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Comment by drenvuk | Hacker News Reader

The author has two articles, one is this one and the other makes a case for veganism.

I understand that killing animals for their meat strikes some people as morally wrong but you're not going to change my mind by making me feel bad about how a cow, pig or chicken is raised and killed. This is not a moral problem for most people. We don't really care enough. We eat them because they taste good, are easily available and are satiating. Vegan and vegetarian foods are usually less so for all three categories.

No matter how many articles or appeals you make trying to instill some amount of empathy for animals or guilt for their situation it's not going to stop people from craving a steak. Most people can't control their cravings for a cookie. This is not a moral problem, this is a taste and option problem.

I'm honestly going to Texas Roadhouse tonight because you made me think about having a ribeye. Way to go.

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The fact that it's illegal to film factory meat farms in some States in the USA should tell you a lot about just what is going on - and how horrible it must be.

Sure, you want to eat steak, I get that. Go eat a steak. But lets at the very least treat the animals with respect and give them some semblance of a decent life and kill them quickly and humanely.

You want to treat something with respect and then kill it to eat it? What exactly is the point?

These are two separate things. Hunters for example are often very respective of the animals they track. And as another example, when a persom is sentenced to death, we still try to treat them with respect throughout the process.

As a thought experiment, let us imagine you have been sentenced to death (that still happens in the USA, right?)

5 years from now, you will be killed.

Would you rather spend those 5 years jammed into a concrete cell with thousands of other inmates, unable to move, standing in your own feces, never to see the sun and only eating corn?

Or would you rather have a bed, running water, proper meals, be allowed outside in the sunshine for some hours a day and even get some exercise?

I think it's pretty clear which one you prefer, and we should treat non-human animals the same way. They're alive, lets treat them with some respect. (That applies to death row inmates, regular citizens and animals equally)

Sure I don't want to be treated like that, but animal well being? I don't care. This just mean I care more than my own well being compare to animal well being and I don't have problem with that.

The same logic was applied to slavery, and is still applied with racism. You believe that you are better than something or someone else. Who cares what happens to them, they are not a real living thing like me...

Yes, but I believe there always someone who care what happen to them, its just might not be me.

I may not agree with the concept of killing animals for food outside of survival necessity, but one must recognize that all life ends in death one way or another. Things do not have less value simply because they are impermanent. The quality of an animal's life is valuable regardless of how it ends, just as ours are.

It's only valuable because you give it value. I don't.

Your question was:

>You want to treat something with respect and then kill it to eat it? What exactly is the point?

I don't see how your values have any relevance on the answer to that question.

I think that many people would care, they just aren't aware. How many people know, or even want to know, where their meat comes from? Factory farming is very much an inconvenient truth.

I only have possibly skewed anecdata for this claim but of the people who I know have seen factory farming investigation videos only two are vegetarians and the rest of them (20+ easily over time) have used it as a joke topic while eating meat laden meals together. This is from college 10 years ago until now. I think sharing these articles helps, maybe it will spur someone into making some new animal-cruelty-free foods but if the intention is to stop most of us from eating meat I doubt it will work.

Can you help me interpret these jokes between you and your friends? "Boy this steak sure tastes good because that cow was suffering" This sort of callousness is a common theme. Is this the form the jokes were taking?

I'd understand if it were making fun of the animal for getting killed so long as it was humane, and people who worry too much about them. I'd understand the idea of "yeah I know it's bad, what am I going to do. It tastes good". I could understand making fun of an exaggerated claim of suffering. I could understand making fun of trying to avoid killing in the world which is probably literally impossible. But I can't understand making fun of real suffering, and furthermore making fun of people who care about it. I don't think they're actually sociopaths but I don't understand how else to interpret what they're expressing here.

If the answer is "hey don't take it seriously, you were a jackass in college too" - fair enough, but you brought this up as an example of the general population just not caring enough. Maybe your friends actually made these jokes to deal with their discomfort with those videos?

