Luxembourg's leaders have proposed a far-reaching animal rights bill | Hacker News Reader

Luxembourg's leaders have proposed a far-reaching animal rights bill

news.vice.com

56 pointssethbannon75 comments

> The legislation wouldn't apply to most farm animals, a common provision in animal rights laws.

I expect that farm animals are the most numerous and most abused large animals in most countries, oh well…

Yeah, it seems like any animal rights legislation that ignores the meat industry is solving the wrong problem.

If you make legislation on the farm industry too onerous then all that happens is that it shuts down and people buy animal products from countries with weaker legislation than you started with.

It's like that with every industry. Can't burn coal in California? No problem we'll burn it for you in Washington and sell you the "cleansed" electricity. Require solar power in Germany? No problem, we'll make the solar cells in China using coal for energy. and sell you the "clean" solar panels.

There are some things you just can't legislate.

How many farm animals are there in Luxembourg?

Hi from Luxembourg. Cows everywhere, chicken, pork, and a few sheep and horses.

http://www.statistiques.public.lu/catalogue-publications/lux...

Very much agreed, but still happy to see people trying to take a step in the right direction. They do mention ending the practice of killing male chicks, which is currently universal among egg-producing farms.

> They do mention ending the practice of killing male chicks

Why?

I mean if you want to make sure animals are not in pain, and treated well, no problem.

But what's the reason for not killing the male chicks? What do they plan to do with them? Release them back into the wild?

It's either an outlandish demand they can let go of during negotiation in order to appear reasonable, Trump-style, or a genuine demand in order to make the price of eggs increase 10x, because they honestly believe the state should eventually be enforcing veganism.

IDK if that price is well calculated, but here in Austria we can buy 6 organic eggs for which no male chicks died vs 10 organic eggs where they do die. Same price. Doesn't look like x10.

What do they do with the males?

They live on a farm, somewhere, you really wouldn't want to visit.

Place your wagers.

Only produce female chicks in the first place. The tech is already available, only introduces a small increase in cost, and I believe Germany is mandating its use in a few years already.

> The tech is already available

There is no such tech. If you think there is post a link to it.

At best there is current research (not actually a product yet) to identify the chicks while still in the egg, and I see absolutely no difference between killing them in the egg or out of it.

Just kill them painlessly (i.e. extremely quickly) and move on.

I believe the GP comment wasn't too far off. This article from last year says the Germans have done promising research and intend to have a working prototype this year, which sexes (technical term) chicks at just three days after inoculation.

http://m.thepoultrysite.com/news/34741

I also understand there is no tech used to identify the sex of chicks at a young enough age. It's a highly specialized skill (chicken sexing) that takes lots of training. I think it's even specialized between different types of poultry.

> I believe the GP comment wasn't too far off.

"The tech is already available, only introduces a small increase in cost"

vs:

"have done promising research and intend to have a working prototype this year"

I consider that quite far off. They don't even have a prototype to show that it even works, let alone cost information for "a small increase in cost".

CSIRO in Australia is all over this.

Article

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-12/marking-male-embroys-a...

Short Doco / News Report

http://www.abc.net.au/landline/content/2016/s4427149.htm

So, again, some research, that doesn't work yet, and is very far from being in production, let alone testing.

Hardly "The tech is already available, only introduces a small increase in cost".

You are clearly not interested, as you were presented with the information and still dismiss it because being wrong upsets you. I did not say it was in production use yet, I said it was available. It is. And as I said, it only introduces a minor cost increase, and is already set to be required by law within 2 years.

> I did not say it was in production use yet, I said it was available.

It is not available.

Two people posted links about research, neither research has even reached the prototype stage yet, never mind "available".

> as you were presented with the information and still dismiss it because being wrong upsets you

I dismissed it because it is not available. I don't understand how even in the face of evidence you still think it's available.

Do you want it so badly that you will misread things on purpose?

> and is already set to be required by law within 2 years.

Uh hu. They can require whatever they like, but if the technology doesn't exist a whole lot of good it'll do them.

What they should do (and probably are in fact doing) is fund research.

When it's available we can come back and talk, right now it's not.

Simply repeating a lie won't make it true. You've been shown repeatedly that it is available. The fact that you do not like this is irrelevant. It is already being used in hatcheries in Germany. It is on track to be fully implemented on all farms in the entire country by the end of the year. There's no way to pretend that is not available.

You are too funny. Post a link to it being used then, and how it works, if you are so sure of yourself.

