Hacker News Reader

I’ve heard this called the “one bad day” approach. The animals have a good life with only one bad day. In my opinion it’s probably the most ethical way to keep animals if the intent is to slaughter them at some point.

A non-obvious issue here is that often these animals are sent to slaughter around 12-24 months when they can live happily up to 25 years.

without farming they cease to exist at all...

So 0 bad days.

NaN bad days.

One way to think about it – Imagine a superior alien civilization farming humans and killing them for food at 12-24 months. Does that feel acceptable?

a more equal comparison would be an adolescence to mature human... So 12-18 years? Food, shelter & protection provided? Blissfully unaware of my predetermined fate?

And if they don't eat me, I never exist in the first place?

I'd opt to be eaten.

Just seems like the aliens would be better off eating cows...

I’m not a vegetarian and I still really hate that “if I wasn’t farmed I wouldn’t exist at all” argument because it’s really just an excuse to be shitty to other life forms.

The fact is if you didn’t exist then you wouldn’t care either way, so it’s a moot argument. The fact that you do exist changes that, not excuses it. Or in other words: we are not doing other species a favour by eating them.

It’s also worth noting that many of the species we far isn’t the natural evolution of that animal. They’ve been bread to be fatter, or more docile etc. Many of the species suffer from health issues due to breeding that their natural cousins do not. The reason a lot of these animals seem suited to farming is because man has bread them that way. This isn’t doing these animals a favour either. It’s purely for man’s own benefit.

If farming result in the existence of happy animals then the process definitely favors them. If it results in their unhappy existence then it does not favor them.

The argument around doing them the favor of providing them existence relies on them having a nice life, until the day we eat them. It sounds like you are opposed to them coming into existence because it means they exist in existential agony.

Also that physical agony is a near certainty, by your last paragraph. But that does not seem to be the core of your objection.

When done responsibly, it's pretty clear ranch cattle are in the same or less physical agony as their counter parts. Where I live, it's not uncommon to see wild elk, antelope and sometimes even bison grazing alongside cattle. The wild ones must fend off predators and often starve during the winters. Cattle do not.

The same cannot be said for industrial scale ranching. In fact, I think the production of dairy is typically far more more inhumane than that of beef.

> It sounds like you are opposed to them coming into existence because it means they exist in existential agony.

No, I’m opposed to stupid arguments where you justify being a carnivore because you’re somehow doing these creatures a favour by farming them. You’re not. If you’re going to eat meat, and I have zero issues with being a carnivore, then you have to reconcile the fact that what you’re doing is immoral for the animals but you’re doing it for your own personal survival. At least call a spade a spade rather than creating these stupid mental paradoxes where you’re the hero for breeding docile animals and then cooking their flesh.

It’s all about taking responsibility for your actions and respecting the consequences they have.

But as I pointed out, it's not a stupid argument if the animals are provided with a nice life until they serve their delicious end. It's a win-win if they are treated with care.

>a more equal comparison would be an adolescence to mature human... So 12-18 years? Food, shelter & protection provided? Blissfully unaware of my predetermined fate?

So basically the plot of the Never Let Me Go. Except you can't really get the blissfully unaware of my predetermined fate thing if the organisms are intelligent.

Also similar to The Promised Neverland.

If they were never born, is that really so bad?

Are you ok with Cows becoming extinct?

Being farmed or being extinct are not the only two choices

Yes. If your never born, you can’t suffer.

Do they actually live 25 years in the wild on average? My understanding was that wild animals have dramatically shorter lives than the same animals in captivity, as a general rule. The exact difference varies from species to species but typically the lifespan would be around half.

source of that general rule?

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/286147

The general rule was my own synthesis from what little I know of this subject. This study is one of the main sources I used to drive my current understanding. You can also try this search term: "do wild animals die of old age?"

Whether a wolf would kill a cow before its 25 years old doesn’t affect our moral duty to not kill animals unnecessarily and prematurely.

