Hacker News, where technology > empathy
The idea that animals should be revered and never used as food is an opinion, not a fact. One can be sympathetic toward the treatment of animals raised for food, and advocate for better treatment while still consuming animal products.
The funny thing is that your comparison is also just flat-out wrong: the technology in question is also in part a product of empathy! Yes, there are efficiency and cost concerns around incubating eggs to maturity where the (male) chick will just be discarded, but there's also a strong empathetic argument that terminating an egg shortly after fertilization is much more humane than killing male chicks after birth.
Their biggest line of defense is "animals are alive and they have feelings and senses, we abuse them for food". That's sadly right. And they implicitly say that "eating plants are OK because, plants are not animals and they're just happen to grow. They don't feel, they don't understand".
On the contrary, there's a growing mountain of research revealing that plants can communicate, issue warnings about diseases and bug infestations. They so-called get stressed when it rains, and their metabolisms startle during fast light changes (like eclipses). More shockingly, they release all the nutrients they store when they sense they're going to die, so other plants can thrive from their remains and nutrient stocks (writing this really moves me).
This is complete opposite of "plants are well, just alive wood" hypothesis. When I share this research with vegans and vegetarians, their response is: crickets.
Moreover, most hardcore ones suggest that we don't ever need meat to thrive or live a healthy life however, we've evolved that far because we consumed meat. Meat made us and, same people are ignorant of this fact.
I can understand that we need to grow these animals more ethically. This is why I always try to buy ethically produced food. I understand that these animals are adding great amounts of greenhouse gases. I can understand that we may live well with less meat. However, we need to understand, some of these animals are evolved under our reign and they may not survive outside farms for long. The cattle are grass puppies now and are essentially "useful pets". We need to understand where we are to move forward. Ignorance and fight won't take us anywhere. We need to talk openly and need to put our prejudice aside. We need to learn and understand first.
If you care about the well being of plants, you should still prefer to eat plants rather than animals. The trophic level of animals in the food chain necessitates that they will eat more calories of plant matter than would provide calories of food upon being eaten.
Secondly, you should look at the sorts of plants being consumed and where they fall in the plant's life cycle. Fruits and nuts have been evolved to be eaten by animals. Staple crops such as grains and pulses are generally harvested from plants that have already lived to maturity and died off. Really it's only fresh greens and tubers that require the damage or destruction of a living plant.
Lastly, it's important to recognize the evolutionary purpose of sensing pain and suffering from it. Animals use pain and suffering to detect harmful situations and learn how to avoid them in the future. This process consists of sensations, memory and adaptive behavior. Plants may have "reflexive" responses to stimulus, but these responses aren't adaptive and aren't affected by previous experience (mostly... there are some exceptions). There would be no evolutionary purpose for plants to develop a sense of suffering if they have no practical use for that sensation.
To put this into more laymen's terms, meat cultivation dramatically increases the total amount of plants that we need to grow.
As mentioned in my other comment:
> 70-75% of soybeans grown globally are for livestock, only 6% are used for human food products (meat eaters often try to claim that soy production is terrible for the environment; surprise, surprise, meat consumption is the main driver)
So, it's a bit counterintuitive, but globally switching to a plant-based diet would actually dramatically reduce the total amount of plants that we are raising, and therefore would dramatically reduce overall suffering of plants (if they suffer)
Only if you believe you are more efficient at digesting grass and other plants than animals.
The only logical endpoint is that humans should just off themselves so we don't participate past one cycle of reabsorption into the Earth's environment.
One way or another, everything is going to die and be consumed by another living organism.
That's why it's absurd. You can arbitrarily pick your own resolution, but it's only arbitrary until you exit the cycle completely.
That would obliterate all future human happiness. It doesn't stand up even under a cold utilitarian conception of morality.
There are various reasons people become vegan or vegetarian, there's no single premise.
Why not? We already have some laws against animal cruelty. Thankfully we don't treat that as a matter of personal choice.
In this case I think the question is something like "is it cruel to eat an animal?"
I'm not a spiritual person, but I like what the general consensus of the tribes around the Great Lakes (and elsewhere) saw of it: we're very much part of the [natural] world, not above or outside of it in any way. And I don't see that as a bad thing. Now, talking scale of consumption and all that is another matter that I didn't gather was at the core of this discussion—at least that is the way I've been framing my comments.
But now I'm getting a bit worried I'm taking this too far off track of the actual linked content and discussion so I think I'll have to leave it at that—but I'm happy to continue to discuss if you wanted to—just fire me an email.
The discussion began with moralizing about eating other living things.
