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Comment by jules | Hacker News Reader

Now I'm wondering whether you are a vegetarian, or whether you pay others to kill animals for a few minutes of eating pleasure.

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I'm not a vegetarian, and I gladly pay others to kill animals for me to eat. But I do not pay for the animals to be tortured in the process; I want them killed as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Cats injure, torture, and play with their prey before killing it. Humans should not do that.

Not that they're always successful, but hunters also want animals killed as quickly as possible (not necessarily painlessly, but are our methods of slaughtering really that painless? Do we give them a nice general anesthetic before bashing in their brains or decapitating them?). Anything but a good clean shot is considered, depending on the hunter, cruel, wasteful, poor form, etc. Most of the people I know who hunt aren't sports hunters. They hunt deer (because there's an abundance in the area, more than were here before the US was founded), primarily for food. A couple decent-sized deer, properly butchered, will last quite a while for them. If they hunt anything beyond what they need, it's to give to family/friends who won't or can't hunt.

There is a great difference between deer hunting and fox hunting, don't confuse the two. In fox hunting there is no "good clean shot".

FYI, the author's original comment was about fox hunting, which is decidedly different from most forms of hunting popular in the US.

Where do you get your ethically produced meat from?

Why would hunting be torture, but slaughtering not?

Fox hunting, where the fox is chased around by dogs for a long time before it is finally killed, is torture. Hunting with a rifle, where you sneak up on an animal and kill it before it even knows it's being hunted, is not. I'd say bow hunting is a grey area; if you have to track the bleeding animal down while it is slowly bleeding out, that's cruel. But if you're hunting for survival and a bow is all you have, or if you're training for that situation (and it's realistic that you might be in that situation) then it's ok.

If you compare the worst case scenario for hunting (fox hunting) with the best case scenario for slaughter, but often the slaughter isn't fun either. Many animals are very distressed on their way to the slaughter. Even more importantly, the lives they had before that point were probably much worse than the lives of the wild foxes. Farming animals for meat also happens on a scale that is absolutely incomparable to fox hunting. More animals are slaughtered every day than the number of foxes that were hunted in the entire history of humankind.

Secondly, you say that hunting is permissible if you're hunting for survival. Why doesn't the same apply for slaughter? You don't need to eat farmed animals for survival.

I'm reading the parent post not as "you say that hunting is permissible if you're hunting for survival" but instead as a claim that this cruelty is justified if and only if you're hunting for survival.

The same would apply for slaughter - if it would be a survival matter, then any methods would be permissible (i.e. some of the more cruel traditional approaches) but since it is not, it should be mandatory to use only the less painful approaches to slaughter.

I'm comparing "hunting for sport" against "hunting for food", and I'm comparing "hunting for food in a cruel way for the challenge" against "hunting for food in a cruel way out of necessity."

I don't think it's ok to torture a fox because it had a nice life before the torture started.

I don't think it's ok to torture a fox because we kill a lot more cows than foxes.

I don't think it's ok to torture animals that we raise for slaughter. I pay more for organic grass-fed cattle, free-range chicken and eggs, etc, in the hopes that the animals that provide my food were treated well while they were alive.

As I said at the start, I'm not a vegetarian. I'm definitely a part of the animal food chain, so I'm ok with the killing of animals further down the chain for me to eat, and I avoid the animals further up the chain so that I don't get eaten. (I wouldn't blame them if they got me, though.) What I object to is killing in a way that causes more suffering than it has to.

If you object to inflicting more suffering than you have to, how do you justify not being a vegetarian? In the end this is a trade of a bit of pleasure for you and quite a bit of suffering for the animal. Fox hunting, it seems to me, is precisely the same sort of trade. You could argue that the pleasure you get from eating meat is worth the suffering, but the pleasure the hunters get from fox hunting is not worth the suffering, but it is not clear to me how you would justify such a claim. Firstly, it seems to me not impossible that a hunter derives more pleasure from a hunting trip than from eating a piece of chicken. Secondly, it seems to me not impossible that the total amount of suffering inflicted on a chicken during its farm lifetime including slaughter is greater than the total amount of suffering inflicted on a fox during the hunt, particularly since free range isn't all it's made out to be. Thirdly, even if it were the case that fox hunting is a worse trade than meat eating, it's still unclear why it couldn't be the case that both are still worth it, or neither is worth it.

Easy: I have to eat meat, and I'm not a reductionist.

I don't eat meat for pleasure, particularly, and certainly not as recreation. Fox hunting is purely recreation.

I agree. What I want to to is ethical because I need to do it. What other people is unethical because I don't need it.

Why do you have to eat meat?

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