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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

Not even 3 generations ago, it was incredibly common for people to slaughter their own farm animals. My grandmother was an old farm woman, raised in the time before refrigeration. She'd slaughter and pluck her own chickens without a second thought. It's entirely a modern phenomenon of global distribution and modern conditioning that lead you to that conclusion. Some animals evolved to be prey, and that is why they have an excessive number of offspring. Fowls are among those species. They lay eggs sometimes once a day so their numbers can increase incredibly rapidly. That is an adaptation to high predation. In the absence of that predation, they can overwhelm ecosystems.

You are a descendent of millions of years of hunters. I know many hunters and have been hunting myself. I know many who like to fish and have been fishing myself, and cooked my own catch. It's quite a satisfying experience actually.

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> Some animals evolved to be prey, and that is why they have an excessive number of offspring. Fowls are among those species. They lay eggs sometimes once a day so their numbers can increase incredibly rapidly. That is an adaptation to high predation. In the absence of that predation, they can overwhelm ecosystems.

Red junglefowl, the ancestors to domesticated chickens, only lay a few clutches annually for a total of less than 20 eggs per year. Modern chickens that lay hundreds of eggs a year are a product of selective breeding, not some natural adaptation.

One could argue that is natural adaptation. Modern chickens are likely going to be more successful at propagating their genes into the future.

Only if you want to argue about what counts as "natural".

I see the case for it, but what wouldn't be natural once you allow this? Gene editing? Why not?

A consequence is that 'natural' will lose all meaning. If everything is natural, then nothing is, really.

I fall under the idea that yes, everything is natural, we are not special no matter what secrets of the universe we uncover and wield . Even our robot descendants , if they ever come to be, are natural too. Just because we have the ability to acknowledge material selection does not mean we are except from it

That's a gross misuse of language that makes words utterly meaningless. When people say "artificial selection" they don't mean a supernatural deity is doing it.

It's like going "haha gotcha! tomatoes are fruit, not vegetables!", completely missing the difference between the use of the word in a culinary versus botanical context. It's not insightful or useful in any way, it's just equivocation.

I just fall under the banner that everything we do is natural since we are natural, even if we were to desires nature it self. After all it was natural selection that brought us here.

Only if by natural you mean "not supernatural".

I didn't mean that "artificial" is an artificial distinction. I meant that the evolutionary fittest chicken long-term might be the modern farmed chicken. It's a weird tradeoff their specie is managing to make.

You could justify any man-made breeding horror with that if it held any ethical weight, but it does not. Breeding a worse life into a sentient being isn't a victory for that being. Neither the being nor its genes should be propagated at all.

Not the case in many South Asian cultures. Lots of South Asians have been vegetarian for a really long time. Jain and Hindu foundational texts advocate for vegetarianism and Buddhism, also originally from the region, also treats vegetarianism as a foundational concept. These all derive from the concept of ahimsa, the principle of nonviolence. People have been horrified at killing for a very long time, in times much materially poorer than our own now. Even now a third of India is vegetarian.

> You are a descendent of millions of years of hunters. I know many hunters and have been hunting myself. I know many who like to fish and have been fishing myself, and cooked my own catch. It's quite a satisfying experience actually.

When I see posts like this I chuckle a bit at how steeped in their culture they are.

Not all Buddhists are vegetarian. It would be really hard to live in the Tibetan plateau or in Mongolia and be vegetarian, just because the land supports grazing and not much farming beyond that. Yet those areas are heavily Buddhist, even if even the monks eat meat.

Definitely and despite ~ 70-80% of India being Hindu only a third of India is vegetarian, so there are more non-veg than veg Hindus. But those cultures often frown on relishing meat (much in the way Protestants "frown" on promiscuity or Muslims "frown" on showing skin even though in practice it absolutely happens) or eating meat and only meat. In a lot of Buddhist Asia you can ask for the "monk's menu" and you'll get something that is veg and can be flavorful (but not always as keeping food underspiced is part of being Buddhist.) You also find lots of households where meat is eaten sparingly or combined with other protein dense foods like tofu or seitan to make a complete meal.

I contrast this with Western cultures where meat is often the centerpiece of the dish and many times your food is just meat with accompanying carbs and veggies. The kind of rhetoric the GP had about relishing hunting is a lot more absent from these cultures just because there's a general understanding that eating meat is unethical but something we all do because we aren't perfect.

All that to say that culture creates a powerful framing. Obviously in places like the steppes it's very hard to live without eating meat, but in places rich with agriculture attitudes toward meat are more about the culture you're steeped in than any material nutritional issues.

I’ve spent time on the Tibetan plateau and suffered from meat overload. We only had meat to eat each night, and my gums began to feel really uncomfortable. I guess at high altitudes, veggies really are a luxury.

