Comment by throwaway4aday | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway4aday | Hacker News Reader

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A mushroom is a weird example for empathy for a few reasons. First, the part you eat is really just the "fruit" or reproductive part of the mushroom that only lasts for a short time before withering away. Second, mushrooms very happily eat you after you die, hell, even before you die you're covered in all kinds of unicellular fungi which are actively trying to eat you.

More to your philosophical point, the beauty of life is always transitory. Life begins, blooms, withers and dies but also passes on the small immortal spark that it all came from to the next generation so it can repeat the cycle. I'm against cruelty to animals but I also recognize that eating them is part of life and that it is possible for us as conscious beings to give them a better life than they would have in the wild and then kill and eat them and I'm ok with that. I don't want to live in a world where all cattle or pigs are reduced to a few wild populations scrabbling for survival against the elements and disease while being occasionally mauled and devoured alive and screaming by wolves and other predators. To me that's more immoral than a properly maintained herd that is sheltered, fed and given medical attention and then slaughtered as painlessly as we can manage.

Before all y'all reply with "factory farming", yes I'm aware of its prevalence but that just means we should be working to reduce that type of treatment, not eliminating raising animals for meat entirely.

hell, even before you die you're covered in all kinds of unicellular fungi which are actively trying to eat you

They started it first, Your Honour!

not eliminating raising animals for meat entirely.

I wonder. If we genetically engineered, maybe via a bio attack, so all cows were effected at once, a deadly disease?

This disease would be a genetic illness, so that just a while after maturity, cows would become sick with crippling pain.

Thus, we would be helping them, to kill them before the pain and agony started, and therefore... none would question what we do with the meat.

...

Now replace the disease with "it all goes downhill after 30". Really, it's sorta the same thing.

I know you are just arguing to argue at this point, but you can’t really think that creating a disease to cause crippling pain in livestock will make it more acceptable to eat them.

No. But it would if bio-terrorists did it, and we were left with the result.

Or, should we let cows go extinct instead? Or suffer?

Just a thought and logic experiment.

Yeah, I don't think we should breed cows. I don't think anyone who is concerned about the welfare of cows to the point of not eating them will go "Oh, well now they also have additional torment baked into their biology, it's OK to

    A) breed them into a life of constant suffering
    B) Start providing the same cramped, unhealthy, and unpleasant living conditions at a young age that we already do
    C) Once the physical pain inherent with living past ripeness sets in, let them experience that just long enough to slaughter them
    D) Slaughter them, even though we likely haven't bred out the desire to live, just piled on more pain. No matter that despite experiencing mutiliation, pain, and poor conditions throughout their lives, these animals still often display a desire to live and additional fear of death.

If anything, I'd suggest the most humane thing to do (if we insisted on raising animals), would be to breed them to desire being eaten, like the cow in Douglas Adams' "A restaurant at the end of the universe"

To me, your statements seem weird.

For example, slaughtering them before the disease exhibits symptoms, means we are 100% preventing that pain. Thus, C is null, and void.

I don't get A. Properly treated cattle, such as in most of the world, are grass fed, or grass fed harvested hay, and free roaming. Thus, A makes zero sense, as A doesn't even take into account medical care (vaccination, antibiotics, vets, birth assistance), nor does it take into account immense protection from predation. Cows properly raised, live pampered, easy, happy, lives.

In terms of slaughter, old factory methods let cows horribly hang by their legs for hours, while they slowly bled out. Smaller concerns were more humane, but at least most of the world insists of quick, painless death for cattle. Where I live, it's destruction of the brain, such as a bullet, immediately stopping all thought, and frankly, far better than a death where (for example) wolves rip you apart while still alive, experiencing hours of agony.

(I have listened, where I live, at 2am to a pack of coyotes eating a large kill, its mewing, and cries of pain going on for more than an hour, it is NOT nice.)

I really think that if people care, really care, they need to stop basing opinions on false realities, and understand that often humans are far far far less brutal, than other animals.

Do you think a wolf takes care to kill a creature it is ripping apart? No. I just eats.

Cats "play" with mice, sometimes for hours before fully killing them. Mother cats also maim mice, so their children can learn.

Do you know why mice can breed from 2, to > 60, in a mere few months? To hundreds and hundreds in a year?

Because most of them are eaten alive, ripped apart while still living, by predation.

Nature is far, far more brutal than proper human animal husbandry.

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