I'm an optimist, but I also don't anoint humankind with some divine moral authority—I put us on the level with every other animal on the planet.
I was being hyperbolic, yes. That was the point. I think the entire argument over the morality of it is an appeal to absurdity. There are gross assumptions made on every side of the argument and I don't see any clear path to one side of the discussion about whether or not eating animals is immoral being possible.
I'm not anti-vegan. How could one even be anti-vegan? Seems more like a personal conviction to me, and that's, quite frankly, none of my business.
You've made interesting points, but I think the most important point here isn't one of biology but of moral philosophy: animals presumably outrank plants in terms of moral standing.
Torturing a person is presumably worse than torturing a mosquito. A person has more capacity for pain than a mosquito, and in turn the mosquito has more capacity for pain than does a heap of sand.
I figure plants lie further down the ranking than mosquitoes, for the reasons you've just explained. They're certainly further down than farmyard animals. It would be considerable moral progress to switch from torturing billions of chickens and pigs, to torturing billions of plants (and that's ignoring that a plant in a farm environment is likely 'happier', in its own terms, than a livestock animal).
A vaguely related TED talk on how brains ultimately exist to orchestrate movement, and essentially nothing else: https://youtu.be/7s0CpRfyYp8?t=15
In aggregate I probably agree but one thing I've wondered, especially in the last year as I started gardening during lockdown, is if that's really universally true. Large, long-lived plants - redwoods, oaks, saguaros, and so on - seem very close to the same niche in the plant kingdom humans occupy in the animal one. They exert significant energy to cultivate and modify their environment; they gather and store resources they do not immediately need; they change "behavioral" patterns significantly and cyclically over the course of their life; they maintain vast communication networks.
I have no doubt a pig "outranks" a mosquito. But I also suspect a redwood outranks a mosquito. The middle is all fuzzy though - where does my cucumber (which exhibits relatively complex reproductive behavior to attract pollinators, and expresses significant "wants" in terms of vining and leaf facing) lie in relation to mosquitos, or aphids, or bees?
"When I share this research with vegans and vegetarians, their response is: crickets."
I'm suprised the vegetarians you're talking to would suggest crickets, even though that's one of the leading animal protein replacements in the form of insects.
Do vegetarians/vegans have similar ethical objections about eating crickets for food? I suspect so, but I don't know if crickets have the same type of cognition/emotions as vertebrate animals.
In a less facetious sense, I do believe that insect neurology is substantially different. Crustaceans have a nervous system web, which is why you have to cut crabs and lobsters in half to kill them rather than just stabbing them in the head.
First when you grow you drink mom's milk and you are under impression drinking milk is good for health which indeed is. So people start consuming milk everywhere.
And there are advertisements which shows happy cows, chocolates made from milk. Vegetarians are under impression that its ethical. And many farmers advertises as if their cows are happy they are grass fed etc. In some religion they even worship cows etc giving impression that cows are respected etc.
And the other thing you often hear is cows babies get enough milk and farmers only sell excess milk. So from religion, society people are brain washed so much they don't even see how animals are tortured, left on road after buffalo/cows stops giving milk.
I wish media would cover this subject more especially in India which is probably top 3 vegetarian country in the world.
So to reiterate the number one reason most people (that I know of) become vegetarians because they are disgusted by meat. I wish there was some great vision to it but there isn't.
My biggest lines of defense are:
* Dr. Kim Williams, former president of the American College of Cardiology, said "there are two kinds of cardiologists, vegans, and those who haven't read the data"
* Animal agriculture is responsible for 20-33% of all freshwater consumption globally
* Mass cultivation of animals increases the chances of pandemic
* 41% of mainland USA is used for grazing livestock, yet meat only provides 18% of our calories; feeding the world on a vegan diet could reduce farmland use by 75% or more
* Going plant-based for two-thirds of meals could reduce food-related carbon emissions by 60% (the way we produce, distribute, and refrigerate food is a huge contributor of global emissions)
* 70-75% of soybeans grown globally are for livestock, only 6% are used for human food products (meat eaters often try to claim that soy production is terrible for the environment; surprise, surprise, meat consumption is the main driver)
But what percentage of our protein?
Personally, I eat more protein than I did when I ate meat, though to be fair I still eat eggs. It's not hard at all to get adequate protein.
[0] https://healthyeating.sfgate.com/worlds-main-sources-protein...
I agree with the perspective on limiting animal suffering and I buy pastured meat. I agree with the vegan perspective on many things but I think its limited and fails to consider other aspects of the human condition. I oppose the widespread mockery and lack of respect that vegans get. The health issues associated with an ethical commitment to avoiding animal products makes it more worthy of respect.
