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Comment by matrix_overload | Hacker News Reader

For context, the life of an average herbivore in the wild consists of living with no shelter in harsh weather while having to fear every sound. And it typically ends by being ripped to pieces by a predator and eaten alive while the brain still has some residual oxygen and awareness.

The typical farmed animal experience where you are sheltered, vaccinated against common illnesses, provided food and slaughtered after being knocked out with electricity is surely boring, but hardly encompasses more suffering.

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I'm not sure I buy your argument. For example, pigs have an average lifespan of 15-20 years but in a farm setting are slaughtered at 6 months old. Also I suspect a pig is more adapted to its natural environment than living in a confined shelter (often less than a square metre). In fact, in the UK, less than 1 in 20 pigs are allowed to go outside - hardly a good life! This is just pigs.

This visualisation was an eye opener. https://justone.earth/food/

Perhaps an individual animal suffering is less compared to a wild death, but the sheer volume has to count for something.

After a cursory glance it would appear the we could reduce animal suffering by focusing on eating the larger animals that produce more food. The idea being, eat the big ones, feed more people, kill less animals.

I'm not entirely serious about this. But I'm curious where the logical flaw is.

The logical flaw is in feed ratios. More feed required to produce less edible mass, therefore more land, water, resources, etc used. Feed production is also typically monoculture in the US. Chickens are actually some of the most efficient animals in this regard: https://awellfedworld.org/feed-ratios/

It's a neat visualization, but it's really missing a domain. They present the counts over time, and nothing else.

There are ~8 billion people living. While some are starving, most of us are eating every day, if not several times per day.

If we assume the average person is eating 2 meals per day, that means 5,840 billion meals per year, or ~185,185 meals per second.

I saw an Oregon Field Guide that said between cougars, wolves, and bears, the predation/death rate for deer fawns in NE Oregon is something over 90%. I don't know about wild pigs, per se, but I don't think it's appropriate to presume they'd live so long. Many would die soon after birth. As for their conditions, many livestock we consume are raised in relatively natural conditions (e.g., cattle run on arid ground in eastern Oregon). Their lives are certainly shorter than maybe they could be, but see my first comment.

Regardless of how one would like to spin it, industrial scale animal production means farming animals with the intent to match market prices or you go out of business. That means the production goes by the minimal animal welfare required by law.

Whether one believes conditions are torturous or not that bad, is beside the point, which is that they wouldn’t even exist if we didn’t spawn them. So what we do is we rip new life into the universe by force for that life to suffer to some degree, its’ life’s only meaning being to be processed for food. There was nothing, now there is. Somehow human kind has decided ethical discussion need not concern animals.

One irony is that every hunter and non-industrial farmer I know goes to significant lengths to limit suffering in the kill.

It's factory farms and non-human predators that ignore the subject as much as possible.

A great deal of product is sold daily that exceeds legal minimums. You've seen "organic" or "pasture raised" labels. All of those are driven by the market.

The animals that we have been breeding for ages are pretty far removed from their wild counterparts of yore.

Also, there's a lot of homeless people that would live better as my slaves, but you'd probably still rather see them free.

I don't think this is sound reasoning as the main issue with slavery is the abuse of the slaves. What GP is saying is that animals are more abused by nature than by people. If the same could be proven that homeless would be better as slaves (ie. thag they would not be whipped and worked to death) then that would in fact be better but since we can't make that guarantee and history has generally shown otherwise we do not allow it. There is also the fact that it would normalize slavery in general.

Or better yet, we just don’t force the people one way or the other.

I have no qualms eating meat (I eat more than my doctor says I should).

Your comment seems pretty disingenuous though. You're comparing life in the wild to that on a small family farm. Factory farms, especially those that produce poultry, are far more horrifying. There is also a growing body of evidence suggesting that many of the drugs (antibiotics and hormones in particular) that we pump our farm animals full of are actively detrimental to their daily comfort.

It sounds to me like your statement was crafted as a defense of your dietary choices rather than an objective assessment of animal wellbeing.

Of course none of this arguing really means anything without some scientific data to back this up. I'd like to see a comparison of cortisol levels and other stress indicators in wild vs factory chickens.

I eat meat, but I think it's fair to say bringing living/feeling/thinking things into existence for the express purpose of being killed and consumed is grim. This feels particularly true if the circumstances they're raised in are horrific, which seems to be pretty common in factory farms.

In any case, nature might be crueler to living things than we are, but I still think becoming less cruel is worth the effort.

> I eat meat, but I think it's fair to say bringing living/feeling/thinking things into existence for the express purpose of being killed and consumed is grim. This feels particularly true if the circumstances they're raised in are horrific, which seems to be pretty common in factory farms.

