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Comment by stared | Hacker News Reader

Also, I highly recommend this Kurzgesagt video on how paying just a bit more for meat or eggs drastically improves animals' living conditions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sVfTPaxRwk

Additionally, while (pun intended) I am not religious about this, I try to avoid eating pork - as pigs are among the smartest animals humans eat (with intelligence comparable to dogs). For a similar reason, I avoid eating octopuses as well.

Also, as a rule of thumb, "less meat is nearly always better than sustainable meat, to reduce your carbon footprint", https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat.

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> how paying just a bit more for meat or eggs drastically improves animals' living conditions

Not exactly. Supermarkets also jack up prices without any improvement at all.

I.e. better conditions require higher prices, but higher prices can mean better conditions or more supermarket profit. And the supermarket is incentivized to pick profit, together with pretty pictures and words that "suggest" better conditions.

Which is why I don't generally trust the wording on packages with regard to animal conditions. I'm not an expert in which exact phrases legally mean substantially better conditions, vs. which ones sound good but aren't meaningful at all. Nor should I be expected to.

I'd much prefer the government just legislated conditions that are humane. Either animal welfare matters or it doesn't. It doesn't make any sense for it to depend on individual consumers. A few people buying top-tier eggs isn't ever going to improve anything for the vast majority of hens.

While it's true marketing can impact how your dollars could actually contribute to better living conditions, I'd just it's defeatist to just throw your hands up and say it doesn't matter.

A consumer can look up certifications like Certified Humane which does audits on farms to ensure they're following the required standards. While I'm sure it's not a perfect system it does hold farms to some accountability. https://www.aspca.org/shopwithyourheart/consumer-resources/c...

Browsing that page, a state like New Hapshire has one pork farm and one beef farm listed and that's it. These seem like they're more for locals and farm-to-table restaurants?

At my local supermarkets, even the nicer ones like Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, I don't ever recall seeing any of those logos on eggs, chicken, beef, anything at all. I'd love to know if I just missed them, though.

I believe Certified Humane has one of the most stringent requirements for animal welfare so there'll be fewer farms. There's other certifications out there such as Animal Welfare Approved. I admit for a welfare-conscious consumer it's not easy to sift through all the noise by doing actual research. Wish things were better but at least it's been trending in the right direction in the last couple of decades.

> I admit for a welfare-conscious consumer it's not easy to sift through all the noise by doing actual research

Case in point, the first result I find on Certified Humane egg brands, is paywalled

https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/food-drink/shopping-guide/eg...

That doesn't mean it's not easy - you found it straight away. It means that independent journalism and research cost money.

Certified Humane is quite likely available for some eggs wherever you’re shopping in the US (maybe not Alaska or Hawaii, and not at convenience stores). I exclusively buy certified eggs, and I’ve never found a normal grocery store that didn’t have them. Trader Joes and Whole Foods definitely do.

If you think Trader Joe's and Whole Foods are normal grocery stores, then you live a much more privileged life than you realize.

They only mentioned Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods because they replied to a post specifically mentioning those stores…

what is with hacker news and comments like this. I once complained about the dmv being innefficient and like ten people came out of the woodwork telling me to check my privelege.

I was specifying Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods because the parent comment did, not because they’re representative grocery stores. I mostly shop at Kroger’s personally, which is where I buy eggs, but I occasionally go to Trader Joe’s because some products are cheaper there. In fact, in some areas (like Manhattan, where many unprivileged people live), Trader Joe’s is cheaper than the normal grocery stores.

I get Certified Humane eggs at my random Strack and Van Til (ordinary, non-lux grocery store) here in Indiana. I never thought of it as that rare or crazy. (In fact, I almost reasoned the reverse that if even here of all places, it's got that logo, then it's probably not worth much.)

This doesn’t make sense in the real world… where dollars and financial outcomes are a lot easier to secure (and defend) than political outcomes.

If the vast majority aren’t willing to use their wallets to back this or that… sacrificing something vastly rarer, for the average HN reader at least, is just nonsensical.

To the contrary, that's the entire premise of government regulation and spending.

Most people aren't going to voluntarily send money to the FDA, Social Security, or Medicare, or the courts, or the military, out of the goodness of their hearts. Left to their own devices, they'll freeload. But we all agree these things are important (as evidenced by how we vote), so we pay for them with mandatory taxes.

So your idea that something is nonsensical "if the vast majority aren’t willing to use their wallets to back this or that" doesn't hold water at all. Most people won't use their wallets to back anything, if it's left up to them as individuals.

I've always thought the solution to this was to fix a tax rate, but let the people apportion the spending themselves, to discover what they find important without letting them claw back the taxes, which I agree would be the default.

Seems like it would shut down entire swaths of "I don't wanna pay for your <x>" bitterness and resentment.

This individual apportionment always seems neat when I think about it, until I realize the vote would not be per person anymore, but per tax paid. I want to force rich people to contribute to welfare. They might be inclined to just fund the police to protect their property.

Yeah, maybe in some ideal world where people never have more than one political priority at the same time…

> financial outcomes are a lot easier to secure (and defend) than political outcomes.

It's also way easier to game, which is the problem here: the asymmetry of information is almost total as the consumer will never know anything behind what the supplier is regulated into saying, and even when it is, then anything that will present itself as an alternative will be massively overpriced (that's why organic stuff is twice as expensive even though it has less than a 25% difference in actual yield in the fields).

And again, your belief has zero empirical evidence, products never improve on that basis.

I agree, organic is a very good demonstration of that. It usually is much more expensive while it's generally impossible to show it being much better quality than something that isn't bottom of the barrel.

Where it kinda make sense is for veggies/fruits that are not grown with lots of water/fertilized and are not of calibrated genetics but that just gives you better tasting products because they are not engineered for productivity and not too water stuffed and thus have a more intense taste. In practice, if you are going to cook the stuff anyway, it doesn't matter much, it really makes a difference on stuff with no/low transformation.

Everything else "organic" is basically bullshit. Very often, they will sell you worse products at a premium (like the trend of "complete" pasta, where you get to pay more for fibers you can't digest and have bad taste).

