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Comment by mongol | Hacker News Reader

I think we are not discussing ethics in depth enough in our soviety. What specifically is it that is unethical about the meat industry? Is it the way the cows are slaughtered? Is it that we take their life? Is it how they live their life? Can any of these arguments be made void from an ethical standpoint, if they are addressed somehow?

Since this discussion lead into brainless cows, why does that solve the ethics problem? Could it not be argued that it would be even more unethical to breed severly handicapped cows, without ability to experience the world?

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Yes pretty much all of the above. Forcing a sentient being to live an existence that it didn't evolve for is extremely cruel. Even animals such as cows and chickens have social and emotional needs that were built into them in millions of years of evolution. A couple thousand years of domestication don't turn them into automata that can be treated as a product whose purpose it is to make our food taste a little better, but which we can easily find substitutes for.

> Forcing a sentient being to live an existence that it didn't evolve for is extremely cruel.

This seems like it would strongly apply to modern day humans living in an extremely complex, sedentary, large scale and atomized world. Much more so than cows even!

It does apply to modern day humans in some aspects and is a reason for a lot of misery and suffering in our world. Obviously I'm not saying that we have a lower quality of life than our hunter and gather ancestors, but a lot of the things that go against our evolutionary environment are the direct causes for much of our suffering. But going back to the actual argument, the the degree to which our lives differ from that we evolved in is obviously much smaller than for livestock.

Does that mean that domestication of animals always is wrong?

Inspired by Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - breeding animals that want to be eaten is more ethical than killing animals that don't want to be eaten.

https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Ameglian_Major_Cow

> Is it the way the cows are slaughtered? Is it that we take their life? Is it how they live their life?

Do cows have emotions and awareness of the world they live in?

It's hard enough to confirm whether other people have emotions and awareness of the world they live in, let alone cows...

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