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Comment by landa | Hacker News Reader

If you think about it, eating meat is really a terrible thing to do. Most people who eat meat would never be able to kill an animal, I suspect. I know I wouldn't. And the conditions in which the poor animals are kept make it a billion times worse. That's the thought that made me switch to being a vegetarian after eating meat my whole life.

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Terrible isn't really the right word here. Keeping animals in cruel conditions, terrible. Eating meat, not so much. It's a natural part of the animal ecosystem. I often find that those who hunt are also much more appreciative of animals and thereby more careful with their consumption.

That being said, we're in a position where our consumption (or more importantly, manufacturing for consumption) is out of hand and is causing great deal of harm. I'm all for meat substitutes.

I have to doubt this kind of thinking. Sure they may not have personally butchered a cow, but your typical human will happily crush insects, or poison and trap various pest animals. Plus the usual hunting and fishing.

If it was still necessary to personally cut the heads off chickens to get chicken meat, I suspect you'd see virtually every household doing so.

> Most people who eat meat would never be able to kill an animal, I suspect.

This is wrong. For the vast majority of human history it has been local people Killing local animals to survive. In all of human history, 99.9% of people are absolutely willing to kill animals in order to eat them.

Vegetarianism and veganism is a modern thing that has come about from the removal of people's daily lives and their food sources. It's a historical accident.

I strongly disagree with this line of thinking. Please let me explain. I do understand that meat eating is environmentally disastrous and is current meat industry practices make it ethically questionable. We're on the same boat, trying to make this planet a better place for the next generations. I simply think forcing consumers into guilt is the worst possible way to solve this problem. I do not think eating meat is morally bad; at least it's not any more morally bad than a wolf eating a prey. What is morally bad is farming animals in cruel cages like they're a piece of plastic. This is not a consumer problem. Consumer is abstracted out of the morally wrong parts of those practices. If we want change, we need to change the economy. Meat should become more expensive. Meat industry should not be allowed to practice their cruel practices. Going door by door and chiming how bad meat eating is, does not help this problem. We will not see any large scale changes by guilting people out of meat eating. We need to fix producers.

Well yeah but if the whole goal is to minimize suffering in the world as I assume yours is, the lines get very blurry very fast. I would probably not personally beat a Chinese kid that's building my phone too slowly in a sweatshop, yet I still use a phone, and all the other electronics and clothing produced like that; and I'm going to assume you do have some of these products as well. And then of you really wanted to get into it you start having a conversation about "well, what is suffering" "how does something suffer, what are the requirements, when does something become able to suffer, can computers suffer?" (The computer suffering thing is actually one of my favorite conversations to have)

Making iPhones does not require beating people. Industrial meat production requires mutilating, imprisoning, and slaughtering animals (edit: obviously I'm not referring to cultured meat tissues, which does not exist on the market).

Going by the same reasoning, making meat does not in fact require that, lab grown meat exists, but as it stands, much like the phone example, the current methods prove cheaper, and easier, and faster.

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