I don't think paying more leads to anything indeed. What matters is the actual product choice, but it takes time and you need to be informed a lot, so most people are not able or unwilling to make the effort.

Someone who has time/money can make the effort of going to the local butcher, the preselection is almost guaranteed to be better but that's something only the richest can do nowadays.

It doesn't make any sense for it to depend on individual consumers

I’m trying to think of a single example where one of these “vote with your wallet” certification movements have ultimately triumphed and become the new norm… I can’t think of one. Organic might be the biggest success, but even then it’s just an alternative, not a consumer-preference-driven revolution in all commercial agriculture.

> I’m trying to think of a single example where one of these “vote with your wallet” certification movements have ultimately triumphed and become the new norm…

Kids toys.

There are a lot of successful wood kids toys brands now that exist as a backlash against plastic toys. Even mainstream retailers now carry an assortment of wood toys.

Melissa and Doug are one of the largest brands, but others exist as well.

Wood toys are a bad example because they are meaningfully distinct from plastic toys, and as such there is a fashion around wooden toys right now. (And I'm not even convinced using wood toys has any advantage over plastic toys in terms of environmental impact or exposition to pollutants for the kids. They are more expansive though, so they may be used less as disposal toys and live longer which is good, but their reusability won't outlive the fashion and I fully expect them to be regarded as “out of date” in less than a decade, like every trend).

> Wood toys are a bad example because they are meaningfully distinct from plastic toys

> And I'm not even convinced using wood toys has any advantage over plastic toys in terms of environmental impact or exposition to pollutants for the kids

I think you just argued both sides. :D

Regarding meats - Farm fresh meat is meaningfully distinct, it tastes better. You can get meat from different breeds of animals, heritage breeds or breeds that are not normally sold in the US but that are needed to replicate recipes from other countries.

For toys, there is an arguable environmental improvement buying wood toys, similar to buying nicer organic meats.

Lovevery, a fancy higher toy subscription service, has a lot of wood toys as part of their service, and they've been around since 2015.

Melissa and Doug has likewise been going strong for around 25 years, with at least 10 years of mainstream success.

> They are more expansive though, so they may be used less as disposal toys and live longer which is good, but their reusability won't outlive the fashion

Because of how they are gifted to new families, baby and toddler goods have a lifetime that is basically "until they fall apart".

As an example, my son has a playset from 1992! (Plastic for sure, but wow, durable thick plastic!)

He also has some wooden blocks from his grandmother! (I was a bit surprised to find other kids playing with identical blocks from the same 60+ year old set, but I guess I shouldn't have been.)

> I think you just argued both sides. :D

Both sides of what? Whether the comparison is valid?

Saying "those shouldn't be directly compared but if you do it anyway it goes the wrong way" isn't arguing both sides. (And a few words to specify less confidence don't change that.)

He said kids toys are a bad example because wood toys are meaningfully distinct from non-wood toys, and then explained how they are in fact not meaningfully distinct beyond a superficial level, which I brought back around to the differences between organic/non-organic food (e.g. feel good and possibly environmentalism).

All that said, my initial reply was wrong because I ignored the "certification movements" part of the phrase I quoted (I honestly didn't notice that) and beyond fear mongering amongst parents (which is pretty easy to do from a marketing standpoint), I also cannot think of any other examples!

> then explained how they are in fact not meaningfully distinct beyond a superficial level

Which part of the comment did this? I don't see it.

The second line you quoted definitely doesn't do that. It talks about the environmental/pollution factor being small, but the environmental/pollution factor is not why they said the toys are meaningfully distinct. The factors making them meaningfully distinct don't get elaborated on at all, let alone elaborated on in a way that contradicts the original claim.

Take almost any secular country with a predominantly Muslim population - and this is exactly what is happening there. In all commercial livestock production slaughter is carried out by special workers with special religious education - purely in order to put a mark of a religious certification center on the packaging.

In Australia, "free range", "cage free" and "cage" eggs are all legally defined terms. Consumer preference for free range is so strong that mainstream supermarkets stock mostly free range, with cage free for the price-conscious, and no cage eggs at all.

The "free range" definition is still pretty permissive, and if you go into the local Trader Joes equivalent (Harris Farms) you'll get a chart prominently comparing how various farms treat their chickens as an explanation why some free range eggs cost $6/dozen while others are $16.

when you have the option to do something rather than nothing, it's not a good excuse to not proceed because it will not fix it all. "Let's topple this dictator" "No no no, it won't free all the people under authoritarian governments"

"I'd much prefer the government just legislated conditions that are humane. Either animal welfare matters or it doesn't. It doesn't make any sense for it to depend on individual consumers. A few people buying top-tier eggs isn't ever going to improve anything for the vast majority of hens."

I assume you don't live in a country that forms a government based on elections. If animal welfare mattered enough, it'd be political.

Popular sentiment has had some influence on the human animal, at least. E.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Meat_Inspection_Act

It's being talked about in the linkdd video.

Showing that you're willing to pay extra for green products (or products that respect animal welfare, etc) creates a competitive environment in which companies can compete on who provides the most green per dollar. Even if those marked up products are all just greenwashed today, it still creates a market opportunity for new companies to come in and outcompete today's greenwashers with products that deliver better green per dollar in the future.

Yes, that is all covered in that video.

It's not that the price increase itself leads to better conditions, it's that better conditions necessitate price increases.

There are ways to assess whether a product meets one's standards. They may not be your standards, but it would meet the median for consumers.

I can purchase poultry from a local farm that has an on-site health inspector, where chickens are free-range. In ovo sexing is coming later for eggs. On the poultry side, life in battery cages by far leads to the most suffering. Absent that, given the right conditions, I find the poultry inoffensive and most consumers would too.

I agree there should be legislation, and that has been happening at the state-level.

Stop buying meat and eggs from supermarkets…

> together with pretty pictures and words that "suggest" better conditions.

Regulations exists to avoid misleading or lying to customers. Many years of deregulation, thou, have increased the number of scams and increased the price of goods and services. Maybe it was not a good idea.

I worked on classical conditioning of isolated invertebrate nervous systems for my Ph.D. I worked on sea slugs.

