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Comment by ak39 | Hacker News Reader

This article and the pics of the dead birds broke my heart. :-(

I can’t understand any human not pausing to think twice and to find alternatives when faced with such horrendous death of innocent creatures. Yeah it’s cheap and efficient but it kills millions of birds. Find another way! I don’t want your fancy olives if you don’t care about what you’re doing to the birds.

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> but it kills millions of birds

Presumably. Is an hypothese.

The article talks about "nearly 100.000 birds killed in Portugal" but the title extrapolates it somehow to "millions of birds killed in Mediterranean" without more supporting data. 96.000 != "millions".

That extrapolation is assuming that all olives in Mediterranean are from the same variety. Another source of statistical error unchecked and running wild in their extrapolation.

Olives are collected from September (green) to May but mainly between November to January. For some reason, the study forgot to mention that most migrating birds are in Africa in Nov-Jan. Only some common species remain. I see a photo with three dead thrushes and a fringillid. Four dead birds.

What is well known is that Malta or Lebanon kills much more migrating birds each year, including protected species, raptors etc. If you look for 2,5 millions of dissapeared birds each year the correct answer is probably here:

https://conservationaction.co.za/recent-news/stop-killing-le...

I'm curious whether you feel the same way about windows, which kill hundreds of millions of birds each year. [0]

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/stop-...

But I'm using Linux!

But seriously my guess would be that most people do feel differently about this. The window issue is passive, while those machines actively kill the birds. Makes it seem much more evil.

And windows actively add a significant quality-of-life value for humans worldwide, while one type of olive harvesting machine is less obviously beneficial.

That's rare to hear, on HN.

> The biggest share of the collision deaths comes not from glass massacres at skyscrapers but from occasional collisions with the nation’s many small buildings

We don't really have an alternative for windows on small building, unless you want to go back to living in caves.

We do for olive picking.

We do have actually, there is no need for our windows to be made our of transparent materials.

So what should they be made of?

I do not want to live in a cave, I want sunlight. I also want to be protected from cold, wind and rain.

I do not see any alternative with current technology

I'm inclined to agree with you, but how different is this from saying "I don't want to pay more for olives"?

edit: on the other hand, one of the other comments in this thread links to an article that suggests that closely spaced decals or visible screens can greatly decrease the amount of birds that fly into windows and die. we could still have natural light indoors, but we might need to make some aesthetic compromises with our buildings.

> I do not want to live in a cave

You don't have to though. I am pretty sure that most of the European population until at least the 17th century did not have glass windows, and neither did the far-eastern cultures, which used paper instead - yet at the same time they did not live in caves.

> I want sunlight. I also want to be protected from cold, wind and rain.

If the windows are fully opaque just open them when you want sunlight - having sunlight while it is cold, windy, and raining is not that common after all.

Frosted glass, screens, and ability to open windows.

Do you know what happens when a bird 'runs into' a window that was open? You have to spend the next half hour chasing it around your house with a broom. I'm speaking from experience here.

It's not so bad. I lived in a south east Asian nation for a few years with no glass windows (but large shutters). We would get a bird once week or so. Trick is to leave the window open and close off other exits.

However, with frosted glass and screens you would keep birds out.

When a dove came into my classroom in high school it started to fly in circles and perched at the projector in the ceiling.

Apparently it got confused by the artificial lightning (6500k fluorescent tubes) because once we killed the lights it went straight to the closed windows instead of the open door at the opposite side. We had to draw the curtains of every window except one for the dove to get out :(

Maintenance guy here. I work at apartment complexes and get calls around once a week during winter and spring about birds( mostly doves and hummingbirds) that are bashing themselves repeatedly on residents upper story windows. It's sad because the birds just need to turn around and fly lower to escape but they seem unable to do that. They are transfixed on the window itself. The only solution I've been able to come up with is to open the window from inside( not always possible) or just allow nature to take it's course. I'd like to help these creatures but climbing a ladder three stories up is not acceptable to me. I hesitate to say that it's nature's way of culling out the dumb ones. We make our own olives here in southern California. It's very easy although picking them is labor intensive. It's very satisfying to make delicious food from things growing on trees and doesn't take a long time or a lot of space

> We don't really have an alternative for windows on small building, unless you want to go back to living in caves.

That's not true at all. Glass windows didn't become commonplace until after the middle ages. Surely there would be something you could do to windows that makes birds not fly into them:

https://www.audubon.org/news/help-birds-avoid-deadly-collisi...

