Comment by yesenadam | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yesenadam | Hacker News Reader

"Ditching meat isn't the answer", "Writing meat off completely is taking the easy way out", by someone who runs "a small, family-operated pig farm", and writes about how "beneficial and rewarding" sustainable farming can be. I'm not sure if they notice they make their living killing pigs.

Another point: in the sentence

>Commercial meat production got to be the monster it is because corporate interests monopolized the market and began seeing animal life as a commodity — something to be produced and traded at the lowest cost possible, at the expense of the environment, animal welfare and working conditions for farmhands.

it seemed very odd—grotesque, even—to include "working conditions for farmhands" in the 3 main costs of seeing animals as just commodities, in a purportedly enlightened article. And animal welfare seems to come a distant second to the effect on the environment—by which I think they mean, having horrible factory farms everywhere etc.

Not sure how the ad hominem is reasonable here (if ever).

If a medical professional made a medical suggestion based on their expertise, would you summarily dismiss it because they've got skin in the game?

Should we stop listening to vegan-positive arguments coming from vegans too?

Putting human well-being above animals in work, sustenance, and sustainability is not odd or grotesque. Animal welfare secures the future of humanity, which seems enlightened to me, though the author doesn't engage in that pretense or emotional language.

I disagree. Killing animals just because humans have been doing is not the answer. I'd rather go with plant-based diet than ignoring the harm even small family farms do to animals, and the environment.

Animal husbandry is an answer to human survival, among other things.

Does there have to be one answer, to such a strong degree, that this mode of survival needs to be treated like a science-fiction oddity?

I can respect that. Slaughterhouses are not pretty places. The weirdness is when you consider that the animals only exist because people raised them for their meat, is it really less cruel for these animals to never exist at all? I think we have to accept that both man and nature can and must be cruel at times.

> is it really less cruel for these animals to never exist at all?

I’ve seen this question asked time and time again, and it makes no sense to me. People commit suicide out of (often transient) emotional pain, and less frequently out of physical pain. If we who have the capability to envision a better future decide to opt out of suffering via death, why do you imagine that a chronically-suffering animal’s life is better than not facing that suffering in the first place?

>chronically-suffering animal’s life

I don't think most farm animals are suffering through their entire life. They seem pretty all right to me. Factory chicken farms should be banned but not all meat.

Well, i've seen pigs pens, i've seen an old sow half eaten by her children, i assure you, even the worst chicken farm is nothing compared to an average pig factory.

All factory farms should be banned. You mentioned chickens, a sibling comment mentioned pigs, and I’ll add cows. They’re all horrible places. Animals “raised” in factory farms are better off never having existed.

Small farms are a different story and a mixed bag.

> is it really less cruel for these animals to never exist at all?

Yes, without question.

I also advocate for a plant-based diet, but your comment misses something about it mentioned in the article:

> Often, pea, soy and potato crops don’t resemble natural ecosystems — they are vast monocultures that rely on large machinery, intensive processing and global distribution, just like the industrial system that produces meat on a large scale.

So yes, let’s end factory farming, and start with the factory farming of animals. Let’s also not pretend that large-scale monocular farming of plants is a silver bullet.

Regenerative farming is the thing to aim for at the moment. That will reduce both awful conditions for animals and the harm to our ecosystems. It affects animal factory farms to a greater extent. Fighting for a globally plant-based food source can be done in parallel, just don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Human can survive well without meat. Even if you don't want to go full vegan, fish is another option, fish are way less intelligent than farm animals.

I'm all for human survival and well-being, but this is more like convenience: it tastes good, easy to get and cheap. We can at least change to make it not cheap and easy anymore. Values in our economy are artificial anyway. It's not like we have much else to innovate for the next centuries, besides making more internet apps and going to Mars.

> fish are way less intelligent than farm animals

There is no concrete evidence of this. A lot of sea creatures, including fish, have skin cells that can create polarized light and some seem to have developed communication systems with pulses of polarized light.

Just the other day it was found that some fish can pass the mirror test, didn't you see that?

The prevailing theory is that ratio of brain mass to body mass is more telling than the absolute size of the brain. Fish may fare worse on this metric but I suspect it's just an area where we have very little understanding yet.

Being vegetarian or vegan is not so hard. It is one of many fundamental changes that society should pursue to avert the current ecological crisis and mitigate species loss.

> The prevailing theory is that ratio of brain mass to body mass is more telling than the absolute size

A bit weird nitpicking when you yourself make an insubstantial claim about some "prevailing" theory. I think we can both agree that reducing meat consumption is the right thing to do, it's just sometimes to convince people you need to show some leeway.

Why don't you go check it out yourself?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-to-body_mass_ratio

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient

check what? You posted some links that explain a metric which was theorized to measure intelligence. That wasn't what I requested source for (it's a theory). I asked for a source that says this theory is the prevalent theory.

Btw I never made any comment about fish's brain size, I said they're generally less intelligent than farm animals, which wikipedia agrees with, fits the brain ratio theory too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_intelligence#Brain

Thanks for derailing the conversation anyway, at the end, there is no such thing as a fish

Fish is still meat even if it has long been said otherwise so that certain religious people can cheat on their dietary restrictions.

Dont care, the premise here is that if you think eating animal products is inhumane because of animal suffering, then there is some logic in switching to suposedly less inteligent food sources

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