[causasui]

> ... we prioritize saving our children from a burning building in a way that we don't prioritize saving the mice living in the basement of that burning building

The building isn't burning. We don't have to choose between our children and mice.

You can live a full, healthy life while minimizing to as full extent as possible the suffering you directly or indirectly inflict on other sentient creatures.

The argument you present here against your characterization of the OPs point is akin to saying "my kid really loves McNuggets so I don't care about the horror 50 billion chickens suffer in a given year".

Again, the building isn't on fire; you don't have to choose one or the other.

[glenstein]

>The building isn't burning. We don't have to choose between our children and mice.

Well we're off to a bad start, because this is just literally incorrect. I remember way back in elementary school we had a fire chief come in and talk about fire safety, about having a plan, etc. Inevitably the question about saving pets comes up, and we heard them talk about how fire safety means prioritizing safety of humans. I just did a quick google about fire safety and pets and if you want to play the Google Stuff game, there are numerous sites with guidance on fire safety that reaffirm this.

Secondly, for goodness sake, it's a hypothetical intended to highlight an underlying principle. Because sure, of course you want to save everybody in all cases. But insisting that you don't even want to consider the premise of a hypothetical is just a fundamental misunderstanding of the entire point of the hypothetical that is focused on precisely the situations where you don't have that luxury of avoiding all possible harms.

Despite your protestations to the contrary, our lives are entangled with the lives of animals in ways that present tradeoffs. Here on HN there was recently an article about the beneficial impact of wolves on ecosystems, in part because they hunt deer, and make driving safer for humans. Figuring out how to protect Atlantic Salmon in rivers depends upon "cover species" such as eels and other fish, so that predators don't just focus on salmon. Indigenous tribes support protections for Atlantic salmon in part because they personally benefit from having salmon available as a natural resource they can fish for.

Only in the context of an internet comment section would somebody seriously try to insist that we aren't interrelated in these ways, that we don't have to think about these choices, and expect it to be treated like a respectable position.

[cheese_goddess]

You don't minimise suffering by not eating meat. You're maximising your bragging rights about your superior ethics. What minimises the suffering of farm animals is... farming. Because without farming they'd live in the wild where they'd suffer from disease, parasites and bad weather and they'd be eaten by predators. Each and every one of them. And most of the time, they'd die while being eaten alive.

At least humans kill our food before we eat it. That is minimising suffering.

[jallen_dot_dev]

> Because without farming they'd live in the wild where they'd suffer from disease

No. Without farming, farm animals just wouldn't exist to live a miserable life. Farmers are not doing them any favors by bringing them into the world.

[cheese_goddess]

Farm animals dont' live miserable lives. Animals in large scale, factory farms are mistreated, but they are still better off than in the wild. The majority of farms in the world are small-sale family farms were animals are treated at least as good as humans:

> Five of every six farms in the world consist of less than two hectares, operate only around 12 percent of all agricultural land, and produce roughly 35 percent of the world's food, according to a study published in World Development.

https://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/1395127/icode/

If you listen to vegan propaganda you may get the impression that all farming everywhere in the entire world means that animals must be tortured in factory farms, but that's a lie. There is nothing in small-scale farming to make animals' lives miserable.

[causasui]

"If animals weren't factory farmed they'd just be wild" is a hilarious misrepresentation of the cause and effect of how farmed animals come to be, and I assume you know that and are being disingenuous.

"Vegan propaganda" ok Cheese Goddess. These animals not existing is preferable to the hell they endure on factory farms.

[cheese_goddess]

> "If animals weren't factory farmed they'd just be wild" is a hilarious misrepresentation of the cause and effect of how farmed animals come to be, and I assume you know that and are being disingenuous.

"If animals weren't factory farmed they'd just be wild" is a dirty lie that you said yourself and I never did. You put it in scare quotes to say that they're my words, but they're yours and you're the one who's outright lying. So much about "disingenuous" then.

And I don't support or defend factory farming, quite the contrary. I think it's a disaster and I'm very upset that it's taking over the world like a cancer spreading and displacing small-scale farming. And I'm very well aware of its horrors. It's you, and people who bundle all of farming with factory farming like you, who are clueless about farming.

Partly this is because the majority of people like you are natives of the countries that are at the heart of the cancer of factory farming, like the Americas or North and Western Europe, countries that consume, per capita, about double the amount of meat as anybody else. People who grew up thinking that "food" means "meat", who have probably never even seen a farm animal up close, who have no clue about how their food is made, or what's in it, even when they're not eating meat. And it's people like you, with strong opinions but weak knowledge, the people of nations who have destroyed their own food production and replaced it with an industry that feeds them shit, that want to tell the rest of the world, all of us other people, how to eat? That's just tragic and so stupid, and arrogant and conceited.

Btw, my username is because I make cheese and your comment makes you sound like a puerile idiot.

[causasui]

> "If animals weren't factory farmed they'd just be wild" is a dirty lie that you said yourself and I never did.

... yet earlier...

> Because without farming they'd live in the wild

Seems pretty cut and dry.