There are shades of grey on this kind of thing. Testing cosmetics seems a less painful ordeal than some of the more brutal examples given in the article.
Another thing. If animal testing was outlawed, the same testing would probably end up being done on poor people instead. Is that worse? I think so.
> If animal testing was outlawed, the same testing would probably end up being done on poor people instead.
That's... quite the leap. The entire point is that ethics committees are much more averse to human testing than to animal testing, so we're less conscientious about animal testing.
Yes, it's safe to say that, in all countries, people are more comfortable with animal testing than with human testing.
The quality of results from human testing is many orders of magnitude better; if you're willing to do it, there's no point in doing any animal testing.
I think this is a bad take. Poor people will be tested after animal testing so it is not that worst. There are many cases of this one example is [1]
Animal testing is unnecessary most of the time. Even when its necessary they are brutally tortured and after testing is over they are simply killed. But you know companies don't think animal deserves to live. We can use simulations etc but you know its hard to change culture.
The use simulations for many things already. That hell's them to determine what to test on animals in many cases, and still they have failures. It's very had to simulate things that we don't know everything about. That's why they do the testing.
> Poor people will be tested after animal testing so it is not that worst.
> Animal testing is unnecessary most of the time. Even when its necessary they are brutally tortured
If animal testing involves brutally torturing the test subjects, then surely it would be much worse for poor human test subjects if they are swapped in, compared to what they go through now. Those steps that involve torturous pain would have to happen with the human subjects instead of the animals.
There's certainly more that could be done to prevent bad or futile research on animals. But there are areas where there is no reasonable way to replace animal testing. How else would you test the safety of a new drug or other chemical? You can't do this in vitro, and going directly into humans is not an acceptable solution in my view.
The article specifically talks about this and you haven't really made a concrete reply to anything they say.
The quality of discourse on HN goes up when we all meaningfully engage with the content. The goal shouldn't be to see who is fastest to post a dismissal of the headline.
The article doesn’t actually talk about it in any meaningful way. They talk about it in a statistical fashion: most animal studies are underpowered, most don’t publish, etc.
And sure, I think we can all agree that nobody should be doing useless experiments, whether on animals or not.
But that in no way proves the article’s argument, and it hardly even supports it.
Are we going to test out new CRISPR therapeutic delivery systems in humans? We don’t have a non-living system that replicates a circulatory system, an immune system, and a liver. If the author has a suggestion for how to do things like this safely and effectively without animals, I didn’t hear it.
The article is makings lots of points, I don't find it well focused which makes it harder to make specific replies. For example it talks a lot about animal experiments in cosmetics, but one of the quotes mentions that those are already outlawed in the EU. So I'm not sure what the point is here, if it is to extend that ban to other countries the author should say so, and it's a point I'd certainly agree with.
The author also claims to some extend that animal experiments can be replaced by other methods. In the general case this is simply wrong, you cannot replace all animal experiments. There are cases where you can gain similar information from other experiments without animals, and those should certainly be further developed. But this is really hard to discuss in general, the specifics matter here and not all animal experiments are equal. Animal experiments are also expensive and time consuming, if there are established and reliable alternatives they will find their use.
> if it is to extend that ban to other countries the author should say so
The article explicitly states this in no uncertain terms as the final sentence in the paragraph you are talking about: "I see no good reason that [animal testing for cosmetics] should not be banned totally and everywhere."
I agree that the article is unfocused. However for the specific issues you are mentioning here, it is simple to search the article to see if the author has covered the relevant point you are making.
The article gives a lot of examples of cruel, useless or ineffectual animal testing but does not address useful or critical animal testing at all. They are simply implying all animal testing is in the former category.
> The quality of discourse on HN goes up when we all meaningfully engage with the content. The goal shouldn't be to see who is fastest to post a dismissal of the headline.
I mean company can always do better like giving animal better life before testing and not enthusiast after testing? But what happens now? Those animal are tortured, kept in worst condition and after testing is done you know what happens. Most of the testing is not harmful but the way companies handle the testing is worst to animal.
If something is going to human probably means it is safe which should mean safe for animals to some extent imo. But to save 1% of research cost you know researcher don't care about animal life :/
Is it actually better to keep them alive after testing? I would think many studies could leave them with issues. Not to mention they would just be sitting in a cage somewhere.
For what it's worth, I'm an in vivo pharma researcher, and the standard is to not euthanize unless we need tissue. Unfortunately, I'd guess that 99% of the time, we need to collect blood, spleens, livers, etc. and doing so reduces the number of animals needed in that study as well as the number of studies we run with animals. There are already a lot of pressures to keep animal numbers low, not least of which being that each of the cheapest mice is somewhere around $28 (you can see the prices yourself on their website, but I think my company gets some discount on those prices). Also, my time is valuable, and adding mice increases the amount of my time is spent working on that study.
I'm also on the IACUC for my company, and I can assure you that we do care about animal life. We go to great lengths to ensure that research is being done in ways that maximize animal welfare to the extent that is possible. The FDA requires animal studies for safety and efficacy, and we can debate the morality of testing in mice, then NHPs before humans, but the system as it exists prioritizes de-risking first human doses as much as possible. Given that system, it is the job of the IACUC to oversee and approve every procedure done to an animal in the facility or in our company's name at other facilities. It's a big job that, at least at my place, is taken very seriously by researchers and up the chain of management.
there are a number of replacement methods, though i don't know if they cover all the cases. these include using tissue cultures, diseased humans and software modelling. also, when drugs have been deemed sufficiently safe, they can be further studied using human volunteer trials.
We already do all of this in drug discovery research before putting things into animals. We try computer modeling (very inaccurate but a good pre filter) then cell culture, and only after that do we use animals. Not only is it ethically the right thing, it’s the economical thing. Animal studies are crazy expensive (each mouse costs a couple dollars per day just to keep alive and you need a lot of them) compared to cell culture and modeling.
The problem is that in your scenario, many many more humans would be harmed. While animal models are flawed, there are no cell culture tools that even come close to recapitulating the system wide effects you get in a whole organism. Without animal tests, all the drugs that hurt a mouse (and there are very many that fail in mouse tests for this reason) would instead do it to humans.
You can ban animal research, but if you do, know that virtually none of the medicines you take would exist. It really is that stark.
Ultimately I am ok with that, but I understand it is a difficult ethical question.
I am personally not ok with subjecting animals to torture, in order to extend human lifespans.
It’s not something I would want done to me if a more advanced alien species were to come along, but I suppose it is an easier decision to make when you are on the side that benefits.
> How else would you test the safety of a new drug or other chemical?
Use computer models first as much as possible, while we know they are imperfect.
In vitro-studies before in-vivo. Then test on volunteers (paid), starting with very very small doses of whatever you want to test to reduce the risk to the maximum, and measure the effects on living systems as you go to better understand how it is metabolized.
As someone who has done drug development this is a horrific idea.
I remember using computer modeling - the lead said “oh yeah, tweak the molecule here and you’ll double the potency”. Cool, make the tweak and…potency was 1/10th.
And we do toxicity filtering already, before we get to animal models (why trying something you know will fail?). Despite this we have plenty of highly toxic molecule make it through. I remember the rats who testicles went necrotic after the first dose. Never saw that coming and thank god it didn’t happen in humans.
We’re so far away from even modeling molecules docking with receptors. Toxicity? You’d have plenty of phase 1 volunteers dying every year. Or being horribly harmed.
Are we not doing this already? I would assume this is even cheaper than producing the thing and testing it. And I'm not sure how confident I would be with computer models since we don't know a whole lot about how biology works enough to simulate it (given the simulation would mostly be trying to replicate previous potentially flawed studies)
You are correct, if you could build a computer model that could even somewhat predict the efficacy of a drug you would instantly become the wealthiest person in the world.
I imagine the only real way to do such a thing would be to simulate physics on an atomic level and have a perfect atomic map of the body. Which we are no where near achieving yet. But once we have that sorted, all kinds of incredible simulations could be done.
You would need to do that, but not just for the target in question but the entire human body - there are so many feedback loops and mechanisms in the body to counter whatever your trying to do. Add on top toxicity and that’s why biology is so hard.
Reminds me of the story of Lyrica. Logic was it targeted GABA receptors - made sense too since it looked very similar to GABA itself. Sweet! And it had the same effect as a GABA agonist would. Pretty god damn smart people thought that one up!
Then a few years after approval someone figured out it actually worked on glutamate receptors.
Complete luck that it looked like GABA, behaved like a GABA agonist. It just didn’t work that way at all though.
There is no computer model that is even close to being accurate enough. Science actually understands very little about the human body on a very micro scale.
What computer models? I can imagine that it is possible to predict some already known toxicological mechanisms for similar molecules. But we're certainly not even close to anywhere where we could predict unknown toxicological interactions.
And in vitro tests are very limited in that area. Of course they're still done and useful, but they can't replace animal tests. And testing on paid volunteers is still ethically problematic, you're targeting pretty desperate people if you remove animal experiments which could detect toxic compounds.
Safety of people matters a lot, but I keep thinking about the following observation - in drug trials we routinely see many drugs that work in vitro, work in mice but don't work in humans, and many drugs that seem safe for mice but have bad side-effects for humans. Shouldn't this cut both ways symmetrically? Does that imply that we have a bunch of drugs developed for as-yet-uncured diseases that work in vitro and would actually work for humans but just won't work on mice, so we never tried them on humans and will never know because it's unethical to try?
Do you work in this field? I don't, but even as a layman I'm quite certain that the research process is more involved than you appear to be suggesting. As far as I'm aware, trials in animal models don't stop at mice — I've heard of researchers testing for safety and efficacy on mice, and then progressing to guinea pigs and subsequently macaques. Some animal anatomies behave more similarly to humans when confronted with the same disease than others.
I know what I'm an expert in and it certainly isn't this. I trust actual scientists to know what they're doing.
You do not cut out animal research but you push for a clearer path to safely start research in humans. Instead of repeated and overlapping pre-clinical studies, focus on designing studies to move as rapidly into humans as possible while retaining a reasonable risk profile. The longer people do work on animals the more they optimize for and are invested in the animal solution.
> But there are areas where there is no reasonable way to replace animal testing.
Two specific examples for which animal testing seems essential:
1. Prediction of nanoparticle clearance from in vitro studies does not correlate with clearance in vivo. If you want to know where the particles go (do they hit the target organ/tumor at all? do they ever leave the body?) you need to do in vivo testing.
2. Adolescent idiopathic adolescent scoliosis can now be treated by vertebral tethering and growth modulation, not just bracing or fusion. Zimmer Biomet Spine recently had a device approved to deliver this treatment [0]. Exploratory research to establish cause-effect relationships between tethering and growth modulation depended on large animal models. It's not good to accidentally make a patient's spine worse because you don't understand what's going on.
That's a viewpoint that's up there with "babies can't feel pain", which was also common until the end of the last century[1], but has completely vanished since then.
Much as I don't like the ethics of animal testing, I don't see the cruelty inflicted as any worse than factory farming, and even quite a number of "pastured" or "free range" husbandry operations.
A lot of that stuff is known as humane washing in the animal rights world. Exploiting and inflicting suffering onto animals is almost always unethical. The only way to treat animals ethically is to not test on them at all.
Well, fuzzy cute ones anyway. Surely we can test on E-Coli? How about slime molds? Maybe the occasional insect? What about shrews - they are nasty and mean.
Unless someone can get out a replacement at least equally effective (and not too expensive), I think we have to rely on animal testing for some of the products.
Still a better usage of an animal life than eating them. I prefer to advance humanity, even minimally. If you put these numbers in comparison to animal farming, their suffering and their murdering, then it's absolutely worth it. For me it boils down to a simple set of questions. Would you murder 10'000 chickens to save your grandma's life? How about 10'000 cows? How about 10'000 rats? How about 10'000 rabbits? How about 10'000 monkeys? How about saving yourself? Your wife? Your child? Your children? Tens of humans? Hundreds of humans? Thousands of humans? I am willing to sacrifice an insane amount of animal lives in order to save anyone human. We could talk about reducing it, but I would agree only once we replaced the meat industry.
Well, how many other humans would you murder to save your grandma's life? Or your wife, your children, someone you love?
What about terminally ill humans who have < 1 year to live (assuming the particular testing results won't get skewed by their particular ailments)? How about prisoners sentenced for heinous crimes?
What about humans who are "not productive"? People who have been sentenced to more than 10 years?
You might draw the line at other species. Someone else might draw it differently to not do experiments on intelligent species like whales, dolphins and primates (who are used in lab experiments too). Or someone might include the categories I mentioned above in the list of test subjects.
The big second question is the effectiveness of transferring the results of tests from animals to humans. Coldly speaking, while there are experiments that yield useful results on animals, there are also extremely pointless experiments that are done for the sake of doing.
I won't go on and on but to your statement about " I am willing to sacrifice an insane amount of animal lives in order to save anyone human", would you do it to save Hitler (who is a proxy for someone who, maybe, you should think twice about saving)?
I agree with you about replacing the meat industry but we can do multiple things as a species at the same time. We can work on replacing the meat industry, working on alternate ways of testing drugs, on understanding animal communications and language (and we keep finding new indicators of intelligence) and on reducing our footprint as we get technologically and hopefully culturally more sophisticated.
I don’t understand, you’re willing to kill tens of thousands of animals to save a single person, but are against meat consumption- an activity that inherently provides nutrients to sustain a human life?
Having too many humans on this earth is more of an ecological disaster than eating animals is. Plenty of animals eat only or mostly meat, and they aren’t causing any ecological disasters.
As a human you have a choice about how much of an ecological disaster you, personally, are going to be. That is the privilege and responsibility of sapience.
Its worth emphasising that many animals and their eating habits are also ecological disasters. Cats, cane toads and rabbits come to mind.
But why should we absolutely "lower net suffering"? Giving birth causes intense agony to the mother, but where are the hordes of humans advocating for the end of suffering, demanding that we put an end to natural births?
Because they believe that the net suffering is reduced by the joy being brought into the world via the birth.
And there are people who believe we should stop giving birth and let our species die. They are antinatalists. I think they are too extreme, imho, but you asked where they are: just google them.
It does so, but via an inefficient route (plant -> animal -> human instead of plant -> human), which causes huge sustainability and animal ethical issues.
You can't eat the plants that are eaten by the animals. Not all pastures can be converted to fields, and converting the rest will actually reduce biodiversity and cause more sustainability issues.
Only a fraction (and sometimes even tiny fraction) of the land is needed to supply the same amount of protein and calories when replacing animals sources with plant sources. That means that you actually will not need to convert all these pastures to fields because they are just not needed anymore.
Here are charts that compare land use of different foods normalized per calorie / grams of protein:
I live in a community with ranches and farms. The ranchland looks like nature. Other than cows here and there, it's wildland. Coyotes, mountain lions, hawks, and all sorts of wildlife abound.
The farms are manicured flat with row crops, irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides, etc. Farming is vastly more destructive to the natural environment.
"Land use" measured in abstract square feet is not a useful concept.
> The farms are manicured flat with row crops, irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides, etc. Farming is vastly more destructive to the natural environment.
You might be surprised but 40% of all (cereal) crops are produced to feed animals. That would almost completely go away except a bit to compensate for the loss of meat.
So we'd be left with the other 60% and then we'd have to increase the production to make up for the decrase in production of meat. That's a very slim margin of improvement.
The other thing we could do of course is to avoid feeding animals with crops like soy and corn, and instead let them browse freely and eat the wild grasses and shrubs that they would eat normally, if humans didn't feed them more "efficient" feeds.
Obviously that would mean a significantly reduced number of farmed animals, but that's a feature, not a bug. Perhaps we can all agree on this: the true plague is industrial meat production.
What percentage of meat or dairy comes from pasture animals? You can't fulfill a country like the US's meat and dairy demand with pasture raised animals. So realistically we are talking about factory farmed animals. If we are talking about factory farmed animals then it goes back to the needing these nature destructing farms you are talking about just to feed animals that then feed humans, this is not an efficient system.
> What percentage of meat or dairy comes from pasture animals?
Meat and dairy are separate considerations. Even in industrial farming, meat
animals and dairy animals are raised separately and often belong to different
breeds. They are certainly treated differently.
So for example, where I'm staying, about 80% of the dairy products are made with
the milk of sheep and goats in small farms where the animals range freely, in
the summer, and eat stored wild grassses as hay in the winter. On the other
hand, most of the meat consumed is chicken and pork and of those animals, at
least the chicken are kept in large battery operations. I don't know about pig
farming. Also, where I stay there are very few cows, most of them raised for
dairy, and the country has one of the smallest, if not the smallest number of
cattle in Europe. It's in South Europe, but I don't want to say exactly where.
Anyway when you ask questions like the one above, please consider that the
conditions you know from the Americas are not the same in all of the rest of
the world, and that most of the rest of the world simply does not eat as much
meat, of all kids, as Americans (and by "Americans" I mean people in the US,
Argentina and Brazil).
> You can't fulfill a country like the US's meat and dairy demand with pasture
raised animals.
"Demand", maybe not. But "need"? It seems to me that this can be done
perfectly well simply because the amount currently consumed is extravagant.
People in the US eat way too much meat, per capita, compared to almost
everyone else in the world, including most industrialised nations. My
selection below:
Nobody needs to eat that much meat. If there is "demand" for it, that is the
matter that should be addressed. Why do people want to eat so much meat? There
is something incredibly wrong in the data above, when you look at how the US,
Argentina, Spain and Brazil eat, compared to the other industrialised
countries in the chart.
Not everywhere. In the US there is an incredible amount of overlap. For example, Male cows born in the dairy industry end up in the meat industry. But more specifically I don't see how they are separate in the context of this conversation? Aren't we just talking about the inefficiency of raising animals as a food source?
>Anyway when you ask questions like the one above, please consider that the conditions you know from the Americas are not the same in all of the rest of the world, and that most of the rest of the world simply does not eat as much meat, of all kids, as Americans (and by "Americans" I mean people in the US, Argentina and Brazil).
I thought I was, I honestly wanted to know what the percentage of meat and dairy comes from pasture animals in the world. I guess I should of been more clear about that.
>"Demand", maybe not. But "need"? It seems to me that this can be done perfectly well simply because the amount currently consumed is extravagant. People in the US eat way too much meat, per capita, compared to almost everyone else in the world, including most industrialised nations. My selection below:
> I thought I was, I honestly wanted to know what the percentage of meat and
dairy comes from pasture animals in the world. I guess I should of been more
clear about that.
Well, I confess I don't know the actual numbers. But most places on Earth
don't have the intensive farming found in the Americas.
> Aren't we just talking about the inefficiency of raising animals as a food
source?
Quite the contrary. In a sibling comment I discuss how ruminants are the most
efficient way to turn inedible plant matter to food that humans can eat.
The wikipedia page on "ruminant" has some interesting information about the
process of rumination. In short, ruminants have four stomachs. In the first
two, plant matter is fermented by bacteria, then regurgitated so that it can
be re-chewed to hydrate it with saliva, that promotes bacterial development
and controls the pH of these stomachs. The third stomach is a kind of filter
that absorbs some nutrients and allows only food of certain size to pass to
the final, fourth stomach. The fourth stomach is the true stomach that is
similar to the one we have in our beliies. So to eat the plants that ruminants
are specialised to eat, we'd need to have it first chewed and pre-digested by
ruminants. In yet another comment I noted how sheep and cows that range freely
eat wild grasses, and goats eat shrub.
As I say in that other comment, factory farmed cows are fed soy and corn, that
humans can also eat, rather than wild grasses that humans can't eat. But that
is factory farming. It is actually harmful for ruminants to feed them that
kind of food and so it's a practice that should absolutely be eliminated,
along with the rest of factory farming.
