Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

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colechristensen

When you're several generations away from needing to take life yourself to eat and survive or knowing personally the person who did it for you... you lose touch with what it means to eat something which was alive, often something you cared for.

Every life ends. Clinging to, and insisting others cling to every possible moment to extend that existence seems to be the default, but people don't take the time to think this through.

I do not have a problem with a life ending to feed me instead of ending because of long lived degradation or disease. I do not have a problem with a life ended with a bad moment caused by me or someone on behalf of me. This is what it is to be alive. You either consume something which lived or you rely on others that do in some form or another.

I do have a problem with eating things which have a consciousness near my own. I do have a problem with eating things which endured a life of hardship and torture on my account. I do have a problem with torturing animals to do scientific testing, more so as consciousness reaches a level nearing my own.

My moral calculus values life and consciousness, but does not preclude me participating in the end of life to sustain myself.

I’ve been given some pretty strange looks for suggesting that if you’re going to eat meat, you should hunt for it at least once. That’s the best case scenario for an animal ending up on a plate- a normal outdoors life followed by a quick death. Stark contrast to the life behind the typical package of shrink wrapped meat in the grocery store.

Hunting takes some skill in being able to find or attract your prey and place a humane shot so considering the effort required to get to that point it is probably not realistic for most people. But further to your suggestion, what is a normal life for a prey animal often consists of a lot of uncertainty in being able to find enough food to survive on the one hand and constantly being on guard against being eaten on the other. Is that really preferable to an animal that is bred for specific traits, raised under rather stable conditions of shelter, food, outside availability, etc, and then also quickly killed in the end? I'm talking about the best condition under which such animals are raised of course - which is what we should support, if at all. Wouldn't suggesting they visit a farm and slaughterhouse be more realistic and closer to an understanding of the process of meat production that they generally consume?

The problem is that you’re likely imagining an idealistic home farm scenario. My great grandparents had a farm, a couple cows, few horses, some pigs, many chickens etc.

Those animals lived the life you describe. Pampered, taken care of, room to roam, and then swiftly killed because fear sours the meat. They’d kill maybe one cow per year, 2 or 3 pigs. Many chickens.

An 800kg cow produces ridiculous amounts of meat. They’d give it away to their entire extended family because no way they’d eat it all in a year.

But meat you buy in a supermarket comes from factories. Their living conditions are the absolute minimum you can get away with to keep the animal healthy enough to sell its meat. Ridiculous things like keeping chickens in cages then throwing them out in the sun for a week so you can get that “pasture raised” label. At that point they’re too weak to even walk around because their muscles didn’t develop enough and their genetic mutants with oversized breasts.

that shit ain’t cool and we should do what we can to get better laws

I don't think what I'm imagining is too far from what many farmers who do it for a living aim to provide for their animals as I've known them from where I grew up. Whether or not such operations can scale to meet current demands we have for meat is another question but we should certainly strive to improve the welfare of animals across the board. My main point wrt to the parent is that for animals in the wild life might be more "natural" but it's not necessarily a better experience for them just for that reason.

The parent comment is not arguing we shouldn't kill any living things, only that we shouldn't kill conscious things.

You obviously need to participate in ending life to sustain yourself, but it's not necessary to end life capable of thinking, feeling, and suffering.

There are people who won't eat plant matter which could lead to new life (seeds, tubers, eggs, etc.) as it is violence to plants. Consciousness isn't a binary feature you can sort things definitely into have and have-not, it's a spectrum. There is a spectrum of decisions to be made about harming other life to survive, and I've made my choice. I'm not telling anybody to make the same choice as me, but I think many people's choices are unreasonable and more importantly not based on reason or appreciation for life.

>Consciousness isn't a binary feature you can sort things definitely into have and have-not, it's a spectrum.

Of course. But while we can't draw an exact line where it begins, we can certainly categorize some obvious things as being on one side of it or the other.

In terms of thinking, feeling, and suffering, it's obvious that

1. pigs (for example) are certainly capable of these things, as least as much as a young human child, and

2. wheat is not meaningfully capable of these things.

So there is a moral cost to killing a pig that there isn't to killing a wheat plant.

This isn't something particularly revolutionary. It's illegal to torture and kill pigs outside of certain sanctioned contexts, so we recognize this intuitively as a society. We just choose to remain cognitively dissonant when it comes to our food sources.

Serious question: how do you feel about conscious animals in the wild killing and eating each other's?

If a leopard can't catch something, it will die. We have alternatives. And we know about them. And we can grow them.

We don't have the capability or will currently to do much about it in a way that won't devastate the food chain, and thus the environment. So while it's sad and unfortunate, there's not much we can or should do about it, on a mass scale. If I personally stumbled upon a (small, not threatening to me) predator attacking a prey animal, I would personally intervene.

This seems pretty intuitive. I think most people have roughly the same mindset.

The slaughter of farmed animals is a footnote compared to the immense suffering they undergo during their lives. It’s possible to to find farm animals who live more comfortable lives, but only through some effort. If you are eating random meat from a store or restaurant, you’re eating tortured animals.

Slaughtering your own meat isn't that big a deal. More people should do it. If nothing else, cutting up an animal is a wonderful biology lesson.

The comment you’re responding to is about cruelty, which you don’t address at all.

Second to last paragraph doesn't cut it?

Thanks for responding. Apparently I fail at reading today!

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