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Havoc 4 hours ago [-]
The sooner we get to true lab grown meat the better
Meat is nice but would be better if we can skip the whole suffering thing
sosodev 3 hours ago [-]
This is a false dichotomy. The choice is not lab grown or suffering. Farmed animals could live happy, healthy lives and then be culled in a humane way.
The problem is that it costs slightly more and our society is more concerned with cost than animal suffering.
ritlo 23 minutes ago [-]
> Farmed animals could live happy, healthy lives and then be culled in a humane way.
> The problem is that it costs slightly more and our society is more concerned with cost than animal suffering.
IDK about other livestock, but this definitely doesn't hold for chickens, one of the cheaper meat sources in the US. Switching to breeds that could live more than a very-few weeks(!) before getting too overweight to walk, would increase price by far more than "slightly more", and there's no hope of anything fitting any sane definition of "humane chicken farming" without that step.
I suspect it's also true for pigs, not necessarily the "we bred them so wrong that their very existence is a crime against god and nature" part but that the price increase from a "healthy, happy life" would be a lot larger than "slightly more". Maybe also cows, dunno about that one.
Insanity 3 hours ago [-]
> Farmed animals could live happy, healthy lives and then be culled in a humane way.
Breeding animals _specifically for killing them_, no matter how they are killed, is not what I'd consider humane. If we take 'humane' literally, it means to be treated as you would treat a human. I doubt we'd do this to humans. So the only way to be okay with this is adhering to a form of specieism.
anonym29 3 hours ago [-]
Many farm animals aren't bred specifically for killing them. Think egg-laying hens and ducks, milk-producing cows and goats, etc.
Not too different from humans in that respect; humans are bred systematically (we have dedicated hormonal supplements, birth facilities, documented birthing procedures, standardized post-birth checklists of forms of vaccination regiments, standardized mass schooling, government-subsidized feeding programs, etc) and most are used machinistically by society exclusively for productive output, regardless of whether the society is corporatist, capitalist, socialist, communist, etc.
quesera 3 hours ago [-]
I think you misinterpreted GP's emphasis.
But still, egg and dairy animals are culled when productivity drops. The human equivalent would be killing all male babies, and females after age ~40.
This does not seem more "humane" than the human equivalent of meat farming, where all human offspring would be harvested at age ~15.
Insanity 2 hours ago [-]
Yup exactly. And when animals are bred specifically for milk, they aren't treated well even before they are killed. Dairy cows need to be kept continuously pregnant / in lactation state through artificial insemination. They don't magically produce milk all-year round.
And pregnancy is _hard_ on animals (including humans), it changes your physiology and psychology. Even if we take for granted that a cow isn't as conscious as a human (IMO consciousness is a sliding scale, not a binary), then they are still being primed for giving birth and taking care of offspring which never comes. Imagine doing that to a human - it's a definite form of cruelty.
block_dagger 3 hours ago [-]
Any kind of domination of one species over another raises serious ethical questions. Avoiding suffering on the dominated side is nearly impossible.
sosodev 3 hours ago [-]
Are all pets suffering?
diacritical 3 hours ago [-]
I think what GP meant is that when it involves money, suffering is nearly impossible to prevent. That's why you have puppy mills, for example. Most people don't know how the puppies are raised, they just see the cute puppy in the shop. The same way people see a pretty piece of meat in the supermarket and don't know its history.
Raising animals for meat is theoretically doable with no suffering (not sure about milk), but it's not happening in practice. With pets the situation is better - a lot of people adopt and some care about how their pet was raised if they buy it from a breeder.
mperham 3 hours ago [-]
Don't strawman other people's comments.
sosodev 3 hours ago [-]
I didn't intend to. I think that domesticated animals have long had a harmonious relationship with humans so I find it a bit difficult to believe that it's always an ethical dilemma. Pets are just the most obvious lens to identify that.
I also think we need to be careful with the idea that we should entirely avoid suffering because it's impossible to do.
constantius 22 minutes ago [-]
I think that it is what you know of the history of animal domestication and of pets that makes you think that there is an acceptable and low amount of suffering.
For pets, I don't think you understood what GP was saying: pet breeding involves massive amounts of death of puppies/kittens that aren't pretty enough or don't manage to survive infancy, the female breeders are basically confined to cages and "producing" all their life, some short-nosed breeds of dogs and cats are even illegal in some countries because they spend their life unable to breathe properly, pets are abandoned and killed, etc. The happy pets you see in the street are not representative of what it is to be a pet. But yes, these ones are not suffering.
As for long and harmonious, as much as we tend to see anything in the distant past as innocent, I'd remind you that the systematic killing of male chicks, the killing of veals to avoid them drinking all the milk, the killing of all animals as soon as productivity drops beyond a threshold, are not new practices. No animal wants to be enslaved. Same as no human wants to be enslaved.
I'm not attacking you, just attempting to give you an idea of why other commenters believe animal domestication is not ethical.
> society is more concerned with cost than animal suffering.
Yes, and it's politically very hard to change. I totally understand price sensitivity around food. At least where I live milk and meat is extremely subsidised. How can you have chicken that is grown, slaughtered, cleaned, packaged, distributed, kept cold all the way, etc. and sell it for 5eur/kg (and cheaper on discounts). There's s much human work, resources, fuel used - I cannot understand.
Also - being a vegetarian/vegan is more expensive than being omnivore.
diacritical 16 minutes ago [-]
> being a vegetarian/vegan is more expensive than being omnivore.
Being vegan is cheaper where I live regardless of whether we factor in the subsidies or not. Beans, chickpeas, lentils and sometimes soy (examples of protein sources) are pretty inexpensive. Peanuts, some other nuts (in the culinary sense of the word) and some of the vegetable oils are also inexpensive.
