Though my SIL has expressed a willingness to slaughter the roosters so perhaps I'll just buy straight runs from now on and eat fresh chicken.

And the females are grown up and impregnated and milked and the process repeats.

At least, that's my understanding of it all anyways.

There's a lot more at play than just killing vs not killing. Some types of killing may be acceptable, and some may not. For example meat-eaters, which as you pointed, effectively kill animals, may disagree with other ways of killing - for example movies production or fur coats.

The most interesting case I've heard about this subject is in the movie Cannibal Holocaust. Among the other animals, two monkeys have been killed for script purposes, however, they have been eaten afterwards. Which are the ethics of this killing? There's no absolute answer¹

¹=I'm not implying, just exposing.

... Unless you were contemplating eating them _live_, I'm not sure how that works.

It's billions of chickens get to live 3 years and get eaten or a million chickens die of liver failure.

But I think you're missing the parent's point. Death isn't cruel. Suffering is cruel and can only be experience by living things.

This kind of philosophy is a pretty active subject currently. The debate is, generally, maximizing happiness vs. minimizing suffering. The former creating more suffering overall and the latter creating less happiness overall.

Even the strictest Jainist can't stop from annihilating an uncountable number of tiny animals that live in, on and around us. (though to their credit, they sure do try).

In the 2020 video, the shot that starts at 55 seconds shows the whole carousel. A pair of robot arms are using pneumatic grabbers to load eggs onto the carousel, they go under the high power laser, then pass under the pipette robot arms, and finally are removed from the carousel by a similar pair of robot arms with pneumatic grabbers (it is at this last step that I suspect the fluid passes through the shell).

This is great! Hopefully Lidl will have them in other countries as well so I can buy them.

I used “as if” not because i think many people think this way, but because it is the de facto way of thinking when you only strive to avoid endings.

In other words, people lack an appreciation for death and are so afraid of it they try to pretend like it can not exist.

Perhaps we can rationalize that they “don’t know what is going on” but it seems unlikely that they are having a good time.

In general baby warm blooded animals want to be near their mothers.

Better to cull pre hatch.

Better still to just eat lentils.

wat

Interesting you hold such expectations. Based on my dealings with people I don't think a lasting response would be that great. Empathy and morals seem to suffice while it is convenient, but when necessary people always take the path of least resistance.

For a few days, then they'll get used to like the 1000 previous generations of humans that had to kill animals to survive.

> For the record I don’t at all think abortion should be politicized

But put yourself in a charitable version of your opponent's shoes: they believe it's a violation of the 5th amendment, and tantamount to murder. From the GOP platform,

> the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed

While I have personally heard convincing counter-arguments to this (as I said, I don't agree with the right), I don't hear them being stated by anyone at a high level on the left. The left's repeated talking point is that women have a right to their own body; but that view ignores, I think, that it's fully possible for someone on the right to believe that, but simultaneously believe that the rights of the unborn child take precedence. I have yet to hear someone high on the left address why either they believe that the right's stance on an unborn child's right to the 5th is wrong (and thus, a woman's right prevails as it is the only thing) or why the unborn child's right to the 5th is trumped by the woman's right to her body.

> and it’s tiring to know it’s going nowhere for the future.

I sincerely think that if the left took the time to argue against the steelmanned argument from the right, we might actually make progress at convincing people, and actually moving the debate forward. But, as it is, one side is screaming "it's murder!" the other "women's right's!", neither addressing the other's position or views. How is that ever to move forward?

Yes, there are plenty of uncharitable arguments made by politicians on the right, and one can no doubt cherry-pick an endless litany of examples. But that you can I do not believe frees you from the requirement of arguing a good, solid argument for your own viewpoint. Do you really think that half the nation is doing no more than "pandering to emotion", or that perhaps some subset of them might sincerely hold a view on the issue that might differ from your own?

While I don't agree with the right, I can certainly see how anyone on that side would be left utterly unconvinced by the rhetoric being produced on the left.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man#Steelmanning

The animals on the farm are welcome to do the same if they don't like being farmed.

I never made this claim, as ethics in this case is subjective: some things are ethical in some eyes and unethical in others, and profitability is the mechanism of reaching consensus between these views.

