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Comment by notesinthefield | Hacker News Reader

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There is no hypocrisy in cattle farming. No species on earth other than humans care about another species existence other than how it will benefit their own species.

I'm not saying humans shouldn't be different, but there is no hypocrisy in keeping in line with every other species in the known universe.

I don't disagree with you, but I'm unaware (naive?) of any other species farming/enslaving/capturing hordes of another species and effectively torturing them the way humans do

Being suddenly killed by a lion is a rather short torture/cruel experience compared to what humans do at larger and larger scales. I think animals even have a mechanism that I forget the name of that spares them a lot of the pain involved in such a situation (adrenaline, "going into shock", etc)

I really do wish I/we could do something to be less cruel but everything seems driven by profit margins and that makes it rather difficult/impossible. They're outlawing 'lab grown' meat! :|

(I eat meat, but I don't feel good about it when I think about it)

Humans didn't care either until very recently, when it became apparant just how much capacity we have to drive other animals to extinction. Our ability to destroy is many orders of magnitude beyond any other animal, so having at least a little more restraint is basically a requirement for a sustainable society.

No one said that.

They did not live the entire lives in the feedlot.

Anything else, you read into.

Probably responding to this from a parent comment:

> Shoving 100 cattle into a 1 acre feed lot for their entire lives

yes they did say that, we can all read

They said they don't spend all their time in the feedlots... are you sure about that?

> Shoving 100 cattle into a 1 acre feed lot for their entire lives

> Ah yes its fine to kill them

Yes. Fundamentally, most people, including myself, believe that it's fine to kill animals and eat them.

There's no hypocrisy here, disgusting or otherwise. You have your own concept of morality, I have mine, yours is considered extreme by society at large, mine is a shared moral belief of the great majority.

That's all that's going on here.

most people also do not care about factory farming. think the claim is that it is hypocrisy if you care about the animal suffering when you will just kill it at the end

It's not hypocrisy to believe that a) animals can be killed for their meat, but also b) they should be treated humanely until then and killed as humanely as feasible.

That's the great thing about human intelligence; we can ensure a humane kill of our prey as opposed to ripping it apart with fangs and claws like other predators.

That's a very bold statement. I believe most people "care" about the welfare about the animals they eat.

I guess my threshold for care is if it is sufficient to motivate any action to be taken at all, whether that is eating slightly less meat or switching to non-factory farmed. The vast majority of people don’t do that, so their revealed “care” is very little.

Frankly, I don’t really care which type they eat, meat is meat and has pretty much the same environmental (and ethics of killing) issues.

What is the "disgusting hypocrisy of cattle farming?" The term "happiness" is an anthropomorphic emotion term to describe animals not living in the distress so well characterized by Temple Grandin. The theory is growing the animal in a low stress environment leads to a higher quality product. Given the scary prions which spread in part by feeding cows to themselves, it makes sense to avoid some of the conditions humans often find aesthetically or morally objectionable.

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