Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 261 posts

Re: Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

#191

Post by whimsicalism »

leetcrew wrote: post #189
whimsicalism wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. I have personally never met someone who only eats backyard eggs. The conditions of commercial egg producers are well documented. 2. You are still essentially using another living being for resources. Why keep the chickens in the first place? They are only going to waste because you bought the chickens in the first place, probably also from an industrial breeder, essentially subsidizing the industry. 3. If your way…

1. how? healthy chickens lay an egg every 1-2 days. a small number of chickens produce more than enough for an entire household. everyone I know who keeps chickens gives most of the eggs away. 2. chickens are the ultimate garbage disposal. you can feed them any excess food from your household and they turn it into fresh eggs. 3. see 1. the volume of eggs gets out of control fast, but not quite on the scale that it’s…

1 -> Sure, but are they declining the omelette when they're out for brunch?

2 -> I think the subsidy point still stands.

3 -> Totally agreed but I think your point about giving away eggs applies just as much, any eggs you eat rather than give away are just going to be an additional egg from the chicken CAFOs or at best case a fractional additional egg from the CAFOs.

But I certainly agree that this is among the instances where the case is weaker.

Re: Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

#192

Post by whimsicalism »

leetcrew wrote: post #187
whimsicalism wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

butter is one of the most easily substituted things around and most vegans i know don’t care about honey. definitely more restrictive but i think the dairy/cheese thing is the big one people also feel that vegans are judging them morally and people are very defensive about their eating habit, hence the dislike

depends what you’re trying to do. there are plenty of alternatives for spreading on toast or frying/sauteing. but it’s still a pretty central ingredient for western cuisine. I have no idea how I’d make a vegan roux, just for example. my guess is that would break the illusion of whipped margarine pretty quickly.

I've made plenty of vegan rouxs, but I also don't have much experience making non-vegan roux... so hard for me to give an honest comparison.

Margarine burns more easily but this hasn't been a problem for me, so I imagine you are talking mostly about flavor difference or?

Re: Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

#193

Post by bnt123 »

collingreen wrote: post #183
y-curious wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the risk of this devolving into a typical online veganism argument: why are eggs bad? Say I keep 3 chickens in a coop in my backyard. They're going to produce unfertilized eggs that will just go to waste

There is a summary of veganism that follows the principle that we shouldn't take sentient things and change their lives for our own ends. There are several important bits and nuances but the overarching point is to not have a world view where you see anything and prioritize what you can get out of it, regardless of the suffering you cause. Sometimes you hear it summarized as "they arent here for us". It is an interes…

I think we can agree humans tend to see reducing suffering as a good thing, and that people who we believe have caused suffering are viewed with disdain. With that in mind, here's a framework: "given two choices, is there a choice that 1) reduces suffering, and 2) is not prohibitively expensive (or in some other way too difficult to make)". "Too difficult" or "too expensive" is obviously subjective, but I don't think having objective definitions is necessary here.

An analogy that I like to illustrate this is: going shopping for clothes vs going shopping for food. Both tend to have ethics attached to them, e.g. with child labor for production of clothing, and slaughtering of animals for production of food. If you walk into a store to buy new clothes, and there are 2 sections of the store, 1 for clothes that were produced using child labor, and 1 for clothes that weren't, and both sections had clothes of the same price and quality, the decision of which section to shop in is very logical. This is how I see going shopping for food- you have sections for food that were produced using factory farming, and sections for food that weren't. Both sources of food are the same price and quality. So the decision to make about which source of food to buy is, again, a logical one. It's also a decision that most people in the developed world have to make every week, at least people who live in cities and do their shopping at grocery stores.

While we unfortunately don't have visibility into whether our clothing is produced with child labor, many of us do know if our food comes from factory farms. In the US, the estimate is that over 95% of meat sold in grocery stores is factory-farmed. Why make the decision to buy that if you could easily avoid it?

Re: Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

#194

Post by barbazoo »

aziaziazi wrote: post #179
y-curious wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem I have always had with veganism, as someone who has had stints of vegetarianism, is the absurdity of certain restrictions. Milk, I can agree, is bad because of how it's derived. Honey and eggs (sourced ethically) are a restriction I cannot stand behind. I think the dislike of self-labeled vegans is aligned with someone publicizing an extreme decision.

Actually there’s many people defining vegan that eat eggs (me) and honey (many vegans). Vegans aren’t as extremist as people see them or as common dictionaries define them. Most don’t define themselves by « I don’t consume any animal product whatsoever », of if they do it’s just a simplification. For the think you feel absurds: - honey is usually done by placing queen in a room she can’t escape. Also the honey is sto…

> I don’t know what eggs production you consider ethical. In my country, the best quality eggs you can fin in the supermarkets comes from chickens that were born in the exact same factory farms as factory chickens In the case of personal backyard poultry it really depends what’s your ethical stance. I often see people that have them in a cage not so big, with no grass (chickens destroy the grass!), no trees, etc… that’s better that a factory but it’s still a miserable cage life. When I go in a farmers market and see someone selling "fallibly farms backyard eggs" I have no way to asses how they live.