Your point about transparency is valid, I have to admit. However, I don't think that it applies in the case of food production: most meat and animal products consumers are well-aware that in order to get meat, you need to kill someone, and if you want to keep milk and eggs as cheap as possible, you can't afford to treat the animals well.

Granted "some vegans" would be more precise, but that's still the sentiment.

1. Killing an 8 day old chicken embryo

2. Killing a 2 month old human embryo

After 2020, I'd like to see more in the middle. I think extremes are overrepresented.

I think that is more of an ethical debate than a fact. One could argue that most farmed chickens live a life of suffering, and keeping them suffering long is not better than gassing them immediately.

On what basis, though? From a humane perspective, the quicker you kill a chicken the less suffering it does, and it's not like the culled chicks are ultimately wasted.

Maybe you meant to write

> the meat of a horse which was not bred just for its meat

Millions of horses are raised every year for their meat.

No, it isn't. That's exactly the problem. Trump found a bug in the system, a security hole, in the form of leveraging the non-linearity built in to the current system. The Constitution was designed to produce minority rule, on the assumption that if the minority abused that power too much the majority would rise up and force them out of power. The problem is that this bias is amplified by modern communications technologies, which allow a determined person to leverage a fairly small minority into effective dictatorial power. The Constitutional bias towards minority rule is amplified by party politics, gerrymandering, echo chambers, etc. to the point where you only need a few million motivated followers to effectively control the agenda. All you need is enough voters following you that you can pose a credible threat to unseat any politician in your party at the next primary. Those few million motivated followers are much more likely to be found at the extremes than in the center, and they are much more likely to be found in rural areas and hence be conservative. Given enough time, this influence can be leveraged into enough disenfranchisement through legitimate-seeming voter suppression efforts that unseating the minority becomes effectively impossible through any legal means. At that point, the minority no longer needs to compromise. And since it is the most radical members of the minority who are the foundation of this strategy, the result is extreme radicalization. And all this can happen without moving the center. That's the problem.

I think it's much too early to assess the totality of (let me put this in the least inflammatory way that I can think of) Trump's long-term impact. At the very least, he has re-formed the American judiciary, delayed action on climate change by four years, and eroded or eliminated many of the societal and governmental norms that are essential for the functioning of our society (e.g. accepting the results of elections).

But even now, we have North Korea with ICBMs and more nuclear weapons than before, Iran closer to a nuclear weapon than before, and probably a hundred thousand people or so dead from Covid who might not have died if Trump had not politicized the wearing of masks. That's not "little damage" by my reckoning.

There are also a few hundred innocent children who were forcibly separated from their parents and likely will never see them again because of shoddy record-keeping. Despite the relatively small numbers, the sheer monstrousness of this makes it impossible to sweep it under the rug. Trump effectively abandoned the moral high ground that America has held since the end of World War II. America is no longer perceived as a reliable partner, leader of the free world, and beacon of hope. I suppose reasonable people can disagree in their assessment of the long-term impact of this, but in my book, that's not "little damage."

[ADDENDUM] Something else Trump has done is form a significant contingent of the citizenry who now equate the interests of the country with Trump's personal interests, i.e. who believe Trump when he says that we face existential threats that he alone can fix. Ironically, they do this in the name of patriotism and freedom, utterly oblivious to the historical precedents that show time and time again that cults of personality lead to tyranny and ruin. Thankfully, we have not yet crossed that threshold. But we were standing on the brink, and it won't take much to bring us back to it.

[ADDENDUM2] There's also this:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/11/william-barr-lam...

Also a good rooster will find food for the hens, and call them over to it. Ours used to find bugs and then make this cute "coo coo coo" and they'd come running, and eat while he watched and waited to take his turn.

sniff miss our guy. I think we'll get a new rooster in the spring, maybe a really neat looking bantam.

Not deliberately, of course. Either hawks or coyotes (not sure; we're in the process of setting up cameras) have taken several of our flock. We're still figuring out what to do about it.

