Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

How should I know? There's no statistics about that kind of thing. And yet it happens all the time: that's why farm animals have bells around the neck so that when they wander off and fall into a ravine or get stuck on a tree (goats, for you) the farmer can find them.

But aren't you moving the goalposts? First you said "farmers aren't going out and rescuing cows from the wildernes". Now you're asking how many do.

I have to ask, other than the horror youtube videos of vegan propaganda, is there anything else you know about farming?

> Btw I hear this argument all the time and it's really silly if you think about it honestly.

So you mean to say I'm either silly, or dishonest? And that's not meant to shut me up and end conversation with a "win"?

Well I won't beat about the bush as you do. I think what you propose is demented. You're suggesting that, to avoid killing animals we should genocide them instead. As if extinction is a better option than living a healthy and happy life and dying at the end and in a better way than the animal would die anyway, except it's now humans killing the animal, which seems to be the only problem with the current status quo.

Hey, I know. Maybe we should genocide all the wild animals also, so that they stop killing each other in horrible ways and dying half-eaten by something.

Oh, wait, that's actually a thing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_animal_suffering

Well, I don't think so. I like to think I've studied enough philosophy to be at least somewhat reasonably acquainted with the term, and it wasn't striking me as "well established." And I did a bit of googling yesterday that also seemed to suggest the "well established definition" being used here is not consistent with any of the normal definitions. And just now I consulted the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and now I'm convinced it's not even remotely close to well established.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I haven't seen anything cited here to back that up, or even just an appeal to any informal, working understanding of the concept that makes me think "oh, of course, that's the definition." And normally I wouldn't ask for such a thing, except for the fact that, to me at least, a lot of people seem to be confidently wrong about what it is.

>Is it when the nerve cells responsible for emitting pain signals develop? When a fetus is capable of responding to pain? Is it when the circuits develop to route those pain sigbals to the part of the brain associated with conscious perception of pain?

Pretty sure it's the last one.

Why is this marked as sarcasm? The greatest personal contribution to the reduction of carbon gas emissions that a person can possibly make is to stop breathing, although that's true for non-vegans as well.

Meanwhile, almost 75% of greenhouse gas emissions come from power production and so from burning fossil fuels:

https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

It's burning fossil fuels that's causing climate change, not eating cows and certainly not eating pigs and chickens (who are the most widely consumed meat animals). We've had farming for more than 10 thousand years but the greenhouse effect causing climate change started only in the last couple hundred years, along with the Industrial Revolution. Why? Because the carbon gasses released by farming are part of the carbon cycle that circulates carbon gasses between the atmosphere and the biosphere, and that is relatively stable and has never caused a greenhouse effect in the billion years of life on the planet. While burning fossil fuels releases carbon gasses at rates and amounts that the natural mechanisms in the environment that normally bind carbon can't cope with:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_carbon_cycle

The idea that eating cows causes climate change is the dirty lie of vegan propaganda, spread by people who, in truth, don't know anything about the environment and don't really care about the environment or climate change and only care about whether other people eat meat. It is a lie because it's false and it's a dirty lie because it's obscuring the real cause of climate change. And it's the dirtiest of dirty lies because it tells people that they can save the environment if they have a soy burger now and then, rather than giving up on their cars (hear that OP?) not buying a new iphone twice a year, not flying to their Instagrammable holiday destinations, not stuffing their houses with useless houseould appliances and generally stopping their incredibly wasteful use of energy produced by the burning of fossil fuels.

I think this is also the most likely reason because humans try to rationalize cognitive dissonance. But in the nature of the HN guidelines to try and take the strongest possible interpretation of someone's comments, I'll try to reframe it.

Suppose someone has a foundational principle that all animal life is sacred. Also suppose that person is a consequentialist. Following the first point, the life of an insect is every bit as valuable as the life of an elk*. It's easily conceivable to me that farming, in the current form that most of use get our food, kills many more animal lives per calorie than eating the elk. If one is a consequentialist, it doesn't matter if there was the specific intent to kill those thousands of insects (and fawns, and fish from runoff etc.), it only matters that my choice led to their deaths. Compare that to the hunting of the elk, where it's conceivable that only one life was lost. From that perspective, a vegetarian/vegan diet could be considered more detrimental to animal life.

(I specifically chose elk to avoid the complication of how much farming goes into livestock feed, but hopefully you understood the point)

If you're like me and don't necessarily agree with the above framework, it still highlights that most of us have unarticulated assumptions that may not hold as we go about our daily choices. E.g., even if people claim that they think all animal life is sacred, their actions display an assumption of a hierarchy to that value.

Well we're off to a bad start, because this is just literally incorrect. I remember way back in elementary school we had a fire chief come in and talk about fire safety, about having a plan, etc. Inevitably the question about saving pets comes up, and we heard them talk about how fire safety means prioritizing safety of humans. I just did a quick google about fire safety and pets and if you want to play the Google Stuff game, there are numerous sites with guidance on fire safety that reaffirm this.

Secondly, for goodness sake, it's a hypothetical intended to highlight an underlying principle. Because sure, of course you want to save everybody in all cases. But insisting that you don't even want to consider the premise of a hypothetical is just a fundamental misunderstanding of the entire point of the hypothetical that is focused on precisely the situations where you don't have that luxury of avoiding all possible harms.

Despite your protestations to the contrary, our lives are entangled with the lives of animals in ways that present tradeoffs. Here on HN there was recently an article about the beneficial impact of wolves on ecosystems, in part because they hunt deer, and make driving safer for humans. Figuring out how to protect Atlantic Salmon in rivers depends upon "cover species" such as eels and other fish, so that predators don't just focus on salmon. Indigenous tribes support protections for Atlantic salmon in part because they personally benefit from having salmon available as a natural resource they can fish for.

Only in the context of an internet comment section would somebody seriously try to insist that we aren't interrelated in these ways, that we don't have to think about these choices, and expect it to be treated like a respectable position.