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Comment by bsdz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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