Perhaps not under your preferred moral system. But yours is not the only moral system. It should be obvious that there are plenty of moral systems where counterfactuals do indeed affect the morality of actions (e.g. any utilitarian system or compound system with a utilitarian component).

What moral belief system posits that it is moral to do something simply because someone else would do it?

Does anyone actual subscribe to such a belief? Do you?

I think you're reading me more broadly than I meant you to. As I mentioned in my comment, at a minimum, any utilitarian system would consider an action's morality in light of what would happen in the absence of that action. Yes, people absolutely do subscribe to utilitarian systems, at least as a component of their overall moral stance.

There are also of course many moral systems that do not value the welfare of other species as highly as that of humans.

We generally don't kill animals "unnecessarily". We kill them to eat them. If we could eat them without killing them, we wouldn't kill them.

We also don't kill them "prematurely". We kill them when it's time to eat them, or else to relieve them of pain.

Also, since we're onto wolves, wolves will kill animals and not eat them (see "surplus killing" article on wikipedia). Conversely, wolves will often eat animals without killing them first. Humans at the very least kill our food before we eat it most of the time.

Is eating them 'necessary' if we can sustain ourselves without killing them?

I don't know. Is it necessary to shower if you can sustain yourself without it?

I'm asking because your comment is about the meaning of the word "necessary" but the same meaning should apply to every other human activity, not just food. But the discussion about necessity crops up about food, in particular.

Also, I understand that the comparison to showers might sound irrelevant to the discussion about the ethics of eating meat, but it turns out it is anything but. I don't want to preempt your opinion, so I'll leave it at that, but I'm not just making a glib riposte to your comment. Despite appearances, this is an important question: how necessary is it to shower?

When we say that it is unnecessary to eat animals, we mean it is unnecessary in order to survive and be healthy.

So then using that same metric to answer your question about showers, I think it’s fair to say that showers are absolutely not necessary. Nice, sure. Perhaps necessary according to social norms, probably. Required for a normal life span with average levels of health? Nah.

cheese_goddess, if I ever get you to see the validity of veganism, or at least cede a point, I’ll die a happy person. I don’t see that ever happening though. You are my HN veganism white whale.

> cheese_goddess, if I ever get you to see the validity of veganism, or at least cede a point, I’ll die a happy person. I don’t see that ever happening though. You are my HN veganism white whale.

That's creepy stalker behavior - again.

lmao you truly are insane

It’s not an issue to the animals. They aren’t made aware of their impending death and made to ponder what more of a life they could have lived. From their perspective they are alive and then suddenly, not.

I wish I could still believe that.

If you have the time and stomach I'd recommend search up slaughterhouse footage. I'll let you judge for yourself what they're feeling in those moment.

If it can be proved that it really would be just one bad day, e.g. if the animals don't figure out that their friends are disappearing one by one and the same is about to happen to them any day.

Clearly the burden of proof is not on the animals.

In a way, it applies to dogs too. I have the privilege of giving my dog a way out of pain: I can put them down. That decision rests with me, and ultimately, one day, I will have to make it. I may choose every day to feed my dog the best diet I can afford, I'll give her massages, I'll snuggle her, care for her when she's sick, but ultimately, one day, I know I will have the choice to spare her the pain of dying a painful death. In some ways, I'm jealous of that choice, as a man who has faced his own mortality before.

One of my great regrets in life so far is shirking that responsibility and selfishly allowing a dog to last too long. I’ve learned from it and since had to make that decision again and actually made a decision this time but the guilt remains. It’s a dreadful responsibility.

While I don't know you or your dog - imagine for a moment if you could talk to your dog one last time and tell them the regret you feel. Do you think they would want you to regret the end, or remember all the love before that day?

In all my experience with dogs (and animals in general), one of the many lessons they have taught me is forgiveness. Both of others and myself.

You made a decision to give that animal the best life you could.

Note the "you could" part.

You did the best you could, and you obviously learned from your mistakes. Don't be hard on yourself, that's everyone else's job and they don't need the help.

