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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I know the thought of semi brainless cows all hooked up to some machine, Matrix-style, may seem like a horror show to many, but from my perspective, it's the ethical thing to do. The primary reason I try to cut down on eating meat is from an animal rights perspective - I just can't grok the cognitive dissonance it takes to ooh and ahh over the cute, "human-like" reactions of, say, a cow getting a backscratch on r/aww, while simultaneously munching down on a burger.

If I could eat meat from a creature that I knew felt no pain and basically had no higher emotions at all, I wouldn't have an ethical dilemma over it.

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I think we are not discussing ethics in depth enough in our soviety. What specifically is it that is unethical about the meat industry? Is it the way the cows are slaughtered? Is it that we take their life? Is it how they live their life? Can any of these arguments be made void from an ethical standpoint, if they are addressed somehow?

Since this discussion lead into brainless cows, why does that solve the ethics problem? Could it not be argued that it would be even more unethical to breed severly handicapped cows, without ability to experience the world?

Yes pretty much all of the above. Forcing a sentient being to live an existence that it didn't evolve for is extremely cruel. Even animals such as cows and chickens have social and emotional needs that were built into them in millions of years of evolution. A couple thousand years of domestication don't turn them into automata that can be treated as a product whose purpose it is to make our food taste a little better, but which we can easily find substitutes for.

> Forcing a sentient being to live an existence that it didn't evolve for is extremely cruel.

This seems like it would strongly apply to modern day humans living in an extremely complex, sedentary, large scale and atomized world. Much more so than cows even!

It does apply to modern day humans in some aspects and is a reason for a lot of misery and suffering in our world. Obviously I'm not saying that we have a lower quality of life than our hunter and gather ancestors, but a lot of the things that go against our evolutionary environment are the direct causes for much of our suffering. But going back to the actual argument, the the degree to which our lives differ from that we evolved in is obviously much smaller than for livestock.

Does that mean that domestication of animals always is wrong?

> Is it the way the cows are slaughtered? Is it that we take their life? Is it how they live their life?

Do cows have emotions and awareness of the world they live in?

It's hard enough to confirm whether other people have emotions and awareness of the world they live in, let alone cows...

Inspired by Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - breeding animals that want to be eaten is more ethical than killing animals that don't want to be eaten.

https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Ameglian_Major_Cow

> I just can't grok the cognitive dissonance it takes to ooh and ahh over the cute, "human-like" reactions of, say, a cow getting a backscratch on r/aww, while simultaneously munching down on a burger.

The person who eats a burger and then sends death threats to someone for killing a cat makes a good example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection

More on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology_of_eating_meat

Would you have a problem eating meat from a dna manipulated cow that essentially was born brain dead? (Mother isn't but the baby's dna is modified during pregnancy).

If yes because it was modified during pregnancy.

What about impregnation said cow with dna modified sperm.

The ethical problem I have with that scenario is that you'd basically have mother cows lined up, factory style, to give birth. Google "pig gestation crate" to get a sense for what that horror show is like.

Cows are mammals and we now do know that we, as mammals, share a common trait which is we love our children so much because it’s an evolutionary advantage for the survival of our species.

So in your scenario, either cows will suffer from giving birth to brain dead children, or at least, not different from today, because we take their children to get their milk.

Brain dead mothers would be ethically ok to me but … that’s really a really strange thought and I feel that there would be unknown issues like how could you know that your cow is sick like a full bag of bacterias if the cow is not showing suffer ?

What an a odd topic.

I just want to point out that modern cows produce milk long after the calf stops needing it.

Why stop there? Couldn't the mother be brain dead as well?

It's a dystopian idea - breeding zombie cows that aren't alive on a cognitive level - but you can draw parallels to abortions and pulling the plug on brain dead human patients. As a society we somewhat agree rationally that the lack of subjective experience or cognition renders most ethical concerns moot.

From an emotional/intuitive stand point it still grinds a few gears though. Would we be fine with growing brain dead humans for consumption?

Are you sure there is such distinction? (cognitive level ethics vs emotion)

As I see it, if there are no emotions/emphaty then field of ethics has no use.

There is a significant dissonance there for sure. For example, most people would say that some wars are justified ethically, yet they might change their mind completely if a family member is killed in one. Emotional impact can be a significant part of what you deem ethical. Yet you can't structure broad ethical "rule sets" based on subjective trauma or experience.

The relationship between rationality and emotions when it comes to ethics is really complex, and since it's in the realm of philosophy I don't think there are any clear cut answers.

> semi brainless cows ... it's the ethical thing to do

A second way to make it ethical in terms of animal suffering is to effectively start eating road kill. That is, you raise a farm of cows, treat them well, and eat them when they die naturally.

A third way is to raise a farm of cows, anaesthetise them via their food when they're old enough, and kill them in their sleep. It's more debatable than the above but I believe it's ethical as long as it's done right (which it won't be, in practice).

This all of course ignores GHG emissions and loss of biodiversity due to the need to produce large amounts of feed and large uses of land. But speaking strictly from the cow's perspective, I think it is ethical.

The meat would probably be disgusting.

> when they die naturally.

For many (most?) animals, predation or starvation is the "natural" way to die before actual old age would be an issue. Many suffer horribly towards actual old age death.

I think this is a children's tale disney style myth we've grown up with.

I would argue that slaughter is more "humane" if done right.

But significantly better to not breed animals for food to begin with, if there is an alternative. Even if the alternative costs significantly more.

Dying naturally (for basically anything we commonly consume as meat) if humans had never evolved, would be being eaten by a predator.

We're just much much better at predation than anything else.

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