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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

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.

jonnybgood 10y ago
The principled reason to care more for dogs from my understanding is mutualism. Dogs are dogs because of humans. Same for cats.
- chc 10y ago
  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.
- greenshackle2 10y ago
  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.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
coldtea 10y ago
>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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    >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.
betenoire 10y ago
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.
komali2 10y ago
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.
- mirimir 10y ago
  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.
  - chongli 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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?
  - harperlee 10y ago
    > 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.
chongli 10y ago
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.

jonnybgood 10y ago

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

chc 10y ago
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.
greenshackle2 10y ago
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.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

coldtea 10y ago

>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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  >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.

betenoire 10y ago

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.

komali2 10y ago

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.

mirimir 10y ago
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.
- chongli 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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?
- harperlee 10y ago
  > 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.

chongli 10y ago

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.