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Comment by sjwalter | Hacker News Reader

How many animals does a 30 acre soy field kill?

Have you ever seen how many foals are chewed up in a combine?

IMO much more ethical to directly kill an animal vs. indirectly destroy its habitat or kill it accidentally (and then fail to use the carcass).

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The amount of feed crop acreage needed to produce a beef burger is much greater than the crop acreage needed to produce an Impossible burger, so the Impossible burger reduces the number of those habitats that are being destroyed. (I'm using "feed crop" loosely to include hay - even 100% grass-fed cattle can't just be pastured year-round in most areas, and cutting hay is just as bad as harvesting feed crops for any smaller animals that've made their homes in the fields.)

Oh in that case we better stop... uh.. eating animals since that drives demand for 77% of Soy consumption [0].

I know we must engage in good faith but the soy scaremongering sure does seem coordinated.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/soy

I don't think it follows that because the largest fraction of soy consumption is as animal feed, that animal agriculture drives soy consumption. Soy animal feed is mostly a byproduct of soy oil and biofuel production. If not for that production, we'd just move to the next cheapest feed.

> Have you ever seen how many foals are chewed up in a combine?

I'm going with zero.

Where do you live that stray horses or donkeys are roaming into crop fields at harvest time?

Foals is probably a red herring. But what do farmers do about gophers, deer and wild pigs?

The bigger ones run away. Combines are enormous and noisy. They don't sneak up on you.

But I think intent makes a difference.

Mice killed by farm equipment are accidental side effects with some ethical implications which most of us choose ignore.

Livestock raised for slaughter is a different ethical question entirely.

(Meat eater here. I do find it to be the natural order of things, but I am aware that I could justify slavery and sexual exploitation by the same logic, and that makes me pretty sure I'm giving myself a pass on the meat thing.)

Yeah, I'm with ya on the combine. But, farmers shoot or exterminate animals like deer, gophers and pigs that threaten their crops. It seems as though it's necessary to kill animals in order to provide even a vegan diet to the world's population, and I often see this truth being ignored by absolutists -- which seems to be what the original comment about combines was reaching for.

I eat meat, too. I'm... mostly okay with that. But I'm told that pigs are smarter than cats, and that makes me a bit squeamish. Natural order sure is a slippery slope. It is human nature, I hope, to aim to be better than our nature.

> It is human nature, I hope, to aim to be better than our nature.

Thank goodness for that!

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