> allowing a dog to last too long

I felt this way with the first dog I raised outside of my parents house. Things were slow but fast. One day I found a boil on her neck, rushed her to the hospital only to walk out with no answers a mountain of bills. I spent months seeking more answers with new testing. She was still the same old dog, playing with my other dog constantly. She'd do silly things, demand walks and pets, and stomp/parade around the house with her toys. I begged every night that she make it to her tenth birthday. She did, then shortly after her birthday she'd struggle to eat for days at a time and was acting sleepy. On the third day I brought her to the vet and did the deed.

It still hurts remembering her sleepily lay in my lap one last time and watching the life quietly slip away. That was the life I nurtured and the life that guided me to be more of a man every day. A life that demanded evolution and growth out of me in the most compassionate way possible. The vet felt her stomach and said, "Her liver is covered in tumors. You did the right thing." Then I began to reflect; had I been selfish? When I found the boil, was that when I should've done it? What about after all the testing? What about when she'd protest her food for a day? Two? Inevitably, I decided somehow the magical number was three.

The only thing that gives me solace is that I consulted the vet constantly on when was the right time. She'd never directly answered me; that choice was mine, a choice I absolutely feared. The advice that sticks out was, "When the dog you know stops being the dog you know." I know in my life I'll have to do this again and I don't think it'll ever get any easier. There's no right answers to this intersection of life, only wrong and less wrong ones. Love is a very tricky thing, especially with a friend that can't say much.

I have had to put 2 pets down due to illness. It was hard to do, and seeing them struggling not to fall asleep was heartbreaking.

In just about every way possible that death is a world apart from what we do to most animals we eat. What we have deemed "humane" slaughter is really nothing else than an attempt to make the word humane devoid of all meaning. I stopped eating meat after seeing how a cow and some pigs from the local organic farm (held as a poster child by the meat industry in my country) were slaughtered.

They were afraid from the first second. The pigs lost consciousness while grasping for air in panic in a co2 gas chamber.

It was awful and nothing short of a disgrace.

New laws and policies promoted by the meat industry has now made inquisitions like mine impossible. All of this happens behind closed doors. I will never trust the industry to fix this. They will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into treating animals with respect.

It's such a disgrace they use CO2. The one gas that the body can detect and percieve as danger and do anything to avoid and get rid of. They use it only because it's cheap.

They could have used argon, helium, maybe even nitrogen. Anything else that can lower oxygen concentration without the body noticing bacause it doesn't detect low oxygen levels, just high CO2 levels when you suffocate.

The jury is still out which gas is the best. I hope it'll be resolved before it's my time to go.

I stopped eating any animal products after that ordeal and realized I don't need to. There are so many problems with the meat industry anyway, so I am pretty much relieved to not have to think about it.

We will look back with astonishment at the sheer madness of killing animals and eating them.

Doesn't it make you want to go back in time to the moment that humans invented the concept of eating animal flesh and putting a stop to it?

No. Because our brains would never have evolved to their current state without meat, and the early animal meat was probably scavenged not hunted. At least wait until agriculture developed to start the ethical debate.

Humans didn't "invent" the concept of eating other animals. We evolved to do so, just like all the other carnivores & omnivores

As another poster has already said, becoming predators was an absolutely necessary stage for humans to become as intelligent as they are now, so we cannot regret it or wish that it has not happened.

Even many of the people who abhor the most to see the death of other animals cannot abstain to admire the beauty of the actions of top predators like tigers/jaguars or octopuses.

Nevertheless, now we are approaching quickly the moment when killing other animals in order to use their body for food or for producing various useful substances is no longer needed, so we should stop this as soon as it becomes possible.

Unfortunately we still need some technological developments for this to become feasible everywhere.

I would like to be completely vegan, but for now there still exist 2 food ingredients of animal origin that I consume, because any equivalent vegan alternatives for them are much more expensive than I can afford.

However, the bulk of the food, which provides most of the energy, can already be restricted to non-animal origins, for everyone, everywhere.

