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Comment by aeonik | Hacker News Reader

If I donate my body to octopus stockfeed after I die (after organs are harvested for those in need obviously), does that give me a pass?

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Just embrace cannibalism.

Now you can eat what you want without having to resort to hypocritical cladistics that don't match reality.

Watch out for prions. Stay safe.

Good advice. Fortunately for the aspiring cannibal, however, Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease is very rare with an estimated prevalence of 1 case per million people per year [1], and it's exposure to prions through the eating of infected meat that allows transmission this way rather than cannibalism specifically.

There's a popular belief that cannibalism can cause prion disease. However, this seems not to be the case with famous outbreaks such as Kuru being the result of many members of the community eating or being exposed to the brain tissue of already infected individuals [2]. Concern of transmission via eating meat of animals with a prion disease was the reason for European bans on British Beef in the 90s and 2000s [3].

If you're concerned about exposure to prion disease then good news! They are rare diseases and research suggests that most (87%) of the few cases that do occur are due to protein misfolding in the individual (spontaneous CJD) rather than genetics (familial CJD) or prion exposure (iatrogenic and variant CJD) [4].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170704234755/https://www.ninds... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease)#Transmission [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat... [4] https://doi.org/10.1002%2Fana.410430611

On behalf of all of us cannibals, I'd like to express my sincere gratitude for this valuable contribution to our way of life.

Can I kill and eat your pets and/or the pets of your friends/family?

I will donate my body as stockfeed to those remaining pets that your family/friends have after I die. Does that give me a pass?

But which pets do you mean. Pigs? Cows? Goats? A dog? A turtle?

Lots of places still eat horses, dogs or other animals. I may make a decision to not eat those but I don’t judge folks that do.

There’s a clear difference between deciding not to eat something for cultural reasons than deciding not to eat something because it’s an intelligent, thinking creature.

No it’s not, hence the conversation around it. I am glad you can draw that line clearly but don’t impose others to do the same.

If you swapped out "slavery", "rape", or "murder" for a few choice words in this thread, you can see how ridiculous your statement is. The way we treat and even talk about animals is an incredible moral failure.

You’re making my point for me. Swapping out words to create new moral equivalencies is exactly what I find unproductive. Humans are animals, and we live with competing instincts: survival, empathy, culture, appetite. In the best of times, we have the luxury to weigh those things and make personal choices. But pretending there’s a clean, universal moral framework that everyone must follow, regardless of history, biology, or circumstance, feels more like ideology than ethics. I respect your choices, just don’t expect everyone else to inhabit your frame.

You would find it unproductive since it makes your position obviously untenable. We use metaphors because they help short circuit whatever mental trappings you've managed to construct for yourself.

You're really just saying that it's not immoral enough for you to justify actually bothering to do anything about it, such as inconveniencing others with your opinion. I can pretty much guarantee you it was impolite for people to share their opinions against slavery back in the day, too. All I can really hope is future people will look back on today as a dark period of ignorance about animals and sentience.

I’m not dodging discomfort, I’m pointing out that morality isn’t just about drawing lines, it’s about understanding the context in which people live and make choices. You frame this as a binary: either one agrees with your comparison or they’re morally bankrupt. But that’s precisely why this conversation goes nowhere. I’m not defending factory farming, I’m pushing back on moral frameworks that flatten human behavior into easily judged categories. If you want lasting change, you have to start by recognizing that not everyone sees the world through the same lens, and that’s not always a failure of conscience.

You seemingly objected to

> There’s a clear difference between deciding not to eat something for cultural reasons than deciding not to eat something because it’s an intelligent, thinking creature.

I don't know how that turned into the conversation we have now. There is a clear difference between culturally choosing not to eat cute animals and being a conscientious objector. Whether you think it's harmful to take that stance publically or not is where we ended up.

I objected to the claim that the difference is clear. For many people, the lines between culture, ethics, and survival blur, especially across history or geography. What one person calls conscientious objection, another sees as cultural imperialism. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have values or push for change, but it does mean recognizing the complexity instead of assuming clarity where there is none. The conversation shifted because I challenged the framing, not the idea that reducing harm is valuable. I’m just wary of framing moral discourse as a purity test.

That's great for you. However, animals do not have a voice, despite being intelligent and feeling the same emotions as us. I am sure if you saw somebody harming a mentally disabled person who could not communicate, you would try to stop them. In the same way, I don't see any harm in being a voice for the animals.

For all we know, in the future we may look back on modern animal agriculture/ factory farming in the same way as we look back on slavery now.

If I can reduce harm in the world to sentient beings at the cost of something tasting slightly different then I will do my best to go down that path personally.

I respect your intentions, but the leap you’re making, comparing animal farming to slavery or abuse of disabled people, relies on swapping out real-world complexity for clean moral hypotheticals. Humans have always lived in tension between empathy and necessity. Culture, environment, and biology shape our choices more than abstract equivalence does. If you choose to avoid harm, great. But turning that into a universal moral indictment flattens history, species difference, and the human condition. We’re animals too, and sometimes we forget how messy that is.

Necessity is a flimsy justification. You could argue eating a little bit of meat is necessary for nutrition and survival. I wouldn't agree, especially if you live in a technically advanced nation, but you could argue it. What you can't really argue is that each American could possibly need to eat 200 chickens every year, or that the incredibly cruelty of their environments are warranted.

And if you stop elevating human sentience over everyone else for (??) reasons, it does become pretty black and white. Some people are still in the "recognizing it's an attrocity but still participating" stage, others are in the "actively (poorly) rationalizing the attrocity" stage, and many are in the "not yet realizing it's an attrocity" stage. Really only the people in the last one should get a pass, morally speaking.

You’re not describing moral clarity, you’re describing moral exceptionalism. You draw a clean line and then declare everyone outside it as ignorant, complicit, or cowardly. That’s not ethics, that’s dogma. Most people aren’t “rationalizing atrocities”, they’re living in the real world, where values collide with circumstance, biology, and culture. The “enlightened” always assume their version of truth is the final one, and they always seem to have the luxury to do so. That’s not moral progress, it’s just another flavor of certainty, polished by privilege and detached from the messiness of life. I am not justifying anything beyond refuting the clear lines you draw in your version of enlightenment.

The biggest impact when killing a pet is on the family, so that breaks the analogy really badly.

Of course, but only if we talk about you dying now, via some pretty horrible death in well oiled industrial process, to make things at least a bit comparable.

Yes. You get to eat one.

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