271–280 of 319 posts
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> How is that immoral if I want tasty meat? > Because I believe it’s immoral to cause needless suffering. It's immoral for the OP to eat meat because you believe it's immmoral? Also, if you think that the need for tasty food, or any food, is trivial, you haven't been around animals much. The ones I know, and I don't mean only the humans, go absolutely batshit insane at the thought of food. A few days ago one of the c…
This is a ride, but let’s take it point by point. Firstly, I think it’s immoral for anyone to do it. I don’t think it’s immoral simply because I decided so. I think it’s fundamentally immoral, period. You continue by saying something to the effect of “good food is really important and plays a huge role in our life and animals go to great lengths to acquire good food”. To this, I completely agree. I never said otherwi…
Specism is based on several flawed assumptions. We decide humans are superior to other animals because we are humans, and us>them. We also decide that because we are superior, we have all rights to do anything to members of "inferior" groups. But: - Superiority is at least debatable and strongly depends on the criteria used fot comparison; - There is absolutely no discernable logical link between being "superior" and…
Interestingly, in another thread a user of HN who is, I presume, vegan, is arguing that because humans are morally superior, we should not eat meat. I have this sneaking suspicion that human superiority has been used historically by both sides of the debate: one side claims that humans are superior to other animals and so we should treat those other animals in ways that other animals would never treat each other, by…
I don't think there are many examples of animals farming humans and torturing them for "testing" purposes (the topic of the article), is there?
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Here's one of many examples https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3322 >Around 30% of the world’s population is currently exposed to climatic conditions exceeding this deadly threshold for at least 20 days a year. By 2100, this percentage is projected to increase to ∼48% under a scenario with drastic reductions of greenhouse gas emissions and ∼74% under a scenario of growing emissions.
I still don't see how is it my problem?
As an academic who isn't directly involved in anything close to animal testing (I'm a physicist) I always find it strange that people working in biology have to jump through incredible hoops relating to how the animals they work with are treated, but then the lunch place in the biology department sells sandwiches with chicken, ham etc in with incredibly minimal oversight for how the animals are treated. The differenc…
> No one really cares if pigs suffer It's surprising that you don't have any family, friends, or co-workers who do care about that kind of thing. My academic astronomy group has a bunch of vegetarians and vegans. While I have no idea why (it's none of my business), it's my life experience is that a large fraction of them do care if pigs suffer.
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It appears that he was speaking for himself.
No, he was saying we , implying that we [humans] have to take some responsibility or whatever grandiose idea he has in his mind.
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> If animal experiments were banned in neuroscience... would actually accelerate progress. And if planes would be banned humans will develop wings, or maybe not. The other option, advances in neuroscience stagnating for decades until we would be able to develop this miraculous Kosher substitutes, is also possible. Young researchers quitting the field in mass upset by the new barriers would be also a probable outcome.…
You're seriously underestimating human ingenuity if you think advances will stagnate for decades. It's also possible more researchers would enter the field since many young people are probably disgusted by the prospect of having to do dubiously ethical experiments on animals. I also want ALS And Alzheimer's solved as fast as possible, but perhaps the solution will be arrived at thanks to more advanced tissue engineer…
Trust me, to be a scientist now is ludicrously difficult enough. I could tell you about the artificial barriers raised carefully to stop or delay for decades this people to... doh, solve OUR problems, but we would need a few hours for enumerating them.
> many young people are probably disgusted by the prospect of having to do dubiously ethical experiments on animals.
You seem to think that everybody is playing ping pong with rats in the labs but the real life is a little different than in the films. Most young people currently, right now, avoid easily this problem choosing NOT to do this kind of experiments.
You are 120% free (and strongly encouraged) to do research only in something that you like. Nobody will stop you if you want to follow a botany career. Most of the really hot stuff come from plants or invertebrates after all. Nobody will force you to do design your experiment in a non ethical way, or make illegal drugs in your lab or... whatever. You can choose.
Well... in fact it is not your choice only. Research with animals is strictly regulated and watched by independent teams. People doing such non ethical experiments would be, first: forbidden to publish in most journals and two, fired-bye-bye before 24 hours. And no more grants for you in the future, of course.
Because those animals are 1) essential for the survival of the team and a poor management would attract diseases, stopping 50 people to justify their grant money for several really stressful months. 2) extremely expensive and difficult to obtain. 3) bond with their caretakers more that you think and 4) Its sacrifice could save thousands of lives and sustain thousands of jobs.
And because universities and companies will avoid bad publicity at any cost, no matter how student heads will be necessary to chop.
