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Comment by aristus | Hacker News Reader

Long long ago I was a tattoo artist. With very careful needle adjustments, color choices, and a steady hand, this is already possible with conventional inks. Simple example: white ink is titanium oxide, basically sunscreen, and breaks down rapidly with exposure to UV.

But you are still gonna have scarring and roughening. If you're gonna get ink, be prepared to have it for life.

Also, testing on pigs? Like, live pigs? I'd pay money to see that. :)

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A Belgian artist did this too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUcX0owdIhY

I just realized the video doesn't say. The artist is Wim Delvoye (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Delvoye).

A friend's daughter does tattooing, and from the friend I heard that apprentice artists work on pigskin. I had imagined footballs, but no, this is obtained from slaughterhouses or butchers. Anyway, I guess that footballs aren't made of pigskin.

Pigskins, oranges, old shoes, dumb friends... :)

But they are talking about tattoos that fade because they are broken down by a biological process, which makes me giggle picturing Arnold The Pig with "Born 2 Trot" on his hock.

> Also, testing on pigs? Like, live pigs? I'd pay money to see that. :)

Disgusting and shameful behavior, I can't believe that attitudes like this still exist.

Can't blame someone for finding pigs getting tattoos quite amusing. :-) You know full well that it's not a big deal and you're just making edgy comments for the sake of edgy comments.

For fuck sake dude, it's a pig. If you actually care about living things, do something about the slave labor used to source raw materials for the computer you wrote that on. I'm going to guess your conviction is about living creatures in pain, not about pigs in particular. One of these is much more disgusting than the other. Honestly who gives a flying fuck about a pig getting a tattoo.

watching the video the pigs seem pretty comfy for the most part. i would have thought they'd be squealing and writhing

they are sedated. (the author say it in the wiki article)

Hell, out in the real world, animals get eaten alive all the time. Getting a tattoo isn't even close to the worst thing that can happen.

This is specious logic. You're saying that anything up to, but not including, getting eaten alive is ok because "it could always be worse."

I suspect your parent's point was that saying putting tattoos on pigs is "disgusting and shameful" is a little odd, given that animals eat each other all the time (which is presumably not disgusting nor shameful).

The logic doesn't work because the two acts are not necessarily equal. Let's take another example: Would you equate the following items?

- Torturing an animal to death for fun.

- Killing an animal quickly and eating it.

They both end up with the animal being dead. Does that mean that they are equal and that you can't find one "disgusting and shameful" but not the other?

I wouldn't equate those two, no. But it's also worth mentioning that it's common in the natural world for prey to spend hours dying (and more rarely, days or even weeks). The idea that a 'natural predator' death means a quick death is a myth. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.

Using that as an excuse for (or in defence of) your own actions is akin to saying "he's doing it, so why can't I?" though.

The point is that you keep making leaps of logic in order to knock down strawmen, rather than addressing the actual substantive arguments at play.

My point is that a pig in captivity that is treated well and protected from predators, oh and that happens to get tattoo or two, is still doing better than a pig out in the wild, which is subject to much worse things happening to it. The pigs in captivity even get health care!

It's only specious if your interpretation is correct.

> Getting a tattoo isn't even close to the worst thing that can happen

Isn't the same as "it's ok"; or "anything up to" (the distance is mentioned, implying it might be relevant to context).

I'm not sure you would find anyone in agreement of a defence of the Iraq War that was along the lines of "It could be worse, just look at the Holocaust!" Pointing to something else and saying "it could be worse" isn't a defence of the actions in question. It's something along the lines of "passing the buck."

It sounds like you are reducing OP to a binary, with us or without us - on the attack or or the defense. This is the discourse of binary politics, and that's why there is no nuance to discussions of the Iraq war.

> If you actually care about living things, do something about the slave labor used to source raw materials for the computer you wrote that on.

This translates to "if you can't save everybody 100%, then you shouldn't help anybody." It's a self-defeating attitude that if something can't be done 100% perfect that it shouldn't be done at all.

Would you tell someone that devotes their lives to working in soup kitchens and helping the poor in first-world countries that they "aren't doing enough" because there are people that "have it worse" than the first-world poor somewhere else in the world?

> If you actually care about living things, do something about the slave labor

The above would contradict that maxim. A better fit would be "don't waste resources on less important things, over more important things".

I meant more in the sense of watching someone try to tattoo a 100kg hog, and how hard they'd get bit. But you are right, it's probably more like little adorable Wilbur pigs. :(

Yes, I thought pig tattooing as a spectator sport died out in the 70s.

Why? They are testing if the tattoo fades or not, there's really no chance of adverse effects. The worst thing that happens is a pig has a permanent tattoo.

Titanium dioxide does not break down in the presence of UV. Any fading would likely be from migration.

You are correct. Tattooists aren't known for their biochem chops.

Do the pigs have beards and skinny jeans on?

Perhaps ear piercings with giant holes?

Hipster hogs.

You've posted a lot of unsubstantive comments to HN. Please don't do that. We're hoping for a higher signal/noise ratio here.

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