Our seawater facility had octopus in several tanks. It became obvious that they easily recognized and differentiated among people who entered the lab. They would approach the front of their tanks when their caretakers (who fed them and cleaned their tanks) arrived, and would hide from the grad students who studied them. When I noticed that decades ago, I stopped eating octopus.

That's weird take unless you decided to be completely vegan.

Cows recognize people very well too and will definitely flock to their feeder yet we have been eating them for centuries. In fact, one could argue that to allow domestication a minimum amount of intelligence is necessary in the animal otherwise it's impractical.

Animals have various degrees of intelligence but that's hardly relevant. What matters is that they are not our own species and they are less intelligent than us so we can dominate them.

People have been looking at some sort of morals in the food we eat, especially the animals, as if it mattered or made us better in any way (probably looking for some sort of religion replacement).

The circle of life doesn't care about your morals/feelings and if some other species were to become dominant because of their intelligence, they would gladly eat us.

Eating things in relation to their perceived intelligence makes no sense, but I guess you can very much go into the cult of veganism.

Some people have a conscious, as irrational and unprofitable as that is. I think it's a fairly coherent position to not want to kill and consume intelligent creatures.

At the same time, I think it's kind of telling of the irrationality in your argument here that, in the first line, you claim that someone's line of thinking is weird unless they took it to the extreme logical conclusion of veganism. Then in your last line you call veganism a cult.

Do you realize that you're arguing in bad faith, or is it unintentional?

This is offtopic (and not affiliated in any way), but I recently read this blog post [https://benthams.substack.com/p/what-to-do-if-you-love-meat-...] which gave me an interesting point of view about this, much in line with what you are saying, but most importantly, an actionable (and easy if you have some spare money) thing to do.

I have since started donating to the mentioned organization, because I can't really bring myself to stop eating meat for several reasons (although I do avoid octopus just as you do), but at least this way I believe I might make a small difference.

Also, I recommend not reading the linked post about factory farm hell if you'd like to avoid having horrific descriptions planted in your head for weeks.

I love meat yet stopped eating all mammalian and fowl protein more than 30 years ago. I compromised with fish, but have gone long stretches without. Yet somehow protein is still very primary in my diet. As many people speak of this difficulty to evolve and change their diet, I have come to theorize that people have a deep seated cultural need for sacrifice -- something must die for their meal to be legitimate. The OP/OA explores the history of this idea. With all of the well developed plant protein options, some imitative of meats and others unique and viable, and the obvious looming problem of scaling livestock production with population growth and climate change, there must be something deep seated holding our evolution back.

Interesting framing, I've seen a similar 'If it's a meal, then where's the meat?' attitude from my own family, I've had some thoughts on where it came from, but I think part of it was escaping poverty in my grandparent's generation, and seeing 'success' as being able to afford meat in the first place.

Meat was then a part of every meal, because doing otherwise would be socially... embarrassing? Not necessarily in a conscious way, but in a way it would be like giving you kids gruel. (Not that I have a problem with savoury oatmeal now :P)

Then my parents grew up in that environment, and it was just part of the landscape of life. Meals have a meat ingredient. Or meat is the meal.

There's a similar resistance to breakfasts that aren't egg-based. (honorable mention oatmeal again for breaking through) Or a similar resistance to eggs as the protein source for dinners, notice it just doesn't happen in north american cooking very much. Happens in other cuisines all the time though.

I don't think it needs to be some deep seated gene-based flaw (at risk of putting words in your mouth) it only needs to be 'normal', and there's massive resistance to changing what's 'normal' when diverging from 'normal' isn't immediately more emotionally or physically comfortable than staying. Sometimes even then, if it makes you an outlier in the social landscape.

I think the prevalence of the "soyboy" epithet is also evidence though. And hunting is a deep seated cultural value -- it is a rite of passage for many in American culture and is an important component of American masculine identity.

Definitely not ruling it out, it's not 0% for sure. Though as a Canadian I don't think we got it as bad here, so I wouldn't say I really have any idea how big a factor it is. Especially in the USA.

It's extremely difficult to eat low-carb without eating animal protein.

Many of us don't eat low-carb because of some internet fad - we do it because we can see the data from our CGM.

> As many people speak of this difficulty to evolve and change their diet, I have come to theorize that people have a deep seated cultural need for sacrifice -- something must die for their meal to be legitimate.

Of course something must die, but it's not because of culture. Even the most devout vegan would surely concede that the plants they eat must die in order to render sustenance from them. The reality we live in, even if we don't like it, is the simple fact that something must die for us to continue living.

Life feeds on life feeds on life

Some might even chant, "This is necessary," over and over.

Since we can't do photosynthesis or break down some rather toxic molecules like our more primitive siblings, we must eat organic matter that once was alive. No need to delve too much in some militant vegan fantasies and rationalizations.

Plant vs animal makes little difference from rational point of view, both feel pain and we have no clue telling which one more, not that it matters in this topic. Health wise plants are better, but ideal is as always some middle ground.

Biohack our guts and we can go on whole lives without harming much, jainists would probably be interested.

> both feel pain and we have no clue telling which one more

I never understood that dumb argument. After so much evolution lead us to being an empathic species, of course we have clue of others pain.

Tear off some leaves of a tree in a public space

Tear off some pets legs in a public space

Observe people around you reaction. They’ll have a clue.

The argument as I understand it is that empathy and the “clues“ are imprinted based on social norms. Little children will happily rip out plants but will start to cry if they see or hear somebody else crying. One theory is that it is all about self-preservation: An environment where one animal cries without being taken care of is considered dangerous and inherently unsafe for self. Not so with plant life.

Why? I mean we only need the molecules from the ingested food, so why can those chemicals only come from things that were living?

Is there any entirely artificial food that doesn't require a previously living thing?

>so why can those chemicals only come from things that were living?

Because food is a way to consume order. In Schrödinger's terms, the food chain is "life feeding on negative entropy". As you go up the food chain more and more complex organisms need to consume more low entropy things to maintain their more and more sophisticated internal structure. There's more energy in the matter of a rock than you'll ever need, but you can't gnaw on the thing to sustain yourself.

