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Comment by causasui | Hacker News Reader

The US breeds and slaughters 8 billion chickens a year.

If you at all believe (not you personally OP, as the above punchline makes it obvious that you have the empathetic range of a thimble) that animals have a level of consciousness/agency similar to humans, you should consider if you want to continue to pay for their suffering for a 15 minute meal.

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>you should consider if you want to continue to pay for their suffering for a 15 minute meal.

Yes. I will never stop eating meat. Can we compromise? Can I eat some without stopping completely?

Just an observation: by this metric, bison meat is approximately 200 times more ethical than chicken meat.

Some people are actually starting to think about that, especially in the context of insect "meat". For example, a cow makes ~250kg of meat, a cricket weight ~0.5g. If you believe all life to be equal, eating a cow is 500 000 times better than eating the equivalent in crickets. If you believe that insect are worth 10 000 times less than cows (arbitrary number), that's still 50 times worse. I think it's important that people come to term that there's no magic way to avoid all suffering, and that they start thinking about what their values are.

I'm very much a meat eater and I absolutely think about this. I think cows are a lot more intelligent than chickens but I feel less bad eating beef because I think I'd be fine killing a single cow every few years but I'd probably struggle to kill a chicken every single day

As I understand it someone did a count of all the animals killed in the production of a vegan diet and in pure numbers it was more than if you any ate beef by a huge amount. Will try to find the original study…

When you find it look hard at who made this "study", and check if they counted in the same way. For example counting the animals killed during the production of the food used to feed the animals raised for their meat.

That study was so flawed, it's not even funny. It took one specific scenario in Australia, where farmers had to kill a lot of rodents (due to a seasonal plague) to protect their crop and compared that to a single animal slaughtered for a meat dish. They completely failed to mention that livestock are fed that exact same crop, that the farmers were killing the rodents for. IIRC there a couple such "studies", but all similarly flawed.

it was a joke, man

a world where meat is grown and animals don’t have to die would be a better one

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