Far as I can tell, nobody has been able to breed goats in factory farms. And
sheep are normally not factory farmed. I don't know what it is that makes cows
good for that sort of thing, but you can be assured that where farming is
primarily of sheep and goats, whatever automation of processes there exists is
nowhere near the scale of factory farms with giant, thousand-animal feedlots
as in the Americas.
Anyway I think "efficiency" is a red herring. The farming industry is very
efficient at producing cheap meat by the thousand-ton. But human bodies are
not tuned to a world were food is produced "efficiently". We are predisposed
to eat as much as we can as soon as we can, to make up for the difficulty of
finding enough nutrients to sustain us "in the wild". Presented with the
extravagant amounts of cheap meat produced by industrial farming, we are
inevitably drawn to excesses of consumption. These excesses are used by the
very industry that caused them in the first place as justification to produce
even more meat, throwing even more fuel to the fire, destroying even more
of the environment and treating even more hundreds of thousands of animals
like garbage. Inevitably, there is a backlash and people swear off meat, when
what we should all be swearing at and off is the meat industry, that would
happily farm us if it was profitable.
>Quite the contrary. In a sibling comment I discuss how ruminants are the most efficient way to turn inedible plant matter to food that humans can eat.
I hear you and agree with everything you say in the rest of your post. I think we are just coming from two different assumptions. My assumption is that with the population the world the and with the increasing middle class we are seeing an increase in meat and dairy consumption, to a level that cannot be met and hasn't been met, with pasture and grazing animals.
Basically I agree with everything you have been saying about the efficiency of ruminants but as a viable way to feed the worlds population, my assumption is that it wont work and isn't working.
If you look at places like the EU, Pig meat is their largest meat sector and factory farms account for 85% off all pig meat available on the market. (page 4: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2020/6520...)
The EU is not a singular case, the trend of farms moving towards intensive factory farms is happening everywhere. In my limited research, I couldn't find statistics on how much pasturing china does but I still thought this was interesting: "Today, China produces and consumes half of the world’s pork, produces nearly 20 percent of the world’s poultry, 10 percent of the world’s beef and is the fourth largest milk producer of the world." (https://www.iatp.org/documents/need-feed-chinas-demand-indus...)
Anyway I agree Factory Farming is a terrible "solution", and thinking about food production in the "most efficient" terms is not a approach to the problem either. I just don't think pasturing ruminant animals is a great solution either, I live in a rural farming community and I don't see it actually working. I'll just go eat my lintels and peas until I see a solution that makes any sense to me.
Actually, I agree with you, I don't believe we can sustainably fulfill a
demand for meat, especially beef, at the current rate that this demand is
rising worldwide. But I also think that this demand is not a true need,
rather it's an artificial need that is created by the over-supply of cheap
meat by the food industry. Kind of like nobody needed to have smartphones,
until everyone had smartphones and now everyone wants to have a smartphone
because everyone else has one.
So I think it's a matter of controlling over-supply and reducing the excess of
demand. One way I think could work to do this in a way that aligns with
middle-class values is to promote a return to traditional, local cuisines and
diets. For example, I come from a Mediterrannean country where the majority of
the traditional diet is, well, typically mediterrannean, 80% vegetables,
pulses and legumes, with tons of olive oil and tomato sauce on everything, and
with meat eaten sparingly and most of the time replaced with dairy. Almost all
traditional dishes are either vegan, or vegetarian because they include eggs
or dairy. We do eat a lot of fish, which is also rapidly becoming impossible
to produce sustainably, so that's another discussion to have. Of the meat we
eat, most of it is chicken or pork, with sheep or goat eaten a few times a
year, as a traditional treat during religious feasts.
In the place I live, sheep and goat farming is free range almost exclusively.
I'm afraid pork production is another scandal of animal abuse, not different
than factory farms for cows. The same goes for chicken, treating animals like
industrial goods must absolutely be made illegal and damn the markets. On the
plus side, pork and chicken are much more sustainable from an environmental
point of view- and both kinds of animals are absolutely fantastic recyclers of
matter that humans can't even consume. Incidentally, the traditional thing to
do with whey left over from cheesemaking is to feed it to pigs. When my cheese
fails, I feed it to the chickens :)
To my mind a large part of the problem is that most people choose to live in
cities, away from food production. This has two effects. On the one hand, the
people in the cities have no idea where their food comes from, they're
insulated from the reality of animal abuse in factory farms and they even lose
the ability to recognise good produce (both meat and plants) from bad. On the
other hand, because the location of people is massively centralised, the
production and distribution of food also becomes massively centralised.
In simpler words, it's impossible for everyone who lives in the city to have
their little garden with their veg and a few chickens or a goat. Instead, the
farms are all outside the city and the food is all in the supermarket shelves.
If everyone could raise their own animals, grow their own vegetables, we
would obviously be in a very different world, with far less animal abuse
(certainly far less systematic animal abuse) and far less over-consumption: it
takes a lot of work to care for an animal, it makes more economic sense to
keep an animal for its milk so one can have dairy year round, rather than
slaughter it and eat meat once, and it's also much harder to mistreat or even
slaughter an animal for food when one has raised the animal from a baby (one
will always find excuses to not do it today).
So a simple solution would be to keep the food where it is produced: in the
countryside, away from the city. But then the city folks would literally
starve and it wouldn't be about meat or veg anymore, it's just impossible to
grow food in the city. So it's not really a practical solution at all.
Clearing forest for ranches has been (and continues to be) among the most ecologically destructive activities in the history of the world, especially in tropical places where it directly replaces rainforest.
In the USA (excluding Alaska), something like 1/4 of all land area is directly used for animal grazing land, and something like 2/3 agriculture production goes to producing animal feed. These take huge amounts of water, fuel, and other resources. Beef production in particular is one of the leading causes of global climate change via CO2 emissions.
I love steaks and hamburgers as much as the next person, but we shouldn’t pretend it has a low environmental cost.
>> Only a fraction (and sometimes even tiny fraction) of the land is needed to supply the same amount of protein and calories when replacing animals sources with plant sources.
That's a quick dodge, but still, a dodge of the OP's point: you can't eat all the plants that animals eat. For example, I eat primarily sheep and goat and their dairy products. The goats eat shrubs and the sheep browse inedible grasses. In fact, funny story, but I know a girl (not me) who tried to eat the grass the sheep were eating and her mouth filled with sores. I mean duh.
Anyway ruminants have four stomachs just so they can digest plant matter that is impossible for omnivores to digest. Industrially farmed animals are fed soy and corn, that can be digested by humans, but those are not those animals' natural feed. Left to their own devices, outside of factory farming, browsing freely, farm animals would exclusively eat plants that are inedible to humans and so they would convert plant matter to food way, way more efficiently than any human stomach ever could.
Four stomachs and rumination is the most efficient plant-to-meat production mechanism known to anyone.
Finding high protein / low carbohydrate plants to eat is hard. Many meatless meat products are hyper-processed. Last I looked a huge part of the population is diabetic. They can't eat grains, can eat small servings of nuts, fruits are mostly out, and greens alone aren't sustainable nutrition.
My charitable interpretation is that when someone says "eat plants", they don't really mean "only eat plants" but "don't eat animal products, eat plants + enriched foods + injections/pills/tablet", because we are omnivores and we need some nutrients that are incredibly hard to get naturally from plants, like vitamin b12, so in order to stay healthy, without eating animal products, there's only the enriched foods and/or pills/injections/tablets route.
You don't need to necessarily eat meat (a glass of milk has half the recommended daily intake of vitamin b12), but if you are not willing to eat any animal product, the only viable alternative is something like fortified plant based beverages or over-the-counter supplements, so that's my take, otherwise they would be suggesting a really poor diet for humans.
Milk is high in carbohydrate. So are most plant based beverages. Back to diabetics... Can't or should not eat it (or should have tiny, tiny portions which reduce the amount of nutrition anyway). Problem is for people who should not consume carbohydrate, especially sugars, a plant-based diet is not sustainable. Yes supplements can supply nutrition, but they are the epitome of highly processed products.
So that would be replacing meat with supplements. I don't think we disagree.
What I disagree with is that it makes any sense to replace real food, meat from animals, with supplements. First because this kind of replacement makes us even more reliant on the food industry, which is the entity that is responsible for the atrocities committed against farm animals in factory farms, and also the damage to the environment caused by such farms. We cannot and should not trust that same industry to provide us with essential nutrients in the form of supplements, because if we do, who knows what new ways they will find to harm us, animals and the environment - the industry is only driven by profit and it will maximise its profit come hell or high water, whether it's selling us sides of beef or B12 pills.
There's a much better alternative: eliminating factory farming, dismantling the meat and dairy megacorps and going back to producing the meat we really need in a way that doesn't cause unnecessary suffering to our domesticated animals and does not destroy the mutualism relation that we've had with them for a few thousand years.
And btw, by "the meat we really need" I mean that most of the world consumes way too much meat, much more than anyone needs. This is the result of the over-supply created by the food industry, for the purpose of maximising its profits as I've said before.
We cannot trust the food industry to feed us, because it will only feed us shit that makes us sick, destroy the environment and harm animals, and it will continue to do so whether we eat meat, plants, or little pills from a bottle.
could you better define hyper-processed? seitan, tofu, and tempeh are very simple in my opinion. I don’t imagine pea or soy protein being wildly difficult to create, but am unfamiliar with those processes.
That's a facile understanding of efficiency. For example, many animals that we eat are dramatically more efficient at absorbing or consuming certain nutrients from plants than we are: Iron, Calcium, Zinc, B12, EPA, DHA.
If adding a step in a supply chain always introduced more net inefficiency, we would never own things like cars or televisions. The complexity you introduce by shortening the supply chain makes a whole host of things completely infeasible.
There are plenty of food sources that could work well for humans without an animal in the intermediate supply chain. But humans aren't about to start consuming their bodyweight in switchgrass or zooplankton just to get a handful of nutrients that only animal sources can easily provide us.
You can live a completely healthy and nutritionally complete plant based life style though, and without consuming your body weight in anything. So if we don’t _need_ the animals to die for us, killing them is immoral. It’s immoral because it’s unnecessary.
"Completely healthy and nutritionally complete" debatable. Vegan diets are discouraged significantly for pregnant women and children because of how damaging calcium, zinc, and B12 deficiencies can be during that time. And even if you aren't a pregnant woman or child, you still have to deal with the various deficiencies that come with that, typically by eating very targeted foods or highly processed and manufactured supplements that also have problems, such as availability, allergies, cost, or simple difficulty incorporating into diets (e.g. you can't exactly use algae oil like you would olive oil, you can't sprinkle flaxseed on everything).
And speak for yourself with regards to morality. Humans evolved as omnivorous creatures, just like millions of other species. I feel no moral obligation to eliminate animal food sources from my diet. The opposite, in fact. Because a vegan diet is effectively an abandonment of culture. I'm not going to stop making Pasteis De Nata or Caldo Verde simply because you feel bad for the animals. Letting my culture wither away like that is a far bigger sin in my eyes than eating animal-derived foods, which we evolved to do.
The American Dietetic Association explicitly says a vegan diet is safe and appropriate for all stages of life, including pregnancy specifically, so you’re just wrong about that.
Also, cultures change and evolve. It was also a part of past cultures to do all manner of inhumane things, and we are all better off for deciding to stop. Simply saying something is a part of culture doesn’t give it a free pass.
Watch what happens to animals in slaughterhouses, and you’ll see why I don’t think preparing Caldo Verde is really super important in comparison: https://youtu.be/7Y_FHhByhBk
No, they don't say that they it is safe and appropriate for all stages of life. They say it can be. That comes with a long list of caveats related to common nutritional deficiencies...some of which are far more serious for some people (such as pregnant women and children) than others. Addressing those deficiencies is hard to do for all people for a multitude of reasons, some of which have already been listed.
Again, speak for yourself about morality. I feel no moral obligation to not be an omnivore. I do feel a moral obligation to pass down my culture to my children.
Omnivorous diets can be unhealthy, but not due to nutrition deficiency. The problems with those diets are all solved with moderation. Vegan diets have to deal with nutrient deficiency. Filling gaps in nutrition deficiency takes targeted food intake or supplements. Those aren't always available or cheap. People have food allergies that can eliminate them as candidates. They are hard to incorporate into existing diets and available foods.
I find it a lot more morally objectionable that your privileged culture-less self would pretend to know what's better for the rest of humanity than they are capable of determining for themselves. There's a reason people who care about food refer to vegans with names like the "Hezbollah of vegetarians". You're not diet advocates, you're religious extremists.
A diet is not implicitly nutrient complete simply because it contains animal products. You can still easily miss out on nutrients. All diets require ensuring that you have access to important vitamins and minerals. Like I said and showed, you can get all these things without eating animals products.
You’re saying that I have no culture and that I’m a religious extremist (which seems contradictory a bit) for saying that you can get all the vitamins and minerals you need from non-animal sources. That seems a little disingenuous and ad-hominem, no?
I don't give a shit that you think it is immoral. I give a shit that you are labeling cultures as immoral and that they need to change to fit your belief system. And yes, I see that as no different than Fred Phelps' ideas.
And yes, there are far too many religious extremists in modern society. Maybe stop joining them.
Because I believe it’s immoral to cause needless suffering. Effectively all meat is the result of animals being tortured and killed for our ephemeral satisfaction while eating a meal, and not because we need it to survive. Causing that level of suffering because it taste good is wrong imho.
I link to a couple videos in this comment section that show what I mean. You should watch them and decide if you think a sentient creature should experience those things because you like how it tastes.
> 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 cats over here gave birth and I realised what is that keening noise adult cats make when they beg for food: it's the same noise the kittens make when they want their mother to breastfeed them. The dogs, a solemn matriarch and her huge son start jumping up and down and cry like little puppies when it's time for food. The cats mob us everytime we step out of the house, just on the off chance we'll drop some tasty morsel. The goats used to not come near me and my friend, but then we fed them a couple of times and now they gallop to us when we enter their enclosure. The chickens catapult themselves from their perches and run like little raptor dragsters when we take them scraps to recycle (there's nothing I've seen that looks more awkward than a chicken running). A small, grey-speckled hen that I fed once or twice now runs to me whenever it sees me because it has forever now associated me with food.
Animals are crazy for food. And so are humans, because we, too, are animals and there's no use trying to shame people with facile moralising, humans have bodies that go absolutely nuts for tasty food and that food includes the meat of other animals.
Edit: vegans are no different. Here's three interviews with three ex-vegan
"influencers" and writers, who quit because they just couldn't stand it:
I have a few friends who were very vocal vegans, who later started eating animal products again. It's always made me wonder just how many vegans switch back to at least vegetarian diets, after a few years. I looked around, but there's not much in the way of good scholarship on the subject. Anyway, every vegan has the option of going back to eating meat whenever they decide it (one can even "take breaks" and enjoy some meat once in a rare while, then go right back to their fierce advocacy of veganism) which to me makes a lot of the claims about moral superiority a little empty. It's very easy to preach, but who knows exactly what vegans actually eat?
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 otherwise. Nor did I ever trivialize this. I just think that good food doesn’t have to mean animal products. I think good food can include beans, grains, vegetables, fruits, fungi, etc. If you disagree with that, I can recommend some vegan cook books which I think will change your mind.
Also to this point, I don’t think it’s relevant how other animals react to food. We are not those animals. We don’t need to hold ourselves to the standards that species without agriculture and advanced supply lines are held. We are more advanced, can make complex decisions, and have more options.
Then you talk about vegans who have “broken veg” and started eating animal products again. I don’t understand what this has to do with anything. Yes, there are people who break vegan. There people who subscribe to any creed and then become disillusioned. If you’re trying to make a point that veganism is so hard and terrible that not even passionate vegans can stand to adhere to it, Id love to connect you with people who have been staunch vegans for decades. Would you like me to put you in touch with them? There are a lot.
Lastly, you say nobody knows what vegans actually eat, but I can tell you definitely: anything except animal products. That is, after all, the point.
The problem is that it's you who thinks it's "fundamentally immoral" to kill another animal to eat it. It's your morality and noone else is obliged to subscribe to it, just because you do.
For instance, if I thought it's immoral not to eat meat because an animal died for you to eat its flesh and it's disgusting that you should let it go to waste, would you accept it if I tried to foist my morality upon you? I'm pretty sure that not. But then, why should anyone else accept your morality? Because you say it's good?
> Also to this point, I don’t think it’s relevant how other animals react to food. We are not those animals. We don’t need to hold ourselves to the standards that species without agriculture and advanced supply lines are held. We are more advanced, can make complex decisions, and have more options.
That really confuses me when I speak to vegans and other animal rights advocates. You're essentially saying that we're in some sense, better than, superior, to other animals. But, isn't that claimed superiority exactly the argument used to justify killing and even mistreating non-human animals? I mean, I'm sure I've heard it said that non-human animals don't experience pain as humans do, so it's OK to for example drip toxic chemicals in their eyballs (like the article says), because they don't really hurt, their reactions are just autonomic responses etc. I've read papers studying animal pain and they invariably assume that "animals don't feel pain as humans do" and try to disprove that. In my mind, it's obvious that animals feel pain as humans do, and that humans are not, as you say "more advanced", in any way, shape or form.
Vegans I've spoken to have tried to convince me to become vegan by telling me how farm animals, like sheep and goats and pigs, are intelligent, sensitive, how they have an internal life, etc. Which makes sense to me, of course they are all that. Yet you say that "we can make complex decisions", as if those other animals can't? It's confusing. I appreciate I'm not talking to the same vegans all the time, but it's still, yes, confusing.
Can you tell me, do you really think you're more than those other animals? Never mind me and others who eat meat, obviously you think we're all some kind of sub-life, but do you think yourself to be something "more advanced" than say a sheep or a cow?
> Lastly, you say nobody knows what vegans actually eat, but I can tell you definitely: anything except animal products. That is, after all, the point.
And the point of Christianity is to love thy neighbour and turn the other cheek, or anyway that is the credo. And yet, throughout history, faithful Christans have killed, maimed, murdered, pillaged, raped and looted all over the world with abandon and with the blessings of their respective churches. It is very easy to preach one thing and practice a whole 'nother one. Everyone does it all the time. Why not vegans?
Edit: anyway, how do you know what vegans eat? Are you vegan? Even so, have you any way to know what other vegans eat?
> If you disagree with that, I can recommend some vegan cook books which I think will change your mind.
Thanks, I think I'll pass. I'm from a Mediterrannean country and 80% of the food we eat traditionally is what you would call vegetarian or vegan, not least because we use olive oil as shortening. But that's just the food we eat, not some kind of political ideal. Anyway I'm pretty sure I can cook much better than anyone who discovered in late life that -OMG- vegetables have taste. I knew that since I knew what food is.
But, I still eat meat once in a while and make my own cheese. Actual cheese, that is. Because the tastes and flavours of meat and dairy cannot be replaced by vegetables and fruit, no matter how well the latter are cooked. Sometimes I crave a nice aubergine ...
>You're essentially saying that we're in some sense, better than, superior, to other animals. But, isn't that claimed superiority exactly the argument used to justify killing and even mistreating non-human animals?
You're confusing a certain kind of superiority (superiority in moral reasoning, for instance) with another one (the value of life). Humans are superior in the first respect (this is pretty uncontroversial), and I can't really think of any serious philosopher who argues that animals carry equal moral weight as a human. I'm sure they exist, though.
>Yet you say that "we can make complex decisions", as if those other animals can't? It's confusing. I appreciate I'm not talking to the same vegans all the time, but it's still, yes, confusing.
The evidence (and the interpretation of that evidence by biologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers) would point to the fact that humans are capable of moral reasoning to a higher degree than other animals, the conventional thought being that animals have no moral reasoning, though that's controversial.
