Hacker News Reader

Comment by swagmoney1606 | Hacker News Reader

It's absolutely 1000% satire, and yet I can see someone like Elon loving this idea:

>Labor: Their manual dexterity could be utilized in commercial labor contexts. In the early 20th century, an enterprising businessman even trained raccoons to perform chimney sweeps (Washington Post, 1906).

Bruh let's just let animals live in their natural environment without subjecting them to the torment-nexus that would be the raccoon-factory

View on HN

Where animals have been domesticated and trained to do economically productive tasks, we've stopped the practice under the guise of preventing animal cruelty. using elephants or monkeys to do work evokes strong emotions in a ways that making humans doing the same job doesn't, so we've decided treating people that way is okay but not animals.

> Where animals have been domesticated and trained to do economically productive tasks, we've stopped the practice under the guise of preventing animal cruelty.

Mostly, we've stopped the practice by replacing it by more efficient, non-animal technology. There's probably a few cases where animal cruelty laws put the final nail in the coffin of practices that were rendered marginal by technological progress, but animal cruelty laws certainly are not the principal means by which use of animals as productive capital has been eliminated. It was tractors, not animal cruelty laws, that mostly stopped animals from being the used to plow fields, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com