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Comment by eigenket | Hacker News Reader

As an academic who isn't directly involved in anything close to animal testing (I'm a physicist) I always find it strange that people working in biology have to jump through incredible hoops relating to how the animals they work with are treated, but then the lunch place in the biology department sells sandwiches with chicken, ham etc in with incredibly minimal oversight for how the animals are treated.

The difference in standards between "science animals" and "food animals" is quite stark. It is very similar to the difference in treatment people require between dogs and pigs. No one really cares if pigs suffer, even though they would be furious if dogs experienced the same treatment.

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In practice it generally comes down to demonstratable utility more than direct concerns about animal well-being. At the most basic level, if you can learn a useful lesson from subjecting an animal to whatever conditions, then the work is generally approvable. But if the researcher has not done their due diligence in experimental design then the whole operation is pointless, or worse than pointless if they then go and p-hack their way through a publication.

For a physics analogue, think of animal experiments like a beamline proposal. In order to get time on the beamline you need to explain what you are doing, what your experiment is intended to accomplish, and why the experiment achieves those goals. With these basic checks you can hopefully ensure that the allocated time is not obviously going to be wasted. Animal experiments can easily be about as expensive in terms of money and time as a beamline-based project, including the cost for the beamline operation itself.

Yeah, but maybe this is an argument for treating the food animals, rather than ridiculousness of standards for science animals.

Of course, I agree. I hope my comment didn't imply otherwise.

Actually I would argue for the wholesale reduction of the category "food animal". Its largely unnecessary, there are very few people (e.g. with unusual medical needs or living in unusual situations) for whom eating other animals is necessary.

Imagine the two following hypothetical societies (we clearly live in neither society):

A) humane open pastures where animals grow to middle age before being killed for food, resulting in expensive meat

B) pure agriculture where land is cleared and irrigated for agricultural produce, completely devoid of animal life

I would argue that society A would be better for animals than society B.

The two situations aren't really comparable without more information. Clearly the people in A are still eating a craptonne of plants, and also have access to much more land per person than B, since they can afford to have a lot dedicated to very unproductive pasture.

Yeah, it's hard to compare and the greater yields of crops certainly bodes well for A.

Though the productivity differences aren't as large as one would think - protein conversion ratios for smaller animals tend to be 2-3. It's worse for beef (~10) but you have to consider that half the cows are creating milk which has a high protein conversion ratio. And it's potentially even better for animals when you consider the quality of protein - e.g. see https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jsfa.8362

> It's worse for beef (~10) but you have to consider that half the cows are creating milk which has a high protein conversion ratio.

Half?

Only female cows produce milk.

All cows are female.

In common parlance (rather than technical terminology), "cows" means "cattle".

Almost all cattle are female. aflag doesn't get less accurate if you interpret "cows" as the species term that it is.

Where do you get "half" from that? Female cows are economically productive and males are not. The ratio is not even close to half-and-half. Go look at a herd of cows sometime.

Pastoral societies usually inhabit ecosystems that don't support human-edible crops

False dichotomy. Animal farming takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land. Switching away from livestock would reduce the need for land clearing, not increase it.

We don’t know this.

Our understanding of nutrition is closer to none than to complete.

The more deeply you research this, the more true my statement will seem.

It appears that universities are held to different standards of reputation than are poultry farms and slaughterhouses.

I don't think that's that weird, they're setting standards for their own behavior and the food source is largely beyond their control. That space probably isn't even directly controlled by them but by the larger university.

An able-bodied person with decent income should have no trouble being at least mostly vegetarian, if not most vegan, in North America.

I don't want to be.

Many people don't want to avoid things that have massive negative externalities but at some point we have to take responsibility for the harm we cause.

Speak for yourself bud. We only have one life, and it is not for you to decide what other person should eat based on your moralist principles.

from an ethical perspective, why wouldn’t you want to live in such a way that minimizes suffering?

Animals in the wild die in ways that are orders of magnitude more gruesome than what occurs in a slaughterhouse.

You may be unfamiliar with the activity that takes place in slaughterhouses, then.

The other notable difference is that humans are directly responsible for slaughterhouses, and it's not a nutritional requirement.

We don't lecture lions on any sort of ethics, now do we?

> We don't lecture lions on any sort of ethics, now do we?

Not yet, but we definitely should!

You’re welcome to lead by example, then.