And yes for disclosure, I'm a vegetarian myself.

I guess i don't have a hard time believing the parent. I can imagine some college-aged youngsters projecting machismo/signalling to their social group and not yet having the maturity to reflect on their actions, indeed especially in the context of changing social norms and how they'd be perceived 50 years down the line. In university i had numerous flatmates or friends-of-flatmates who, upon discovering i'm a vegetarian, would appear to take delight in smugly telling me about how they would eat an extra steak on my behalf, or perhaps explaining some graphic detail about animal cruelty. I learned to be unflappable and simply leave the conversation at that point so as not to reward them with an emotional reaction, but all i'm trying to say is, i can totally imagine what the parent poster talks about. Thankfully though, these days i am blessed to have friends and colleagues who are both more self-aware and creative in the ways they crack jokes :).

Me too, I've experienced that before, and I see signs of it online today by post-college aged people. I'm just trying to sort out the difference between being too uptight and pointing out what their jokes are really implying. It's like "Okay, you're making fun of me for worrying about something you think is silly. That's fine. But what exactly are you saying in response? You _don't care at all_? Are you telling me that you're a sociopath?" It's the particular formulation of _some_ of these jabs that get me.

Even if they say something like "the cow was stupid anyway om nom nom" _that's different_ because at least they're not necessarily in favor of torturing the thing, and they give a reason why killing it humanely is different from killing a human humanely.

The exact nature of the jokes isn't clear, but I'd say your last guess is the most likely: papering over one's own cognitive dissonance with dismissive "humor" is a pretty natural tactic.

Which tells me that these videos are indeed hitting the target, if eventually.

It's not hard the understand, everyone its different, me too if you might say sociopath againts animal, the only thing that make me care animal well being is nothing to do with the animal itself but much to do with the other human who care about it.

And yet it does persuade some people. Many people are vegetarian and an increasing proportion of the population is moving in that direction. It seems reasonable to assume that at least some of that change is due to exposure of modern factory farming methods.

> you're not going to change my mind by making me feel bad about how a cow, pig or chicken is raised and killed

Why not? If you're feeling bad about it, presumably you have some empathy with the animal. Or do you mean that it's not possible to make you feel bad about it?

As a counterexample, I used to be like you (loved eating meat) and was convinced not to by allowing myself to entertain the notion that it was wrong, and learning about animal suffering at factory farms. I was able to make a moral determination that went against what I wanted or craved. I still crave meat years later, but I don’t eat it.

Probably similar arguments to yours were made in favor of slavery not so long ago. “It’s convenient and makes my life better, and the morality of it is irrelevant.” Now slavery is repulsive, and in the future we will look back at how we treated farm animals in a similar way. For me it was worth considering which side of the moral history I wanted to be on.

It might be very well the case like slavery. So until the other side win and I'm forced to not allowed to eat meat then I'll continue to eat meat.

> they taste good, are easily available and are satiating. Vegan and vegetarian foods are usually less so for all three categories.

This might be true for some people in some places, but is far from an objective fact. I'm not a vegetarian, but I frequently prefer to eat vegan or vegetarian food because it offers more interesting flavours, is easily available and easy to cook, and leaves me with a more pleasant fullness.

Ok, so this article is not about going meat free. Just about factory farming. If you "crave meat" maybe you could consider non-factory farmed meat, for all the reasons mentioned.

Regarding your 3 points: 'Availability' is a problem with non-meat? I would think in most neighbourhoods that have a butcher, you should find a supermarket.

'Satiability', really? You don't feel full after baked potatos with sour cream? Mac and Cheese? A pizza quattro formaghi? Noodle soup? Indian curry? All of the above and an apple pie? You need that patty, right?

As a life-long meateater, I can very well understand your last point on taste. Hard to argue with taste. Since I don't want to miss it either, I will have meat from time to time as a special treat. Usually when eating out fancy. So about 1-2 times a month. Makes me looking forward to those dinners even more and I don't have to go the hardest 10% of the meat-free way.