That said "life" doesn't necessarily mean "sentient animal". You can certainly expend energy to create artificial food sources but they'll always be lifelike, that is ordered for the reason Schrödinger lays out.

> Even the most devout vegan would surely concede that the plants they eat must die in order to render sustenance from them.

Let me (far from a vegan) try to disagree: you can sustainably harvest the fruit or the bark of a plant without killing it, and you can certainly argue that those parts aren't alive in themselves. You could stretch the argument to include the sap and the leaves. Does a mother have to die to suckle her baby?

A really enlightened follower of this argument might limit himself not only to renewable parts of the plant, but also of animals: it's OK to eat eggs, dairy products, honey, blood pudding, but not meat, potatoes or carrots.

Of course, we don't farm those products in a way consistent with not killing the non-productive animals, with the possible exception of honey. But in principle one could.

> dairy products

There is no dairy without lots of dead male cows. “Lacto” vegetarians for ethical reasons are frequently unaware or ignorant of this.

If we had no emotional attachment to specific recipes, shapes, colors, textures of food, we'd plausibly move away from "of course something must die" quite fast. We have the tech to produce a nutrient dense food from "thin air", from waste, from any number of things that do not require destroying sentient or non-sentient life. Notable in the press was https://solarfoods.com but that's just one example of many.

Still, there is a clear and significant distinction between killing sentient life (most animals) and non-sentient life (plants or mushrooms), and there are very few people here who could not feasibly switch to the latter.

Yes, the weird truth is that donating a small percentage of your salary to a charity like this is a lot easier than trying to be vegetarian/vegan while still being about as effective.

That site says ~$25 per month, which is not a lot for engineer salaries. Or $50/month if you want to make up for your past choices too.

FWIW I've donated a lot to The Humane League and Giving What We Can's Animal Welfare Fund.

Octopodes don't actually have a very long lifespan, as adults die shortly after mating. Which is only to say that the decision to consume is more complicated for this creature than others, because if the goal is to minimize suffering, an ethically aquaculture-farmed octopus harvested after mating will not live much longer anyways.

And I've always found the argument that "more intelligent/sentient creatures deserve more protection and rights" to be basically a post hoc defense against cannibalism. We can't know what "suffering" feels like to less intelligent and "simpler" animals so why make our sentience a criterion for the morality of eating? Just from a safety concern we shouldn't be eating humans, but not because we "suffer uniquely more" than other species.

> We can't know what "suffering" feels like to less intelligent and "simpler" animals so why make our sentience a criterion for the morality of eating?

Using the power of the scientific method, we can form hypothesis. Take a bite out of a few hundred people, give them IQ tests. Give surveys. Use induction.

As our ability to communicate with more and more animals improves with technology, start giving them surveys after taking a bite out of them.

My hypothesis is that every animal along the questionnaire wave front will overwhelmingly self report that they prefer not to be eaten.

At some point, we'll all have to wring our hands about an arXiv preprint where somebody convincingly lets us know that the corn doesn't like being eaten either.

We'll find a few really depressed plants and animals that are ready to be eaten, and some people will propose we make the world a more depressing place so there's more consent in all this. That's a bad take, but the argument will last 1000 years. All the while everyone and everything will keep on eating and eating.

Have you ever sat and thought about all the eating that has gone into making this moment for you? Like, all the eating you've done, all the eating of the creatures and plants that you've eaten have done. All your ancestors. So on and so forth back to the simplest primordial chemical reactions. Life is the tip of the spear atop a long cone of death and teeth gnashing. It's quite horrific.

The universe would be a lot more chill if we could just leave the clouds of fluorine to meditate. They're quite serene when they do that.

Not to worry. CRISPR will give us the talking cows from the restaurant at the end of the universe.

> And I've always found the argument that "more intelligent/sentient creatures deserve more protection and rights" to be basically a post hoc defense against cannibalism.

It's not some veiled aversion to cannibalism, it's because humans have empathy for other humans, and our empathy for non-humans scales with how human-like we perceive those animals to be. If someone sees intelligence as a defining trait of humanity, then they're likely to empathize with animals that display great intelligence. And if you empathize with the animal, you're more likely to be sensitive to its perceived suffering.

Raw intelligence isn't the only thing that drives our empathy toward animals though. I'd argue that it isn't even the main thing.

We care much more about an animal's biological/genetic similarity to ourselves, which is why people are comfortable eating octopuses but not lemurs, even though octopuses are much better problem solvers and lemurs are relatively dumb.

We also care more about sociability / the animal's ability to communicate with humans. This is why people are more comfortable eating pigs instead of dogs. Pigs might be smarter, but dogs are much better at communicating with us, eager to please, etc.

This is completely cultural and has little to do with "genetic similarity". People have been eating monkeys since forever. Monkeys that have the most human-looking gazes.

Same with dogs.

Thank you for using "octopodes"!

Would have preferred the more standard "octopuses", but at least it's not the incorrect "octopi"!

My dislike of "octopi" is a funny thing. It makes me feel both educated and snobbish in equal measure.

> with intelligence comparable to dogs

Pigs are thought to be closer to toddlers in intelligence and they can use tools without any human help. Personally, I never eat them. Too weird.

> Pigs are thought to be closer to toddlers in intelligence

You're making a common mistake here, in conflating pigs being compatible with toddlers based on a very limited scope test, with being comparable to toddlers in general, which they are not remotely close to being.

Pigs are comparable to dogs, but dogs are much more impressive overall. Lookup dogs like Chaser, for example, and show me a pig that has ever come close.

I'm not sure how many pigs have had their intelligence evaluated. Most outliers probably go unnoticed. The experimental evidence seems to indicate that pigs are probably smarter than dogs.

People think that dogs are special because they have relationships with them. But that doesn't really make dogs special except as far as the relationship is concerned.

> I'm not sure how many pigs have had their intelligence evaluated.

The point is when intelligence of animals is evaluated like this, it's evaluated in very limited scopes, e.g. arithmetic abilities, mental time travel capabilities, abstract thinking capabilities, etc.

To generalize the results from one limited scope test to intelligence in general is flawed and wrong.