> We don't lecture lions on any sort of ethics, now do we?

Doesn't the fact that we can consider such things while lions cannot cement the fact that we have dominion over animals?

Moralist principles aren't really my issue here. Its kinda sad that animals suffer but I understand that not many people care about that. My issue is the massive ecological harm done by eating other animals compared to eating plants.

Climate change and ecosystem collapse are real, concrete problems that are coming home to roost, and I find it incredibly sad that educated, prosperous people don't do the bare minimum they could to reduce these problems.

I want the climate to change.

Why do you assume things you believe are ‘problems’ are problems to others?

Here's one of many examples https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3322

>Around 30% of the world’s population is currently exposed to climatic conditions exceeding this deadly threshold for at least 20 days a year. By 2100, this percentage is projected to increase to ∼48% under a scenario with drastic reductions of greenhouse gas emissions and ∼74% under a scenario of growing emissions.

I still don't see how is it my problem?

If not you, who else?

Not my problem who else?

It appears that he was speaking for himself.

No, he was saying we, implying that we [humans] have to take some responsibility or whatever grandiose idea he has in his mind.

Uh, OK. Guess you get in a lot of fights on the Internet.

Could you describe why you think its "grandiose" to try to take responsibility for the consequences of your own actions?

People often feel differently about food animals than they do about lab animals. Part of it has to do with the kinds of animals. People get very upset about the treatment of beagles, which are used in research for human eye applications, but not cows. The species seems to be a major factor.

Last year of college we could submit our own experiment. I did a physics one so it didn't apply but my peers at the time mostly did biology related experiments.

As a rule of thumb, as our biology professor put it, just make sure the animal you're experimenting on do not look like a baby (big head, big eyes, small mouth, makes squeaking sounds). This is why experiments on fish were ok but "fish embryo" would get much more scrutiny.

> No one really cares if pigs suffer

It's surprising that you don't have any family, friends, or co-workers who do care about that kind of thing. My academic astronomy group has a bunch of vegetarians and vegans. While I have no idea why (it's none of my business), it's my life experience is that a large fraction of them do care if pigs suffer.

Yeah I'm a vegan and know a few vegetarians, but still caring about this stuff is still incredibly niche. I was generalising (probably too much) in my comment above.

Death is not the same as torture. Kill me before you ever torture me.

Too bad most food animals are tortured, sometimes for their entire life, before being killed. The unluckiest ones are the females kept alive for breeding.

That is true of battery chickens and of meat and dairy cattle in factory farms, but not for "most animals", like you say, and certainly not the world over. On the contrary, around most of the world, farm animals are among the happiest, healthiest, best-fed and best-cared for animals on the planet.

Of course you will not know that if you selectively look at the factory farms with feedlots that are the norm in the US, Argentina, etc. These are indeed atrocities. But, for the time being, they are not representative of the majority of farms in most of the world.

You can see that if you take a slow train ride through the French countryside, for example. You'll see houses, barns, trees, grass and small herds of cows busking in the sun, peacefully chewing cud, just like large beef and dairy industries want you to think their animals are kept (which obviously they're not). Or, if you take a walk around the countryside where I live, you'll see that every meadow and plot of land has a few sheep or goats browsing serenely, often next to the road, typically without even a fence to keep them in, because it's unnecessary. I know one particular dairy farm on a Mediterranean island, with a fully modern barn and automatic milking machine, where, if you visit during the day, you'll see maybe a dozen goats in the barn that can house a couple hundred. The rest are out in the mountains, browsing, and will return on their own in the evening. That's how terrified those allegedly mistreated animals are. The barn is their home.

"Most animals" in the world are the animals we raise for meat. Well, mammals anyway.

60% are food animals

36% are we humans

4% are wild animals

So there's that.

In fact, we eat more animals every year than are alive at any one time. E.g. 50B chickens are eaten every year, but only 19B are alive at any moment.

Its essentially true that the only animals that matter are the ones we raise. By the numbers anyway.

Numbers please. Where do they come from?

Also, it doesn't matter how many food animals we have, what matters is how the majority of them are treated. And the majority are not meat and dairy cows raised in feedlots in the US, because that kind of farm animal is a small proportion of all meat an dairy animals bred the world over. From Our World in Data:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-meat-production-by...

