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Comment by zvmaz | Hacker News Reader

I really wish them to succeed. Imagine centuries from now, a future civilisation where human-inflicted cruelty towards billions and billions of sentient beings is ended...

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Beef cattle are almost always raised on open pastureland. They live a very normal, happy, life for all their years. Yes their last moments are perhaps bad, but then so are ours.

Would you rather not exist at all if it saved you from dying?

Not true in the US, the market in question for TFA. Beef cattle are mostly raised on feed lots, fed by crops specifically grown as cattle feed, such as alfalfa. My understanding for US beef is that it's something like 80% from feed lot, 20% pasture.

Cattle are not raised in feed lots.

Feed lots do sometimes come into play for finishing beef cattle, but this takes only ~4 months. And it is very possible to buy pasture&grass finished beef that doesn’t use feed lots at all.

I shouldn't have said "raised", that was wrong, but I just wanted to talk about beef cattle that are not pasture grazing at all, or at least only for a tiny percentage of their lifespan. About 80% of beef cattle go from mother's milk, to feed lot once weaned.

Of course you can buy the other stuff, I said as much.

My point is that this statement is one part deceptive, and one part obviously wrong for the US, the market in question.

> Beef cattle are almost always raised on open pastureland. They live a very normal, happy, life for all their years.

“Once weaned” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. The bulk of their life - until month 12-14 is on pasture with the mother. A ~third of those females stay on pasture indefinitely as birthers. The rest go to feed lots (assuming not pasture finished), where they spend the final ~120 days of their life. So at absolute minimum roughly 3/4 of the life is on pasture land.

> indefinitely as birthers

Let's not ignore how terrible of a life that is. Forcefully impregnated repeatedly and then having your calf taken from you while your body slowly falls apart form abuse. Cows aren't dumb beasts, they have social relationships and care for their calves.

Calves stay with mothers until appropriately developed. Then some leave, others remain. Humans are the same.

But how many human mothers do you know that spend their whole life with 1/3 of their children? To the extent “keeping families together” is something to optimize for, they’re doing better than us.

Not to mention the benefits for us: all the space dedicated to pasture could be dedicated to wildlife or outdoor recreation, and all the high-density facilities fouling air and waterways could be closed. If it works for fish, we could stop scouring the ocean like an Old Testament-style god angry with our creation.

Even the food snobs would be happy, since responsible wildlife management practices would yield a certain amount of expensive, hard-to-get wild meat that they could build a culinary mystique around.

Space that is currently dedicated to pasture is already currently dedicated to wildlife. In fact, grazing cattle on land serves to rejuvenate the land, since the cattle's hoove's serve as little plows, and the cows walk around and poop and pee, which fertilizes the land and allows for insects and bugs to thrive, which helps the bird population, and the little rodents.

In some cases that land was recently deforested. It was previously dedicated to wildlife but now it's dedicated to agriculture which happens to benefit some different wildlife.

Forests are full of trees and trees tend to convert sunlight into wood, something that very little wildlife can eat. There's typically more food available to wildlife on pastures even when farmers try to fend off wildlife. For example, deforestation in Australia combined with a general reluctance of Australians to hunt brought about a kangaroo population explosion that requires government-mandated culls.

> wood, something that very little wildlife can eat

Not all wildlife can be picked up and pet by a human. That doesn’t mean it’s not a living being participating with a vital role in the ecosystem. There was a time before life could eat wood, and that time period is why the energy source is named “fossil fuel” and “dino juice”, that time period was long ago.

Wood is mostly consumed by fungus. If that's wildlife in your book, fine.

It is! I can tell that my interpretation is annoying to you though so I will leave you alone with a question. Who then eats the fungus? And who eats that?

Some fungus fruit bodies are eaten by insect larva, which feeds into birds. Most of the energy stored in the wood is just wasted bypassing any macroscopic wildlife. If forests were efficient in feeding mammals or birds (i.e. making meat) our farms would have been forests.

Ranchers insist on extinction-level suppression of large predators, probably for sound economic reasons. Wolves can't live on land that is heavily fragmented by pasture, because they'll be harassed and killed.

Do you think animals in the wild are being cruel to each other when they eat them?

Yes? What nonstandard non-dictionary definition of "cruel" do you use, that would not apply to eating something alive?

(And presumably also does not describe what happens in factory farming, which is the actual topic at hand, and which wildlife behavior has nothing to do with)

Yes- it’s pretty messed up seeing those wealthy carnivore animals systematically breed, cage and murder billions of the other animals just so it can be conveniently purchased on-demand at their animal grocery store.

Factory farming is pretty messed up. We like to paint a pretty picture of a pasture, and I actually do get to see that in the midwest US, but a lot of the meat people buy does come from horrible conditions.

Yes; and we should strive to behave better than other animals.

I don't think your definition of sentient is very accurate. Is a chicken sentient? Or a clam? Having a nervous system does not a sentient being make. By that definition a microcontroller with sensors for temperature would be sentient. All natural animal meat is delicious and a reaaaallly efficient way of getting practically all nutrients the human body needs to thrive. I'm always surprised by the level of personal guilty paople feel by simply living the way humans were designed to live.

Designed?

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