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Comment by elif | Hacker News Reader

It's also curious that we feed an animal that laughs (cows) to an animal that doesn't laugh (cats) and somehow construct logic to justify it all morally.

I find myself in that weird cult, despite personally having an animal free diet for decades.

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I eat animals, and probably will for the rest of my life, but I do think it's one of those aspects of daily life that we'll look back on as extremely barbaric.

This is interesting! So you‘re extrapolating the reduction of babaricness that humanity expresses historically into the future and that the threshold will be so low that killing animals for food will be seen as one of the most babaric thing humans do by then. I think for this to happen we would need to shield us quite well from the inherent babaricness of nature. „Why should I not eat animals, if lions are doing it everyday?!“ on the other hand we also got better in shielding us from reality in form of video games, netflix etc. On the flipside these virtual worlds are often excessively babaric, e.g. horror movies or shooter games. So in the end it is not so obvious to me that we will see eating animals as babaric. Maybe we will rather view it as very inefficient and primitive instead?

> the threshold will be so low

To take one "small" example, 7 billion male[0] chicks a year are put into a "macerator", aka "chick grinding machine". 7 billion. I don't think it takes a very "low threshold" to find this barbaric, just look at it and think about it. If that's not "barbaric" (whatever that means exactly), I'm not sure what would be.

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

> So in the end it is not so obvious to me that we will see eating animals as babaric

Many people already do, and have for many years.

[0] "the males of egg-laying chickens are killed as soon as possible after hatching and sexing to reduce financial losses incurred by the breeder."

As soon as we learn how to cultivate some good quality meat in-vitro, we will stop killing animals and start to pretend to be different from the barbaric previous generations.

That's what people do in every ethical aspect, we circumvent it and pretend it's easy to solve, and then criticize the people that can't circumvent it due to some environmental issue. When that people is on the past, there isn't even a problem with this.

"As soon as we learn how to cultivate some good quality meat in-vitro, we will stop killing animals and start to pretend to be different from the barbaric previous generations."

In the very long term maybe. But even if cheap, good quality artifixial meat becomes avaiable by tomorrow - killing animals for meat simply out of tradition - will go on a long time.

Sure, but that's the case with all traditions. Plenty of things that westerners see as barbaric (slavery, ritual genital mutilation, institutionalized torture) are still common in the developed world (and often openly endorsed by western governments).

Edit to add: The bigger picture is that for a set of practices, even if they still occur on a smaller scale than in the past, that's probably strictly an improvement.

As a circumcised male who is disappointed that Guantanamo bay is still holding prisoners I’d suggest that the west still does many of the things you mentioned.

I have come to accept this as well.

I try to use the “Alt meat” Version or fish when possible though to reduce meat consumption. But I’m incapable of giving it up altogether at this point.

I do find the alt - meat to be good enough for cooked meat though; I think there is a huge market here.

Same here, in some ways I regard myself as a pre-abolition slave owner/user (analogy breaks down somewhat, is it the farmer who is the slave owner?). I get the feeling society will change and this thing that used to be common will slide towards being seen as despicable, worthy of having your statue thrown in the water.

Originally I was reducing my meat intake for health reasons but thinking about it more and more it does seem to be a cruel thing to kill animals for meat, and doesn't seem necessary. I still do it at a reduced rate because I'm basically not strong willed enough and I want to be part of society, which has very few qualms about raising animals for slaughter. I also can't deny the stuff tastes good, and one thing I've seen with addictive traits is it's very hard to separate your desires from your moral judgement: if you want something, you will think of an excuse to get it. So now I just acknowledge the hypocrisy and eat a bit of meat now and again.

One loophole I thought about was wild animals. Maybe someone has thought about this more than me, but wild fish and roaming animals would be condemned to either predation, disease, or starvation if we didn't hunt them. Does that change the moral calculus? I'm not sure.

In regards to your loophole I’m reminded of the pretty famous Yellowstone study that showed when wolves are not artificially reduced by hunting their entire environment stabilized. Or is your loophole inferring that animals should be hunted so they can avoid their natural fate? Knowing that animals run away from their hunter I would think their natural fate is preferable to the animal than getting shot and killed.

Of course in the moment they don't want to be killed, but they are going to get killed either by the hunter or a predator.

I guess what I mean is that (in short), animals that are bred to be eaten didn't have to exist in the first place, we are literally creating them and making them suffer, both in life and in death. So we're creating suffering out of nothing.

Animals that live in the wild are gonna meet a bad end regardless, so how much are we creating that suffering?

Who are you (or anyone) to say how a wild animal’s end should be? If animals are anything like humans (also an animal), they would most likely want to live as long as possible and prefer a natural death over a shortened human-caused death.

Any creation of life is creating suffering. The first Noble Truth of Buddhism is that there is suffering. Accepting that truth the rational action would be to minimize the suffering. Factory farms cause suffering to its inhabitants everyday, much more than the suffering caused from being born. Watch Earthlings [1] to learn about how animals at farms get treated.

[1] https://vimeo.com/209647801?embedded=true&source=vimeo_logo&...

That's actually where I started thinking this way. My point was a side point though, I had already addressed the farm animals.

The only barbaric thing about it imho is the scale and way we do it, not the process of eating meat in itself. There is a big difference between eating 300gr of cheap meat from a shady slaughterhouse every day vs once in a week piece of meat hunted by a local friend.

But that's capitalism for you, we basically have meat factories now, we have to make it cheap and in mass quantities no matter the "moral" aspect of it

After 14 years of eating a plant-based diet my partner got a cat. Then I started buying the cat raw meat. Shortly after I became an omnivore again. I still try to minimize meat for my own health and the climate, but it’s hard to argue about the ethics of meat eating while feeding an obligate carnivore.

That's my main argument against flexitarianism. You can't be "kinda vegan" without leaving your brain in permanent stress due to dissonance. It's part of what stops me from adopting an animal, specially a cat.

> You can't be "kinda vegan" without leaving your brain in permanent stress due to dissonance.

To be honest, a lot of meat still tastes kind of gross to me. Give me fried tofu over baked chicken in a salad. Heck if I’m just having a a boring burger for a random lunch on a Tuesday, give me an Impossible patty over some crappy fast food beef.

That said if there’s a dish that’s enhanced by meat (say a Wagyu steak or a pastrami sandwich) then sure, I’ll eat that a few times a week.

At least so far, this hasn’t caused me any stress.

I tried impossible beef for the first time a couple of weeks ago. It's nothing like real beef. It sorta passes for a meat-colored component in something like lasagna, but the texture and taste is not the same.

If you follow the links through to the original paper --

https://gabryant.scholar.ss.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/site...

-- you'll see that a variety of felines (including domestic cats) are among the species listed as having play vocalizations.

I've never heard of "can it laugh" as a criteria to judge morality?

OP is suggesting that laughter is a measure of intelligence, and that it might be immoral to feed a more aware/intelligent creature to a lesser one.

In the same way we might be uncomfortable eating dolphins.

We keep cats, cause they are small and fun to be around. Not because they laugh or have high IQ.

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