You're not arguing on principle, you're just saying that killing birds for cheaper olives is less acceptable than killing birds for "clean" glass windows.

I was fascinated when I learned that many universities have discussion groups within their Biology/Natural Sciences/Ornithology departments dedicated to identifying and cataloging dead birds, and most of their urban finds died from colliding with windows.

Also don't forget about wind turbines. Those result in some magnitude of thousands of bird kills (why is this such a contested figure‽) but are still necessary if we don't want to start rationing out electricity.

Edit: Wrong reply chain

It’s a contested figure because groups against renewable energy exaggerate the figures to try to push a hypocrisy angle on environmentalists.

The figure is disputed because it depends upon the kind of wind turbines. Old wind turbines were much smaller, they had more blades, and they turned much faster. My understanding is that this led to many more bird deaths.

>I'm curious whether you feel the same way about windows, which kill hundreds of millions of birds each year.

I do feel the same way, which is why I take steps to remediate it on all of my windows duh. I put up screens on many windows year round (higher light pass through meshes like UltraVue make this much less of an impact on views vs older ones, and the tech could improve farther), ultraviolet decals/solutions (also lower view impact, they look milky clear to humans but strongly reflect UV which most birds can see, though since they're chemical they must be refreshed), golden spiderweb decals on some higher windows, etc. On new buildings thought can be put into materials, how the windows face vs light and surrounding environments, and so on as well. There are plenty of remediation steps available even for existing structures though and yes those steps should be taken.

You casting this as some zero-sum game is confusing regardless, because even if no steps were possible for windows rather then many, why the heck would you suggest that meant we shouldn't encourage what action could be taken?

Really sad and shocking. On the other hand, one glance at industrial meat production shows how little we as a species care about our fellow creatures. Live animals (male chicks) thrown in meat grinders, calves separated at birth from their mothers, pigs living with horrendous infections in their own waste, geese force-fed no matter the pain,just to produce fat livers. And then the animals are ferried off to be killed in the most horrendous ways. You and I are both contributing to this by the choices we make to eat the cheapest/easiest/most convenient... meals.

I dont know where are you from but I visited a pig farm near where I live and they are in really clean spaces because they grow faster, and also regulations.

That's not how it works. The space being "clean" doesn't really help much. Consider the transport and killing, and also the fact that by far the largest number of animals killed for meat (excluding fish) are factory-farmed chickens and chicken factory-farming always looks the same

Chicks for example. I don't say it's not clean, but this is how industrial scale production looks like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV-rO2-Rwz4

I understand what you want to say, but taken literally, I am sure you know many humans who would not pause and think twice about the birds. They would think twice about the cheapest way to harvest and that would pretty much be the extend of it.

In our economic system, that's kind of how it works. It's a survival-of-the-fittest environment, where anyone who can exploit the rules of the legal system while making the most profit will grow to be the largest. That's why you see so many "unethical" huge corporations in the world, because they were the ones that learned to exploit the system. To actually change the outcome at-scale, you need to change the system, which we haven't figured out how to do yet while still providing a good quality of life.

I doubt it that the quality of life would drop significantly should the olives be harvested during the day rather than at night. There are many problems to solve in the politics and economy which doesn't mean we cannot enforce specific policies for specific problems.

> In our economic system, that's kind of how it works. It's a survival-of-the-fittest environment.

I doubt that the survival-of-the-fittest environment is a product of the economic system. It is the converse which is true. Our society which includes economic system is a product of survival-of-the-fittest because it is hardcoded in our DNA, in fact in the genetic material of every living thing.

This is fallacious

Businesses have decision-makers who are not simply paperclip-maximizers. They read the news and have opinions about right and wrong. This means politics matters; it isn't all economic incentives, let alone genetics.

This doesn't mean it's easy to change people's minds, though.

Like the previous commenter said: You do things ethically and you need to price your product at $1.87 a lbs. Someone else gives them less room, add some crap to make them grow faster and can make e larger profit by pricing at $1.55 or whatever. Guess who will go out of business?

The same innocent creatures will experience a horrendous death in the wild any way.

This is an odd comment. If someone has a high chance of having a horrible death, does that justify us killing them in whatever way we see fit?

The natural world is filled with horrible pain and deaths. These do not add to that in quality. Maybe in quantity.

You seem obvious to the real world

Actually in the real world there are plenty of people who will learn about this and change how they buy olives.

Are you a vegetarian?

Humans kill 50 billion chickens a year. Does your sympathy extend far enough to eat a purely plant-based diet?

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