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Comment by faebi | Hacker News Reader

Still a better usage of an animal life than eating them. I prefer to advance humanity, even minimally. If you put these numbers in comparison to animal farming, their suffering and their murdering, then it's absolutely worth it. For me it boils down to a simple set of questions. Would you murder 10'000 chickens to save your grandma's life? How about 10'000 cows? How about 10'000 rats? How about 10'000 rabbits? How about 10'000 monkeys? How about saving yourself? Your wife? Your child? Your children? Tens of humans? Hundreds of humans? Thousands of humans? I am willing to sacrifice an insane amount of animal lives in order to save anyone human. We could talk about reducing it, but I would agree only once we replaced the meat industry.

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I don’t understand, you’re willing to kill tens of thousands of animals to save a single person, but are against meat consumption- an activity that inherently provides nutrients to sustain a human life?

You're not considering opportunity cost.

Meat-as-food can be substituted with non-meat products which net lowers suffering.

Since "animal" basically means "non-human" in the case of "animal testing", by definition, there is no substitute which net lowers suffering.

Humans suffer as least as much as non-human animals.

Also the way trophic levels work humans eating plants is way more efficient as a system than humans eating animals that eat the plants.

Humans eating animals eating plants is an ecological disaster.

Add another level of indirection to make it even worse, that is by eating predators that eat other animals. Tuna fish are an example for this.

Having too many humans on this earth is more of an ecological disaster than eating animals is. Plenty of animals eat only or mostly meat, and they aren’t causing any ecological disasters.

As a human you have a choice about how much of an ecological disaster you, personally, are going to be. That is the privilege and responsibility of sapience.

Its worth emphasising that many animals and their eating habits are also ecological disasters. Cats, cane toads and rabbits come to mind.

But why should we absolutely "lower net suffering"? Giving birth causes intense agony to the mother, but where are the hordes of humans advocating for the end of suffering, demanding that we put an end to natural births?

Because they believe that the net suffering is reduced by the joy being brought into the world via the birth.

And there are people who believe we should stop giving birth and let our species die. They are antinatalists. I think they are too extreme, imho, but you asked where they are: just google them.

To be clear, I asked where are the hordes of people demanding that we put an end to natural births, not all births, ever.

> Because they believe that the net suffering is reduced by the joy being brought into the world via the birth.

Sorry, who believes that?

Anyone who thinks there will be more joy in the world than suffering, when they have a kid.

It does so, but via an inefficient route (plant -> animal -> human instead of plant -> human), which causes huge sustainability and animal ethical issues.

Here is a useful link in case anyone wants to read up on this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level#Biomass_transfer...

You can't eat the plants that are eaten by the animals. Not all pastures can be converted to fields, and converting the rest will actually reduce biodiversity and cause more sustainability issues.

Only a fraction (and sometimes even tiny fraction) of the land is needed to supply the same amount of protein and calories when replacing animals sources with plant sources. That means that you actually will not need to convert all these pastures to fields because they are just not needed anymore.

Here are charts that compare land use of different foods normalized per calorie / grams of protein:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-kcal-poore

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-protein-poore

If you want to know more, type "land use" into the search box of https://ourworldindata.org and pick an article of your choice.

This is incredibly misleading.

I live in a community with ranches and farms. The ranchland looks like nature. Other than cows here and there, it's wildland. Coyotes, mountain lions, hawks, and all sorts of wildlife abound.

The farms are manicured flat with row crops, irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides, etc. Farming is vastly more destructive to the natural environment.

"Land use" measured in abstract square feet is not a useful concept.

> The farms are manicured flat with row crops, irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides, etc. Farming is vastly more destructive to the natural environment.

You might be surprised but 40% of all (cereal) crops are produced to feed animals. That would almost completely go away except a bit to compensate for the loss of meat.

See https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cereal-distribution-to-us...

So we'd be left with the other 60% and then we'd have to increase the production to make up for the decrase in production of meat. That's a very slim margin of improvement.

The other thing we could do of course is to avoid feeding animals with crops like soy and corn, and instead let them browse freely and eat the wild grasses and shrubs that they would eat normally, if humans didn't feed them more "efficient" feeds.

Obviously that would mean a significantly reduced number of farmed animals, but that's a feature, not a bug. Perhaps we can all agree on this: the true plague is industrial meat production.

I would argue this is incredibly misleading.

What percentage of meat or dairy comes from pasture animals? You can't fulfill a country like the US's meat and dairy demand with pasture raised animals. So realistically we are talking about factory farmed animals. If we are talking about factory farmed animals then it goes back to the needing these nature destructing farms you are talking about just to feed animals that then feed humans, this is not an efficient system.

> What percentage of meat or dairy comes from pasture animals?

Meat and dairy are separate considerations. Even in industrial farming, meat animals and dairy animals are raised separately and often belong to different breeds. They are certainly treated differently.

So for example, where I'm staying, about 80% of the dairy products are made with the milk of sheep and goats in small farms where the animals range freely, in the summer, and eat stored wild grassses as hay in the winter. On the other hand, most of the meat consumed is chicken and pork and of those animals, at least the chicken are kept in large battery operations. I don't know about pig farming. Also, where I stay there are very few cows, most of them raised for dairy, and the country has one of the smallest, if not the smallest number of cattle in Europe. It's in South Europe, but I don't want to say exactly where.

Anyway when you ask questions like the one above, please consider that the conditions you know from the Americas are not the same in all of the rest of the world, and that most of the rest of the world simply does not eat as much meat, of all kids, as Americans (and by "Americans" I mean people in the US, Argentina and Brazil).

> You can't fulfill a country like the US's meat and dairy demand with pasture raised animals.

"Demand", maybe not. But "need"? It seems to me that this can be done perfectly well simply because the amount currently consumed is extravagant. People in the US eat way too much meat, per capita, compared to almost everyone else in the world, including most industrialised nations. My selection below:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/meat-supply-per-person?ta...