Wouldn't the logical conclusion than be to eat less and higher quality meat? I mean I have worked on Biodynamic farms with livestock and I can assure you they live incredibly well, and are often eating as good if not better than the the regimen of the cows used for Wagyu, and sometimes even better than some of us farmers depending on the pat of the season.

> In any case, nature might be crueler to living things than we are, but I still think becoming less cruel is worth the effort.

I still think that if the key issue is the poor practice and animal welfare than the only acceptable solution is to eat less and higher quality meat from local and sustainable farms.

This synthetic meat is peak tech-bro, no one who is relying on eating fake hamburger meat on a daily basis is in a position to be taken serious when most Asian diets are mainly vegetarian and have fed populations in the billions for millennia (eg India, China, Japan). The arrogance to believe that the amount of inputs for these fake meats isn't a slight of hand because all the oils, and stabilizers at scale seems on it's face entirely absurd to a more environmentally friendly solution: pasture raised and grass fed cattle replenish the soil and serve as a natural re-vitalization for the soil between crop rotations.

I worked at a highly renown Vegetarian and Vegan place in Boulder, and even tried being both but abandoned it because of how depressed it made me feel wile working a manual labour job and working out/hiking, and I can assure that 80% of the time all were were doing was re-making vegetarian substitutes to meat based dishes rather than focus on the in-season vegetables a menu that reflected that which is what I had done for most of my career in kitchens that served meat and offered veterinarian options.

Ultimately, I think this a reflection of both hyper based capitalism, tons of Vc money cashing in on the immense amount of ignorance regarding food education with clever marketing. At the end Ag can be modeled and scaled in suh a way where it is carbon net-negative if the same amount of capital, time, and incentives were applied to it.

>when most Asian diets are mainly vegetarian and have fed populations in the billions for millennia (eg India, China, Japan).

The modern Japanese diet is very, very far from vegetarian. In fact, you'll have a very hard time eating in restaurants if you're a vegetarian in Japan. I guess if you consider fish to somehow be "not an animal", though, it's much easier.

> The modern Japanese diet is very, very far from vegetarian. In fact, you'll have a very hard time eating in restaurants if you're a vegetarian in Japan. I guess if you consider fish to somehow be "not an animal", though, it's much easier.

Granted, but Modern anything will often reflect a more meat based diet due to convenience (Lawson's bentos and snacks are amazing!) and despite several lost generations and the rise of the freeta generation(s) an over all higher standard of living as made meat consumption a norm rater tan an exception.

As a fomer cook/chef I can assure I can easily make 5 days our of 7 wit just tasty vegetarian meals rather easily because Japanese is my repertoire, and plant based dashi can be just as good as it's fish based variants (I onsider it a meat protein, albeit a more naturally sustainable one wen done properly/seasonally) thus can build flavour tat way.

By contrast I ave a harder time to do so with Italian which is my other cuisine despite having a more immersed culture experience--I lived and worked in Emilia Romagna wit its abundance of meat based parma options.

I agree there are a lot of problems with the intersection of food and capitalism, and there's plenty of room for solutions to those problems to just... create new or different problems. That said, I don't think the key issue is "poor practice and animal welfare", it's exchanging another animal's life for a few minutes of personal pleasure and eight-ish hours of energy.

With sufficient research, I believe we can free ourselves and other living things from that dynamic without sacrificing the experience and benefits animal products provide, and I'd be happy to live in that future. We obviously aren't there yet, so I support efforts that bring us closer to it, even knowing they'll be sub-par for years.

And in the meantime, I agree: eating less meat and favoring producers who treat their animals well is the way to go if avoiding animal products entirely isn't on the table.

> key issue is "poor practice and animal welfare", it's exchanging another animal's life for a few minutes of personal pleasure and eight-ish hours of energy.

This presumes so many things, chief among them that plants are neither alive or intelligent, and I can assure both are not true--plants are incredibly intelligent actually and have mechanisms that we should mimic now that only now we have the capacity to observe and measure them.

My time in tech notwithstanding, I have a background and careers in both the Life sciences and spent time on farms and cooking in kitchens and it became very clear to me at a young age that Life feeds on Life [0].

So long as you live in this physical Universe you have to take in the elements of another living being in order to not die and the best one can do is be considerate and take this responsibility. You can abstract this all you want but the end is that this must take place in order for your body to continue to stay alive.

I'm a total glutton by nature with an incredibly fast metabolism and I have in earlier and darker periods of my life over-indulged in both food and drink, but I soon realized that despite thinking I was 'deserving' of it I felt ill every time as body had been optimized and used to intermittent fasting and nourishment rather than over eating and drinking everyday like it was my last day on Earth.

> With sufficient research, I believe we can free ourselves and other living things from that dynamic without sacrificing the experience and benefits animal products provide, and I'd be happy to live in that future.