The debate on the morality of killing animals for food where not necessary has very strong support for the moral vegetarian case[0], arguing from harm to animals, harm to humans, and harm to the environment; but I'd be interested to see if you have any counter-arguments, or rather, ones that haven't already been replied to.
It doesn't sound like you really would, though. "I'd be interested to see if you have any counter-arguments, or rather, ones that haven't already been replied to"? Is that a way to ask for a frank exchange of views that predisposes your interlocutor to expect an honest and unbiased discussion? Because to me it sounds more like a preemptive dismissal of anyhing I'd possibly say.
I also don't like to hold internet conversations with commenters who talk of "arguments" like they're goals in football, whereby points are scored. If you want to exchange views because you think my views are useful to you, then please let me know that you want to have a genuine and constructive conversation. If you just want to win some culture war, then go away.
As far as we know, humans are the only animals with moral agency (though there is some debate on this topic). That said, the immoral actions of one person (or animal, or society, etc.) does not absolve others of moral responsibility. Even if animals act immorally, this doesn't provide an excuse for humans to act in the same way.
Nope. But if those animals ever develop advanced societies with agriculture, the ability to reason about morality, and ways to live long healthy lives _without_ eating other animals, then I'll expect them to.
Right now, that's only humans, so I only hold humans to this standard.
But why is it immoral to eat another animal? Whether or not someone can "reason about morality", the question is what is moral and what is immoral. So why is it immoral to eat another animal?
You say you hold humans to a certain standard (of morality). But why does this standard entail an avoidance of eating meat? What is immoral about eating meat and what is moral about avoiding it?
Because it involves causing extreme suffering, and we definitively do not need to do it to live long healthy lives.
Literally just watch Dominion. Watch it to see the suffering I’m talking about. Why do you think animals deserve this so that you can eat a meal? Is that agony they exist in for their whole life worth a hamburger, or a piece of cheese? Vegans say no.
The images you share are of factory farming that is indeed an atrocity that
must be eliminated. There is no justification for treating animals like this.
However, my question was "why is it immoral to eat another animal"? Are you
perhaps suggesting that the only way to eat another animal is by causing the
extreme suffering undergone by cows in American factory farms?
It should be obvious that this is not the case: people eat meat all over the
world, but American factory farms exist only in the Americas and farming in
other places does not involve the kind of extreme suffering that you point
out. For example, most of the meat I eat is from sheep and goats that graze
freely in meadows and hills around the place where I live, in the Eastern
Mediterrannean. I know that is true because I see those animals everytime I go
out. Some goats live in the farm I'm staying and I can assure you that
they are not suffering one bit.
In general, the animals raised by small-scale farmers, in herds of no more
than a few dozen animals, are amonng the happiest, healthiest, best fed, best
cared for animals the world over, some even better cared than human infants.
Bottom line, it is perfectly possible to eat meat without causing the extreme
suffering you are concerned about. To be clear, I absolutely agree with you
that causing extreme suffering, of the kind in the video you shared, or of any
kind at all, is absolutely morally repugnant. But this extreme suffering is
characteristic of factory farmign, not of eating another animal, and so I am
not satisfied that I understand why you think that it is immoral to eat
another animal.
Edit: I keep rewriting the above to make myself more clear, but everytime I
read it, it sounds like something from a high school debate. What I really
want to achieve is to understand how you think and maybe help you understand
how I think, if that's interesting to you at all. So if something I say sounds
completey wrong to you, please let me know and I'll try to make it more clear.
I am not looking to score points in a futile internet fight. I'll be happy if
we can find some common ground- and I can see that we already have some: I
think we're both disgusted by the horrors in the video you shared.
Over 99% of all animals killed are killed on factory farms, so pointing out a handle of farms that are NOT factory farms doesn't really do much. If less than 1% of the animals we are talking about are covered by the farms your talking about, its a pretty meaningless statistic.
Also, you clearly didn't watch the film because it doesn't discuss American farms, it clearly focuses on Australian farms. Here is a link to the same practices being done in Britain: https://www.landofhopeandglory.org/
These practices are industry standard across the world, though. Peter Singer writes about this in "Animal Liberation". Let me know if you don't want to or cannot pay for a copy of the book and I'll buy it for you. He discusses at _length_ how these standards exists worldwide.
Besides, even those small farms are deeply unethical. They kill animals a mere fraction into their lifespans, and do so in horrific ways, often inhumanely. Killing an animal that does not want to die, if it doesnt need to, is always wrong.
The onus is now on you to educate yourself. I'm done with this conversation. I've pointed you to many places where you can learn about the problem, both in this thread and others in this comment section. If you choose not to, then you choose to remain ignorant to what is happening around the world, every day.
I suggest you dig into some of those studies and try tearing them apart. Watch some of those films and find reasons why they are bullshit. Then message me (email is in my profile), and tell me how wrong I am. But only after you've really made an effort to understand the issues. Remember, I was a carnist for almost the first 30 years of my life, so I know how you feel. I'm asking you to challenge yourself and really see the issue from the other side.
> Over 99% of all animals killed are killed on factory farms, so pointing out a
handle of farms that are NOT factory farms doesn't really do much.
That's not true. The majority of farms around the world are small-scale farms
with no more than a few dozen animals or so. Factory farms are not the norm.
> Besides, even those small farms are deeply unethical. They kill animals a mere
fraction into their lifespans, and do so in horrific ways, often inhumanely.
I'm sorry but this is completely ridiculous. Why would farmers want to kill
their animals "in horrific ways"? To achieve what? Hard as it might be for you
to believe, farmers are not Jason Voorhees, going around with a machette
murdering innocent little lambs for fun. It's obvious to me that despite your
interest for animals' welfare you've never talked to a farmer and never been to
a farm, looked at the animals and seen how they are treated first hand.
Instead, it seems to me that you take all your information from books and videos
like the ones you ask me to "educate myself" with. Surely, you appreciate that
those are written by vegans and for vegans, or for the purpose of indoctrinating
more people into the vegan ideology? Such books and videos are no reliable
source of knowledge for farming. They only show you what they want you to see:
the horrors of factory farming. They seem to make the point that because factory
farming is a horror, all farming is a horror. This is just a rhetorical trick
and it should be easy to see through.
Anyway if you don't want to continue the conversation that's up to you. I don't
want to convince you of anything, and I'm not in the habbit of pursuing internet
arguments over emai. That sounds... unhygienic. What I was hoping to achieve
with this conversation was to have a useful exchange of views. I don't guess
this is possible though.
Proof that I wasn't lying about the percentage of animals killed in factory farms. Thats USDA data, not some vegan propaganda. Good luck, and reach out if you ever come around to considering a world with less suffering.
The link you posted is not USDA data. It's estimates, based on USDA data, by
the owners of the website. For example, the opening paragraph in the article
says:
> We estimate that 99% of US farmed animals are living in factory farms at
present.
The owners of the website are the Sentience Institute, a nonprofit promoting
various Effective Altruism goals. One of those goals seems to be the elimination
of animal farming. One of the founders of the Institute is the author of a book
called "The End of Animal Farming" that "argues animal farming will end by the
year 2100 based on effective altruism reasoning and social movement strategy" (see Wikipedia on the book).
So it's vegan propaganda. From the point of view of Effective Altruism, but
still, vegan propaganda.
Let's see that quote again:
> We estimate that 99% of US farmed animals are living in factory farms at
present.
It says US farmed animals. The whole link talks about the situation in the US.
In our discussion, I made the point that factory farms are the norm in the
Americas, but not in the rest of the world. I agreed with you that factory farms
are an atrocity that must be eliminated. But that atrocity is an American
atrocity, and the rest of the world, by and large, is not yet responsible of it
although this situation is changing rapidly, because of course where America
leads the way in atrocities, everyone else soon follows because that way lie
dollars and everyone wants dollars.
In general, my complaint about your comments is that they seem to ignore that
there is a world outside the Americas, or even the US, and that this world is
not the US and doesn't do things, particularly farming, like the US does them. I
seem to be justified to complain so, given the continued American focus of your
discussion of farming and animal rights.
I'm sorry, but what would someone need to hand you for you to at least admit there _might_ be a worldwide problem.
You complain this doesn't prove anything outside of the US, but I've already linked to material which covers similar issues in Australia, the UK, and Peter Singer's book which talks about this for all of Europe!
Does someone need to literally drag you to each and every factory farm? Seriously asking, what would it take? Just to consider, on your own, seriously, that perhaps the way we kill these _billions_ of animals every years (100s of billions if you include fish!) might be pretty fucked up.
You say you're interested in exchanging views, but that doesn't seem to be the case. What would it take for you to actually be convinced that there is actually a problem?
Also, it _is_ USDA data. They are using it to draw a conclusion based on things like # of animals that farms own, etc. But it is USDA data they are using.
> Does someone need to literally drag you to each and every factory farm?
This is a threat of physical violence and it is very disturbing, especially as
it comes after your offering to buy me a book and asking me to contact you by
email. You've crossed from creepy stalker to online bully behaviour.
The most disturbing thing is that you seem to not even understand what we are
disagreeing about.
What I keep saying is that factory farming is typical only in the Americas. Yes,
there are factory farms outside the Americas. No, they are not the norm outside
America. Outside America, most farms are small-scale farms with a few dozen
animals.
The typical farm in most of the world is a small-scale farm, run by a
family, often not even commercially.
Despite your threats to drag me to factofy farms and your insistence that I
don't know they exist (clearly, I do, I have repeated several times that
"factory farms are an atrocity that must be eliminated"), it is you who hasn't
seen the world with your own eyes. It is you who relies, for your knowledge of
farming, on books and youtube videos. Books and youtube videos that are
specifically created to spread vegan propaganda: they show you the horrors of
factory farming, that should rightly outrage everyone, and pretend that there is
no other way to farm animals, and that all farming is an atrocity, that all
farmers are Freddy Krueger, monsters who torture animals and kill them in
"horrific ways".
Instead of trying to coerce me into agreeing with your misinformed beliefs,
you're the one who should go and look at the things that the brainwashing
rhetoric you try to spread hasn't shown you. Go to the rural communities that
subsist on farming, in Europe, in Africa, in India and Bangladesh, in South-East
Asia. Go and see the farms, see the animals, talk to the farmers. If you really
care about animal welfare, go help the farmers to care for the animals.
But do you really care about animals? Do you really want to know what's going on
in the world, or are you more interested in fighting a pointless culture war on
the internet?
> I am willing to sacrifice an insane amount of animal lives in order to save anyone human.
That is insane, and psychopathic. But it is shared by many (most?) humans. The result will be that there will be no animals left, and soon afterwards, no humans left either.
Another question is, how many humans are you willing to sacrifice to save your wife? Your child? Is your child worth a specific number of human lives, in your eyes? And what is that number?
OK. We'll be only left with food animals and even those will be replaced soon with some salad cause the popular opinion it that this is more effective. I believe this is going to be a sad place and we are getting there quite fast now, cause for centuries the population was much smaller. And yet humans managed to depopulate vast areas.
That's like saying humans have been enslaving (among other things. this is just one example) other humans since the dawn of civilization and on a large scale, that didn't stop the growth of art, culture, science etc.
But our ethics progress and evolve. Similarly, treating other species as commodities for our consumption has been done for millennia but it doesn't mean we should keep doing it.
Your argument is that the majority opinion is never psychopathic? Technically, if you were referring only to insanity, I might agree that an operational definition of insanity is anything that a majority of the population doesn't believe. But that doesn't mean the view is not psychopathic.
This definition of insanity might also not be correct. After all, was Galileo insane because most people (assuming they followed the church) didn't agree with his views?
> Another question is, how many humans are you willing to sacrifice to save your wife? Your child? Is your child worth a specific number of human lives, in your eyes? And what is that number?
I think the question is not whether people are willing to kill large numbers of animals to save a couple of humans, but whether we might have alternative methods that also save the humans, but with fewer dead animals. I mean, if we had no alternatives to eating animals, there would be far fewer vegans.
I agree with you on medical research. Particularly how many animals you’d be willing to sacrifice.
That being said and with respect, I think you are misrepresenting and lack some understanding... some alternatives to consider.
1) humans are built to consume meat. Yes we can manage alternatives, but it’s not really all that healthy (I know some people claim with a lot of work and expense it’s possible to be healthy...)
2) farms producing beans and grain require a large amount of pesticides, arguably far worse for the environment and humans. Pesticides have been the #1 killer of living creatures
3) animals can eat a diverse set of food, so cattle farms, etc have more biodiversity than row crop
4) many cattle, elk, etc farms, are particularly humane. I recently purchased a grass fed cattle farm and everything I need is onsite. Cattle just roam, drink from the springs, get medicine, have calf’s, etc they seem very very happy.
5) if you have a lot of produce in a field, it’s essential to kill the wildlife trying to eat the field. I don’t think most people understand this, but if you have fields of corn you need to ensure bugs, birds and deer aren’t overly in abundance
I would argue farms mass producing meat could be reduced or need to be changed. But generally speaking, I’d argue leaving chickens out and collecting eggs in the yard isn’t all that bad. Or letting cattle roam until right before butchering.
1) It’s straightforward to be a healthy vegetarian, on net even in cultures that are largely vegetarian meat eaters are generally less healthy.
Personally a really enjoy meat, but at one point I became vegetarian for a few months simply based on what I was eating. I accidentally ended up with a vegetarian diet with sufficient protein etc, which demonstrates how little effort it actually takes.
"A number of studies have shown that a diet low in meat is linked to longer lifespans. But the matter is far from settled, as some studies haven’t found a significant difference in life expectancy between meat eaters and vegetarians.
"But there is growing evidence that plant-based diets are associated with benefits like lower blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar and reduced body weight. These improved health measures often translate to less risk of heart disease, diabetes, cancer and other diseases. Eating more whole, plant-based foods could help lower the risk of some health conditions, and might even help people live longer. But researchers also suspect that vegetarians are more health-conscious overall — so, they’re likely to be drinking and smoking less and moving their bodies more than the general population — which complicates some study results.
"Still, emerging research points to a potentially helpful role of plant-based diets in managing some chronic health conditions. For instance, some studies suggest that plant-based diets — veganism in particular — may help control rheumatoid arthritis."
"I prefer to advance humanity, even minimally." - Part of advancing humanity is expanding our moral circle. Pointlessly hurting animals is not an "advanced" society.
If animal experiments were banned in neuroscience I think it's likely that would force the development of new technologies for studying the brain that would actually accelerate progress in neuroscience - "necessity is the mother of invention".
That seems unlikely. Look into techniques like ICSS which have no non-invasive substitutions. Banning animal experiments in neuroscience would just eliminate large swaths of research pursuits, leaving only observational techniques like FMRI, which would slow down the science greatly.
It's not just FMRI - what about blood tests looking at gene expression, computational methods, tissue engineering, and stuff that hasn't been invented yet? Regarding ICSS though, I've had a look and I really fail to see how this technique is benefiting humanity..? For example they've discovered more detail about where cocaine affects pleasure/reward neural circuitry - so what?
The point wasn’t FMRI per say, just that it would limit the science to observational studies like FMRI, which cannot reproduce the results of things like ICSS. Also such research may have large implications for understanding and treating addiction. The first step is understanding it.
As far as I know we already understand quite a lot about the neurological basis of addiction. Some treatments already exist but the main problems with them are social & political ones. Discovering better drugs would be really useful, but this can & is being done computationally. In addition, such research may also produce techniques for creating addictions & otherwise more effectively controlling human beings.
> 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.
I want ALS and Alzheimer solved as fast as possible and the new solutions supported by proven solid facts so, thanks, but not thanks.
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 engineering and computational methods, and we're 100,000,000 person-hours away from it. But resources are finite, so investment in animal experiments takes resources away from and delays us finding the actual solution. This is of course speculative, but thinking that animal testing will deliver the solution is also speculative, with career & institutional inertia also playing a role.
> You're seriously underestimating human ingenuity
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.
TLDR: instead of testing on animals we should use computer simulations and tissue cultures instead.
The authors comparison of kernel bugs to lab testing mice is ridiculous to be honest.
The author cherry picks examples like cosmetics to justify their view, failing to acknowledge a long history of successful testing on animals that led to drugs that help reduce human suffering.
As much as I like technology, I would be afraid to use a drug that was only tested this way or even in cultured tissue. The biological system is too complex with too many unknown factors for me to believe this is highly effective method for everything.
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 difference in standards between "science animals" and "food animals" is quite stark. It is very similar to the difference in treatment people require between dogs and pigs. No one really cares if pigs suffer, even though they would be furious if dogs experienced the same treatment.
Of course, I agree. I hope my comment didn't imply otherwise.
Actually I would argue for the wholesale reduction of the category "food animal". Its largely unnecessary, there are very few people (e.g. with unusual medical needs or living in unusual situations) for whom eating other animals is necessary.
The two situations aren't really comparable without more information. Clearly the people in A are still eating a craptonne of plants, and also have access to much more land per person than B, since they can afford to have a lot dedicated to very unproductive pasture.
Yeah, it's hard to compare and the greater yields of crops certainly bodes well for A.
Though the productivity differences aren't as large as one would think - protein conversion ratios for smaller animals tend to be 2-3. It's worse for beef (~10) but you have to consider that half the cows are creating milk which has a high protein conversion ratio. And it's potentially even better for animals when you consider the quality of protein - e.g. see https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jsfa.8362
Where do you get "half" from that? Female cows are economically productive and males are not. The ratio is not even close to half-and-half. Go look at a herd of cows sometime.
False dichotomy. Animal farming takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land. Switching away from livestock would reduce the need for land clearing, not increase it.
Too bad most food animals are tortured, sometimes for their entire life, before being killed. The unluckiest ones are the females kept alive for breeding.
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, Argentina, etc. These are indeed atrocities. But, for the time being, they are not representative of the majority of farms in most of the world.
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). Or, if you take a walk around the countryside where I live, you'll see that every meadow and plot of land has a few sheep or goats browsing serenely, often next to the road, typically without even a fence to keep them in, because it's unnecessary. I know one particular dairy farm on a Mediterranean island, with a fully modern barn and automatic milking machine, where, if you visit during the day, you'll see maybe a dozen goats in the barn that can house a couple hundred. The rest are out in the mountains, browsing, and will return on their own in the evening. That's how terrified those allegedly mistreated animals are. The barn is their home.
Also, it doesn't matter how many food animals we have, what matters is how the majority of them are treated. And the majority are not meat and dairy cows raised in feedlots in the US, because that kind of farm animal is a small proportion of all meat an dairy animals bred the world over. From Our World in Data:
You can see that pork and poultry make up the largest amount of meat produced. Though the plot shows meat rather than number of animals, remember that it takes seveal pigs or goats to make the same meat as one cow, and many more chickens. There are way more pigs and chickens farmed the world over than there are cows and cow farming (cow factory farming) is concentrated in the US, Argentina, Brazil and China:
It is those places where the images of tortured cows, that live their whole lives connected to milking and impregnating machines come from. It is such conditions that have to be eliminated. But in most of the rest of the world, those are not typical conditions and the numbers of animals raised are many, many fewer.
Edit: which is not to whitewash the pig and poultry industries. Chickens in particular are treated horribly, even the so-called "free range" ones (in many places it's enough for the chickens to be kept in a gigantic barn with a tiny bit of yard outside for the chickens to be considered "free range", legislation is often an absolute scandal). And there are many large pig farms were pigs are kept in absolutely inhumane conditions.
But, again- that's true in some places, not the world over and not for most animals.
From a 2017 article: “According to the UN, globally [concentrated animal feeding operations] account for 72% of poultry, 42% of egg, and 55% of pork production.”
It’s entirely plausible that most animals live under those conditions by now, or will quite soon without intervention.
Those are not the numbers quoted by the OP, though.