> The experimental evidence seems to indicate that pigs are probably smarter than dogs.

It indicates nothing of the sort.

Non-human animals lack abstract thought and language in the full human sense.

"full" is doing an extraordinary amount of work in that statement.

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/07/1092127/the-way-...

We had pigs and dogs when I grew up and was around a lot of sheep dogs.

I would based on my experience say the pigs are more intelligent than dogs, even the sheep dogs which are some of the cleverest I have seen.

The pigs would be solving problems, building things (the first thing in a new place was always a latrine), organizing their environment but then would take well earned rests. There was a social dynamic to them that was also kind of interesting.

I think dogs like Chaser show in general the upper limit for dogs, at least demonstrated so far, is much higher than that of pigs.

It can be hard to compare the two since we can't compare their intelligence overall as one thing, but have to compare specific subsets, showing dogs and pigs are intelligent in different ways.

I think any claim that one is outright more intelligent than the other is dubious.

I'm left wondering whether you mean "dogs < pigs < toddlers" or some other ordering.

Last 5 years or so I buy meat maybe once in 3 months, and that is strictly from the local farm. They have their own cows, goats, pigs and sheep. You just get an email for the next slaughtered animal and reserve the cuts you want. This happens once in 6 weeks, so I do every other event. You can see the animals in the farm, it's all open. It's maybe 50% more expensive than horrible spongy chewy supermarket meat. Sometimes they have game meat which is mummy.

Chicken per kg costs as much as beef, if not more. But it is so tasty! They are from another farm, which is also open to visit.

Reducing my meat consumption and going for higher quality helped me to appreciate meat more! It's a speciality. I think about the dish days ahead, what side dish I should make, which wine should I pair it with..

Paying more of course doesn't improve animals' conditions automatically. Improved conditions would most likely increase the price.

But even with quite hefty price increse, the conditions will still be a living hell. And for an individual eating animals and animal produce is about the most environmentally harmful thing conducted regularly regardless of the price.

This is a good thing to point out. I source most of my meat and eggs from local small farms where I know that the animals are raised in good conditions. Partially because I think it tastes better, partially for the ethics of it. Because of that, I pay more.

But if one goes to the local supermarket, it's easy to find upbranded labels charging more for who knows what. Probably mostly to fund their marketing budget.

For some products, like free-range eggs, there is the possibility of choosing more ethical options. With many others, the supply chain is opaque, and paying more gives absolutely no guarantee of better conditions. The only way to be sure is if you know a local farmer personally.

So, I think there should be much better regulations about minimal living conditions (though this would face strong opposition).

Additionally, it would be wonderful if every animal-derived product had a recent photo (within the last year) from the exact farm of origin. It would be even better if every food product included a CO2e per calorie estimate (see e.g. https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore).

> The only way to be sure is if you know a local farmer personally

This isn't as hard as people make it seem. I live in a city. Yet I participate in a local livestock farm share, the farm is about an hour away. They allow members & prospective members to come in and tour the farm, see the conditions, and their processes. They work to be transparent about everything that's going on. It took me about 10 minutes of googling 15 years ago to find it. The only extra work I've had to do since is once a month go about 30 minutes out of my way to the local pickup spot

Yes, this isn't feasible for every American. Nor could the scale of small farms accommodate that. Yes, it's a luxury. But still, people discuss these things like it's fantasy land and it really isn't.

> Yes, this isn't feasible for every American. Nor could the scale of small farms accommodate that.

Not immediately, but if the food-buying public started to prefer doing things that way, eventually the industry would reshape itself to accommodate. Over the span of decades, I figure.

Yes, it's more possible than most people realize. Where I live outside a town of 40,000, everyone could still buy meat and other food locally if they wanted to. Most just don't, and so many of the small farms have disappeared. But enough remain for everyone who's interested, and the farmers I know would like to sell more directly if they had the customers. (One problem is that farmers make terrible marketers and salesmen, generally.)

> For some products, like free-range eggs, there is the possibility of choosing more ethical options.

There sure are, e.g. anything plant-based! ;)

> Additionally, it would be wonderful if every animal-derived product had a recent photo (within the last year) from the exact farm of origin. It would be even better if every food product included a CO2e per calorie estimate (see e.g. https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore).

Produce animal welfare and environmental impact are orthogonal, and maybe even somewhat opposed. But both would indeed be better.

Meat from free-range chickens has an ecological footprint about 4 times higher (they grow slower, live longer, so need more water and feed, while excreting more methane, and use up more land).

It would indeed be interesting if packaging from supermarkets put some estimate of environmental footprint on the packaging. I doubt it will happen: It would thoroughly confuse many consumers that the product with the highest price has the worst environmental impact, and could reduce sales of their highest margin products.

That's considering that you only use the land for chickens, and that you get your feed from elsewhere. Multi-use land solves that problem, and can also reduce the need for feed (e.g. chickens in an orchard). Those systems can work really well when implemented & maintained by someone with the necessary knowledge and experience, and drastically reduce resource usage. However, most of those systems are not easily automatable, and thus require more human labour, which makes them more expensive overall (this might be solvable with todays AI & robots, but the resources needed to buid, use & maintain the robots would probably wipe out any resources gains). But they'd win the packaging war you mention hands down ;)

A chicken needs 4 m2 per bird to be called free range (in the EU), a battery chicken needs less space than a sheet of paper, and they can be stacked. Then you need twice as much land to grow their feed, or more if you don't want to use intensive agriculture. This is not something you can realistically offset with multi-use land usage.

I don't particularly care whether people choose to let the environment or animal welfare prevail, but the choice should be well-informed.

Yes, basically those are cheaper because they use less ressource and thus have necessarily less environmental impact. It doesn't make sense any other way. Capitalism has plenty of bad outcomes, but inefficient use of ressources not generally one of them.

All of this makes it very hard for people who are posturing trying to appear virtuous/moral in their choices (food, clothing, whatever). At the end of the day if you think you are a problem the best solution is to get rid of it...

All the studies about plant-based vs animal food are deeply flawed because they don't compare properly the nutritional profile and ressource intensity. Most of what we feed to animals is waste/byproducts or just not fit for human consumption, but conveniently can be grown in less arable land.

