In this case, it's not even extra animal deaths:
> It was important to Dr Hartnell that no kangaroos were killed expressly for his research, and this has remained his practice throughout his investigations: all of the work has been done only using kangaroos that have either been culled for reasons of population control or harvested for meat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thylacine too, but probably not for adult kangaroos.
Kangaroo meat is super lean and very tasty. needs to be cooked very carefully or it goes very chewy and dry.
https://www.coles.com.au/search?q=kangaroo
It's pretty gamey, I don't find it unpleasant, but I wouldn't eat it in favour of a good beef steak.
But in some European countries, more bits of the animal are being eaten (beef tongue, e.g.), and more animals are being eaten (e.g. horses). In Switzerland, kangaroo and ostrich became somewhat popular when at the height of the Mad Cow Disease epidemic, people were reluctant to eat beef.
Maybe we can bring back the “lake cows” and their “lake cow bacon”.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-us-almost-bec...
I think I've yet to meet somebody with a Christian Anglo-Saxon background who said they did. People with Hispanic, Jewish, Eastern European, and many continental Western European backgrounds often do. Of course beef tongue is also found in Chinese cuisine.
The article mentions that the kangaroos harvested for meat are sufficient to meet the current worldwide needs for ACL surgeries.
Sometimes killing animals is the ethical thing to do. Reality is complex.
We don't do this for cats, why should we have to do it for kangaroos? Trap Neuter Release exists. There have been struggles with implementing it, but it seems largely to do with lack of awareness and funding.
Perhaps it's just a case of different strategies for different regions.
(edit: this opening graf is too good not to share)
"Animal welfare protestors at a hunting contest in rural New Zealand have faced off against a group of child attendees, some clutching dead feral cats, who repeatedly chanted the word “meat” at demonstrators."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/28/chaos-at-new-z...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-08/federal-inquiry-propo...
https://www.agriculture.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents...
We're not likely to release a neutered cat back into the environment where it will kill more native creatures. Feral cats have already caused the extinction of 20 native species.
In my opinion, thought that verges beyond: "how to acquire food," "how to acquire mate," "how to acquire friend," and "how to acquire sleep" is "too much," and a neuroses. Or maybe all of our actions are predicated on fulfilling these base needs? And that our civilization has created an environment where these needs can no longer be simply attained, so we come up with ever more complex ways to attempt attaining them.
One can also make the distinction that those needs are also simply just "feel good" and "don't feel bad." For a lion, the aforementioned things are enough to "feel good." But for us people, the simple pleasures have become unattainable in any sustainable sense. So we once again try to find something to make us feel good. For the GP, that might be practicing vegetarianism; for the readers of Hacker News, it might be stuffing their minds full of information of only temporary utility.
And for what? So we can feel good, and escape the bad. "Ethical calculus" is no different. It's simply a rationalization of our base needs. Though I wish the simpler pleasures were more readily available... I'm getting awfully tired of working harder and smarter to find outlets!
Most people probably do feel bad. Presumably you'd also feel bad if a lion attacked and ate a human even though it was just doing what you purport to be "required".
Where it goes south is when people cherry pick the behavior of animals to justify their own actions.
Would you feel better or worse?
I admit my first thought was "are they going to at least eat the kangaroo?" - like that's any consolation for the animal.
I hunt and slaughter animals. While I do fully understand and appreciate the sanctity of all forms of life, I also understand that my actions are part of the natural order of the universe.
I hate factory farming and if we lived in a world with more wilderness and healthier oceans, I think hunting is a fairly humane to operate. For most wild animals they die horrible deaths, the most humane way to go is being taken by an expert marksman or archer during adulthood.
I've seen a fish have it's face mauled off by squid, and much worse. If that fish could've been dispatched by fish spike in seconds as opposed to having it's face mauled off, I think it would've went with the spike.
I typically only eat chicken but I just don’t see an issue with if the chickens are humanely treated and killed. What else would we do with all the chickens besides eat them? They’d die out if we stopped eating them and it’s not like anyone’s going to put them in a zoo.
The way I see it is we’ve bred these animals as livestock and we’re responsible for them as livestock and that’s okay. It’s how we treat them as livestock that matters. Factory farms are one of many gross byproducts of industrialization that we now have to deal with like fossil fuels.
There are feral chickens in quite a few places. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_chicken
Tahiti's airport has a bunch of them.
Sure the big factory chicken farms are something else, but you can buy ethically sourced chickens (or raise them yourself if you have the space) if that bothers you.
Domesticated chickens are bred into existence. We could just stop doing that if we had ethical problems with it. The consideration doesn't hinge on whether there exists some wild variant of the animal we're breeding.
If that's your only concern, and not environmental destruction, then that's fine - if you're ensuring that the chickens you eat are humanely treated and humanely killed. The best way to do that is to buy from local farms you can visit - otherwise it's just aspirational and in effect identical to someone who doesn't care at all.
> The way I see it is we’ve bred these animals as livestock and we’re responsible for them as livestock and that’s okay.
But we can stop mass producing them. There don't need to be 30 billion of them. Scale is what makes factory farming such a catastrophe (environmentally, ethically, and for our own health).
The typical response to this would be a game of Name The Trait.
For example, what would be wrong about farming humans as long as we treat them humanely?