Anyway, yes, it seems like I'm wrong and the majority of chickens are grown in intensive farms. For pigs though, 55% is about half of all animals.
But I don't want to argue over margins. The point I'm making in my comments above and elsewhere in this thread is that in most of the world most farms are not factory farms. This is still the case. Note also the title of the article in your link: "Rise of mega farms: how the US model of intensive farming is invading the world". Again, I made the point that industrial farming is typical to the Americas and not the rest of the world. It's "invading" the world, but it's not how most of the world does farming, it's how Americans do farming.
And yes, this will change without intervention because people the world over are blinded by the prospect of maximising their profits, even if all they achieve in the end is to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs (their animals, that feed them). All those farmers will achieve who give up their small family farms for tin sheds on concrete lots is to make themselves slaves and force their children out of the farming business.
So the intervention should be to protect the small scale farmers from the encroachment of the gigantic corporations that want to take their land, their animals and their businesses. This is the only way to ensure that all farm animals are given the care and respect they deserve, care and respect that is simply not available in industrial farming.
> in most of the world most farms are not factory farms
From the perspective of animal welfare, the number of farms matters less than the number of animals raised in horrible conditions. So if factory farms raise 50% of the animals, or even 30% or 20%, this is still a huge problem to me.
I mostly agree with your last paragraph. I have friends who are farmers, who raised and loved and posted Instagram pics of their delightful pair of goats, knowing that they were raised to be food. They slaughtered them eventually, and cooked and ate them for the meal at their wedding ceremony. I do not understand this mentality, but I do know that for the years they raised them, the goats lived a great life.
To me, “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” applies here. Arguments (which I don’t think you have made) about “more cows born is better than fewer cows born” don’t hold water. Quality of life for farmed animals is important. Small-scale farms on the whole do a much better job of making that happen.
The French AOC [1] regulates what’s allowed to be marketed as Comté etc by stipulating location, breed, population density, etc; however aside from cheese, I’m not aware of a similar set of standards existing for animal products. As someone who has lived in a rural area with much animal agriculture, I can tell you labels like “free range” roughly translate to “Let’s put as many animals as we legally can fit onto this plot of land modulo our budget, then neglect them to every extent allowable by law, followed by killing them because we need the money”. You specifically give the example of the animals having a shed to shelter in, which IME is an exceptional rarity.
In any case, cherrypicked examples of “free range” farms that actually provide shelter for their animals are about as irrelevant as saying hunting is “more ethical” than factory farming. We cannot feed billions more people sustainably on diets heavy in animal products, no matter the method, especially so with the more inefficient methods like free range and hunting. There’s a reason factory farming exists.
It's true like you say that "free range" is mainly an empty label, for the reasons you say.
But I'm not talking about "free range" as a label. In my comment above I've described the animals I've seen, and see around me, right now. Those range freely in the literal sense. They are left to go out on their own and eat what they want, then return to their sheds when they want. I stay in a friend's farm, with goats and chickens on the grounds. Those are not sold anywhere and are not labelled as "free range" by anyone, but they're free range alright. I can assure you. I once made the mistake of cooking one of the farm's chickens as I'd cook a chicken bought at the supermarket. Never again! You basically can't eat the meat of a really free-range chicken unless you boil it for a couple of hours. I chewed and chewed and chewed until my mouth muscles couldn't take it anymore and ate the whole thing because I absolutely didn't want to throw the poor animal away like garbage, but it was painful and unpleasant. Even properly cooked, the meat of really free-range chickens is a dark gray, very unlike the pale white meat of supermarket chickens. Most people would probably not prefer actual "free range" if they had access to it. And I know a good few people who won't eat goat meat because "it stinks".
>> We cannot feed billions more people sustainably on diets heavy in animal products, no matter the method, especially so with the more inefficient methods like free range and hunting. There’s a reason factory farming exists.
The good news is that there is no reason to "feed billions more people ... on diets heavy in animal products". Diets heavy in animal products characterise only certain parts of the world, not coincidentally the same ones where factory farming is the norm. The rest of the world doesn't eat that way, and doesn't need to eat that way. We can feed billions of humans on sustainably grown meat and dairy produced by small scale local farms, like we already do in most of the world.
The trick is to avoid creating an artificial need for even more cheap meat and animal products in the diets of everyone. Just because Americans and some Europeans eat that way doesn't mean that everyone must mimetically do the same.
> 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 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.
My place is a mountain "hay" area, meaning it's wet and ideal for cows, and yet most pastures are abandoned and we can see articulated lorries coming from Spain, loaded with straw. They don't bother cutting the hay on slopes, like they still do in Austria/Switzerland/Germany. A few farmers like my neighbour are even reluctant to cut the hay on a good, easy area; he usually waits 2 months after it's "ripe" for a first cut and lets it go bad, and then also misses the second cut.
Yes, you can still see cows in the remaining meadows, but they represent a vanishing part. Also, when you had 10 or 20 cows, it was easy to take them out, or leave them out and move them from meadow to meadow; but doing the same with 100 of them? There isn't enough open meadow land around to sustain a proper rotation (this is not at all a country of huge ranches like a few other countries like the USA), and even if there were, it would require manual (foot) work, while farmers are less and less inclined to leave their tractor seat.
Oh, on the paper, they have the needed surface to feed the cows, because it is mandatory to present a good ratio to get subsidies. But that's because they "took" (bought, rented or just declared as used) fields/meadows/woods here and there: 10 miles away one way, 20 or 30 miles away another way. It's not practical at all. I let you imagine how well they take care of some of them.
Icing on the cake, there are quite many cheese dairies around. The good cheese for the good cows for the good pastures of our good mountain. Well, truth is 75% of the milk doesn't come from here, it is imported from other regions. How comes, in such a "cow area"? Simple: because dairy farming is more work and yet brings much less subsidies than livestock farming for meat which is a true jackpot when you live in a area like mine, classified as "difficult": most cow farmers (1-2 persons) here will get around 40,000-60,000€ subsidies a year for their 99 cows (the 100th and following do not bring more subsidies so they all have about 99 cows) and 75-90 ha declared surfaces (subsidised until the 75th, but a bit more can be needed to have the right head/ha ratio to maximize head subsidies).
There can of course be a few pathological cases too in that domain: one former neighbour was a cheese maker. First they moved to a bigger village in the valley, while keeping the name of the higher altitude, smaller village for their cheese, which was already a bit of a dubious commercial practice, but well, let's say it wasn't a big deal. 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).
> I know one particular dairy farm on a Mediterranean island, with a fully modern barn and automatic milking machine, where, if you visit during the day, you'll see maybe a dozen goats in the barn that can house a couple hundred.
Yeah, well, that French "Mediterranean island" is famous for its VIRTUAL cattle which only exist in documents filed for subsidies. This small area ...
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 oppos...
Please, see the Animal Welfare Section on the Wikipedia page for slaughterhouses. There is nothing here sensational, just facts. It's important that those who choose to eat meat understand the contract they sign when financially supporting the industrial animal processing system.
Again, these conditions, of industrial farming and slaughtering, are only the norm in some countries in the world. For beef, that's the US, Argentina, Brazil and China, predominantly. In the rest of the world, large scale farming or slaughtering is not the norm.
Generally my point in this discussion is that you should not bundle together factory farms and slaughterhouses in the US with, e.g. small dairy farms in the Pyrenees or Austria, or Bantu farmers in Africa, etc. There is one way that people eat meat in the Americas, Australia and China, and quite another in other parts of the world.
So when you say "those who choose to eat meat" financially support the industrial animal processing system, you're painting with an overly broad brush and I don't think it's serving anyone's purposes to do so.
> Generally my point in this discussion is that you should not bundle together factory farms and slaughterhouses in the US with, e.g. small dairy farms in the Pyrenees or Austria, or Bantu farmers in Africa, etc. There is one way that people eat meat in the Americas, Australia and China, and quite another in other parts of the world.
And even if you assume the existence of supposedly “ethical” animal agriculture — which is considerably farcical given the non-consensuality of murder in any case — it’s inherently irrelevant because these niche models of food production don’t scale to feeding the world.
That's not what the data you link to ("your data") shows. It shows who are the
biggest single country net exporters and importers of poultry, but it doesn't
show you who sells to whom and who buys from whom, for example, Germany and
France are in the groups of both biggest net importers and exporters.
Further, that import/export data is not at all representative of the amount
of meat consumed by people in the different countries in "your data". The
following is from Our World in Data and it shows that, for example, China,
which is listed in "your data" as one of the largest net importers of poultry,
has a very low rate of overall meat consumption compared with the countries
that are net exporters:
So, perhaps counter-intuitively, it is possible for a country to be both a
large net exporter and exporter, or one of the two and at the same time not
have a large per-capita meat consumption.
Finally, "your data" is only about poultry, whereas factory farming and
slaughterhouses in the Americas produce primarily beef cattle. Certainly, in
my comment I mentioned beef cattle, not poultry.
> And even if you assume the existence of supposedly “ethical” animal
agriculture — which is considerably farcical given the non-consensuality of
murder in any case — it’s inherently irrelevant because these niche models of
food production don’t scale to feeding the world.
Killing non-human animals is not "murder" in any legal system I'm aware of.
Where do you live?
As I say in another comment, yes, small-scale farming can absolutely feed the
world. Most of the world eats way too much meat, way much more than any human
needs to. We have factory farms because of the way the economy works, not
because of what humans need to eat to survive. Healthy adult humans only need
to eat meat a few times a year and can fulfill their needs for nutrients found
only in animal products with eggs and dairy, and I guess fish, depending on
whether one considers fish to be "meat" or not. Humans are omnivores, but
there's a lot of other stuff we need to eat, besides meat, and to have a
balanced diet we really need to eat everything - in proportional amounts.
Bottom line, perhaps factory farms are needed to cover the demand for meat in
the Americas, but they are not in any way "needed" to cover the need of meat
of any humans anywhere.
In practice it generally comes down to demonstratable utility more than direct concerns about animal well-being. At the most basic level, if you can learn a useful lesson from subjecting an animal to whatever conditions, then the work is generally approvable. But if the researcher has not done their due diligence in experimental design then the whole operation is pointless, or worse than pointless if they then go and p-hack their way through a publication.
For a physics analogue, think of animal experiments like a beamline proposal. In order to get time on the beamline you need to explain what you are doing, what your experiment is intended to accomplish, and why the experiment achieves those goals. With these basic checks you can hopefully ensure that the allocated time is not obviously going to be wasted. Animal experiments can easily be about as expensive in terms of money and time as a beamline-based project, including the cost for the beamline operation itself.
Yet I think both these concerns come from very wealthy people who have time thinking those thoughts.
Most people, when they have enough money to buy a bit of meat, are relieved to have such a good intake of protein. And most life, in the broader context, doesn't even have the ability to compute this question.
I wonder if we're not overthinking it a bit. Sadistic pleasure in torturing animal should be prevented but also because it can derive to human treatment, and we should accept that animals that would never have been born if not for food or experimental purpose are just necessary for our greater good until we find something that really works better.
Assuming you are not living in a good desert, you can eat a delicious healthy plant based diet for very little. Plant based diets are not something that need to be left to the very wealthy at all.
To those who literally cannot access those foods, I don’t think anyone holds them accountable.
I mean pretty much everything that has ever been written, and will ever be written on hackernews counts as come(ing) from very wealthy people who have time thinking those thoughts.
I'm not sure why you wrote that here rather than on some discussion on programming or whatever else.
I don't think that's that weird, they're setting standards for their own behavior and the food source is largely beyond their control. That space probably isn't even directly controlled by them but by the larger university.
Many people don't want to avoid things that have massive negative externalities but at some point we have to take responsibility for the harm we cause.
Moralist principles aren't really my issue here. Its kinda sad that animals suffer but I understand that not many people care about that. My issue is the massive ecological harm done by eating other animals compared to eating plants.
Climate change and ecosystem collapse are real, concrete problems that are coming home to roost, and I find it incredibly sad that educated, prosperous people don't do the bare minimum they could to reduce these problems.
>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.
People often feel differently about food animals than they do about lab animals. Part of it has to do with the kinds of animals. People get very upset about the treatment of beagles, which are used in research for human eye applications, but not cows. The species seems to be a major factor.
Last year of college we could submit our own experiment. I did a physics one so it didn't apply but my peers at the time mostly did biology related experiments.
As a rule of thumb, as our biology professor put it, just make sure the animal you're experimenting on do not look like a baby (big head, big eyes, small mouth, makes squeaking sounds). This is why experiments on fish were ok but "fish embryo" would get much more scrutiny.
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.
Yeah I'm a vegan and know a few vegetarians, but still caring about this stuff is still incredibly niche. I was generalising (probably too much) in my comment above.
> try to imagine that we live in a world where no one has ever used animals in research before, and someone proposes it for the very first time
Why do I have to imagine? We live in that world. At some point in our history people decided to use animals in research.
It seems like this is a slight-of-hand - it's asking us to imagine ourselves, now in that environment. But most of us are far removed from hunting, killing animals for food, raiding, etc. and don't live in a time where most kids died before adulthood and where pricking your thumb on a rose could cause an infection leading to death.
In our history, we know that people treated other people pretty poorly, and animals even worse. There was no problem in using animals in research.
> Even if you can find one particular invention – insulin is often brought up
Manned flight and space travel were both preceded by animal experiments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkeys_and_apes_in_space comments "Before humans went into space in the 1960s, several other animals were launched into space, including numerous other primates, so that scientists could investigate the biological effects of spaceflight."
A few examples drawn from medical history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiaan_Barnard - "Barnard performed experiments on dogs while investigating intestinal atresia ... Barnard was able to reproduce this condition in a fetus puppy ... Jannie Louw used this innovation in a clinical setting, and Barnard's method saved the lives of ten babies in Cape Town. This technique was also adapted by surgeons in Britain and the US."
Same page - "Gil Campbell who had demonstrated that a dog's lung could be used to oxygenate blood during open-heart surgery. (The year before Barnard arrived, Lillehei and Campbell had used this procedure for twenty minutes during surgery on a 13-year-old boy with ventricular septal defect, and the boy had made a full recovery.)"
I picked Barnard because I know he was one of several doctors who practiced on dogs to get experience on how to do human open heart surgery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Kantrowitz - "Using dogs and other animals as experimental subjects, Kantrowitz developed an artificial left heart, an early version of an oxygen generator for use as a component in a heart-lung machine and a treatment for coronary artery disease"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_C - guinea pigs were discovered to be a good laboratory animal model for scurvy and the identification of vitamin C. Note that while Lind did human testing to identify that citrus fruits prevented scurvy, that didn't pinpoint vitamin C.
Most of toxicological studies are cargo cult level science, so yeah it's hardly surprising it's "ineffective". The worst part is that it is codified in regulations and it's now a political problem to fix it, which makes it a lot harder.
I think there's an argument to be made that informed consent can't be given by someone who doesn't understand the underlying science, which is virtually everyone.
I'd be surprised if most people who advocate that drugs be tested on consenting adult humans would themselves give consent... especially to drugs which weren't already shown to be safe when tested on animals.
It would be interesting if every citizen was required to act as a research subject every year, to more equitably distribute human testing.
But of course most people would freak out if such a requirement was ever seriously floated, as they want drugs tested on others not on them, so it would never happen.
I think you're going to have trouble finding adult humans that are willing to infect themselves with, e.g., vibrio cholera to test new vaccines (or, for that matter, to have their guts biopsied for immunological assays).
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 having a right to do anything to the "inferior" beings. (For example, a human adult is "superior" to a human infant; but it doesn't give them the right to torture it.)
We torture animals because we can, and because we don't think about it. But it won't last, because the more we think about it, the less acceptable it becomes.
> We decide humans are superior to other animals because we are humans, and us>them.
That's painting things with a pretty broad brush, not everyone thinks this way. From conversing with people about the issue, those that do, do so mostly because they haven't actually put any conscious thought into it, even a few minutes is enough to knock down that straw man.
Personally, I think humans are superior to other animals because we are more capable of feeling and thinking than they are. A bacterium or plant cannot feel joy, it cannot communicate pride in it's accomplishments to other members of its species, it cannot feel pain, it cannot suffer, it cannot develop into an adult which can do those things, it just is. A pig, dog, or dolphin can do many of those things, a chicken or fish can a little but much less so.
Empirically, to me, this capability criteria sets a 'value' roughly proportional to their number of cortical neurons on a logarithmic scale.
If an alien species came to Earth, and they were FAR more emotionally sensitive than we were, and could suffer MUCH more as a result, would that make your suffering when they start to enslave you any less meaningful? Would you understand, and allow yourself to be enslaved, or would you believe that it was still wrong for them to do that to you, even if they had the capacity to suffer more?
I personally don’t think so. Can I feel a wider range of emotions than a chicken? Probably. Can I be upset or elated by more things than a chicken? Probably. Can the chicken still suffer? Yes. Can it be anxious? Can it be terrified? Can it be in pain? Can it be lonely? All yes.
Whether or not it feels any if those things more or less than anything else is irrelevant when it doesn’t need to happen at all.
> If an alien species came to Earth, and they were FAR more emotionally sensitive than we were, and could suffer MUCH more as a result, would that make your suffering when they start to enslave you any less meaningful?
But perhaps they would do so in a way that is appropriate for our level of consciousness. Perhaps we'd not even be aware that someone was experimenting on us, just like animals have no idea that this is what is happening to them. Etc.
Oh boy, let me tell you, animals absolutely know what we are doing to them. They suffer immensely. Check this out, it offers just a glimpse into what that suffering includes: https://youtu.be/LQRAfJyEsko
No it’s about factory farming. If you were specifically talking about animal testing, the video I linked is irrelevant. I was talking about what we do to animals in general, not just testing.
But to that point, the first chapter of Peter Singer’s “Animal Liberation” covers what animal testing is, and how horrific it can be, if you’d like to learn more about just how aware these animals are about what we are doing to them.
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 refusing to eat them; and the other claims that humans are superior to other animals and so we can treat those other animals in the same way that other animals treat each other, by eating them.
I think both sides are missing the point: we are not superior to other animals. We are better equipped to eat them. As a species, but not as individuals. Other animals are genearlly better equipped to eat us and so, for example, lions, sharks, etc carnivores kill a few individual humans mostly for food (but not always) every year.
And then there's the fact that cows kill a few humans every year (intentionally, after attacking them deliberately, not by accident), as do hippos and elephants: obligate plant-eaters that don't want to eat us, just kill us.
So to me it's clear that we're animals that treat other animals like other animals treat other animals and there isn't a hint of moral or other superiority anywhere to be found.
I don't think so either, but in my comment I'm talking about animals eating other animals, not animals farming humans.
I have many examples of animals torturing other animals, for nothing else but pleasrue. Where I live, there is a small clan of seven cats. I see them playing with their food often. I don't know if you have cats and if you've seen them hunting and seen what they do when they catch their prey, but it's revolting. At least we don't do that to the animals we eat.
I also have examples of animals killing other animals just to kill them, not even to eat them. Ten years ago two dogs sneaked in the chicken coop and killed 40 chickens, piled their corpses high, and didn't eat a single one of them. Four or five years ago, some stray dogs got into the goat enclosure and killed five goats and a few chickens. They left the goats half-dead with their guts streaming out of their bellies, and again didn't eat them. This year, stray dogs snuck in another goat pen and killed three goats, including a young kid.
Humans also kill senselessly, if left to their own devices. But, in modern societies, they are not left to their own devices and there's strict laws against such behaviour. And this behavior is absolutely not the behaviour of farmers.
The humans who own the goats and the chickens in my examples slaughter maybe one or two goats and a dozen chickens a year. Slaughter and eat them. Nobody who raises animals kills them for fun, first because killing an animal is not funny at all, second because animals are valuable and humans who raise animals respect at the very least that value, and many also hold those animals very dear, care for them better than they care for their own children, and respect the fact that those animals die so we can eat their meat.
