World's first no-kill eggs go on sale in Berlin (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: World's first no-kill eggs go on sale in Berlin (2018)

#141

Post by dzolob » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 5:11 PM UTC

slothtrop wrote: post #84

dzolob wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as animals are treated as commodities instead of sentient beings, yeah, nothing is going to be enough for vegans. Empathy is a great quality to cultivate.

Demonstrated sentience/consciousness is on a gradient, from nil/very-low, to high. And somewhere in between, a gray area. - mussels/mollusks (zero sentience) - insects (very low demonstrated consciousness) - fish (low demonstrated consciousness) - chickens/reptiles (disputed level) - dogs, dolphins, primates, etc (high) You can't equivocate chicken sentience with human sentience. What you can do is suggest they have…

There is a whole lot of citation needed on this reply, not to mention you’re talking about consciousness as something that can be clearly defined and measured.

This is not physics. If you think it’s ok to breed beings that clearly look to avoid suffering and care for their offspring with the sole purpose of exploiting them, and that’s fine because life > death, there you have it. Just don’t try to push a pseudoscientific scale to vegans just to prove their fallacy.

Re: World's first no-kill eggs go on sale in Berlin (2018)

#142

Post by triangleman » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 5:11 PM UTC

jansan wrote: post #16

I am by far not an animal rights activst and enjoy my daily portion of meat and dairy, but shreddering millions of male chicks always struck me als plain wrong, even by my carnivorian standards. This is progress that I fully support and I would not mind paying a little(!) extra to make sure that for my scrambled eggs no male chicken are shreddered.

Check the sibling comment linking to a 9-day-old chicken embryo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25211285

Re: World's first no-kill eggs go on sale in Berlin (2018)

#143

Post by kgwgk » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 5:11 PM UTC

tehjoker wrote: post #117

grawprog wrote: post #115

So, they're still culling fertilized eggs with males, they just do it before they hatch now. I guess it's a little more visually appealing to the public, but it literally changes nothing. The same number of chickens are still culled, they still get turned into animal feed. Honestly, what difference does it really make if male chickens are shredded and ground up into feed pre or post hatching? It's the same result in…

It's a bit less horrific... the line between egg and birth is a clear line between brutalizing an organism capable of feeling pain and one that might not have reached that point (depending on how close to hatching it is).

> the line between egg and birth is a clear line

> (depending on how close to hatching it is)

Not so clear a line then.

Re: World's first no-kill eggs go on sale in Berlin (2018)

#144

Post by howlin » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 5:13 PM UTC

bayindirh wrote: post #125

JacobSuperslav wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News, where technology > empathy

I value ethics and empathy deeply but, I don't understand vegans and vegetarians. Their biggest line of defense is "animals are alive and they have feelings and senses, we abuse them for food". That's sadly right. And they implicitly say that "eating plants are OK because, plants are not animals and they're just happen to grow. They don't feel, they don't understand". On the contrary, there's a growing mountain of re…

There are several responses to the "plants have senses" rebuttal:

If you care about the well being of plants, you should still prefer to eat plants rather than animals. The trophic level of animals in the food chain necessitates that they will eat more calories of plant matter than would provide calories of food upon being eaten.

Secondly, you should look at the sorts of plants being consumed and where they fall in the plant's life cycle. Fruits and nuts have been evolved to be eaten by animals. Staple crops such as grains and pulses are generally harvested from plants that have already lived to maturity and died off. Really it's only fresh greens and tubers that require the damage or destruction of a living plant.

Lastly, it's important to recognize the evolutionary purpose of sensing pain and suffering from it. Animals use pain and suffering to detect harmful situations and learn how to avoid them in the future. This process consists of sensations, memory and adaptive behavior. Plants may have "reflexive" responses to stimulus, but these responses aren't adaptive and aren't affected by previous experience (mostly... there are some exceptions). There would be no evolutionary purpose for plants to develop a sense of suffering if they have no practical use for that sensation.

Re: World's first no-kill eggs go on sale in Berlin (2018)

#145

Post by kaycebasques » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 5:15 PM UTC

soperj wrote: post #128

wpietri wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing's ever enough for vegans. That's a weird complaint on a site about eternal disruption, eternal improvement of things that are basically fine already. I'm an omnivore, and I'm comfortable with it. But that doesn't keep me from recognizing the ethical issues with killing and controlling other beings to survive. I really appreciate people pushing the envelope on this. If I could eat basically the same diet but…

>But that doesn't keep me from recognizing the ethical issues with killing and controlling other beings to survive. Does that include plants?

