Hacker News Reader

I have friends who own cattle that will later be butchered. They truly love those animals, even though they know their fate in the end. They give even them names. They would be heartbroken if one of them died like this pig did. I suppose this is the mindset of many who raise these animals. There is definitely a sense a humaneness towards their animals, and at the same time enjoy the meat they produce.

I have seen cows butchered -- one second they are alive -- one blow to the head they are gone. Sharp transition from death to life. Better than many humans who endure being eaten by cancer while lying in a hospital bed.

We are so insulated from death in our society, we almost pretend it doesn't happen. Many who butcher there own animals or hunt for their own meat have a better grip on this reality I think.

One of Terry Pratchett's characters, an old shepherdess, summed it up well. From memory: "We are as gods to the beasts of the field: we order the hour of their birth and their death. In between times, we has a duty."

A better grip on reality.

Yes, and there is not this perverse attempt to replace human company with controllable companions (aka pets), that leads to so much animal antromorphism and hidden missery.

I can like a cow, and still know its a cow. A horse can not know what a hand is that holds the sugar cube. For a horse, you are another smaller horse.

I live near a horse-stable, where strong-empowered single ladies have up to five horses. The sadness and missery of a live that has replaced what could be a family or just human company with animals - is on par in my eyes with some computer addicted males. You should hear the arguments they have with the vet.

> I live near a horse-stable, where strong-empowered single ladies have up to five horses. The sadness and missery of a live that has replaced what could be a family or just human company with animals - is on par in my eyes with some computer addicted males.

What the actual fuck?

It's inelegantly expressed, but have you ever talked to horse people?

Not any more than is absolutely required by law. I would render aid should I come upon someone of the Horse Peoples tribe who had collapsed, but that's about as far as it goes. Their ways...they are strange, their speech garbled.

Yeah, you think you're joking.

For a horse, you are another smaller horse.

I can't speak for horses because I have little desire to be around them, but it would take some solid evidence to convince me that a dog doesn't know the difference between humans and dogs. Perhaps a dog doesn't bucket me into "human" or "dog" (though I'm confident that they have some concept of categorization), but they sure heck don't think I'm a bipedal dog.

As for "horse people", well, I make no apologies for that lot. I think there's something in horse dander that makes the owners neurotic.

Are you sure, you are not just a very very strange alpha dog, whos moods are easily readable by looking at the face muscles and the tone of voice?

Dogs have no concept of society beyond the pack that is family. Dogs prefer to communicate by action and smell. Maybee antromorphizing makes alien company more bearable. I somehow miss that trait, i guess.

Are you sure, you are not just a very very strange alpha dog, whos moods are easily readable by looking at the face muscles and the tone of voice?

Pretty sure, yeah. It's an extrapolation: my dogs don't try to eat another dog that's about the same size and furriness of a rabbit, but they'll about take my arm off to chase a rabbit. So there's some kind of categorization going on. "These things are for eating, these other things are for fun." I'm quite confident that dogs have not created a system that breaks things down along lines of genus and species, but I'm pretty sure they know I'm not one of them. To a large degree it's moot, I suppose, because they can't tell us what's on their mind, so we just have to play with inputs and observed behavior, and go from there.

As a sidenote, research has on multiple occasions demonstrated that pack mentality and other such things as "alpha dog" don't apply to domesticated dogs (IOW, you can pretty much ignore anything Caeser Millan has to say). Extrapolating from those assumptions can be rife with error.

So it's understood that in the best of cases, the pig is being cared for so that it can be murdered for food.

I grew up with livestock that would later be converted to food on our table. Those animals had one bad day their entire lives. Though we intended to eat them, we had no intention of adding to that count of bad days if we didn’t have to. So, though never called upon to do so, I’d stay up all night with a pig if she were sick even if I were going to eat her later.

> Or am I just expecting too much introspection from someone who hasn't examined their own motives and actions?

You're expecting logical consistency from the author, but the author is partly pointing out that our emotions and feelings do not always obey such a rigid framework.

The author is examining how they feel about the pig's death; that sometimes comes before, or is not in congruence with, their other motivations.

If you reflect on this a bit more, the normal course of a farmer (and to a greater degree, industrial meat production) is to view their animals as a product and to not regard them as feeling individuals, as that might rather get in the way of their work. But the farmer is slowly drawn into a situation where the pig is more than future meat, but a suffering fellow creature.

Just to add to this point, with something that Yuval Noah Harari said in an interview with Sam Harris:

  "If tensions, conflicts and irresolvable dilemmas are the
  spice of every culture, a human... must hold contradictory
  beliefs and be riven by incompatible values. Cognitive 
  dissonance is often considered a failure of the human
  psyche. In fact, it is a vital asset. Had people been unable
  to hold contradictory beliefs and values, it would probably
  have been impossible to establish and maintain any human
  culture."

Godel's Incompleteness Theorem proves that at least in math, there's a tradeoff between power and completeness / consistency, in that formal systems than can encode arithmetic can prove more things, but they are necessarily either inconsistent or incomplete.

Would make a lot of sense if this tradeoff were also present in other contexts.

I guess the point is to make the reader think.

The author is fully aware of the irony that he cares and thinks so much about this pig that he was planning to butcher.

It reminds me about when I was a kid and didn't care much about animals until one of my rabbits died because I'd placed it in a cage without shelter and not brought it back in before a heavy cold rain.

I had to kill it, as I realized it was suffering and I guess that was the day I started caring about animals.