You will not learn all this from anti-meat eating propaganda.
You will also never see any vegans or animal rights activists going to farms and helping the farmers care for the animals. All the vegans and the animal rights folks care about, is that other humans stop eating meat. What happens to the animals we raise for meat, that never seems to be part of the conversation, unless it is to show images of animals in industrial farms to shock other humans into quitting meat. In vegan and animal rights propaganda, you hear about the atrocities, about the horrors of the slaughterhouses, about fluffy baby bunnies having toxic substances dripped in their eyes- but you never hear about the farmers who stay up all night helping their cows to give birth, or keeping vigil over a sick ewe. Because that is very tricky to portray as torture, and the propaganda is that humans torture animals, always, no matter what. This is a lie, a disgusting lie and it is only serving to put small farmers out of business and leave their land and their animals to the hands of the industry.
I like how the article starts with talking about software, because I find the case for ethical software, and ethical treatment of animals to be linked.
There should be no animal exploitation. If humans want human things they should test on humans which volunteer to be tested on. Everything else is exploitive to others.
Much of the problem comes from the fact that there is insufficient incentive for the studies to be effective in the first place. The sample size issue is real and often justified due to a lack of resources, but this results in minimum publishable units which are anecdotal and an over-reliance on meta-studies which attempt to aggregate these positively-biased results. Increasing the sample size is not always possible, but sometimes there are alternative trial designs which can yield different but more reliable outcomes.
Another aspect of effectiveness comes from whether the animal studies are actually designed to advance anything at all. For example, if the goal is to develop an imaging technique in humans, then the purpose of animal experiments is primarily to confirm that the idea is not wrong, debug the machinery and protocols, and generally get things to the point that the system is no longer the point of failure when running experiments on humans. Instead it is common to see series of publications on new imaging methods and contrast agents which grind away at small animals with no visible attempts to progress upward, which pushes back the time at which you can actually learn how the system works. Publishing this way is far safer but ultimately pointless: drugs for Alzheimer's is a classic case of optimizing for animals and completely missing in humans.
This is at least partly why pre-registration of experiments is becoming normalized, as it is in human clinical trials. The goal here is to require basic statements of purpose and methods prior to execution, such that it is possible to improve the (often quite expensive and time-consuming) experiments beforehand and not during the manuscript review process. Many research groups lack this internal quality control and as a result some institutions are stepping in to require or provide it.
Lets also consider how much more money and brainpower would be redirected to the development of significantly more advanced technologies if experimentation on animals was to be even partially banned. Things like more advanced simulations, tissue/organ engineering and better non-invasive testing of humans. "Necessity is the mother of invention" and currently animal testing is often the "easy" and "obvious" way to do something.
Nobody really LIKES doing experiments. Even in vitro work is slow, tedious, and expensive. Anything involving living organisms is orders of magnitude more aggrevating.
If we could simulate things instead, we absolutely would: cheaper, faster, less suffering, etc. But we can't.
The canonical example is a nematode called C. elegans. It's small: 959 cells, 302 of which are neurons. It has been studied thoroughly. We have a complete "wiring diagram" of its entire nervous system, we know the origin and fate of every single cell, it has been sequenced and probed and imaged with every technology under the sun. If there is an organism we should be able to simulate, C. elegans is it. But there aren't any good models of it, in the sense that you start a simulation and it behaves like a "real" worm. There are a lot of factors that we know we don't understand/can't model well: the passive diffusion of neuromodulators is probably important but is a nightmare to simulate. There are undoubtedly other factors we don't even know matter yet too.
The worm is, of course, really simple. A human brain has about 300M times more neurons (and combinatorially-many more connections between them).
Yes, I know we can't simulate a worm and that it's really hard - that's the point - much more brainpower and resources are required to make progress on the simulation front, but resources are finite and many of them are currently being spent on animal experiments - many of which are arguably not delivering value.
I have yet to hear a convincing argument that human life matters at all, but I operate as though it does because it feels like it does and in some sense that's all the reason you should need.
If the reduction of suffering is not something that you internally see as valuable, you might want to check with a psychologist (I mean that plain matter-of-fact-ly). While I can construct philosophical arguments and know what nihilism is, outside of thought experiments this is highly unusual for any individual capable of any empathy at all.
Thanks for the diagnosis, I think it's not as highly unusual as you might think. I bet outside of their relatively small social circles humans aren't preoccupied with reduction of suffering or altruism in any meaningful way. Of course, it's not a fashionable thing to say (see the downwotes) and I'd love to be proven wrong but I just don't see it.
Most people may not be concerned with reduction of suffering but those that argue for not killing animals for food definitely are. I'm not sure why you think it has anything to do with being fashionable.
I disagree, the rate of vegetarianism has been increasing over the years and the rate of people demanding more ethical meat products e.g. free range eggs and chicken becoming more popular too. This is the free market catering to demand that was almost non existent 30 years ago.
Most people probably don't preoccupy themselves with reduction of suffering, but that is not the same as saying most people don't see value in reducing suffering.
Its true though, not being able feel empathy for anyone or thing that is not normal. So any individual who can't would be well served going to a psychologist or being expelled from society entirely. Reduction of suffering being good is generally viewed as axiomatic. I don't want any part of any moral code that doesn't assume that. And I frankly don't care about the feelings of those who are indifferent to suffering.
I think it is a pretty big leap from 'maybe this is not automatically good' to 'you must be a pscyhopath.' If there were no trade-offs, then it would be a short discussion and we could definitely fall back on axioms.
Theres a huge difference between the statements "Lots of humans eatanimals for sustenance and there is a tradeoff between the value we derive vs the suffering of the animals" vs "Prove that I should care about suffering".
I mean more likely the OP is just being edgy and is only performatively apathetic at a surface level, but the only thing we have to go off of are their words, which do point to some deeper problem.
So the main reason to exploit animal is because the other human hate it and that other human could harm you. I see so it has nothing to do with the animal suffering itself.
I know that rule of thumb, but it's only a rule of thumb. I haven't yet seen a way to suggest seeing a doctor via the written part of the web that won't immediately get interpreted as name calling by many people.
I want to second the clarifications by adrianN and shawnz -- there is a difference between not actively caring about suffering, and not even seeing the point in anyone caring about it.
It seems my "I in fact believe you should see a psychologist" worked exactly as well rootusrootus implied it would. Many seem to think I want to label the previous poster as a psychopath, and do so in hatred. That was not my intention. I admit, I fail at communication, regularly, even more so the more I try to refrain from it.
Although suggested otherwise, my message did *not* contain a diagnosis. Given this extremely limited context, I doubt anyone could give a proper remote diagnosis. And I especially did not attach a psychopathy label to the previous poster. I personally know of at least three mental/neurological atypical (and not voluntarily chosen) states that cause people to (partially) adopt nihilism, and I'm sure mental health professionals have seen quite a few more.
You seem like a self-interest oriented individual, so perhaps you will find this idea worth considering:
The animals are in some ways like our collective ancestors, who have continued living the way we changed from.
The machines are in some ways like our collective offspring, finding new ways to function while we stay where we currently can't move from (carbon-DNA mechanics).
It has been observed that machines learn the same way animals do -- mostly by watching and repeating, not by "listening" to what they're told to do.
So in how we treat the animals is going to translate into how we are treated once we are no longer in power.
That seems like a perfectly legitimate question. Is it a good idea to anthropomorphize other animals? Is it beneficial to society overall to make macro-level policy decisions based on moral beliefs that are more of a personal thing?
FWIW, HN on the weekend is a different beast entirely than it is on weekdays. Even dang needs some time off, and the reduction in moderation can be glaringly obvious. Makes me really appreciate how much of the 'HN we all love' is a result of his efforts as much as it is a general consensus by participants on this site.
The way you are using the word anthropomorphism implies that there is a difference between humans and other animals and that we should concern ourselves with human suffering, but not with animal suffering. If you think we shouldn’t concern ourselves with the second, then what is the argument for concerning ourselves with the first?
Of course we make policy decisions based on moral belief. We do outlaw murder and rape, for example.
I think this is probably sample bias. HN on the weekend isn't a different beast entirely, and FWIW my and other mods' time off doesn't particularly correlate with weekends. Thanks for the kind words in any case!
I've got a good one: happy critters taste better. Modern factory farmed pork is fine, and $2/lb is awesome and wonderful; but I'll never have pork like the pig I raised as a child, or the pigs the neighbor ran in a retired peach orchard, from such a lifestyle.
Because you wouldn't want to be subjected to suffering yourself. It's not complicated.
All humans everywhere desire the end of their own suffering. We're awful at minimizing it but you can see our hamfisted attempts in our seeking out of pleasures and avoidance of activities which are unpleasant, stressful, and painful.
When we observe other humans/animals hurting most of us feel with what is suffering.
Exactly. If anyone reading this is puzzled about whether reduction of suffering is worth striving for, you only need to observe yourself when you are suffering. Do you want more suffering or less suffering?
I suppose a person could argue that the universe is just a bunch of atoms and that living beings and their suffering is just chemicals behaving in a certain way and in that sense it doesn’t matter any more than any other chemical reaction but it seems like that argument would also render the concept of “striving” to be moot.
You dropped a controversial opinion with absolutely nothing to back it up and are now disappointed of the replies. What else did you expect instead? (Well, beside something "better")
I've expected for people to formulate an interesting, persuasive counter argument. That's how you advance a conversation. You don't advance the discussion by ad hominem remarks or ignoring the argument like some people have done.
There was no argument that could have been countered. You stated the opinion that you have not heard any argument yet that suffering actually should be minimized but did not list any of these arguments much less explained why you did not find them convincing.
There was nothing anyone could possibly have debated in a reasonable way.
You wrote down a truly idiotic thought with no argument or justification whatsoever and you expect people to take you seriously, where did you learn to be so brave and clever.
Please don't cross into personal attack or respond by breaking the site guidelines yourself. Regardless of how bad or annoying another comment is (or you feel it is), you owe the community better if you're participating here.
That's obvious flamebait, and tedious self-congratulatory tropes like "Unpopular opinion" and "expected better" are flame multipliers. Please don't post like that here.
Morality and compassion are traits humans evolved in order to build society and have lasting social relationships. There's nothing natural about them, nature is full of animals exploiting, killing, hunting other animals. Nature limits compassion to family and sometimes tribe / pack. Imagine a lion with compassion for zebras.
It's easy for those feelings to spill over to other animals over their intended purpose (building a human society), but people need to realize those feelings have overreached their purpose.
I argue that the only reason this guy had written this article in the first place is the introduction of mice into his family, which triggered the natural response of compassion to family members.
Humans only recently managed to convince themselves to extend compassion beyond their tribe, which is what they were programmed to.
The claim that "probability of meaningful transfer between animals to humans can be astoundingly low, far below 50%" requires more scrutiny. Let's say drug b is being tested for treating condition A. Assume that it's found effective in rats. It seems the claim then is that probability of it also being effective in humans is less than 50% and sometimes 0%. But this in itself isn't a good enough argument against animal testing. If one can show that there were drugs c, d, e.. etc that were found ineffective in rats and as a result did not have to be considered for human trials. If there is a good enough probability that not effective in rats A implies not effective in humans, it will still lead to huge benefits to science and clinical trials.
We have no idea how many drugs would work in humans but are not being considered because they don't work in animals. If we assume it's about the same as the number that work in animals but don't work in humans, we're missing out on a huge number of therapies.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 386 ms ] threadAnother thing. If animal testing was outlawed, the same testing would probably end up being done on poor people instead. Is that worse? I think so.
That's... quite the leap. The entire point is that ethics committees are much more averse to human testing than to animal testing, so we're less conscientious about animal testing.
The quality of results from human testing is many orders of magnitude better; if you're willing to do it, there's no point in doing any animal testing.
2. Using humans for testing makes no sense bc. animals are exactly used to avoid early testing on humans
>> if you're willing to do [human testing], there's no point in doing any animal testing.
> animals are exactly used to avoid early testing on humans
These are two statements of the same idea.
Animal testing is unnecessary most of the time. Even when its necessary they are brutally tortured and after testing is over they are simply killed. But you know companies don't think animal deserves to live. We can use simulations etc but you know its hard to change culture.
1. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/ethics-in-human-experimenta...
> Animal testing is unnecessary most of the time. Even when its necessary they are brutally tortured
If animal testing involves brutally torturing the test subjects, then surely it would be much worse for poor human test subjects if they are swapped in, compared to what they go through now. Those steps that involve torturous pain would have to happen with the human subjects instead of the animals.
If we remove animals from this process, the first time a lot of products will touch living tissue is during these trials.
Also, some Asian countries would get a huge advantage as they don't seem to care as much about animal rights, unfortunately.
Anyway, it's a bad argument, but one that has to be taken into account as the practice won't stop anyway.
The quality of discourse on HN goes up when we all meaningfully engage with the content. The goal shouldn't be to see who is fastest to post a dismissal of the headline.
And sure, I think we can all agree that nobody should be doing useless experiments, whether on animals or not.
But that in no way proves the article’s argument, and it hardly even supports it.
Are we going to test out new CRISPR therapeutic delivery systems in humans? We don’t have a non-living system that replicates a circulatory system, an immune system, and a liver. If the author has a suggestion for how to do things like this safely and effectively without animals, I didn’t hear it.
The author also claims to some extend that animal experiments can be replaced by other methods. In the general case this is simply wrong, you cannot replace all animal experiments. There are cases where you can gain similar information from other experiments without animals, and those should certainly be further developed. But this is really hard to discuss in general, the specifics matter here and not all animal experiments are equal. Animal experiments are also expensive and time consuming, if there are established and reliable alternatives they will find their use.
The article explicitly states this in no uncertain terms as the final sentence in the paragraph you are talking about: "I see no good reason that [animal testing for cosmetics] should not be banned totally and everywhere."
I agree that the article is unfocused. However for the specific issues you are mentioning here, it is simple to search the article to see if the author has covered the relevant point you are making.
> The quality of discourse on HN goes up when we all meaningfully engage with the content. The goal shouldn't be to see who is fastest to post a dismissal of the headline.
The same could be said about comments.
If something is going to human probably means it is safe which should mean safe for animals to some extent imo. But to save 1% of research cost you know researcher don't care about animal life :/
I'm also on the IACUC for my company, and I can assure you that we do care about animal life. We go to great lengths to ensure that research is being done in ways that maximize animal welfare to the extent that is possible. The FDA requires animal studies for safety and efficacy, and we can debate the morality of testing in mice, then NHPs before humans, but the system as it exists prioritizes de-risking first human doses as much as possible. Given that system, it is the job of the IACUC to oversee and approve every procedure done to an animal in the facility or in our company's name at other facilities. It's a big job that, at least at my place, is taken very seriously by researchers and up the chain of management.
The problem is that in your scenario, many many more humans would be harmed. While animal models are flawed, there are no cell culture tools that even come close to recapitulating the system wide effects you get in a whole organism. Without animal tests, all the drugs that hurt a mouse (and there are very many that fail in mouse tests for this reason) would instead do it to humans.
You can ban animal research, but if you do, know that virtually none of the medicines you take would exist. It really is that stark.
I am personally not ok with subjecting animals to torture, in order to extend human lifespans.
It’s not something I would want done to me if a more advanced alien species were to come along, but I suppose it is an easier decision to make when you are on the side that benefits.
Use computer models first as much as possible, while we know they are imperfect. In vitro-studies before in-vivo. Then test on volunteers (paid), starting with very very small doses of whatever you want to test to reduce the risk to the maximum, and measure the effects on living systems as you go to better understand how it is metabolized.
I remember using computer modeling - the lead said “oh yeah, tweak the molecule here and you’ll double the potency”. Cool, make the tweak and…potency was 1/10th.
And we do toxicity filtering already, before we get to animal models (why trying something you know will fail?). Despite this we have plenty of highly toxic molecule make it through. I remember the rats who testicles went necrotic after the first dose. Never saw that coming and thank god it didn’t happen in humans.
We’re so far away from even modeling molecules docking with receptors. Toxicity? You’d have plenty of phase 1 volunteers dying every year. Or being horribly harmed.
Are we not doing this already? I would assume this is even cheaper than producing the thing and testing it. And I'm not sure how confident I would be with computer models since we don't know a whole lot about how biology works enough to simulate it (given the simulation would mostly be trying to replicate previous potentially flawed studies)
Reminds me of the story of Lyrica. Logic was it targeted GABA receptors - made sense too since it looked very similar to GABA itself. Sweet! And it had the same effect as a GABA agonist would. Pretty god damn smart people thought that one up!
Then a few years after approval someone figured out it actually worked on glutamate receptors.
Complete luck that it looked like GABA, behaved like a GABA agonist. It just didn’t work that way at all though.
And in vitro tests are very limited in that area. Of course they're still done and useful, but they can't replace animal tests. And testing on paid volunteers is still ethically problematic, you're targeting pretty desperate people if you remove animal experiments which could detect toxic compounds.
I know what I'm an expert in and it certainly isn't this. I trust actual scientists to know what they're doing.
Two specific examples for which animal testing seems essential:
1. Prediction of nanoparticle clearance from in vitro studies does not correlate with clearance in vivo. If you want to know where the particles go (do they hit the target organ/tumor at all? do they ever leave the body?) you need to do in vivo testing.
2. Adolescent idiopathic adolescent scoliosis can now be treated by vertebral tethering and growth modulation, not just bracing or fusion. Zimmer Biomet Spine recently had a device approved to deliver this treatment [0]. Exploratory research to establish cause-effect relationships between tethering and growth modulation depended on large animal models. It's not good to accidentally make a patient's spine worse because you don't understand what's going on.
[0] https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/recently-approved-device...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_babies
I'd wager that it isn't exploitative however, because plants are not sentient, and (AFAWK), do not have thought/feelings or emotions.
I guess my next question would be - if a lion eats a gazelle. Is it exploiting the gazelle?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://olaw.nih.gov/resources/tutorial/iacuc.htm
What about terminally ill humans who have < 1 year to live (assuming the particular testing results won't get skewed by their particular ailments)? How about prisoners sentenced for heinous crimes?
What about humans who are "not productive"? People who have been sentenced to more than 10 years?
You might draw the line at other species. Someone else might draw it differently to not do experiments on intelligent species like whales, dolphins and primates (who are used in lab experiments too). Or someone might include the categories I mentioned above in the list of test subjects.
The big second question is the effectiveness of transferring the results of tests from animals to humans. Coldly speaking, while there are experiments that yield useful results on animals, there are also extremely pointless experiments that are done for the sake of doing.
I won't go on and on but to your statement about " I am willing to sacrifice an insane amount of animal lives in order to save anyone human", would you do it to save Hitler (who is a proxy for someone who, maybe, you should think twice about saving)?
I agree with you about replacing the meat industry but we can do multiple things as a species at the same time. We can work on replacing the meat industry, working on alternate ways of testing drugs, on understanding animal communications and language (and we keep finding new indicators of intelligence) and on reducing our footprint as we get technologically and hopefully culturally more sophisticated.
Meat-as-food can be substituted with non-meat products which net lowers suffering.
Since "animal" basically means "non-human" in the case of "animal testing", by definition, there is no substitute which net lowers suffering.
Humans suffer as least as much as non-human animals.
Humans eating animals eating plants is an ecological disaster.
Its worth emphasising that many animals and their eating habits are also ecological disasters. Cats, cane toads and rabbits come to mind.
And there are people who believe we should stop giving birth and let our species die. They are antinatalists. I think they are too extreme, imho, but you asked where they are: just google them.
> Because they believe that the net suffering is reduced by the joy being brought into the world via the birth.