While it gives me hope that legislation is at least acknowledging that the suffering of animals is something we might care about, it still is sad to see the same arbitrary pet/livestock divide.

Of course extending such legislation to farm animals would be politically impossible, but it still hurts to read

> the animal's dignity must prevail over the profitability of the industrial activity

when we all know it's not true.

honest question here. What is a animal vs a rodent vs a insect vs a pest?

I am all for this, but what are the edge cases? I couldn't find it anywhere in that article.

The article says the bill will "ban people from giving animals as gifts or prizes." Can someone explain why giving animals as gifts is inhumane or something we should ban?

Giving a relative a dog to raise seems altogether kind (especially a rescue dog) and beneficial for both (assuming you know the character of the person who will raise the dog and that they are ready/willing).

you'd be amazed at the number of dogs in animal shelters who are there cause the kid who got it for Christmas suddenly got tired of it. banning it might be extreme, but I wish more people would think of the consequences of gifting someone an animal.

Pets require a long term commitment. If you're buying one for yourself, you've [hopefully] put some thought into the implications. It's a lot harder to be thoughtful on behalf of someone else over that time period.

It says legislation wouldn't apply to most farm animals, but it bans the poultry industry (unless they have some billionaire ready to adopt a bunch of roosters?).

One can easily see that the call to "limit the sales of dogs and cats to reputable breeders" is gonna make some of these bill authors unjustifiably rich at a higher likelihood than it protects a cat or dog.

The poultry industry won't be hurt too much, since there is no good reason you can't sell rooster meat (actually they will typically be a little bit larger than the females) but I don't know if they do already sell them.

The egg industry will be hit somewhat, since it will essentially double the price of eggs. Probably it will also hurt the pre-made goods industry (cookies, etc) and they will likely be forced out of Luxemberg.

(Essentially nobody, other than people who raise chicks in their backyard, use the same chickens for eggs and meat, since different chickens species are optimized for either so this probably won't impact those who raise meat chickens much).

You can't sell the rooster meat. The breed used for laying eggs doesn't produce nearly as much meat as actual meat breeds. The best you could manage is to turn them into stock for soup, something they already do with the laying hens when they get too old.

I must have been unclear, I meant that you could presumably sell the rooster meat from the meat chickens (at least my family eats rooster meat and it tastes great) but those who produce eggs would be foobar.

The vast majority of male chicks which are destroyed are of the egg-laying variety.

Industrial broilers of both sexes are raised to slaughter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broiler

I think it's also the case that requiring something else be done with males would have much less than 2x effect on the price of eggs. A hen will produce ~300 eggs a year. Whatever extra it might cost to raise the less efficient egg breed roosters for meat would be less than the cost of feeding a hen to produce that many eggs.

It is not just that they are less efficient, it is that they supposedly taste terrible.

The bad taste has the ring of folk wisdom.

Isn't it interesting that calls for animal rights are strongest among those who don't interact with any animals except pets? We've become too far removed from the realities of nature. It leads to pointless feel-good laws like this, which "prohibit[s] the poultry industry practice of killing male chicks because they don't lay eggs" among other things.

In general, I think it is totally inappropriate for governments to put human beings in prison for crimes against the well being of an animal. The coercive authority of the government must only be used to protect human interests. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't have environmental law; that's about protecting a shared resource, not about protecting the well being of any animal as an end in itself.

I don't know if I agree with you but I see your point, and it's not the sort of thing that people should be downvoting, I don't think.

I usually think that the law shouldn't exist to enforce morality, but I'm not sure if that principle should be applied in the absolute sense or not. Anyway, its not clear that it's immoral under any secular ethics to "mistreat" animals in the first place, especially if there's a clear benefit to humans. Even if it is immoral, its not clear which animals should be valued. Most people seem to agree that chimpanzees should be treated with more consideration than jellyfish. My personal utility function values warm blooded animals higher than all others and below humans, but that's just an intuitive preference, not based on any rigorous analysis. I have hope that the next few decades of AI research might shed some light on this issue by giving us an idea of what "sentience" really means, but this is far from guaranteed.

I suppose I'd like to see efforts focused on restructuring meat subsidies to make meat more expensive (and better reflective of the costs of production). I'm sure doing this would be a political nightmare, and I don't have the necessary understanding of agricultural economics to give any suggestions for exactly how to do this, but it seems doable. Higher meat prices will also hopefully make synthetic meat research more attractive. Synthetic meat would conveniently bypass this whole debate.