India has a lot of carb veggies as well, which I found really interesting. I found it hard to get leafy greens of some sort (the vegetables you need to eat to stay healthy, cooked or otherwise) when I visited Delhi and Jaipur. But that could have just been me picking the wrong places to eat. China has much more leafy greens in my opinion, but again I’m limited in experience when it comes to South Asia. They definitely take the cake in making tofu taste like meat, but I’m not really into that.

You're totally right, South Asian diets tend to be poor in leafy greens and tend to stick with protein and carb heavy veggies like rice, grains, cauliflower, lentils, and beans. I've encountered and was raised with a small cultural disdain for leafy greans ("we aren't cows why should we eat like them" is how I've heard it joked about), but this is changing with new nutritional science and greater popularization of Western food fads like salads. Chinese diets definitely have more leafy greens.

I also find Japanese food to be shockingly short on veggies but same thing, it's hard to grow veggies there so a lot is imported, which makes veggies a bit of a luxury. Fruits are ridiculously hard/expensive to get there. Japanese food is a good example of a diet that historically was pretty meat poor and fish rich, though is changing with meat imports and modern processed fast foods like fried chicken ("chikin") and chicken nanban.

Three generations ago it was also common to beat your children. I’m not sure that we should base moral arguments on what was common in the past.

No, it was not. It was common to spank your children, out of care and love, when they did things dangerous to themselves or others, and sometimes a strap or switch when something truly horrific was done.

We now view this as wrong, but that wasn't beating them.

Yes, some idiots did beat their children, or hit their children out of anger. That doesn't mean it was common.

From what I observe, although spanking is described as basically harmless, not everyone who lived through it see it as something that improved their lives. Even if it was administered by well-meaning, loving parents.

To be clear, as this is often required on HN, I was speaking of a subset of spanking:

out of care and love, when they did things dangerous to themselves or others, and sometimes a strap or switch when something truly horrific was done.

In other words, never because fed up / angry. Never because of minor situations, and so on. For example, swearing isn't "dangerous to themselves or others". Spanking employed when the life of the child or others is involved, is a short-cut to locking an intense memory into long-term recall.

This sort of event is rare.

And to be frank? "Improved their lives" isn't necessarily important. Note how I state "dangerous to themselves or others"? Siblings and other children have to be taken into account.

Lastly, and take this from someone with grey hair, it wasn't until my 30s that I started to appreciate some of the discipline I disagreed with as a child. Disagreeing, doesn't mean it was wrong.

"Yes, some idiots did beat their children, or hit their children out of anger. That doesn't mean it was common."

In the areas that still do beat their children, they commonly do beat more, when they are angry.

Okay, I believe my argument is not hurt by replacing the word „beat“ with „spank“. Adding that physical punishment was done out of love strengthens my argument, I think.

The change is spanking is not because spanking is harmful but because the world doesn't need it. The environment people are in is much more gentle, so it's not necessary to raise children that can handle large amounts of adversity.

We also don't teach our kids to defend themselves against sword attacks, for the same reason - it's no longer necessary.

Your argument implies that the past behavior was bad and we should change it, but that's incorrect. The past behavior was correct for its time. If someone would have raised a child without spanking 100 years ago they would end up with a weak person who could not live in the real world, this would be a bad thing.

I’m not particularly knowledgeable about early child development but I believe the science we have today says that spanking is in fact harmful and spanking your children does not „toughen them up“.

I read parent's comments more as a counter argument to the suggestion more people would be vegetarian if they had to kill their own animals for food, not a moral justification based on "people used to do it".

I read it as both, especially given the "I'm a hunter and hunting is great" bit. It is moral psychology. There is an implicit notion of what it means to be a human, and what is ethically sound is tied up with it, because it is universal, beyond time and place, and thus normal and good.

In this particular ethical issue it is an eternal tug-of-war between humans as essentially vegans by nature, corrupted by cloaking animal suffering in neat, pre-slaughtered packages (if we would only see...), and the other side presenting humans as one of the animals eating other animals. We are made out to be part of a natural order as hunter and butcher, which is both normal and good. Modern sensibilities around animal suffering is seen as a whimsy aberration of normality, artificial and unnatural. It is both descriptive and normative, and the what-is functions as a tool for the what-should.

This does lead to pretty bad 'science' (on both sides, really) and conversations that are very loaded around basic facts. I would agree if you would say the what-is does not depend on the what-should-be and vice versa, free will and all, but this is often not how ethical conversations (and rhetoric) works.

Just think of how much the environment would benefit if we wouldn't need to run so many refrigerators to eat fresh food…

It would not benefit at all. Zero. It would harm the environment because all the food waste outweighs the energy cost of refrigerators by several orders of magnitude.

