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Comment by jquery | Hacker News Reader

In the time it took you to read that article about 20 Rhesus monkeys who will be cared for in the most humane way possible given the study parameters, roughly 1000 pigs and 300 cows were slaughtered in the USA, many living in ghastly conditions. The Rhesus monkeys will perish so that we can improve treatment for millions of people suffering from anxiety and depression. The cows and pigs died so you can eat a bacon cheeseburger.

I'm not a vegetarian, because bacon cheeseburgers are delicious, but I don't understand why we insist on being so morally inconsistent.

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Three-fold:

1) Killing animals for food is something that happens in nature.

2) The purpose of this study is to inflict psychological damage. Death isn't the worst possible thing.

3) Monkeys are a lot more intelligent. Indeed, that's why the researchers are studying monkey psychology instead of pig psychology.

I'm no vegetarian either, but I think looking back 50 years from now, we'll look back regretfully at how we treat certain higher functioning animals like primates and cetaceans today.

How does the intelligence of an animal effect how that living creature should be treated? For example, do you think it is appropriate to treat a monkey better then one should treat a dog or cat simply because a monkey has a higher mental capacity?

Isn’t that the basic justification for why we treat humans much differently than other animals? I think this is because we each know we’re capable of suffering and assume other humans are as well, and in the lack of other evidence, assume that animals with brains more similar to humans’ are more capable of suffering than less intelligent animals. I also think this reasoning is a major reason why research into differences in human intelligence between individuals is so controversial.

I think that could be one reason/assumption. Though I think generally humans think that living creatures can all suffer. After that it comes down to acceptability and return.

Why does it matter if something happens in nature? Do you think animals don’t suffer in the process of being killed by other animals? I’m not necessarily saying that we should all be vegetarians (what if we raise and slaughter animals so that they experience less suffering than wild animals do?), only that this is a lousy argument.

> I don't understand why we insist on being so morally inconsistent

Where is this inconsistency? Both are bad. Are you not aware of people who object to consumption of animals?

The 'ethical treatment' of animals includes respect for their natural diets. A significant portion of the bio-mass of the planet is genetically architected to consume other animals--they are true carnivores. You might as well go feed the bears in yosemtie a snickers bar. Its not consistent (morally or scientifically) to pretend the world is designed another way. In the same way its not consistent to feed (even) omnivores human-junk-food.

Not sure I follow.

Where did you get lost?

Where you leaped from vegetarianism to preventing carnivores from eating animals.

Logically, preventing carnivores from eating other animals would have a similar effect on animal suffering as humans not eating other animals. This is not a valid argument against vegetarianism unless you think we should do things just because other animals do (I’m not currently a vegetarian, but a lot of their arguments do make sense). The easiest way to do this would be to kill all the carnivores (as opposed to trying to create and feed them all nutritionally-complete tofu-based meat substitutes), and while that would be an unusual action to take from the perspective of usual environmentalism with the goal of protecting species diversity, it might actually be the case that it would reduce the total amount of animal suffering, if we had a way to measure and quantify suffering.

You and many others may very well be morally consistent on this point, and yet I suspect that more than half of the people outraged by this will eat meat this week without even thinking about it.

likely cause we're further genetically and emotionally removed from farm animals than from primates.

i don't think many will consider the use of pesticides an inhumane way to kill insects (even though it likely is). the word itself (humane) implies a standard derived from/for humans.

Veganism is a logically consistent answer to this question.

if not for that "moral inconsistency" we would still be cutting live dogs without anesthesia in the name of scientific research.

> The Rhesus monkeys will perish so that we can improve treatment for millions of people suffering from anxiety and depression

moral ends where horsetrading starts.

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