Still not much methane compared to cows. Also, methane doesn't persist in the atmosphere nearly as long as CO2 does.

> methane doesn't persist in the atmosphere nearly as long as CO2 does

Technically correct, but very very misleading. Yes, methan degrades quickly, but it degrates to CO₂.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane#Atmospheric_methane_an...

I've seen suggestions that livestock can actually be a key component to carbon sequestration, if done correctly. I think it was mentioned in the documentary Kiss the Ground, narrated by Woody Harrelson, but I may be wrong. I believe the gist was that no-till farming and managed grazing helps to save the topsoil, sequester more carbon dioxide, and make something like cattle farming effectively carbon-negative (ie, they're actually helping to mitigate climate change). I'd recommend watching if you haven't, it shows some compelling examples such as a farmer who's the only one in his area farming this way, and he's also the only one who's having successful harvests while being environmentally conscious.

Also, farmed livestock don't automatically exist in a "living hell". Factory farms, yeah, but a properly-managed ranch should have happy, healthy animals.

> make something like cattle farming effectively carbon-negative

The situations in which this is the case (which are oversimplified by the doc) are so specific and small scale that to think they will address the environmental impact without acknowledging the insane, unsustainable demand for meat is magical thinking. People love to point to ideas like this and stuff like feeding cows seaweed to avoid the reality of the dire need for significant shifts in our consumption behaviors.

> but a properly-managed ranch should have happy, healthy animals.

again - the percentage of meat that comes from these conditions is so small as to be virtually irrelevant in the context of the animal agriculture industry

That's what they said about solar power but year after year the industry grows.

I think the comparison of an industry of solar panels and batteries to one of the harvesting of living animals is not a very valuable one. Just as one example: you can improve the efficiency of solar panel and/or battery technology and the manufacturing processes but you can't do the same with cows. You could however move away from the breeding of living animals and instead improve something like lab grown meat which might have more overlap with technologies like solar panels.

You have to recognize that the scale of demand for meat REQUIRES the conditions you find in factory farms. You do not get to keep the same demand while having it all come from Happy Healthy Farm™ for a wide variety of reasons.

You can improve the efficiency of cows via selective breeding. In fact, we have improved the efficiency of cows and that process is accelerating.

Manufactured meat can't and won't replace cattle farming. It still needs vast inputs of energy, water and raw ingredients compared to raising a cow.

> In fact, we have improved the efficiency of cows and that process is accelerating.

Care to share some data on that?

I have always been very dumbfounded by the lab meat craze, nature is very efficient by design, so it would be quite hard to even come close to this efficiency.

But on top of that we don't only get meat from animals (quite a few modern things use byproduct of meat production in fact) and the animals help us re/up-cycle things that would be just a waste otherwise.

All the anti-meat anti-animals' thing is just a new kind of religion that is based on the morals of a few alternative types who want to appear more virtuous than anyone else, in a desperate attempt at faux competition (race to the bottom).

> nature is very efficient by design, so it would be quite hard to even come close to this efficiency.

Do you think that the evolutionary goal for animals is "make the most edible mass possible"?

> All the anti-meat anti-animals' thing is just a new kind of religion that is based on the morals of a few alternative types who want to appear more virtuous than anyone else, in a desperate attempt at faux competition (race to the bottom).

What an incredibly shallow reading of an idea that has been around for thousands of years. Clearly a strawman to avoid engaging with important questions.

"so specific and small scale..."

Hm..I think that Gabe Brown would like a word. :) https://www.fwi.co.uk/arable/land-preparation/soils/how-gabe...

not sure why you thought you were addressing my point about "small scale" with an example of a guy with 2000ha... There wasn't even any mention about how much meat his approach produces per hectare.

> unsustainable demand

Scales with population growth, and immigrants don't come to the U.S. just so they can eschew meat. I don't see what's unsustainable about it. Land-use has barely budged. At any rate if the population didn't grow, the demand wouldn't either. As it happens, global population growth is projected to stall in less than 100 years.

Growth in the 1st world means more emissions and land encroachment, until innovation catches up. Electricity is being abated with renewables, but not concrete, ammonia, plastics, etc. There's no free lunch, if we want the juicy GDP growth, that's the price.

> again - the percentage of meat that comes from these conditions is so small as to be virtually irrelevant in the context of the animal agriculture industry

There's the consideration of our own personal choices and options having a place in the conversation, and the other consideration of prescription for improving conditions and/or emissions.

> I don't see what's unsustainable about it

You think 11-20% of GHG emissions[1] coming from livestock and the insanely high water footprint of meat[2] is sustainable?

[1] https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-agriculture-environm...

[2] https://waterfootprint.org/resources/Report-48-WaterFootprin...

Emissions are projected to fall through innovation (and methane does not persist in the atmosphere very long, compared to CO2). Water use in itself is not a problem. We waste plenty on inessential things and that's no deterrent either.

Notwithstanding that since global population growth is going to stall anyway, demand for meat will stagnate as well. It could only be "unsustainable" on the conceit that it would skyrocket into perpetuity.

Plenty of things you enjoy and "don't need" necessitate emissions, water, and land encroachment. Increases in efficiency mitigate that. Recently, China's fossil fuel use has plateaued. That is quite an accomplishment because demand for energy had been growing fast.

nothing is less convincing in the face of real problems than handwaving everything with "other things also use water" and "don't worry, everything will just become more efficient"

Meat consumption hasn't grown at all in the last 20 years, in fact it has fallen in many of the rich industrial countries (not having highly demanding physical job allows to drop the protein requirements, so there is that).

Even in the US it has been rather stable. There are just more people getting out of poverty on the planet and they won't deny themselves consumption of this beneficial product just to fit to the ideology "du jour".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_cons...

Those claims don't actually pan out in practice. See the Allan Savory vs George Monbiot debate as an example.

It's just feelgood greenwashing for people who don't want to consider changing their diet.

Kind of like the allure of finding people to tell you that butter and bacon are actually superfoods. How convenient that you were already eating those every breakfast.