If you factor in foods meant to replace or replicate the taste of a carnivore diet like vegan yogurt, milk or cheese, or things like Beyond Meat burgers, it might become expensive, but you don't have to limit yourself by trying to replicate what you used to eat - you can make lots of things from 10-20 basic ingredients.
diacritical 3 hours ago [-]
That's exactly why lab grown meat is the best way to solve the issue.
Society is only concerned with cost, regulations are weak and rarely enforced and companies are operating in a capitalistic market where they can't compete unless they squeeze every last cent out of each animal. That's hard to change as lots of people have an interest in keeping the status quo and the citizens who vote don't have the time to read everything that comes their way. We can't expect that society will wake up, that people will start voting with more conscience or that everyone will go vegan.
Lab grown meat (or growing brainless animals or something similar) is a technological solution. When it becomes cheaper than normally-grown meat and similar in quality, the atrocities committed in the farms would cease to exist as the farms themselves would cease to exist. The same market forces that are responsible for what's happening to the animals now would prevent any future torture.
sosodev 3 hours ago [-]
I'm skeptical of this claim because there's clearly a growing population that hates the idea of putting anything they don't understand in their bodies. Genetically modified vegetables, food dyes, vaccines, etc.
I find it hard to believe you could convince a large portion of Americans to eat lab grown meat just to save a buck.
diacritical 3 hours ago [-]
I think that population is shrinking, not growing. They're surely vocal, though.
But if lab grown meat is cheaper, some part of the population would buy it. The farms would lose part of their business so economy of scale would help lab grown meat and hurt the farms. I think it would lead to a feedback loop where lab grown meat will get even cheaper and farm meat would get more expensive.
With lab grown meat you also have the option not only for a perfect piece of meat, but for different kinds of tastes, textures and compositions that haven't existed before. Just like people eat processed meat (think ham or nuggets or deep fried pieces), they would love to try the new tastes. I know I would.
delecti 3 hours ago [-]
Not to be glib, but the shelves of most American grocery stores do a pretty good job demonstrating that that segment of the population isn't dominant yet. There's a glut of processed food full of ingredients much harder to pronounce than an ingredient list that would read "Ingredients: Beef (cultured)".
And to be glib, I'm not thrilled about the idea of catering to the bar set by "things they don't understand" from that group in particular.
wholinator2 3 hours ago [-]
Sure you could, just don't tell them. The fast food burgers are already part soy and no one is yelling. If they replaced that with lab meat people would probably like it better.
mrguyorama 1 hours ago [-]
Worse. We were told we couldn't have happy, cruelty free meat because it would be expensive. We were told we couldn't have clean meat because it would be expensive. We couldn't have sustainable meat because it's too expensive. We couldn't reduce the environmental harms of meat because it's too expensive. We couldn't have locally produced meat because it's too expensive.
Well we got none of those things. But beef steak is still $25 a pound. I don't really care if it gets more expensive because at current prices I can't eat it regularly anyway and rich assholes will have no problems eating their steaks every day even at $100 a pound so why don't we just have a sustainable, clean, less cruel industry?
Countries reduced their demand of our meat, because of horseshit tradewar games, and yet the price went up. Demand for American industrial crops like soybeans, which is used significantly as a cattle feed, cratered, to the point we will have to hand the farms tens of billions of dollars, yet somehow beef still got more expensive. Meat processing uses illegal immigrant labor, sometimes even child labor, and all regulation of those facilities has dramatically curtailed under Trump administrations, and yet beef still gets more expensive.
Here's what beef producers say:
>“It’s hard as a beef producer to necessarily say that beef prices are too high. I mean, if people are paying $6 for a latte at Starbucks, but then they’re paying $6 for a pound of beef, they’re able to feed a family for a family of three with that pound of beef,” said Taylon Lienemann, co-owner of Linetics Ranch in Princeton, Nebraksa.
In other words, fuck you pay me. "Starbucks makes great profit so we should make more". The reason for the price increase is a "very small herd", which producers have been reducing because of droughts and otherwise because they don't think the profit is high enough to invest in future production.
clickety_clack 3 hours ago [-]
At least the thing with live animals is that they have to be kept within some kind of parameters to survive, with those parameters hopefully also leading to some level of food standards for us. I can’t even conceive of the kind of chemicals and processes that would be required to keep random meat-like cells alive without the rest of the body.
dehrmann 3 hours ago [-]
I actually had some this weekend.
If you support this, visit one of the handful of restaurants selling it to show interest and support the companies. The salmon I had was ready for prime time in the right context, and if you didn't know, you probably wouldn't have noticed.
delecti 3 hours ago [-]
I'm surprised to hear that it works with fish in particular. I wouldn't have thought it could replicate the flakiness of real fish. That's great to hear honestly.
I'd assumed it would mostly be limited to cultured ground beef and chicken nuggets.
flowerbreeze 3 hours ago [-]
I think not so long from now the exotic meal experience for the young ones will be real grilled chicken that looks like a chicken. Like zebra or crocodile meat was for us northerners.
From my own little box I think that that if lab grown meat was available and affordable, I would never eat a bit of real chicken, pork or beef again. I know veganism is an option too, but... I grew up with meat and it's very difficult to give up.
aziaziazi 2 hours ago [-]
Have you tried tempeh? It solves 95% of my chicken craving since I found the right recipe and spices. It's also cheaper, nutritious, faster to cook and almost no processed.
But debrained animals are certainly more plausible.
You just need a miminum interface to keep their bodies running. Cruelty free meat.
dehrmann 3 hours ago [-]
Oysters don't have a central nervous system.
pmarreck 3 hours ago [-]
I understand that at least chicken works.
also, you misspelled "meat" as "mean"
hackable_sand 3 hours ago [-]
What a weird compromise.
pmarreck 3 hours ago [-]
In nature, animals are routinely torn apart and devoured while still breathing.
In a proper rending facility, a captive bolt pneumatic/hydraulic pistol punctures their skull and sends a shockwave through their brains, killing them like Tony in the last scene of the Sopranos.
okokwhatever 4 hours ago [-]
I'll be pleased to let you eat that for me.