Nobody needs to eat that much meat. If there is "demand" for it, that is the matter that should be addressed. Why do people want to eat so much meat? There is something incredibly wrong in the data above, when you look at how the US, Argentina, Spain and Brazil eat, compared to the other industrialised countries in the chart.

>Meat and dairy are separate considerations.

Not everywhere. In the US there is an incredible amount of overlap. For example, Male cows born in the dairy industry end up in the meat industry. But more specifically I don't see how they are separate in the context of this conversation? Aren't we just talking about the inefficiency of raising animals as a food source?

>Anyway when you ask questions like the one above, please consider that the conditions you know from the Americas are not the same in all of the rest of the world, and that most of the rest of the world simply does not eat as much meat, of all kids, as Americans (and by "Americans" I mean people in the US, Argentina and Brazil).

I thought I was, I honestly wanted to know what the percentage of meat and dairy comes from pasture animals in the world. I guess I should of been more clear about that.

>"Demand", maybe not. But "need"? It seems to me that this can be done perfectly well simply because the amount currently consumed is extravagant. People in the US eat way too much meat, per capita, compared to almost everyone else in the world, including most industrialised nations. My selection below:

I 100% agree.

>Nobody needs to eat that much meat.

Again I very much agree.

> I thought I was, I honestly wanted to know what the percentage of meat and dairy comes from pasture animals in the world. I guess I should of been more clear about that.

Well, I confess I don't know the actual numbers. But most places on Earth don't have the intensive farming found in the Americas.

> Aren't we just talking about the inefficiency of raising animals as a food source?

Quite the contrary. In a sibling comment I discuss how ruminants are the most efficient way to turn inedible plant matter to food that humans can eat.

The wikipedia page on "ruminant" has some interesting information about the process of rumination. In short, ruminants have four stomachs. In the first two, plant matter is fermented by bacteria, then regurgitated so that it can be re-chewed to hydrate it with saliva, that promotes bacterial development and controls the pH of these stomachs. The third stomach is a kind of filter that absorbs some nutrients and allows only food of certain size to pass to the final, fourth stomach. The fourth stomach is the true stomach that is similar to the one we have in our beliies. So to eat the plants that ruminants are specialised to eat, we'd need to have it first chewed and pre-digested by ruminants. In yet another comment I noted how sheep and cows that range freely eat wild grasses, and goats eat shrub.

As I say in that other comment, factory farmed cows are fed soy and corn, that humans can also eat, rather than wild grasses that humans can't eat. But that is factory farming. It is actually harmful for ruminants to feed them that kind of food and so it's a practice that should absolutely be eliminated, along with the rest of factory farming.

Far as I can tell, nobody has been able to breed goats in factory farms. And sheep are normally not factory farmed. I don't know what it is that makes cows good for that sort of thing, but you can be assured that where farming is primarily of sheep and goats, whatever automation of processes there exists is nowhere near the scale of factory farms with giant, thousand-animal feedlots as in the Americas.

Anyway I think "efficiency" is a red herring. The farming industry is very efficient at producing cheap meat by the thousand-ton. But human bodies are not tuned to a world were food is produced "efficiently". We are predisposed to eat as much as we can as soon as we can, to make up for the difficulty of finding enough nutrients to sustain us "in the wild". Presented with the extravagant amounts of cheap meat produced by industrial farming, we are inevitably drawn to excesses of consumption. These excesses are used by the very industry that caused them in the first place as justification to produce even more meat, throwing even more fuel to the fire, destroying even more of the environment and treating even more hundreds of thousands of animals like garbage. Inevitably, there is a backlash and people swear off meat, when what we should all be swearing at and off is the meat industry, that would happily farm us if it was profitable.

>Quite the contrary. In a sibling comment I discuss how ruminants are the most efficient way to turn inedible plant matter to food that humans can eat.

I hear you and agree with everything you say in the rest of your post. I think we are just coming from two different assumptions. My assumption is that with the population the world the and with the increasing middle class we are seeing an increase in meat and dairy consumption, to a level that cannot be met and hasn't been met, with pasture and grazing animals. Basically I agree with everything you have been saying about the efficiency of ruminants but as a viable way to feed the worlds population, my assumption is that it wont work and isn't working. If you look at places like the EU, Pig meat is their largest meat sector and factory farms account for 85% off all pig meat available on the market. (page 4: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2020/6520...)

The EU is not a singular case, the trend of farms moving towards intensive factory farms is happening everywhere. In my limited research, I couldn't find statistics on how much pasturing china does but I still thought this was interesting: "Today, China produces and consumes half of the world’s pork, produces nearly 20 percent of the world’s poultry, 10 percent of the world’s beef and is the fourth largest milk producer of the world." (https://www.iatp.org/documents/need-feed-chinas-demand-indus...)

Anyway I agree Factory Farming is a terrible "solution", and thinking about food production in the "most efficient" terms is not a approach to the problem either. I just don't think pasturing ruminant animals is a great solution either, I live in a rural farming community and I don't see it actually working. I'll just go eat my lintels and peas until I see a solution that makes any sense to me.

Actually, I agree with you, I don't believe we can sustainably fulfill a demand for meat, especially beef, at the current rate that this demand is rising worldwide. But I also think that this demand is not a true need, rather it's an artificial need that is created by the over-supply of cheap meat by the food industry. Kind of like nobody needed to have smartphones, until everyone had smartphones and now everyone wants to have a smartphone because everyone else has one.

So I think it's a matter of controlling over-supply and reducing the excess of demand. One way I think could work to do this in a way that aligns with middle-class values is to promote a return to traditional, local cuisines and diets. For example, I come from a Mediterrannean country where the majority of the traditional diet is, well, typically mediterrannean, 80% vegetables, pulses and legumes, with tons of olive oil and tomato sauce on everything, and with meat eaten sparingly and most of the time replaced with dairy. Almost all traditional dishes are either vegan, or vegetarian because they include eggs or dairy. We do eat a lot of fish, which is also rapidly becoming impossible to produce sustainably, so that's another discussion to have. Of the meat we eat, most of it is chicken or pork, with sheep or goat eaten a few times a year, as a traditional treat during religious feasts.

