Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonym29 | Hacker News Reader

Many farm animals aren't bred specifically for killing them. Think egg-laying hens and ducks, milk-producing cows and goats, etc.

Not too different from humans in that respect; humans are bred systematically (we have dedicated hormonal supplements, birth facilities, documented birthing procedures, standardized post-birth checklists of forms of vaccination regiments, standardized mass schooling, government-subsidized feeding programs, etc) and most are used machinistically by society exclusively for productive output, regardless of whether the society is corporatist, capitalist, socialist, communist, etc.

View on HN

I think you misinterpreted GP's emphasis.

But still, egg and dairy animals are culled when productivity drops. The human equivalent would be killing all male babies, and females after age ~40.

This does not seem more "humane" than the human equivalent of meat farming, where all human offspring would be harvested at age ~15.

Yup exactly. And when animals are bred specifically for milk, they aren't treated well even before they are killed. Dairy cows need to be kept continuously pregnant / in lactation state through artificial insemination. They don't magically produce milk all-year round.

And pregnancy is _hard_ on animals (including humans), it changes your physiology and psychology. Even if we take for granted that a cow isn't as conscious as a human (IMO consciousness is a sliding scale, not a binary), then they are still being primed for giving birth and taking care of offspring which never comes. Imagine doing that to a human - it's a definite form of cruelty.

To be fair you can keep a cow milking for LONG after it gave birth, but yields are a bit lower and baby cows are very valuable in themselves, which is generally the same kind of problem that keeps most bad farming practices going. Dairy farming is already a bottom of the barrel low margin business. And running a dairy farm while not maximizing calf output is like running a low-yield gold mine while dumping gem quality emeralds out with the tailings. Yeah it can be done, but you would be foolish not to do both, especially if it means your competitors across the road are able to squash your business with far higher capital returns after a few years.

What do you think happens to a cow, when she stops producing milk? She is kept constantly pregnant, what do you think happens to most of her male offsprings? In the end, almost every single cow’s life ends in violence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com