> How convenient that you were already eating those every breakfast.

Who is actually doing that? Who has enough time and money to actually do that? I'm confused because in EU it's an extremely rare thing and as far as I'm concerned in the US you have a whole section just for breakfast cereal.

So surely if there are people doing that, there are the minority and considering how in bad health much of the US population is, maybe, just maybe, they are onto something.

Those suggestions — that livestock can be a key component for carbon sequestration — have so far all been proven wrong. Just a recent publication in an ever growing list of many disproving the hypothesis: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2404329122

Eat your grain and don't pollute peon! No pork chops for you in New World!

> But even with quite hefty price increse, the conditions will still be a living hell.

Local farmers markets sell animals that had quite happy lives. Some farms even have live webcams where you can check in on the animals 24/7.

Honestly the prices aren't always that much higher, especially for certain cuts, with prices being at worst, about the same as higher end grocery stores, and at best, halfway between fancy grocery stores and a regular supermarket.

> conditions will still be a living hell

I've seen what better farms look like and I disagree. It most closely matches what consumers want and expect. Suffering is non-zero because it necessitate slaughter, but not as egregious as in commercial agriculture.

In other words, there is a threshold of suffering consumers are ok with.

A bit more also can shield you from price shock - if you buy local.

Could our egg farm sold theirs to some big city for big bucks during the eggsistential crisis? Probably, but they didn’t have it setup and just kept selling through normal channels and basically the same price.

This is something I hadn't thought of until the current egg sticker shock. I buy my eggs from a local small farm. I'm still paying more than grocery store prices but my price hasn't changed. Meanwhile the local grocery store has increased by a large percentage. To the point where they're almost the same price.

We realized a similar thing during Covid, when my parents couldn’t find milk on the shelves and we had farmers a few miles away from us dumping it down the drain.

Buying local has an outsize influence for the small increase in price.

Maybe your frame of reference is Whole Foods or something. Out here the farmers are wise to people “wanting to spend more for humanely-raised meat” and price it accordingly. It’s considerably more expensive at the farmer’s market than what it costs at a regular grocery store.

You simply don't understand economies of scale. If you produce 10,000kg of meat a month and decide to sell it off to private customers 0.5-3kg per sale on some farmer market, you need somebody spending whole day managing sales, delivering stuff to sales point, managing unsold meat and so on. If you don't manage to sell it and it goes bad, you tank and soon whole business is over, this ain't some pottery.

Then you have hypermarket chain coming in and telling you they will buy 5,000kg per month, regularly, for next 12 months at lower price, just show it into back of that truck in 1 hour. For much lower price. Still farmers sell to them, so even with their additional 20-50% on top of the cost its cheaper for end customers. Or they subsidize some meat for few days to lure you into shop and bus some other necessities to balance this smaller income.

It does not make sense to eat things with of a lack of intelligence as the guiding principle. Would you eat a human if he or her were stupid enough?

We group outliers with the rest of humanity because there are severe moral hazards with not doing that.

If all humans had the IQ of a waffle, then it would be reasonably fine to farm humans.

I have yet to see a sci-fi scenario where the extra-terrestial super-intelligence considers us just a food source.

I don't have any example on the top of my mind but surely there is.

Matrix is a story were sentient machine use humans as feed for energy so not extra-terrestrial but somewhat close.

Yeah it seems like flawed logic to me too. Why is intelligent suffering worse than dumb suffering? Both feel the same pain when slaughtered. Are smart beings "worth" more? Does a smart pig contribute more to society than a dumb pig? Nonsense distinctions lead to nonsense questions I guess.

But it does pile on more proof for that theory that on some level we are just "inteligence" personified and tend to instinctively act in the interest of inteligence as a concept. Probably also why we're nice to LLMs on principle despite them having zero ability to suffer, and we like to fantasize about making galaxy spanning alliances with smart aliens.

Suffering and pain are supposed to be minimized no matter what. The pain from the slaughter itself is next to nothing when done properly, and not the reason for the distinctions about which animals it's acceptable to kill.

Only when you're an utilitarian. Not everyone is.

My deontological take is that animals deserve the right for bodily autonomy. Violation of that, even if painless, is unethical.

Plus we all know that most animals are factory farmed and suffering and pain there is not limited to the time of slaughter.

Which part of my post do you think is different between those systems?

I said all animals deserve a lack of suffering. It sounds like you agree with that.

I said the reason to avoid (or not avoid) killing animals is a different reason from pain. You gave a reason based on bodily autonomy, so it sounds like you agree with that statement.

We might disagree on the specifics of bodily autonomy, but I made my previous post focused and kept those specifics out of the argument.

So when you get a rat infestation you leave them their bodily autonomy? This is such a naive, black-and-white view of the world, I hope you get into a situation where this will be made extremely obvious.

Modern educated humans are so smart yet so dumb. The city dweller that has never suffered the relentless drive of nature to fuck with him (and instead, sometimes eat him) is quite a specimen.

It's the lack of personhood, and low demonstrated consciousness, in spite of sentience. We have a social contract with each other, not animals.

Social contract is an awful concept. We have moral duties toward one another, but not because of some hideous contract.

We have moral duties to the extent we collectively share values, which are arrived at subjectively and change with time.

In the secular world in the West, even human life in itself isn't considered sacred, as exemplified by sentiment on abortion. The moment we pop out into the world though, we assume personhood and are protected by the social contract.

If I give the grocery store more than sticker price for the animal products on their shelves it will in no way affect the animal's living conditions.

And even if I bought the more expensive animal products it would also not in any way affect the animal's living conditions.

The price of an animal product in no way affects the way the producer treats the animal. You have the causation completely backwards.

The point obviously isn't to give grocery stores more money for no reason, it's to support products that have higher quality standards.

Take poultry as an example, standards vary by county, but the differences between quality labels can be stark. Cheap poultry is often raised in tiny indoor cages and they need to be pumped full of antibiotics due to the unhealthy living conditions. On the other end of the spectrum, organic poultry is free to roam in fields and the coops are regularly moved or kept clean, avoiding the need for antibiotics in the first place.

