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Comment by chadcmulligan | Hacker News Reader

I'm looking forward to the cow/pig/sheep/chicken extinction event - no one will keep them around, except maybe in zoos, if the whole world is vegan.

Edit: a downvote? this is totally serious - what are they going to be - released back into the wild where they roam free? There won't be any more, except as I said in zoos, if the whole world goes vegan

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Chickens will probably stick around. A German company has discovered a way to determine a chick's gender while still in the egg. That will end the cruel practice of tossing male chicks into a grinder. And will allow cruelty free eggs to be produced. As long as the hens have space, comfortable quarters, and allowed to keep living in those conditions after they stop laying.

For those who are vegan for purely ethical reasons, this will allow them to have eggs.

I thought most vegans are against eggs? Laying eggs is cruel to chickens I've heard (just quoting here)

I think the argument is that half the animal are killed, because they are roosters instead of hens. In addition to whatever their living standards are.

It's not a good idea to be confident predicting how anyone will see your ethical argument. There's a lot of things people still consider cruel left in egg production after the practices you mention change.

There are robust feral populations of each of those in different parts of the world. It takes surprisingly few generations to "undo" the domestication too. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_wild_cattle

There will never be zero people on the planet keeping hens for eggs, you've lost your mind.

Why are you looking forward to them becoming extinct, though? What's the benefit to anyone of that?

A vegan society could still keep sheep for example to keep grassland under control?

Just a bit odd to look forward to an innocent species _being wiped off the face of the Earth_.

Chickens, cows and pigs are overbred to have more meat etc. some of those breeds can't walk properly anymore... They are far from what their early ancestors were...

They were all modified through the generations to make them a commodity. If they have no purpose, them going extinct is not a bad thing. Most of them are optimized for meat or other purposes and they probably can't survive outside. It would be humane to let them go extinct after we transition. FWIW we already wiped them off the Earth, you don't find a lot of wild cows or chickens other than the ones we have modified.

> they probably can't survive outside

You should come and see the sheep roaming around the mountains near me.

They keep the grasslands under control, and they happily mind their own business. I don't think they need genocide.

Who's going to pay to transport sheep to grassland? Who's going to rehabilitate a pig that's never been outside a cage? What do we do with cows? There's a lot of unanswered questions, and not many mountains waiting for unwanted sheep.

I didn't say we should move any around. The person I was replying to said extinction as in all of them, even those minding their own business elsewhere.

Many breeds of sheep need to be sheared as they've been bred to not shed their wool.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/09/0...

> They keep the grasslands under control, and they happily mind their own business. I don't think they need genocide.

I never asked for them to be killed. Letting them go extinct is different from killing them en masse.

I was pointing out that the people who say we shouldn't eat meat haven't really thought it through. I would guess that this would be an unintended consequence of their actions and I've never heard it said - the only reason these animals exist is because we've bred them for food - if we don't eat them any more then they'll no longer exist.

I'm pretty sure the Animal Liberation, considered one of the founding blocks of militant vegetarians and vegans in occident, raised this question in… 1975. I think it would be like horses, you would still find (healthy, relatively happy) chicken, cows, pigs, in the countryside; but in smaller numbers and not tortured by millions in factories. No "unintended consequence" there.

ok, I've said this to quite a few people and the result is pretty well what it was here, denial and outrage :-) I don't think its well publicized but happy to be proved otherwise.

You apparently have no idea how important those animals are to the health of soil (and growing good vegetables)

And that is the vast majority¹ of all living mammals: https://xkcd.com/1338/

¹ By weight, at least

We still need milk, eggs.

I think the assumption is that we can grow substitutes for those too?

"need" is too strong a word here, especially as milk gets more expensive if you cannot sell excess meat (and not everyone wants milk from hormone-treated cows).

Milk and eggs are not vegan.

We do not "need" milk or eggs. If you think that's the case, we also "need" meat.

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