We've tried the broomstick method but it's hard. What works best for us is to take a traffic cone, cut off the top of it, mount it upside down, stuff the chicken in it so their head is poking out the bottom, and slit their throat with a very sharp knife. It's gruesome and if your family is squeamish it won't go well. But they go quick and drain out, so cleaning is easier.

Which would still feed 18,000,000 million people in Africa for a year.

I mean the subject matter is itself a disruption and improvement, which is being rejected. It is not the status quo. So I don't see that as analogous.

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

I also try to be cognizant of related issues. But I see developments like these as a win, whereas for for a certain demographic, it's irrelevant. They aren't the ones asking for this in the first place, egg consumers are. Granted vegans are a good base for criticism which probably contributed.

I disagree. Vegans generally adopt a hard-line, no-compromising position on things like this. That's the antithesis of a lot of what we talk about here, which is continual improvement, perfect-is-the-enemy-of-good, and making reasonable trade-offs and compromises to find better solutions.

A startup that said "We're going to build X in the most perfect, idealized way, and will settle for nothing less! We'll never ship until it's perfect" would be laughed out of town and burn through their money before shipping anything. And that's pretty much what veganism advocates for.

Does that include plants?

We don't undergo photosynthesis, so fundamentally we have to kill and eat other beings to survive. Plants are other living beings too. And a revolution is underway in learning about plant intelligence -- while not a nervous system, trees communicate with each other and share resources. [1]

My primary reason for trying to eat less meat is the environmental harms -- not the individual rights of animals -- as I think might eventually find ourselves in a place where we recognize that we cannot escape denying the rights of another organism (plants included) for our own nourishment given that we aren't photosynthesizers. Unless we become fruitarians and only eat fruit that naturally falls from the tree -- but obviously that is ludicrous.

[1] https://mothertreeproject.org/about-mother-trees/

I'd say most vegans at this point think "harm reduction" is just a form of "green washing" and does not deserve our support or attention.

In a less facetious sense, I do believe that insect neurology is substantially different. Crustaceans have a nervous system web, which is why you have to cut crabs and lobsters in half to kill them rather than just stabbing them in the head.

There is a big moralizing streak in veganism, and a lot of vegans are into it from ethical, moralizing or emotional reasons, which leads to activism and trying to ban, tax and reduce meat eating. We see where the puck is heading.

(by the way, 30g of chicken at hatching are not 30g of meat)

First when you grow you drink mom's milk and you are under impression drinking milk is good for health which indeed is. So people start consuming milk everywhere.

And there are advertisements which shows happy cows, chocolates made from milk. Vegetarians are under impression that its ethical. And many farmers advertises as if their cows are happy they are grass fed etc. In some religion they even worship cows etc giving impression that cows are respected etc.

And the other thing you often hear is cows babies get enough milk and farmers only sell excess milk. So from religion, society people are brain washed so much they don't even see how animals are tortured, left on road after buffalo/cows stops giving milk.

I wish media would cover this subject more especially in India which is probably top 3 vegetarian country in the world.

Why everything must be reduced to an industrial activity when clearly it doesn't need to?

I guess "teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime" is not a good advice either, how much fish food do you need in a lifetime?

And who's gonna pay for it?

- mussels/mollusks (zero sentience) - insects (very low demonstrated consciousness) - fish (low demonstrated consciousness) - chickens/reptiles (disputed level) - dogs, dolphins, primates, etc (high)

You can't equivocate chicken sentience with human sentience. What you can do is suggest they have a high enough level of sentience to warrant that certain treatments be immoral. I think infliction of constant stress and suffering certainly would be immoral, however, raising chickens does not necessitate it. And moreover, the level of sentience is not so high that captivity in itself / exploitation be problematic. If that were true keeping domestic pets ought to be just as problematic.

Animals suffer in the wild, that is a constant. They require vigilance over a) predators, b) constant search for food, c) other natural threats. In captivity, these issues don't exist.

Notwithstanding the symbiotic evolution of chicken with humans, a chicken is arguably better off in a free-roam farm than in the wild. This is constantly ignored.

The vegan solution is such that these animals basically cease to exist (i.e. are killed) because they are more dependent on humans than their ancestors. That's what letting them be "sentient" beings instead of commodities would mean.

