Comment by ornornor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ornornor | Hacker News Reader

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> it doesn't change much (it is nothing actually, but I don't want to sound insensitive)

Of course, I also don’t eat meat eggs or milk, don’t wear leather, and haven’t for over 15 years now. But it didn’t happen all at once, and if I just thought that moving snails out of the way wouldn’t make any difference anyway I probably would have given up there and then. But instead I did a little bit more every once in a while until I’m at the point where I am.

So yes cats kill billions of animals a day for example but that’s only if you let your cat out. Every vet we spoke to said that it’s better to keep cats indoors because they live longer lives, don’t get diseases, don’t get maimed, don’t fight, don’t get hot by cars or even caught and tortured by humans (that’s a thing), don’t get obese from eating at home and at the neighbor’s and as long as you make sure they have toys and windows to look through they don’t mind.

My cat has killed maybe four mice in the 8 years I have her, tops. It’s unfortunate that cats must eat meat to survive but the canned food is pretty much the only meat we buy which is a fraction of what most people consume. That cat was abandoned and we took her in.

In conclusion, yes, focusing on the wrong thing is diminishing your impact. But I’d bet that for most people it’s not choosing between high impact and lower impact actions, but rather between nothing at all and anything at all. In that case I still believe anything at all is better than nothing at all. And doing anything at all might raise your awareness to do more and more on top of it.

> Of course, I also don’t eat meat eggs or milk

It doesn't change a lot anyway.

It's a change for you, that's for sure, but not for the World.

For example: in US in the past 50 years meat consumption per capita has not gone down, but what radically changed is what kind of meat Americans eat.

Once was beef all the time, now more than 50% of the meat is poultry, only about 20% is beef.

Why?

Have people become more aware of the beef feelings?

The industry simply realized that poultry is a lot cheaper to farm, you can stuff a lot more of them in the same space and take a lot less time (poultry 3-4 months, vile 12-18 months)

But the margins are higher, if you sell beef (for example, just as a measure) at 10 monetary units/kg you can sell poultry at 6/kg. It will look cheaper than beef so it's gonna sell more, but truth is beef costed 6/kg to produce, poultry probably something around 0.5-1/kg.

And that's what really drives a change in habits in societies and economic system where free market is the only available choice.

It works much better and without all the friction that ethics or beliefs pose.

Next big thing is gonna be plant based food, because it's even cheaper than poultry, it's not evident if the plant is suffering or not (it's easy to recognize a limping chicken, what about a peronospora on lettuce?) but you can sell it at the same price of poultry.

Even better, thanks to the small portions packaging, you can buy at the supermarket 250gr of salad at 1.50 euro in Italy (and that's the price of the cheap one), which is 6 euros/kg, avocados cost about 7-8 euros/kg, but roasted chicken costs about 5 euros/kg!

And it's ready to eat!

That's something we should also be careful about.

But we don't.

> that’s only if you let your cat out. Every

Not really.

But suppose we do all the time.

What do they eat then?

not their owners' flesh I suppose...

They eat other animals

The meat you don't eat is gonna become food for pets (cats and dogs have a special tendency to not care about humans' religions and eat meat to survive), it's already happening, pet food is an ever growing market, which is already valued around 100 billion dollars and guess who is the primary segment for this market?

It's the US with 40% of the global market.

Cats and dogs in US are already eating, today, in 2020, 30% of the meat produced.

It they were a Nation, they would rank 5th in the World for meat consumption.

When I talk about priorities, this is what I actually mean: how many animals can we save fighting the fur industry and how many by giving up on keeping pets confined in our houses?

(the irony, minks in a cage are considered a crime, a cat in an apartment that can never go out it's caring...)

But nobody asks this question, because it's an uncomfortable one and it would mean to actually face the consequences of our actions and rethink our societies from the ground up, instead we prefer as a species to "Tilting at Windmills" the same way Don Quixote did.

> It doesn't change a lot anyway. It's a change for you, that's for sure, but not for the World.

Granted, one person out of the 6 or 7 billions we are makes no difference at all. But that’s not the reality. It’s becoming more and more popular to do this so it snowballs. Until you reach a tipping point where there is enough people doing it that companies start seeing an opportunity to make money and offer new products/lowers the price/increases availability/reduces friction. And that all started from individuals doing anything as opposed to nothing. It didn’t tip the balance individually but as more and more people started doing it, it is now shifting. I can go to the supermarket and find meat alternatives. It wasn’t the case 20 or 30 years ago. It’s still a drop in the bucket but it’s more than no drop in the bucket.

