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Comment by btcindivist | Hacker News Reader

The thing is, people don't really care about animals. Especially not the kind, calm and docile ones.

A holocaust is happening currently, 60 billion most docile and mostly female cows and fowls are eliminated every year. No one gives a damn.

Heck, even I don't. I drink my milk and eat my chicken. I consider those things mine and don't care if the milk is a product of forced selection that created a monster of a species, or that chicken is a flesh of an innocent animal.

I do not even care about what it does to the environment.

I'm voting with my money to have this practice continue.

The whole system is built for meat and milk to work. Yeah, it's some wierd suboptimal local minimum but that's what it is. I live in a meat culture and don't care if I can survive eating only plants.

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And thus man killed the Earth with a shrug.

Accepting the truth is the first part, the next step is aligning your actions to your beliefs. Took me maybe 20 years for that second step.

I straight up started to taste grass when drinking milk. Then later I realized how bland meat is. I can cook much more flavor and texture into a plant based meal than ever achievable with traditional animal products. Low sodium,cholesterol free, etc etc.

I wonder kind of meat you had available. Good meat is anything but bland.

Iirc beef tasted similarly “grassy”. Essentially my tastebuds changed. Food suddenly had different tastes than I remembered. Could be age changing my taste buds, could be focusing my diet on healthier choices changed my tastebuds, etc.

Its common for people who closely monitor their salt intake to be unable to eat many packaged food items - as they suddenly taste all the added salt.

> I can cook much more flavor and texture into a plant based meal than ever achievable with traditional animal products.

That's a bit of a strange way to put the comparison, as non-vegan meals can include all of those plant based options (just with meat in addition to them). And whether you like meat flavour and texture or not, there is a lot of unique variety in meat flavour and texture that's distinct from what's in plant-based options.

> Low sodium

What has that got to do with plant-based vs meat?

Man is not killing earth, man is killing man and there will be casualties along the way, but earth will continue without man. Species go extinct all the time, and homo sapiens shall join the list in turn.

People care enough to pay extra for cage-free chicken eggs at the supermarket. My local Safeway has about as many cage-free offerings as not. So people do care, and enough that catering to it is profitable. The question is whether they care enough to pay enough extra to significantly affect treatment of animals.

And who knows what the limit is as we grow wealthy enough to willingly pay extra to salve our souls. With enough wealth and wokeness, could we someday provide our livestock with an actually good, and perhaps even idyllic life ... before we kill and eat them?

Cage free is still factory farming, there's just no cages, but a huge big closed dark cage. I'm in no denial when I'm buying those eggs.

you can get pastured eggs. those are (supposedly) happy chickens running around, living a very good chicken life.

the difference in the eggs is striking: thicker shells, much deeper orange yolks.

The orange is probably still vitamin b supplementation

Yolk color is fully controlled by the producer using feed supplements: https://www.dsm.com/markets/anh/en_US/products/products-caro...

interesting!

My grandmother raised chickens; they had a huge field just for them (easily 10m² for each). The eggs were essentially the same as store-bought.

But you and I do pay extra even for that small improvement, to buy eggs with a little less self imposed shame. We'd probably pay a bit more for a bit more improvement. It'll never be as cheap to raise animals without cruelty. But we could become wealthy and horrified enough to be willing to pay the difference.

Eh yes and no. Many may care enough to buy these labels but not enough to do research or accept the BS of most of these labels.

NPR did a great break down of all the trending terms for eggs: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/12/23/370377902/fa...

Because of how confusing all those labels are, here in Seattle some grocery stores display a cheatsheet explaining the difference between them and even some info about the certifications.

To be completely honest I’ve always thought cage-free branding meant the eggs taste better.

>could we someday provide our livestock with an actually good, and perhaps even idyllic life ... before we kill and eat them?

I would say yes. It's certainly not a new concept, if unfamiliar with Judiasm, part of the Jewish dietary laws knows as Kashrut (where the term kosher is derived) address this.

I have an old book somewhere that said the dairy cow is the most efficient way to convert the grass on a rocky hillside into human-usable protein.

Meat is rather inefficient. Temple Grandin is an autistic woman who designed more humane slaughterhouse systems. A quote in the HBO movie about her sticks with me: "Nature is cruel, but we don't have to be."

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1278469/?ref=m_nv_sr_1

Great. Where can I find milk from cows that live off the grass from rocky hillsides?

