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Comment by fouc | Hacker News Reader

The meat-eating utilitarian vegetarian tries to pick meat from larger animals over smaller animals. Since you get more meat per unit of pain inflicted.

So Beef > Pork > Chicken. But if pigs can be bred to be as big as cows that helps a lot!

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As someone who accidentally killed a small bull while working on a free range ranch, I can tell you that cows are surprisingly sentient and sensitive. The dead yearling's mother-cow howl-moo'ed the rest of the day and into the late evening. Her moos of agony still haunt me.

I defy you to find 1 chicken in 1000 that is capable of suffering this at this level.

There was an article I read a while back about a guy in Europe who raises cows until they are like 20-years of age (the end of their life). When they are getting near the end of their natural lifespan, they are then slaughtered and and sold. He denied they are his "pets", but you can tell that caring for a life-form for 10-20 years definitely will cause a bond to develop.

It made me think that cows really are just big dogs. But big dogs that we have taken to eating, unfortunately.

I'm not sure I want to keep eating pork and beef. I do eat a lot of chicken these days in lieu of that anyways.

If it was chickens they’d be doing the killing instead of you. They don’t call it pecking order for a reason.

If there were one ton chickens running around they’d probably be killing us. They’re not that far removed from their ancestors.

There were half-ton "chickens" in Australia 5 million years ago. 10 feet tall!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dromornis_stirtoni

Or the even heavier Elephant birds in Madagascar until 800 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_bird

oh wow, well this is a very silence of the lambs like scenario. thanks for sharing. i, too, have witnessed other animals being extra aware of death in the past.

>The meat-eating utilitarian vegetarian tries to pick meat from larger animals over smaller animals. Since you get more meat per unit of pain inflicted.

By that logic, the endgame would be an animal bred so it can't experience pain or suffering. After all, if it can't suffer, you can treat it however badly you want, right?

relevant Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri quote:

>My gift to industry is the genetically engineered worker, or Genejack. Specially designed for labor, the Genejack's muscles and nerves are ideal for his task, and the cerebral cortex has been atrophied so that he can desire nothing except to perform his duties. Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain?

You've created one of the characters from Douglas Adams' "Restaurant at the End of the Universe", the Ameglian Major Cow, which had been bred to actually want to be slaughtered and eaten.

The definition of vegetarian stretches ever further.

I guess you could just strike that word without changing your meaning.

> meat-eating utilitarian vegetarian tries to pick meat from larger animals over smaller animals

That’s not what ‘vegetarian’ means.

Ironically, the exact inverse of carbon emissions per meat species. Chicken < Pork << Beef

Personally I'd prefer to order it in terms of sentience & intelligence as well, which still leaves us with chicken for dinner..

My dad was a poultry pathologist. Spent some of my childhood touring chicken houses.

I feel absolutely no ethical qualms about murdering chickens from an intelligence aspect. ;)

It'd take a lot of crickets to make up one cow's worth of meat... but I don't think crickets experience anything like what we would call pain. So the correct answer may lie at the opposite end of the spectrum.

Why not Beef > Mutton > Pork > Chicken?

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