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Comment by toasterlovin | Hacker News Reader

A couple of things:

1. Those particular animals would not be alive. I was replying to a comment about the quality of life of those particular animals.

2. Regarding the point that other animals would take their place: isn’t this an argument against veganism? Life in a state of nature is brutal and not at all what I would classify as clearly better than life under domestication.

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2. I can't speak for other animals, but I can speak for myself: there's no way I would prefer to be locked up in a cage or a farm (where I will be killed and eaten, probably way before my natural lifespan) than to be free to live a natural life and be killed by predators.

Yes, you could say that providing those animals have a good life, there is an argument there. However, whilst the eggs from your own hens might be ethical, in reality, probably 95%+ of chickens are factory farmed and have pretty awful lives, in which cases their life is not so much of a gift.

As a (probably controversial) counterpoint, I'm not so sure that life in a state of nature is much better than life on a factory farm. The math of making it in the natural world is brutal: a stable population size means that, on average, only two of the offspring that an animal produces will ever become reproductive adults. You know that cute string of ducklings following their mother around? Statisticaly speaking, almost every one of them will be mauled, starved, or frozen to death.

That being said, I still believe that we have some kind of a moral obligation to provide the animals in our care with a decent quality of life.

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