In the place I live, sheep and goat farming is free range almost exclusively. I'm afraid pork production is another scandal of animal abuse, not different than factory farms for cows. The same goes for chicken, treating animals like industrial goods must absolutely be made illegal and damn the markets. On the plus side, pork and chicken are much more sustainable from an environmental point of view- and both kinds of animals are absolutely fantastic recyclers of matter that humans can't even consume. Incidentally, the traditional thing to do with whey left over from cheesemaking is to feed it to pigs. When my cheese fails, I feed it to the chickens :)

To my mind a large part of the problem is that most people choose to live in cities, away from food production. This has two effects. On the one hand, the people in the cities have no idea where their food comes from, they're insulated from the reality of animal abuse in factory farms and they even lose the ability to recognise good produce (both meat and plants) from bad. On the other hand, because the location of people is massively centralised, the production and distribution of food also becomes massively centralised.

In simpler words, it's impossible for everyone who lives in the city to have their little garden with their veg and a few chickens or a goat. Instead, the farms are all outside the city and the food is all in the supermarket shelves. If everyone could raise their own animals, grow their own vegetables, we would obviously be in a very different world, with far less animal abuse (certainly far less systematic animal abuse) and far less over-consumption: it takes a lot of work to care for an animal, it makes more economic sense to keep an animal for its milk so one can have dairy year round, rather than slaughter it and eat meat once, and it's also much harder to mistreat or even slaughter an animal for food when one has raised the animal from a baby (one will always find excuses to not do it today).

So a simple solution would be to keep the food where it is produced: in the countryside, away from the city. But then the city folks would literally starve and it wouldn't be about meat or veg anymore, it's just impossible to grow food in the city. So it's not really a practical solution at all.

> I live in a community with ranches and farms. The ranchland looks like nature.

That depends on the land. Cattle and rainforests don't go together well

The problem is that for every acre of ranch, you need 5 to 10 acres of farm to feed the ranch.

Clearing forest for ranches has been (and continues to be) among the most ecologically destructive activities in the history of the world, especially in tropical places where it directly replaces rainforest.

In the USA (excluding Alaska), something like 1/4 of all land area is directly used for animal grazing land, and something like 2/3 agriculture production goes to producing animal feed. These take huge amounts of water, fuel, and other resources. Beef production in particular is one of the leading causes of global climate change via CO2 emissions.

I love steaks and hamburgers as much as the next person, but we shouldn’t pretend it has a low environmental cost.

>> Only a fraction (and sometimes even tiny fraction) of the land is needed to supply the same amount of protein and calories when replacing animals sources with plant sources.

That's a quick dodge, but still, a dodge of the OP's point: you can't eat all the plants that animals eat. For example, I eat primarily sheep and goat and their dairy products. The goats eat shrubs and the sheep browse inedible grasses. In fact, funny story, but I know a girl (not me) who tried to eat the grass the sheep were eating and her mouth filled with sores. I mean duh.

Anyway ruminants have four stomachs just so they can digest plant matter that is impossible for omnivores to digest. Industrially farmed animals are fed soy and corn, that can be digested by humans, but those are not those animals' natural feed. Left to their own devices, outside of factory farming, browsing freely, farm animals would exclusively eat plants that are inedible to humans and so they would convert plant matter to food way, way more efficiently than any human stomach ever could.

Four stomachs and rumination is the most efficient plant-to-meat production mechanism known to anyone.

Yes, it is true that we cannot eat all the plants that animals can but it is only "technically true" in the sense that it does not not really matter.

Finding high protein / low carbohydrate plants to eat is hard. Many meatless meat products are hyper-processed. Last I looked a huge part of the population is diabetic. They can't eat grains, can eat small servings of nuts, fruits are mostly out, and greens alone aren't sustainable nutrition.

My charitable interpretation is that when someone says "eat plants", they don't really mean "only eat plants" but "don't eat animal products, eat plants + enriched foods + injections/pills/tablet", because we are omnivores and we need some nutrients that are incredibly hard to get naturally from plants, like vitamin b12, so in order to stay healthy, without eating animal products, there's only the enriched foods and/or pills/injections/tablets route.

So, "don't eat meat, eat supplements"? How does that make any sense?

You don't need to necessarily eat meat (a glass of milk has half the recommended daily intake of vitamin b12), but if you are not willing to eat any animal product, the only viable alternative is something like fortified plant based beverages or over-the-counter supplements, so that's my take, otherwise they would be suggesting a really poor diet for humans.

Milk is high in carbohydrate. So are most plant based beverages. Back to diabetics... Can't or should not eat it (or should have tiny, tiny portions which reduce the amount of nutrition anyway). Problem is for people who should not consume carbohydrate, especially sugars, a plant-based diet is not sustainable. Yes supplements can supply nutrition, but they are the epitome of highly processed products.

Yes, that's what I understand from your previous comment. You say:

> "don't eat animal products, eat plants + enriched foods + injections/pills/tablet"

So that would be replacing meat with supplements. I don't think we disagree.

What I disagree with is that it makes any sense to replace real food, meat from animals, with supplements. First because this kind of replacement makes us even more reliant on the food industry, which is the entity that is responsible for the atrocities committed against farm animals in factory farms, and also the damage to the environment caused by such farms. We cannot and should not trust that same industry to provide us with essential nutrients in the form of supplements, because if we do, who knows what new ways they will find to harm us, animals and the environment - the industry is only driven by profit and it will maximise its profit come hell or high water, whether it's selling us sides of beef or B12 pills.

There's a much better alternative: eliminating factory farming, dismantling the meat and dairy megacorps and going back to producing the meat we really need in a way that doesn't cause unnecessary suffering to our domesticated animals and does not destroy the mutualism relation that we've had with them for a few thousand years.

