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The fight over transparency in the meat industry

nytimes.com

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Re: The fight over transparency in the meat industry

#71

Post by wes-k »

nathanaldensr wrote: post #28
adamnemecek wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some definition of ethical, maybe. I guess fundamentally my question to you is, why do you think that human life is worth more than animal life, because that is the foundation of our differences.

tjic didn't say that human life is worth more than animal life. Are you projecting? All life is precious, but we are all still animals. We need food to survive. Almost all life consumes other life for survival. There is nothing more natural than eating.

(Warning vegan here).

The idea that eating meat is natural is one of the four main reasons people give (the 4n's: natural, nice, normal, necessary).

A few counters: It is also natural for animals to kill their own. We as humans have decided to rise above this "natural" existence. It is natural for animals to eat other animals. A balanced predator prey system is a healthy ecosystem. This is not what we humans are doing. We are raising a handful of species simply because meat tastes good. Sure there are some cases where humans must still hunt for survival and I take no issue there. But most of us have the resources to eat a plant based diet. Which is healthier for us and the environment.

Re: The fight over transparency in the meat industry

#72

Post by hx87 »

douche wrote: post #65
pillowkusis wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you seem concerned with animal welfare, or at least the minimization of suffering; how do you justify willfully killing animals (which undoubtedly creates suffering)?

If you lead a pig to a trough and feed it something tasty, then bonk it on the head from behind with a sledge hammer, they're dead before they even know it. I hope I get to go out that easy.

Yep, it seems perverse that we force humans to die in ways (e.g. chemotherapy on late-stage cancers, irreversible brain damage) that we would be horrified by if we inflicted them on animals.

Re: The fight over transparency in the meat industry

#73

Post by korethr »

HSO wrote: post #39
tjic wrote: post #10

As I mentioned in another thread, I live on a farm. (I hack Ruby and C++ as a day job, the farm is just a hobby). One major reason for doing so is animal welfare. I'm a meat eater and will staunchly defend it...but factory farming is terrible. At this point we get most of our meat from our own pastures: chicken, goat, lamb, pork. It's much more expensive than buying factory farmed meat, and even more expensive (in la…

You've just put a new idea about "the good life" into my head… This sounds positively delightful, to combine tech with rural living. I just might give that a try someday! As someone who has struggled with his diet for ethical reasons for a long time, I have a question though. You say > at the end of the season, when it's time to turn living creatures into meat, doing it yourself ensures that it's done well, and with…

I've not raised animals for food, so I am hypothesizing here. It seems to me the key is to be honest with oneself that you are intending to kill this creature for food, and not allow yourself to form emotional attachments to it like one would with a pet. Now, having not done this, I don't know how easy or hard it would be. Were I to have the opportunity to do so, I would be willing to try it.

Re: The fight over transparency in the meat industry

#74

Post by PerfectElement »

CarpetBench wrote: post #36
adamnemecek wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some definition of ethical, maybe. I guess fundamentally my question to you is, why do you think that human life is worth more than animal life, because that is the foundation of our differences.

It's an interesting question because it informs where we draw arbitrary lines about what's ok to eat and what's not. Honestly, and not to just be a smart-ass, but what are the acceptable life forms to eat? We've drawn the arbitrary line that "humans aren't ok to eat," but that's really about the only nearly-unanimous thing we can agree upon. If we move the line further, to say, "no intelligent animals," then we're st…

I think most animal rights advocates draw the line at sentience. If a being is capable of suffering, then this suffering needs to be justified. If an animal has their own desires, those desires should be taken into consideration.

Intelligence is not a justifiable metric, e.g. some individual humans are less intelligent than some animal species. Yet, we don't use those humans for our own interests.

Re: The fight over transparency in the meat industry

#75

Post by adamnemecek »

hx87 wrote: post #69
adamnemecek wrote: post #19

I think that fundamentally this is just a sign of people realizing that the meat industry can't ever be ethical. I'm expecting society to become maybe 50% vegetarian/vegan in the next couple of decades.

50% of the population being 100% vegetarian/vegan is bit much to ask, but I can certainly see 100% of the population being 50% vegetarian/vegan, i.e. eating 50% less meat and using 50% less animal products.

That's a good point actually. Yeah, that would be a big win but I also expect more people to be making the switch.

Re: The fight over transparency in the meat industry

#76

Post by Zigurd »

1457389 wrote: post #5
wmil wrote: post #3

What's really interesting is that slaughterhouses are major users of H1B visas.

Trust HN to find a way to make animal suffering all about their career prospects...

One of the negative effects of visa holders that are completely dependent on their employers is that working conditions don't matter as much. That's probably true in abattoirs as it is in coding shops.

Re: The fight over transparency in the meat industry

#77

Post by archagon »

tjic wrote: post #61
HSO wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've just put a new idea about "the good life" into my head… This sounds positively delightful, to combine tech with rural living. I just might give that a try someday! As someone who has struggled with his diet for ethical reasons for a long time, I have a question though. You say > at the end of the season, when it's time to turn living creatures into meat, doing it yourself ensures that it's done well, and with…

Glad you're intrigued! Feel free to reach my by email with any questions! > Do you not get cognitive dissonance from killing "your children"? Well, first, they're not my children. I don't mean that flippantly, and it's a great question to ask, it's just that my answer is: my wife is my wife, my dogs are my dogs (and, yes, family), pigs are livestock...and chickens are sort of walking squawking vegetables. :) I should…

Wow, that was an amazing read. Thank you for sharing!

Re: The fight over transparency in the meat industry

#78

Post by wildmusings »

1457389 wrote: post #50
kbenson wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is cultured meat unethical? Sure, it's uneconomical at this point, but I'm not sure how it's unethical. You could even go so far as to culture your own cells, and eat meat derived from yourself. That would be somewhat unappealing to most people (at least with current cultural taboos and stigmas), but I'm not sure how that could be seen as unethical.

You need serums and growth media derived from animals. Not derived as in scraping a few cells with a spatula but as in grinding up foetuses into fetal calf serum, or the like. Synthetic media are nowhere near as cheap or effective, at least from what I remember working in biomed research a couple years back.

>as in grinding up foetuses into fetal calf serum, or the like.

You must not be paying attention to how little we care about human fetuses.

Re: The fight over transparency in the meat industry

#79

Post by HSO »

tjic wrote: post #61
HSO wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've just put a new idea about "the good life" into my head… This sounds positively delightful, to combine tech with rural living. I just might give that a try someday! As someone who has struggled with his diet for ethical reasons for a long time, I have a question though. You say > at the end of the season, when it's time to turn living creatures into meat, doing it yourself ensures that it's done well, and with…

Glad you're intrigued! Feel free to reach my by email with any questions! > Do you not get cognitive dissonance from killing "your children"? Well, first, they're not my children. I don't mean that flippantly, and it's a great question to ask, it's just that my answer is: my wife is my wife, my dogs are my dogs (and, yes, family), pigs are livestock...and chickens are sort of walking squawking vegetables. :) I should…

This was a beautiful answer. Thank you! :-)

(I especially liked the line "Just as dog fighting isn't merely horrific in its own right, but extra horrific because it is a perversion of something good, factory farming takes something good and inherently human and replaces it with something cruel and inhumane.")

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