I don't know if you're talking about the broader community of people who self-identify as athletes but I'll restrict the discussion to professional athletes for the sake of clarity.
Here's a few household-name professional vegan athletes:
* Venus Williams
* Lewis Hamilton
* Colin Kaepernick
* Kyrie Irving
* Tia Blanco
* Meagan Duhamel
Veganism isn't very popular in general so I'm not sure if this "if professional athletes don't do it, then it must be bad" argument holds. I'm also not even sure if that claim is true. If we could compile a list of all professional athletes, find the vegan population, and then compare that to the general population, I would wager that veganism might have a higher percentage in the athlete population than the general population. Pure speculation, though, and obviously I'm biased. But I follow lots of vegan channels and they're very proud and vocal about vegan athletes and it's the kind of news that I think you won't be exposed to unless you're inside the vegan community. In other words we should both acknowledge that there's a lot of selection bias / echo chamber at play here and I don't think either of us can definitively say whether veganism is more popular or less popular among professional athletes.
Venus Williams is a "chegan" and uses milk-based protein.
Lewis Hamilton is a driver and is unlikely to have protein demands related to his sport that are different than the average person.
Colin Kaepernick became a vegan at approximately the same time he stopped playing professionally.
Kyrie Irving: I can't find what he does for protein but SI says he may not be a pure vegan. [0]
Tia Blanco is a surfer and also unlikely to have protein needs different from a normal person.
Meagan Duhamel is a good example and seems to be one of the few people who is known to have achieved professional goals while vegan.
> I don't know if you're talking about the broader community of people who self-identify as athletes but I'll restrict the discussion to professional athletes for the sake of clarity.
There are some confounders with professional athletes that make those examples less persuasive than they might be otherwise. Pros have access to more resources (such as medical/endocrine assistance) and are able to structure their lifestyle around their training and competition. Additionally I'm unable to find anyone who went from an amateur to a professional while vegan in a competitive sport that requires one to build a physique. It is somewhat more believable that some people can maintain a professional-grade physique on a vegan diet.
> No disrespect but I see this "I'm an athlete, I need more protein" thing all the time. It's yet another meme that has spread that has the convenient side effect (or main effect) of shutting people off from considering the effects of their food choices.
I'm not really repeating a meme but arguing from my personal experience and my understanding of diet and physiology. The effect of relying on plant-based protein is that your protein sources are more difficult to digest.
> I would wager that veganism might have a higher percentage in the athlete population than the general population. Pure speculation, though, and obviously I'm biased.
I'm glad you're conscious of your biases and while I would take that wager opposite you, I will also admit that is more a result of my biases. I'll also mention that professional athletes tend to be outliers and if a genetic freak can build muscle on a vegan diet, it may be evidence that they are a genetic outlier their rare physiology is able to build muscle on any diet with protein but more sensitive to the byproducts of animal product consumption.
> But I follow lots of vegan channel and they're very proud and vocal about vegan athletes
Thats because they are passionate about veganism and want to counter the meme you referred to above. I would be more persuaded if people who were passionate about nutrition or athletics were vocal about veganism as a performance enhancer.
Thanks for the reply and much respect to you for making ethical decisions a central part of your lifestyle.
[0] https://www.si.com/eats/2017/10/12/kyrie-irving-celtics-plan...
Professional surfing is not physically demanding and doesn't require needs different from normal people? Do you think that they just casually go out on the water once a week? Also, from my brief experiences surfing, I seem to recall it being one of the most physically taxing sports I've ever done, in terms of total body usage.
Valid points about needing to distinguish between professional athletes who were vegan at their peak versus after their peak, and diving into the details about how precisely how "vegan" each of the people I quoted actually are.
> Thanks for the reply and much respect to you for making ethical decisions a central part of your lifestyle.
Thank you for the respect, the feeling is mutual
Thanks for the reply.
Plant based protean is often used for pure muscle building simply due to cost. With actual vegan examples being Barny du Plessis a bodybuilder, and Kendrick Yahcob Farris a weightlifter.
In terms of endurance Jack Lindquist a track cyclist shows that’s likely viable for the overwhelming majority of people. So while I think it likely takes more effort that’s in part due to market forces and economy of scale not inherent physical differences. If anything the higher amount of calories burned by top athletes often mean they need a larger quantity but lower percentage of protein in their diets.