Feed food waste to chickens, fish, rabbits, and worms. Feed poop to worms and bacteria, feed bacteria and worm waste to plants, which convert that dastardly CO2 to sweet wholesome Oxygen. I was always taught that recycling was good, while pumping oil out of the ground and creating new CO2 is bad, but I'm no expert.

It's better to eat the "food waste", rather than create more waste in the first place.

If I have leftover rice, I'd rather refrigerate it and eat it tomorrow, instead of feed it to chickens.

Rabbits can not eat food waste, they have very sensitive digestions. Very few fish will eat food waste (mostly just tilapia will do so).

> feed bacteria and worm waste to plants

Plants do not eat bacteria. You can't just "feed" worm waste to plants, you would have to bury into the soil via plowing or some other method.

Bacteria also make CO2 by digesting food. The fertilizer they make is minerals and nitrogen.

You have a bit of a simplistic view of how this food cycle works.

> I was always taught that recycling was good, while pumping oil out of the ground and creating new CO2 is bad, but I'm no expert.

It's not so simple. Except for metal, recycling usually uses more oil than not recycling.

Plants do eat bacteria waste (see aquaponics), rabbits can eat some kitchen plant waste, but should of course not solely be fed that, (same with chickens), rabbit poop can be fed to fish and chickens (rabbits themselves eat it like 3x because poor digestive tract)… There are obviously a few steps I left unmentioned, as I am keeping my comments simplistic for the format.

You seem to have selective comprehension issues.

Recycling is more than just throwing trash into different coloured bins and burning oil to process it; Specifically, recycling in my comment refers to the process of water and air turning into food, and back into water and air, as has been customary for terran life for a few years now.

It is quite simply a natural cycle using no oil for centuries, vs. an industrial cycle using millions of tons of oil per year.

> Plants do eat bacteria waste (see aquaponics)

Sort of. Some bacteria do convert ammonia into a form that plants can eat, but the majority of bacteria waste is just CO2.

> rabbits can eat some kitchen plant waste

Very very very little. A couple leaves from romaine lettuce and that's about it. They can not eat vegetable peelings for example.

Chickens can.

> rabbit poop can be fed to fish and chickens (rabbits themselves eat it like 3x because poor digestive tract)

This is not correct. Rabbit poop is mostly cellulose and chickens can not digest it, nor can most fish except for tilapia. Rabbits do not eat their poop 3x - they have a special partially digested waste that they will eat a second time, sometimes, it depends on their diet. They do not re-eat their regular poop.

> It is quite simply a natural cycle using no oil for centuries

And it releases lots of CO2. The CO2 the plant absorbed is released when it decays. What's your goal? Reduction of CO2? Less stuff in landfill?

This started with your claim that not refrigerating will reduce CO2 emissions. This is not true. When you "recycle" leftover food, all the CO2 in the food is emitted, and you have to grow more.

The amount of CO2 emitted to recycle food is FAR FAR more than the CO2 from running a refrigerator.

I understand you long for the old days and how we did things, but you are overlooking the downsides. Each person in the past used far more resources than they do today, the world had fewer people and it worked out. It's not possible to support this many people using the inefficient methods of the past.

Before the industrial revolution almost every single tree in Europe was cut down in order to support human life there, it was not sustainable - they ran out of trees.

Using technology the increase in efficiency was so great we also got "treats" other technology we greatly enjoy. There are downsides of course, too much CO2, but going back to the old ways is NOT the solution.

Food production and consumption using the methods by which living beings have consumed each other for the last 3.8 billion years, is emissions neutral, on average.

The argument for CO2 reduction has always been that all the extra carbon released from coal, gas, and petroleum, is bad, as a net increase of emissions, beyond natural processes.

Yeah, I used to perform similar mental gymnastics too. Interestingly, it's very similar to the behaviour of addicts. Unfortunately, the way poor people lived 3 generations ago has absolutely nothing to do with how fat, rich people live today. What's next? No vaccines? No pasteurisation? This line of reasoning is a very slippery slope.

Hunting is different for a couple of reasons. First, you're almost certainly talking about killing from a distance with a gun. But it's also quite different to hunt a wild animal rather than raise a domestic animal just to kill it. But also some "hunting" is basically a simulation using released domestic animals (see pheasant shooting in the UK). And some is just downright cruel (see fox hunting in the UK or shooting of birds in Malta). Nobody is doing the slaughter for fun, though. It's always guns or dogs doing the dirty work. Funny that.

> Nobody is doing the slaughter for fun, though. It's always guns or dogs doing the dirty work. Funny that.

But also to provide. The estate near us has shoots every season and the fowl which is killed is given to the local residents. Lots of local poorer people really look forward to shoot season because they can pack their freezer with lots of free meat. I speak to lots of older folks in the area and they say this is the way it has been done for hundreds of years.

> It's always guns or dogs doing the dirty work. Funny that.

Someone has to skin & butcher the animal though, or does that "just happen?"

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