[stevenwoo]

It's long been thought that a large percentage of studies on mice can not be replicated in humans because we are such different species but we use mice because it is cheap.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_t...

Some larger animals might be somewhat closer but a.) much more expensive b.) more ethically challenging to kill/drug something more intelligent at the scale at which we do mice

An acquaintance of mine did work in medical studies with mice and he quit after a few years because he said one handled the mice so much that he grew attached to them and could not bear to kill them at the end of the trials anymore.

On the other hand we eat pigs and octopus and those are pretty smart creatures.

[Simon_says]

I bought some live lobsters to kill (humanely, with a knife to the brain) and steam. I only had him in my custody for a couple hours, but I got attached. I had a bad experience thinking about taking a life, and it kinda fucked me up. I don't think I'll be doing it again. If I had to kill everything I ate, I'd be vegetarian. But I have no problem buying it at the store.

[batiudrami]

You might find being vegetarian easier than you think. It's a little more effort while you learn new recipes, and depending on where you live you'll have less choice when you dine out, but I have been (mostly) vegetarian for the last two years and found it surprisingly easy. :)

[Simon_says]

I don't want to be a vegetarian.

[jacobush]

Some experience for me. Unfortunately, after a couple of years, it was also easy to relapse when my social circles changed.

[J-dawg]

I went vegetarian a couple of years ago, and friends keep asking me whether it's been hard to adjust.

Truth is, 99% of any difficulties have been social rather than related to my own appetite.

Giving up meat in itself was much easier than I expected, but I still haven't become comfortable with people quizzing me about my reasons.

Even when people are well-meaning and genuinely curious, they always end up asking these questions just when you're having a meal together. It's hard not to come off as preachy when you're talking about farming practices at the exact moment when steaming plates of meat arrive at the table!

Then there's the thing of going to someone's home and having them make different food for you. Even if they're super nice about it, I still feel like a bit of a burden.

It's reinforced my respect for vegans. Being a vegan while having an active social life takes a strength of character and bloody-mindedness that I don't think I have.

[rtx]

Don't consider it a relapse. Meat is not a drug. You can leave it as many time as you want. It's a journey you might have to take rest.

[indubitable]

This is something of a pet peeve of mine. Somebody will post a hunting video or whatever and people, who otherwise enjoy meat, will freak out watching an animal die. The irony is that the way these animals die, with a clean lung shot or whatever, is a vastly more humane than the stuff the mass production meat you buy at the store is put through. They live their lives in the wild open and free as they see fit. And after a few seconds it ends with their brains so full pumped of endorphins that they likely don't feel a thing.

Compare that to store meat and you're looking at things that lived in cramped uncomfortable quarters and spent their lives being pumped full of antibiotic agents just to try to prevent them from becoming too sick before they're sent off a slaughter line where all their senses are going to inform them well ahead of time what's coming. And then enter in things like the growth hormones we use (that have been banned in much of the rest of the developed world) that often result in ongoing pain and other issues for the animals again before they're lined up for slaughter. Then there are straight up sadistic things like foie gras. That involves force feeding animals, generally ducks, to increase their liver to ~10x its normal size by shoving a pipe down their throat and jamming in "food" over a period of many weeks.

Cooking that lobster (or hunting deer or whatever else) is vastly more humane than supporting our meat industry. Like many things that happen on scale, ethics are quickly replaced with an insatiable lust for profit. I enjoy traveling and something I like more than anything else is to go into a chicken and rice shop and see some chickens freely pecking about around the shop. We should understand where our food comes from, and give it the respect it deserves. That doesn't mean not killing it, but it does mean giving it as reasonable a life as possible in the interim.

[emj]

This goes for humans too, succesfull oppressors dehumanize first, then massmurder.

[ethagnawl]

One of the experiences which led to me becoming a vegetarian was ordering a whole lobster and being forced to pick it apart bit by bit. It's easy to forget/dismiss that the "stuff" inside your lobster roll was ever a living, breathing, thinking being. However, when you're handed the whole animal, told to crack it open and stuff it into your mouth, it's a very different story.

[toomanybeersies]

On the other hand, I have gutted and butchered whole animals before, and still happily eat meat.

Good on you for sticking to your morals though. I don't mind vegetarians or vegans or whatever, but the one group that really annoys me is people who eat meat, but get upset seeing animals get butchered.

[simonh]

My grandfather was a slaughterman for a while and a really good butcher. When he talked about the animals going to be killed he said he could tell many of them at the end probably knew what was going to happen to them. It clearly did bother him a bit and he did feel sorry for the animals but said it was quick and humane overall. In everyday life he hated to see animals mistreated or suffering. There’s no hypocrisy in showing some emotion, especially when it’s something you’ve not experienced before.