And btw, by "the meat we really need" I mean that most of the world consumes way too much meat, much more than anyone needs. This is the result of the over-supply created by the food industry, for the purpose of maximising its profits as I've said before.

We cannot trust the food industry to feed us, because it will only feed us shit that makes us sick, destroy the environment and harm animals, and it will continue to do so whether we eat meat, plants, or little pills from a bottle.

could you better define hyper-processed? seitan, tofu, and tempeh are very simple in my opinion. I don’t imagine pea or soy protein being wildly difficult to create, but am unfamiliar with those processes.

That's a facile understanding of efficiency. For example, many animals that we eat are dramatically more efficient at absorbing or consuming certain nutrients from plants than we are: Iron, Calcium, Zinc, B12, EPA, DHA.

If adding a step in a supply chain always introduced more net inefficiency, we would never own things like cars or televisions. The complexity you introduce by shortening the supply chain makes a whole host of things completely infeasible.

There are plenty of food sources that could work well for humans without an animal in the intermediate supply chain. But humans aren't about to start consuming their bodyweight in switchgrass or zooplankton just to get a handful of nutrients that only animal sources can easily provide us.

You can live a completely healthy and nutritionally complete plant based life style though, and without consuming your body weight in anything. So if we don’t _need_ the animals to die for us, killing them is immoral. It’s immoral because it’s unnecessary.

"Completely healthy and nutritionally complete" debatable. Vegan diets are discouraged significantly for pregnant women and children because of how damaging calcium, zinc, and B12 deficiencies can be during that time. And even if you aren't a pregnant woman or child, you still have to deal with the various deficiencies that come with that, typically by eating very targeted foods or highly processed and manufactured supplements that also have problems, such as availability, allergies, cost, or simple difficulty incorporating into diets (e.g. you can't exactly use algae oil like you would olive oil, you can't sprinkle flaxseed on everything).

And speak for yourself with regards to morality. Humans evolved as omnivorous creatures, just like millions of other species. I feel no moral obligation to eliminate animal food sources from my diet. The opposite, in fact. Because a vegan diet is effectively an abandonment of culture. I'm not going to stop making Pasteis De Nata or Caldo Verde simply because you feel bad for the animals. Letting my culture wither away like that is a far bigger sin in my eyes than eating animal-derived foods, which we evolved to do.

The American Dietetic Association explicitly says a vegan diet is safe and appropriate for all stages of life, including pregnancy specifically, so you’re just wrong about that.

Also, cultures change and evolve. It was also a part of past cultures to do all manner of inhumane things, and we are all better off for deciding to stop. Simply saying something is a part of culture doesn’t give it a free pass.

Watch what happens to animals in slaughterhouses, and you’ll see why I don’t think preparing Caldo Verde is really super important in comparison: https://youtu.be/7Y_FHhByhBk

No, they don't say that they it is safe and appropriate for all stages of life. They say it can be. That comes with a long list of caveats related to common nutritional deficiencies...some of which are far more serious for some people (such as pregnant women and children) than others. Addressing those deficiencies is hard to do for all people for a multitude of reasons, some of which have already been listed.

Again, speak for yourself about morality. I feel no moral obligation to not be an omnivore. I do feel a moral obligation to pass down my culture to my children.

Any diet can be unhealthy. Regardless of whether or not you’re vegan you need to ensure you’re getting your vitamins and minerals.

And it’s not very difficult to get those on a vegan diet. There are LOADS of resources to refer to. For example: https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/the-vegan-diet/

Yes, actually, it is.

Omnivorous diets can be unhealthy, but not due to nutrition deficiency. The problems with those diets are all solved with moderation. Vegan diets have to deal with nutrient deficiency. Filling gaps in nutrition deficiency takes targeted food intake or supplements. Those aren't always available or cheap. People have food allergies that can eliminate them as candidates. They are hard to incorporate into existing diets and available foods.

I find it a lot more morally objectionable that your privileged culture-less self would pretend to know what's better for the rest of humanity than they are capable of determining for themselves. There's a reason people who care about food refer to vegans with names like the "Hezbollah of vegetarians". You're not diet advocates, you're religious extremists.

A diet is not implicitly nutrient complete simply because it contains animal products. You can still easily miss out on nutrients. All diets require ensuring that you have access to important vitamins and minerals. Like I said and showed, you can get all these things without eating animals products.

You’re saying that I have no culture and that I’m a religious extremist (which seems contradictory a bit) for saying that you can get all the vitamins and minerals you need from non-animal sources. That seems a little disingenuous and ad-hominem, no?

No, you're a religious extremist because you're telling other cultures that they need to change in order to fit your belief system.

Calling someone a religious extremist because they think an act is immoral seems to me to be watering down the phrase "extremist" to a useless degree.

Good luck with life, friend, as you're bound to encounter many other "religious extremists" if your POV is so easily challenged.

I don't give a shit that you think it is immoral. I give a shit that you are labeling cultures as immoral and that they need to change to fit your belief system. And yes, I see that as no different than Fred Phelps' ideas.

And yes, there are far too many religious extremists in modern society. Maybe stop joining them.

How is that immoral if I want tasty meat?

Because I believe it’s immoral to cause needless suffering. Effectively all meat is the result of animals being tortured and killed for our ephemeral satisfaction while eating a meal, and not because we need it to survive. Causing that level of suffering because it taste good is wrong imho.

I link to a couple videos in this comment section that show what I mean. You should watch them and decide if you think a sentient creature should experience those things because you like how it tastes.

> How is that immoral if I want tasty meat?

> Because I believe it’s immoral to cause needless suffering.

It's immoral for the OP to eat meat because you believe it's immmoral?

