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Comment by sifoo | Hacker News Reader

Fish farms are concentration camps for fish, same goes for the rest of the meat industry. The reason they need all the antibiotics is because the animals are so sick they just wouldn't survive without. Many still don't, it's just more effective to let 20% or so die if it allows stuffing more animals in the same space. Did anyone really think we would get away with treating animals like that and not have to face the consequences? Just say no, really. It's a disgusting, harmful habit; much more so than tobacco and alcohol. And down-voting me for telling you what you already knew isn't going to save you.

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It's worse than that - the meat industry uses antibiotics on perfectly healthy animals as a growth enhancer. This is pure profit motive, nothing to do with veterinary care.

I don’t think you need to invoke concentration camps here, true as it may be in some cases.

They use antibiotics to make them grow faster. That’s half the reason.

My understanding is that this practice is now banned in both the US and EU.

Sounds like a bedtime story in my ears. We're eating more and more meat, and demanding that it gets cheaper and cheaper while the stock market index needs to go higher and higher. It won't stop until the majority is willing to look beyond the bullshit we're being fed and start using their brains.

We (french) are not https://www.planetoscope.com/elevage-viande/1587-consommatio..., pretty much the opposite actually

What's the difference then? Piling up living beings in awful conditions to kill them in the most cost-effective way is pretty much the definition of a concentration camp. And making them grow faster than they're supposed to at the expense of everything isn't very nice either.

They're not people. Concentration camps are for people. At least we don't eat them alive, like their other natural predators.

At least they have a chance to fight for their survival, which makes all the difference. If it's horrible when done to humans, it's horrible when done to animals. And as long as we keep doing it to animals, we shouldn't expect to escape the same fate ourselves; Karma 101.

Fair enough, if you fear karmic retribution that makes sense. I don't, so for me the shoe remains on the same foot. Other people are more valuable to me than animals, and also more dangerous. The stakes are higher and therefore the moral considerations are more prudent (or karmic, if that's your bag).

Karma has nothing to do with revenge, karma is just another word for consequences. Every action leads to reactions; if they didn't the universe would have descended into chaos in no time at all. And thats how we learn, by acting and studying reactions until we get it. One of those lessons is recognizing the value of all living beings.

A big difference is that humans in concentration camps generally don’t get antibiotics, not for disease or for accelerated growth, and their bodies are generally not used as food.

Also, animals kept not in high concentrations have often been given antibiotics since the 50s. It’s not all about supporting concentration.

I understand that animals suffer in mass farming conditions—which is why I don’t buy mass produced meat or eggs or milk—but concentration camps are for people. You cans say animals are just like people, and I may even agree with you mostly, but to me and most people they’re not entirely like people. I understand if they are to you.

The metaphor is backward actually. The Nazis transitioned to gassing and extermination camps because the leadership saw first hand the psychological problems of having ordinary people commit mass murder, not because it was cheap. It was probably far more expensive. Think of all the war time train and supply usage.

> During a visit to Minsk in August 1941, Himmler witnessed an Einsatzgruppen mass execution first-hand and concluded that shooting Jews was too stressful for his men. By November he made arrangements for any SS men suffering ill health from having participated in executions to be provided with rest and mental health care. He also decided a transition should be made to gassing the victims, especially the women and children, and ordered the recruitment of expendable native auxiliaries who could assist with the murders. Gas vans, which had been used previously to kill mental patients, began to see service by all four main Einsatzgruppen from 1942. However, the gas vans were not popular with the Einsatzkommandos, because removing the dead bodies from the van and burying them was a horrible ordeal. Prisoners or auxiliaries were often assigned to do this task so as to spare the SS men the trauma.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einsatzgruppen#Transition_to_g...

They grow faster because they are less sick. Antibiotics are not like growth hormones.

That is probably true (that they don't act like growth hormones) but last I visited the subject, scientist don't know exactly why, but antibiotics actually do increase growth in some livestock.

No, antibiotics make animals like chickens and pigs (and humans) actually grow much faster and bigger.

