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Comment by scottLobster | Hacker News Reader

You can buy ethically sourced/farmed meat (albeit at a premium), and farmed fish in particular is quite sustainable.

I would dispute that there are "a dozen" reasons we should not be eating meat. There are perhaps a few practical reasons we should not be eating low-quality mass-market meat (health, environment, animal cruelty), and a few moral reasons we should not eat unethically raised meat. And even those reasons are debatable (what if someone in a 3rd world country can only afford unethically raised meat? etc)

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Any source of meat is not ethical to the animals.

Affordability almost doesn't matter. Staple foods like rice, grains, and beans are staple foods for a reason.

Just because you believe this doesn’t make it true. Do you think a pack of coyotes tearing apart a newborn deer is unethical too? Do you think farming grains and vegetables is without impact on wildlife?

Humans have moral agency, and most importantly, do not need meat to survive in 2020. Which is different than wild coyotes.

Veganism according to the vegan society:

https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/definition-veganism

> "Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; ...

Most importantly to the point, animal agriculture causes more suffering because we still need to farm grains for feed, more than we would have to otherwise. Reducing animal agriculture will have a positive impact on wildlife, reducing deforestation, etc.

> “we still need to farm grains for feed, more than we would have to otherwise. Reducing animal agriculture will have a positive impact on wildlife, reducing deforestation, etc.”

Uh, where do you think Vegan friendly foods are grown? Do you realize that the earth must be cultivated to grow the vast majority of these foods? Do you think farmers of these foods take kindly to crop damage from wild animals?

Beef cattle do not require farmed grain, in fact many graze only beef farms exist and the practice continues to gain popularity.

I respect your choice to be Vegan, please respect my choice to reject lab grown goop.

Can you do the math on how much land you would need to have all the cattle in the world graze? To save you time, it does not compute with our Earth.

Suggesting any solution which is not scalable to the whole world is not a solution at all. For example Joe Rogan is talking about how hunting as being ethical way to get meat. But what would happen if 7 billion people hunted their meat?

Somehow 60 million bison wandered the prairie for millenia without the world ending... shall we kill all of the wild ungulats? Cap the volcanoes? At what point should humans just commit mass self sacrifice in the interest of saving the earth?

60 million is a drop on the bucket compared to how many cows humans raise for the purpose of food. This is a dumb take.

U.S. currently has ~95 million cows. That 60 million figure for Bison was U.S. population pre-westward expansion. 60/95=63% - that’s a rather large “drop in the bucket”... dumb take seems to be on your end here bud.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/194297/total-number-of-c...

The overwhelming majority (95-99%, from what I can find) of cattle in the United States are fed corn or soy. 98% of soy and 48.7% of all corn grown in the United States are used to feed livestock. Corn is the top crop in the US and soy is #6. Replacing these monocultures with a variety of vegetables would do a great deal to improve farming sustainability in the country.

https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/where_do_all_these_soybeans_go....

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

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/time-to-rethink-c....

https://agamerica.com/power-of-10-top-10-produce-crops-in-th...

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