See above, but I will add that I have ever since I started to farm and focus on farm-to-table cuisine I formed a deep respect for every meal I eat (plant or animal based), it came at an immense cost (that I think everyone should experience) after having done the back breaking labour to grow and slaughter animals that I then ate or sold in the market(s). I can assure you that what you are advocating for is the fantasy, and most undesirable, aspects of my trans0humanist leanings. When one eats it is more than just input and output, and when we address that way it is no surprise our Western Developed nations are incredibly sick, depressed and despondent and that the 1-2 biggest killers in developed nations are food related (heart disease and diabetes).

> And in the meantime, I agree: eating less meat and favoring producers who treat their animals well is the way to go if avoiding animal products entirely isn't on the table.

I cannot see myself enjoying Life at all if we deny that food is and has been the reason why our very constitution as Homo Sapiens has pushed us this far along the evolution scale; such that we have tamed and evolved alongside with dogs, ventured and conquered this planet and sadly have gone to war with our very own (eg salt wars) in order to be able to feed ourselves and our tribes. I refuse to see how we wouldn't lose a very fundamental part of our psyche and the Human experience if we lost this and to be honest I'd be the first to resist that: given how lonely and depressed became when COVID struck and they couldn't go to their favorite restaurants and longed so much for those days that they would even risk getting sick in order to return speaks volumes: also worth noting is that despite front line workers like doctors and nurses being so exposed to COVID patients, even without PPE, it was cooks, farm workers and meat processors who had the highest number of deaths [1] in the US!

Putting on my pedantic hat on: Having done all 3 at some stage of my culinary career it has long been taken for granted the sacrifice and risk some of us have and will continue to go through in order to fulfill this vital role in Society; I just wish most would take it more serious and see how fundamental it is the Human Condition and a part I would be despondent if it ever went away.

0: https://allpoetry.com/poem/14460785-Life-feeds-on-life-by-De...

1: https://qz.com/1962493/a-new-study-shows-occupations-with-th...

>but hardly encompasses more suffering.

I think that's hard to say. But I also think "the alternative" to farmed life is somewhat ignored by vegans/peta activists.

On the one hand, as you say, death is more painful by the claws/teeth of a predator; that is certain. But life itself with little shelter (but usualy some) is the natural state of afairs for most mammals. To say that that is suffering is to say that life itself is suffering, which I think is counterintuitive as suffering is evolutionarily a means of preasuring an animal to escape from the suffering. Not to say that isn't possible. It's hard to say if the natural resiliance (assuming it exists) that mammals have to little shelter and food carries over to say being croweded into small enclosures.

If anyone has any (scientific) articles on this topic I would be interested.

The alternative, for the purposes of a farmed animal, is an animal that never lived. If the entirety of the life of an animal is suffering, as is the case in many factory farms, it's fair to suggest that not having that animal ever live reduces the total amount of suffering in the world.

That’s a slippery slope, because by that logic we should destroy all life, because life always causes suffering. Maybe a better alternative is to provide better conditions for farm animals. I’ve raised chickens in my backyard, and they seemed pretty happy to exist.

The vegan principle is about non-interference with non-human animals, it doesn't necessarily minimize suffering.

Funny, I largely agree with you, on the other hand, if I had to choose between being "free range" or factory fed, I'd still rather take the free range option. Or as one of the other commenters put it, I'd rather be homeless and all that entails than live as somebody's slave and get food and a bed.

Animals aren't people though. I think it's important to avoid unnecessary suffering or cruelty, but it's also important to be able to eat them.

Nature's basically a real-life horror film for anything not at the tippy-top of the chain in an area, every hour of every day. Which means most things that aren't humans. But, farming doesn't really help with that, especially industrial farming.

You're either constantly at risk from hordes of relentless and effective slasher-murder-cannibals (to put it in human-focused horror movie terms—they're not really cannibals when it's one species eating another, of course) and will very probably be killed and eaten by one before you can die of other "natural causes", and every moment you're not on high alert is a moment you're more likely than normal to abruptly be murdered, or you're in one of those movies where aliens or vampires or something are farming you for whatever reason, typically in such horrible conditions that you really might prefer to take your chances with the super-murderers out in the wild.

It's all very pretty to look at when you're at the top but IMO Lovecraft's works, or films like The Thing, really capture the underlying reality of what life is, fundamentally. Incomprehensible, brutally savage, and horrifying, mostly. One of those things you kinda have to try not to think about too much (which is one of the ways it's all a bit Lovecraftian—not healthy to contemplate actual-reality, rather than our illusions about it, in this case).

We aren’t rescuing them from the wild, though. We are breeding them into existence. The comparison doesn’t make much sense.

Scenario: Humanity is partly enslaved by a superior alien species that holds us as cattle, breeds us, kills most of our male offspring etc. — you know, the things we do to our cettle.