Havoc 3 hours ago [-]
I mean if it’s functionally identical then I would.
Not super interested in pink slime style concoctions either
JungleGymSam 3 hours ago [-]
what a disgusting idea.
globular-toast 4 hours ago [-]
It's not even nice. People ate meat because fresh fruit and vegetables weren't available all year round or even at all. All good food has plants to make it taste nice. You can easily just skip the meat and go straight for the flavour.
pmarreck 3 hours ago [-]
The Alaskan word for "vegetables" is literally "boring food"
globular-toast 53 minutes ago [-]
Mmm yeah, Alaska being well known for culinary excellence, of course.
dehrmann 3 hours ago [-]
In Swedish, it's "green things."
givemeethekeys 3 hours ago [-]
Do you live in Alaska?
anonym29 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I hate being stuck with a luscious rare filet mignon basked in clarified butter, it's so flavorless that I have to chase it with celery, cucumbers, and lettuce just to stomach it... /s
globular-toast 52 minutes ago [-]
Anything tastes good in butter. Try some okra or cabbage if you're ready for some flavour.
snowe2010 3 hours ago [-]
Your comment makes no sense. If plants weren’t around for humans to eat then how did the animals humans eat survive?
Humans eat animals because they are a denser faster nutrition than plants. More bang for your buck. Trying to act like humans “only eat animals because” is ignoring reality.
criddell 4 hours ago [-]
Here's a link to the bill if you are interested in who sponsored and cosponsored it. It's a total of 24 people, so it had a fair bit of support.
If you live in the district of one of these people you might consider contacting them to let them know your opinion.
The "R-" after their names means they're all Republicans, right?
evan_ 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, [R-IA-4] means Republican from Iowa's 4th Congressional District.
hansbo 4 hours ago [-]
Gestation crates are up there among the most immoral things created by man.
Ancapistani 3 hours ago [-]
In their current implementation, yeah, they’re pretty bad.
There is a need for something like it, though. A sow will absolutely lay down on her piglets and suffocate them.
hangonhn 3 hours ago [-]
> A sow will absolutely lay down on her piglets and suffocate them.
This makes me really curious because that behavior seems very maladaptive for a species. That leads me to wonder if something else, ie. the environment or domestication, is leading to this behavior rather than pigs being really, really prone to wiping out their own species. Does anyone know why they do this in a farm environment?
jonah 2 hours ago [-]
Both things you mentioned.
2 hours ago [-]
aristofun 23 minutes ago [-]
I can understand and respect no meat people’s position (vegans etc), because it is consistent. Even if I disagree generally.
But how can I comprehend people who eat meat and okay with killing animals, but get outraged by so and so practices of growing them? Isn’t it a textbook definition of inconsistency and hypocrisy?
bayarearefugee 4 hours ago [-]
Humanity is almost definitely going to wipe itself out in the not too distant future through an avoidable (if not for the selfish greed of many of us) climate change resource war Great Filter event.
This used to really bother me, but lately I'm thinking it is probably for the best.
digitalsushi 3 hours ago [-]
> This used to really bother me, but lately I'm thinking it is probably for the best.
The older I get, the more careful I am to remember there's young people left in my wake and I get to decide whether I owe them anything or not - and, I make a personal belief that I do, a very great deal in fact. So getting comfortable that the whole system is damned and worth tossing is very convenient but too cavalier for me to find comfort in
bayarearefugee 3 hours ago [-]
> The older I get, the more careful I am to remember there's young people left in my wake and I get to decide whether I owe them anything or not - and, I make a personal belief that I do, a very great deal in fact.
I don't disagree with this at all, and on a personal level I do everything I can to reasonably leave things as good or better than I found them. I just no longer believe anything I do is going to pull humanity as a whole back from the edge.
sethammons 2 hours ago [-]
no single raindrop feels it is to be blamed for the flood.
I've always enjoyed that line. I also find it interesting how people interpret it. I take it to mean that each raindrop should still try to not cause a flood, and at some point, the flood will be prevented. Others take it to say there are simply too many other raindrops and they won't try, so there is no point in any drop trying. I don't care for that version.
abound 4 hours ago [-]
One of my favorite questions to ask people is something like: "Imagine a button appears in front of you. Pressing it will snap all human beings painlessly out of existence. Do you push the button?"
Some people get caught in minutiae about downstream effects, I tell them it can go however they want (house pets are free or gone too, planes land harmlessly, etc)
In my circles, I've found it's about 50/50 button pushers to non-button pushers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, vegetarians are more likely to be button pushers.
wincy 4 hours ago [-]
That’s wild to me. I’d hazard a guess that 0% of my friends would push the button (okay, lizardman tax, I’m sure I could find someone I know who would say yes). I think they’d also feel a need to go find whoever made said button and lock them in a cell for safekeeping.
moribvndvs 4 hours ago [-]
My first serious programming job was at a start up and the owner asked me this question. I was caught off guard, of course I wouldn’t! I couldn’t really explain why at the time, but it essentially revolved around the fact that I was young and optimistic. 25 years later, I’m not so sure. Now, said optimism has almost vanished and there are days pushing seems like the path to least suffering, but I also feel it’s unethical for one person to decide for everyone else.
greygoo222 3 hours ago [-]
I mean this sincerely, not as an insult: consider that the problem is with your mind or personal life, not with the world, and you should look for a way to address that if you haven't already.
moribvndvs 2 hours ago [-]
Suggesting that the wholesale suffering wrought by humanity unto itself and all other life on this planet throughout its entire history is merely in my mind or a problem with my personal life is actually incredibly insulting on top of being willfully ignorant.
greygoo222 1 hours ago [-]
That's not what I'm suggesting. I'm suggesting your attitude towards it might be.
glenstein 4 hours ago [-]
It's impossible to refute anecdotes purporting to represent populations based on what they might do in a hypothetical, and the people being described fade further out of tangible existence at every next layer of abstraction.
