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Comment by 781 | Hacker News Reader

There are quite a few (relatively) famous pigs on Instagram.

Try suggesting to someone that maybe they should be turned into bacon this Christmas. I'm not talking about vegans, but regular meat-eating people. Study reaction.

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If you (the general You) are one of the people who would have an adverse reaction to the idea of eating a beloved pig from Instagram, but you eat meat otherwise, examine and consider carefully your preferences and opinions. Same thing if you feel outraged at the fate of Cecil the Lion or at the thought of other people eating dogs for example.

There is a contradiction there. Look at it carefully. Try to generalize that to other living things, for example humans.

/End of Public Service Announcement

That's a entirely reasonable position; those pigs are more useful as entertainment than food, by a rather large margin too.

As someone with a rack of ribs currently slow cooking in the oven, I beg to differ!

Unless you mean that you don't find the pigs on Instagram entertaining, I don't see your point. Clearly there is no grave shortage of food pigs if you're eating one, so the marginal benifit of having a few extra food pigs is much less than the benefit of using those few pigs for entertainment. Kind of like how it's better to use marble for statues or architecture than for landfill, because there's plenty of landfill rock already available.

They haven’t been through hunger or starvation. They have plenty, so they can experience such “luxury”.

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