> minks in a cage vs cats confined

You see the difference though? An indoors cat with access to windows, toys, and plenty of space to move about (if it’s a livable amount of space for a human, surely it is for a cat that is 1/30th the volume of a human) vs minks raised with no other concerns than the quality of their furs at the expense of everything else and stacked up in overcrowded cages is a different situation. I’d think minks and cat are on the same intelligence and awareness level.

> plants suffering

Yeah that’s a bit tenuous. I always see this argument as a reason not to do anything as a copout. We know that animals suffer and experience pain, you’d have to be really dishonest to say it’s not certain that animals experience pain at the very least. Plants on the other hand it’s really not obvious. From what we know, they don’t seem to. Of course it’s not 100% certain and it’s hard to conclusively prove a negative. But there is a lot more evidence towards animals being sentient and experiencing pain than there is for plants.

> number of animals saved

I’d say it doesn’t matter as much as you say it does. You seem to assume that it’s a choice between doing something with a lower impact and something with a higher impact. But I’m arguing that for the vast majority of people it’s between doing nothing at all and save no animals by changing their habits va doing something that might not be the single thing they could do to save the most animals but still spare a few. And with that, I am convinced that saving, say 5 animals a year by changing your habits vs saving 0 a year is a worthwhile improvement. Yes it’s not saving 100% of the animals from cruelty and suffering by making a bigger change in your life but it’s still something. And, again, I think that once you develop the awareness and go down that path it has a snowball effect in that individual’s habit. It makes that individual start questioning their lifestyle and society’s values which create a bigger impact than what it started with.

> dogs and cats eating the meat I don’t eat

I don’t think that’s true. My cat eats something like 300g of food per day. If I were to eat meat I’d eat a lot more than that in a day (that includes not only a steak but more insidious things like the gelatin in candies or desserts which usually comes form porks for instance, or the milk and eggs powder that is an additive in large numbers of products). It would take more than one pet to “absorb” the amount of animals I spare from ever being raised and slaughtered. There is a reason why the UN I’m has been saying for years that we must drastically lower our meat consumption if we want to keep feeding everyone! Part of it is because it’s a lot more efficient to eat the crops directly rather than have an animal eat them and lose the majority in the process (I don’t know the numbers off hand but it takes say 1000 kcal of crops to make 10 kcal of meat), but also because the demand for meat would drop and thus not require nearly as many animals raised for meat and eating crops we could feed people directly.

Furthermore, it’s not 100% comparable. Although dogs don’t need to eat meat (they can live healthily on a vegetables diet), cats don’t have this option. Their digestive tract is too short to process vegetal proteins so they must eat meat. Humans aren’t like that either. We can absorb vegetal proteins and there is no reason to eat all the meat we do. It’s not a requirement. Never mind the amount of antibiotics and hormones they come with that we also absorb. Or the effects of industrial animal farming in a pandemic. In the end of the day, choosing to not eat animals anymore has a larger impact than keeping feeding your cat meat. And the first one is totally doable while the second one would make the cat unhealthy. It’s still not saving as many animals as quitting animal products AND killing your cat so it doesn’t have to eat meat anymore but it’s a massive improvement if only your cat (1/30th of your weight) eats meat and you don’t vs you and your cat changing nothing and eat meat as usual.

> And that all started from individuals doing anything as opposed to nothing > It wasn’t the case 20 or 30 years ago

An example?

In just 20 years China has gone from 5kg of meat/year on average to 60kg/year (and growing) on average.

And they are more than a billion people.

Simply when you are not poor, you don't want to live like poor people anymore, with all its drawbacks.

In particular people that go from poor to less poor try to avoid dietary deficiencies, that caused so much pain in their past, especially for their children.

> say 5 animals a year by changing your habits vs saving 0 a year is a worthwhile improvement

Worthwhile for whom?

You can save 5 of them by sheer luck.

I know one can find meaning in almost anything, but structural change must have a structure.

> You seem to assume that it’s a choice between doing something with a lower impact and something with a higher impact.

Because it is.

Something with negligible impact has no impact, by definition.

