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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

Almost everyone here is down with killing animals for minutes of taste bud pleasure, so it's debatable whether it's morally worse to harvest ivory to build something that lasts much longer (like keys on a piano) than minutes of taste bud pleasure.

Most of us are completely on board with making animals suffer by the billions while exploiting them. Usually this very post will summon people who are actually proud of it.

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I think it’s more than taste bud pleasure. Animals are an easy source of protein with a complete amino acid profile. It takes real effort to learn how to eat a vegetarian diet (even one that incorporates eggs and dairy). Excluding eggs and dairy increases the difficulty even further. I’m not ready to be so pithy about it. And I have gone on extended vegan and vegetarian dieting phases due to ethical concerns. It’s hard.

> It’s hard.

It requires some effort, sure. But it has to be weighed against the suffering and killing and polluting that not doing it is responsible for.

Looking after children is hard. Studying is hard. Working for 40 years is hard. And yet we manage all these.

actually its not hard but the current demand of meat etc makes it hard. Go to supermarket around half of food is non vegan. And its hard to convince parents if children wants to become vegan because they think they may not get enough nutrition. And on another hand meat and dairy industry try to hide everything using marketing strategy like drink milk to become strong, McDonald food are high quality and rich people eats there etc.

Its just like palm oil which has become ubiquitous before 5 years we could avoid that now its hard.

> And its hard to convince parents if children wants to become vegan because they think they may not get enough nutrition

To be fair, it is pretty easy to cause yourself malnutrition by experimenting with diet. And you know how you feel and are adult.

It is even easier to cause it to kids and consequences can be serious. It is responsible for parents to go by what is recommended for kids.

>> Animals are an easy source of protein with a complete amino acid profile.

For example, the is Glycine in connective tissue. But how many people want their food processed and those parts kept off the plate?

Do you really think the majority of people are eating meat because they care about their health? Maybe in your bubble. The vast majority of people do not even know what protein is, let alone amino acid profiles etc.

India and Italy both have very large vegetarian populations, and they get along just fine.

Without wading into more of the morality of this, I'll add to my previous comment about how I feel about it, that I think the farming makes a difference. That we devastated natural populations, not through farming, is one difference, that right now I feel so much more terribly sad about.

Oh but we devastated natural populations through farming. According to the IPCC, humans have transformed _more than 70%_ of all ice-free land if you take stuff like agriculture into account. That's a lot of destroyed natural habitats.

I don't doubt that. And I definitely think farming can do much better in many ways, and that improvements in agritech can make a huge impact for humans and Earth's ecosystem.

I still feel that using the land like this, even when it destroys natural habitats (which is very undesirable), and farming animals for food, is still a much better use of land and animals, than the "let's hunt a natural population from 7 tribes down to 4 tribes for our trinkets, aha!"

Elephants are intelligent and social and I guess I feel sadder about them being slaughtered like this, than about fish dying as a result of an oil spill, tho that's still pretty sad for me.

If we were farming elephants for meat, or even tusks, and we went about it in the most humane way possible, along with supporting and not interfering with their natural populations as much as possible, I still might think that's wrong, but I wouldn't feel nearly so sad about it.

I just think these elephants had real lives, nothing to do with these humans, and we slaughtered them for stupid trinkets. What gives us the right? To me, it's an example of the kind of gratuitous cruelty humans are expert at. I don't just feel sad for the elephants, I feel sad for us.

> Almost everyone here is down with killing animals for minutes of taste bud pleasure

I don't really care about your argument against eating meat. Let's just say you win.

But who talks like this? How many minutes of brain power did it take for you to assemble this discourse into this digital dialog interface which I am currently visually consuming information from?

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