You can see that pork and poultry make up the largest amount of meat produced. Though the plot shows meat rather than number of animals, remember that it takes seveal pigs or goats to make the same meat as one cow, and many more chickens. There are way more pigs and chickens farmed the world over than there are cows and cow farming (cow factory farming) is concentrated in the US, Argentina, Brazil and China:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/beef-and-buffalo-meat-pro...

It is those places where the images of tortured cows, that live their whole lives connected to milking and impregnating machines come from. It is such conditions that have to be eliminated. But in most of the rest of the world, those are not typical conditions and the numbers of animals raised are many, many fewer.

Edit: which is not to whitewash the pig and poultry industries. Chickens in particular are treated horribly, even the so-called "free range" ones (in many places it's enough for the chickens to be kept in a gigantic barn with a tiny bit of yard outside for the chickens to be considered "free range", legislation is often an absolute scandal). And there are many large pig farms were pigs are kept in absolutely inhumane conditions.

But, again- that's true in some places, not the world over and not for most animals.

From a 2017 article: “According to the UN, globally [concentrated animal feeding operations] account for 72% of poultry, 42% of egg, and 55% of pork production.”

It’s entirely plausible that most animals live under those conditions by now, or will quite soon without intervention.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/18/rise-of-...

Those are not the numbers quoted by the OP, though.

Anyway, yes, it seems like I'm wrong and the majority of chickens are grown in intensive farms. For pigs though, 55% is about half of all animals.

But I don't want to argue over margins. The point I'm making in my comments above and elsewhere in this thread is that in most of the world most farms are not factory farms. This is still the case. Note also the title of the article in your link: "Rise of mega farms: how the US model of intensive farming is invading the world". Again, I made the point that industrial farming is typical to the Americas and not the rest of the world. It's "invading" the world, but it's not how most of the world does farming, it's how Americans do farming.

And yes, this will change without intervention because people the world over are blinded by the prospect of maximising their profits, even if all they achieve in the end is to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs (their animals, that feed them). All those farmers will achieve who give up their small family farms for tin sheds on concrete lots is to make themselves slaves and force their children out of the farming business.

So the intervention should be to protect the small scale farmers from the encroachment of the gigantic corporations that want to take their land, their animals and their businesses. This is the only way to ensure that all farm animals are given the care and respect they deserve, care and respect that is simply not available in industrial farming.

Late reply, thanks for responding.

> in most of the world most farms are not factory farms

From the perspective of animal welfare, the number of farms matters less than the number of animals raised in horrible conditions. So if factory farms raise 50% of the animals, or even 30% or 20%, this is still a huge problem to me.

I mostly agree with your last paragraph. I have friends who are farmers, who raised and loved and posted Instagram pics of their delightful pair of goats, knowing that they were raised to be food. They slaughtered them eventually, and cooked and ate them for the meal at their wedding ceremony. I do not understand this mentality, but I do know that for the years they raised them, the goats lived a great life.

To me, “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” applies here. Arguments (which I don’t think you have made) about “more cows born is better than fewer cows born” don’t hold water. Quality of life for farmed animals is important. Small-scale farms on the whole do a much better job of making that happen.

The French AOC [1] regulates what’s allowed to be marketed as Comté etc by stipulating location, breed, population density, etc; however aside from cheese, I’m not aware of a similar set of standards existing for animal products. As someone who has lived in a rural area with much animal agriculture, I can tell you labels like “free range” roughly translate to “Let’s put as many animals as we legally can fit onto this plot of land modulo our budget, then neglect them to every extent allowable by law, followed by killing them because we need the money”. You specifically give the example of the animals having a shed to shelter in, which IME is an exceptional rarity.

In any case, cherrypicked examples of “free range” farms that actually provide shelter for their animals are about as irrelevant as saying hunting is “more ethical” than factory farming. We cannot feed billions more people sustainably on diets heavy in animal products, no matter the method, especially so with the more inefficient methods like free range and hunting. There’s a reason factory farming exists.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellation_d%27origine_contrô...

It's true like you say that "free range" is mainly an empty label, for the reasons you say.