Switzerland/France. I've seen farmers take their mobile milk-carts up mountains to milk them in-situ. Not sure whether they do the same thing with calves or not though.

So called "Mutterkuh-Haltung", where the calves are kept with the mother, is increasingly popular. This occasionally causes problems, as hiking paths often intersect grazing ranges, and cows will defend their calves aggressively from perceived threats.

" The thing is, people don't really care about animals. Especially not the kind, calm and docile ones."

That's the beauty of our modern society. Most of us never see the dirty stuff that's going on. We only get a very sterilized image of the world. Just go into a chicken or pig farm and see how horrific the conditions really are. But we get protected from having to see this and get our meat with nice clean pictures on it.

Some years ago I saw a video some journalists that got in a "surgical" airstrike. Same thing. We only see clean images from above but their footage showed had terrible such a strike is. Cut off limbs everywhere, people screaming, badly burned children. This took my excitement for modern weaponry down a lot.

We are now as cruel or probably more cruel than people in that past. We just don't have to see it anymore because only a few people will do the dirty work.

The "modern" in modern weaponry is the precision.

Bombs were bombs a hundred years ago and they will still be bombs in 2118.

"...eliminated..."

More accurately, created for the purpose of elimination.

“…elimination…”

…more accurately, consumption, and more charitably, harvesting.

> A holocaust is happening currently, 60 billion most docile and mostly female cows and fowls are eliminated every year.

I think you mean million, not billion. And even then that number is high for estimates.

edit: I missed the part about fowl (I am dumb)

Chickens? That's only 10 year/person.

My mistake, I missed the part about chickens. I'll edit my comment.

About a billion cows or so annually.

60 million birds? That must be consumed on Super Bowl alone.

I do have an addition to offer to your first sentence. The thing is, people don't care about almost anything that affects others (or even themselves). Most people act or react based on their habits and what's convenient for them. If most people were rational, then things would be a lot better for humans and non-humans.

Since you yourself referred to it as "a holocaust", and seem to know more, you could still make changes, however small they may seem to anyone else (or even to you).

”mostly female cows and fowls are eliminated every year”

AFAIK, about half the cows and chicken being born are male, and “eliminated” applies (even) more to them than to their female counterparts.

The only way the eliminated animals can be mostly female is if there is a skewed birth ratio or more males survive.

Males don't produce milk or eggs, and so are killed at a younger age.

The male chicks in egg production are killed in the first few days

> A holocaust is happening currently

Jeez. You do know that Israel had it's 70th birthday only a couple of days ago and you sit here and, basically, relativize the Holocaust. Please don't do that. Thanks.

Holocaust is a word that has its origin long before The Holocaust happened. [0]

I did not call the non-human animal holocaust as The Holocaust (committed by the nazis).

Here's a Jewish Holocaust survivor https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2h8df0/i_am_an_80year... that gladly uses the word holocaust to talk about what is happening to docile, domesticated animals all over the world.

Here's a notable survivor too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Bashevis_Singer#Vegetari...

[0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/holocaust

> I did not call the non-human animal holocaust as The Holocaust (committed by the nazis).

Maybe this is because (at least in Germany and France) any kind of Holocaust comparison is widely deemed offensive. It may be seen as OK in the US sphere, but not in Europe. We actually have a word for this in German ("Holocaustrelativierung"), and organizations like PETA which routinely use Holocaust comparisons when talking about e.g. chick sexing, regularly get flamed for it.

The AfD are far more frightening a right-wing group, and have far more power, than e.g. UKIP in Britain. I believe that because Germans refuse to see the Holocaust as anything other than a singular event they are now at risk of repeating it all over again. Their inability to relativise it (if that can be taken to mean to put it in a historical continuum in which other events of comparable atrocity are committed) means it's snugly in the past. I think this leads to a false sense of security.

Cows and other animals involving factory farming are the least endangered species on the planet. There is literally zero effort to eliminate cows from the gene pool, except by activists who want to see these animals fend hilariously ineffectively for themselves in the wild. Their predators and their reliance on humans would ensure the genocide you speak of would actually happen.

The parent post wasn't claiming extinction or genocide in their post, they were using Holocaust in the sense of a continuous, horrific mass slaughter.

Most animal rights activists I know know that cattle mostly exist due to animal agriculture. They would rather the cows not exist at all then to suffer corralled, forcefully bred, fed and slaughtered in a short brutal life. The human diet does not require animal protein to live.

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