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Comment by macinjosh | Hacker News Reader

Are we supposed to believe that the wild animals our ancestors hunted were not consistently under stress? I think living in the food chain pretty much ensures experiences of stress. Both of hunger and the threat of being food for something else.

Do some people think nature before modern human agriculture was a happy go lucky place where the creatures experienced little or no adversity? Hope not!

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I'm sure being a wild animal means some level of stress. I'm also sure it is nothing compared to the deplorable conditions in which factory farm animals are raised.

Your comparison feels like talking about soldiers with PTSD and then saying "all humans have jobs and deadlines and they depend on these for their livelihood! All humans have stress, how are soldiers different?"

I have no desire to look for images of how disgusting the living conditions and lives of these animals are in an attempt to prove this, but you are welcome to. There is no doubt in my mind it is far worse than their state in the wild. (I'm not defending the "article" or its findings, just saying that we as a society do terrible things to animals we plan to eat).

> Your comparison feels like talking about soldiers with PTSD and then saying "all humans have jobs and deadlines and they depend on these for their livelihood! All humans have stress, how are soldiers different?"

Wouldn't the animals in nature be more like soldiers with PTSD and livestock be more like humans?

> I have no desire to look for images of how disgusting the living conditions and lives of these animals are in an attempt to prove this, but you are welcome to.

Are they any better than the animals in nature being eaten while alive?

> There is no doubt in my mind it is far worse than their state in the wild.

Then you don't know what it is like in the wild. Ever wonder why you don't live out in the wild but rather live in human factory farms instead?

The vast majority of livestock don't live like the few cherrypicked photos/videos pushed by "activists/propagandists". Just like the vast majority of animals in the wild don't live wonderful lives.

Pigs in particular have it pretty bad, in factory farms in general. Ever heard of a gestation crate? Imagine being stuck in a box on a concrete floor forced to look straight ahead for months on end. That's the life of the average pig in today's world.

I would not be this dismissive, considering the studies showing starkly different effects of acute vs chronic stress, for example [1].

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3788324/

Yes, actually. Animals in the wild don't experience _chronic_ stress. I recommend Robert Sapolsky's book "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers."

Animals in the wild also aren't eating a diet of pure corn or soy. They're eating 'organic' grass, with a few critters thrown in.

Animals living in nature are typically well adjusted to the stresses they experience. Their stress levels return back to normal quickly after a dangerous situation.

No, animals in the wild are not under constant stress, because that would completely nullify the effect of stress in the first place. Stress is a bodies' response to an 'unusual' situation, in which you have to act in an 'unusual' way. But the baseline that defines 'usual' and 'unusual' is the environment in which the animal evolved over thousands of years. In this environment their stress response is natural, e.g. spikes in case of danger or exceptional threat, otherwise normal.

If you now bring those in a completely new environment (factory farming), their stress levels go wild.

Based on what I read in anthropology classes, yeah, there actually wasn’t that much stress or food insecurity in small scale societies. Cooking was time-consuming but there wasn’t much else to do but hang out with your friends and mash yams anyway.

I'm not sure I got your point. They were under severe stress for sure. So what? Even if that was very damaging somehow, our ancestors anyway died very young and in not very sophisticated ways.

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