Sorry, who believes that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level#Biomass_transfer...
Here are charts that compare land use of different foods normalized per calorie / grams of protein:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-kcal-poore
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-protein-poore
If you want to know more, type "land use" into the search box of https://ourworldindata.org and pick an article of your choice.
I live in a community with ranches and farms. The ranchland looks like nature. Other than cows here and there, it's wildland. Coyotes, mountain lions, hawks, and all sorts of wildlife abound.
The farms are manicured flat with row crops, irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides, etc. Farming is vastly more destructive to the natural environment.
"Land use" measured in abstract square feet is not a useful concept.
You might be surprised but 40% of all (cereal) crops are produced to feed animals. That would almost completely go away except a bit to compensate for the loss of meat.
See https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cereal-distribution-to-us...
The other thing we could do of course is to avoid feeding animals with crops like soy and corn, and instead let them browse freely and eat the wild grasses and shrubs that they would eat normally, if humans didn't feed them more "efficient" feeds.
Obviously that would mean a significantly reduced number of farmed animals, but that's a feature, not a bug. Perhaps we can all agree on this: the true plague is industrial meat production.
What percentage of meat or dairy comes from pasture animals? You can't fulfill a country like the US's meat and dairy demand with pasture raised animals. So realistically we are talking about factory farmed animals. If we are talking about factory farmed animals then it goes back to the needing these nature destructing farms you are talking about just to feed animals that then feed humans, this is not an efficient system.
Meat and dairy are separate considerations. Even in industrial farming, meat animals and dairy animals are raised separately and often belong to different breeds. They are certainly treated differently.
So for example, where I'm staying, about 80% of the dairy products are made with the milk of sheep and goats in small farms where the animals range freely, in the summer, and eat stored wild grassses as hay in the winter. On the other hand, most of the meat consumed is chicken and pork and of those animals, at least the chicken are kept in large battery operations. I don't know about pig farming. Also, where I stay there are very few cows, most of them raised for dairy, and the country has one of the smallest, if not the smallest number of cattle in Europe. It's in South Europe, but I don't want to say exactly where.
Anyway when you ask questions like the one above, please consider that the conditions you know from the Americas are not the same in all of the rest of the world, and that most of the rest of the world simply does not eat as much meat, of all kids, as Americans (and by "Americans" I mean people in the US, Argentina and Brazil).
> You can't fulfill a country like the US's meat and dairy demand with pasture raised animals.
"Demand", maybe not. But "need"? It seems to me that this can be done perfectly well simply because the amount currently consumed is extravagant. People in the US eat way too much meat, per capita, compared to almost everyone else in the world, including most industrialised nations. My selection below:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/meat-supply-per-person?ta...
Nobody needs to eat that much meat. If there is "demand" for it, that is the matter that should be addressed. Why do people want to eat so much meat? There is something incredibly wrong in the data above, when you look at how the US, Argentina, Spain and Brazil eat, compared to the other industrialised countries in the chart.
Not everywhere. In the US there is an incredible amount of overlap. For example, Male cows born in the dairy industry end up in the meat industry. But more specifically I don't see how they are separate in the context of this conversation? Aren't we just talking about the inefficiency of raising animals as a food source?
>Anyway when you ask questions like the one above, please consider that the conditions you know from the Americas are not the same in all of the rest of the world, and that most of the rest of the world simply does not eat as much meat, of all kids, as Americans (and by "Americans" I mean people in the US, Argentina and Brazil).
I thought I was, I honestly wanted to know what the percentage of meat and dairy comes from pasture animals in the world. I guess I should of been more clear about that.
>"Demand", maybe not. But "need"? It seems to me that this can be done perfectly well simply because the amount currently consumed is extravagant. People in the US eat way too much meat, per capita, compared to almost everyone else in the world, including most industrialised nations. My selection below:
I 100% agree.
>Nobody needs to eat that much meat.
Again I very much agree.
Well, I confess I don't know the actual numbers. But most places on Earth don't have the intensive farming found in the Americas.
> Aren't we just talking about the inefficiency of raising animals as a food source?
Quite the contrary. In a sibling comment I discuss how ruminants are the most efficient way to turn inedible plant matter to food that humans can eat.
The wikipedia page on "ruminant" has some interesting information about the process of rumination. In short, ruminants have four stomachs. In the first two, plant matter is fermented by bacteria, then regurgitated so that it can be re-chewed to hydrate it with saliva, that promotes bacterial development and controls the pH of these stomachs. The third stomach is a kind of filter that absorbs some nutrients and allows only food of certain size to pass to the final, fourth stomach. The fourth stomach is the true stomach that is similar to the one we have in our beliies. So to eat the plants that ruminants are specialised to eat, we'd need to have it first chewed and pre-digested by ruminants. In yet another comment I noted how sheep and cows that range freely eat wild grasses, and goats eat shrub.
As I say in that other comment, factory farmed cows are fed soy and corn, that humans can also eat, rather than wild grasses that humans can't eat. But that is factory farming. It is actually harmful for ruminants to feed them that kind of food and so it's a practice that should absolutely be eliminated, along with the rest of factory farming.
Far as I can tell, nobody has been able to breed goats in factory farms. And sheep are normally not factory farmed. I don't know what it is that makes cows good for that sort of thing, but you can be assured that where farming is primarily of sheep and goats, whatever automation of processes there exists is nowhere near the scale of factory farms with giant, thousand-animal feedlots as in the Americas.
Anyway I think "efficiency" is a red herring. The farming industry is very efficient at producing cheap meat by the thousand-ton. But human bodies are not tuned to a world were food is produced "efficiently". We are predisposed to eat as much as we can as soon as we can, to make up for the difficulty of finding enough nutrients to sustain us "in the wild". Presented with the extravagant amounts of cheap meat produced by industrial farming, we are inevitably drawn to excesses of consumption. These excesses are used by the very industry that caused them in the first place as justification to produce even more meat, throwing even more fuel to the fire, destroying even more of the environment and treating even more hundreds of thousands of animals like garbage. Inevitably, there is a backlash and people swear off meat, when what we should all be swearing at and off is the meat industry, that would happily farm us if it was profitable.
I hear you and agree with everything you say in the rest of your post. I think we are just coming from two different assumptions. My assumption is that with the population the world the and with the increasing middle class we are seeing an increase in meat and dairy consumption, to a level that cannot be met and hasn't been met, with pasture and grazing animals. Basically I agree with everything you have been saying about the efficiency of ruminants but as a viable way to feed the worlds population, my assumption is that it wont work and isn't working. If you look at places like the EU, Pig meat is their largest meat sector and factory farms account for 85% off all pig meat available on the market. (page 4: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2020/6520...)
The EU is not a singular case, the trend of farms moving towards intensive factory farms is happening everywhere. In my limited research, I couldn't find statistics on how much pasturing china does but I still thought this was interesting: "Today, China produces and consumes half of the world’s pork, produces nearly 20 percent of the world’s poultry, 10 percent of the world’s beef and is the fourth largest milk producer of the world." (https://www.iatp.org/documents/need-feed-chinas-demand-indus...)
Anyway I agree Factory Farming is a terrible "solution", and thinking about food production in the "most efficient" terms is not a approach to the problem either. I just don't think pasturing ruminant animals is a great solution either, I live in a rural farming community and I don't see it actually working. I'll just go eat my lintels and peas until I see a solution that makes any sense to me.
So I think it's a matter of controlling over-supply and reducing the excess of demand. One way I think could work to do this in a way that aligns with middle-class values is to promote a return to traditional, local cuisines and diets. For example, I come from a Mediterrannean country where the majority of the traditional diet is, well, typically mediterrannean, 80% vegetables, pulses and legumes, with tons of olive oil and tomato sauce on everything, and with meat eaten sparingly and most of the time replaced with dairy. Almost all traditional dishes are either vegan, or vegetarian because they include eggs or dairy. We do eat a lot of fish, which is also rapidly becoming impossible to produce sustainably, so that's another discussion to have. Of the meat we eat, most of it is chicken or pork, with sheep or goat eaten a few times a year, as a traditional treat during religious feasts.
In the place I live, sheep and goat farming is free range almost exclusively. I'm afraid pork production is another scandal of animal abuse, not different than factory farms for cows. The same goes for chicken, treating animals like industrial goods must absolutely be made illegal and damn the markets. On the plus side, pork and chicken are much more sustainable from an environmental point of view- and both kinds of animals are absolutely fantastic recyclers of matter that humans can't even consume. Incidentally, the traditional thing to do with whey left over from cheesemaking is to feed it to pigs. When my cheese fails, I feed it to the chickens :)
To my mind a large part of the problem is that most people choose to live in cities, away from food production. This has two effects. On the one hand, the people in the cities have no idea where their food comes from, they're insulated from the reality of animal abuse in factory farms and they even lose the ability to recognise good produce (both meat and plants) from bad. On the other hand, because the location of people is massively centralised, the production and distribution of food also becomes massively centralised.
In simpler words, it's impossible for everyone who lives in the city to have their little garden with their veg and a few chickens or a goat. Instead, the farms are all outside the city and the food is all in the supermarket shelves. If everyone could raise their own animals, grow their own vegetables, we would obviously be in a very different world, with far less animal abuse (certainly far less systematic animal abuse) and far less over-consumption: it takes a lot of work to care for an animal, it makes more economic sense to keep an animal for its milk so one can have dairy year round, rather than slaughter it and eat meat once, and it's also much harder to mistreat or even slaughter an animal for food when one has raised the animal from a baby (one will always find excuses to not do it today).
So a simple solution would be to keep the food where it is produced: in the countryside, away from the city. But then the city folks would literally starve and it wouldn't be about meat or veg anymore, it's just impossible to grow food in the city. So it's not really a practical solution at all.
That depends on the land. Cattle and rainforests don't go together well
In the USA (excluding Alaska), something like 1/4 of all land area is directly used for animal grazing land, and something like 2/3 agriculture production goes to producing animal feed. These take huge amounts of water, fuel, and other resources. Beef production in particular is one of the leading causes of global climate change via CO2 emissions.
I love steaks and hamburgers as much as the next person, but we shouldn’t pretend it has a low environmental cost.
That's a quick dodge, but still, a dodge of the OP's point: you can't eat all the plants that animals eat. For example, I eat primarily sheep and goat and their dairy products. The goats eat shrubs and the sheep browse inedible grasses. In fact, funny story, but I know a girl (not me) who tried to eat the grass the sheep were eating and her mouth filled with sores. I mean duh.
Anyway ruminants have four stomachs just so they can digest plant matter that is impossible for omnivores to digest. Industrially farmed animals are fed soy and corn, that can be digested by humans, but those are not those animals' natural feed. Left to their own devices, outside of factory farming, browsing freely, farm animals would exclusively eat plants that are inedible to humans and so they would convert plant matter to food way, way more efficiently than any human stomach ever could.
Four stomachs and rumination is the most efficient plant-to-meat production mechanism known to anyone.
> "don't eat animal products, eat plants + enriched foods + injections/pills/tablet"
So that would be replacing meat with supplements. I don't think we disagree.
What I disagree with is that it makes any sense to replace real food, meat from animals, with supplements. First because this kind of replacement makes us even more reliant on the food industry, which is the entity that is responsible for the atrocities committed against farm animals in factory farms, and also the damage to the environment caused by such farms. We cannot and should not trust that same industry to provide us with essential nutrients in the form of supplements, because if we do, who knows what new ways they will find to harm us, animals and the environment - the industry is only driven by profit and it will maximise its profit come hell or high water, whether it's selling us sides of beef or B12 pills.
There's a much better alternative: eliminating factory farming, dismantling the meat and dairy megacorps and going back to producing the meat we really need in a way that doesn't cause unnecessary suffering to our domesticated animals and does not destroy the mutualism relation that we've had with them for a few thousand years.
And btw, by "the meat we really need" I mean that most of the world consumes way too much meat, much more than anyone needs. This is the result of the over-supply created by the food industry, for the purpose of maximising its profits as I've said before.
We cannot trust the food industry to feed us, because it will only feed us shit that makes us sick, destroy the environment and harm animals, and it will continue to do so whether we eat meat, plants, or little pills from a bottle.
If adding a step in a supply chain always introduced more net inefficiency, we would never own things like cars or televisions. The complexity you introduce by shortening the supply chain makes a whole host of things completely infeasible.
There are plenty of food sources that could work well for humans without an animal in the intermediate supply chain. But humans aren't about to start consuming their bodyweight in switchgrass or zooplankton just to get a handful of nutrients that only animal sources can easily provide us.
And speak for yourself with regards to morality. Humans evolved as omnivorous creatures, just like millions of other species. I feel no moral obligation to eliminate animal food sources from my diet. The opposite, in fact. Because a vegan diet is effectively an abandonment of culture. I'm not going to stop making Pasteis De Nata or Caldo Verde simply because you feel bad for the animals. Letting my culture wither away like that is a far bigger sin in my eyes than eating animal-derived foods, which we evolved to do.
Also, cultures change and evolve. It was also a part of past cultures to do all manner of inhumane things, and we are all better off for deciding to stop. Simply saying something is a part of culture doesn’t give it a free pass.
Watch what happens to animals in slaughterhouses, and you’ll see why I don’t think preparing Caldo Verde is really super important in comparison: https://youtu.be/7Y_FHhByhBk
Again, speak for yourself about morality. I feel no moral obligation to not be an omnivore. I do feel a moral obligation to pass down my culture to my children.
And it’s not very difficult to get those on a vegan diet. There are LOADS of resources to refer to. For example: https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/the-vegan-diet/
Omnivorous diets can be unhealthy, but not due to nutrition deficiency. The problems with those diets are all solved with moderation. Vegan diets have to deal with nutrient deficiency. Filling gaps in nutrition deficiency takes targeted food intake or supplements. Those aren't always available or cheap. People have food allergies that can eliminate them as candidates. They are hard to incorporate into existing diets and available foods.
I find it a lot more morally objectionable that your privileged culture-less self would pretend to know what's better for the rest of humanity than they are capable of determining for themselves. There's a reason people who care about food refer to vegans with names like the "Hezbollah of vegetarians". You're not diet advocates, you're religious extremists.
You’re saying that I have no culture and that I’m a religious extremist (which seems contradictory a bit) for saying that you can get all the vitamins and minerals you need from non-animal sources. That seems a little disingenuous and ad-hominem, no?
Good luck with life, friend, as you're bound to encounter many other "religious extremists" if your POV is so easily challenged.
And yes, there are far too many religious extremists in modern society. Maybe stop joining them.
I link to a couple videos in this comment section that show what I mean. You should watch them and decide if you think a sentient creature should experience those things because you like how it tastes.
> 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 cats over here gave birth and I realised what is that keening noise adult cats make when they beg for food: it's the same noise the kittens make when they want their mother to breastfeed them. The dogs, a solemn matriarch and her huge son start jumping up and down and cry like little puppies when it's time for food. The cats mob us everytime we step out of the house, just on the off chance we'll drop some tasty morsel. The goats used to not come near me and my friend, but then we fed them a couple of times and now they gallop to us when we enter their enclosure. The chickens catapult themselves from their perches and run like little raptor dragsters when we take them scraps to recycle (there's nothing I've seen that looks more awkward than a chicken running). A small, grey-speckled hen that I fed once or twice now runs to me whenever it sees me because it has forever now associated me with food.
Animals are crazy for food. And so are humans, because we, too, are animals and there's no use trying to shame people with facile moralising, humans have bodies that go absolutely nuts for tasty food and that food includes the meat of other animals.
Edit: vegans are no different. Here's three interviews with three ex-vegan "influencers" and writers, who quit because they just couldn't stand it:
https://www.womenshealthmag.com/food/a32211871/vegan-influen...
I have a few friends who were very vocal vegans, who later started eating animal products again. It's always made me wonder just how many vegans switch back to at least vegetarian diets, after a few years. I looked around, but there's not much in the way of good scholarship on the subject. Anyway, every vegan has the option of going back to eating meat whenever they decide it (one can even "take breaks" and enjoy some meat once in a rare while, then go right back to their fierce advocacy of veganism) which to me makes a lot of the claims about moral superiority a little empty. It's very easy to preach, but who knows exactly what vegans actually eat?
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 otherwise. Nor did I ever trivialize this. I just think that good food doesn’t have to mean animal products. I think good food can include beans, grains, vegetables, fruits, fungi, etc. If you disagree with that, I can recommend some vegan cook books which I think will change your mind.
Also to this point, I don’t think it’s relevant how other animals react to food. We are not those animals. We don’t need to hold ourselves to the standards that species without agriculture and advanced supply lines are held. We are more advanced, can make complex decisions, and have more options.
Then you talk about vegans who have “broken veg” and started eating animal products again. I don’t understand what this has to do with anything. Yes, there are people who break vegan. There people who subscribe to any creed and then become disillusioned. If you’re trying to make a point that veganism is so hard and terrible that not even passionate vegans can stand to adhere to it, Id love to connect you with people who have been staunch vegans for decades. Would you like me to put you in touch with them? There are a lot.
Lastly, you say nobody knows what vegans actually eat, but I can tell you definitely: anything except animal products. That is, after all, the point.
For instance, if I thought it's immoral not to eat meat because an animal died for you to eat its flesh and it's disgusting that you should let it go to waste, would you accept it if I tried to foist my morality upon you? I'm pretty sure that not. But then, why should anyone else accept your morality? Because you say it's good?
> Also to this point, I don’t think it’s relevant how other animals react to food. We are not those animals. We don’t need to hold ourselves to the standards that species without agriculture and advanced supply lines are held. We are more advanced, can make complex decisions, and have more options.
That really confuses me when I speak to vegans and other animal rights advocates. You're essentially saying that we're in some sense, better than, superior, to other animals. But, isn't that claimed superiority exactly the argument used to justify killing and even mistreating non-human animals? I mean, I'm sure I've heard it said that non-human animals don't experience pain as humans do, so it's OK to for example drip toxic chemicals in their eyballs (like the article says), because they don't really hurt, their reactions are just autonomic responses etc. I've read papers studying animal pain and they invariably assume that "animals don't feel pain as humans do" and try to disprove that. In my mind, it's obvious that animals feel pain as humans do, and that humans are not, as you say "more advanced", in any way, shape or form.
Vegans I've spoken to have tried to convince me to become vegan by telling me how farm animals, like sheep and goats and pigs, are intelligent, sensitive, how they have an internal life, etc. Which makes sense to me, of course they are all that. Yet you say that "we can make complex decisions", as if those other animals can't? It's confusing. I appreciate I'm not talking to the same vegans all the time, but it's still, yes, confusing.
Can you tell me, do you really think you're more than those other animals? Never mind me and others who eat meat, obviously you think we're all some kind of sub-life, but do you think yourself to be something "more advanced" than say a sheep or a cow?
> Lastly, you say nobody knows what vegans actually eat, but I can tell you definitely: anything except animal products. That is, after all, the point.
And the point of Christianity is to love thy neighbour and turn the other cheek, or anyway that is the credo. And yet, throughout history, faithful Christans have killed, maimed, murdered, pillaged, raped and looted all over the world with abandon and with the blessings of their respective churches. It is very easy to preach one thing and practice a whole 'nother one. Everyone does it all the time. Why not vegans?
Edit: anyway, how do you know what vegans eat? Are you vegan? Even so, have you any way to know what other vegans eat?
> If you disagree with that, I can recommend some vegan cook books which I think will change your mind.
Thanks, I think I'll pass. I'm from a Mediterrannean country and 80% of the food we eat traditionally is what you would call vegetarian or vegan, not least because we use olive oil as shortening. But that's just the food we eat, not some kind of political ideal. Anyway I'm pretty sure I can cook much better than anyone who discovered in late life that -OMG- vegetables have taste. I knew that since I knew what food is.