Other measures that should probably be attempted before we turn to fining and jailing people for mistreating or disrespecting animals should probably address the pet breeding industry, people who aren't looking for a dog to aid with hunting or foraging or some other specialized purpose should have more incentives to prefer a shelter over a breeder than currently exist. And maybe make it a crime to intentionally kill or hurt certain animals for no reason.

> "In North America, the fur trade is an example of the sustainable use of renewable natural resources," Herscovici told VICE News. "This is the key concern of modern environmental thinking."

The chutzpah is strong in this one.

There was a nice SF novel by Clifford D. Simak where all the humans eventually migrated to Jupiter, to cavort pleasantly amongst the clouds, and the world was literally left to the dogs.

All we need is the migration to Jupiter.

"City" it is called to whomever is concerned. Pretty good stuff.

It's a good start.

...to what end, from your perspective?

Can't speak for the OP but for many people the billions of animals killed every year for food, clothing and fun is a major moral crime which will be looked back on in the future - both the activities and the almost total lack of consideration given that it's even a problem - as completely unbelievable, just like women being unable to vote, black slavery and so on.

Think about it this way: the Prohibition backfired badly. And alcohol is not as entrenched in modern society as meat consumption.

Those billions of animals will keep dying until we can manufacture synthetic meat that is exactly as safe and tasty as natural meat.

I'm morally fine with meat-eating as a concept, but we need to treat those animals a lot better than we do, while they're alive.

I am also for meat-eating, but I am against animal killing. The two positions are very hard to reconcile, let me tell you that.

The future you imagine will have very few animals in it. I love animals, so I am glad they serve so many useful purposes, since otherwise the cost of feeding, sheltering and caring for them would be enormous. Raising a token number in preserves is not an equitable substitute.

> The future you imagine will have very few animals in it.

It would have just as many wild animals in it. Keeping those alive in the face of human expansion and industry is, of course, a whole different problem than animal rights.

> I love animals, so I am glad they serve so many useful purposes, since otherwise the cost of feeding, sheltering and caring for them would be enormous.

I'm a meat-eater and that still doesn't make sense to me. It sounds like what you love isn't animals, but biomass.

You're imagining that an animal lover has unlimited resources. I'm saying that since caring for animals (on an individual and species/ecological level) takes a lot of time and money, I'm glad animals are useful during and after their life, because otherwise it's difficult or impossible to sustain caring for animals in significant numbers.

Note that I'm not defending the typical Westerner loading up a grocery cart with chicken breasts. There are a lot of things wrong with the meat industry on the supply and the demand side.

What you say is true only if you assume we will continue to ignore and extingush the natural world in favor of human habitats. There are efforts to make space for Earth's non human animals to live in the wild. See, for example, E.O. Wilson's work: http://eowilsonfoundation.org/e-o-wilson-on-saving-half-the-...

Also, only a small number of species are bred for food or other resources. I think there's less than 20 types of animals bred for farming. Re-wilding 50% of the earth meanwhile would provide food and shelter to all animal species.

Two thoughts: I certainly hope that technology and space colonization can expand the definition of animal preserve. However, Wilson's proposals are fantastic and don't factor the benefits animals gain from symbiotic living with humans.

And I believe there are several problems with overly specialized diets, not just that we're willing to preserve only a few species in significant numbers. It would be very good for world hunger if the west began to eat more kinds of meat again.

The vast majority of animal suffering happens to wild animals. If your reason for supporting animal rights is to reduce suffering (not the only possible reason) then eliminating wild animals is not a bad thing:

http://foundational-research.org/the-importance-of-wild-anim...

Reading that article was a serious WTF.

The basic argument is that most animals are insects, small fish etc. which live lives so short that they do not have the time to experience enough pleasure to compensate for the pain of death.

I believe this is the worst kind of bike shedding, as it detracts from the very important discussion on actual human influences on actual animal welfare.

Preventing wild animal suffering is much more difficult than preventing suffering in captive animals. We don't understand nature well enough to make major changes without risk of making things worse. Therefore it's a reasonable choice to focus on captive animals. I don't see how awareness of a difficult problem prevents work on the easier one.

The point I was trying to make is: do we really believe insect suffering is a larger problem than mammal suffering?

The author of the article linked above implements some moral calculus where insect suffering is weighted lower, but since there is such a huge number of insects, they still end up concluding that insect suffering is a huge problem.

My claim is that instead it's correct to give zero weight to insect suffering, since it's not a "difficult problem", it's a literally unsolvable problem.

Well, the only way to solve it would be to exterminate all insects in order to end their cycle of suffering, and that would entail so much destruction and ecosystem collapse it would literally render the entire earth barren and lifeless.

