Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

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"we don't base our moral choices on what animals do to each other"

Also: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/veggie-cat-food/

> Unlike dogs and other omnivores, cats are true (so-called “obligate”) carnivores: They meet their nutritional needs by consuming other animals and have a higher protein requirement than many other mammals. Cats get certain key nutrients from meat—including taurine, arachidonic acid, vitamin A and vitamin B12—that can’t be sufficiently obtained from plant-based foods. Without a steady supply of these nutrients, cats can suffer from liver and heart problems, not to mention skin irritation and hearing loss.

Unlike cats, we can survive without meat.

Sure. My point was only that cats kill even when they are already well fed. The larger point is that nature can be cruel.

I suppose I should have written a proper more detailed comment, I absolutely do believe that humans should hold ourselves to a higher standard and definitely shouldn’t be doing cruel things to living creatures because we do know better and can do better. But nature is still a pretty messed up place sometimes.

Be careful about drawing conclusions about broader nature from the behavior of the domestic cat. The cat’s behavior is, like the dog’s, very significantly the result of human driven natural selection. In the cat’s case, humans have favored them for 1000s of years because they kill pests like rodents. That was their ancestral “job”, their role as a domesticated animal that lives in harmony with humans.

You can probably find some other animals in nature that kill for no apparent reason though. There is apparently a term for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_killing (though the term confusingly conflates unnecessary killing with caching the excess for later)

Fair. Although, that surplus killing link does list a number of animals that weren't affected by human-driven natural selection.

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