But, I still eat meat once in a while and make my own cheese. Actual cheese, that is. Because the tastes and flavours of meat and dairy cannot be replaced by vegetables and fruit, no matter how well the latter are cooked. Sometimes I crave a nice aubergine ...
You're confusing a certain kind of superiority (superiority in moral reasoning, for instance) with another one (the value of life). Humans are superior in the first respect (this is pretty uncontroversial), and I can't really think of any serious philosopher who argues that animals carry equal moral weight as a human. I'm sure they exist, though.
>Yet you say that "we can make complex decisions", as if those other animals can't? It's confusing. I appreciate I'm not talking to the same vegans all the time, but it's still, yes, confusing.
The evidence (and the interpretation of that evidence by biologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers) would point to the fact that humans are capable of moral reasoning to a higher degree than other animals, the conventional thought being that animals have no moral reasoning, though that's controversial.
The debate on the morality of killing animals for food where not necessary has very strong support for the moral vegetarian case[0], arguing from harm to animals, harm to humans, and harm to the environment; but I'd be interested to see if you have any counter-arguments, or rather, ones that haven't already been replied to.
[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vegetarianism/
I also don't like to hold internet conversations with commenters who talk of "arguments" like they're goals in football, whereby points are scored. If you want to exchange views because you think my views are useful to you, then please let me know that you want to have a genuine and constructive conversation. If you just want to win some culture war, then go away.
Nope.
Right now, that's only humans, so I only hold humans to this standard.
You say you hold humans to a certain standard (of morality). But why does this standard entail an avoidance of eating meat? What is immoral about eating meat and what is moral about avoiding it?
Literally just watch Dominion. Watch it to see the suffering I’m talking about. Why do you think animals deserve this so that you can eat a meal? Is that agony they exist in for their whole life worth a hamburger, or a piece of cheese? Vegans say no.
https://youtu.be/LQRAfJyEsko
However, my question was "why is it immoral to eat another animal"? Are you perhaps suggesting that the only way to eat another animal is by causing the extreme suffering undergone by cows in American factory farms?
It should be obvious that this is not the case: people eat meat all over the world, but American factory farms exist only in the Americas and farming in other places does not involve the kind of extreme suffering that you point out. For example, most of the meat I eat is from sheep and goats that graze freely in meadows and hills around the place where I live, in the Eastern Mediterrannean. I know that is true because I see those animals everytime I go out. Some goats live in the farm I'm staying and I can assure you that they are not suffering one bit.
In general, the animals raised by small-scale farmers, in herds of no more than a few dozen animals, are amonng the happiest, healthiest, best fed, best cared for animals the world over, some even better cared than human infants.
Bottom line, it is perfectly possible to eat meat without causing the extreme suffering you are concerned about. To be clear, I absolutely agree with you that causing extreme suffering, of the kind in the video you shared, or of any kind at all, is absolutely morally repugnant. But this extreme suffering is characteristic of factory farmign, not of eating another animal, and so I am not satisfied that I understand why you think that it is immoral to eat another animal.
Edit: I keep rewriting the above to make myself more clear, but everytime I read it, it sounds like something from a high school debate. What I really want to achieve is to understand how you think and maybe help you understand how I think, if that's interesting to you at all. So if something I say sounds completey wrong to you, please let me know and I'll try to make it more clear. I am not looking to score points in a futile internet fight. I'll be happy if we can find some common ground- and I can see that we already have some: I think we're both disgusted by the horrors in the video you shared.
Also, you clearly didn't watch the film because it doesn't discuss American farms, it clearly focuses on Australian farms. Here is a link to the same practices being done in Britain: https://www.landofhopeandglory.org/
These practices are industry standard across the world, though. Peter Singer writes about this in "Animal Liberation". Let me know if you don't want to or cannot pay for a copy of the book and I'll buy it for you. He discusses at _length_ how these standards exists worldwide.
Besides, even those small farms are deeply unethical. They kill animals a mere fraction into their lifespans, and do so in horrific ways, often inhumanely. Killing an animal that does not want to die, if it doesnt need to, is always wrong.
The onus is now on you to educate yourself. I'm done with this conversation. I've pointed you to many places where you can learn about the problem, both in this thread and others in this comment section. If you choose not to, then you choose to remain ignorant to what is happening around the world, every day.
Here is the most comprehensive list of vegan resources and studies that I know of: https://www.vegancheatsheet.org
I suggest you dig into some of those studies and try tearing them apart. Watch some of those films and find reasons why they are bullshit. Then message me (email is in my profile), and tell me how wrong I am. But only after you've really made an effort to understand the issues. Remember, I was a carnist for almost the first 30 years of my life, so I know how you feel. I'm asking you to challenge yourself and really see the issue from the other side.
That's not true. The majority of farms around the world are small-scale farms with no more than a few dozen animals or so. Factory farms are not the norm.
> Besides, even those small farms are deeply unethical. They kill animals a mere fraction into their lifespans, and do so in horrific ways, often inhumanely.
I'm sorry but this is completely ridiculous. Why would farmers want to kill their animals "in horrific ways"? To achieve what? Hard as it might be for you to believe, farmers are not Jason Voorhees, going around with a machette murdering innocent little lambs for fun. It's obvious to me that despite your interest for animals' welfare you've never talked to a farmer and never been to a farm, looked at the animals and seen how they are treated first hand.
Instead, it seems to me that you take all your information from books and videos like the ones you ask me to "educate myself" with. Surely, you appreciate that those are written by vegans and for vegans, or for the purpose of indoctrinating more people into the vegan ideology? Such books and videos are no reliable source of knowledge for farming. They only show you what they want you to see: the horrors of factory farming. They seem to make the point that because factory farming is a horror, all farming is a horror. This is just a rhetorical trick and it should be easy to see through.
Anyway if you don't want to continue the conversation that's up to you. I don't want to convince you of anything, and I'm not in the habbit of pursuing internet arguments over emai. That sounds... unhygienic. What I was hoping to achieve with this conversation was to have a useful exchange of views. I don't guess this is possible though.
Proof that I wasn't lying about the percentage of animals killed in factory farms. Thats USDA data, not some vegan propaganda. Good luck, and reach out if you ever come around to considering a world with less suffering.
> We estimate that 99% of US farmed animals are living in factory farms at present.
The owners of the website are the Sentience Institute, a nonprofit promoting various Effective Altruism goals. One of those goals seems to be the elimination of animal farming. One of the founders of the Institute is the author of a book called "The End of Animal Farming" that "argues animal farming will end by the year 2100 based on effective altruism reasoning and social movement strategy" (see Wikipedia on the book).
So it's vegan propaganda. From the point of view of Effective Altruism, but still, vegan propaganda.
Let's see that quote again:
> We estimate that 99% of US farmed animals are living in factory farms at present.
It says US farmed animals. The whole link talks about the situation in the US. In our discussion, I made the point that factory farms are the norm in the Americas, but not in the rest of the world. I agreed with you that factory farms are an atrocity that must be eliminated. But that atrocity is an American atrocity, and the rest of the world, by and large, is not yet responsible of it although this situation is changing rapidly, because of course where America leads the way in atrocities, everyone else soon follows because that way lie dollars and everyone wants dollars.
In general, my complaint about your comments is that they seem to ignore that there is a world outside the Americas, or even the US, and that this world is not the US and doesn't do things, particularly farming, like the US does them. I seem to be justified to complain so, given the continued American focus of your discussion of farming and animal rights.
You complain this doesn't prove anything outside of the US, but I've already linked to material which covers similar issues in Australia, the UK, and Peter Singer's book which talks about this for all of Europe!
Does someone need to literally drag you to each and every factory farm? Seriously asking, what would it take? Just to consider, on your own, seriously, that perhaps the way we kill these _billions_ of animals every years (100s of billions if you include fish!) might be pretty fucked up.
You say you're interested in exchanging views, but that doesn't seem to be the case. What would it take for you to actually be convinced that there is actually a problem?
Also, it _is_ USDA data. They are using it to draw a conclusion based on things like # of animals that farms own, etc. But it is USDA data they are using.
This is a threat of physical violence and it is very disturbing, especially as it comes after your offering to buy me a book and asking me to contact you by email. You've crossed from creepy stalker to online bully behaviour.
The most disturbing thing is that you seem to not even understand what we are disagreeing about.
What I keep saying is that factory farming is typical only in the Americas. Yes, there are factory farms outside the Americas. No, they are not the norm outside America. Outside America, most farms are small-scale farms with a few dozen animals.
The typical farm in most of the world is a small-scale farm, run by a family, often not even commercially.
Despite your threats to drag me to factofy farms and your insistence that I don't know they exist (clearly, I do, I have repeated several times that "factory farms are an atrocity that must be eliminated"), it is you who hasn't seen the world with your own eyes. It is you who relies, for your knowledge of farming, on books and youtube videos. Books and youtube videos that are specifically created to spread vegan propaganda: they show you the horrors of factory farming, that should rightly outrage everyone, and pretend that there is no other way to farm animals, and that all farming is an atrocity, that all farmers are Freddy Krueger, monsters who torture animals and kill them in "horrific ways".
Instead of trying to coerce me into agreeing with your misinformed beliefs, you're the one who should go and look at the things that the brainwashing rhetoric you try to spread hasn't shown you. Go to the rural communities that subsist on farming, in Europe, in Africa, in India and Bangladesh, in South-East Asia. Go and see the farms, see the animals, talk to the farmers. If you really care about animal welfare, go help the farmers to care for the animals.
But do you really care about animals? Do you really want to know what's going on in the world, or are you more interested in fighting a pointless culture war on the internet?
https://youtu.be/QnrtRaM28cY
It’s a really great intro to some of the common misconceptions
That is insane, and psychopathic. But it is shared by many (most?) humans. The result will be that there will be no animals left, and soon afterwards, no humans left either.
Another question is, how many humans are you willing to sacrifice to save your wife? Your child? Is your child worth a specific number of human lives, in your eyes? And what is that number?
This is illogical.
Humans have been eating animals since the dawn of civilization. We've been using animals in experiments for centuries.
There are still animals to eat and use in experiments. Why? because animals reproduce. There aren't a fixed number of animals.
We only lose species when we kill faster then they reproduce. For experiments and food, that's an impossibility. We bread to accommodate demand.
But our ethics progress and evolve. Similarly, treating other species as commodities for our consumption has been done for millennia but it doesn't mean we should keep doing it.
Is that not a contradiction? When you find yourself thinking that the majority of humans are the abnormal ones...
This definition of insanity might also not be correct. After all, was Galileo insane because most people (assuming they followed the church) didn't agree with his views?
As much as it is necessary.
That being said and with respect, I think you are misrepresenting and lack some understanding... some alternatives to consider.
1) humans are built to consume meat. Yes we can manage alternatives, but it’s not really all that healthy (I know some people claim with a lot of work and expense it’s possible to be healthy...)
2) farms producing beans and grain require a large amount of pesticides, arguably far worse for the environment and humans. Pesticides have been the #1 killer of living creatures
3) animals can eat a diverse set of food, so cattle farms, etc have more biodiversity than row crop
4) many cattle, elk, etc farms, are particularly humane. I recently purchased a grass fed cattle farm and everything I need is onsite. Cattle just roam, drink from the springs, get medicine, have calf’s, etc they seem very very happy.
5) if you have a lot of produce in a field, it’s essential to kill the wildlife trying to eat the field. I don’t think most people understand this, but if you have fields of corn you need to ensure bugs, birds and deer aren’t overly in abundance
I would argue farms mass producing meat could be reduced or need to be changed. But generally speaking, I’d argue leaving chickens out and collecting eggs in the yard isn’t all that bad. Or letting cattle roam until right before butchering.
Personally a really enjoy meat, but at one point I became vegetarian for a few months simply based on what I was eating. I accidentally ended up with a vegetarian diet with sufficient protein etc, which demonstrates how little effort it actually takes.
What Science Says About The Health Benefits Of Plant-Based Diets https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/what-science-says-ab...
"A number of studies have shown that a diet low in meat is linked to longer lifespans. But the matter is far from settled, as some studies haven’t found a significant difference in life expectancy between meat eaters and vegetarians.
"But there is growing evidence that plant-based diets are associated with benefits like lower blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar and reduced body weight. These improved health measures often translate to less risk of heart disease, diabetes, cancer and other diseases. Eating more whole, plant-based foods could help lower the risk of some health conditions, and might even help people live longer. But researchers also suspect that vegetarians are more health-conscious overall — so, they’re likely to be drinking and smoking less and moving their bodies more than the general population — which complicates some study results.
"Still, emerging research points to a potentially helpful role of plant-based diets in managing some chronic health conditions. For instance, some studies suggest that plant-based diets — veganism in particular — may help control rheumatoid arthritis."
https://speakingofresearch.com/2015/12/10/importance-of-anim...
Do we want to give up learning the brain? (And other organs but brain is extra special)
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.
I want ALS and Alzheimer solved as fast as possible and the new solutions supported by proven solid facts so, thanks, but not thanks.
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 engineering and computational methods, and we're 100,000,000 person-hours away from it. But resources are finite, so investment in animal experiments takes resources away from and delays us finding the actual solution. This is of course speculative, but thinking that animal testing will deliver the solution is also speculative, with career & institutional inertia also playing a role.
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.
The authors comparison of kernel bugs to lab testing mice is ridiculous to be honest.
The author cherry picks examples like cosmetics to justify their view, failing to acknowledge a long history of successful testing on animals that led to drugs that help reduce human suffering.
All in all I think the post is bad
As much as I like technology, I would be afraid to use a drug that was only tested this way or even in cultured tissue. The biological system is too complex with too many unknown factors for me to believe this is highly effective method for everything.
By causing the suffering of living, sentient beings. There's a clear and obvious slippery slope here.
The difference in standards between "science animals" and "food animals" is quite stark. It is very similar to the difference in treatment people require between dogs and pigs. No one really cares if pigs suffer, even though they would be furious if dogs experienced the same treatment.
Actually I would argue for the wholesale reduction of the category "food animal". Its largely unnecessary, there are very few people (e.g. with unusual medical needs or living in unusual situations) for whom eating other animals is necessary.
A) humane open pastures where animals grow to middle age before being killed for food, resulting in expensive meat
B) pure agriculture where land is cleared and irrigated for agricultural produce, completely devoid of animal life
I would argue that society A would be better for animals than society B.
Though the productivity differences aren't as large as one would think - protein conversion ratios for smaller animals tend to be 2-3. It's worse for beef (~10) but you have to consider that half the cows are creating milk which has a high protein conversion ratio. And it's potentially even better for animals when you consider the quality of protein - e.g. see https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jsfa.8362
Half?
Our understanding of nutrition is closer to none than to complete.
The more deeply you research this, the more true my statement will seem.
Of course you will not know that if you selectively look at the factory farms with feedlots that are the norm in the US, Argentina, etc. These are indeed atrocities. But, for the time being, they are not representative of the majority of farms in most of the world.
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). Or, if you take a walk around the countryside where I live, you'll see that every meadow and plot of land has a few sheep or goats browsing serenely, often next to the road, typically without even a fence to keep them in, because it's unnecessary. I know one particular dairy farm on a Mediterranean island, with a fully modern barn and automatic milking machine, where, if you visit during the day, you'll see maybe a dozen goats in the barn that can house a couple hundred. The rest are out in the mountains, browsing, and will return on their own in the evening. That's how terrified those allegedly mistreated animals are. The barn is their home.
60% are food animals
36% are we humans
4% are wild animals
So there's that.
Its essentially true that the only animals that matter are the ones we raise. By the numbers anyway.
Also, it doesn't matter how many food animals we have, what matters is how the majority of them are treated. And the majority are not meat and dairy cows raised in feedlots in the US, because that kind of farm animal is a small proportion of all meat an dairy animals bred the world over. From Our World in Data:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-meat-production-by...
You can see that pork and poultry make up the largest amount of meat produced. Though the plot shows meat rather than number of animals, remember that it takes seveal pigs or goats to make the same meat as one cow, and many more chickens. There are way more pigs and chickens farmed the world over than there are cows and cow farming (cow factory farming) is concentrated in the US, Argentina, Brazil and China:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/beef-and-buffalo-meat-pro...
It is those places where the images of tortured cows, that live their whole lives connected to milking and impregnating machines come from. It is such conditions that have to be eliminated. But in most of the rest of the world, those are not typical conditions and the numbers of animals raised are many, many fewer.
Edit: which is not to whitewash the pig and poultry industries. Chickens in particular are treated horribly, even the so-called "free range" ones (in many places it's enough for the chickens to be kept in a gigantic barn with a tiny bit of yard outside for the chickens to be considered "free range", legislation is often an absolute scandal). And there are many large pig farms were pigs are kept in absolutely inhumane conditions.
But, again- that's true in some places, not the world over and not for most animals.
It’s entirely plausible that most animals live under those conditions by now, or will quite soon without intervention.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/18/rise-of-...
Anyway, yes, it seems like I'm wrong and the majority of chickens are grown in intensive farms. For pigs though, 55% is about half of all animals.
But I don't want to argue over margins. The point I'm making in my comments above and elsewhere in this thread is that in most of the world most farms are not factory farms. This is still the case. Note also the title of the article in your link: "Rise of mega farms: how the US model of intensive farming is invading the world". Again, I made the point that industrial farming is typical to the Americas and not the rest of the world. It's "invading" the world, but it's not how most of the world does farming, it's how Americans do farming.
And yes, this will change without intervention because people the world over are blinded by the prospect of maximising their profits, even if all they achieve in the end is to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs (their animals, that feed them). All those farmers will achieve who give up their small family farms for tin sheds on concrete lots is to make themselves slaves and force their children out of the farming business.
So the intervention should be to protect the small scale farmers from the encroachment of the gigantic corporations that want to take their land, their animals and their businesses. This is the only way to ensure that all farm animals are given the care and respect they deserve, care and respect that is simply not available in industrial farming.
> in most of the world most farms are not factory farms
From the perspective of animal welfare, the number of farms matters less than the number of animals raised in horrible conditions. So if factory farms raise 50% of the animals, or even 30% or 20%, this is still a huge problem to me.
I mostly agree with your last paragraph. I have friends who are farmers, who raised and loved and posted Instagram pics of their delightful pair of goats, knowing that they were raised to be food. They slaughtered them eventually, and cooked and ate them for the meal at their wedding ceremony. I do not understand this mentality, but I do know that for the years they raised them, the goats lived a great life.
To me, “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” applies here. Arguments (which I don’t think you have made) about “more cows born is better than fewer cows born” don’t hold water. Quality of life for farmed animals is important. Small-scale farms on the whole do a much better job of making that happen.
In any case, cherrypicked examples of “free range” farms that actually provide shelter for their animals are about as irrelevant as saying hunting is “more ethical” than factory farming. We cannot feed billions more people sustainably on diets heavy in animal products, no matter the method, especially so with the more inefficient methods like free range and hunting. There’s a reason factory farming exists.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellation_d%27origine_contrô...
But I'm not talking about "free range" as a label. In my comment above I've described the animals I've seen, and see around me, right now. Those range freely in the literal sense. They are left to go out on their own and eat what they want, then return to their sheds when they want. I stay in a friend's farm, with goats and chickens on the grounds. Those are not sold anywhere and are not labelled as "free range" by anyone, but they're free range alright. I can assure you. I once made the mistake of cooking one of the farm's chickens as I'd cook a chicken bought at the supermarket. Never again! You basically can't eat the meat of a really free-range chicken unless you boil it for a couple of hours. I chewed and chewed and chewed until my mouth muscles couldn't take it anymore and ate the whole thing because I absolutely didn't want to throw the poor animal away like garbage, but it was painful and unpleasant. Even properly cooked, the meat of really free-range chickens is a dark gray, very unlike the pale white meat of supermarket chickens. Most people would probably not prefer actual "free range" if they had access to it. And I know a good few people who won't eat goat meat because "it stinks".