TL;DR: when someone claims we have a big problem where the only possible solution is killing all living organisms on planet Earth, I say they're wrong: that what they claim is a problem is, in fact, not a problem.

I think that's inevitable. You just have to look at Gary Yourofsky and how he alone made 8% of Israel go vegan[0] with his popular Youtube speech[1].

[0] http://metro.co.uk/2015/09/28/how-animal-rights-activist-gar...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es6U00LMmC4

> is a major moral crime

And spiritual too.

I believe the proverbial "forbidden fruit" in the Bible is actually animal flesh. That's what transformed Heaven, were humans an animals cohabited peacefully, into not-Heaven - Earth.

Consequently, at least in theory - not eating animal flesh would transform Earth back into Heaven. And that is the grand challenge for us as a species.

As long as there are slaughterhouses there will be battlefields (Leo Tolstoy).

Overcoming the meat addiction requires a higher level of spiritual awareness, which also leads to non-violence towards other humans - or Peace.

Make your case for not eating meat, but you can't do it from that passage in the Bible. The Bible's forbidden fruit was unambiguously fruit from a tree, not animal flesh. Adam and Eve's taking of it was direct rebellion against God. Turning Earth back into heaven requires atonement for that rebellion against God. It has absolutely nothing to do with eating meat. In fact, one of the very first things that God does in Genesis 3:21 after Adam and Eve take the forbidden fruit is provide animal skins as clothing for them, partially to foreshadow the system of animal sacrifices that would be instituted by God in the book of Exodus for the nation of Israel.

Isn't it interesting how there's always a passage in the bible somewhere that supports a point of view, as long as you 'interpret' it 'correctly'?

If meat eating was the reason for being exiled out of heaven - the only thing I would say is - it was worth it. As a person that spent summers in the rural area while young - killing an animal is no big deal.

You do know that agriculture also kills animals, both from pesticides and (at the very minimum) from destroying their habitat, right? Whole species are now extinct due to agriculture.

I don't think it is possible for us to be on Earth without causing the death of animals, be it in a direct or indirect way. Or at least, it won't be until we get a technology to produce food out of inorganic matter.

Degree matters.

it almost makes up for the systematic tax dodging and money laundering that the country relies on to keep a float.

almost

Yeah, nice to see they've found a way to square their consciences with stealing from the taxpayers of Europe.

depends on your view, I see the politicians and the ones living at the expense of others as stealing from the tax payers

Symptoms of a dying society (fertility rate of 1.57). Can't wait to see what they think of next.

Freedom is very important to me. Keeping animals locked up makes me uncomfortable. Of course, the fact that I enjoy being free, does not necessarily mean that freedom is important to animals as well. Perhaps animals are too dumb to appreciate freedom.

I have tried eating a vegan diet a couple times. I was surprised by how much delicious vegan food there is. I actually didn't miss the eating of meat much. However, my energy levels were really low, so I went back to eating meat.

> Isn't it interesting that calls for animal rights are strongest among those who don't interact with any animals except pets?

That's an interesting observation. My impression is that the most intelligent humans typically move to large cities, whereas the dumbest ones remain in the rural areas. Most farmers don't seem terribly bright (there are of course exceptions). Could this have something to do with it?

> Most farmers don't seem terribly bright (there are of course exceptions).

Way to stereotype vast groups of people.

Also, it's more or less totally inaccurate. Modern farms (even small ones) are multimillion dollar businesses and definitely require savvy.

All the farmers I knew in rural Vermont had been to university (often for agriculture studies) and definitely weren't dumb. They also all universally recognized that death is part of nature. They treated their animals well (these were predominantly small family farms) but also had no qualms about killing them.

My philosophy is that everyone who eats another animal should have to kill an animal once. If you're willing to do it, fine. (I am.) If you're not, then you're living your life by an inconsistent moral principal, where death is fine as long as you don't cause it—even if it's for your benefit. (Similarly, I think every politician voting for a war should be required to serve a tour of duty.)

You can't slur entire populations of people like that here. That's a bannable offense on Hacker News, so please don't do it again.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11702913 and marked it off-topic.

What about rights for ladybugs?

What about it? Is there anything specific you want to raise up as an issue?

My point was obvious. Why are animals valued more than other living organisms?

Ladybugs are animals. Note the "Kingdom: Animalia" here [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coccinellidae

It wasn't obvious. There are a few things you could have meant. People often guess wrong if you aren't explicit, or will just be confused and not reply.

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