[Fricken]

Lobsters have about 100,000 neurons in their whole bodies. Less than half as many as an ant or fruit fly.

[alt2501]

Perhaps you forgot about the significance of life?

[Fricken]

No. But the humane slaughter of lobsters is fairly low on my list of priorities for that sort of thing.

[stuntkite]

I watched a documentary on Horseshoe Crabs recently where the researchers were clearly very attached to their specimens talking about their personalities like they were nephews/nieces. I think they are a more bizarre thing than a lobster, but I'd never before thought giant seabugs could be cute. They are definitely cute.

That said, I'll put a lobster in a pot without hesitation. I like to put a cigarette in their claws beforehand like a last smoke before a firing squad. I appreciate their sacrifice for my butter drenched enjoyment.

[agumonkey]

I think it's hard to kill when you have comfort. If I was alone in a forest I wouldn't think long (your brain wouldn't mind a bit).

The saddest part of the desensitization to killing is the waste. You wouldn't waste much if you had to kill it too. You'd know the value.

[Simon_says]

I agree. If I were in a wilderness survival situation, and I were actually /able/ to hunt an animal, I'm certain I'd do it.

[fjsolwmv]

Is that intellectually honest, to hide from the truth you know about your food?

[Turing_Machine]

Probably not any more dishonest than someone who knows that a lot of "organic" food is grown with manure, but would prefer not to see (or worse, smell) the animals actually defecating, with the feces then being applied to something they're going to eat.

[matt4077]

Manure is widely used as a fertiliser for non-organic food as well. And there's no need for the scare quotes, because using manure is perfectly congruent with organic farming.

The manure is also applied before seeding, months before harvest. Together with rinsing, and sometimes peeling or boiling, there's really no need for the scaremongering.

If you want to be afraid of faeces, manure is the least of your problems. Foxes and other wild animals shit on every field, and they often carry parasites.

[roel_v]

"Foxes and other wild animals shit on every field, and they often carry parasites."

I've wondered about this. Fox tapeworm is very common (30% of all foxes in many areas in North-West Europe carry it last time I checked) and (the scary part) for humans, it can cause lethal liver failure 10 years after infection. Not 'lethal' is in 'flu lethal' - like 'might cause you to die in specific circumstances, when untreated, and when you were unhealthy already anyway' - but rather 'will certainly kill you in a painful way, very difficult to diagnose, no known effective treatment'.

So the advise is 'don't eat berries or mushrooms that grow in the wild below waist height'.

However, many/most fruit farms have fruit growing at that height, and the standard cleaning procedures don't remove worms (e.g. vaccinium isn't washed at all, too fragile). I know for a fact foxes (sometimes) enter these farms, I've seen some with my own eyes. How does this work from an epidemiological point of view? When devising health warnings, are there separate measurements for incidents caused by fruit picked in the wild, and from farms? Or is this just one of those things where everybody shrugs and says 'we don't have a better solution' and hope for the best?

On the off chance anyone doing epidemiology research is reading this, this sort of situation must be common; how is that dealt with?

[Turing_Machine]

Very large-scale modern farming is done with manure.

I used the scare quotes because "organic" food is basically just a giant scam. Plants don't actually care if their nitrogen comes from manure or from anhydrous ammonia. Really.

[Turing_Machine]

Missing word above. I meant to say "very LITTLE large-scale modern farming is done with manure", but did not notice until after the editing time had expired.

[mark_edward]

It's not, I feel the same way, but it's hard to be intellectually honest. I will be a vegetarian soon I think, it's been getting harder and harder to manage the dissonance since I got a dog.

[Danihan]

If it helps, becoming vegetarian simply helps contribute to more human over-population.

Any efficiency gleaned in food production is simply eaten up with billions of new mouths to feed within decades.

I'd prefer an "inefficiently" managed planet with 6B people, versus a "very efficiently" managed planet with 20B vegetarians.

[ComputerGuru]

It’s funny; that’s never a problem with a cat since they’re natural hunters and carnivores.

[yorwba]

Dogs are natural hunters and carnivores, too. I don't see how they are different from cats.

[fbarred]

Many dogs are natural hunters, but like bears, pigs, and humans, but unlike cats, dogs are omnivores. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnivore.

[ComputerGuru]

Because household dogs don’t retain that behavior in the same way cats do.

[Simon_says]

I struggled with this. I suppose it's not intellectually honest, but I learned intellectual honesty is not my highest priority.

[DonHopkins]

That explains your intellectually dishonest statement that "Nothing about the joke is homophobic."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15764612