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Comment by illlogic2 | Hacker News Reader

"many giraffes are slaughtered just for their tails, which are considered a status symbol and have been used as a dowry when asking a bride’s father for his daughters hand in marriage in some cultures."

Humans are the most wasteful species.

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I would say more that humans have evolved to be very interested in status (as stated in the text you quoted) and that wasting resources is high on the list of how to show your high status. Status used to be critical to survival when being kick out of the tribe was basically a death sentence. Tim Urban wrote a good article about this[1] with some good ideas to ponder about the value of caring about what other people think about you.

[1]https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/06/taming-mammoth-let-peoples-op...

Effort should be prized, it's quite lazy - likely paying someone else - to slaughter an animal, and then pay for its tail.

That’s how I feel about the meat industry and its attempt to be seen as masculine.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean, can you elaborate?

I think of Arby's "ITS THE MEAT!" campaign to make it appear manly by slamming a sandwich in slow motion on the table. You can just do a google search for something like "Meat and Masculinity", "Meat and Toxic Masculinity", or "Meat Heads" to see what I'm getting at. Basically, there is the continued association between meat and masculinity when its mostly caged animals and you just go to the grocery and pick it up like any commodity.

Arby's serves meat? Huh, TIL.

For most of history in most post-agricultural cultures not working has been the status people admired and aspired to.

„Our bodies and minds are built to live in a tribe in 50,000BC, which leaves modern humans with a number of unfortunate traits, one of which is a fixation with tribal-style social survival in a world where social survival is no longer a real concept.“

James Damore will be eager to know more about this theory.

Yeah in a world where people are known to commit suicide because of rejection from their peers, in a world where people die homeless on the streets of the richest cities due to rejection from their peers, I would strongly disagree that social survival is no longer a real concept.

Yeah, very much alive in blue collar and white collar jobs.

He seems to still be alive and going on speaking tours at the moment, I believe.

Nah. Many carnivores will kill a large animal and eat only its liver and a bit of the meat. We should know better, though.

Materialistic modern cultures are the most wasteful. Native American Plains tribes used every part of the buffalos that they killed. Then white Americans came and killed for their fur and for sport.

Cultures that do so certainly are.

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