Comment by techiferous | Hacker News Reader

Comment by techiferous | Hacker News Reader

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[EDIT: The following comment is off-topic; therefore I wish I hadn't posted it. I didn't delete it, though, so that you could make sense of the comment responses to it. My apologies for being off-topic.]

I'm about to express an unpopular opinion, so I'm expecting lots of downvotes, but at least I believe that what I'm expressing is rational and from the heart.

Regarding this whole WikiLeaks incident, I felt bad for both the Iraqi casualties and the soldiers. If the soldiers had full knowledge that they were firing on a family that was simply trying to help the wounded, you know that they wouldn't have fired. They fired because they assumed there were insurgents in the van. They made a mistake.

What really bothers me is that so many people get outraged over the soldiers' mistake, but so many people gladly eat factory-farmed meat. Animals in factory farms are subject to a very painful existence before their lives are cut short. Yet most people don't care. It's hard for me to stomach the criticism that the soldiers get knowing that many of the people who criticize these soldiers will then go eat a burger, fully and willfully participating in a system that creates unnecessary suffering and carnage to innocent beings.

In other words, our priorities as a society are out of whack. If we really cared about violence, there is something that each of us can do right away: go vegetarian. It's easier to criticize the violence of soldiers than take action ourselves to live a less violent life.

Let the downvoting begin. :/

I'm not trying to be a jerk about this, but you really cannot expect us to hold the lives of children in Iraq anywhere near that of Cattle. It's hardly hypocrisy to eat a burger after calling out the soldiers, as people and animals really are, according to almost every person as well as almost every religion/philosophy, on completely different planes of existence.

I support the troops who did this, but I don't think people who don't and who eat non-organic meats are hypocrites for it.

"...according to almost every person as well as almost every religion/philosophy, on completely different planes of existence..."

This whole thread is OT, but this statement is extremely dubious. You have no basis for evaluating another being's "plane of existence" — whatever that is. That's like saying that non-English-speakers' lives are worth less because you can't understand what they're saying.

I'm not downvoting you for your opinion.

I'm downvoting you because there's absolutely no reason to bring up your opinion on factory farming in this particular thread. In a discussion of factory farming, the harm done to animals, or even a basic food/vegitarianism thread, I would gladly upvote you for sharing from the heart, even as I disagreed with you. But really, this is not the place.

> Animals in factory farms are subject to a very painful existence before their lives are cut short

Well, as someone with family members in farming - AND a cynic who dislikes causing animals to suffer unnecessarily - for the most part this is utter bullshit. Slaughtering is highly regulated (at least here in the UK) and is designed to cause very little suffering to the animal.

I'm talking about the conditions that they are subject to while they are alive as well. As I understand it, many chickens are kept penned in a cage the size of a piece of notebook paper, male baby chicks are ground up alive, etc. I am interested in more accurate information about factory farms, so please share it if you have it.

Oh I see your point. Well conditions on facorty farms are.. Worse but not quite like the picture your painting. I don't really agree with the way factory farms operate but regualations are forcing them to improve.

I don't think Im qualified to comment on animals suffering in those conditions. I've never researched it fully.

This isn't really the sort of place for this discussion - in hindsight.

You raise an interesting point about the difference between intent and outcome. Making the factory farm analogy makes it appear that you are hijacking an issue to push your own agenda.

To paraphrase you: The soldiers weren't out there with the express intent of killing civilians, but farms do have the express intent of killing animals. It's not that you equate human loss of life with animal loss of life. It's that you equate accidental loss of human life with intentional destruction of animal life.

In response I would say that we all draw that line somewhere. Humans don't tolerate unlimited cruelty to animals, even if it is beneficial to us.

Jeez dude... Do you really equate human and animal life? I have lots of sympathy with your position in general, and I don't have a good answer for why I don't go vegetarian, but this seems extreme to me.

> Do you really equate human and animal life?

No.

Ya dude, that's taking it too far. You can't compare the loss of human life to ANYTHING else. I understand your position, but stating it detracts from what's really important - the unnecessary loss of human life.

"You can't compare the loss of human life to ANYTHING else."

I'm not equating animals and humans.

I would be happy if I could get at least one person to start questioning. We don't have enough philosophers nowadays. We have all "picked up" from society that we can treat animals as objects and that violence against animals isn't a big deal. I just wish I would live in a world where people would question deeply these values and assumptions instead of just "picking up" what people around us believe.

One of my ex girlfriends held views similar (a little more extreme) to the one your expressing.

Ultimately I came to the realisation there is a limit to how much we can care for the animal kingdom on a philosophical level.

Speaking purely as animals the need to hunt/rear/kill is perfectly natural ("if god wanted us to be veggies why does meat taste so damn good"). I realised that, yes, we have to counterbalance that with our increased level of intelligence (i.e. an advantage) and respect our co-inhabitants.

Edit. I'm commenting on the general philisophical views of the gp by the way rather than the specific comments about factory farming. It was not clear this was their emphasis :-) But there is a limit :)

> Ultimately I came to the realisation there is a limit to how much we can care for the animal kingdom on a philosophical level.

I agree with you 100%.

I think we probably disagree on where that limit is, and I think we as humans are way overstepping our bounds.

> Speaking purely as animals the need to hunt/rear/kill is perfectly natural

You have a good point, and I would add that factory farming is very far from natural.

You have a good point, and I would add that factory farming is very far from natural.

It's "natural" for a certain, non-negligible percentage of humanity to starve to death, or to suffer from malnutrition. Factory farming is a very important reason why fewer people starve to death every year. Screw your idea of what's "natural."

Factory farming generally means pigs, cows and chickens crammed into small spaces. I think you're confusing that with Industrial Agriculture, aka. "The Green Revolution".

It's quite possible to have non-factory farming and not starve to death.

I think the issues with inhumane animal treatment and overcrowding are going to solve themselves eventually. Nobody wants agribusinesses out of the animal-husbandry business more than the agribusinesses do. Feeding, confining, and slaughtering animals is a messy and expensive annoyance.

Before long, I think we'll see engineered meat being grown on scaffolds in vats, without no need for anyone to deal with animal maintenance at all. As I understand it, the biotech advances needed to make this happen are incremental, not revolutionary.

This will obviously be considered revolting at first, but it won't be hard to change peoples' minds. There simply aren't any downsides -- everybody from ordinary consumers to PETA nutcases to cigar-chomping Con-Agra executives will get what they want.

Factory farming of livestock hardly contributes to solving malnutrition - it is much more efficient to eat plants directly rather than first feeding the stuff to animals and then eating the animals.

Note: not that I have any problems with eating animals, but you can hardly defend it on efficiency grounds.

> Screw your idea of what's "natural."

Ouch.

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