Unless humans are somehow exempt from the list, I don't see how this argument is feasible in the realistic sense. Humans are frequently treated as commodities, as any team over the size of 1 needs to delegate responsibilities to people. Hence, "doctor, lawyer, police officer, teacher, pilot" are all words that describe a delegated responsibility of a human, and therefore the commodity that they represent. "We need more firefighters!" is a phrase that literally treats humans as commodities - showing how replaceable they are. How about whenever you ask a friend, or a family member to pick something up for you from the grocery store? Are they not being treated as a commodity to suit a need in that moment?

However idealistic the notion, being a "sentient being" isn't mutually exclusive from being treated as a commodity.

I understand the empathic argument in support of veganism full well (and I empathize with it), but there is such a thing as runaway-empathy, to the point that it becomes unproductive conversation.

This is a win in an aim to reduce unnecessary suffering and pain. I'll take it as such.

Seeking some sort of absolutism though, I can't wrap my mind around that. It gives me some serious Sith vibes...

Glad we had this exchange.

* unscrew the lid of a peanut butter jar to get a treat without training

* hop from one tank to another to prey on the fish in the tank. This was observed quite by accident and not part of an experiment at first. In fact the octopus waited for its human handlers to leave the room before going in for the kill; the incident was caught on camera.

* gently grasp the hand of a friendly human with their tentacles, and squirt water through their siphon at a disliked human

All spontaneously, without training or prompting.

That last bit is particularly interesting to me, because they are recognizable signs of affection and dislike. Octopuses show some semblance of an ability to bond with us, despite having vastly different brains from us.

If you have a lot of pressures in your life, adding a diet change to that is not realistic. Pushing for meat alternatives in convenient places and making it easy for large groups of people to have small cognitive load (low cost of spoons) to go without meat for a meal is far more impactful than trying to convince everyone to go “full vegan or you are a monster”. If you have the time to consider your options and make a change to your habits that match your values, great, otherwise power to those trying to make those choices easier for everyone. Don’t let it weigh on you, take care of yourself and create space to make the changes you want to see in yourself.

But let me set this aside since it might obscure our dialog. What surely can be measured is the degree of immune system depression this animals experience, how far do their life cycles deviate from control, and what health an behavioral consequences they experience from being forced to live the way we make them live. We can also measure the impact this ways have on ourselves and the environment.

Would we put the family dog trough this experience just because it is not clear (to us) if it fully understands or experience what is happening, ignoring all the fairly obvious signals that it will experiment a great deal of suffering?

I once witnessed an organic cow’s sacrifice and no one in its right heart can argue it didn’t experience an great deal of distress and suffering.

I don’t judge people from being meat eaters, I’m no vegan myself, but I won’t play conceptual games to ease people’s minds. If you have the heart to kill this animals and eat them (and I don’t mean this pejoratively or disrespectfully), go ahead. Just don’t pretend there is a gray area in what this animals will be experiencing and what does this means in terms of their lives. I mean, we eat calves that have been kept all their short lives strained in cages just for the taste, and we do this in mass scale.

This is not something to run from.

(To clarify, I’m not trying to make it personal, english is not my native language. On the contrary, I’m very open to talk about this topic with an open mind and a warm heart).

To put this into more laymen's terms, meat cultivation dramatically increases the total amount of plants that we need to grow.

As mentioned in my other comment:

> 70-75% of soybeans grown globally are for livestock, only 6% are used for human food products (meat eaters often try to claim that soy production is terrible for the environment; surprise, surprise, meat consumption is the main driver)

So, it's a bit counterintuitive, but globally switching to a plant-based diet would actually dramatically reduce the total amount of plants that we are raising, and therefore would dramatically reduce overall suffering of plants (if they suffer)

You've made interesting points, but I think the most important point here isn't one of biology but of moral philosophy: animals presumably outrank plants in terms of moral standing.

Torturing a person is presumably worse than torturing a mosquito. A person has more capacity for pain than a mosquito, and in turn the mosquito has more capacity for pain than does a heap of sand.

