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Comment by codefreeordie | Hacker News Reader

[citation needed] on "sentient". Insofar as that word actually has a concrete, specific meaning, it does not seem to apply to any of the animals we're discussing.

But regardless, it has always seemed weird to me that our society applies such radically different moral standards to the treatment of livestock versus the treatment of pets, and how that even varies from creature to creature. Leather is fine, but fur is "murder" and killing cats/dogs is actually a crime.

I think that they take the argument the wrong direction, but at least the fully vegan no-animal-products-in-my-life folks are being consistent.

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Sentience as in "the capacity to experience feelings and sensations": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience. I don't want to be too philosophical, just consider that both chickens and cats will complain if you poke them with a stick. I'm allowing for something like cricket powder.

I think we agree about pets. Many people treat pets like people but when it comes down to it, they're not, and people won't treat them that way when it counts. Most people won't starve their family to pay for medical care for a pet. The pretense bothers me and feels hypocritical to an animal that trusts its owner so much.

I'm vegetarian in a one-animal-at-a-time sense. I sometimes think of it in terms of killing squirrels, since I see a lot of squirrels every day. For every burger you eat, imagine you have to go out and stomp a squirrel to death. I don't particularly care about squirrels but doing that would be pretty gross and traumatic, so if it's all the same I'll just eat some beans. The benefit to the environment is similarly incremental.

Sometimes I think that those who want humanity to be forced to return to subsistence farming should get their way.

They'd learn so much about what life actually is.

But I don't actually want to live in that world, because I know enough to hope it never returns.

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