> . There is a reason why the UN I’m has been saying for years that we must drastically lower our meat consumption if we want to keep feeding everyone

Yeah - we - means mainly US, where people eat on average around 120kg/year of meat.

It doesn't mean meat is bad, when Africa is gonna raise there gonna be almost 1 billion people that will exit food shortages and countries like Kenya or Uganda will finally pass from eating 4-5kg of meat a year, to something better for their nutritional needs, something like 30-40kg/year.

Another billion will reach a lifestyle more similar to ours.

Thew west is gonna need to share its surplus, it's not the World that needs to stop eating something because others ate too much of in the past.

That's injustice.

> I don’t think that’s true.

But unfortunately it is.

There are more than 160 million dogs and cats in USA alone, think about the entire West.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

> (they can live healthily on a vegetables diet)

It is possible, but no advisable, for many reasons:

- it's incredibly expensive

- takes a lot of care

- takes a lot of time

- chances of failure are astronomically high

- dogs are omnivore, like pandas are omnivore bears, pandas spend the entire time they are awake eating, because the nutrients of vegetables are much less energetic than eating meat directly. dogs deprived of meat would follow the same destiny.

> My cat eats something like 300g of food per day

Multiplied for 365 days a year it's more or less 110-120kg of meat

The average European human eats less than 90kg of meat a year (which is already a lot)

So a cat eats on average 25-30% more meat than an European human

You’re forgetting about all the indirect meat we eat. Gelatin is everywhere and usually comes from porks. That’s not a steak but that kills an animal. Same for milk and eggs, you don’t get these without killing calves early so you can take all of the cow’s milk and you don’t get eggs without shredding newly hatched male chickens or killing hens after a couple of years when they stop laying eggs.

I’m pretty sure the kg of meat consumed in your statistic above is kg of meat in the plate as in a steak or a kebab only and ignores the rest.

Also, the cat food is usually between 40 and 90% meat while the rest is fillers (depending on quality and price)

> You’re forgetting about all the indirect meat we eat

Why do you assume I am forgetting something?

Do yo have some special power that lets you know what other people know or don't know?

I simply posted a well respected and openly published statistics created by international organizations devoted to food, one of them is called FAO.

Do you know it?

Second: any "non meat related meat" is also in pets food, because, surprise surprise, IT'S THE SAME FOOD REPACKAGED.

> I’m pretty sure

Yeah, I was pretty sure you were going to be pretty sure, without having actual knowledge.

There's a thing called methodology in statics, you should check it out.

The stats I posted used this methodology

> The figures tabulated below do not represent per capita amounts of meat eaten by humans. Instead, they represent FAO figures for carcass mass availability (with "carcass mass" for poultry estimated as ready-to-cook mass),[2] divided by population. The amount eaten by humans differs from carcass mass availability because the latter does not account for losses, which include bones, losses in retail and food service or home preparation (including trim and cooking), spoilage and "downstream" waste, and amounts consumed by pets (compare dressed weight)

So, in short, human meat consumption in this stats is always overstated (for good reasons, we produce it anyway, it's not coming from outer space).

> For example, the FAO (2002) figure for Denmark, which has one of the highest meat export rates compared to its population, was 145.9 kg (322 lb) (highest in the world). More recent FAO figures (2009) have taken the earlier discrepancy into account, resulting in a significantly lower 95.2 kg (210 lb) for Denmark (13th in the world). When further adjusted for loss, calculations by DTU Fødevareinstituttet suggest the actual consumption was 48 kg (106 lb) per adult

But your cat instead eats 300 grams of meat everyday, there's no margin of error, multiplied by 365 days it amount to 109,5 kgs.

Make no mistake, your cat could be actually eating 2.28 times more meat than the average Danish person.

> the cat food is usually between 40 and 90% meat while the rest is fillers

While instead humans eat only filet and steaks, no bones, no fat, nothing else, only steaks, right?

Well, haggis would like to show you something.

Also, the centenarian Italian tradition of cooking entrails would like a word.

If you seat at a table with my mom and her four sisters, they constantly fight to eat the neck and feet of the chicken.

While my sister prefers the liver and the giblets.

I, on the other hand, love the "fagioli con le cotiche" (beans and pork rind) cooked in the pignata and served with a tomato sauce cooked together with an ham bone. What's not to love?

https://www.nerinoumbro.it/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Fagiol...

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