I figure plants lie further down the ranking than mosquitoes, for the reasons you've just explained. They're certainly further down than farmyard animals. It would be considerable moral progress to switch from torturing billions of chickens and pigs, to torturing billions of plants (and that's ignoring that a plant in a farm environment is likely 'happier', in its own terms, than a livestock animal).

A vaguely related TED talk on how brains ultimately exist to orchestrate movement, and essentially nothing else: https://youtu.be/7s0CpRfyYp8?t=15

The only logical endpoint is that humans should just off themselves so we don't participate past one cycle of reabsorption into the Earth's environment.

One way or another, everything is going to die and be consumed by another living organism.

That's why it's absurd. You can arbitrarily pick your own resolution, but it's only arbitrary until you exit the cycle completely.

I invite you to come to my country and see how farmers/maquila workers live, in what conditions do they work, who they work for and which populations most benefit from this farmers/workers living conditions.

As I said before, empathy is a great quality to cultivate, and so does awareness.

You familiar with the concept of consent?

Thank you for the citations.

These make a very strong case for showing poor living conditions in your area, and I empathize with that - please don't think that I'm debating this fact.

I'm not entirely sure how it relates to my comment which is a nit about veganism's fundamental issue with defining it's own belief systems effectively. Are humans considered animals? Is the issue that some things are treated as commodities at all, or just that living things are? Are we okay with treating people as commodities, but just not "animals"? As in, it's okay to buy human-animal created products (like a phone or a computer), but not to buy wool socks because that is animal cruelty?

I'm not suggesting that people aren't treated as commodities, I'm suggesting the opposite. Your citations (unfortunately) add to my point.

* most plastic in the ocean is made up of abandoned fishing gear (see https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/03/great-pacifi...)

But I do question how much of some the things you reference are actually problems.

We have plenty of fresh water. Distribution is often our problem when it comes to getting that water to humans everywhere, but stopping livestock production will not fix that.

Does it really matter how much of the USA is used for livestock grazing? Are we missing out on using that land for other things that are important to us?

I have no opinion on soybean production, but, again, does it matter that the lion's share of soybean production goes toward feeding livestock? And if soybean cultivation really is that bad for the environment, are there other things we could be feeding livestock that don't have such bad effects?

The carbon emissions suck, but are there ways to reduce these through better process?

I don't think any of these problems are unsolvable, but likely they're expensive, and there's no political will to tax the bad behavior to the point that it becomes financially better to do the right thing. Getting around that is likely easier than getting a significant chunk of the world to go vegan.

And that's the issue I have with most logical arguments around veganism. Meat production and consumption has a lot of problems, certainly, but vegans seem to believe that the only way to fix those problems is to throw the baby out with the bathwater, when there are almost certainly solutions or at least mitigations to those problems. I get that as an individual, you aren't going to fix those problems, so personally going vegan is a way for people to avoid being a part of the problem. That is a satisfying route for some people, but not for everyone.

Eventually, humanity will have to accept that going vegan is the only sustainable method.

An appeal to authority. I'm mean surgeon general once called for not wearing masks until he changed his mind completely.

"* Animal agriculture is responsible for 20-33% of all freshwater consumption globally"

Why would that be problematic? There is no shortage of water where they raise animals. On the other hand there is a shortage of water in California where they grow crops on a massive scale.

"* Mass cultivation of animals increases the chances of pandemic"

That is a true, but the same can be said of large fields of monoculture crops where disease can quickly spread and destroy everything resulting in hunger.

"* 41% of mainland USA is used for grazing livestock, yet meat only provides 18% of our calories; feeding the world on a vegan diet could reduce farmland use by 75% or more"

Only if that 41% of mainland is suitable for plowing and you don't mind destroying other habitats for food production. Live stock can graze, humans cannot. Plus we don't need pesticides and insecticides on grasslands which are destroying our fresh water supplies.

"* Going plant-based for two-thirds of meals could reduce food-related carbon emissions by 60% (the way we produce, distribute, and refrigerate food is a huge contributor of global emissions)"

That is already true for vast majority of people on this planet. Think of the food pyramid.

"* 70-75% of soybeans grown globally are for livestock, only 6% are used for human food products (meat eaters often try to claim that soy production is terrible for the environment; surprise, surprise, meat consumption is the main driver) "

I don't know how real the numbers are, regardless it is not an ideal situation and we should strive towards less monulture.

