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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

If people raised chickens then killed them only for their crests, then that would be comparable. Put another way, if sharks were abundant and people fished them and ate the whole fish, it would not raise such concern.

The concern arises when people take a whole shark, then cut the fin and dispose of it --only for the fin.

Imagine if Tigers only ate the tails or ear flops of their prey and then ran off after that.

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The animals doesn’t care how much of it you use. I don’t want to be killed even if you use my whole body afterwards.

I think it’s the problem of being a relatively more pointless waste of life. Eating a whole animal at least provides substantial nutrition. Also the fact the animal is left to suffer for hours or even days, motionless and alone at the bottom of the sea. There’s something excessively inhuman about simply abandoning life like that.

We can also recognize that prisons today are tortuous and should be improved (much like the farming/slaughter industry), and the death penalty is hard for many to justify as well, but paralyzing a human and throwing them in a hole to rot while still alive—even if they were a major criminal—would probably outrage nearly everyone.

Substantial nutrition that we don't need though. You could get even more nutrition if you didn't feed the animal in the first place and just ate some crops made on the same land the animal would have eaten.

It's like those golden tomahawk steaks. There's no point in covering a steak with gold, yet we spend effort digging a hole in the ground to do it.

Unfortunately, humans explicitly evolved to consume animal products. There are B vitamins that humans can only naturally acquire through eating animals that we die without.

It’s possible now to generate those B vitamins, but saying humans don’t need to consume animals is like saying we don’t need to walk to be healthy. Technically true, but most of us have two legs that we evolved to live a human lifestyle and getting around that requires a bunch of atypical lifestyle changes that are massively difficult and unnatural for most people.

People don't eat animals to get B vitamins.

If they did they wouldn't need to eat the amount they do.

The animal might not care but we should. There's a sustainability factor that should be included in decision making around harvesting product in general. Marijuana is a decent example. Once turned to flower, the whole pant gets killed for harvesting. The product (flower) is worth a lot more than the remaining plant.

With shark finning, the product (fin) is worth less than the shark even by the most conservative estimate.

If killed, would you choose a swift painless death or someone chopping off your limbs and leaving you too die slowly over next few days.

> Imagine if Tigers only ate the tails or ear flops of their prey and then ran off after that.

Not exactly the same, but orcas literally follow baby belugas until they are too tired to swim any further and drown. Then the orcas eat the lower jaw (most delicate part I guess) and leave the rest of the beluga to go to waste.

Point being, probably better to not point to the practices of other animals to determine whether or not what we’re doing is ethical.

One need only spend a little time browsing some of the more graphic nature subreddits to very quickly learn that life ends in spectacularly brutal ways for a great many wild animals. Predation is messy; predators don’t care.

Yes, but humans are really good at doing it at scale.

I suggest you not look into what happens to the male sex of chicks in factories.

They are killed in an instant in a rapid grinder and used for animal feed.

There is a large difference between killing animals as swiftly as possible to use as much as possible and knicking off a small bit they need to live and leaving them to a slow painful death.

In Europe they decided that slowly suffocating them with C02 is more humane. I am not making this up.

Given the choice of being put through a grinder or asphyxiating in CO2 or N2 I would definitely take that gas. The gas is painless and you don't even realise that it's happening.

As I understand it, N2 would have you quietly fall asleep before death, whereas CO2 would have you in pain and terror until your end, since our asphyxiation detection system only accounts for additional CO2, not the lack of oxygen. I expect you meant just CO there?

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