonate with me personally, but that doesn't make them any less valid than the ones that do. Just want to be clear, when I debate concepts of Buddhism, I'm not saying that they're wrong or that other people shouldn't follow it, only that it those particular aspects don't resonate with my personal world view.

I totally agree that the world would be a better place if more people were open to listening to other people's worldviews. That's one of the reasons I enjoy debating philosophy and religion, when people are open to it and don't interpret it as a personal attack. I think most of us agree on most of the important things, and the relatively minute differences are just reflections of differences in priorities, values, preferences, lifestyle, opinions, etc, which aren't worth getting too worked up about because they mostly come down to personal preference, and without which differences the world would be a pretty boring place.

 

[Nicrom]

Plants don’t have feelings or consciousness. Please - don’t be ridiculous. What are we supposed to survive on, air and the lord? Makes no sense and this is completely irrelevant.

The Lord? Yes, absolutely! My soul along with my physical body needs to be fed. Man cannot live on bread alone. I’ve lived my life for myself and now I live it for Jesus. For me, I’ve found the truth I had been searching for.

To the original question, I would aid in ending my chickens life if it were suffering.