The truth is pretty far from that and most people with a regular omnivore diet get enough protein just through the plants they eat without even considering the meat. The human body burns protein and most excess protein just ends up getting burned along with carbs and fat.
So while animals may take up a large percentage of protein intake, our irrationally high collective protein intake is hardly a good reason to chose meat over plants. Eating meat is really all about calorie density.
Eventually, humanity will have to accept that going vegan is the only sustainable method.
* most plastic in the ocean is made up of abandoned fishing gear (see https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/03/great-pacifi...)
For example, freshwater consumption is important in regions which lacks freshwater. Crop agriculture is however the most common source for water pollution, occurs in all regions, and is not only a major environmental problem but also harms the supply of fresh water even if its not responsible for the primary consumption. Fertilizers and pesticides being the main culprits here. Sadly there is very little food in stores that do not have a direct link to fertilizers and pesticides except for wild fish, shellfish and seaweed.
In quite a few times I have seen studies showing that the lowest carbon emission in any food group would be either shellfish, seaweed, or insects. No fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, minimal land usage and sustainable. Vegan would exclude two of those, and seaweed is pretty rare in non-asian diets.
In general I try to look for marks of sustainability when buying food. Small producers, non-factory farm operations, local, crops that are in season, and so on. The article here focus on the issue of sex determining the eggs, but my primary priority is the area that the hen has. In EU you can have 16 hens located in a small box the size of 0.2m². That is plain cruelty and so I choose eggs under the mark that require 4m², a requirement for outside area, always access to natural lighting, and given crops grown without chemical fertilizers, pesticides or herbicides.
Is it perfect? No. Not using fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides is still being debated and researched if they are better for the environment or worse since land usage increases from it, but since I regularly dive in the Baltic sea I am constantly reminded by the harm done already by the revolution of chemical fertilizers produced primarily by natural gas.
There's a whole strand of veganism called bivalveganism which supports the usual vegan diet + eating bi-valve creatures like mussles precisely because their cultivation seems to have a lot of positive environmental benefits (or at least, it's one of the least harmful, as you mentioned) and because they seem to rank pretty low in terms of sentience / capacity-to-feel-pain.
> Crop agriculture is however the most common source for water pollution
Again I think the most compelling rebuttal is the fact that dairy/meat is the primary driver of crop agriculture today. We can feed the world on literally a fraction of the crop agriculture that we currently do. The vast majority of that crop agriculture goes towards feeding the animals we use for dairy or meat. So in terms of thinking about the whole picture, as you mention, any problems with crop agriculture are exacerbated by meat/dairy reliance.
Thus why I go for "the whole picture" approach. Locally produced food with markings for organic and sustainability is usually devoid of burned rain forest. Small producers tend to value sustainability more than large factory farms. Crops in season tend to involve less obscurity and less complex process which can hide ecological crimes. Animal farms with fewer animals tend to care more about individual animals health than larger farms that treat animals as items.
A big reason why organic crops has a rather complex picture comes from the issue that there exist no free lunch. Farmers that do not use chemical fertilizers derived from natural gas will instead use natural fertilizers. What that actually mean from a ecological perspective is that the chemical fertilizers produced from natural gas get put in the ground to produce animal feed, the animal feed get put into animals, and the rest product in form of manure get sold as a natural fertilizers which then is used to produce organic crops. Since organic farmers need to use more manure than non-organic farmers, and the output is lower, the total amount of carbon emissions per product can be argued as higher depending on how one count and attribute emissions. Still I generally prefer organic over non-organic because it does not directly put natural gas into the ground, and I find the cost in increase land use preferable over the other trade-offs.
Sustainable grazing (most grazing isn't) is a perfectly good use of marginal land, but that cannot produce anywhere near the meat we consume. Most animal production requires producing feed from other agricultural products. It is inherently less efficient to do this. Chicken is more efficient than beef, but still much worse than just eating plants directly.
But I do question how much of some the things you reference are actually problems.
We have plenty of fresh water. Distribution is often our problem when it comes to getting that water to humans everywhere, but stopping livestock production will not fix that.
Does it really matter how much of the USA is used for livestock grazing? Are we missing out on using that land for other things that are important to us?
I have no opinion on soybean production, but, again, does it matter that the lion's share of soybean production goes toward feeding livestock? And if soybean cultivation really is that bad for the environment, are there other things we could be feeding livestock that don't have such bad effects?
The carbon emissions suck, but are there ways to reduce these through better process?
I don't think any of these problems are unsolvable, but likely they're expensive, and there's no political will to tax the bad behavior to the point that it becomes financially better to do the right thing. Getting around that is likely easier than getting a significant chunk of the world to go vegan.