But Most Vegans I Know (tm) regard human life as valuabe, speak in terms of harm reduction, and tend not to fantasize about making Vault Tec real.
gowld 3 hours ago [-]
If human life is net harmful, then harm reduction means targeting 0 humans.
bayarearefugee 4 hours ago [-]
FWIW I wouldn't push the button.
I just think we are going to absolutely deserve the outcome as we collectively and metaphorically push that button... which we continue to do and are regressing on stopping ourselves from doing so a handful of super wealthy can watch gamified number go up.
gowld 3 hours ago [-]
What makes you think that we we collectively and metaphorically are pushing the painless button?
bayarearefugee 3 hours ago [-]
Well you're right, the real world isn't so simple and the button we are pushing certainly isn't going to be painless.
pmarreck 3 hours ago [-]
We have examples of how that actually plays out (in a limited form).
If I were to implement such a button, I'd make it so that only the people who said "yes" would disappear.
Life is a gift. A painless life has no value. In fact, if you are genetically immune to pain, your lifetime survival rate is something like the teens.
hrimfaxi 4 hours ago [-]
Are you in silicon valley by any chance?
relaxing 27 minutes ago [-]
Even more, Xoogler.
tengbretson 3 hours ago [-]
Ehhh no they wouldn't.
mock-possum 4 hours ago [-]
God what an awful prospect. How about when you push the button it only removes the button pushers, so the rest of us are free to continue enjoying our existence.
stouset 4 hours ago [-]
The point is that continuing to enjoy your existence is inflicting a massive toll of suffering around the world, to both others humans as well as non-humans.
I’m not saying I’d be one to push the button, but I think it’s worth trying to understand the mindset of someone who would. It’s very arguable that pushing it would be the ethical thing to do.
trylfthsk 4 hours ago [-]
Not entirely convinced that outside the torment nexuses used in industrial meat farming, natural suffering is any lesser sans humanity.
"Someone who would" is a terminally online loser who's confused the symptoms of their mental illness for philosophical insights.
Speaking as a lifelong atheist, I cannot stand this genre of nihilistic post-Christianity, all questionable moral baggage with none of the guidance. Here's a tip for you: humanity did not introduce evil to the world. If you don't understand this, find a church, it'll be better for us all.
aziaziazi 3 hours ago [-]
Here's a tip for you: describe what you find questionable and why, otherwise reader will understand: "I don't like that, you're [loser / mentally hill / nihilist]".
I you don't like the conversation you're also free to ignore it.
greygoo222 2 hours ago [-]
While I usually try to refrain from unsupported insults, I am comfortable calling people who support killing the entire world population "losers."
Capricorn2481 1 hours ago [-]
You really have nothing productive to say in this thread, you sound irrationally angry. This is a pretty milquetoast philosophical question. If someone asks whether humanity is a net negative environmentally and your only response is to call them whiny losers, maybe you'd be better off on Twitter.
I mean I know you understand what an abstract argument, is but you've chosen to interpret it in the laziest way possible for maximum rage. There are better ways to spend your time.
Extra points for calling yourself a vegan atheist to appeal to credibility.
relaxing 17 minutes ago [-]
The only people who find the question of erasing humanity milquetoast are terminally online losers.
stouset 3 hours ago [-]
Humanity did not introduce evil, but we have absolutely industrialized and massively scaled it.
greygoo222 1 hours ago [-]
There probably are reasonable methods of estimation that would say suffering associated with factory farms currently outweighs suffering occurring in the wild, though I don't know if I agree. However, factory farms are both relatively recent and temporary. It's hard to defend the position that humanity vanishing tomorrow would reduce net suffering in the long run. If nothing else, another industrial species will eventually replace us, and there's little reason to believe they'll be any better.
Of course, I personally have higher hopes for intelligent life than merely not causing massive suffering. That brings me to another tangent: Are you vegan?
I am. You might be, but I'm estimating you probably aren't. You can go vegan, it's easier than you think, and if you don't think you can commit, being 90% vegan is 90% as good as being 100% vegan. All thought experiments aside, you can be a part of making a better world, right now.
It requires a sense of morality to divide good from evil, and I don't think that existed on Earth before humans. Digging into the Hominid tree might add some qualifications, but I don't see that as a meaningful distinction.
SoftTalker 4 hours ago [-]
What if the suffering is the point?
hypeatei 3 hours ago [-]
It is, because you can't have pleasure without suffering but I think these conversations should focus on the amount (maybe as a percentage) of suffering that someone/something experiences.
If you were locked in a room and being tortured, would you think it'd be appropriate for me to go: "they feed you at the end of each torture session, isn't it worth it to keep going for that?"
cindyllm 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
jancsika 4 hours ago [-]
You should definitely watch the Black Mirror episode about the robot bees!
itsanaccount 4 hours ago [-]
Because that line of "enjoying your existence" making no mention of the monumental harm we cause to every biome on the planet is exactly the kind of selfishness that the button pushers would like to eradicate.
greygoo222 4 hours ago [-]
Biomes are not moral subjects and don't deserve consideration. (Pigs are).
namero999 3 hours ago [-]
Biome is just a fancy term that encompasses a set of moral subjects.
Capricorn2481 4 hours ago [-]
> Biomes are not moral subjects and don't deserve consideration. (Pigs are).
Where do you think animals live?
greygoo222 3 hours ago [-]
Causing harm to biomes is not the same thing as causing net harm to animals inside biomes. The base rate of harm done to animals inside biomes is immense and horrific.
Capricorn2481 1 hours ago [-]
You're doing crazy gymnastics right now. Eliminating biomes drives animals to extinction. In what world could you argue that doesn't deserve even a little moral consideration?
I'm not going to argue with someone who works this hard to be a contrarian.
