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Comment by shlant | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

Care to share some data on that?

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