Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think it's a good ethical argument. We decide to birth these animals for our own well being, ergo we are responsible for their suffering. If we only rescued lost cows from the wilderness, giving them shelter and a good life until we decided to quickly end their life to get their meat you might have a point (and even then, I still think it would be a bit shaky IMO) but that's not how it's done.

If a cat is born in the wild and ends up dying of a curable disease then it sucks for it but that's life. If you have a cat as a pet and when it gets sick you decide to abandon it to fend for itself and die in the wild then you're a bad person. Same outcome, very different ethical implications.

>So as long as you make sure to get your milk and meat from traditional farming

That's another gotcha that I really dislike. Every time the problem of animal suffering comes up there's always this opposition between "those crazy vegoons" vs. "the pop and mom farm who love their animals and take good care of them".

If that were the case, I agree that the situation would be very different. It's not though, you can't just ignore the woes of industrial farming when that's the vast majority of the meat products that surround us. These animals are for the most part born into horrible living conditions. In that sense I suppose that killing them early when they stop producing enough might be one of the least worse things that happens to them.

It would be like responding to somebody lamenting the deforestation of the Amazonia by bringing up the story of a poor farmer tending to his two acres of land in order to sustain his family. That's a best missing the point, at worse a truly disingenuous argument.

> It's not though, you can't just ignore the woes of industrial farming when that's the vast majority of the meat products that surround us. These animals are for the most part born into horrible living conditions.

Reducing animal product consumption is important. But there is no reason to reduce it to 0, that is my main point. And note that you don't have to be extremely loving and caring with farm animals to be better than how nature treats them - it's not a high bar.

And purely from an argument point of view, the arguments against the extreme cruelty of industrial farming are far different from the arguments you presented, which would apply just as much to traditional farming as well (which, to be fair, is not always without its own horrors, especially where delicacies like foie Gras are concerned).

> If a cat is born in the wild and ends up dying of a curable disease then it sucks for it but that's life. If you have a cat as a pet and when it gets sick you decide to abandon it to fend for itself and die in the wild then you're a bad person. Same outcome, very different ethical implications.

To some extent that is true, but just as we don't judge the bear for killing salmon, I don't think it's right to judge a human for killing a cow to eat its flesh. The fact that we are farming it and not hunting it doesn't affect the morality of the situation in any way from my point of view. The cat example is immoral from a purely human and internal point of view: the human in question had entered into a caring relationship with a pet, so abandoning it in its hour of need is immoral.

> but just as we don't judge the bear for killing salmon, I don't think it's right to judge a human for killing a cow to eat its flesh

The difference is you, as a human, have a choice. You are capable of living a healthy, full life w/o eating the flesh or excretions of animals. The bear (or lion or tiger) has no such ability to choose.

The bear does as well - it is omnivorous and could survive entirely on berries. We could also decide to provide supplements for bears so that they find it easier to eat less salmon and deer, so I guess we are also morally responsible for every deer or salmon or bee that a bear kills (tigers and lions are a different matter, since they are indeed unable to survive on a non-meat diet).

However, the larger point is that the idea that it is immoral to kill to sustain yourself goes so far against the way nature is organized that I find it ridiculous. While it's true that morality often means going against natural tendencies, in this particular case I find it exceedingly opposed to the regular order.

So, I personally reject the very premise that it is in any way immoral to end the life of anything except members of your own species, as long as you don't do it out of cruelty or greed, and as long as you do not eradicate the entire species through your actions.

> ...the idea that it is immoral to kill to sustain yourself goes so far against the way nature is organized

This is an appeal to nature.

> ... as long as you don't do it out of... greed

How does "I like the taste of cows and milk" not meet your definition of greed?

> This is an appeal to nature.

A moral system that would consider the vast majority of natural life to be immoral is dubious to me. It's not simply an appeal to nature, it is a particular choice for the way I think a moral system should be evaluated.

> How does "I like the taste of cows and milk" not meet your definition of greed?

Greed always refers to excessive consumption. If you go on an all-beef-and-milk diet, and slaughter hundreds of animals a year just to feed yourself, you are probably being greedy. But eating well-raised beef, in quantities that do not encourage others to find the most efficient ways of raising as many cows as possible in as little space, doesn't fall under my idea of greed.

A single dairy cow, if well raised, can give enough milk for a family of 2 or 3. With two cows, one can have a constant supply of milk by essentially having each cow produce a calve each year. The calves can be raised for a while and then sold on to a bigger herd or slaughtered for food. When the animal is slaughtered, as much of its entire body should be used, not just a few of its muscles. The cows would be kept well fed, warm over the winter, clean and free of diseases. In the warm months, every day they would be taken out to pasture and returned home.

Of course, this means that cow meat would be something that people should expect to eat a few times a year, not daily or weekly. The same would apply to most or all other farm animals. Overall, adding some extra efficiency from larger herds as well, meat could probably be consumed something like once a month, while still raising animals in good conditions. Milk and eggs can be consumed almost daily without forcing others to keep animals in inhumane conditions.

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