But I'm not talking about "free range" as a label. In my comment above I've described the animals I've seen, and see around me, right now. Those range freely in the literal sense. They are left to go out on their own and eat what they want, then return to their sheds when they want. I stay in a friend's farm, with goats and chickens on the grounds. Those are not sold anywhere and are not labelled as "free range" by anyone, but they're free range alright. I can assure you. I once made the mistake of cooking one of the farm's chickens as I'd cook a chicken bought at the supermarket. Never again! You basically can't eat the meat of a really free-range chicken unless you boil it for a couple of hours. I chewed and chewed and chewed until my mouth muscles couldn't take it anymore and ate the whole thing because I absolutely didn't want to throw the poor animal away like garbage, but it was painful and unpleasant. Even properly cooked, the meat of really free-range chickens is a dark gray, very unlike the pale white meat of supermarket chickens. Most people would probably not prefer actual "free range" if they had access to it. And I know a good few people who won't eat goat meat because "it stinks".

>> We cannot feed billions more people sustainably on diets heavy in animal products, no matter the method, especially so with the more inefficient methods like free range and hunting. There’s a reason factory farming exists.

The good news is that there is no reason to "feed billions more people ... on diets heavy in animal products". Diets heavy in animal products characterise only certain parts of the world, not coincidentally the same ones where factory farming is the norm. The rest of the world doesn't eat that way, and doesn't need to eat that way. We can feed billions of humans on sustainably grown meat and dairy produced by small scale local farms, like we already do in most of the world.

The trick is to avoid creating an artificial need for even more cheap meat and animal products in the diets of everyone. Just because Americans and some Europeans eat that way doesn't mean that everyone must mimetically do the same.

> You can see that if you take a slow train ride through the French countryside, for example. You'll see houses, barns, trees, grass and small herds of cows busking in the sun, peacefully chewing cud, just like large beef and dairy industries want you to think their animals are kept (which obviously they're not).

Over the last 15 years (thus quickly), this has changed a lot in France. Now the standard is having 100 cows kept most of the year in a huge shed (newly built on subsidies), on a concrete slab partially covered with straw, behind galvanised steel fences, fed from a tractor a mix of straw or hay and "powdered" soja and stuff.

My place is a mountain "hay" area, meaning it's wet and ideal for cows, and yet most pastures are abandoned and we can see articulated lorries coming from Spain, loaded with straw. They don't bother cutting the hay on slopes, like they still do in Austria/Switzerland/Germany. A few farmers like my neighbour are even reluctant to cut the hay on a good, easy area; he usually waits 2 months after it's "ripe" for a first cut and lets it go bad, and then also misses the second cut.

Yes, you can still see cows in the remaining meadows, but they represent a vanishing part. Also, when you had 10 or 20 cows, it was easy to take them out, or leave them out and move them from meadow to meadow; but doing the same with 100 of them? There isn't enough open meadow land around to sustain a proper rotation (this is not at all a country of huge ranches like a few other countries like the USA), and even if there were, it would require manual (foot) work, while farmers are less and less inclined to leave their tractor seat.

Oh, on the paper, they have the needed surface to feed the cows, because it is mandatory to present a good ratio to get subsidies. But that's because they "took" (bought, rented or just declared as used) fields/meadows/woods here and there: 10 miles away one way, 20 or 30 miles away another way. It's not practical at all. I let you imagine how well they take care of some of them.

Icing on the cake, there are quite many cheese dairies around. The good cheese for the good cows for the good pastures of our good mountain. Well, truth is 75% of the milk doesn't come from here, it is imported from other regions. How comes, in such a "cow area"? Simple: because dairy farming is more work and yet brings much less subsidies than livestock farming for meat which is a true jackpot when you live in a area like mine, classified as "difficult": most cow farmers (1-2 persons) here will get around 40,000-60,000€ subsidies a year for their 99 cows (the 100th and following do not bring more subsidies so they all have about 99 cows) and 75-90 ha declared surfaces (subsidised until the 75th, but a bit more can be needed to have the right head/ha ratio to maximize head subsidies).

There can of course be a few pathological cases too in that domain: one former neighbour was a cheese maker. First they moved to a bigger village in the valley, while keeping the name of the higher altitude, smaller village for their cheese, which was already a bit of a dubious commercial practice, but well, let's say it wasn't a big deal. But then when the daughter in law took over the business, she soon got tired of actually performing the work; so she now buys ready-made cheese from a bigger factory in another area, make it grow old a bit (if you are lucky), sticks the same old brand and traditional picture over it, and sells it to tourists as a local product (except the fine print).