3 hours ago [-]
wincy 4 hours ago [-]
And I’d call entertaining thought experiments such as this “having such an open mind your brain falls out of the back of your head”.
hypeatei 4 hours ago [-]
Well, some people do choose suicide but I have a feeling that you'd be uncomfortable discussing assisted suicide. These conversations around humanity and suffering typically end in thought terminating takes such as yours. Why even respond if you're effectively throwing your hands up in the air and ignoring nuance?
greygoo222 3 hours ago [-]
The person you're responding to is explicitly saying they would be fine with suicide.
hypeatei 3 hours ago [-]
> is explicitly saying
I don't think it's explicit, that's why I put the quip in there about assisted suicide. This thread is showing me that perhaps a lot of people would be okay with the "complainers" offing themselves but I'm not sure... my gut feeling is that a lot of optimists hold conflicting beliefs around this.
greygoo222 3 hours ago [-]
As a card-carrying optimist, I am strongly in favor of universal right to die. Maybe you should wait for the people in this thread to report their opinions before making assumptions?
I don't want most "complainers" to kill themselves, nor would I recommend them to, but I support their right to. And if they showed me convincing evidence their life contains too much suffering to be worthwhile, I would agree with their decision.
We live in a sandbox. Unless we decide to work together to escape it, then there is no point in humanity to exist. All we essentially do is produce rubbish, poo and suffering.
dylan604 3 hours ago [-]
> there is no point in humanity to exist
Did any one ever state that there was? Religious types will argue, but my counter is just humanity came up with religion as a stop gap in knowledge.
HoldOnAMinute 4 hours ago [-]
The suffering is mainly because of overcrowding
smarf 4 hours ago [-]
the suffering is mainly because of extreme wealth hoarding and profoundly selfish use of resources; overcrowding could be easily solved for all people if we as a species decided it was important
jagged-chisel 4 hours ago [-]
Well, social stratification isn’t helping anything.
giraffe_lady 4 hours ago [-]
If you can’t find anything worthwhile here what makes you think you’ll find it out there?
epgui 4 hours ago [-]
It’s a meaningless question, there is no “out there”.
varispeed 4 hours ago [-]
Not saying it is not worthwhile. As nature equipped us with feelings to make existence more pleasant. Enjoy the brief blip of consciousness.
giraffe_lady 3 hours ago [-]
I am thanks.
hermannj314 3 hours ago [-]
Pigs outnumber the humans 7-to-1 in Iowa, but they don't vote so here we are.
As an Iowan, it is obligatory to show love for Herbert Hoover and our pig population when called upon.
Anyone who's ever looked after and cared for pigs knows that this is very-very cruel. I would do the same with those humans(?) who wants this. Greed over everything. Disgusting
ryandrake 3 hours ago [-]
If the billionaires in power thought that they could grow their wealth 1% more by forcing the rest of us humans into gestation crates, they would do it in a heartbeat.
nekusar 4 hours ago [-]
Farming practices are already absolutely terrible.
And for reasons of arbitrary weight increase, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ractopamine is used in the USA. Doesnt degrade when cooked, so humans also get fat from it amongst other bad side effects. Banned in most countries, but not the USA. This is also why pork export is banned in most countries.
I know 1 person who is "allergic to pork". But European pork is fine. Even Canadian pork is fine. But what's different with US pork? Ractopamine.
To me, this is yet another reason why capitalism initially was great at making an economy, but profit-seeking behavior gets legally and ethically worse and one trades ethics for money.
Aurornis 4 hours ago [-]
> I know 1 person who is "allergic to pork". But European pork is fine. Even Canadian pork is fine. But what's different with US pork? Ractopamine.
Ractopamine is used in Canada.
This sounds like a possible case of the nocebo effect: Someone experiences symptoms based on a belief that an ingredient is bad for them. When they consume the same thing without the belief that the ingredient is present, the effects are absent even though the ingredient is present.
This happens with people who believe they have WiFi sensitivity disorders, too. If you put them next to a WiFi router with blinking lights they will experience the pain of their condition. If you turn off the lights on the router but leave the WiFi transmitting, they stop feeling the effects.
bananalychee 4 hours ago [-]
Ractopamine is authorized in Canada per the article you linked.
1234letshaveatw 4 hours ago [-]
Let's not let that pesky detail get in the way of the USA bad narrative he has going.
enaaem 3 hours ago [-]
Still banned China, Russia and the EU...
Insanity 3 hours ago [-]
Looking at the stuff China puts in their food (like the actual instant noodles), definitely a red flag if even they ban it.
Generally I look at EU for what's good/bad to consume though. It's scary how much stuff is banned there that's in everyday US products.
jonah 2 hours ago [-]
I generally think that as well and so was surprised to read that they're planning to not label CRISPER fruits as such.
"European Union’s Parliament and Council, the bloc’s governing body, reached a provisional deal in December to “simplify” the process for marketing plants bred through new genomic techniques, such as by scrapping the need to label them any differently from conventional ones."
This is fascinating to me. I am allergic to pork (or I would say intolerant, when I eat it I get a headache and/or stomach ache). But I did try a piece of wild boar once, and was fine after that. I will have to look into this!
imjonse 4 hours ago [-]
> To me, this is yet another reason why capitalism initially was great at making an economy,
Initially it wasn't that great either if you were a slave or worked 14 hours a day .
akramachamarei 3 hours ago [-]
Capitalism precludes slavery.
quesera 2 hours ago [-]
> Capitalism precludes slavery.
Hmm? Capitalism neither precludes nor predates slavery.
akramachamarei 24 minutes ago [-]
Capitalism precisely precludes slavery. One of the most important and foundational of its principles is private property. The first, most natural, and universal instance of private property is the ownership of one's own body. Heck, we even have the phrase "private parts." Slavery requires the most basic violation of bodily autonomy. In other words, to permit slavery is to permit the violation of the most basic property right. I struggle to see how slavery could be compatible with capitalism.
metalman 3 hours ago [-]
crates are wastefull , gestation tubes, amputate there irrelevant legs, and keep them in nice cozy tubes.
gowld 3 hours ago [-]
Ashley Hinson, sponsor of Save Our Bacon Act, endorses bombing people thought to be dangerous. Pig-torturers are dangerous.
