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Comment by wiz21c | Hacker News Reader

Could we agree once for all that we are predators in a food pyramid and that this naturally implies that we kill to eat. Now, as a sentient species, we might try to kill in a more acceptable way (for the victim), but that won't change much to the result : we kill.

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Humans are omnivores with a physiology primarily geared towards eating & digesting plants. We can eat animals but we absolutely don't need to to live a long, healthy life. So it's really a matter of how much you value your own pleasure & taste over another creature's suffering.

There’s still a significant difference between eating meat less often and abstaining from meat and other animal products completely, isn’t there?

Yeah sure. The suffering you cause is proportional to how much meat you eat. If quitting it entirely is too big a step for you then try scaling it back. Even a single meat-free day a week is a good place to start. You may find you don't miss it as much as you think you will.

> The suffering you cause is proportional to how much meat you eat.

Oh really? Sounds like ideology more than fact.

Are you really insinuating that plants don't feel pain? Because they certainly do. Look up Cleve Backster's research on plants.

It takes 7-10 kg of plants to produce one kg of meat, so you're causing that much more suffering even if you are willing to claim that plants suffer as much as we do from pain.

Then we just need to feed the animals their natural diets instead of the abnormal, unnatural diet of grains and soyabeans that most factory-farmed animals are currently fattened on.

Solution doesn't seem that difficult to me.

If we do that then we can all eat meat about once a week. And anyway the ratio of plants eaten to meat produced would be about the same so no gain there.

I don't think, Backster's "research" on plants is convincing: http://skepdic.com/plants.html

All kinds of creatures will suffer and die even without us eating them. The fields, which were used to grow food for cattle, will became populated with wildlife.

The choice is between suffering for predators survival or for our pleasure. Note that predators don't always listen to humane treatment of animals proposals, so the amount of suffering could increase. But it will not be our fault, so it's OK, right?

The very brief suffering of an animal in the wild at the hands of a predator is nothing compared to the entire lifetime of unrelenting cruelty, suffering and unnatural confinement we offer them. There just really is no comparison at all. If you think there is then go educate yourself about what really goes on in factory farms.

This is a good place to start: https://vimeo.com/209647801

This is why it is far more ethical to eat animals who have been raised in conditions that allow them to thrive happily and wholesomely.

Factory farms are more-or-less a result of corporate capitalism and the greed for money.

Agreed but about 99% of the meat we eat in the US comes from factory farms. So unless you only ever eat meat that you are sure comes from humanely treated animals, which pretty much means never ever eating in restaurants, you won't be eating much meat.

Producing meat in this way also can't come close to supporting even current global demands for meat so it's not really a solution.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/nil-zacharias/its-time-to-end...

I'm certain a system could be devised to allow enough pasture-raised cattle, chickens and pigs to be raised in happy, healthy conditions until slaughtered for food. It would take more resources, but it would be worth it. It might also support the plant ecosystems more, because soyabean and grain monocultures won't be needed.

However, the current Capitalist system's greed will ensure that this doesn't happen, because of the junk/fast food industry and their advertizing.

Without junk/fast food's demands, the amount of meat required to sate the global population may actually shrink, because with proper education, food addiction may vanish, meaning we'll only need to eat what we actually need for nutrition and not for addiction's sake.

There is no way we can feed the entire population the amount of meat that Americans eat every day even with industrial farming practices, so there's no chance at all we can do it with sustainable, humane practices. The only way it would work is if people ate WAY less meat per person than Americans currently do:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/is-the-livestock-indus...

Problem with the US is the fast food industry. Eliminate that, educate people properly, and you need far less meat to sate the ridiculous demand.

How do you feel about hunting? For pretty much my entire life I've lived off venison that I (or someone in my family) has harvested.

I think hunting out of necessity to survive is justified. Hunting for sport or pleasure seems cruel to me but I will say I have a lot more respect for people that kill & butcher their own meat than people that buy it in a pretty shrink wrapped container in the supermarket and do their best to not think about what it really is.

>This is why it is far more ethical to eat animals who have been raised in conditions that allow them to thrive happily and wholesomely.

I used to think that, but it's not a defensible point of view if you examine it a little more critically. Animals like pigs (or rather, their very very recent wild ancestors) have needs and behaviours that simply aren't useful to agriculture, and they can't possibly life fulfilling lives (not to mention that they should also be living for about 15 years rather than under a year).

The least we can do is to not eat them. It took me a long time to accept that, but that's how it is.

> Animals like pigs (or rather, their very very recent wild ancestors) have needs and behaviours that simply aren't useful to agriculture, and they can't possibly life fulfilling lives (not to mention that they should also be living for about 15 years rather than under a year).

