4 ms·

I'm not vegan, but that's absurd. Right now we spend an inordinate amount of land on the relative monocultures of raising these animals, consuming vegetable mat

by avar 7y ago

I'm not vegan, but that's absurd. Right now we spend an inordinate amount of land on the relative monocultures of raising these animals, consuming vegetable matter is generally more efficient when it comes to land use. So we'd have fewer chickens, but we'd have more land left to the wilderness. I don't really care about the interest of 100 chickens somewhere, but purely from a conservation point of view veganism is one of the worthwhile things we can be doing. Those animals are taking up land that we can replace with a more varied ecology. But these species are never going to become extinct, we won't have 100% veganism, and some of them will still be raised even if they're not being eaten. E.g. chickens are very useful for pest control and to dispose of food waste.

gwd 7y ago
> I'm not vegan, but that's absurd. Sorry, I'm having trouble figuring out from your response what it is that you disagree with. The main point of my post is to address the question of whether it's ethical to raise and eat animals at all: whether, all things being equal, a world in which nobody eats cows or sheep or chickens is better than a world in which we eat cows and sheep and chickens, but give them decent living conditions. Obviously other things are not equal, as I alluded to in my final paragraph.
- avar 7y ago
  How does that make any sense? In the real world we have resource constraints, so positing something like "there won't be any chickens" as a moral loss doesn't make sense, we'll have something else instead since the resources to raise chickens were freed up. If you're throwing resource constraints out the window the question should be why we're not raising 1 billion blue whales for food in addition to of cows. After all they're smarter, and if you're going to follow this logic that these animals ultimately benefit from their numbers being raised as a result of food production that should go for all of them. Having 1 billion city-sized aquariums isn't an issue if we're assuming we have infinite resources. But we don't, in fact that's the entire reason we ended up with these particular species as food animals, they're the most efficient relatively speaking, not necessarily the tastiest.
  - gwd 7y ago
    > How does that make any sense? Again I'm having trouble figuring out what the "that" is that offends you. I'm guessing that you mean, "How does it make any sense to consider a chicken's life to have any value whatsoever?" All I can say is, you may not think so, but lots of people do. We're discussing a story in which some researchers found millions of ants that had fallen into a pit and were living only by cannibalizing their comrades who had starved to death, and responded by building them a "bridge" to allow them to escape. Why did they do that? Party to see what would happen; but partly because they felt bad for the ants and felt better when they helped them. I mean, not a huge amount. I'm sure the researchers wouldn't have intervened, or even felt that bad, if the ant nest had been destroyed to make way for a parking lot. But there's not a parking lot, and all it takes to help is standing up a wooden beam. Like, sure, why not help if it's so easy? In response to this, someone asked how it was consistent to do this and yet continue eating meat. That person obviously cares enough about chickens to think they shouldn't be slaughtered, and to argue about it on Hacker News. In response, a bunch of other people, like myself, jumped in to explain why it's perfectly consistent to value ants enough to save them, but still eat chickens. It was the person who cared about chickens being killed and eaten I was responding to. I was trying to show how trying to make the current system more humane would be better for chickens than eliminating chicken farms altogether. I'm not going to cry for the grass and ants and crickets if they dig up a field to build a useful building. But I'd rather have grass and ants and crickets than an unused parking lot. And I'm not going to cry too badly if chickens go extinct; but all things being equal I'd rather have happy chickens than no chickens. I mean yeah, if you don't give two figs about ants or chickens, then it doesn't matter one way or the other. But an awful lot of people do -- at least a little bit.
philliphaydon 7y ago
Can you cite that because my understanding is it takes less space to have live stock as you don’t need to do crop rotation. Organic is the worst as the yields are low you need to plant more to attempt to come close to the same yields as a GM crop.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago
  Livestock always takes more land than an equivalent calorie-load of crops. It has to; you're feeding the crops to the animals instead of eating the crops yourself, so there's a lot of energy lost on building cows. The actual farm footprint may be smaller, but the feed for those animals was still grown somewhere. (Of course there are resources besides land. In desert environments, livestock still takes more land, but it takes several orders of magnitude less water, since ruminants can digest dry scrub while humans need well-watered grains. But in places that get plenty of rain, livestock is always less efficient.)
  - Arnt 7y ago
    Tell me about my home country, which certainly has enough rain. Here's a photo: https://nasjonalparken.no/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/081-hestkjlen-02-08-1-1400x1000.jpg https://nasjonalparken.no/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/081-hes... Sheep, goats and reindeer will spend the summer there and taste great. It's not done on that particular mountain at present due to... explanations vary, and generally contain some or all of the words "market price", "herders" and "bears". I suppose you could say that keeping sheep there is less efficient than transporting grain from somewhere else. But that isn't the sense of "efficient" you had in mind, is it?
    - PhasmaFelis 7y ago
      Fair enough, there are other considerations besides just water that make land less practical for growing food crops. It still takes more land--square kilometers--to produce X calories of livestock than X calories of plants. It's just that sometimes there are more important factors than square kilometers. Water, soil quality, markets, terrain inclination.

