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Comment by Lhiw | Hacker News Reader

As a vegan how do you reconcile the thousands of insects and field animals that get culled during harvesting those lentils?

I don't really have a problem with vegetarians but I do struggle to understand the lines they seemingly draw at random.

Minimising harm should be a given for all but that doesn't rule out all meat eating that veganism somehow does.

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Eating farm animals requires you to grow 9 times as many crops to feed them as if you had just eaten the crops directly, since only about 9% of the food they eat is converted into edible flesh.

So even if you take this argument seriously, the insects and field animals are better off if you grow fewer crops, which you accomplish by directly eating the crops you grow, not feeding them to livestock.

But you get 10 times the nutrition density from animal protein.

That sort of claim is going to require some numbers for what you define as "nutrition density". Picking at random 100g of steak vs 100g of kidney beans you get more calories, equal protein, far more potassium, vitamin c, iron, vitamin b, calcium, and magnesium from the beans. I enjoy a good steak too, but I know it's a luxury.

>Eating farm animals requires you to grow 9 times as many crops to feed them as if you had just eaten the crops directly

This applies to industrial meat production. Do your thoughts change in regards to hunting/fishing which doesn't (necessarily*) rely on industrial crop agriculture?

(I realize a lot of species population numbers - especially deer in the Midwest - are inflated due to the availability of crops for them to feed upon. But there are other species where this isn't necessarily the case.)

Yes, I'd say hunting and fishing don't have this problem. I have other ethical issues with eating animals, but hunting wildlife is orders of magnitude better than industrial agriculture.

> Minimising harm should be a given for all but that doesn't rule out all meat eating that veganism somehow does.

I'm not a vegan but from my perspective if minimizing harm is your goal then veganism is the only valid choice.

Any meat consumption will unquestionably increase the misery and pain the consumed animals had. Both while alive and at their final end. You're lying to yourself if you cannot admit to that.

Your argument wrt the insects and land animals is super strange too... What do you think the animals are going to eat until they're butchered? Love and good feelings?

In my opnion focusing on ethical farming is more promising (under an utilitarian perspective).

If the focus is to reduce suffering and exploitation of animals the best action is to ban the most cruel practices by law pushing stricter ethical standards.

People will continue to eat meat everywhere they can afford it (maybe less, maybe more) veganism is not going to change that.

People love to ask me this. One guy said deer are being run over by tractors so as a vegan I’m killing deer.

I don’t really see how only eating plants is a random line. As I said in my original comment living in an industrialized society includes some amount of harming animals (for example carbon dioxide emissions harm animals).

I’m actually designing a solar powered farming robot for regenerative agriculture so we don’t have to use harmful chemicals to do farming.

But in my mind there is a clear distinction between accidentally harming insects while harvesting lentils and intentionally breeding animals in cages for slaughter.

If you think that line is arbitrary and you can’t understand it, I’m not sure I can help.

I can't speak for the person you're replying to, but some people adhere to a consequentialist worldview, where intent does not matter (or matters relatively little). It's the same outlook that creates the need for good Samaritan laws. I don't agree with it in whole form, but it should be recognized as a valid philosophical framework.

I understand that, but I have a hard time believing a vegan diet could possibly harm animals more than an omnivore diet. Like it just sound so absurd and I run in to a lot of people online that just seem to want to bullshit themselves about veganism for some reason. Like the guy that said I was killing deer by eating only plants because it means more tractors and tractors can run over deer… that seems to me to be a shoddy leap of logic, not a genuine point I should consider.

>bullshit themselves about veganism for some reason

I think this is also the most likely reason because humans try to rationalize cognitive dissonance. But in the nature of the HN guidelines to try and take the strongest possible interpretation of someone's comments, I'll try to reframe it.

Suppose someone has a foundational principle that all animal life is sacred. Also suppose that person is a consequentialist. Following the first point, the life of an insect is every bit as valuable as the life of an elk*. It's easily conceivable to me that farming, in the current form that most of use get our food, kills many more animal lives per calorie than eating the elk. If one is a consequentialist, it doesn't matter if there was the specific intent to kill those thousands of insects (and fawns, and fish from runoff etc.), it only matters that my choice led to their deaths. Compare that to the hunting of the elk, where it's conceivable that only one life was lost. From that perspective, a vegetarian/vegan diet could be considered more detrimental to animal life.

(I specifically chose elk to avoid the complication of how much farming goes into livestock feed, but hopefully you understood the point)

If you're like me and don't necessarily agree with the above framework, it still highlights that most of us have unarticulated assumptions that may not hold as we go about our daily choices. E.g., even if people claim that they think all animal life is sacred, their actions display an assumption of a hierarchy to that value.

I don't know if this is helpful, but this 2003 research estimates about 6 animal deaths per acre of agricultural harvest, or about 7.3 million animals.[1] That puts it about on par with industrial animal consumption. But granted it seems much more difficult to have accurate estimates.

I think part of the problem is that most people in industrialized economies are extremely far removed from the food supply. I don't think it's super common, but also not unheard of for deer (especially fawns) to be killed by harvesting machinery as they bed down in fields. Considering hunting a deer may yield 60-70 lbs of meat, it might be possible to claim that reduces total animal deaths. Now I don't know how you'd arrive at a final number because most people are omnivores and still eat plants, but I don't know if I'd immediately dismiss their claim as absurd.

I see from your profile that you work in the farming machinery business so I'd be curious if there are any specific mitigations you would consider to alleviate this problem?

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10806-018-9733-8

Funfact you didn't want to know today:

Figs are technically not vegan (nor vegetarian) as during the (highly complex) pollination process some fig-wasps have a wild time in the fruit, where eventually some of the wasps die and get absorbed by the fruit.

The wasp is completely digested. You're no more eating a wasp when eating a fig, than you are eating grass when eating beef.

Hmm ... how does that work? We are obviously not eating cow stomach when eating a steak?

Hmmm...I see you've never had menudo or haggis :-)

(Yes, I know tripe is not really stomach.)

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