Many jurisdictions have well defined categories. In BC for instance [1], free range and organic ensure the animals get to spend a significant amount of time outdoors.

Where I live there are small farms you can observe and buy eggs from directly. It's totally possible it just takes some looking into and some effort.

[1] https://bcegg.com/eggs-101/egg-labels-101/

Re: Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

#195

Post by Der_Einzige »

renewiltord wrote: post #180
Der_Einzige wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides the obvious "Vegans and Vegetarians", you'll find that an awful lot of folks from India and surrounding regions will not be down with any consumption of cattle what-so-ever.

Okay, yeah, that’s fine. If people are reacting this way because they’re religiously vegan, that makes sense. I’m not, so the anxiety fish who’s been going to therapy for years is not of any significance.

No, Many of those in india will eat Chicken - but not beef. The view of seeing most as either "meat eaters" or "vegetarians" or "vegans" is very "eurocentric"

Re: Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

#196

Post by barbazoo »

whimsicalism wrote: post #172
throwaway3287 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with veganism is that, unless you grow your own food, it does not change the fact that an immense amount of pain and suffering is inflicted on other beings in the production and transportation of the food you eat. It's pure virtue signaling. If they genuinely cared about minimizing suffering, they'd be Jains, not vegans.

uhhhh explain? is there some extreme amount of suffering that goes into the production of root vegetables because afaik that’s the only distinction between jainism and veganism?

Maybe the temporary foreign worker living in economic servitude to the farm that guarantees their job. /s

For many, perfect is the enemy of the good. Either you remove all suffering or you're a hypocrite. Meanwhile us that genuinely care about our impact on the environment make incremental changes to reduce our negative impact.

Re: Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

#197

Post by barbazoo »

bythreads wrote: post #128
spondylosaurus wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think non-dairy milks are artificially expensive so much as cow milk is artificially cheap. At least in the US. Federal dairy subsidies and all that.

Milk is a byproduct of producing meat, and its a fallacy to see it in isolation. Plantmilks are firstorder product. This means that clinate impact of most plantmilks are higher than milks, excepting oat and ryemilk. On a cost note - : making oat milk is literally just blending some oats and let them soak a day or 2, filter the water and done, perhaps do that if cost is an issue? On a sidenote, if you drink soy, almon…

> if you drink soy, almond or worse ricemilk you're actually doing something worse for the climate/environment

In what way? Data seems to suggest otherwise but maybe I'm misunderstanding

https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milks

Re: Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

#199

Post by JumpCrisscross »

AnonHP wrote: post #153
jvanderbot wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've recently taken up hunting, mostly because my rural family prioritizes it. The natural world is full of unimaginable cruelty. Wolves will take down young deer and eat them alive while parents watch. Bears will pin down whatever they can catch and who cares if it is alive. On and on, the amount of bloodshed required to support an omnivore/carnivore is simply bananas. Killer whales are hyper-intelligent aquatic nig…

> But there is _no_ version of a carnivore or meat-eating omnivore that does not involve killing and savagery Absolute statements are not useful in this context. Vultures are obligate scavengers who eat the flesh of already dead animals as a practice. The dead animal could be due to death from natural causes (diseases, old age, injury, poisoning, starvation) or hunting by other animals. So there are some versions. Al…

> empathy in killing an offspring who’s not their own

As well as their own: "numerous studies support the correlation between postpartum depression (PPD) and lack of social support or indicators of possible infant health and development problems. PPD may be an adaptation that informs mothers that they are suffering or have suffered a fitness cost, which motivates them to reduce or eliminate investment in offspring under certain circumstances, and that may help them negotiate greater levels of investment from other [1].

More broadly, "the analytical rumination (AR) hypothesis proposes that depression is an adaptation that evolved as a response to complex problems and whose function is to minimize disruption of rumination and sustain analysis of complex problems" [2].

[1] https://anthro.vancouver.wsu.edu/documents/316/Hagen_1999_Th...

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2734449/

Re: Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

#200

Post by perfmode »

bamboozled wrote: post #16
qwertyuiop_ wrote: post #7

https://freefromharm.org/animal-farmer-turned-vegan/jackie-s...

I believe this is nice, but how do regular people actually find the time to care about this stuff? If you have kids, bills, a job, listen to crap from politicians all day, where do you find the time to be this empathetic. My kids school gives them milk as part of lunch, my kid likes milk now. You have to live in a very special world to get around this. I was a vegetarian for a while, I was mostly starving hungry and…

A first step is to no longer eat meat for pleasure or for recreation. If needed, just eat it for nutrition.

Could you imagine if the whole world took this incremental step?

Post reply on HN