Hacker News Reader

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

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?

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.

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?...