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Comment by happytoexplain | Hacker News Reader

Regarding the comment in the article about the relative quality of life in the wild vs life in various farming conditions: Surely that's irrelevant, as farmed animals would not exist - in the wild or elsewhere - if they were not farmed.

Edit: Note that this is not an opinion about farming, since some farms offer arguably better lives than in the wild, while others offer arguably worse lives.

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The "humane" argument is flawed because in the end - factory or pasture - the animal is killed. Live a happy life and be slaughtered or a miserable life and be slaughtered.

What is the argument you're referring to, and how is it flawed due to the fact that factory-raised and pasture-raised animals are both killed, regardless of the nature of their killing and the nature of their lives?

The argument is that pasture raised cows is better than factory farmed cows. I am saying that in both cases the cows die.

Can you stomach eating fruits and vegetables from an industrialized farm knowing that more animals died to make your salad compared to my steak? Or are certain animals lives worth more than others?

"crop deaths tho" is not a stable argument. Eating meat requires death. But there are ways to avoid killing animals when harvesting grains etc. And in any case, it's a very inflated view - you're still killing more animals by eating meat than you are by not.

> you're still killing more animals by eating meat than you are by not

Pure conjecture. All numbers I've seen show a higher quantity of deaths from crop farming per calorie.

I've seen this thoroughly debunked several times. What "numbers" are you alluding to? The most commonly cited number I've seen from a 2003 study is 7.3 billion crop deaths per year, which experts seem to agree is likely a large overestimate. Even if that were the case, that puts crop deaths at an order of magnitude smaller than the number of _land_ animals slaughtered every year; that number is further dwarfed if we included aquatic animals.

Additionally, the crops where some of the highest number of field deaths are encountered (such as soy and corn) are also primarily as animal feed.

So no. Vegans do not kill more animals.

Furthermore, most meat eaters additionally eat plants too, and the animals they eat also usually are eating industrially farmed plants, which really makes the crop deaths argument silly.

Farm animals are fed primarily crop byproduct that you can't digest and grass.

So what? If your argument is absolute number of deaths because of crop deaths, those crops would still be killing animals and thus it's still more than not eating meat.

Wave your hand, call it debunked and then pretend that we grow far more surplus crops to feed animals than we would need to of everyone switched to your disease riddled cult diet.

Feel free to cite something in defense of your argument.

You've already seen sources and are even able to cite estimates. Why would I waste time linking to something that will never change your opinion?

Yes, and the sources and estimates I've referenced disagreed with you. I'm completely willing to change my opinion, but you've presented nothing substantive so far.

What you bring up is an interesting topic, and you should try to increase the explicit information and reduce the hostility.

So the slaves would not exist and would not be born if not for the slavers. Sounds legit.

Farmed animals are bred in extreme quantities over uncountable generations. There is obviously an argument for the original ancestor generations of farmed animals as to whether their lives would have been better if we did not farm them (and another, different argument for the current generation, if we decide to stop farming and have the choice of slaughtering them as normal or freeing them), but as we produced their descendants, that quickly became morally irrelevant as an argument for either side. E.g. it doesn't make sense to defend the concept of animal farming by saying that they are better off on a farm than in the wild if the ratio of the farmed population that would have been born otherwise is close to zero. So the question the cited person should have been thinking about is instead: Is it better to be farmed or to not exist? Since your sarcasm indicates a combative emotion, I'll let you know that I think the answer is obviously "to not exist" in the case of factory farms, but my moral opinion on the topic isn't what I was writing about.

I'm not a combative, I've just tried to put the things in a more relatable perspective.

It is easy for persons with power (over other people or animals) to justify why the exercise of power is justified or moral. But if we would try to imagine ourselves in their shoes or hooves and being subjugated for extreme exploitation, than that could open a door for a bit of empathy at least.

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