> I know one particular dairy farm on a Mediterranean island, with a fully modern barn and automatic milking machine, where, if you visit during the day, you'll see maybe a dozen goats in the barn that can house a couple hundred.

Yeah, well, that French "Mediterranean island" is famous for its VIRTUAL cattle which only exist in documents filed for subsidies. This small area represents the majority of such frauds in the whole country.

Invaluable perspective. Thank you for your comment!

> Yeah, well, that French "Mediterranean island" is famous for its VIRTUAL cattle which only exist in documents filed for subsidies.

I meant this dairy farm, on the Aegean island of Ios:

https://youtu.be/gFrciodixsw?t=831

The bald guy is the farmer. What island did you mean? Corsique?

> Over the last 15 years (thus quickly), this has changed a lot in France. Now the standard is having 100 cows kept most of the year in a huge shed (newly built on subsidies), on a concrete slab partially covered with straw, behind galvanised steel fences, fed from a tractor a mix of straw or hay and "powdered" soja and stuff.

This and the various shennanigans you report on is getting more and more common in the place I live, also, and it's only going to intensify unless a serious effort is made on the part of the EU to put the breaks on the intensification of farming - and also agriculture. Maybe that's a futile hope, because after all it's probably EU subsidies that have motivated the farmers to industrialise their production in the first place. If it's not subsidies, then it's the incentives created by the market that force smaller farms to conglomerate into giants, constantly.

Perhaps it doesn't come through in my comments but I'm desperate to see this direction changed, turned around. Otherwise, we're just killing the goose that lays the golden eggs and soon we'll have neither goose, nor golden eggs. I made the point in a few comments yesterday that farming (as well as agriculture) in most of the world is not like factory farming in American feedlots. That is still the case. Even the hillarious 99-cow farms you report are not that big, compared to American feedlots with thousands of animals. It would be a disaster if everywhere ends up like in the Americas.

> But then when the daughter in law took over the business, she soon got tired of actually performing the work; so she now buys ready-made cheese from a bigger factory in another area, make it grow old a bit (if you are lucky), sticks the same old brand and traditional picture over it, and sells it to tourists as a local product (except the fine print).

Wonderful. And so very typical. This lady is basically doing at a smaller scale what Lactalis is doing on a much grander scale with its Camembert "fabriqué en Normandie". You probably know this but for the benefit of other readers, "Camembert de Normandie" is the (only) PDO camembert, that must be made in Normandy with the raw milk produced by cows of the Normandy race, actually raised in Normandy, and with a very specific technology (for example, the curd must be "moulé á la louche", placed in forms with scoops of a hemispheric laddle called "louche", though not necessarily manually these days. The moulage must be done by a fixed number of passes of the "louche" and with precisely defined intervals between them). These very stringent requirements meant to protect the "traditional" camembert are constantly challenged by the industry, with Lactalis, the owner of the Président brand, at the head. The industry primarily wants to be able to make camembert with pasteurised milk from cows of any race, as long as the cheese is made in Normandy (in a Lactalis factory). Because the industry is such a much bigger and more powerful entity, it is able to call its produce "Camembert fabriqué en Normandie", meaning "camembert made in Normandy" which is of course very misleading, at least to the people who even know anything about the relation of camembert and Normandie. For much of my life, I didn't and happily ate camembert whatever thinking there's only one kind. I only realised the distinction when I went looking for the PDO regulations because I was curious to see how camembert is actually made in France (as opposed to the recipes for "camembert" that one can find on hobby cheesemaking websites and books).

I digress. There's a constant struggle between large industry that wants to eat up everything, farmers, products, land, animals, everything, and the smaller farmers who are for whatever reason still clinging on to their "old" ways, even if those are not that "old" (camembert was standardised to the brilliant white Penicilium candidum coat it has today only in the 1960's and it would have been a markedly different cheese with a gray-blue coat of P. album, in the past). In the middle are caught all those people who want the "authentic" in their life, and in their plates. Like myself, I confess.

Unfortunately, most of us have completely lost the thread that once kept us connected to the treasures of the land, the "village", the farm, the sea even. It is a tragedy. But the extreme ideologies against consumption of meat are to me missing the point and only making matters worse: it's the industrialisation of farming and agriculture that's the true horror, not the raising of animals for their meat and milk.