And that's the issue I have with most logical arguments around veganism. Meat production and consumption has a lot of problems, certainly, but vegans seem to believe that the only way to fix those problems is to throw the baby out with the bathwater, when there are almost certainly solutions or at least mitigations to those problems. I get that as an individual, you aren't going to fix those problems, so personally going vegan is a way for people to avoid being a part of the problem. That is a satisfying route for some people, but not for everyone.
Cattle raising and soy production (for animal feed) are major contributors to the continued loss of Amazon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxW-JKLeu1k
Blog version w/ reference links: https://www.sapien.org/blog/why-we-should-be-eating-more-mea...
An appeal to authority. I'm mean surgeon general once called for not wearing masks until he changed his mind completely.
"* Animal agriculture is responsible for 20-33% of all freshwater consumption globally"
Why would that be problematic? There is no shortage of water where they raise animals. On the other hand there is a shortage of water in California where they grow crops on a massive scale.
"* Mass cultivation of animals increases the chances of pandemic"
That is a true, but the same can be said of large fields of monoculture crops where disease can quickly spread and destroy everything resulting in hunger.
"* 41% of mainland USA is used for grazing livestock, yet meat only provides 18% of our calories; feeding the world on a vegan diet could reduce farmland use by 75% or more"
Only if that 41% of mainland is suitable for plowing and you don't mind destroying other habitats for food production. Live stock can graze, humans cannot. Plus we don't need pesticides and insecticides on grasslands which are destroying our fresh water supplies.
"* Going plant-based for two-thirds of meals could reduce food-related carbon emissions by 60% (the way we produce, distribute, and refrigerate food is a huge contributor of global emissions)"
That is already true for vast majority of people on this planet. Think of the food pyramid.
"* 70-75% of soybeans grown globally are for livestock, only 6% are used for human food products (meat eaters often try to claim that soy production is terrible for the environment; surprise, surprise, meat consumption is the main driver) "
I don't know how real the numbers are, regardless it is not an ideal situation and we should strive towards less monulture.
Plants don't feel as much animals do. They don't feel the torture animals do. They don't grief. They don't show responses that they don't want to be killed.
The fact is at the end we have to draw lines even though we don't want. For vegans its probably in bacteria. Vegans don't care about bacteria even though they are living.
Its the situation where vegans cannot go beyond right? Are you going to say vegan eat bacteria so eating meat should be justified? Nope.
> Moreover, most hardcore ones suggest that we don't ever need meat to thrive or live a healthy life however, we've evolved that far because we consumed meat. Meat made us and, same people are ignorant of this fact.
That's just flat-out untrue. Meals would be less delicious and you'd have to plan a bit better to get certain nutrients (B12) but healthy life is absolutely possible on a vegan diet. And even more so on a lacto-vegetarian diet (one of the most ripped guys I know is lacto-veg).
The fact that plants can have subconcious reactions to stimuli does not mean they are sentient beings. These reactions are more akin to when you subconciously kick when a doctor hits a hammer on your knee.
Plants do not have a central nervous system nor do they feel pain in the same way animals do. In an evolutionary sense, pain is useful for animals because it tells us to deliberately move and avoid that pain, plants are obviously not able to do this.
Also, we evolved without living in stone structures and sewn clothes. I don’t see you asking people who wear jeans and tshirts to defend themselves.
I’m neither, but you’re arguing a straw man version of what either vegetarianism or veganism is.
There is a big moralizing streak in veganism, and a lot of vegans are into it from ethical, moralizing or emotional reasons, which leads to activism and trying to ban, tax and reduce meat eating. We see where the puck is heading.
If 800 rats and fluffy squirrels die violently & painfully for the equivalent amount of veggie nutrition of one cow who is killed ethically, eating grass grown naturally, are their lives worth less? What is the ratio?
The TV show Cosmos with Neil deGrasse Tyson discussed this "Mycelium Network" on Season 3/Episode 7, "The Search for Intelligent Life on Earth," that aired Nov. 17th. It was quite fascinating. It starts about the 5 minute mark.
If you do have a moral problem with eating humans, then you probably have moral hierarchy - humans' lives are the most important, and every other life is less important.
Some vegetarians have a different moral hierarchy - animals' lives are most important, then plants' lives. You can value plants' lives, and treat plants with respect, and still decide that you're morally okay with eating plants.
That’s a ironic contradiction. If you witness the conditions in which animals are born, raised, harvested and culled by the millions, and still be okay with it, you really don’t have a claim to empathy.
[I enjoy meat]