For example, freshwater consumption is important in regions which lacks freshwater. Crop agriculture is however the most common source for water pollution, occurs in all regions, and is not only a major environmental problem but also harms the supply of fresh water even if its not responsible for the primary consumption. Fertilizers and pesticides being the main culprits here. Sadly there is very little food in stores that do not have a direct link to fertilizers and pesticides except for wild fish, shellfish and seaweed.

In quite a few times I have seen studies showing that the lowest carbon emission in any food group would be either shellfish, seaweed, or insects. No fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, minimal land usage and sustainable. Vegan would exclude two of those, and seaweed is pretty rare in non-asian diets.

In general I try to look for marks of sustainability when buying food. Small producers, non-factory farm operations, local, crops that are in season, and so on. The article here focus on the issue of sex determining the eggs, but my primary priority is the area that the hen has. In EU you can have 16 hens located in a small box the size of 0.2m². That is plain cruelty and so I choose eggs under the mark that require 4m², a requirement for outside area, always access to natural lighting, and given crops grown without chemical fertilizers, pesticides or herbicides.

Is it perfect? No. Not using fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides is still being debated and researched if they are better for the environment or worse since land usage increases from it, but since I regularly dive in the Baltic sea I am constantly reminded by the harm done already by the revolution of chemical fertilizers produced primarily by natural gas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxW-JKLeu1k

Blog version w/ reference links: https://www.sapien.org/blog/why-we-should-be-eating-more-mea...

But what percentage of our protein?

Personally, I eat more protein than I did when I ate meat, though to be fair I still eat eggs. It's not hard at all to get adequate protein.

[0] https://healthyeating.sfgate.com/worlds-main-sources-protein...

There are various reasons people become vegan or vegetarian, there's no single premise.

I was being hyperbolic, yes. That was the point. I think the entire argument over the morality of it is an appeal to absurdity. There are gross assumptions made on every side of the argument and I don't see any clear path to one side of the discussion about whether or not eating animals is immoral being possible.

I'm not anti-vegan. How could one even be anti-vegan? Seems more like a personal conviction to me, and that's, quite frankly, none of my business.

In this case I think the question is something like "is it cruel to eat an animal?"

I'm not a spiritual person, but I like what the general consensus of the tribes around the Great Lakes (and elsewhere) saw of it: we're very much part of the [natural] world, not above or outside of it in any way. And I don't see that as a bad thing. Now, talking scale of consumption and all that is another matter that I didn't gather was at the core of this discussion—at least that is the way I've been framing my comments.

But now I'm getting a bit worried I'm taking this too far off track of the actual linked content and discussion so I think I'll have to leave it at that—but I'm happy to continue to discuss if you wanted to—just fire me an email.

I'm an optimist, but I also don't anoint humankind with some divine moral authority—I put us on the level with every other animal on the planet.

I don't know if you're talking about the broader community of people who self-identify as athletes but I'll restrict the discussion to professional athletes for the sake of clarity.

Here's a few household-name professional vegan athletes:

* Venus Williams

* Lewis Hamilton

* Colin Kaepernick

* Kyrie Irving

* Tia Blanco

* Meagan Duhamel

Veganism isn't very popular in general so I'm not sure if this "if professional athletes don't do it, then it must be bad" argument holds. I'm also not even sure if that claim is true. If we could compile a list of all professional athletes, find the vegan population, and then compare that to the general population, I would wager that veganism might have a higher percentage in the athlete population than the general population. Pure speculation, though, and obviously I'm biased. But I follow lots of vegan channels and they're very proud and vocal about vegan athletes and it's the kind of news that I think you won't be exposed to unless you're inside the vegan community. In other words we should both acknowledge that there's a lot of selection bias / echo chamber at play here and I don't think either of us can definitively say whether veganism is more popular or less popular among professional athletes.

Thanks for the reply.

On the contrary, it feels like veganism holds quite a lot of sway in your mind.

Based on my understanding, you have created an imaginary idealised version of veganism, so that you can mentally reject its imperfections, while recognising that this version would still hold some value. All the best.