Please, see the Animal Welfare Section on the Wikipedia page for slaughterhouses. There is nothing here sensational, just facts. It's important that those who choose to eat meat understand the contract they sign when financially supporting the industrial animal processing system.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterhouse#Animal_welfar...

Again, these conditions, of industrial farming and slaughtering, are only the norm in some countries in the world. For beef, that's the US, Argentina, Brazil and China, predominantly. In the rest of the world, large scale farming or slaughtering is not the norm.

Generally my point in this discussion is that you should not bundle together factory farms and slaughterhouses in the US with, e.g. small dairy farms in the Pyrenees or Austria, or Bantu farmers in Africa, etc. There is one way that people eat meat in the Americas, Australia and China, and quite another in other parts of the world.

So when you say "those who choose to eat meat" financially support the industrial animal processing system, you're painting with an overly broad brush and I don't think it's serving anyone's purposes to do so.

> Generally my point in this discussion is that you should not bundle together factory farms and slaughterhouses in the US with, e.g. small dairy farms in the Pyrenees or Austria, or Bantu farmers in Africa, etc. There is one way that people eat meat in the Americas, Australia and China, and quite another in other parts of the world.

The countries which you claim aren’t factory farming are just importing much of their meat from countries which do, see: https://oec.world/en/profile/hs92/poultry-meat

And even if you assume the existence of supposedly “ethical” animal agriculture — which is considerably farcical given the non-consensuality of murder in any case — it’s inherently irrelevant because these niche models of food production don’t scale to feeding the world.

> The countries which you claim aren’t factory farming are just importing much of their meat from countries which do, see: https://oec.world/en/profile/hs92/poultry-meat

That's not what the data you link to ("your data") shows. It shows who are the biggest single country net exporters and importers of poultry, but it doesn't show you who sells to whom and who buys from whom, for example, Germany and France are in the groups of both biggest net importers and exporters.

Further, that import/export data is not at all representative of the amount of meat consumed by people in the different countries in "your data". The following is from Our World in Data and it shows that, for example, China, which is listed in "your data" as one of the largest net importers of poultry, has a very low rate of overall meat consumption compared with the countries that are net exporters:

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

So, perhaps counter-intuitively, it is possible for a country to be both a large net exporter and exporter, or one of the two and at the same time not have a large per-capita meat consumption.

Finally, "your data" is only about poultry, whereas factory farming and slaughterhouses in the Americas produce primarily beef cattle. Certainly, in my comment I mentioned beef cattle, not poultry.

> And even if you assume the existence of supposedly “ethical” animal agriculture — which is considerably farcical given the non-consensuality of murder in any case — it’s inherently irrelevant because these niche models of food production don’t scale to feeding the world.

Killing non-human animals is not "murder" in any legal system I'm aware of. Where do you live?

As I say in another comment, yes, small-scale farming can absolutely feed the world. Most of the world eats way too much meat, way much more than any human needs to. We have factory farms because of the way the economy works, not because of what humans need to eat to survive. Healthy adult humans only need to eat meat a few times a year and can fulfill their needs for nutrients found only in animal products with eggs and dairy, and I guess fish, depending on whether one considers fish to be "meat" or not. Humans are omnivores, but there's a lot of other stuff we need to eat, besides meat, and to have a balanced diet we really need to eat everything - in proportional amounts.

Bottom line, perhaps factory farms are needed to cover the demand for meat in the Americas, but they are not in any way "needed" to cover the need of meat of any humans anywhere.

We all know this is our great sin. Like vampires we devour this stuff.

Yet I think both these concerns come from very wealthy people who have time thinking those thoughts.

Most people, when they have enough money to buy a bit of meat, are relieved to have such a good intake of protein. And most life, in the broader context, doesn't even have the ability to compute this question.

I wonder if we're not overthinking it a bit. Sadistic pleasure in torturing animal should be prevented but also because it can derive to human treatment, and we should accept that animals that would never have been born if not for food or experimental purpose are just necessary for our greater good until we find something that really works better.

Assuming you are not living in a good desert, you can eat a delicious healthy plant based diet for very little. Plant based diets are not something that need to be left to the very wealthy at all.

To those who literally cannot access those foods, I don’t think anyone holds them accountable.

I mean pretty much everything that has ever been written, and will ever be written on hackernews counts as come(ing) from very wealthy people who have time thinking those thoughts.

I'm not sure why you wrote that here rather than on some discussion on programming or whatever else.

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