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Comment by pdexter | Hacker News Reader

The problem is, that's not what's happening. Not everyone who eats cows are getting them from people who treat them as nicely as I guess you claim to. Further, why waste food and water on cows when humans can just eat and drink that themselves? Why raise a cow and then shoot it in the head when you can just, you know, eat plants.

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I'd argue it's great for the cow! Think about it they're doing really well as a specie, never before in history they were so successful and enjoyed such high numbers. Their population has simply sore, that however cannot be said about most other species. Also Daniel Dennet gave a TED talk about this. [1]

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_s_response_to_rick_war...

If aliens arrived tomorrow and took half the humans to another planet to farm their meat would you think that was great for those humans because we are now a multiplanetary species?

That would be terrible, but if they did that to the cows or plants I wouldn't object. Cows don't understand what's happening to them we would! Unless we wouldn't as aliens might already be secretly controlling us and that's why we don't understand "the meaning of life" etc. in which case it's not that bad is it?

> Cows don't understand what's happening to them

I don't believe this is as true as you seem to think.

Supposing someone proved to you with some future subjectivity-detecting tricorder that cows do understand all they go through, will you change your mind about the humane bullet method?

Yes and then I'll use my transporter to beam myself to the past to right all the wrongs.

> cows do understand all they go through Also you seem to be exaggerating a bit, what do you exactly mean by all? Are you talking about their entire life or just when they're about to be slaughtered, because I think for most parts cows have a pretty happy life. The slaughtering could be done more precisely and quickly but that's really just negligence on the part of some bad actors and not something that is inherently difficult to fix.

If cows killed other cows I'd think there was something wrong.

"Cows don't understand what's happening to them, we would! Unless we wouldn't, as aliens might already be secretly controlling us and that's why we don't understand 'the meaning of life' etc. in which case it's not that bad is it?"

So it should be perfectly all right to raise humans for slaughter then, as long as we can manage to keep them unaware that they are going to be slaughtered until the last moment?

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