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Comment by natchy | Hacker News Reader

As long as the animals are eaten then it's a lot better than factory farming IMO.

I think people would eat meat less regularly if they see the animals butchered.

...this is a weird thing to say in reply to a post about killing lab mice.

I don't think the corpses were eaten, they took out the parts they needed to autopsy and tossed the rest in a biohazard bag, if it's anything like labs I've worked in.

For large parts of human history, if you wanted to eat meat you'd have not only to kill it yourself, but also to raise it yourself. People still ate meat. Imo the killing part is not actually that bad, it's everything we do to the animals before that that is truly horrendous.

> I think people would eat meat less regularly if they see the animals butchered.

I have been on a carnivore diet for some time now. I wanted to know if I was capable of butchering. With some training from a pro, I did it around 6 times(goat). Gave up on meat since.

For some reason I don't feel the same disgust with fishing, so my diet is mostly replaced with fish. Good thing about sea food is you get a lot more variety!

I dunno, I lived in Africa and it was a pretty regular occurrence to either kill a goat/chicken or kill it yourself. Didn't seem to stop people from wanting to eat meat (including me).

No one eats lab mice. But it is perfectly normal to kill them in order to fix the brain tissue so you can image it.

I think people would eat meat less regularly if they see the animals butchered.

I don't think this holds. It's pretty obvious that a Thanksgiving turkey or a rotisserie chicken used to be a whole animal, but we still eat those.

Also, you really wouldn't want to eat lab animals, especially ones that have been subjected to pharmaceutical testing.

There's a difference between obvious they were butchered and seeing them butchered. E.g. while I'm ok eating a chicken, I'm not sure I'd want one murdered and gutted as I watch, then immediately fried.

It's likely different for people who grew up on a farm and know it as normal life.

It's likely different for people who grew up on a farm and know it as normal life.

I've mostly just seen pictures of cows being butchered, but I did watch a rooster die when it had to be shot. It's not ideal. I still eat meat and will continue to do so until lab-grown alternatives are nutritionally and culinarily indistinguishable, and IMO what humans do for food is far more humane than what most of nature does.

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