Would you rather:

A) live this life that can be ended for your meat at any point

B) hide in the hostile and foreign wilderness of their planet

Sure one might argue that cows are to stupid to understand their fate, but that alien species might argue the same. Also: even the simplest animal suffers when you take their offspring away. Or you might argue that option A is totally acceptable if the aliens are just good enough at keeping us happy.

I have yet to find a rational argument why it should be acceptable to industrially breed and herd other living beings that doesn't boil down to "because we are stronger, smarter or because we can do it", which is not a universal rational argument, unless you argue the aliens are right to herd us as well.

Is the fox "right" to eat the hare?

I personally look forward to the day where our technology is advanced enough that wild animals no longer have to live in constant fear of being ripped to shreds. IMO, no one, not even wild animals, should have to live in fear of that.

Also, by extension, predators shouldn’t have to face starvation, and prey should have their population controlled in a humane way.

These are problems that can’t be solved today, or likely any time soon. But I don’t buy the argument that “just because it happens in nature, it’s right”. I think Mother Nature provides effective solutions to these problems, but I also believe they aren’t the optimal solutions. We can and should do better.

As I understand your post, an explicit version of your argument would be something like "the level of suffering that nature intends for animals far exceeds the level of suffering experienced by animals farmed for meat, so farming animals for meat provides them with a better life than they deserve."

When assessing arguments like this I find it useful to substitute animals for a hypothetical population of hominids with cognitive abilities typical of nonhuman mammals. If an island populated by such people were discovered, and they turned out to generally live nasty, brutish and short lives for some reason, would that justify farming them for meat?

The answer is clearly no. If you were to ever encounter a hominid of any cognitive ability who was being farmed for meat, you would be horrified and would report the situation to law enforcement. That individual's treatment by the operators of the farm would qualify as brutal regardless of how much people of the same background tend to suffer out in the world.

I don't think there is a valid reason to treat hypothetical hominids with cognitive abilities typical of nonhuman mammals differently from actual nonhuman mammals.

An animal does not choose to live a wild or farm life. I assume that fewer farmed animals does not increase the number of wild animals.

According to Our world in data wild terrestrial mammals make up 2% of the total number of mammals (in biomass so it is not exactly headcount, but also includes predators and rodents not strictly herbivores), while cattle, pigs, goats and sheep are >50%. So when looking at suffering you may want to take scale into account.

I’m not going to try to argue about which experience is worse because that’s difficult to quantify and I don’t actually think it achieves a lot.

If we can agree that ignoring nature, factory farmed animals don’t lead what we would call a fulfilling life, how can we justify bringing trillions of them into existence if we have alternatives? We don‘t have to go too deep into utilitarian rhetoric here, maybe it is better than nature, maybe if you follow that line of reasoning it wouldn’t be right to let animals suffer in nature or have children either. Anyway, I haven’t been able to justify eating meat to myself for as long as I was able to think along these lines.

I think we need a definition for a fulfilling life. I think we also need to consider if it is an important criteria.

This is an absurdly biased view. Factory farms are horrific and even pasture raised animals are treated like property and killed well before their natural lives are up.

When we think about human suffering we don’t immediately go and compare it to the Neolithic period. I’m not arguing that animals are human, but it’s a false comparison. The correct comparison would be to compare it to if we didn’t do this. It just means there wouldn’t be factory farms and cows wouldn’t exist in the quantity (and evolutionary state) that they do now.

Also the life of an average human is pretty depressing, so it's OK for management in better-off companies to harass employees.

> living with no shelter

Maybe not up to human standards, but plenty of animals seek and find shelter as part of their normal life.

> having to fear every sound

Do you think animals fear their own species' mating calls? Or the rain and the breeze? How do you know what animals feel? If you are going to project the human emotion of "fear" onto them, you considered that they might feel humanlike emotions of elation, joy, and satisfaction as well?

> And it typically ends by being ripped to pieces by a predator and eaten alive while the brain still has some residual oxygen and awareness.

Human death, including death by common age-related ailments, is often painful and drawn out.

> sheltered, vaccinated against common illnesses, provided food

"Sheltered" in a coup filled with feces and "vaccinated" so that they do not succumb to the myre of illness in which they live. "Fed" via pellets of the cheapest food that the farm could buy while still sustaining them enough to develop tissue that is desirable for us to eat.

> being knocked out with electricity

I doubt that slaughter at factory farm is often as efficient, quick, and humane as you imagine.

> hardly encompasses more suffering.

Have you ever been, or been close to anyone, who was locked in jail or a psychiatric ward for a long period of time? The mental anguish of captivity is often described as worse than physical suffering.

Listen to this episode where Will talks about how most farmed animals wouldn't live more than a few year than they would in the wild.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0qf7CYEhxSFPAcdSw1JJMY

You may want to look into the life of factory farmed pigs, for example, before you conclude which life is worse than the other. I would certainly prefer to be a wild pig over a factory farmed one.

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