I find it odd we need legislation to prevent this.
There are not enough consumers to care? Or maybe with legislation we get better outcomes due to scaling effects?
If we are willing to use legislation, could we tax such gestation crates, and use that tax revenue to breed unconscious pigs? Or find a way to disable consciousness in their brain? Or fund lab meat? I'm sure small labs are doing this, but if we are at the point of legislation, I imagine there is enough willpower to solve this problem rather than bandaids.
stetrain 3 hours ago [-]
Consumers probably don't know all of the conditions involved in making any of the products they buy. That information is generally not on the label, and even environmental and conditions based labels are often vague and hard to interpret.
Also in an economy of rising costs, people are going to choose affordable options even if they might be vaguely aware of worse conditions happening somewhere else, far away from the grocery store aisle where they are making that choice for their family.
post-it 3 hours ago [-]
> If we are willing to use legislation, could we tax such gestation crates, and use that tax revenue to breed unconscious pigs? Or find a way to disable consciousness in their brain? Or fund lab meat?
This is the kind of "big government libertarian" thinking that you only find on HN. It's like virtue signalling but the virtue is contrarianism. What you've suggested is more complicated, less ethical, less effective, and likely to be opposed by just about everyone across the political spectrum.
hackable_sand 3 hours ago [-]
Everything you suggested are bandaids
Spivak 2 hours ago [-]
Voters do care, in both blue and red states, they already passed laws in their state to this effect. This is the federal government invalidating those laws.
SunshineTheCat 4 hours ago [-]
Does anyone else ever find it odd that in posts like this the person posts a sad picture of a pig instead of a screenshot of the page of the bill they're talking about?
I think "a provision that would condemn millions of pigs to a lifetime in gestation crates" is in fact horrific, however, outrage is the currency on places like X.
Posting a page number sounds specific, but then why not post the page (or quote it)? Particularly in any even remotely political environment where the default is "vote for (or oppose) this bill or you want [insert cute animal, baby, person, minority group] to die."
Just a tiny bit of source referencing could go a long way to help people better understand what you want them to support (or oppose).
djcannabiz 3 hours ago [-]
fwiw, i found it helpful, i had no idea what a gestation crate is. i don’t think the photo is sad or manipulative, the sad part is what is being done to the pigs! and seeing a photo of what is done to the pigs is all i needed to make up my mind. it’s like the difference between posting a document that references “enhanced interrogation techniques” vs seeing a photo of what was actually done, it has a very different impact. i agree some kind of a citation would be nice though, so i don’t have to go digging about what to say when i contact my representative about.
lux-lux-lux 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, why would someone trying to drum up opposition to the measure show the real-world impacts of it instead of the (easily Googlable) dry legalese? Real thinker, there.
jagged-chisel 4 hours ago [-]
Whoa there - can’t shape public sentiment if you let people go read it for themselves.
Meat is nice but would be better if we can skip the whole suffering thing
The problem is that it costs slightly more and our society is more concerned with cost than animal suffering.
> The problem is that it costs slightly more and our society is more concerned with cost than animal suffering.
IDK about other livestock, but this definitely doesn't hold for chickens, one of the cheaper meat sources in the US. Switching to breeds that could live more than a very-few weeks(!) before getting too overweight to walk, would increase price by far more than "slightly more", and there's no hope of anything fitting any sane definition of "humane chicken farming" without that step.
I suspect it's also true for pigs, not necessarily the "we bred them so wrong that their very existence is a crime against god and nature" part but that the price increase from a "healthy, happy life" would be a lot larger than "slightly more". Maybe also cows, dunno about that one.
Breeding animals _specifically for killing them_, no matter how they are killed, is not what I'd consider humane. If we take 'humane' literally, it means to be treated as you would treat a human. I doubt we'd do this to humans. So the only way to be okay with this is adhering to a form of specieism.
Not too different from humans in that respect; humans are bred systematically (we have dedicated hormonal supplements, birth facilities, documented birthing procedures, standardized post-birth checklists of forms of vaccination regiments, standardized mass schooling, government-subsidized feeding programs, etc) and most are used machinistically by society exclusively for productive output, regardless of whether the society is corporatist, capitalist, socialist, communist, etc.
But still, egg and dairy animals are culled when productivity drops. The human equivalent would be killing all male babies, and females after age ~40.
This does not seem more "humane" than the human equivalent of meat farming, where all human offspring would be harvested at age ~15.
And pregnancy is _hard_ on animals (including humans), it changes your physiology and psychology. Even if we take for granted that a cow isn't as conscious as a human (IMO consciousness is a sliding scale, not a binary), then they are still being primed for giving birth and taking care of offspring which never comes. Imagine doing that to a human - it's a definite form of cruelty.
Raising animals for meat is theoretically doable with no suffering (not sure about milk), but it's not happening in practice. With pets the situation is better - a lot of people adopt and some care about how their pet was raised if they buy it from a breeder.
I also think we need to be careful with the idea that we should entirely avoid suffering because it's impossible to do.
I think most people are aware of animal cruelty in factory farms (the chicken in cages, the pigs in cages, etc.), which represents 90% of all farm animals globally (https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/global-animal-farming-est...).
For pets, I don't think you understood what GP was saying: pet breeding involves massive amounts of death of puppies/kittens that aren't pretty enough or don't manage to survive infancy, the female breeders are basically confined to cages and "producing" all their life, some short-nosed breeds of dogs and cats are even illegal in some countries because they spend their life unable to breathe properly, pets are abandoned and killed, etc. The happy pets you see in the street are not representative of what it is to be a pet. But yes, these ones are not suffering.
As for long and harmonious, as much as we tend to see anything in the distant past as innocent, I'd remind you that the systematic killing of male chicks, the killing of veals to avoid them drinking all the milk, the killing of all animals as soon as productivity drops beyond a threshold, are not new practices. No animal wants to be enslaved. Same as no human wants to be enslaved.
