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Comment by pacaro | Hacker News Reader

In her book "Animals make is human" - Temple Grandin makes the argument (among many others, this is not the main thesis of the book) that we can have a symbiotic relationship with animals, wherein we provide secure food supply, protection from predation and the associated stress, etc. and in return we eat the animal. Factory farming, by contrast has more in common with a parasitic relationship.

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I always think of factory farming as a horror story written by a cow in a parallel universe where cows are the dominant life form.

I think of alien abduction stories and related horror fiction as our species' fear of someone else doing to us what we do to animals in factory farms.

I'm always struck by the way that so many horror stories / movies are literally just something else treating us the way we treat animals.

To play devil's advocate, would you accept the same trade? We've provided you with medicine, police protection, and subsidized food and shelter. Does that give me the right to presume that I should be able to eat you?

Well, since we were discussing different forms of suffering... They [the state, the company] effectively eat most of my soul and half of my conscious life. In return I get wages and spend them on police protection, medicine etc.

So you're saying it might be moral to eat the unemployed? They don't pay time or money to anyone, yet they still receive some basic level of access to infrastructure. They take more than they give, and that means killing them and eating them could be a viable way to make up the difference.

That's before you get into the fact that we don't give animals a choice in the matter. They can't opt out of our protection and their eventual slaughter. We presume that it's acceptable to agree to that bargain on their behalf.

Like I said, it's a thought experiment, but it's one that leaves me uneasy with the consequences.

A Modest Proposal by Jonathon Swift:

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

Are you familiar with it? Obviously, it's not quite the same, but this was the first thing that came to mind from your comment.

I don't get the beef with cannabilism

Well yeah, cannibalism is only beef when cows do it.

This is how mad cow disease spreads.

It might be a bit off-topic, but this is the idea behind one of the most popular episodes of the Twilight Zone.[0]

[0] - https://youtu.be/6g7vz6c2fog

I think our ancestors called it hunting.

I agree that this would be a better situation. Does it explore if that symbiotic relationship would change the impact on the environment animal farming has? I have in mind the movie cowspiracy, which explained that cow farming causes a big greenhouse effect.

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