[greenshackle2]

Do you eat animal products?

I find it much stranger that violence towards farm animals is ok but not pets.

At least there are principled reasons to care less about insects (much less complex nervous system), I can find no principled reason to care more for dogs than pigs.

[komali2]

To be fair, that's a cheap strike to go straight for hypocrisy as a means to win this argument.

Whether or not the person posting the argument "animal testing is bad" eats meat doesn't change the question - "should we fatally test on animals."

I'm a bit disappointed that nobody is really engaging this non-sarcastically. A couple are talking about "drawing a line" somewhere but nobody is being allowed to say "all life should fall on the safe side of the line." I think there are interesting arguments for this position but right now HN is being aggressively hostile to that position.

[greenshackle2]

I can see how it comes across that way but I'm fascinated that OP does not kill flies, I was genuinely curious if it extended to farm animals too. I would have bet they are vegetarian.

The question is worth considering, I wrote up a detailed answer on why I don't care about insects in a sibling thread.

EDIT: I'm not well placed to argue from hypocrisy, I'm like 90% vegetarian but I still eat meat. Meateaters love taking me down a notch for that one time per week or whatever I eat meat.

[animal531]

That's because there's no such thing as 90% vegetarian, it's a binary option which you've re-purposed into a scale.

I eat meat at every opportunity, but if I were to calculate a number such as yours then I'd be say "65% vegetarian" just due to the volume difference between meat and the rest.

People taking a swing at you is most likely just because you describe yourself as a vegetarian to them even though you're still eating meat (regularly) while in their presence.

[greenshackle2]

What I mean is that I eat 90% less meat than I used to as an average omnivore. A can of sardines or tuna per week and beef once in a long while is far from 10% of my diet, in terms of calories or mass or whatever metric you choose.

> I eat meat at every opportunity, but if I were to calculate a number such as yours then I'd be say "65% vegetarian" just due to the volume difference between meat and the rest.

Most people, who don't try to take my words in the least charitable way possible as you are here, understand just fine what 'mostly vegetarian' means.

I don't describe myself as vegetarian (without qualifiers).

> That's because there's no such thing as 90% vegetarian, it's a binary option which you've re-purposed into a scale.

Words are meant for communicating. Arguing by definition is a losers' game.

Note that meateaters give me more crap than full on vegetarians/vegans. If the issue was really that I'm coopting the word, you'd think it'd be the opposite.

My experience is that, at least among my circles, vegetarians can appreciate that reduced meat consumption = reduced animal suffering and environmental impact, even if you're not 100% pure; it's meateaters, who feel you are trying to take a moral high ground, who will try to take you down.

Actually my problem is probably that I did use to be strictly vegetarian, vegan at one point, for a few years, and slipped back for various reasons. I don't claim it anymore but it's not like I made a public announcement that I am no longer strictly vegetarian.

[chrisweekly]

Non-sarcastic question about "all life": don't you _have_ to draw the line somewhere? Bacteria? Vegetables?

[usrusr]

I'd even want to put particularly nicely shaped rocks on the "don't" side of the line. Kill a plant to save a rock? It's called building maintenance. Kill a short-lived animal to protect a mighty old tree that has seen entire cultures come and go? Sure! There might even be some rocks that I would hesitate to destroy if it saved a human life, maybe not even excluding my own. The beautiful thing about life is that in the grand scheme of things, only avoiding extinction matters.

[mirimir]

Well, if "all life should fall on the safe side of the line", what would you eat? Perhaps only organisms that have died without human intervention. Scavenging, I mean. But that wouldn't support very large populations.

[harperlee]

> But that wouldn't support very large populations.

Well I don't agree at all! Apart from the fact that large populations can live without meat, I can easily envision a "scavenging farm" where animals are liked after until they die, and only then processed. It wouldn't be as efficient as our farms, but completely possible.

[mirimir]

I suspect that you're pushing plants over the line.

[chongli]

Dead bodies, unless mummified or otherwise desiccated into jerky, are teeming with bacterial life.

There's simply no way to survive without destroying other life. Even plants kill other living things in self defense (and many plants prey on animals).

[mirimir]

Yeah, pretty much. Especially if you're an animal.

Eventually, maybe we'll become effectively plants, creating our food from sunlight, CO2 and minerals. But what about our microbiota?

[chongli]

I find it much stranger that violence towards farm animals is ok but not pets.

For the same reason people are more disturbed by terrorists beheading one person whose name and picture accompany the story than they are of a statistic where hundreds of civilians are killed by a dictator's bombing attack.

People are motivated by empathy which only works with identifiable beings. We just can't empathize with statistics or abstractions, as horrifying as that sounds.

[coldtea]

>I find it much stranger that violence towards farm animals is ok but not pets.

Pets are a recent phenomenon (last 100 or so years, and urban). [edit: recent, not common phenomenon]

In rural places animals like cats and dogs where actually useful: guarding, helping with the sheep, killing mice and snakes, and such.

The bonding came from having them around (and having them be useful), not because there was some bizarro artificial distinction between e.g. cows and sheep and cats and dogs.

And in many cultures and/or periods things we now call pets were/are eaten as casually as we eat cows or kale.

[PerfectElement]

This doesn't address the fact that pigs are no less capable of experiencing pain and distress than dogs and cats. And most people in western cultures would not be okay with killing dogs and cats that are not being useful to them. So even though the cognitive dissonance and the framework that sustains it is well understood (look up carnism), it's still pretty strange when you stop to think about it.

[coldtea]

>This doesn't address the fact that pigs are no less capable of experiencing pain and distress than dogs and cats.

No but it addresses the fact that there's no underlying grand principle beyond it all.

Some animals we grew to like more, because they were useful, and we kept them around. That's all.

It's no more strange than caring for some people because they are relatives, and not caring as much (or at all) for other people.

[jonnybgood]

The principled reason to care more for dogs from my understanding is mutualism. Dogs are dogs because of humans. Same for cats.

[greenshackle2]

It's the same for farm animals though, isn't it? Modern broiler chickens, egg-layers, dairy cows and beef cattle, turkeys, etc. are very different from their wild ancestors.

Farmed turkeys can't have sex, they have to be artificially inseminated, I don't know who made them that way if not humans.

[chc]

AFAIK the prevailing theory is that humans did not domesticate cats, and instead cats just learned to coexist with us because we attracted lots of tasty pests.

[betenoire]

Do you _really_ find it strange? Or just rationally inconsistent?

It seems pretty normal and not strange at all that I develop stronger feelings for animals I personally bond with.