I'm not attacking you, just attempting to give you an idea of why other commenters believe animal domestication is not ethical.
> society is more concerned with cost than animal suffering.
Yes, and it's politically very hard to change. I totally understand price sensitivity around food. At least where I live milk and meat is extremely subsidised. How can you have chicken that is grown, slaughtered, cleaned, packaged, distributed, kept cold all the way, etc. and sell it for 5eur/kg (and cheaper on discounts). There's s much human work, resources, fuel used - I cannot understand.
Also - being a vegetarian/vegan is more expensive than being omnivore.
Being vegan is cheaper where I live regardless of whether we factor in the subsidies or not. Beans, chickpeas, lentils and sometimes soy (examples of protein sources) are pretty inexpensive. Peanuts, some other nuts (in the culinary sense of the word) and some of the vegetable oils are also inexpensive.
If you factor in foods meant to replace or replicate the taste of a carnivore diet like vegan yogurt, milk or cheese, or things like Beyond Meat burgers, it might become expensive, but you don't have to limit yourself by trying to replicate what you used to eat - you can make lots of things from 10-20 basic ingredients.
Society is only concerned with cost, regulations are weak and rarely enforced and companies are operating in a capitalistic market where they can't compete unless they squeeze every last cent out of each animal. That's hard to change as lots of people have an interest in keeping the status quo and the citizens who vote don't have the time to read everything that comes their way. We can't expect that society will wake up, that people will start voting with more conscience or that everyone will go vegan.
Lab grown meat (or growing brainless animals or something similar) is a technological solution. When it becomes cheaper than normally-grown meat and similar in quality, the atrocities committed in the farms would cease to exist as the farms themselves would cease to exist. The same market forces that are responsible for what's happening to the animals now would prevent any future torture.
I find it hard to believe you could convince a large portion of Americans to eat lab grown meat just to save a buck.
But if lab grown meat is cheaper, some part of the population would buy it. The farms would lose part of their business so economy of scale would help lab grown meat and hurt the farms. I think it would lead to a feedback loop where lab grown meat will get even cheaper and farm meat would get more expensive.
With lab grown meat you also have the option not only for a perfect piece of meat, but for different kinds of tastes, textures and compositions that haven't existed before. Just like people eat processed meat (think ham or nuggets or deep fried pieces), they would love to try the new tastes. I know I would.
And to be glib, I'm not thrilled about the idea of catering to the bar set by "things they don't understand" from that group in particular.
Well we got none of those things. But beef steak is still $25 a pound. I don't really care if it gets more expensive because at current prices I can't eat it regularly anyway and rich assholes will have no problems eating their steaks every day even at $100 a pound so why don't we just have a sustainable, clean, less cruel industry?
Countries reduced their demand of our meat, because of horseshit tradewar games, and yet the price went up. Demand for American industrial crops like soybeans, which is used significantly as a cattle feed, cratered, to the point we will have to hand the farms tens of billions of dollars, yet somehow beef still got more expensive. Meat processing uses illegal immigrant labor, sometimes even child labor, and all regulation of those facilities has dramatically curtailed under Trump administrations, and yet beef still gets more expensive.
Here's what beef producers say:
>“It’s hard as a beef producer to necessarily say that beef prices are too high. I mean, if people are paying $6 for a latte at Starbucks, but then they’re paying $6 for a pound of beef, they’re able to feed a family for a family of three with that pound of beef,” said Taylon Lienemann, co-owner of Linetics Ranch in Princeton, Nebraksa.
In other words, fuck you pay me. "Starbucks makes great profit so we should make more". The reason for the price increase is a "very small herd", which producers have been reducing because of droughts and otherwise because they don't think the profit is high enough to invest in future production.
If you support this, visit one of the handful of restaurants selling it to show interest and support the companies. The salmon I had was ready for prime time in the right context, and if you didn't know, you probably wouldn't have noticed.
I'd assumed it would mostly be limited to cultured ground beef and chicken nuggets.
From my own little box I think that that if lab grown meat was available and affordable, I would never eat a bit of real chicken, pork or beef again. I know veganism is an option too, but... I grew up with meat and it's very difficult to give up.
https://tempeh.info/
But debrained animals are certainly more plausible.
You just need a miminum interface to keep their bodies running. Cruelty free meat.
also, you misspelled "meat" as "mean"
In a proper rending facility, a captive bolt pneumatic/hydraulic pistol punctures their skull and sends a shockwave through their brains, killing them like Tony in the last scene of the Sopranos.
Not super interested in pink slime style concoctions either
Humans eat animals because they are a denser faster nutrition than plants. More bang for your buck. Trying to act like humans “only eat animals because” is ignoring reality.
If you live in the district of one of these people you might consider contacting them to let them know your opinion.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4673...
There is a need for something like it, though. A sow will absolutely lay down on her piglets and suffocate them.
This makes me really curious because that behavior seems very maladaptive for a species. That leads me to wonder if something else, ie. the environment or domestication, is leading to this behavior rather than pigs being really, really prone to wiping out their own species. Does anyone know why they do this in a farm environment?
But how can I comprehend people who eat meat and okay with killing animals, but get outraged by so and so practices of growing them? Isn’t it a textbook definition of inconsistency and hypocrisy?
This used to really bother me, but lately I'm thinking it is probably for the best.
The older I get, the more careful I am to remember there's young people left in my wake and I get to decide whether I owe them anything or not - and, I make a personal belief that I do, a very great deal in fact. So getting comfortable that the whole system is damned and worth tossing is very convenient but too cavalier for me to find comfort in
I don't disagree with this at all, and on a personal level I do everything I can to reasonably leave things as good or better than I found them. I just no longer believe anything I do is going to pull humanity as a whole back from the edge.