Also, if you think that the need for tasty food, or any food, is trivial, you haven't been around animals much. The ones I know, and I don't mean only the humans, go absolutely batshit insane at the thought of food. A few days ago one of the cats over here gave birth and I realised what is that keening noise adult cats make when they beg for food: it's the same noise the kittens make when they want their mother to breastfeed them. The dogs, a solemn matriarch and her huge son start jumping up and down and cry like little puppies when it's time for food. The cats mob us everytime we step out of the house, just on the off chance we'll drop some tasty morsel. The goats used to not come near me and my friend, but then we fed them a couple of times and now they gallop to us when we enter their enclosure. The chickens catapult themselves from their perches and run like little raptor dragsters when we take them scraps to recycle (there's nothing I've seen that looks more awkward than a chicken running). A small, grey-speckled hen that I fed once or twice now runs to me whenever it sees me because it has forever now associated me with food.

Animals are crazy for food. And so are humans, because we, too, are animals and there's no use trying to shame people with facile moralising, humans have bodies that go absolutely nuts for tasty food and that food includes the meat of other animals.

Edit: vegans are no different. Here's three interviews with three ex-vegan "influencers" and writers, who quit because they just couldn't stand it:

https://www.womenshealthmag.com/food/a32211871/vegan-influen...

I have a few friends who were very vocal vegans, who later started eating animal products again. It's always made me wonder just how many vegans switch back to at least vegetarian diets, after a few years. I looked around, but there's not much in the way of good scholarship on the subject. Anyway, every vegan has the option of going back to eating meat whenever they decide it (one can even "take breaks" and enjoy some meat once in a rare while, then go right back to their fierce advocacy of veganism) which to me makes a lot of the claims about moral superiority a little empty. It's very easy to preach, but who knows exactly what vegans actually eat?

This is a ride, but let’s take it point by point.

Firstly, I think it’s immoral for anyone to do it. I don’t think it’s immoral simply because I decided so. I think it’s fundamentally immoral, period.

You continue by saying something to the effect of “good food is really important and plays a huge role in our life and animals go to great lengths to acquire good food”. To this, I completely agree. I never said otherwise. Nor did I ever trivialize this. I just think that good food doesn’t have to mean animal products. I think good food can include beans, grains, vegetables, fruits, fungi, etc. If you disagree with that, I can recommend some vegan cook books which I think will change your mind.

Also to this point, I don’t think it’s relevant how other animals react to food. We are not those animals. We don’t need to hold ourselves to the standards that species without agriculture and advanced supply lines are held. We are more advanced, can make complex decisions, and have more options.

Then you talk about vegans who have “broken veg” and started eating animal products again. I don’t understand what this has to do with anything. Yes, there are people who break vegan. There people who subscribe to any creed and then become disillusioned. If you’re trying to make a point that veganism is so hard and terrible that not even passionate vegans can stand to adhere to it, Id love to connect you with people who have been staunch vegans for decades. Would you like me to put you in touch with them? There are a lot.

Lastly, you say nobody knows what vegans actually eat, but I can tell you definitely: anything except animal products. That is, after all, the point.

The problem is that it's you who thinks it's "fundamentally immoral" to kill another animal to eat it. It's your morality and noone else is obliged to subscribe to it, just because you do.

For instance, if I thought it's immoral not to eat meat because an animal died for you to eat its flesh and it's disgusting that you should let it go to waste, would you accept it if I tried to foist my morality upon you? I'm pretty sure that not. But then, why should anyone else accept your morality? Because you say it's good?

> Also to this point, I don’t think it’s relevant how other animals react to food. We are not those animals. We don’t need to hold ourselves to the standards that species without agriculture and advanced supply lines are held. We are more advanced, can make complex decisions, and have more options.

That really confuses me when I speak to vegans and other animal rights advocates. You're essentially saying that we're in some sense, better than, superior, to other animals. But, isn't that claimed superiority exactly the argument used to justify killing and even mistreating non-human animals? I mean, I'm sure I've heard it said that non-human animals don't experience pain as humans do, so it's OK to for example drip toxic chemicals in their eyballs (like the article says), because they don't really hurt, their reactions are just autonomic responses etc. I've read papers studying animal pain and they invariably assume that "animals don't feel pain as humans do" and try to disprove that. In my mind, it's obvious that animals feel pain as humans do, and that humans are not, as you say "more advanced", in any way, shape or form.

Vegans I've spoken to have tried to convince me to become vegan by telling me how farm animals, like sheep and goats and pigs, are intelligent, sensitive, how they have an internal life, etc. Which makes sense to me, of course they are all that. Yet you say that "we can make complex decisions", as if those other animals can't? It's confusing. I appreciate I'm not talking to the same vegans all the time, but it's still, yes, confusing.

Can you tell me, do you really think you're more than those other animals? Never mind me and others who eat meat, obviously you think we're all some kind of sub-life, but do you think yourself to be something "more advanced" than say a sheep or a cow?

> Lastly, you say nobody knows what vegans actually eat, but I can tell you definitely: anything except animal products. That is, after all, the point.

And the point of Christianity is to love thy neighbour and turn the other cheek, or anyway that is the credo. And yet, throughout history, faithful Christans have killed, maimed, murdered, pillaged, raped and looted all over the world with abandon and with the blessings of their respective churches. It is very easy to preach one thing and practice a whole 'nother one. Everyone does it all the time. Why not vegans?

Edit: anyway, how do you know what vegans eat? Are you vegan? Even so, have you any way to know what other vegans eat?

> If you disagree with that, I can recommend some vegan cook books which I think will change your mind.

Thanks, I think I'll pass. I'm from a Mediterrannean country and 80% of the food we eat traditionally is what you would call vegetarian or vegan, not least because we use olive oil as shortening. But that's just the food we eat, not some kind of political ideal. Anyway I'm pretty sure I can cook much better than anyone who discovered in late life that -OMG- vegetables have taste. I knew that since I knew what food is.

But, I still eat meat once in a while and make my own cheese. Actual cheese, that is. Because the tastes and flavours of meat and dairy cannot be replaced by vegetables and fruit, no matter how well the latter are cooked. Sometimes I crave a nice aubergine and zucchini casserole, overflowing with olive oil and tomato sauce; sometimes I just want kokorec:

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

>You're essentially saying that we're in some sense, better than, superior, to other animals. But, isn't that claimed superiority exactly the argument used to justify killing and even mistreating non-human animals?