"Making the reader think" seems reasonable to me, especially after doing a bit more research on E.B. White.

While it's nice to think that this is the goal of the story, I also wonder if it's not actually giving people a way to rationalize inhuman behavior. By his own account, White is saying "murder" and it seems this wording is intentional. Looking at other comments, it's clear there's a compartmentalization that happens when people try to reconcile having empathy for living things then murdering and eating them.

It's almost as if it's giving permission to people by saying they're more human because they have empathy for a creature that they'll later murder and eat.

Are you actually having trouble understanding the story and the emotions involved, or are you just looking for as many opportunities as possible to call the slaughter of an animal raised for meat "murder", in a non-poetic sense?

I'm actually having trouble. I do admit that I have a hard time reconciling the empathy expressed with the brutality of murder but I've tried to get at the core of what's trying to be expressed.

You're trying to bait me and I think that's unfair. The story itself about the juxtaposition of caring for an animal that can be clearly empathized with while planning a per-meditated murder (White's words). White literally calls it murder. This is what the story is about. You think it's unfair of me to try and discuss it?

Before you judge me to harshly, notice some of the other comments to my original question aren't saying that they have a hard time reconciling the murder of animals with their emotional attachment, they're saying they love their animals while not caring that they kill them. It's almost as if they're saying that their empathy towards their animals gives them moral latitude in killing them. Is this what White was trying to express? I don't think so but that's what half of the comments to my question seem to be saying.

Was this what White was trying to say? That people should feel better about killing animals because they empathize with them? Or is he saying they should feel worse and work towards a world that doesn't kill animals? Or is he not examining this at all and just expressing an emotion without any introspection? I really don't know and I wanted to see what other people had to say about it.

> You're trying to bait me and I think that's unfair.

I offered a response in the spirit of your original comment. If you think that's unfair, then I don't know what to tell you. I think that you're being disingenuous with your posts as a rhetorical device to make a point about your perception of the ethics of using animals as food.

> White literally calls it murder.

In a non-literal, poetic sense. He uses the word murder two times, true.

> Is this what White was trying to express?

I don't think he's saying that people should feel better about killing animals. I think that he's acknowledging the reality that killing an animal for food is killing a feeling being. That it's better to go into an action with full knowledge of the result. I don't think it's a matter of making people feel better or worse about the situation.

He wasn't empathizing with the animal's death anyhow, at least not primarily; everything dies, after all. It was the unnecessary pain that was never a part of the plan.

It's almost as if they're saying that their empathy towards their animals gives them moral latitude in killing them. Is this what White was trying to express?

No. I don't think that is what White is trying to express.

I think it is the wonder that we actually care so much about these animals even when they are clearly (in the opinion of most humans) lesser than us.

As for why we are allowed to kill and eat animals this needs no extra justification as is governed by the same rules that allow eagles, hyeanas, lions and wolves to kill and eat.

Yes, people kill animals for food. Yes, people care about the well-being of those animals during the time they are alive and in their care.

If you see a contradiction there, that's just you.

I assume you are a "supermarket kid", like most of us here, and grew up away from the land, getting your meat from the invisible machinery of modern industrialized food production. Now you seem to have gone off eating meat, and apparently feel quite morally superior. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

From this position of inexperience and moral superiority, of course you are unable to process the nuanced emotions conveyed so skillfully by White. Unable to reconcile the essay with your black-and-white moralistic view of the world, you blame the author for lacking introspection. This is why you are sensing some disdain in the responses you are getting.

I think the author is trying to get across a mindset that is common among people who raise livestock, which others might find foreign like you seem to.

He seems fully aware of the contradictions within it, and isn't making any attempts to rationalize it. He's likely hoping that the reader will try to understand the mindset that makes this contradiction possible.

If this is true, then I would say it's laziness on the author's part to not try to reconcile this contradiction or to at least to address it in a deeper way.

Emotions are not rational; they can be handled, but trying to force them into a rational framework seems...counterproductive to me.

Or maybe it's laziness on your part not making enough effort to understand what he is trying to tell you ... This is not a maths essay, this is literature. Contradiction is part of it (as it is part of life), or even: contradiction is the whole point of it. On the other hand, there is no contradiction at all.

Interestingly, your comment is so much removed from what I read in this essay that the only thing I can recommend you is not worry about it, just set this story aside and try reading it again 25 years from now. It will most probably make a difference.

I'm not sure why this essay was posted to HN, but I'm glad to have read it. Thanks for posting it!

>then I would say it's laziness on the author's part to not try to reconcile this contradiction or to at least to address it in a deeper way

Authors are not there to force-feed explanations and offer cliff notes. They convey the experience.

That we may live, other life must inevitably die -- in fact, this is generally the rule for most life at this point. Even if you consider plants unworthy of the same regard we give animals (how zoochauvinist of you), animal life is lost in the tilling and harvesting from fields, even if pesticides are not used and no new habitat turned to our use. Further, the harvest would be most meager without any pest control, and manual removal of insects, etc. is fairly prohibitive; organic farmers usually make use of more natural options for pest control, like diatomaceous earth, rather than discarding treatment entirely.

The real lack of introspection is our handwaving away of this truth from notice, such that we find an unavoidable truth abhorrent.

Farmers respect the animals even though their fate is pre-ordained.

There are all sorts of questions that are tough to answer. My thought always was that it's better to live than to not live at all, and if we didn't eat pigs, we wouldn't have any.