Why does it have to be about usefulness? They can live happy lives close enough to how they might live in the wild, at least until they're killed, if for food, no?

And neither do we absolutely need to eat plants to live a long, healthy life. Case in point? The traditional Eskimo diet that consisted majorly of fats, offal and meat. They lived long healthy lives only shortened due to the extreme coldness of their environment.

This is actually a myth. Eskimos have a relatively high rate of cardiovascular disease and not particularly long lifespans:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25064579

https://nutritionfacts.org/video/omega-3s-and-the-eskimo-fis...

The risk of the dying from the top 10 causes of death in the US is reduced, in many cases dramatically, by eating a plant based diet.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr59/nvsr59_04.pdf

Vegans have longer lifespans than non-vegans:

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/...

How is killing an animal different than killing a plant ?

Killing animals isnt new, but what has changed recently is that we have built large scale factories which greatly increase suffering. So, the least that we can do is to ensure that suffering(like dunking birds in hot water) is reduced.

We are also sentient enough to consciously decide what to kill, and maybe restrict ourselves to plants.

I’m not the least bit religious at this point in my life, but it reminds of a verse from the Bhagavad Gita, which I came across as a kid: “jivo jivasya jivanam” which roughly translates to - life thrives on other life forms.

Although that is true, we do value the character of independence of a conscious existence. That argument would never hold regarding the killing of humans for food.

When trying to properly answer the question "Is is acceptable to kill a human being for food, (caeteris paribus)", it is impossible, in the process, to avoid the recognition of the right to self-determination, and I find it difficult not to anchor that right to the perception of self, and to an independent sense of existence.

So it's not just that we will have to kill in order to eat, eventually: it's that sometimes that involves the destruction of a being that can, in some particular way, experience its own existence, which would make that killing ethically unacceptable.

If we value our own right to existence, how transmissible is that right? To what extent are non-human mammals, and vertebrates in general, etc, entitled to it?

Maybe humane killing is still wrong, for some animals.

Personally, I could not avoid considering the implications of the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in adjusting my behaviour, and not only in terms of my diet.

Human is a terrible source of food, just like any omnivore or carnivore is. This is because carnivores are unable to excrete most of the heavy metals they acquire over the years. As such, they become toxic to ingest. Even people who only eat seafood are susceptible to Mercury poisoning for this very reason.

And dare I say this is the reason societies evolved in a way to avoid cannibalism of aged people.

So if you were to practice cannibalism, it really would be healthier to eat vegetarians?

I was not making a case for cannibalism.

You can't practically make a case for cannibalism. It isn't even about morals.

Practically? What does that even mean? Of course there are moral questions regarding the practice of cannibalism! Cannibalism still existed as a traditional practice in the twentieth century, so it is a moral question. And ethically speaking, there are many things to say about it.

The reason I brought it up is because I think it sets a line when discussing the right to kill for food: there are cases in which no harm comes of it, and other cases in which the practice would be highly objectionable.

Making a moral case against cannibalism is like making a moral case against eating poisonous mushrooms. It does not benefit you in any way.

What??

I am making the case that in order for you to claim a moral high ground against an actor, the actor needs to benefit from the action they do. In this case, they don't. If you start a human carcass diet, you poison yourself. Your body reacts to it in terrible ways. Clear enough?

It seems to me that you are confusing utility with morality. The fact that eating human flesh might not be good for us (which, being a questionable claim, let's take for granted for the sake of this discussion) is beside the point. The question is not "is it good for us in a dietary perspective?" but "even if it were good, would it be acceptable?".

A consequence of what you are saying is that it is impossible to claim a higher ground against a murderer if the murderer doesn't benefit from the murder or if an accuser can't make a case for it.

Besides, benefits are relative most of the time: you say there isn't one, but someone else may just as well argue there is.

But if you absolutely need a benefit, so be it: imagine someone eating human flesh simply to satiate one's appetite for it. It would still be a morally questionable practice because of other values put into question.

Anyway, this was a thread about fish feeling pain, so I insist: maybe there are many species we should treat in a different way, independently of whether they feel pain or not. Some scientists have reclaimed the statute of non-human personhood for great apes and cetaceans, for example. So killing them painlessly still raises questions.

No we can’t, because it is wrong.

The whole point of the article was about humane slaughter methods for fish.

It wasn't about if it's right or wrong to kill fish; it was about studies suggesting that fish feel pain at a level that is more than just reflex and so, where possible, we should slaughter fish more humanely than suffocation.

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