Even if you disagree that the latter provides a better quality product, it's pretty clear that supporting brands with higher standards results in better living conditions for the animals.

If an animal product is more expensive at point of sale it does not also follow that the producers of said product provided better living conditions for their animals. It could be that the producers of the cheaper of two similar products provided better living conditions. Again, you have the causation all mixed up.

All else being equal, providing betting living conditions should increase the cost to the farmer. But thah A implies B does not mean thah B implies A. Not everything thah increases production cost is better animal living conditions.

I watched the video but I found his premise that there's extreme market pressure to keep prices low lacking. I think that could be true some places but in highly populated areas like California I think prices could be much lower. Whenever the topic comes up people will highlight how laws/regulations like cage free don't raise prices by that much. Which could be true. What this point sidesteps though is that as a collective these limitations make prices much higher because they mean a large amount of product can only be sourced in-state. In short, they collectively act as a form of protectionism that jacks up prices even if their regional impact is minor. It's minor because they're playing into a paradigm that already wildly jacks up prices. What would bring prices down a lot and by extension benefit the poor Americans in these places a lot more is removing all of the barriers to importing these products from other states where they are significantly cheaper.

I went vegetarian for similar animal welfare / cruelty reasons (though I'll have fish occasionally, but not octopus). We also buy the pasture raised eggs for this reason.

I don't care that much about individual carbon footprint personally.

> how paying just a bit more for meat or eggs drastically improves animals' living conditions

It does not. Farms will happily eat the additional earnings and wont improve animals living conditions just because they have money. What improves animal living conditions are regulations and their actual enforcement. That may raise cost of the meat, sure. But just paying more wont improve nothing.

Eating sustainable meat from local farms has never been bad for the environment, which is what this article actually says as well. Of course plants are less.

Also, this article looks extremely deceptive. "Feed and excreta at the bottom of warm, unaerated fish ponds can create more methane than cows" - more than how many cows?

Agreed on octopuses. Sure they taste OK, but it's maybe more of a novelty food than anything else, and when you have read of their alien and physically-distributed intelligence, guilt accompanies any desire to munch one.

It's certainly not a novelty around the coasts of the mediterran sea.

Guilt doesn't apply to all mammals?

A separate issue, innit ? There is a broader consensus on the capacity of mammals for suffering. Plus the issue of the innate value of life at some level (let's say, vertebrates).

100% agreed, just going one step at a time here

Last I heard, the EU is planning intensive octopus farming for meat. The seems really horrible for an intelligent and solitary animal. There are also questions about how humane the proposed killing methods are.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64814781

That's particularly weird because I think their meat is really not enjoyable at all. I have eaten just a piece of it once as a tasting of Spanish tapas tradition and I wouldn't want to renew the experience at all...

They only get two years old or so. We could raise them and just wait for them to die naturally!

They're not novelty in places like Greece where they are a staple.

It's sort of a disingenuous video since they try to present 50-200% increases as small by saying it's some number of cents. And ignoring the environmental land use concerns with these lower efficiency approaches

Not eating animal products at all improves animals living condition infinitely more.

They would not have any living conditions (i.e. would not live at all), because they only live for the purpose of being eaten.

That line of thinking only leads to a conclusion where you should already have fathered a few dozen children, as otherwise you're depriving them of any living conditions.

And ate them?

At least get some blood transfusions out of the deal!

That is a pipe dream.

> paying just a bit more for meat or eggs drastically improves animals' living conditions

Billionaire Egg Baron Pays Contract Farmers Just 26 Cents Per Dozen - https://farmaction.us/exposed-billionaire-egg-baron-pays-con...

Paying more could improve living conditions, but without directly forcing farms to provide better conditions, it won't.

Once you become a vampire meat eater it just becomes so hard to turn it off. It is the most immoral thing I do at the moment and I’m trying to create a multi year plan to be done with this. It’s nothing short of a sin, and to say a smarter animal shouldn’t be eaten as opposed to a dumber one just sounds like the words of a vampire, a tribe I also belong to.

> a smarter animal shouldn’t be eaten as opposed to a dumber one

i think there is something to this, it's about being able to relate to the animal more, making it more digusting. At some point also lactobacillaceae are living beings, is it unethical to eat bread then? Plants also have a level of intelligence. To me these living beings are so far removed from us that it's ok to eat them, mammals are much closer to us, we can empathize with them much more than a fish for instance.

That's how I justify my pescetarian diet. Mammals and birds, too close to our cognition for comfort, fish.. eh, less so. I rarely eat fish anyway, but I haven't eaten mammals or bird since 2019. The second I can buy lab meat that is functionally the same but didn't require a brain (and suffering), I'm back to meat.

Do you think that's where the battle is currently? People debating between Pigs and Bread? Let's avoid the reductive argument otherwise we can never determine right or wrong. Reductive arguments are Thor's hammer for those that want to be amoral at best.

The animals we eat can play fetch, go look up cows. We think chickens are brainless. I don't think a single one of them likes being raised at mass scale in the way we do it. Few can look at it, but so many can debate down to the atom of whether we should stop eating literal matter. I'm not trying to be aggressive specifically towards you, I'm just trying to disturb a lurkers mind that thinks in this way.

No one is going to look at the factory farm videos today, but they will talk their ass off about this topic. I hope everyone makes the pilgrimage to Youtube at the very least to see it every once in awhile.

That was not the point, nor was it reductive. Everyone has to draw the line somewhere along the line from bacteria to other humans. It is impossible not to eat a living creature was the point.

Pigs sleep and root in shit. That's a filthy animal.

https://clip.cafe/pulp-fiction-1994/want-some-bacon/

We used to own chickens. They had no qualms about walking over their own poop, and getting it between their claws. They would peck through their own poop to look for food, getting it all over their beak. Their idea of a bath was covering themselves in dust.

Do you also forgo chicken?

I do, I’m vegetarian.

But my comment entirely missed the mark. It’s referencing the great Pulp Fiction scene.

No they don’t. They build latrines and that is their toilet which they certainly do not sleep in. They cover themselves in mud because it acts as sun block and helps against certain pests. The rooting is either to sort out the land or literally looking for roots, truffles and other things to eat.

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