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Comment by brabel | Hacker News Reader

Most animals in the wild live very tough, short lives and have high likelihood that they be killed and eaten by predators, so they live every second of their lives in fear. I am not convinced that when animals are grown by humans in appropriate conditions (i.e. not overcrowded sausage factories), given all the food they need and able to "enjoy" (this is a human emotion, but perhaps they have an analogous "feeling" when out in nature?) nature while being protected, it's really wrong. We are part of nature and our physiology made us capable of eating meat, just like all other predators. Do you believe all predators are "morally wrong", or only humans?? Denying our nature never seems like a very wise thing.

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> so they live every second of their lives in fear.

Seems like an oversimplification to me, and we don't know that they live their whole live in fear. We observe playful and happy behavior in plenty of wild animals, not only in apex predators.

> I am not convinced that when animals are grown by humans in appropriate conditions [...]

They lack any kind of self determination, take a milk farm for example. The cows are inseminated/raped by humans until they die, children are taken away from their mothers shorty after birth, the girls are destined for a live of constant pregnancy, the boys for 9 month of power food and then the knife. So many animals that we use including many pets, would run away, if we opened the prison doors. I fail to see this form of enslavement as something positive.

> Do you believe all predators are "morally wrong", or only humans??

No, I don't believe that. But I believe you are making a false equivalence here, I have no moral qualms with an indigenous group of people hunting for a living. I do have a problem with industrial scale exploitation, when we have reasonable plant based alternatives, heck personally I don't even mind industrial scale insect farming. Do you think that two angry humans killing each other over a conflict is the same thing as industrial scale genocide with labor camps?

If you think we are raping cows when they are artificially inseminated, I hope you are equally horrified by natural animal sex. Everything from penis spines to traumatic insemination, to dolphin rape gangs, and worse exist in animal sex. And the there is oven nothing resembing consent asked or given. Its humans and bonaboo and thats pretty much it that who do it nicely most of the time.

I see your point, indeed by human standards consent and in general a lack of cruelty are not what defines wild animal life. At the same time I believe there is an important difference between humans doing it in an industry setting and it happening in the wild. Additionally, even ignoring the insemination point, I'd say the big picture remains the same. For me the big picture is a question of self determination, in the wild, female mammals usually have more than zero control over who they mate with, in the setting of a farm her head gets locked into place between bars so she can't move away when a human plunges a probe into her.

If you intend to maintain the falsehood that cows’ sex is not completely denatured, you’re simply wrong. We have manufactured species that are easier to manipulate, that are incapable of surviving without us. We cause untold misery on them to give us food. We do that, because it’s cheap.

I don’t fool myself. Any industrial food industry is built on a foundation of manufactured pain.

I do agree that animal "factories" are wrong. I think we disagree only on a minor point: I think that it's not wrong for humans to domesticate and "grow" animals if they do it in a "humane" (I don't know a better word here) way where the animals do not suffer and have ways to enjoy their lives, whatever that may be, while I believe you're saying that's also wrong and only hunting wild animals is acceptable?

> We observe playful and happy behavior in plenty of wild animals, not only in apex predators.

I don't know... you may see that in an environment heavily modified by humans, like National Parks or zoos... but in really wild environments, there would be a healthy population of predators that "control" the population of those animals they hunt, so it seems it's almost inevitable that if you're prey, in a real wild environment, you would need to be on your toes absolutely all the time. This is what I've observed from the little interactions I had with really wild environments.

> Do you think that two angry humans killing each other over a conflict is the same thing as industrial scale genocide with labor camps?

That's a weird questions to ask, I don't see any relation whatsoever with what is being discussed.

There is no version of animal farming that if you did the same with humans wouldn't constitute human rights violations. Why should we be special? "Hey, my slaves are well fed, happy and they are even allowed to sleep in the house, where's your problem man."

> That's a weird questions to ask, I don't see any relation whatsoever with what is being discussed.

I painted a false equivalence in a related field with the same tools you did. In both cases people are killed, but the details matter. And for our discussion, killing animals != killing animals.

>>There is no version of animal farming that if you did the same with humans wouldn't constitute human rights violations.

