Hacker News Reader

Comment by marton_s | Hacker News Reader

I was wondering what happens to the (hopefully) very small amount male chicks that still hatch because no testing is free from false positives/negatives.

The good news is, according to section 5.2.4 of the the "respeggt System Manual"[1] they are forbidden to kill earlier than 12 weeks old.

[1] https://respeggt-group.com/files/respeggt-Systemhandbuch_en....

Edit: link to the English system manual

View on HN

Sarcasm aside is killing a 1 year old, let alone at 12 weeks, more ethical than killing a day-old chick? The latter is basically post-natal abortion, which, is not a huge world different than abortion aside from consciousness of inflicted pain.

12 weeks is the point at which they have grown enough to be viable as a meat supply. Killing a 1 day old chick has zero purpose to the wider world - it is just killing. Harvesting for meat at 12+ weeks serves the purpose of feeding people.

If you have an ethical problem with eating animals at all, this won't matter. Otherwise, killing animals for food is part of our reality, and waiting until the 12 week mark brings the killing in line with the realities (and problems) of our worldwide food supply chain.

Good point.

I don’t think there’s a binary switch at any single point from conception to birth to 1 year old where an organism switches from “not conscious to pain” to “conscious to pain”.

The first few days / weeks after birth are certainly louder but otherwise not much different developmentally from the preceding days.

Certainly it doesn't change in an instant, that development is a process just like the rest. Still in the very early stages, "not conscious to pain" seems to be the case, but "conscious to pain" may begin earlier than people think.

You certainly didn't have a brain or nervous system at the moment you were conceived. So there had to be some point in your development where you made the switch to being "conscious to pain".

It’s just a fun thought experiment.

If you decide that consciousness [of pain] can’t possibly be a binary switch, then perhaps that also means being conscious isn’t a binary property.

If it isn’t a binary property, then is it a property that varies in degree based on developmental age (e.g. counting day 0 as conception)? Is it a quantity that can be measured quantitatively?

If it can be measured, do some fully developed humans have more or less of it? Do some non-humans have more or less of it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com