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That is true of battery chickens and of meat and dairy cattle in factory farms, but not for "most animals", like you say, and certainly not the world over. On the contrary, around most of the world, farm animals are among the happiest, healthiest, best-fed and best-cared for animals on the planet. Of course you will not know that if you selectively look at the factory farms with feedlots that are the norm in the US,…
> You can see that if you take a slow train ride through the French countryside, for example. You'll see houses, barns, trees, grass and small herds of cows busking in the sun, peacefully chewing cud, just like large beef and dairy industries want you to think their animals are kept (which obviously they're not). Over the last 15 years (thus quickly), this has changed a lot in France. Now the standard is having 100 c…
> Yeah, well, that French "Mediterranean island" is famous for its VIRTUAL cattle which only exist in documents filed for subsidies.
I meant this dairy farm, on the Aegean island of Ios:
https://youtu.be/gFrciodixsw?t=831
The bald guy is the farmer. What island did you mean? Corsique?
> Over the last 15 years (thus quickly), this has changed a lot in France. Now the standard is having 100 cows kept most of the year in a huge shed (newly built on subsidies), on a concrete slab partially covered with straw, behind galvanised steel fences, fed from a tractor a mix of straw or hay and "powdered" soja and stuff.
This and the various shennanigans you report on is getting more and more common in the place I live, also, and it's only going to intensify unless a serious effort is made on the part of the EU to put the breaks on the intensification of farming - and also agriculture. Maybe that's a futile hope, because after all it's probably EU subsidies that have motivated the farmers to industrialise their production in the first place. If it's not subsidies, then it's the incentives created by the market that force smaller farms to conglomerate into giants, constantly.
Perhaps it doesn't come through in my comments but I'm desperate to see this direction changed, turned around. Otherwise, we're just killing the goose that lays the golden eggs and soon we'll have neither goose, nor golden eggs. I made the point in a few comments yesterday that farming (as well as agriculture) in most of the world is not like factory farming in American feedlots. That is still the case. Even the hillarious 99-cow farms you report are not that big, compared to American feedlots with thousands of animals. It would be a disaster if everywhere ends up like in the Americas.
> But then when the daughter in law took over the business, she soon got tired of actually performing the work; so she now buys ready-made cheese from a bigger factory in another area, make it grow old a bit (if you are lucky), sticks the same old brand and traditional picture over it, and sells it to tourists as a local product (except the fine print).
Wonderful. And so very typical. This lady is basically doing at a smaller scale what Lactalis is doing on a much grander scale with its Camembert "fabriqué en Normandie". You probably know this but for the benefit of other readers, "Camembert de Normandie" is the (only) PDO camembert, that must be made in Normandy with the raw milk produced by cows of the Normandy race, actually raised in Normandy, and with a very specific technology (for example, the curd must be "moulé á la louche", placed in forms with scoops of a hemispheric laddle called "louche", though not necessarily manually these days. The moulage must be done by a fixed number of passes of the "louche" and with precisely defined intervals between them). These very stringent requirements meant to protect the "traditional" camembert are constantly challenged by the industry, with Lactalis, the owner of the Président brand, at the head. The industry primarily wants to be able to make camembert with pasteurised milk from cows of any race, as long as the cheese is made in Normandy (in a Lactalis factory). Because the industry is such a much bigger and more powerful entity, it is able to call its produce "Camembert fabriqué en Normandie", meaning "camembert made in Normandy" which is of course very misleading, at least to the people who even know anything about the relation of camembert and Normandie. For much of my life, I didn't and happily ate camembert whatever thinking there's only one kind. I only realised the distinction when I went looking for the PDO regulations because I was curious to see how camembert is actually made in France (as opposed to the recipes for "camembert" that one can find on hobby cheesemaking websites and books).
I digress. There's a constant struggle between large industry that wants to eat up everything, farmers, products, land, animals, everything, and the smaller farmers who are for whatever reason still clinging on to their "old" ways, even if those are not that "old" (camembert was standardised to the brilliant white Penicilium candidum coat it has today only in the 1960's and it would have been a markedly different cheese with a gray-blue coat of P. album, in the past). In the middle are caught all those people who want the "authentic" in their life, and in their plates. Like myself, I confess.
Unfortunately, most of us have completely lost the thread that once kept us connected to the treasures of the land, the "village", the farm, the sea even. It is a tragedy. But the extreme ideologies against consumption of meat are to me missing the point and only making matters worse: it's the industrialisation of farming and agriculture that's the true horror, not the raising of animals for their meat and milk.