Hacker News Reader

Comment by justinmchase | Hacker News Reader

Another question is, if its banned to kill an animal for meat, for various animals, how long until they go extinct? Many are co-dependent on humanity for their survival at the species level... Or at the very least how will it affect their evolution?

View on HN

Domestic animals are already going extinct[1] as agriculture standardizes on the most profitable, most stable, or lowest maintenance breeds. Most domestic breeds wouldn't survive transition to wild living, survive by outcompeting native wildlife. That's why we don't have flocks of wild chickens roaming North America but there feral pigs are a menace.

Based on this, I would bet that our current domestic meat animals would go extinct relatively quickly. There are some people who try to preserve various breeds in what are essentially zoos, but I can't imagine them operating in perpetuity.

1: https://www.livestockconservancy.org/index.php/heritage/inte...

If humans only existed as mindless stock animals, bred for food, I'd prefer extinction. But I wouldn't care to make that choice on behalf of Bovideae Bovinae Bos taurus.

I would expect to see pockets of domesticated animals survive in captivity across the world for various non-meat purposes. Even if all captive breeding is banned, I would still expect allowances for governments or organizations to maintain breeding populations as a living reminder of where our civilization came from.

Right. I've seen some zoos that already have a little "farm" section showing off some local heritage livestock breeds. I'd expect that sort of thing to take right off if it started to look like there was real risk of extinctions.

It's a hard problem. I'd like to imagine factory meat will free up land for use as wild nature preserves, which are the only real way to, well, preserve nature.

But land has many other alternative uses. Until we value every one of those alternative uses less than we value preserving nature itself, we'll tend to use the land for something else.

Of course it depends on the land in question. Any land that is currently good for grazing and nothing should immediately be freed up once grazing stops being economical. Unfortunately, the land like that is not the most biodiverse -- it's rocky scrub, not forest -- but I'll be happy to see it added to the set of lands we don't want to mess with.

Good question. Another: How will the ranchland dedicated to their raising be used? In Montana, where the cows outnumber the people, the land they occupy is considered unfit for farming, largely because it’s not friendly for combines.

There’s also the whole infrastructure and supply chain dedicated to the breeding and raising of various meat sources. What will happen to them?

Seems fairly straightforward to predict, since this has happened dozens of times before as technology marched on: with no more business for them, they'll go bankrupt and the workers will eventually be assimilated into other professions. Maybe there will be a small remaining industry tending to hobbyists, similar to how horse shoeing and buggy whip manufacturing are very much a niche professions these days.

Have we had one of these "industry extinctions" in the last quarter century, particularly one at the scale of the meat industry?

Our economy and workplaces are significantly different from what they were when horses were replaced by cars.

Manufacturing and textiles, though they might have happened slightly more than 25 years ago.

> Our economy and workplaces are significantly different from what they were when horses were replaced by cars.

The 21st century isn't special and we weren't born a quarter century ago. The economy and our workplaces will continue to evolve, as they have since the beginning of time.

The 20th century may have been special. In a hundred years we went from riding horses to landing on the moon. If the 21st century is to advance on a similarly breathtaking scale we'll need some astounding changes -- immortality, say, or true AI.

About 27% of the world still works in agriculture, as of 2019 - the vast majority as subsistence farmers - down from 44% of the world as of 1990 [1]. That's over 200 million people that just began the transition from pre-industrial agriculture to a modern market based economy. Modern technology is so unevenly distributed that over two billion people are still fed without the benefit of industrialized farming.

I think you're vastly underestimating how much work there is left to do.

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.AGR.EMPL.ZS

Well, down from 80% farmers in the Middle Ages. So we've come a long way.

You're right. I was thinking about the technological frontier. In terms of improving the average or the floor, rather than the ceiling, we've got our work cut out.

Consumer film cameras are extinct as they have been replaced by digital. They are only carried by specialty stores now as people only use it as a hobby.

The fraction of the population employed in agriculture has continued to decline precipitously over the last few decades as automation technology improves, continuing the trend that began with the industrial revolution.

https://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture

The businesses will be shot down when they are no longer profitable. If the land has no other use it would seem obvious to convert it into parks or other wild preservations.

The big issue is the slaughterhouses, which would obviously die out but which also may be the only big employeer around, kinda like the steel mills used to be. The farms raising feed are not likely to employ a lot of people.

humans have kept dogs and cats and horses around even though many of them aren’t used for their original purposes anymore, so I’d be surprised if some sentimental folks didn’t keep a few cows or sheep or whatnot around just for fun.

Especially with cows, sheep and chickens, I suspect the market for their non-meat goods (milk, wool, eggs) will persist (perhaps in a progressively more artisanal market) for far longer than the killing-animals version of the meat industry.

I don't know about wool, but outside of artisanal situations the industry for milk and eggs is cruel from birth to death, not just at death.

For sure, my thinking is that those industries are likely to survive more in the "I have a coop with a dozen chickens in my back yard" sense.

> Many are co-dependent on humanity for their survival at the species level

Can you list them?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com