by avar 7y ago

gwd 7y ago

> I'm not vegan, but that's absurd. Sorry, I'm having trouble figuring out from your response what it is that you disagree with. The main point of my post is to address the question of whether it's ethical to raise and eat animals at all: whether, all things being equal, a world in which nobody eats cows or sheep or chickens is better than a world in which we eat cows and sheep and chickens, but give them decent living conditions. Obviously other things are not equal, as I alluded to in my final paragraph.

avar 7y ago
How does that make any sense? In the real world we have resource constraints, so positing something like "there won't be any chickens" as a moral loss doesn't make sense, we'll have something else instead since the resources to raise chickens were freed up. If you're throwing resource constraints out the window the question should be why we're not raising 1 billion blue whales for food in addition to of cows. After all they're smarter, and if you're going to follow this logic that these animals ultimately benefit from their numbers being raised as a result of food production that should go for all of them. Having 1 billion city-sized aquariums isn't an issue if we're assuming we have infinite resources. But we don't, in fact that's the entire reason we ended up with these particular species as food animals, they're the most efficient relatively speaking, not necessarily the tastiest.
- gwd 7y ago
  > How does that make any sense? Again I'm having trouble figuring out what the "that" is that offends you. I'm guessing that you mean, "How does it make any sense to consider a chicken's life to have any value whatsoever?" All I can say is, you may not think so, but lots of people do. We're discussing a story in which some researchers found millions of ants that had fallen into a pit and were living only by cannibalizing their comrades who had starved to death, and responded by building them a "bridge" to allow them to escape. Why did they do that? Party to see what would happen; but partly because they felt bad for the ants and felt better when they helped them. I mean, not a huge amount. I'm sure the researchers wouldn't have intervened, or even felt that bad, if the ant nest had been destroyed to make way for a parking lot. But there's not a parking lot, and all it takes to help is standing up a wooden beam. Like, sure, why not help if it's so easy? In response to this, someone asked how it was consistent to do this and yet continue eating meat. That person obviously cares enough about chickens to think they shouldn't be slaughtered, and to argue about it on Hacker News. In response, a bunch of other people, like myself, jumped in to explain why it's perfectly consistent to value ants enough to save them, but still eat chickens. It was the person who cared about chickens being killed and eaten I was responding to. I was trying to show how trying to make the current system more humane would be better for chickens than eliminating chicken farms altogether. I'm not going to cry for the grass and ants and crickets if they dig up a field to build a useful building. But I'd rather have grass and ants and crickets than an unused parking lot. And I'm not going to cry too badly if chickens go extinct; but all things being equal I'd rather have happy chickens than no chickens. I mean yeah, if you don't give two figs about ants or chickens, then it doesn't matter one way or the other. But an awful lot of people do -- at least a little bit.

philliphaydon 7y ago

Can you cite that because my understanding is it takes less space to have live stock as you don’t need to do crop rotation. Organic is the worst as the yields are low you need to plant more to attempt to come close to the same yields as a GM crop.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
PhasmaFelis 7y ago
Livestock always takes more land than an equivalent calorie-load of crops. It has to; you're feeding the crops to the animals instead of eating the crops yourself, so there's a lot of energy lost on building cows. The actual farm footprint may be smaller, but the feed for those animals was still grown somewhere. (Of course there are resources besides land. In desert environments, livestock still takes more land, but it takes several orders of magnitude less water, since ruminants can digest dry scrub while humans need well-watered grains. But in places that get plenty of rain, livestock is always less efficient.)
- Arnt 7y ago
  Tell me about my home country, which certainly has enough rain. Here's a photo: https://nasjonalparken.no/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/081-hestkjlen-02-08-1-1400x1000.jpg https://nasjonalparken.no/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/081-hes... Sheep, goats and reindeer will spend the summer there and taste great. It's not done on that particular mountain at present due to... explanations vary, and generally contain some or all of the words "market price", "herders" and "bears". I suppose you could say that keeping sheep there is less efficient than transporting grain from somewhere else. But that isn't the sense of "efficient" you had in mind, is it?
  - PhasmaFelis 7y ago
    Fair enough, there are other considerations besides just water that make land less practical for growing food crops. It still takes more land--square kilometers--to produce X calories of livestock than X calories of plants. It's just that sometimes there are more important factors than square kilometers. Water, soil quality, markets, terrain inclination.