No, we definitely won't.

But we did finally realize that other races aren't inferior. And that women are equals. So I have hope, that some day we would stop taking their lives just for having a good time. Killing them isn't essential for our survival, or even health.

Who are you speaking on behalf of when you say "our"?

The species, obviously

Not to be overly argumentative, but what a small world view you seem to have. The world certainly doesn't realize that other races aren't inferior and that women are equals. Sorry =[

Why not? We'll move on to better things and eating corpses will be just gross.

It would be too gross even today for many people if there weren't any people with stronger stomachs around to prepare and partition corpses for them.

There is not a single area in food production that future us won't look back with astonishment at the sheer madness. The amount of destruction and suffering that regular farming does with pesticides, herbicide, fertilizers, deforestation, water and air pollution is on a planet scale. It insane how much destruction we do just so a few people has the luxury to eat a few culturally selected fresh vegetables year round while still living in cities (and also throwing away most of the food). Most of the worlds biodiversity in insects are gone, as well as most of the world fresh water supplies and forests. Complete oceans, like the Baltic ocean, have been turned into a death trap for animals as a result of fertilizers, slowly killing fish and other animals through suffocation or starvation.

Here is hope that the future realize that the only ethical way to produce food is through methods that neither require land, fertilizers or fresh water. This is also the only way forward if the worlds populations will continue to increase.

Even still, your cows live a fraction of their natural lifespans. A few years as opposed to 10+

I know you mean lifespan if left to die of natural causes, but To be honest the “natural lifespan” of a cow is 0 years and the average life of a cow is a picnic compared to the hardships faced by a comparable natural animal in the wild.

Edit: clarified distinction in understood meaning.

Is it really ‘free clean shelter’ and ‘free hay’ if, in exchange, their flesh is being harvested at some point? I applaud your efforts for humane animal consumption and I’m shamefully nowhere near your commitment. But I just took issue with the small problem in the mental model.

"Free clean shelter and hay" are the mental model of the cow.

Don't they mind having their kids taken away from them though?

That is one of the saddest parts, and one that a lot of people ignore.

> does living a farm style life cause them undue distress and harm, and will they realize they are on a farm instead of just some weird octopus community.

Why even take the chance then, other than to show greed and a lack of empathy?

How long do your cows live before they are sent to slaughter?

Does that work for, for example, veal or lamb?

Once head transplant works we will have this dilemma for human clones as shown in “Island” movie.

Octos aren't social creatures.

It varies, several species have been found to be social.

can you really compare cows to octopuses? are there even wild cows?

The wild ancestor of cows is extinct, so technically they would all be feral cows, but there are places where feral cows have ran around for a few generations alone that you might consider wild.

However their extensive past breeding still brings into question their actual intelligence and cognitive abilities compared to their wild ancestor, most animals inadvertently are bred to be significantly dumber during domestication because they are the easiest to handle and control.

there are wild goats, and the goats on a farm live pretty much the same life as cows do.

Where I am in Vanuatu in the south Pacific we have wild cows in the bush. Originally, these cows would have been domestic but escaped and they raise their young in the bush and now people hunt wild cows. Cows are usually kept by a rope around their neck tied to a tree and every couple days move the cow to a new area to let them access fresh vegetation. There are also some big plantations for coconuts and these usually have cows which if they break a fence will allow many to escape into the bush and hills.

People here use a dozen or so dogs to sniff out wild animals in the bush and chase them down until they tire enough for the hunters to catch up and spear the animal. These hunting parties can take days of hanging out and following the dogs or just one if lucky. Then carrying home giant cuts of meat is the hard part which often requires the hunting party to leave a lot of fresh meat behind.

I didn’t know Vanuatu was actually that big. It looks like just that thin strip of land on the map.

BTW, I just find it fascinating to be talking to someone from Vanuatu here. HN rocks.

I think the gaur is a legitimately "wild cow" (wild bovine anyway):

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

I don't think it's a feral breed, coming from once domesticated animals, but I may be wrong.