As one vegan (we don't all think the same) I can say yes, I absolutely recognize the issues of how we control plants. I mention it tangentially in this other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25211083

I sense that some vegans give the impression that it's totally OK to eat plants, and there are no repercussions. Or maybe that's what meat eaters think vegans are saying. In my experience as a vegan, it's not about plants versus meat. It's about let's be more aware about the impact of our daily actions and strive towards optimal decisions. (As I mention in the other comment) when I consider the health, environmental, ethical, and maybe even spiritual benefits of veganism, it clearly seems like a more optimal general strategy, both for myself and for the world.

Re: World's first no-kill eggs go on sale in Berlin (2018)

#146

Post by Aeronwen » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 5:15 PM UTC

zaroth wrote: post #97

slothtrop wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sarcasm aside is killing a 1 year old, let alone at 12 weeks, more ethical than killing a day-old chick? The latter is basically post-natal abortion, which, is not a huge world different than abortion aside from consciousness of inflicted pain.

I don’t think there’s a binary switch at any single point from conception to birth to 1 year old where an organism switches from “not conscious to pain” to “conscious to pain”. The first few days / weeks after birth are certainly louder but otherwise not much different developmentally from the preceding days.

You certainly didn't have a brain or nervous system at the moment you were conceived. So there had to be some point in your development where you made the switch to being "conscious to pain".

Re: World's first no-kill eggs go on sale in Berlin (2018)

#147

Post by kaycebasques » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 5:19 PM UTC

dzolob wrote: post #71

slothtrop wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing's ever enough for vegans. > Would be more interested in seeing more means of producing tasty food without using animals and at reduced costs to the environment. There is increasingly more of that all the time. > On the other hand it just seems like another step into the direction of turning the chickens into optimized food machines. Another step? They aren't getting any more optimized, if anything new availab…

As long as animals are treated as commodities instead of sentient beings, yeah, nothing is going to be enough for vegans. Empathy is a great quality to cultivate.

As a vegan myself I think appealing to empathy is probably counterproductive because it implies that meat eaters don't have empathy. It's basically the vegan-mirror-equivalent of slothtrop's "Nothing's ever enough for vegans." comment. I feel like "meat eaters don't have empathy" is the common judgment that vegans cast on meat eaters, and "vegans are unrealistic, holier-than-thou perfectionists" is the common judgment that meat eaters cast on vegans.

Re: World's first no-kill eggs go on sale in Berlin (2018)

#148

Post by kgwgk » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 5:19 PM UTC

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #140

noxer wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's no reason the meat industry couldn't.... >But that would be inefficient by market measures. >No reason >Gives reason

I can't help you if you choose to read things that pedantically. Maybe get a job as a lawyer. I guess I need to edit and insert "no technical reason" or "no non-price sensitive reason" in for you?

Some people may argue that raising and killing one "meat-efficient chicken" is preferable to raising and killing three "inefficient" ones from a moral point of view.

Re: World's first no-kill eggs go on sale in Berlin (2018)

#149

Post by dzolob » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 5:21 PM UTC

kempbellt wrote: post #95

dzolob wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as animals are treated as commodities instead of sentient beings, yeah, nothing is going to be enough for vegans. Empathy is a great quality to cultivate.

This is a reducto ad absurdum takeaway, but I wonder if at some point will we consider the humans required to create said food, part of the "animals treated as commodities"? Unless humans are somehow exempt from the list, I don't see how this argument is feasible in the realistic sense. Humans are frequently treated as commodities, as any team over the size of 1 needs to delegate responsibilities to people. Hence, "d…

Well, there are whole continents where people are treated as commodities. Working 16 hours a day for one or two dollars while living in unhealthy, unmerciful environments is not drastically different from being breeded for exploitation.

Re: World's first no-kill eggs go on sale in Berlin (2018)

#150

Post by tashoecraft » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 5:21 PM UTC

soperj wrote: post #131

tashoecraft wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing is ever enough for anyone. Look at any discussion here. "This software should be fully free without ads", "this license isn't permissive enough", it's not distrbuted, it's not blockchain, it is blockchain, it's written in java. And I think it's fine. We need people on the extremes in order to put pressure and advance things, as extremes rarely get implemented, but meeting in the middle does.

How does not writing it in Java advance things?

Was just an example, but I feel like there is a very anti java sentiment on HN. I have near no Java experience, but it's certainly on undertone that if you aren't using Go, Rust, Elxir, whatever you're doing it wrong. Which is nonsense, anything can be good.