You're confusing a certain kind of superiority (superiority in moral reasoning, for instance) with another one (the value of life). Humans are superior in the first respect (this is pretty uncontroversial), and I can't really think of any serious philosopher who argues that animals carry equal moral weight as a human. I'm sure they exist, though.

>Yet you say that "we can make complex decisions", as if those other animals can't? It's confusing. I appreciate I'm not talking to the same vegans all the time, but it's still, yes, confusing.

The evidence (and the interpretation of that evidence by biologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers) would point to the fact that humans are capable of moral reasoning to a higher degree than other animals, the conventional thought being that animals have no moral reasoning, though that's controversial.

The debate on the morality of killing animals for food where not necessary has very strong support for the moral vegetarian case[0], arguing from harm to animals, harm to humans, and harm to the environment; but I'd be interested to see if you have any counter-arguments, or rather, ones that haven't already been replied to.

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vegetarianism/

It doesn't sound like you really would, though. "I'd be interested to see if you have any counter-arguments, or rather, ones that haven't already been replied to"? Is that a way to ask for a frank exchange of views that predisposes your interlocutor to expect an honest and unbiased discussion? Because to me it sounds more like a preemptive dismissal of anyhing I'd possibly say.

I also don't like to hold internet conversations with commenters who talk of "arguments" like they're goals in football, whereby points are scored. If you want to exchange views because you think my views are useful to you, then please let me know that you want to have a genuine and constructive conversation. If you just want to win some culture war, then go away.

> I think it’s fundamentally immoral, period

Nope.

Nope, I don't think that? But I do?...

Do you believe animals eating other animals to be immoral as well?

As far as we know, humans are the only animals with moral agency (though there is some debate on this topic). That said, the immoral actions of one person (or animal, or society, etc.) does not absolve others of moral responsibility. Even if animals act immorally, this doesn't provide an excuse for humans to act in the same way.

Nope. But if those animals ever develop advanced societies with agriculture, the ability to reason about morality, and ways to live long healthy lives _without_ eating other animals, then I'll expect them to.

Right now, that's only humans, so I only hold humans to this standard.

But why is it immoral to eat another animal? Whether or not someone can "reason about morality", the question is what is moral and what is immoral. So why is it immoral to eat another animal?

You say you hold humans to a certain standard (of morality). But why does this standard entail an avoidance of eating meat? What is immoral about eating meat and what is moral about avoiding it?

Because it involves causing extreme suffering, and we definitively do not need to do it to live long healthy lives.

Literally just watch Dominion. Watch it to see the suffering I’m talking about. Why do you think animals deserve this so that you can eat a meal? Is that agony they exist in for their whole life worth a hamburger, or a piece of cheese? Vegans say no.

https://youtu.be/LQRAfJyEsko

The images you share are of factory farming that is indeed an atrocity that must be eliminated. There is no justification for treating animals like this.

However, my question was "why is it immoral to eat another animal"? Are you perhaps suggesting that the only way to eat another animal is by causing the extreme suffering undergone by cows in American factory farms?

It should be obvious that this is not the case: people eat meat all over the world, but American factory farms exist only in the Americas and farming in other places does not involve the kind of extreme suffering that you point out. For example, most of the meat I eat is from sheep and goats that graze freely in meadows and hills around the place where I live, in the Eastern Mediterrannean. I know that is true because I see those animals everytime I go out. Some goats live in the farm I'm staying and I can assure you that they are not suffering one bit.

In general, the animals raised by small-scale farmers, in herds of no more than a few dozen animals, are amonng the happiest, healthiest, best fed, best cared for animals the world over, some even better cared than human infants.

Bottom line, it is perfectly possible to eat meat without causing the extreme suffering you are concerned about. To be clear, I absolutely agree with you that causing extreme suffering, of the kind in the video you shared, or of any kind at all, is absolutely morally repugnant. But this extreme suffering is characteristic of factory farmign, not of eating another animal, and so I am not satisfied that I understand why you think that it is immoral to eat another animal.

Edit: I keep rewriting the above to make myself more clear, but everytime I read it, it sounds like something from a high school debate. What I really want to achieve is to understand how you think and maybe help you understand how I think, if that's interesting to you at all. So if something I say sounds completey wrong to you, please let me know and I'll try to make it more clear. I am not looking to score points in a futile internet fight. I'll be happy if we can find some common ground- and I can see that we already have some: I think we're both disgusted by the horrors in the video you shared.

Over 99% of all animals killed are killed on factory farms, so pointing out a handle of farms that are NOT factory farms doesn't really do much. If less than 1% of the animals we are talking about are covered by the farms your talking about, its a pretty meaningless statistic.

Also, you clearly didn't watch the film because it doesn't discuss American farms, it clearly focuses on Australian farms. Here is a link to the same practices being done in Britain: https://www.landofhopeandglory.org/

These practices are industry standard across the world, though. Peter Singer writes about this in "Animal Liberation". Let me know if you don't want to or cannot pay for a copy of the book and I'll buy it for you. He discusses at _length_ how these standards exists worldwide.

Besides, even those small farms are deeply unethical. They kill animals a mere fraction into their lifespans, and do so in horrific ways, often inhumanely. Killing an animal that does not want to die, if it doesnt need to, is always wrong.

The onus is now on you to educate yourself. I'm done with this conversation. I've pointed you to many places where you can learn about the problem, both in this thread and others in this comment section. If you choose not to, then you choose to remain ignorant to what is happening around the world, every day.

Here is the most comprehensive list of vegan resources and studies that I know of: https://www.vegancheatsheet.org

I suggest you dig into some of those studies and try tearing them apart. Watch some of those films and find reasons why they are bullshit. Then message me (email is in my profile), and tell me how wrong I am. But only after you've really made an effort to understand the issues. Remember, I was a carnist for almost the first 30 years of my life, so I know how you feel. I'm asking you to challenge yourself and really see the issue from the other side.

