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Comment by cies | Hacker News Reader

The abstract says:

> The covid-19 virus isn't the first coronavirus to jump from animals to humans. What can we learn from previous encounters

But we don't. We're heavily to addicted to animal products. Not only on individual level (i'm vegan and it's bizarre to see how people are clinging to "their" animal product indulgence, many straight up admit it is cruel and unnecessary), but also institutionalized (subsidies for animal farms, animal feed products, gov't paid advertising campaigns, etc.).

This covid is an animal abuser's disease. It's about time (or long overdue as we can read in this article) we revisit our relations to the animal kingdom.

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This is a baseless assumption, and lets be honest you're only making the argument because you want people to be vegan.

Industrialized animal farming is almost never going to cause a COVID crisis like this, this is going to come from game meat. Which is funny, because if you seriously expect anyone to transition to veganism over time then only allowing a limited amount of hunted meat would be a good intermediate period.

So transitioning to global veganism would make it temporarily worse!

Read the article. It names other instances that did come from industrial meat production. And there are other issues on the rise: mad cow disease, antibiotic resistance.

> if you seriously expect anyone to transition to veganism over time then only allowing a limited amount of hunted meat would be a good intermediate period.

You dont make sense here.

> So transitioning to global veganism would make it temporarily worse!

Still not making sense: what'd be worse?

Glad you acknowledged that on the long term veganism does provide a solutions to some global issues.

Sci-fi thought: if everybody was vegan we’d have a crazy plant-based industry that would do crazy thing to scale and we would start having plant-based diseases.

You're describing modern agriculture, with all the issues around pesticide use, soil erosion, cutting down forests to plant crops, etc...

> cutting down forests to plant crops

And then feeding most of that crop produce to our livestock. Eating plants directly solves the problem: we'd have abundance.

Wouldn’t population just increase until we’re back where we are now?

If we need less crop produce (because we dont need to feed the live stock) then the crop produce related pollution will decrease by the same factor, right?

No also consider all the pollution from the live stock (which is huge! see the documentary Cowspiracy or Dominion for details).

A lot of pollution come directly or indirectly from animal produce. I count CO2, NOx, phosphor, methane, water use/pollution/acidification, land use/pollution/acidification. It's said that it is one of the most polluting industries, up there with transport and residential heating/cooling.

As a life long meat eater, most of those things you mention are caused by agriculture which ends up feeding animals in the form of corn and soya.

If we stop eating animals (who eat plants) and eat the plants directly we'd end up needing a lot less "plant-based industry" than we currently have.

Most of our crop produce is for the live stock we keep.

I don't 100% understand this mindset. There are plenty of carnivorous animals on the planet and they (likely) never deal with viruses on this scale. But somehow humans should stop consuming animal product? It doesn't make sense unless there is a serious health concern. The main issue would be attempting to purchase from sustainable, responsible animal product sources, rather than the mass-produced/institutionalized ones.

It's not about hunting down an animal in the wild. It's about bio industry: having great numbers of animals on the smallest possible area, with the least amount of care.

If we are as addicted as we are to animal products we cannot all get that from "from sustainable, responsible animal product sources", or have that hunted in the wild. We simply do not have enough earths for that.

> This covid is an animal abuser's disease.

I swear there's a certain religious strain of thought that pervades coronavirus discussion.

As though someone must be responsible for the plague. Find the dirty people! Find the sinners! Burn them!

Scarlet letter, 1984, The Crucible, etc. seems like all these things are converging at once.

> Scarlet letter, 1984, The Crucible, etc. seems like all these things are converging at once.

You are just spreading FUD. If our reality matches any work of fiction it is Idiocracy.

You, and many others, continue to put politics ahead of common sense.

If everyone stayed home COVID would go away. I challenge you to dispute this.

> If everyone stayed home COVID would go away.

A plan that requires 100% compliance and fundamentally works against the grain of human nature is a plan bound to fail from the start.

You seem to be the type of ivory-tower utopian that's blinded by end-justifies-the-means thinking.

Your "plan" will end in disaster because it's intractable by design.

> You, and many others, continue to put politics ahead of common sense.

How is utopianism just common sense? I haven't said anything about politics either. So maybe you're projecting and revealing your mindset?

>I haven't said anything about politics either.

Sure you have. You continually make reference a 'communist' and 'authoritarian' conspiracy in the US. You make the unsubstantiated claim that our government will enforce permanent lockdowns. You ignore the fact that even the most unabashedly communist and authoritarian regime in the world (China) has not done this.

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