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Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

Hi could you please add "NSFW" to that? I am a vegan and these images are very disturbing to me. I mean, I saw someone said it was a deer so I very quickly clicked to confirm I should post this - I am mostly saying this for others and so people are aware this can be disturbing to some.

Thank you.

EDIT: Wow I kindly say something is disturbing to me and y'all respond with down votes. Thanks for the compassion.

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The comment is too old, I can no longer edit it. I’m sorry that you were disturbed. I did not feel it needed a warning label when posting, as the video shows neither cruelty, nor did I consider it particularly gory. But I guess I could have erred on the side of caution and included a short description as not to catch anyone off guard. Then again, that’s part of what fascinated me about the video and made me post it..

For late readers who are deciding on whether to watch it: the video shows somebody butchering some deer meat, and the deer carcass is shortly seen hanging in the background.

Thank you for the kind reply. I do understand that a skinned animal may not appear gory to many people, but it’s definitely gory to me!

Maybe NSFV would be more helpful?

Thank you for the warning. I am vegan too!

Maybe because it has nothing to do with being vegan ? Some people are grossed out by carcasses while eating meat. And I used to cut animals open for work, during a time where I was strictly vegetarian.

Right there with you. Didn't sign up to watch a video of someone mutilating a corpse, and I didn't read your comment until it was too late. A content warning in general would be nice for these situations, as I'd probably click on "NSFW." May be a while before this catches on, unfortunately.

> someone mutilating a corpse

Those words may technically be accurate, but I don't think that's a very fair representation of what's going on in the video.

It may be worth considering how ordinary and unremarkable such a sight is to all the world's humans. Even in the first world, a stroll down Chinatown of any major city is bound to result in seeing some "carcasses" hanging upside down from the ceiling.

Some may object to the idea of labeling the customs of such a huge swath of the global population as something which demands a warning.

> a stroll down Chinatown of any major city

Walking down the street in Chinatown I may not be too surprised to see a hanging animal carcass, but this is Hacker News not a street market.

> unremarkable such a sight is to all the world's humans

Vegetarianism is pretty common in the world, with for example 30% of India being vegetarian[1]. So be careful not to project your own thoughts on to "all the worlds humans".

[1] https://www.hinduamerican.org/blog/4-things-about-hinduism-a...

30% of a population being vegetarian sounds like it would barely impact your chance of seeing meat or a carcass at the market.

This is why I said it may take a while to catch on. Morality and norms are dynamic things. Raising animals for the sole purpose of butchering them is an incredibly inefficient way to feed people. Once we move beyond it, I have little doubt peoples' feelings about the practice will change quickly, as they have with other historically brutal practices.

How can you say that it's inefficient? The reason we do this today is precisely because of how efficient it is.

Cows eat grass, turn into huge balloons of meat, and feed lots of people. They take almost no maintenance.

I can't think of a more efficient way to feed people.

Roughly 1% of the cattle produced in the US are grass fed (source below). The rest are fed in feed lots and receive primarily a diet of corn and soy. The rule of thumb is that for each step you go up the food chain, an order of magnitude of biomass efficiency is lost-- that is, you have to give an animal 10 calories of feed to produce 1 calorie of meat. In beef, the caloric and protein efficiency metrics are 3%, meaning that you're feeding the cow 33x as many calories and grams of protein as you're getting out of it (source below). This is incredibly inefficient and is one of many reasons that a meat-based diet is not sustainable for a growing population and particularly a growing (global) middle class.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401#....

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/1...

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