“People cause suffering because they value pleasure and lack empathy” sure sounds like a moral problem, but I hear you that just telling people to be better is unlikely to improve things.

The advantage of having a human brain is that you can think about your actions and the consequences they have. Eating meat, especially mass-produced beef, is catastrophic for the environment. Well done on destroying the systems you depend on to live.

You might be surprised at how these things work, given enough time. My friends and I also used to joke about the "poor cows" (like you mention in a child comment). Then, slowly, cracks started appearing in our defenses. We realized that we do actually care about the lives of animals, strangers, and all manner of things in a way that maybe wasn't natural for our species even a few generations ago. Slowly, many of us have abandoned the meat industry. Even guys you may not expect it from.

Obviously I don't know you, and have no idea if any of that might apply to you. But I get the sense that unless a person is a sociopath, it's almost unavoidable to slowly wake up to the fact that other beings are sentient, and deserve our compassion. This happened with skin color and gender, and it seems to now extend to other species.

Cheers.

I feel that you don't want to change your mind anyway, and are happy to show us how smart you are by purposefully doing the opposite of what people hope to get you do after reading the article.

To me, your comment reads as someone saying that reading an article about lung cancer didn't deter them from smoking and actually reminded them to go and buy a pack of smokes. Or how an article about global warming reminded them they had to buy a gas guzzler today. Or reading an article about how cars should share the road with bicycles and saying it reminds you you didn't drive today and you're off to doing punishing passes and coal rolling cyclists.

Good for you, people can't tell you what to do and you know exactly what buttons to push to show how smart you are.

You might not agree with the article, but your reaction is ridiculous.

You're reading me a bit wrong, though maybe the last sentence was me being an asshole while also failing to explicitly point out what's wrong with their approach. You're correct that I don't feel like changing my mind but that's because their argument is old and I know that I enjoy meat. The objective was to point out that instead of trying to make meat eaters feel bad they should just make it easier for us to make better food choices. Food that we don't have to explicitly search for.

I'm not going to pick a food because it has a label for "vegetarian" or "vegan". I don't care. I pick what tastes good and is mostly healthy. Many other people have that line of thought besides me. Those kinds of people won't be attracted by those two terms and the moral implications behind them alone. If the food was good enough and marketed enough you wouldn't even need mostly useless articles like this.

That was what I was trying to point out. Hopefully you understand now.

Have you actually watched a film like Earthlings, though? Why don't you watch it before you go to "Texas Roadhouse"?

Watching it right now. Pretty gruesome so far, up to the kosher part but it's still not a deterrent.

edit: Finished. I'm still going to eat that steak but some of those scenes will probably pop into my head while I'm eating. A bit annoying tbh.

Tbh you just sound like someone who knows what the right thing to do is but is too damn weak to do it for yourself. Your posts are screaming out "if it's the right thing, why won't someone make it easy for me to stop?"

Sadly you are just like most people throughout human history. We're ashamed of some of the things people have done in the past, and in the future people will be ashamed of this.

Hah, hardly. I only care about my enjoyment when it comes to this. There is a difference between a person unable to control their desire to eat animals in the face of the suffering those animals undergo versus eating animals because they enjoy it and not giving a damn. Do you consider it wrong? Maybe. Do I? Not even slightly. I would sooner bludgeon and cut the animals myself than eat only vegetarian food. I'm not sure how this is hard to grasp.

Your assumptions about me are mistaken, don't be a jerk.

Now you're beginning to sound psychopathic.

Whether you meant to or not, you basically trolled this thread. That's destructive. Please don't do it again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

noted.

Eating meat is killing your health, your body imagine, your productivity. It’s killing YOU.

Meat consumption is the reason heart disease is our number one killer.

Will that convince you? Eating a plant-based diet is simply logic: for your health, for the environment, for ethics, for the health of society, etc, etc.

Read How Not To Die by Michael Gregor. Read Pubmed. Get educated on what meat is doing to your body.

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