Look at the way cattle and sheep are farmed over moorlands in the UK, the animals are literally left alone on land hundreds of hectares large, they live in as "natural" environment as physically possible. We can argue that a human left in those conditions would be unhappy with the still limited space, but I don't think we can argue in good faith that any animal is "unhappy" in those circumstances.

Humans are still imposing their will on these animals. They will still be used in one way or the other.

If we substitute your children into their lifestyle, would you be ok with that? Run around these free fields, but there are fences, and you will have to subject yourself to mandatory harvest long before the end of your natural lifespan. Ah and sometimes a dude will come around and shove a stick with a magnet down your throat to collect metal junk you've eaten because people carelessly throw away trash. I never talked about happiness, I talked about self determination. Yes it's not all equally bad, but saying humane farming is like saying humane torture. A dichotomy and a lie. I'm not saying farming equals torture, I'm saying self determination and farming are fundamentally incompatible.

>>If we substitute your children into their lifestyle, would you be ok with that?

Animals are not humans though, so this comparison is completely moot(for me anyway).

>>Humans are still imposing their will on these animals.

That's like saying that I'm imposing my will on my dog by making him live with me. Like....I guess you are correct? That doesn't automatically make it bad - if it does for you, then I guess that's where we disagree.

>> I talked about self determination

I don't believe animals have self determination in the first place, not it in the same way humans do. A cow is neither capable of deciding its own fate, nor is any attempt to give it such agency even remotely reasonable. Again, I expect we will disagree here.

>> but saying humane farming is like saying humane torture

Uhmmm, again, no not really, because keeping an animal on an open moor like in my example wouldn't be called torture by literally anyone other than the most extreme believer in animal rights. After all that's where these animals normally live, the fact that there is a fence there(sometimes there isn't even one, or if there is the animal might literally never come across it), is literally the only difference between "wild" and "farmed" animal here.

But for the sake of the discussion - do you then consider hunting wild animals ethical or humane? Like a bunch of deer living in a forest, and they just get shot one day - is that more or less ethical than killing a sheep that spent its entire life out in the open? What makes that difference?

> There is no version of animal farming that if you did the same with humans wouldn't constitute human rights violations.

This is also true of vegetable farming.

If you are arguing that dividing humans from animals is arbitrary, the same is true of dividing the other kingdoms of life from Animalia.

You are right. That's a subjective line. As I've argued above all of ethics builds on top of subjective axioms. Personally I draw the line at complex emotions, which I define as anything more complex than insects.

Its not a strong argument. Denying nature is what we do constantly. We teach our children to shit in a bowl that flushes water instead of shitting on the ground, we teach them to delay their gratification s, we tell them not to use violence, we teach them to ask for consent. All unnatural things to do. Are you saying these are not wise things to do?

You misunderstand what "natural" means. Nature doesn't care at all about those things. But as a social species, we evolved some "rules" which ensure our survival. In that sense, some of our morality has roots in nature and evolution.

So I don't agree at all that by not using violence all the time we're going against our nature.

But in the case of food, I believe we are, because evidently we require certain substances to survive, and one of the best ways to get those is to eat meat. In most regions where humans live today, without meat or foods imported from faraway regions, we couldn't survive.

> But in the case of food, I believe we are, because evidently we require certain substances to survive, and one of the best ways to get those is to eat meat.

If it was the only way this would be more compelling. However it is just the easiest way.

Like arguably the best way to get money is to mug someone, but i don't think that makes it ethical when there are alternatives.

Nature is adaptation for survival. I think you're mixing up "the old ways" with "naturally beneficial ways". Your chances of survival and reproduction are much higher with access to modern toilets, delayed gratification, no unnecessary violence, and due to society asking for consent. It's perfectly natural.

So "natural" includes anything artificial, so long as it's adaptive. This is a peculiar definition of the word.

"artificial" itself needs expanding on to use in this discussion. Are tools artificial? Where's the threshold? Stick, hammer, wrench, electric drill? Or is it only natural if we're naked collecting fruit?

predators hunt, humans farm

Not really, farming is a clever hack that we only learned in the last ~12,000 years [1]

The evidence is that most of our existence we hunted and gathered nomadically.

[1] https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/developmen...

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