[sam_goody]

Well, that problem is solved, but there are new ones.

Once no one needs minks for coats, they just wipe them out as nuisances, making them endangered or extinct. As it is, I believe the mink has been eradicated from many parts of the world.

Now, we may not need mink. But at least making coats from them mean they will be around.

[foogazi]

> But at least making coats from them mean they will be around.

Being around means nothing to the individual minks being caged and slaughtered

[jfk13]

"Being around" as a farmed animal may bear little relation to being around as a free, wild creature. Given a few generations, we tend to turn the animals we farm into a parody of the original creature. How well would the average battery chicken survive if it were set free?

[rapnie]

> How well would the average battery chicken survive if it were set free?

This was tested in a Dutch TV program some years ago ("Keuringsdienst van waarde") where they got some newborn battery chickens and placed them on a regular farm, amongst healthy free-roaming chickens. They got the same food, but still 'exploded' in size until they couldn't walk. Their feathers look awful. On the whole they looked sick and miserable. Just like battery chickens, actually

[romanoderoma]

Dennet wrote a lot about animal perceptions and self consciousness

It's hard to tell if the life they live makes some difference for the individual

It's hard for us humans to fathom it, but is it for them?

We still don't know for sure.

https://lafavephilosophy.x10host.com/dennett_anim_csness.htm...

[ornornor]

If in doubt, why not err on the side of caution and just not inflict animals this existence, just in case they might care?

[notreallytrue]

We are not doing it though

What do you do if a snake or a cockroach appears in your house?

What happens if a bear wants to share the same living space you live in?

I understand your position, but the simple fact that we live in a modern World and we are at the top of it "inflicts animals this existence"

I like to not do it on purpose and I don't own a fur, if that's what you are curious about, but I'm not lying to myself believing that mink farming is worse than living in big cities that pollute the environment irreparably

Am I being cautious enough?

I don't think so...

[ornornor]

We’re talking about farming animals and killing them for food or fur here.

I personally go out of my way to not kill anything. I catch bugs and throw them outside. I move frogs and snails off the road when I get the chance so people or cars don’t step on them. I’ve never faced a bear yet though. But that’s a bit extreme. How many people face bears?

It’s not a competition, because something is worse than something else or not doesn’t mean we should keep doing it. Farming animals is unnecessary in the vast majority of cases so why not stop doing it? Same with cities and pollution, it’s not all or nothing. There are more and less damaging ways of building, ways that are a bit less obnoxious than the way we’ve mostly been doing it for the last couple of centuries.

[notreallytrue]

> We’re talking about farming animals and killing them for food or fur here

and they are two completely different categories, orders of magnitude different, and serve two completely different purposes

the amount of furs produced every year has been dropping for decades, meat consumption is not

> I personally go out of my way to not kill anything

Everyone does.

But being a S. Francesco is something we do for ourselves, it doesn't change much (it is nothing actually, but I don't want to sound insensitive)

Assuming you save 10 animals a day (which is very very very hard) it's 400 thousands animals in a lifespan of 100 years.

Meanwhile millions die everyday to keep our lifestyle going.

Meanwhile

Cats kill billions of birds every year and even more tiny rodents and other mammals in the United States

It's a matter of scale, not of will of the individual.

> because something is worse than something else or not doesn’t mean we should keep doing it

But maybe we should have priorities, so if something is not impacting the ecosystem in a meaningful way, the time used to fight it it's wasted and could be better spent on something vastly more dangerous.