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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

I feed a large group of stray cats around the neighborhood every morning for years now.

Let me tell you, they definitely have feelings.

Some cats are overjoyed to see me, they even come running down the road, purring and chirping at me. It's not because of the food because many of them don't even eat it right when I put it down, they must eat later in the day. They are just genuinely happy to get some attention, to "talk" to you and to be talked to.

What people should be asking is if all those chickens, cows and bulls that are slaughtered every year had feelings and if it is right to raise them only to kill them.

(and yes I know the irony is the cat food is made of chickens, cows, etc. - I don't know how to resolve that conflict)

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>I don't know how to resolve that conflict

this is why artificial meat would be so important to our civilization - probably the most important thing to happen in the near future. It would finally allow to unblock the idea in human minds that the animals are sentient beings.

I like the idea of forcing people to consider living, feeling creature vs not but I dunno how they would ever reduce the cost of artificially grown. Maybe a technology that doesn't exist yet. It would have to be grown like plants/mold.

The livestock industry is sure going to push some nasty ads to fight artificial.

It's seems pretty obvious to me that pigs and cows have feelings and are somewhat intelligent, so I'm reluctant to eat those. But I'm really wondering about dumb animals like chickens, fish and insects. Do they have feelings? Does a chicken or a fish suffer when imprisoned?

I saw a study somewhere that maybe fish do have feelings, they just don't express them in a way we can identify or relate to so we write it off. They do have very tiny brains but still.

After refusing to eat meat since I was a teenager (we're talking decades) I recently "gave in" and started eating tuna because my protein intake was so low it was doing damage. Still feel guilty as hell about it. Beans and milk just don't cut it though and greek yogurt is way way too expensive to eat regularly.

Here's a steer that was let outside after being cooped up for the winter, tell me it's not happy:

https://imgur.com/gallery/r1picTv

cows do that too - I've seen all sorts of scenes with cows that clearly show them expressing emotions, with music, with dogs, etc.

and pigs are VERY smart, smarter than dogs in many cases, makes completely sense to me if they have emotions, would be strange if they did not while dogs do

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