I would encourage you to read Antibiotic Growth-Promoters in Food Animals ( http://www.fao.org/docrep/ARTICLE/AGRIPPA/555_EN.HTM ) (the fao domain is the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) or the introduction of Antimicrobial Growth Promoters Used in Animal Feed: Effects of Less Well Known Antibiotics on Gram-Positive Bacteria ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC153145/ )

The Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock also covers it:

> Certain antibiotics, when given in low, sub-therapeutic doses, are known to improve feed conversion efficiency (more output, such as muscle or milk, for a given amount of feed) and/or may promote greater growth, most likely by affecting gut flora.[15] However, any antibiotics deemed medically important to humans by the CDC are illegal to use as growth promoters in the U.S. Only drugs that have no association with human medicine – and therefore no risk to humans – are allowed to be used for this purpose.[5][16] It is also important to note that some drugs listed below are ionophores, which are not antibiotics and do not pose any potential risk to human health.

They are indeed not growth hormones, but they do change the gut bacteria balance and make it easier to extract calories from the feed stock. This has nothing to do with actually being sick or not.

The reason they need all the antibiotics is because the animals are so sick they just wouldn't survive without

I'm not sure this is entirely true.

Have you bothered to look into it? It's not like the information is impossible to find, even if they don't exactly advertise the icky parts of their business. 'Eating Animals' by Jonathan Safran Foer is a good place to start.

I am curious if you have. I would encourage you to read http://www.fao.org/docrep/ARTICLE/AGRIPPA/555_EN.HTM

> According to the National Office of Animal Health (NOAH, 2001), antibiotic growth promoters are used to "help growing animals digest their food more efficiently, get maximum benefit from it and allow them to develop into strong and healthy individuals". Although the mechanism underpinning their action is unclear, it is believed that the antibiotics suppress sensitive populations of bacteria in the intestines. It has been estimated that as much as 6 per cent of the net energy in the pig diet could be lost due to microbial fermentation in the intestine (Jensen, 1998). If the microbial population could be better controlled, it is possible that the lost energy could be diverted to growth.

Do you have any material from a peer reviewed source that refutes this?

Your argument relies on the assumption that one would feel as much empathy towards animals as they do towards humans, or at least a comparable amount.

Imagine the day you was born, somebody already planned your death. Because this is how it is for pig, cow, chicken on this planet.

Everyone and everything dies in the end. It's fairly common among religions to presume that fate is inexorable and already written, with free-will being only an illusion working towards the predestined plan of god(s).

The crucial difference of course is that most of us aren't forced to live day to day in horrifically cruel conditions and then killed about one tenth of the way into our natural lifespan, purely for the pleasure of others.

Well, I think I'd take a sledgehammer or pneumatic bolt to the brain over being hamstrung, disemboweled, and eaten alive by wolves...

Nature is no less cruel.

Nature doesn't force animals to stand in their own shit for their entire life in cages that don't allow them to even turn around.

https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missin...

Watch this and get back to me about cruelty.

https://vimeo.com/209647801

Cruel conditions aside (which could be argued as morally bad thing), this:

> then killed about one tenth of the way into our natural lifespan, purely for the pleasure of others

does not seem to be rational. Humans and animals don't eat only for the pleasure, then need to eat something in order to live. Your stomach and other organs do not really care about your conscientious choices about what to eat, whether you had to kill for that or not. The natural lifespan is also partially influenced by 'demand' for the species by the predators, so the fact that some animal populations in wildlife have ten times the lifespan can be explained by the fact that those animals do not have humans in their natural habitat. Those which do end up in farms and their natural lifespan is lower.

Anyway, I believe eating meat is so profound on moral debates only because humans are apex predators and no one preys on us. If there were such things then maybe our moral choices about animals could be more compassionate (in order to possibly influence moral choices of the human-eating predators).

It's easy to live a long healthy life without ever eating meat, so, with a few exceptional cases, yeah it's completely a question of what you prefer to eat.

A cow will live about 20 years on average. A dairy cow will live about 4. I'm having a hard time coming up with a definition of "natural" that fits the latter. And for most of human history it was a small fraction of animals in the wild that would up on a human's dinner table (American Buffalo, for example).

It doesn't seem likely that humans are ever going to have to worry about predators again but meat production is a huge contributor to climate change so we are going to pay for our meat habit one way or the other.

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