Or more generally, what's true of animals that if made true of humans would make it okay to farm humans? And then when you come up with a symmetry breaker, we apply it to humans and see if you're okay with the reductio. If so, you bite the bullet on a crazy human atrocity, and if not, then it's not the trait that actually matters to you.
Most edge cases you could come up with are covered by "it wouldn't necessarily be unethical to eat them, but we have a universal taboo because edge cases are so absurd and rare."
One trait seems to be "shared culture" whatever that means. What about humans with cultures we don't share? What about humans with downright alien cultures we can hardly understand nor agree with? What does "shared experience" with a dog mean? What about brain-dead humans that we don't share an experience with?
Another trait seems to be "being a human". What about Santa's elves or any hypothetical sentient being that's not a human? Does any alien race that discovers us have the ethical justification to farm us?
> it wouldn't necessarily be unethical to eat them, but we have a universal taboo because edge cases are so absurd and rare.
Would it be okay to farm or enslave humans if we simply didn't have that taboo? Or in a hypothetical world where it wasn't taboo: would it be okay then?
These aren't edge cases btw, these are reductios that test for position's consistency and dispel the sort of "I'll know it when I see it" hand-waving we like to do.
Any coherent position has a coherent answer to hypotheticals.
There is a trivial answer that does nip it easily in the bud: we agree to value sentience thus we stop farming sentient beings whether they're human, cows, or Santa's elves.
Finally, I was just offering a potential response to your question. HN is a poor place for this kind of discussion, but I hope you at least see that there is conversational meat on the bone, pun not intended.
"Shared experience" in this case is a basic history of doing stuff together, or in a sympathetically similar way. Dogs have been shaped to serve side-by-side with humans as companions, sharing in our experiences. So eating them is wrong. There are no humans that are less like us than than the animals we eat. Brain-dead humans are an example of just following taboo: We don't kill and eat other humans, because of the whole "we are more alike than we are different" thing, and incidentally extend the same courtesy to things that take complex explanations for not being us.
If we ran into other conscious, sapient species, we'd probably be hesitant about killing them due to the shared experience of sentience making them a lot more like us than a cow. But on the other hand, killing an alien would be a hell of a lot more permissible than killing a human.
And I apply the same kind of logic to people. My friends and family are significantly more valuable than random strangers. In a trolley scenario with one of my friends on one track and 3 strangers on another, I'd save my friend, every time, and I wouldn't trust anybody who would answer otherwise.
Take mosquitoes. Even in areas where mosquitoes rarely if ever carry diseases, people are perfectly cool with widescale genocide. Why? Because half of those animals can, on occasion, give us a little itchy that's mildly inconvenient for a few moments. Roaches are another example. In their case, their life itself is often worth less than our mild annoyance or discomfort at seeing them. And so on. In practice, most people are perfectly fine with killing the overwhelming majority of species of animals.
And so too here. I simply do not see any problem with killing a e.g. chicken for food. Oddly enough I have a strong suspicion that the more one is around animals, the more this becomes true. Which is paradoxical, because contrary to what you might think, even chickens can be awesome little affectionate critters. It's probably because you see the cycle of life itself more regularly. Foxes are cute, clever, and awesome critters - until one makes its way into your chicken coop, kills every hen, and takes exactly 1 away. At the same time, that's just the nature of life. It's all as natural and normal as the fact that you and I too will be wormfood soon enough.
I find meat also very tasty and eat meat. There are several ways to reduce impacts though: Eating less will most likely also have a health benefit. Game doesn’t suffer it’s whole life but only when it gets hunted.
Anyone who has the room for a chest freezer in their garage and can afford it can go to a local farm and buy a whole (or half or quarter) cow, lamb, or pig and have them slaughtered and deep frozen.
Depending on their locality, there are usually plenty of such farms that usually treat their animals much better than the farms supplying super markets. Makes it much easier to inspect their farm in person too.
What we seem to care about as a civilization is like a narrowly focused laser: we can only wrap our heads around the things small enough to fit in the tiny spotlight. Anything bigger and we just kinda take it for granted.
We can recognize the emotional state of pigs and cows, probably more than even we can with cats. Certainly more than we can with rodents and other pets.
I also think most people wouldn't accept a video of someone abusing a cow, pig, or even a chicken. Let's just replace dog with piglet in my comment if that helps track the point.
I'd wager most people wouldn't find footage inside a slaughterhouse or factory farm very palatable. But this happens by the hundreds of millions daily.
Companies pay hunters around $1-$2 per kg for the kangaroo meat. An adult kangaroo can be upwards of 60kg (130lb). The meat is often used for dog food, but is extremely lean but a bit gamey tasting I've been told.
So, hopefully this treatment doesn't cause additional death of the roos, but helps to make their deaths less wasteful.
I mean, all species do this. Antelope don't lay down to be eaten by lions because it is good for the lion.
It is funny that you feel like this is wrong while eating meat. I also eat meat and I would say it is morally much worse to kill a pig because I like the taste of the food and killing a kangaroo to provide significant quality of life improvement through increased mobility to those with severely damaged knees. I have zero issue with this being used until a better solution without killing a kangaroo could be developed.
If we had happy cows as cartoon characters we might not eat as much beef.