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Comment by tuna-piano | Hacker News Reader

What's worse, and why:

-Locking a dolphin up in "jail" or killing a cow/pig?

-Locking the few dolphins up in "jails" or the billions of cows/pigs killed each year?

I think the ethical inconsistencies with regards to animal treatment are huge, but also understandable. I don't know the answers, but the questions do bother me.

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The dolphins at the Vancouver aquarium are deemed not releasable by the federal government due to injury or lack of ability to survive in the wild (e.g. Chester, the aquariums false killer whale was found at 2 months old and was not properly socialised).

The aquarium is not a jail.

It's a "country club" jail. It's not a public park. You can't just go in, or out, when you want to.

Cows are treated pretty fairly until the end. They are usually grass feed and graze until they fatten them up for slaughter. They have miles and miles of fields to roam. You can find pigs that are treated fairly or are "free range". Both of these animals have been domesticated and lives with humans for a couple thousand years.

Both of these animals are slaughtered young so they aren't locked up for years and years.

Putting an dolphin in a small pond and put to work all day doing tricks is horrible. Whales and dolphins belong in the open ocean where they can swim for miles and miles. They are not domesticated animals.

My view is that if you have to put the animal in a cage to keep it, you shouldn't have them. The exception would be a fish tank with nothing exotic.

Most animals that are raised for meat are treated horribly. there is no way around that. I am not for dolphins being held captive but they have it much better than most cows, pigs or chickens.

I agree about chickens. My state is the chicken capital of the world. Those coops are so nasty you can start to smell them a mile away.

The only way it will change is everyone buys organic or true free range. The costs are too expensive for me to buy all the time. I think Americans should rethink eating meat at most meals. I've not been able to do it regularly.

Most people could reduce their meat consumption by 80% and not miss much.

> The only way it will change is everyone buys organic or true free range. The costs are too expensive for me to buy all the time

Both of those terms are pretty meaningless, and their ineffectual enforcement makes them even less so. The solution isn't to humane-wash, it's to stop eating things that come out of chickens' anuses.

The terms might be meaningless, but that still shouldn't stop you from sourcing your meat/poultry locally from a farmer where you can witness the living conditions of the animals yourself before buying.

That way you are not only doing something healthy for yourself and the animals, it's also supporting the local economy in a meaningful way.

> That way you are not only doing something healthy for yourself and the animals, it's also supporting the local economy in a meaningful way.

There is nothing healthy about consuming animals. Not for humans, not for animals, not for this planet, not for anyone. And a similar "supporting the economy" justification was used in defense of slavery, which you're still supporting in another form.

>And a similar "supporting the economy" justification was used in defense of slavery, which you're still supporting in another form.

Seriously... I advocate people being more aware of where they get their food and cutting down on their meat intake and your first reflex is to compare it to advocating slavery? Sorry but behavior like that is exactly the reason why barely anybody likes vegans or takes them seriously.

Change doesn't happen in massive paradigm shifts, it happens slowly. You won't convince 7 billion people to stop consuming animal products from one day to another. So let's be a little bit realistic and start with small steps which people are actually willing to take, wouldn't that be an actual start?

> Cows are treated pretty fairly until the end [...] They have miles and miles of fields to roam.

Except in many parts of the world where they are placed into barns for six months of the year. Or if they're used for veal.

Have you ever been to a dairy?

dairy cows: raped to be artificially inseminated, calf removed soon after birth. Repeat 5x (yearly). Send to hamburger factory. cattle: fattened in "concentrated animal feeding operations" pigs: artificially inseminated, separated from piglets, teath and tails cut, transported without climate control, food or water.

> Cows are treated pretty fairly until the end. They are usually grass feed and graze until they fatten them up for slaughter. They have miles and miles of fields to roam. You can find pigs that are treated fairly or are "free range".

This is a complete fabrication and utter logical fallacy.

Several dimensions are in play when it comes to treatment of animals:

* intelligence and potential for suffering

* Duration of suffering

* Endangered status

* Usefulness as a human product

* Ability of average human to empathize with species

Locking them up is worse. I don't eat dolphins. My ravenous appetite must be filled with the billions of cows/pigs killed each year!

Killing animals for food is ethically justifiable. Humans like all life are part of the food chain, and that's just the way things are on this planet.

Keeping an animal "jailed" purely for entertainment -- "worse." Nobody needs to see dolphins doing tricks in order to survive.

Nobody needs meat in order to survive either(in 2017 America/Canada). Meat is eaten purely for pleasure.

In fact, there's some good arguments (potentially debatable) that eating animal products actually shortens lifespan! The exact opposite of needing meat to survive...

No one needs plants to survive either, we could just eat a nutrient rich prokaryotic soup.

>Meat is eaten purely for pleasure.

So are plants. Do you know how delicious this apple is I'm eating right now?

This is a strawman. We care about animals because animals have nervous systems and a pain response. Plants have no analog - they cannot feel pain, and have no neurological system to indicate intelligence. Nothing feels pain when you cut off a tree branch. Something feels pain when you break off a lobsters claw or hit a dog.

Additionally, the plants we do eat often evolved to produce food for us. Apple trees and other fruiting plants all evolved to be eaten, so the consumer distributes the seeds in stool. That apple is delicious because the tree had an evolutionary bias to make it delicious so you would eat it. We eat plenty of plants like herbs and cabbages not for that purpose (albeit we did breed cabbages to be mutant and tasty) but an apple is a terrible example of a plant we hurt by eating it.

> Nothing feels pain when you cut off a tree branch

We don't actually know that for certain. We only know that it does not communicate that pain in a method discernable to us.

We define pain as a neurological response. Since plants don't have nerves, they cannot feel pain. They cannot feel.

You argue the semantics in problem domains we don't fully understand. Feelings and sensations only get wishy-washy when you have a developed nervous system, because we cannot accurately predict how said system behaves due to its complexity. But we do know what is actually ascribed to that system, what behaviors it propagates as, and that things without it don't experience it.

We have vernacular in place to express how plants react to stimuli. Sensation, pain, and feeling are not in that vocabulary, because they describe an essential aspect of the animal kingdom, not the plant one.

> No one needs plants to survive either

Completely wrong, and frankly a pretty stupid thing to say. Plants provide the basis for all life on this planet. Without plants, there would be no complete proteins, there would be no essential fatty acids, there would be no sustainable nutrition for humans nor any other being on this planet. What you're saying is straight up silly. Stop.

Animals are just simply "killed for food". They are raised in absolutely deplorable conditions. This isn't meant to be accusatory, but in honest question. Do you think it is justified to raise animals in torturous conditions from birth to slaughter?

> Humans like all life are part of the food chain, and that's just the way things are on this planet.

This is not a scientifically tenable statement. It's just based on hearsay and various nonsense.

"In the global food web, we discover that humans are similar to anchovy or pigs and cannot be considered apex predators"

- http://www.pnas.org/content/110/51/20617.abstract

It does not have to be only one or another: one can both stop holding wild animals in captivity and also stop farming domestic animals for food. Just do your part in this (significantly lower your meat/dairy consumption and never go to zoos).

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