> Over 99% of all animals killed are killed on factory farms, so pointing out a handle of farms that are NOT factory farms doesn't really do much.

That's not true. The majority of farms around the world are small-scale farms with no more than a few dozen animals or so. Factory farms are not the norm.

> Besides, even those small farms are deeply unethical. They kill animals a mere fraction into their lifespans, and do so in horrific ways, often inhumanely.

I'm sorry but this is completely ridiculous. Why would farmers want to kill their animals "in horrific ways"? To achieve what? Hard as it might be for you to believe, farmers are not Jason Voorhees, going around with a machette murdering innocent little lambs for fun. It's obvious to me that despite your interest for animals' welfare you've never talked to a farmer and never been to a farm, looked at the animals and seen how they are treated first hand.

Instead, it seems to me that you take all your information from books and videos like the ones you ask me to "educate myself" with. Surely, you appreciate that those are written by vegans and for vegans, or for the purpose of indoctrinating more people into the vegan ideology? Such books and videos are no reliable source of knowledge for farming. They only show you what they want you to see: the horrors of factory farming. They seem to make the point that because factory farming is a horror, all farming is a horror. This is just a rhetorical trick and it should be easy to see through.

Anyway if you don't want to continue the conversation that's up to you. I don't want to convince you of anything, and I'm not in the habbit of pursuing internet arguments over emai. That sounds... unhygienic. What I was hoping to achieve with this conversation was to have a useful exchange of views. I don't guess this is possible though.

https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estima...

Proof that I wasn't lying about the percentage of animals killed in factory farms. Thats USDA data, not some vegan propaganda. Good luck, and reach out if you ever come around to considering a world with less suffering.

The link you posted is not USDA data. It's estimates, based on USDA data, by the owners of the website. For example, the opening paragraph in the article says:

> We estimate that 99% of US farmed animals are living in factory farms at present.

The owners of the website are the Sentience Institute, a nonprofit promoting various Effective Altruism goals. One of those goals seems to be the elimination of animal farming. One of the founders of the Institute is the author of a book called "The End of Animal Farming" that "argues animal farming will end by the year 2100 based on effective altruism reasoning and social movement strategy" (see Wikipedia on the book).

So it's vegan propaganda. From the point of view of Effective Altruism, but still, vegan propaganda.

Let's see that quote again:

> We estimate that 99% of US farmed animals are living in factory farms at present.

It says US farmed animals. The whole link talks about the situation in the US. In our discussion, I made the point that factory farms are the norm in the Americas, but not in the rest of the world. I agreed with you that factory farms are an atrocity that must be eliminated. But that atrocity is an American atrocity, and the rest of the world, by and large, is not yet responsible of it although this situation is changing rapidly, because of course where America leads the way in atrocities, everyone else soon follows because that way lie dollars and everyone wants dollars.

In general, my complaint about your comments is that they seem to ignore that there is a world outside the Americas, or even the US, and that this world is not the US and doesn't do things, particularly farming, like the US does them. I seem to be justified to complain so, given the continued American focus of your discussion of farming and animal rights.

I'm sorry, but what would someone need to hand you for you to at least admit there _might_ be a worldwide problem.

You complain this doesn't prove anything outside of the US, but I've already linked to material which covers similar issues in Australia, the UK, and Peter Singer's book which talks about this for all of Europe!

Does someone need to literally drag you to each and every factory farm? Seriously asking, what would it take? Just to consider, on your own, seriously, that perhaps the way we kill these _billions_ of animals every years (100s of billions if you include fish!) might be pretty fucked up.

You say you're interested in exchanging views, but that doesn't seem to be the case. What would it take for you to actually be convinced that there is actually a problem?

Also, it _is_ USDA data. They are using it to draw a conclusion based on things like # of animals that farms own, etc. But it is USDA data they are using.

> Does someone need to literally drag you to each and every factory farm?

This is a threat of physical violence and it is very disturbing, especially as it comes after your offering to buy me a book and asking me to contact you by email. You've crossed from creepy stalker to online bully behaviour.

The most disturbing thing is that you seem to not even understand what we are disagreeing about.

What I keep saying is that factory farming is typical only in the Americas. Yes, there are factory farms outside the Americas. No, they are not the norm outside America. Outside America, most farms are small-scale farms with a few dozen animals.

The typical farm in most of the world is a small-scale farm, run by a family, often not even commercially.

Despite your threats to drag me to factofy farms and your insistence that I don't know they exist (clearly, I do, I have repeated several times that "factory farms are an atrocity that must be eliminated"), it is you who hasn't seen the world with your own eyes. It is you who relies, for your knowledge of farming, on books and youtube videos. Books and youtube videos that are specifically created to spread vegan propaganda: they show you the horrors of factory farming, that should rightly outrage everyone, and pretend that there is no other way to farm animals, and that all farming is an atrocity, that all farmers are Freddy Krueger, monsters who torture animals and kill them in "horrific ways".

Instead of trying to coerce me into agreeing with your misinformed beliefs, you're the one who should go and look at the things that the brainwashing rhetoric you try to spread hasn't shown you. Go to the rural communities that subsist on farming, in Europe, in Africa, in India and Bangladesh, in South-East Asia. Go and see the farms, see the animals, talk to the farmers. If you really care about animal welfare, go help the farmers to care for the animals.

But do you really care about animals? Do you really want to know what's going on in the world, or are you more interested in fighting a pointless culture war on the internet?

Morality has nothing to do with whether you want tasty meat or not.

Here is a simple video I recommend that anyone who is interested in the effects if animal agriculture on land should watch:

https://youtu.be/QnrtRaM28cY

It’s a really great intro to some of the common misconceptions

I think the question is not whether people are willing to kill large numbers of animals to save a couple of humans, but whether we might have alternative methods that also save the humans, but with fewer dead animals. I mean, if we had no alternatives to eating animals, there would be far fewer vegans.

