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Comment by avg_dev | Hacker News Reader

What a load of rubbish.

1. Plant-based diets are good for the environment. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6316289/

2. Animals are sentient. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4494450/

3. The "thought experiment" is flawed. See https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/eating-meat-is-good-says-the... - good rebuttal here

Keeping animals alive in the worst possible conditions on the promise that "we'll do better!" just so the species don't die out is utterly ridiculous.

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Agreed, it's hard to imagine voluntarily embarrassing yourself in public as badly as the author has done here.

"When I went to college and met for the first time a good number of vegetarians and vegans, I used to blow their minds with this argument"

Indeed. That must have really been something. Well, he won't say anything to make us thinks he's positioning this in less than good faith, then?

"Honestly, fuck crabs"

Ok. but...

" but really octopuses are pretty horrible too. Oh, they’re smart, but, similar to crabs, they’re cannibals. They spend most of their time cavorting in a midden pile of prey bones."

Midden pile?

"If your cats were big enough, they’d eat you. Feline fillets are simply turnabout as fair play."

Cats?

"we should obviously be eating hyenas"

I'm done. Seriously, it's this guy https://as.tufts.edu/biology/people/faculty/erik-hoel ? what a waste of intellect.

The author says, in the introduction, "this entire essay is ridiculous." You are taking it much too seriously. It's all meant in a joking way just to explore some sillier ideas around animal ethics that may or may not have a kernel of value hidden in them.

Nothing about this article is embarrassing, unless you intentionally misconstrue the tone and intentions of the author.

The entire pieces is extremely embarrassing. It frames itself as ridiculous and then goes on to take itself entirely seriously. The author clearly thinks it is quite clever. I won't give it a pass.

The "one bad day" movement in the meat industry is a rounding error overall production It isn't that funny when 1) wild caught seafood is crushing wild populations of fish, cephalopods, and shellfish 2) nearly all meat is raised industrially and the livestock live in inhumane conditions 3) most animals are processed well before their first years.

The essay isn't provocative and cute, it is logically flawed and glaringly incomplete, which is the embarrassing part. The closest thing to a kernel of truth is at the end, when he talks about "one bad day" philosophy and he ruins that part by talking about eating only old animals, too (ignorance of what that means for farming ROI and also the impact of the taste/texture of the product).

This essay is a steaming pile from someone that is - based on their other accomplishments - clearly smart and capable of much better, and that pisses me off.

> Agreed, it's hard to imagine voluntarily embarrassing yourself in public as badly as the author has done here.

That's a common problem on Substack, it seems. Lots of people writing long "essays" on topics they don't quite understand, but think they do.

It's always easier to do mental gymnastics than it is to change one's lifestyle.

I agree, but that's kind of what we do to resolve moral cognitive dissonance all the time, with varying results. Personally it's something I really struggle with, and the questions usually boil down to whether I would be fine living my life wrongly, or if I'll give up enjoyment of my already sad life just to feel good about myself for being moral.

I just can't picture it. 9 hours a day in the office, then I come back home and I just want to hedonistically enjoy all that I can until I sleep. Of course I'm going to want to eat a big steak, watch porn, and listen to pirated music, morality be damned, and I know it makes me a bad person.

Meat substitutes taste great, you can still have that cheeseburger with something like beyond meat. Yes I'm biased but seriously give it a try. As for porn, I wouldn't even put it in the same ballpark as eating meat (if you're watching some free porn somewhere your contribution to the industry is negligent) , but anyways it might be overwhelming to try to change everything at once so I wouldn't even try. Pick one thing and commit to it. Maybe after that you'll pick another thing - and maybe not. None of us is perfect.

Not to mention we've bred many species beyond what nature would ever allow. Many broiler chickens can't support their own body weight.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

> At a mean age of 40 days, over 27.6% of birds in our study showed poor locomotion and 3.3% were almost unable to walk.

And keep in mind we're talking about 60 billion chickens annually.

https://www.humanesociety.org/news/super-size-problem-broile...

Matthias is arguing the metaphor. Which is a little fair in this case because the metaphor is the meat of the thing, but still, his response is basically "Ok, but imagine a completely different scenario. Isn't it different now?"

Not to mention he has a very, very low opinion of animals. Animals do engage in creativity and play. That we've been able to observe. We honestly don't know if they engage in philosophizing or other sorts of abstract thoughts because we don't speak dolphin. Matthias is basically basing his rebuttal on animals not being sentient. Or at the very least, minimally sentient.

So cows can't tell us if they'd rather go extinct or continue as they are. And I'd imagine that whatever way you formulate the thought, you'd find people who would prefer one or the other. If the people were only as aware as cows; if the people were as aware as normal but treated as cows; a third scenario I haven't thought of.

And there's the question of whether or not we have an obligation on how to treat them. If someone disagrees with that obligation, you have to get over that hump first. Kind of on their terms. Because if they believe we don't have an obligation because cows have hooves, you're not going to convince him that cows don't have hooves. You have to find out why hooves matter to him then find an argument along those lines. Arguing from the sentience of a cow isn't going to cut it. Arguing we have a moral imperative as the most abstract thinkers isn't going to cut it. You have got to argue hooves.

And if you can't do that because his position is so nonsensical there's no way to rationally argue against it, you have to accept he's just not going to understand.

If you're eating farmed plants, then there is a lot of environmental destruction and animal death/suffering behind that, too.

So why add the destruction and suffering caused by animal agriculture on top of that?

We also dramatically increase the amount of plants we need to grow by feeding so much grass and grain to live stock. We can reduce the footprint of eating plants and hurting animals by not farming livestock for meat at all. It would be a net win, even with the incidental damage done by farming vegetables/grains/etc.

That's a common and unimpressive argument around plant based diets. Short of suicide, is it a choice that causes the least possible harm? Surely it causes less suffering that farming all of those plants anyway, feeding them to other animals that take up more land and cause more pollution, and then killing those animals and eating them?

Animals eat farmed plants, and the amount of death/suffering required to produce the caloric equivalent is several orders of magnitude higher.

> Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.

— The Vegan Society, Definition of veganism

Emphasis mine.

That is certainly true, but livestock is often eating row crops. A significant chunk of soybean meal and corn goes to feed livestock [1] [2]. If those row crops were consumed directly by humans instead, it would require a lot less land. [3]

[1] https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/where_do_all_these_soybeans_go [2] https://www.iowacorn.org/corn-uses/ [3] https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-m...

You need more than just raw calories, though. How much plant food would it take to match this in terms of protein and B-vitamins?

https://imgur.com/a/8zzvcrq

So that's just 1 pound of beef.

You could get about 500 pounds of that raising a cow for a couple of years and slaughtering it.

What inputs would you need? Not too much, if you have grass, which a lot of the earth does. Let the cow graze, find it water. Optionally fatten it up at the end w/ some grain -- probably a better use than making ethanol out of it, at least.

We used to have millions of wild buffalo roaming North America. They were a dietary stable for many Native American tribes.

Were they really living in a less sustainable way than modern vegans picking up Impossible Burgers from Whole Foods?

Thank you. What drivel, my god.

2. I guess what you have meant is "self-aware" because to claim animals are sentient is to make this word meaningless.

How does the claim that animals are sentient make the word meaningless?

Then there's nobody who is not sentient, and we need a separate word for those who can, like, talk and use tools.

I have seen the word "sapient" used to delineate the ways in which humans seem to differ from most animals.

I expected that, but it's highly likely that Neanderthals and/or Habilis would also qualify as sentient (old definition), whereas it would be confusing to say that they are both "sapient".

Thanks, but I'm sticking with meat eating

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