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Comment by autosharp | Hacker News Reader

The issue is very much analogous. Lots of pigs getting culled (in many cases burned and/or buried alive on a grand scale) because they are infected with diseases that are dangerous to humans. Corona included.

I just keep being surprised that there is consensus forming around mink but the hog issue, which is very similar and actually a bigger problem by numbers, is not really part of the mainstream debate. For some reason being against mink farming is much more acceptable than being against hog farming and this is reflected in policy.

It could be because the interests of hog farmers and consumers of hog are a much bigger part of society. But the harm is also that much bigger.

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A single hog being killed for 150000 kcal of sustenance is a lot more morally acceptable than 50 minks being killed for a single luxury coat. It's not cognitive dissonance to think this.

(numbers from quick, non-exhaustive googling)

Does the cognitive sophistication of the animals (their ability to feel emotions, form long term memories, etc) factor into that? Pigs are highly sophisticated. Minks probably less so.

I’d suggest you’d have to factor the perceived sophistication of the species as much as the direct benefits for the homo sapiens facing the moral dilemma (you).

Dogs, pigs, cows, are good examples with varying cultural responses.

So... “depends on who you ask”.

Google Snippet: To make one fur coat, it takes 150-300 chinchillas, 200-250 squirrels, 50-60 minks, or 15-40 foxes, depending on the animals' subspecies.

I don’t agree. Pigs are on the same cognitive level as dogs. Would it be morally acceptable to kill and eat a (big) dog for its 150000 calories after raising in terrible conditions for a few years?

I agree btw - but most pigs are killed after just 20 to 24 weeks - though yes breeding mothers are kept in terrible conditions for years.

> raising in terrible conditions

...source?

Farming doesn't have to be intensive. We get milk from a nearby farm. Given we mostly walk there the "food miles" would be precisely zero.

Not intensive farming is less bad than intensive farming but in your example, a cow still needs to have a calf and that calf slaughtered for milk to keep coming. And that cow will be killed off the moment it stops making enough milk which is a fraction of its natural life span. It’s not like not intensive farming is innocent either.

And for shit and giggles, check what’s the proportion of industrially farmed meat vs non intensive that’s sold every day.

> Farming doesn't have to be intensive. We get milk from a nearby farm. Given we mostly walk there the "food miles" would be precisely zero.

Sure, that is nice but in no way representative.

More than 99% of produced hogs do live in horrific conditions. The fact that you know of a happy hog doesn't relate to the vast majority of hogs.

I don't see why it matters if it's a dog or a pig. But to answer your question: it depends on a lot of factors, if you really want to go down the morality rabbit hole.

I guess I'll say it's less morally acceptable to slaughter a dog for food that's kept in terrible conditions than one that's kept in good conditions.

It seems to be becoming less acceptable in one of the few places to actually do that.

Kinda my point. Why are dogs not ok but pigs no problem.

For reference, a pig is 3-10 dogs, more if you're talking about the smallest dogs.

Have a Whale more calories than a person?

Everyone eats pork. Only the rich wear mink coats.

Real fur is regretfully not always the most expensive option.

Hopefully, it's a side effect of diseases that we will be starting to think this all over though.

Technologically, I don't think there's much to be done here. Fake fur is pretty good.

This is factually incorrect given that ~25% of the world literally does not eat pork

Including Pigs. Never forget that when Fred dies early of natural causes, his life long friends will be munching on him soon. Note that this is while on full food and not at modern feed lot densities, just on a low rate family farm.

Increasing the cost of food is anti-poor. Increasing the cost of luxury fabric, not so much. Until poverty and hunger are eliminated worldwide, it's going to be hard to make me care more about how animals are farmed in order that the most possible people can afford enough to eat.

It's easy to not care about people not getting mink coats. Much harder to care about people having food taken out of their mouths by people who think they have a right to dictate that sort of thing. If you think eating pork should be forbidden, I've got a part of the world to introduce you to.

It is funny that you mention human need for food. Hog is actually an inefficient food production method because they need to be fed more corn/soy etc than the food they produce.

If your goal was to make food more accessible to the poor then one way to go would be to stop this inefficient food production method and just consume the corn/soy protein directly. That would be healthier also. Consuming corn/soy directly would drive down the price of food because we would need less of it.

Consuming excessive amounts of corn is associated with other issues, up to and including cannibalism, mind.

https://phys.org/news/2017-01-corn-french-hamsters-deranged-...

Do not discount the value add of multiple digestive and organ systems worth of energy work, even if the numbers otherwise look attractive. The entire planet is interrelated.

From the article:

"A diet of corn is turning wild hamsters in northeastern France into deranged cannibals that devour their offspring, alarmed researchers have reported."

Are you saying I might be a wild hamster from northeastern France? And I should not just be eating corn?

I am saying that mammalian research models have predictive power, and that shifting to a fully corn based diet without any of the livestock based foods we'd raise on corn could have unintended side effects. Not everything happens as a first order outcome.

Every creature in the logistical food chain is performing different nutrient accumulations for the next one in the chain. If you think about bioaccumulation as a mechanism, that research should have you realizimg that "You are what you eat" has a terrifyingly poignant meaning, in the sense that if we end up seeing a smaller creature fed on a single having potential in the wild population management problems, the same thing could happen to us. By the time we realized what was going on, the damage to the ecosystem could realistically already be done.

I mean, scoff if you like. Me? I'm trying to figure out how to companion farm. Better for the ecosystem as a whole, and I like the plethora of wildlife that end up benefitting as result too.

On another note, I don't remember making this posting twice? Did I pocket post somehow? Hrrm.

Of all the problems with eating a lot of corn, you chose cannibalism as your example?

Consuming excessive amounts of corn is associated with other issues, up to and including cannibalism, mind.

https://phys.org/news/2017-01-corn-french-hamsters-deranged-...

Do not discount the value add of multiple digestive and organ systems worth of energy work, even if the numbers otherwise seem unintuitive the entire planet is interrelated in ways we have not even scratched the surface of.

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