>> We cannot feed billions more people sustainably on diets heavy in animal products, no matter the method, especially so with the more inefficient methods like free range and hunting. There’s a reason factory farming exists.
The good news is that there is no reason to "feed billions more people ... on diets heavy in animal products". Diets heavy in animal products characterise only certain parts of the world, not coincidentally the same ones where factory farming is the norm. The rest of the world doesn't eat that way, and doesn't need to eat that way. We can feed billions of humans on sustainably grown meat and dairy produced by small scale local farms, like we already do in most of the world.
The trick is to avoid creating an artificial need for even more cheap meat and animal products in the diets of everyone. Just because Americans and some Europeans eat that way doesn't mean that everyone must mimetically do the same.
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.
My place is a mountain "hay" area, meaning it's wet and ideal for cows, and yet most pastures are abandoned and we can see articulated lorries coming from Spain, loaded with straw. They don't bother cutting the hay on slopes, like they still do in Austria/Switzerland/Germany. A few farmers like my neighbour are even reluctant to cut the hay on a good, easy area; he usually waits 2 months after it's "ripe" for a first cut and lets it go bad, and then also misses the second cut.
Yes, you can still see cows in the remaining meadows, but they represent a vanishing part. Also, when you had 10 or 20 cows, it was easy to take them out, or leave them out and move them from meadow to meadow; but doing the same with 100 of them? There isn't enough open meadow land around to sustain a proper rotation (this is not at all a country of huge ranches like a few other countries like the USA), and even if there were, it would require manual (foot) work, while farmers are less and less inclined to leave their tractor seat.
Oh, on the paper, they have the needed surface to feed the cows, because it is mandatory to present a good ratio to get subsidies. But that's because they "took" (bought, rented or just declared as used) fields/meadows/woods here and there: 10 miles away one way, 20 or 30 miles away another way. It's not practical at all. I let you imagine how well they take care of some of them.
Icing on the cake, there are quite many cheese dairies around. The good cheese for the good cows for the good pastures of our good mountain. Well, truth is 75% of the milk doesn't come from here, it is imported from other regions. How comes, in such a "cow area"? Simple: because dairy farming is more work and yet brings much less subsidies than livestock farming for meat which is a true jackpot when you live in a area like mine, classified as "difficult": most cow farmers (1-2 persons) here will get around 40,000-60,000€ subsidies a year for their 99 cows (the 100th and following do not bring more subsidies so they all have about 99 cows) and 75-90 ha declared surfaces (subsidised until the 75th, but a bit more can be needed to have the right head/ha ratio to maximize head subsidies).
There can of course be a few pathological cases too in that domain: one former neighbour was a cheese maker. First they moved to a bigger village in the valley, while keeping the name of the higher altitude, smaller village for their cheese, which was already a bit of a dubious commercial practice, but well, let's say it wasn't a big deal. 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).
> I know one particular dairy farm on a Mediterranean island, with a fully modern barn and automatic milking machine, where, if you visit during the day, you'll see maybe a dozen goats in the barn that can house a couple hundred.
Yeah, well, that French "Mediterranean island" is famous for its VIRTUAL cattle which only exist in documents filed for subsidies. This small area ...
> 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 oppos...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterhouse#Animal_welfar...
Generally my point in this discussion is that you should not bundle together factory farms and slaughterhouses in the US with, e.g. small dairy farms in the Pyrenees or Austria, or Bantu farmers in Africa, etc. There is one way that people eat meat in the Americas, Australia and China, and quite another in other parts of the world.
So when you say "those who choose to eat meat" financially support the industrial animal processing system, you're painting with an overly broad brush and I don't think it's serving anyone's purposes to do so.
The countries which you claim aren’t factory farming are just importing much of their meat from countries which do, see: https://oec.world/en/profile/hs92/poultry-meat
And even if you assume the existence of supposedly “ethical” animal agriculture — which is considerably farcical given the non-consensuality of murder in any case — it’s inherently irrelevant because these niche models of food production don’t scale to feeding the world.
That's not what the data you link to ("your data") shows. It shows who are the biggest single country net exporters and importers of poultry, but it doesn't show you who sells to whom and who buys from whom, for example, Germany and France are in the groups of both biggest net importers and exporters.
Further, that import/export data is not at all representative of the amount of meat consumed by people in the different countries in "your data". The following is from Our World in Data and it shows that, for example, China, which is listed in "your data" as one of the largest net importers of poultry, has a very low rate of overall meat consumption compared with the countries that are net exporters:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/meat-supply-per-person?ta...
So, perhaps counter-intuitively, it is possible for a country to be both a large net exporter and exporter, or one of the two and at the same time not have a large per-capita meat consumption.
Finally, "your data" is only about poultry, whereas factory farming and slaughterhouses in the Americas produce primarily beef cattle. Certainly, in my comment I mentioned beef cattle, not poultry.
> And even if you assume the existence of supposedly “ethical” animal agriculture — which is considerably farcical given the non-consensuality of murder in any case — it’s inherently irrelevant because these niche models of food production don’t scale to feeding the world.
Killing non-human animals is not "murder" in any legal system I'm aware of. Where do you live?
As I say in another comment, yes, small-scale farming can absolutely feed the world. Most of the world eats way too much meat, way much more than any human needs to. We have factory farms because of the way the economy works, not because of what humans need to eat to survive. Healthy adult humans only need to eat meat a few times a year and can fulfill their needs for nutrients found only in animal products with eggs and dairy, and I guess fish, depending on whether one considers fish to be "meat" or not. Humans are omnivores, but there's a lot of other stuff we need to eat, besides meat, and to have a balanced diet we really need to eat everything - in proportional amounts.
Bottom line, perhaps factory farms are needed to cover the demand for meat in the Americas, but they are not in any way "needed" to cover the need of meat of any humans anywhere.
For a physics analogue, think of animal experiments like a beamline proposal. In order to get time on the beamline you need to explain what you are doing, what your experiment is intended to accomplish, and why the experiment achieves those goals. With these basic checks you can hopefully ensure that the allocated time is not obviously going to be wasted. Animal experiments can easily be about as expensive in terms of money and time as a beamline-based project, including the cost for the beamline operation itself.
Most people, when they have enough money to buy a bit of meat, are relieved to have such a good intake of protein. And most life, in the broader context, doesn't even have the ability to compute this question.
I wonder if we're not overthinking it a bit. Sadistic pleasure in torturing animal should be prevented but also because it can derive to human treatment, and we should accept that animals that would never have been born if not for food or experimental purpose are just necessary for our greater good until we find something that really works better.
To those who literally cannot access those foods, I don’t think anyone holds them accountable.
I'm not sure why you wrote that here rather than on some discussion on programming or whatever else.
The other notable difference is that humans are directly responsible for slaughterhouses, and it's not a nutritional requirement.
We don't lecture lions on any sort of ethics, now do we?
Not yet, but we definitely should!
Doesn't the fact that we can consider such things while lions cannot cement the fact that we have dominion over animals?
Climate change and ecosystem collapse are real, concrete problems that are coming home to roost, and I find it incredibly sad that educated, prosperous people don't do the bare minimum they could to reduce these problems.
Why do you assume things you believe are ‘problems’ are problems to others?
>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.
As a rule of thumb, as our biology professor put it, just make sure the animal you're experimenting on do not look like a baby (big head, big eyes, small mouth, makes squeaking sounds). This is why experiments on fish were ok but "fish embryo" would get much more scrutiny.
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.
Why do I have to imagine? We live in that world. At some point in our history people decided to use animals in research.
It seems like this is a slight-of-hand - it's asking us to imagine ourselves, now in that environment. But most of us are far removed from hunting, killing animals for food, raiding, etc. and don't live in a time where most kids died before adulthood and where pricking your thumb on a rose could cause an infection leading to death.
In our history, we know that people treated other people pretty poorly, and animals even worse. There was no problem in using animals in research.
> Even if you can find one particular invention – insulin is often brought up
Manned flight and space travel were both preceded by animal experiments.
The first unmanned balloon flight had a sheep, a duck, and a rooster - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_ballooning#First_un... : "The sheep was believed to have a reasonable approximation of human physiology."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkeys_and_apes_in_space comments "Before humans went into space in the 1960s, several other animals were launched into space, including numerous other primates, so that scientists could investigate the biological effects of spaceflight."
A few examples drawn from medical history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiaan_Barnard - "Barnard performed experiments on dogs while investigating intestinal atresia ... Barnard was able to reproduce this condition in a fetus puppy ... Jannie Louw used this innovation in a clinical setting, and Barnard's method saved the lives of ten babies in Cape Town. This technique was also adapted by surgeons in Britain and the US."
Same page - "Gil Campbell who had demonstrated that a dog's lung could be used to oxygenate blood during open-heart surgery. (The year before Barnard arrived, Lillehei and Campbell had used this procedure for twenty minutes during surgery on a 13-year-old boy with ventricular septal defect, and the boy had made a full recovery.)"
I picked Barnard because I know he was one of several doctors who practiced on dogs to get experience on how to do human open heart surgery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Kantrowitz - "Using dogs and other animals as experimental subjects, Kantrowitz developed an artificial left heart, an early version of an oxygen generator for use as a component in a heart-lung machine and a treatment for coronary artery disease"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_C - guinea pigs were discovered to be a good laboratory animal model for scurvy and the identification of vitamin C. Note that while Lind did human testing to identify that citrus fruits prevented scurvy, that didn't pinpoint vitamin C.
The history of such self-experimentation is chronicled in a book called "Who Goes First?":
https://www.amazon.com/Who-Goes-First-Lawrence-Altman/dp/052...
It would be interesting if every citizen was required to act as a research subject every year, to more equitably distribute human testing.
But of course most people would freak out if such a requirement was ever seriously floated, as they want drugs tested on others not on them, so it would never happen.
if human beings determine a need, then we should pay the price for their development. not force that onto “lesser” species.
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 having a right to do anything to the "inferior" beings. (For example, a human adult is "superior" to a human infant; but it doesn't give them the right to torture it.)
We torture animals because we can, and because we don't think about it. But it won't last, because the more we think about it, the less acceptable it becomes.
That's painting things with a pretty broad brush, not everyone thinks this way. From conversing with people about the issue, those that do, do so mostly because they haven't actually put any conscious thought into it, even a few minutes is enough to knock down that straw man.
Personally, I think humans are superior to other animals because we are more capable of feeling and thinking than they are. A bacterium or plant cannot feel joy, it cannot communicate pride in it's accomplishments to other members of its species, it cannot feel pain, it cannot suffer, it cannot develop into an adult which can do those things, it just is. A pig, dog, or dolphin can do many of those things, a chicken or fish can a little but much less so.
Empirically, to me, this capability criteria sets a 'value' roughly proportional to their number of cortical neurons on a logarithmic scale.
If an alien species came to Earth, and they were FAR more emotionally sensitive than we were, and could suffer MUCH more as a result, would that make your suffering when they start to enslave you any less meaningful? Would you understand, and allow yourself to be enslaved, or would you believe that it was still wrong for them to do that to you, even if they had the capacity to suffer more?
I personally don’t think so. Can I feel a wider range of emotions than a chicken? Probably. Can I be upset or elated by more things than a chicken? Probably. Can the chicken still suffer? Yes. Can it be anxious? Can it be terrified? Can it be in pain? Can it be lonely? All yes.
Whether or not it feels any if those things more or less than anything else is irrelevant when it doesn’t need to happen at all.
But perhaps they would do so in a way that is appropriate for our level of consciousness. Perhaps we'd not even be aware that someone was experimenting on us, just like animals have no idea that this is what is happening to them. Etc.
But to that point, the first chapter of Peter Singer’s “Animal Liberation” covers what animal testing is, and how horrific it can be, if you’d like to learn more about just how aware these animals are about what we are doing to them.
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 refusing to eat them; and the other claims that humans are superior to other animals and so we can treat those other animals in the same way that other animals treat each other, by eating them.
I think both sides are missing the point: we are not superior to other animals. We are better equipped to eat them. As a species, but not as individuals. Other animals are genearlly better equipped to eat us and so, for example, lions, sharks, etc carnivores kill a few individual humans mostly for food (but not always) every year.
And then there's the fact that cows kill a few humans every year (intentionally, after attacking them deliberately, not by accident), as do hippos and elephants: obligate plant-eaters that don't want to eat us, just kill us.
So to me it's clear that we're animals that treat other animals like other animals treat other animals and there isn't a hint of moral or other superiority anywhere to be found.
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?
I have many examples of animals torturing other animals, for nothing else but pleasrue. Where I live, there is a small clan of seven cats. I see them playing with their food often. I don't know if you have cats and if you've seen them hunting and seen what they do when they catch their prey, but it's revolting. At least we don't do that to the animals we eat.
I also have examples of animals killing other animals just to kill them, not even to eat them. Ten years ago two dogs sneaked in the chicken coop and killed 40 chickens, piled their corpses high, and didn't eat a single one of them. Four or five years ago, some stray dogs got into the goat enclosure and killed five goats and a few chickens. They left the goats half-dead with their guts streaming out of their bellies, and again didn't eat them. This year, stray dogs snuck in another goat pen and killed three goats, including a young kid.
Humans also kill senselessly, if left to their own devices. But, in modern societies, they are not left to their own devices and there's strict laws against such behaviour. And this behavior is absolutely not the behaviour of farmers.
The humans who own the goats and the chickens in my examples slaughter maybe one or two goats and a dozen chickens a year. Slaughter and eat them. Nobody who raises animals kills them for fun, first because killing an animal is not funny at all, second because animals are valuable and humans who raise animals respect at the very least that value, and many also hold those animals very dear, care for them better than they care for their own children, and respect the fact that those animals die so we can eat their meat.
You will not learn all this from anti-meat eating propaganda.
You will also never see any vegans or animal rights activists going to farms and helping the farmers care for the animals. All the vegans and the animal rights folks care about, is that other humans stop eating meat. What happens to the animals we raise for meat, that never seems to be part of the conversation, unless it is to show images of animals in industrial farms to shock other humans into quitting meat. In vegan and animal rights propaganda, you hear about the atrocities, about the horrors of the slaughterhouses, about fluffy baby bunnies having toxic substances dripped in their eyes- but you never hear about the farmers who stay up all night helping their cows to give birth, or keeping vigil over a sick ewe. Because that is very tricky to portray as torture, and the propaganda is that humans torture animals, always, no matter what. This is a lie, a disgusting lie and it is only serving to put small farmers out of business and leave their land and their animals to the hands of the industry.
There should be no animal exploitation. If humans want human things they should test on humans which volunteer to be tested on. Everything else is exploitive to others.
Another aspect of effectiveness comes from whether the animal studies are actually designed to advance anything at all. For example, if the goal is to develop an imaging technique in humans, then the purpose of animal experiments is primarily to confirm that the idea is not wrong, debug the machinery and protocols, and generally get things to the point that the system is no longer the point of failure when running experiments on humans. Instead it is common to see series of publications on new imaging methods and contrast agents which grind away at small animals with no visible attempts to progress upward, which pushes back the time at which you can actually learn how the system works. Publishing this way is far safer but ultimately pointless: drugs for Alzheimer's is a classic case of optimizing for animals and completely missing in humans.
This is at least partly why pre-registration of experiments is becoming normalized, as it is in human clinical trials. The goal here is to require basic statements of purpose and methods prior to execution, such that it is possible to improve the (often quite expensive and time-consuming) experiments beforehand and not during the manuscript review process. Many research groups lack this internal quality control and as a result some institutions are stepping in to require or provide it.
(Thats silly. We’d just stop going to the moon for a few decades to centuries).
If we could simulate things instead, we absolutely would: cheaper, faster, less suffering, etc. But we can't.
The canonical example is a nematode called C. elegans. It's small: 959 cells, 302 of which are neurons. It has been studied thoroughly. We have a complete "wiring diagram" of its entire nervous system, we know the origin and fate of every single cell, it has been sequenced and probed and imaged with every technology under the sun. If there is an organism we should be able to simulate, C. elegans is it. But there aren't any good models of it, in the sense that you start a simulation and it behaves like a "real" worm. There are a lot of factors that we know we don't understand/can't model well: the passive diffusion of neuromodulators is probably important but is a nightmare to simulate. There are undoubtedly other factors we don't even know matter yet too.
The worm is, of course, really simple. A human brain has about 300M times more neurons (and combinatorially-many more connections between them).
Edit, looking at the replies I'm disappointed in hn, expected better.
Could it be that reduction of _observable_ suffering is what many people are actually concerned about, not the underlying suffering as such?
It's OK to buy a burger - just as long as you don't have to watch how it's made.
It's OK to buy a $5 imported shirt - as long as you don't have to observe the conditions under which it was produced.
When you find yourself having to qualify such a statement, that could be a useful indicator that what you said isn't constructive.
So the main reason to exploit animal is because the other human hate it and that other human could harm you. I see so it has nothing to do with the animal suffering itself.
I want to second the clarifications by adrianN and shawnz -- there is a difference between not actively caring about suffering, and not even seeing the point in anyone caring about it.
It seems my "I in fact believe you should see a psychologist" worked exactly as well rootusrootus implied it would. Many seem to think I want to label the previous poster as a psychopath, and do so in hatred. That was not my intention. I admit, I fail at communication, regularly, even more so the more I try to refrain from it.
Although suggested otherwise, my message did *not* contain a diagnosis. Given this extremely limited context, I doubt anyone could give a proper remote diagnosis. And I especially did not attach a psychopathy label to the previous poster. I personally know of at least three mental/neurological atypical (and not voluntarily chosen) states that cause people to (partially) adopt nihilism, and I'm sure mental health professionals have seen quite a few more.
The animals are in some ways like our collective ancestors, who have continued living the way we changed from.
The machines are in some ways like our collective offspring, finding new ways to function while we stay where we currently can't move from (carbon-DNA mechanics).
It has been observed that machines learn the same way animals do -- mostly by watching and repeating, not by "listening" to what they're told to do.
So in how we treat the animals is going to translate into how we are treated once we are no longer in power.
FWIW, HN on the weekend is a different beast entirely than it is on weekdays. Even dang needs some time off, and the reduction in moderation can be glaringly obvious. Makes me really appreciate how much of the 'HN we all love' is a result of his efforts as much as it is a general consensus by participants on this site.
Of course we make policy decisions based on moral belief. We do outlaw murder and rape, for example.
All humans everywhere desire the end of their own suffering. We're awful at minimizing it but you can see our hamfisted attempts in our seeking out of pleasures and avoidance of activities which are unpleasant, stressful, and painful.
When we observe other humans/animals hurting most of us feel with what is suffering.
I suppose a person could argue that the universe is just a bunch of atoms and that living beings and their suffering is just chemicals behaving in a certain way and in that sense it doesn’t matter any more than any other chemical reaction but it seems like that argument would also render the concept of “striving” to be moot.
I've expected for people to formulate an interesting, persuasive counter argument. That's how you advance a conversation. You don't advance the discussion by ad hominem remarks or ignoring the argument like some people have done.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The only reason I may care about animal suffering is because the other human that care about animal can get angry and cause me trouble.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27492086.
It's easy for those feelings to spill over to other animals over their intended purpose (building a human society), but people need to realize those feelings have overreached their purpose.
I argue that the only reason this guy had written this article in the first place is the introduction of mice into his family, which triggered the natural response of compassion to family members.
Humans only recently managed to convince themselves to extend compassion beyond their tribe, which is what they were programmed to.
I suspect that it's motivated reasoning. If you don't like animal testing, it's going to distort your perception of how effective it is.