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Comment by codeulike | Hacker News Reader

Its so fast now, we're killing 50 billion chickens per year to eat. 136 million per day. 1585 per second. More than 1 chicken per millisecond. Start the stopwatch on your phone and watch those milliseconds fly by. Living breathing creatures raised in tiny cages and never seeing the sky or scratching dirt with their feet.

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Sometimes I wonder how many microorganisms I kill when I wash my hands.

I get that this is probably mostly sarcastic humour, and I'm not trying to dispute the kernel of truth. No serious person loses sleep over our mass murder of malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

But there is a line _somewhere_ on the natural spectrum of life forms, from microorganisms, to plants, to bugs and vermin, to dogs, pigs, primates, and humans, where our attitude about loss of life and/or a miserable life changes. Where are you suggesting we put that line?

EDIT: wording

Not the parent, but as someone who lives in the country and has a small flock - somewhere above the chicken. Easy.

Well at least those microorganisms had a chance of a normal life, and you did the killing yourself. What gets me about factory farming is the complete hopelessness of an animal born into a factory, reduced by us to being an inconvenient ingredient and nothing more, and how all of that is hidden from the consumer as much as possible, outsourced to a faceless machine.

Here you go; the chicken scene from Baraka https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFQhn8RW0Nk

What's a normal life? I've seen the chicken scene, and I've killed a chicken with my bare hands. I've clubbed a fish and cleaned it. I'm not afraid of where my food comes from. Chickens don't have hope, and I don't project that feeling onto them, just like I don't with microorganisms. Why do you think what you're saying is negative? If this trend tends to infinity we raise chickens instantly and vaporize them into cooked chicken in a blink of an eye.

Chickens want things. They want to walk around the scratch the ground. If you make a noise they'll run away from you - they dont want to get eaten by a fox.

Your comment about microorganisms is about 'where to draw the line' and your comment about 'tend to infinity' implies you like the 'appeal to extremes' form of argument.

I'm interested in what we're doing in the world now and I'm happy to suggest where a line should be drawn. I'm not worried about absolutes.

I say we engineer a breed of Mike the Headless Chickens. Just enough brain stem to stay alive, not enough brain to care.

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

Or, Lab grown meat would be a good solution.

edit: Lab grown chicken exists, its just wicked expensive at the moment. Just a matter of time.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/12/2/22125518/lab-gr...

Aren't they still microorganisms at that point? Don't they have hopes and dreams like animals? Or do we not know about either and are drawing a magical line at some point?

I'm comfortable to draw a line in the sand.

Something along the lines of: If its got eyes and an arsehole, lets treat it with some basic respect

Sure, you let me know when we can grow a decent drumstick in a petri dish.

We can do it now, just not at anywhere near competitive scale/cost yet

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/12/2/22125518/lab-gr...

No. A randomly arranged amorphous mass of protein is not a drumstick. There is no bone, there is no skin, there is no cartilage, there is no connective tissue.

Would it not make sense to re-use the circulatory, filtration, energy production, digestive, and excretory systems that evolved over millions of years to locomote chicken flesh, rather than try to re-engineer these systems? Just ditch the brain. If there’s no sentience, what is the ethical difference between this and vat-grown synflesh?

A randomly arranged amorphous mass of protein is all I want from chicken.

I remove the bones anyway.

> Your comment about microorganisms is about 'where to draw the line' and your comment about 'tend to infinity' implies you like the 'appeal to extremes' form of argument.

I would say that's accurate. I think extremes can bring out honest positions in an argument. Where would you suggest we draw a line? How long should a chicken live before we decide to kill it?

We could do a lot worse than go with EU Regulation 889/2008 (i.e european definition of organic)

See Article 12 for poultry. There are details about how they should be kept, density, materials (e.g. straw or turf), lighting conditions, access to perches, access to outside space. Minimum age at slaughter is 81 days.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:...

I don't doubt it, but what is the source of this figure?

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/02/chart-of-the-day-this....

We can barely get people to care about their fellow man, I'm pessimistic about getting people to care about the genocide we commit towards animals on an hourly basis.

Edit: And for the record I'm vegan.

The population of beef cattle isn't going to go up if everyone stops eating steaks and hamburgers.

> the genocide we commit towards animals on an hourly basis

It's not genocide, by definition, if we have no desire to extinct the species.

Holocaust then?

Still not quite right; still centers on destruction being the intention. The problem, I think, is that you're reaching for the most emotionally-charged words when they don't actually fit. We don't hate animals; they just taste good. So it's just slaughter on an industrial scale.

No, holocaust can be used for slaughter on a large scale too, so it’s a completely accurate use of the term.

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