I've always enjoyed that line. I also find it interesting how people interpret it. I take it to mean that each raindrop should still try to not cause a flood, and at some point, the flood will be prevented. Others take it to say there are simply too many other raindrops and they won't try, so there is no point in any drop trying. I don't care for that version.
Some people get caught in minutiae about downstream effects, I tell them it can go however they want (house pets are free or gone too, planes land harmlessly, etc)
In my circles, I've found it's about 50/50 button pushers to non-button pushers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, vegetarians are more likely to be button pushers.
But Most Vegans I Know (tm) regard human life as valuabe, speak in terms of harm reduction, and tend not to fantasize about making Vault Tec real.
I just think we are going to absolutely deserve the outcome as we collectively and metaphorically push that button... which we continue to do and are regressing on stopping ourselves from doing so a handful of super wealthy can watch gamified number go up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525
Life is a gift. A painless life has no value. In fact, if you are genetically immune to pain, your lifetime survival rate is something like the teens.
I’m not saying I’d be one to push the button, but I think it’s worth trying to understand the mindset of someone who would. It’s very arguable that pushing it would be the ethical thing to do.
Speaking as a lifelong atheist, I cannot stand this genre of nihilistic post-Christianity, all questionable moral baggage with none of the guidance. Here's a tip for you: humanity did not introduce evil to the world. If you don't understand this, find a church, it'll be better for us all.
I you don't like the conversation you're also free to ignore it.
I mean I know you understand what an abstract argument, is but you've chosen to interpret it in the laziest way possible for maximum rage. There are better ways to spend your time.
Extra points for calling yourself a vegan atheist to appeal to credibility.
Of course, I personally have higher hopes for intelligent life than merely not causing massive suffering. That brings me to another tangent: Are you vegan?
I am. You might be, but I'm estimating you probably aren't. You can go vegan, it's easier than you think, and if you don't think you can commit, being 90% vegan is 90% as good as being 100% vegan. All thought experiments aside, you can be a part of making a better world, right now.
You can also make donations: https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/animal-welfare
It requires a sense of morality to divide good from evil, and I don't think that existed on Earth before humans. Digging into the Hominid tree might add some qualifications, but I don't see that as a meaningful distinction.
If you were locked in a room and being tortured, would you think it'd be appropriate for me to go: "they feed you at the end of each torture session, isn't it worth it to keep going for that?"
Where do you think animals live?
I'm not going to argue with someone who works this hard to be a contrarian.
I don't think it's explicit, that's why I put the quip in there about assisted suicide. This thread is showing me that perhaps a lot of people would be okay with the "complainers" offing themselves but I'm not sure... my gut feeling is that a lot of optimists hold conflicting beliefs around this.
I don't want most "complainers" to kill themselves, nor would I recommend them to, but I support their right to. And if they showed me convincing evidence their life contains too much suffering to be worthwhile, I would agree with their decision.
Did any one ever state that there was? Religious types will argue, but my counter is just humanity came up with religion as a stop gap in knowledge.
As an Iowan, it is obligatory to show love for Herbert Hoover and our pig population when called upon.
And for reasons of arbitrary weight increase, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ractopamine is used in the USA. Doesnt degrade when cooked, so humans also get fat from it amongst other bad side effects. Banned in most countries, but not the USA. This is also why pork export is banned in most countries.
I know 1 person who is "allergic to pork". But European pork is fine. Even Canadian pork is fine. But what's different with US pork? Ractopamine.
To me, this is yet another reason why capitalism initially was great at making an economy, but profit-seeking behavior gets legally and ethically worse and one trades ethics for money.
Ractopamine is used in Canada.
This sounds like a possible case of the nocebo effect: Someone experiences symptoms based on a belief that an ingredient is bad for them. When they consume the same thing without the belief that the ingredient is present, the effects are absent even though the ingredient is present.
This happens with people who believe they have WiFi sensitivity disorders, too. If you put them next to a WiFi router with blinking lights they will experience the pain of their condition. If you turn off the lights on the router but leave the WiFi transmitting, they stop feeling the effects.
Generally I look at EU for what's good/bad to consume though. It's scary how much stuff is banned there that's in everyday US products.
"European Union’s Parliament and Council, the bloc’s governing body, reached a provisional deal in December to “simplify” the process for marketing plants bred through new genomic techniques, such as by scrapping the need to label them any differently from conventional ones."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47271338
Initially it wasn't that great either if you were a slave or worked 14 hours a day .
Hmm? Capitalism neither precludes nor predates slavery.
https://www.kcrg.com/2026/03/06/rep-hinson-speaks-iran-confl...
There are not enough consumers to care? Or maybe with legislation we get better outcomes due to scaling effects?
If we are willing to use legislation, could we tax such gestation crates, and use that tax revenue to breed unconscious pigs? Or find a way to disable consciousness in their brain? Or fund lab meat? I'm sure small labs are doing this, but if we are at the point of legislation, I imagine there is enough willpower to solve this problem rather than bandaids.
Also in an economy of rising costs, people are going to choose affordable options even if they might be vaguely aware of worse conditions happening somewhere else, far away from the grocery store aisle where they are making that choice for their family.
This is the kind of "big government libertarian" thinking that you only find on HN. It's like virtue signalling but the virtue is contrarianism. What you've suggested is more complicated, less ethical, less effective, and likely to be opposed by just about everyone across the political spectrum.
I think "a provision that would condemn millions of pigs to a lifetime in gestation crates" is in fact horrific, however, outrage is the currency on places like X.
Posting a page number sounds specific, but then why not post the page (or quote it)? Particularly in any even remotely political environment where the default is "vote for (or oppose) this bill or you want [insert cute animal, baby, person, minority group] to die."
Just a tiny bit of source referencing could go a long way to help people better understand what you want them to support (or oppose).
The insane language in the sponsor's own press release tells me all I need to know about who the evil side on this bill is.
California prop 12: https://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/nu/fd/mb-fdp-03-2022-a.asp