"I prefer to advance humanity, even minimally." - Part of advancing humanity is expanding our moral circle. Pointlessly hurting animals is not an "advanced" society.

Well, how many other humans would you murder to save your grandma's life? Or your wife, your children, someone you love?

What about terminally ill humans who have < 1 year to live (assuming the particular testing results won't get skewed by their particular ailments)? How about prisoners sentenced for heinous crimes?

What about humans who are "not productive"? People who have been sentenced to more than 10 years?

You might draw the line at other species. Someone else might draw it differently to not do experiments on intelligent species like whales, dolphins and primates (who are used in lab experiments too). Or someone might include the categories I mentioned above in the list of test subjects.

The big second question is the effectiveness of transferring the results of tests from animals to humans. Coldly speaking, while there are experiments that yield useful results on animals, there are also extremely pointless experiments that are done for the sake of doing.

I won't go on and on but to your statement about " I am willing to sacrifice an insane amount of animal lives in order to save anyone human", would you do it to save Hitler (who is a proxy for someone who, maybe, you should think twice about saving)?

I agree with you about replacing the meat industry but we can do multiple things as a species at the same time. We can work on replacing the meat industry, working on alternate ways of testing drugs, on understanding animal communications and language (and we keep finding new indicators of intelligence) and on reducing our footprint as we get technologically and hopefully culturally more sophisticated.

> I am willing to sacrifice an insane amount of animal lives in order to save anyone human.

That is insane, and psychopathic. But it is shared by many (most?) humans. The result will be that there will be no animals left, and soon afterwards, no humans left either.

Another question is, how many humans are you willing to sacrifice to save your wife? Your child? Is your child worth a specific number of human lives, in your eyes? And what is that number?

> The result will be that there will be no animals left, and soon afterwards, no humans left either.

This is illogical.

Humans have been eating animals since the dawn of civilization. We've been using animals in experiments for centuries.

There are still animals to eat and use in experiments. Why? because animals reproduce. There aren't a fixed number of animals.

We only lose species when we kill faster then they reproduce. For experiments and food, that's an impossibility. We bread to accommodate demand.

OK. We'll be only left with food animals and even those will be replaced soon with some salad cause the popular opinion it that this is more effective. I believe this is going to be a sad place and we are getting there quite fast now, cause for centuries the population was much smaller. And yet humans managed to depopulate vast areas.

That's like saying humans have been enslaving (among other things. this is just one example) other humans since the dawn of civilization and on a large scale, that didn't stop the growth of art, culture, science etc.

But our ethics progress and evolve. Similarly, treating other species as commodities for our consumption has been done for millennia but it doesn't mean we should keep doing it.

> That is insane, and psychopathic. But it is shared by many (most?) humans.

Is that not a contradiction? When you find yourself thinking that the majority of humans are the abnormal ones...

Your argument is that the majority opinion is never psychopathic? Technically, if you were referring only to insanity, I might agree that an operational definition of insanity is anything that a majority of the population doesn't believe. But that doesn't mean the view is not psychopathic.

This definition of insanity might also not be correct. After all, was Galileo insane because most people (assuming they followed the church) didn't agree with his views?

> Another question is, how many humans are you willing to sacrifice to save your wife? Your child? Is your child worth a specific number of human lives, in your eyes? And what is that number?

As much as it is necessary.

I agree with you on medical research. Particularly how many animals you’d be willing to sacrifice.

That being said and with respect, I think you are misrepresenting and lack some understanding... some alternatives to consider.

1) humans are built to consume meat. Yes we can manage alternatives, but it’s not really all that healthy (I know some people claim with a lot of work and expense it’s possible to be healthy...)

2) farms producing beans and grain require a large amount of pesticides, arguably far worse for the environment and humans. Pesticides have been the #1 killer of living creatures

3) animals can eat a diverse set of food, so cattle farms, etc have more biodiversity than row crop

4) many cattle, elk, etc farms, are particularly humane. I recently purchased a grass fed cattle farm and everything I need is onsite. Cattle just roam, drink from the springs, get medicine, have calf’s, etc they seem very very happy.

5) if you have a lot of produce in a field, it’s essential to kill the wildlife trying to eat the field. I don’t think most people understand this, but if you have fields of corn you need to ensure bugs, birds and deer aren’t overly in abundance

I would argue farms mass producing meat could be reduced or need to be changed. But generally speaking, I’d argue leaving chickens out and collecting eggs in the yard isn’t all that bad. Or letting cattle roam until right before butchering.

1) It’s straightforward to be a healthy vegetarian, on net even in cultures that are largely vegetarian meat eaters are generally less healthy.

Personally a really enjoy meat, but at one point I became vegetarian for a few months simply based on what I was eating. I accidentally ended up with a vegetarian diet with sufficient protein etc, which demonstrates how little effort it actually takes.

> humans are built to consume meat. Yes we can manage alternatives, but it’s not really all that healthy

What Science Says About The Health Benefits Of Plant-Based Diets https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/what-science-says-ab...

"A number of studies have shown that a diet low in meat is linked to longer lifespans. But the matter is far from settled, as some studies haven’t found a significant difference in life expectancy between meat eaters and vegetarians.

"But there is growing evidence that plant-based diets are associated with benefits like lower blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar and reduced body weight. These improved health measures often translate to less risk of heart disease, diabetes, cancer and other diseases. Eating more whole, plant-based foods could help lower the risk of some health conditions, and might even help people live longer. But researchers also suspect that vegetarians are more health-conscious overall — so, they’re likely to be drinking and smoking less and moving their bodies more than the general population — which complicates some study results.

"Still, emerging research points to a potentially helpful role of plant-based diets in managing some chronic health conditions. For instance, some studies suggest that plant-based diets — veganism in particular — may help control rheumatoid arthritis."

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