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What would you say to someone who’s only qualm is the animals humane treatment? I typically only eat chicken but I just don’t see an issue with if the chickens

What would you say to someone who’s only qualm is the animals humane treatment? I typically only eat chicken but I just don’t see an issue with if the chickens are humanely treated and killed. What else would we do with all the chickens besides eat them? They’d die out if we stopped eating them and it’s not like anyone’s going to put them in a zoo. The way I see it is we’ve bred these animals as livestock and we’re responsible for them as livestock and that’s okay. It’s how we treat them as livestock that matters. Factory farms are one of many gross byproducts of industrialization that we now have to deal with like fossil fuels.

ceejayoz 3y ago
> They’d die out if we stopped eating them and it’s not like anyone’s going to put them in a zoo. There are feral chickens in quite a few places. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_chicken https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_chicken Tahiti's airport has a bunch of them.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  I'm not sure I agree that a feral chicken has a better life than a domestic chicken being humanely raised for meat/eggs. The feral chicken probably lives in a state of borderline starvation and is at risk from disease and predators; the domestic chicken gets to walk around in a protected area and has a good supply of nutritious food and water and a place to get inside at night and when the weather is bad. Sure the big factory chicken farms are something else, but you can buy ethically sourced chickens (or raise them yourself if you have the space) if that bothers you.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    I mean, we're getting into Star Trek episode ethical/moral dilemmas; is it better to live in a gilded cage, or be free but at risk of poverty? No right answer to this.
    - hombre_fatal 3y ago
      Well, the decision isn't between having feral chickens vs. caging them. Domesticated chickens are bred into existence. We could just stop doing that if we had ethical problems with it. The consideration doesn't hinge on whether there exists some wild variant of the animal we're breeding.
      - ceejayoz 3y ago
        My note about feral chickens was to contest the stated idea upthread that the species would die out if we stopped intentionally breeding them.
        hombre_fatal 3y ago
        True, my comment was really for them: What's wrong with stopping the breeding of a species, especially one we bred to exploit.
digging 3y ago
> I typically only eat chicken but I just don’t see an issue with if the chickens are humanely treated and killed. If that's your only concern, and not environmental destruction, then that's fine - if you're ensuring that the chickens you eat are humanely treated and humanely killed. The best way to do that is to buy from local farms you can visit - otherwise it's just aspirational and in effect identical to someone who doesn't care at all. > The way I see it is we’ve bred these animals as livestock and we’re responsible for them as livestock and that’s okay. But we can stop mass producing them. There don't need to be 30 billion of them. Scale is what makes factory farming such a catastrophe (environmentally, ethically, and for our own health).
hombre_fatal 3y ago
> What would you say to someone who’s only qualm is the animals humane treatment? The typical response to this would be a game of Name The Trait. For example, what would be wrong about farming humans as long as we treat them humanely? Or more generally, what's true of animals that if made true of humans would make it okay to farm humans? And then when you come up with a symmetry breaker, we apply it to humans and see if you're okay with the reductio. If so, you bite the bullet on a crazy human atrocity, and if not, then it's not the trait that actually matters to you.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  That's trivially solved with shared culture. Simply by both being human, we share a level of shared experience that would make me uncomfortable eating you. To a lesser extent, we have a shared experience with our domesticated pets, which is why we find it repugnant to eat them, but unlike with Grandma it's okay to give them the Old Yeller' treatment when need be. Most edge cases you could come up with are covered by "it wouldn't necessarily be unethical to eat them, but we have a universal taboo because edge cases are so absurd and rare."
  - hombre_fatal 3y ago
    You're putting forth multiple traits, btw, but I don't think it's as trivial as you think it is. One trait seems to be "shared culture" whatever that means. What about humans with cultures we don't share? What about humans with downright alien cultures we can hardly understand nor agree with? What does "shared experience" with a dog mean? What about brain-dead humans that we don't share an experience with? Another trait seems to be "being a human". What about Santa's elves or any hypothetical sentient being that's not a human? Does any alien race that discovers us have the ethical justification to farm us? > it wouldn't necessarily be unethical to eat them, but we have a universal taboo because edge cases are so absurd and rare. Would it be okay to farm or enslave humans if we simply didn't have that taboo? Or in a hypothetical world where it wasn't taboo: would it be okay then? These aren't edge cases btw, these are reductios that test for position's consistency and dispel the sort of "I'll know it when I see it" hand-waving we like to do. Any coherent position has a coherent answer to hypotheticals. There is a trivial answer that does nip it easily in the bud: we agree to value sentience thus we stop farming sentient beings whether they're human, cows, or Santa's elves. Finally, I was just offering a potential response to your question. HN is a poor place for this kind of discussion, but I hope you at least see that there is conversational meat on the bone, pun not intended.

ceejayoz 3y ago

> They’d die out if we stopped eating them and it’s not like anyone’s going to put them in a zoo. There are feral chickens in quite a few places. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_chicken https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_chicken Tahiti's airport has a bunch of them.

SoftTalker 3y ago
I'm not sure I agree that a feral chicken has a better life than a domestic chicken being humanely raised for meat/eggs. The feral chicken probably lives in a state of borderline starvation and is at risk from disease and predators; the domestic chicken gets to walk around in a protected area and has a good supply of nutritious food and water and a place to get inside at night and when the weather is bad. Sure the big factory chicken farms are something else, but you can buy ethically sourced chickens (or raise them yourself if you have the space) if that bothers you.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  I mean, we're getting into Star Trek episode ethical/moral dilemmas; is it better to live in a gilded cage, or be free but at risk of poverty? No right answer to this.
  - hombre_fatal 3y ago
    Well, the decision isn't between having feral chickens vs. caging them. Domesticated chickens are bred into existence. We could just stop doing that if we had ethical problems with it. The consideration doesn't hinge on whether there exists some wild variant of the animal we're breeding.
    - ceejayoz 3y ago
      My note about feral chickens was to contest the stated idea upthread that the species would die out if we stopped intentionally breeding them.
      - hombre_fatal 3y ago
        True, my comment was really for them: What's wrong with stopping the breeding of a species, especially one we bred to exploit.

digging 3y ago

> I typically only eat chicken but I just don’t see an issue with if the chickens are humanely treated and killed. If that's your only concern, and not environmental destruction, then that's fine - if you're ensuring that the chickens you eat are humanely treated and humanely killed. The best way to do that is to buy from local farms you can visit - otherwise it's just aspirational and in effect identical to someone who doesn't care at all. > The way I see it is we’ve bred these animals as livestock and we’re responsible for them as livestock and that’s okay. But we can stop mass producing them. There don't need to be 30 billion of them. Scale is what makes factory farming such a catastrophe (environmentally, ethically, and for our own health).

hombre_fatal 3y ago

> What would you say to someone who’s only qualm is the animals humane treatment? The typical response to this would be a game of Name The Trait. For example, what would be wrong about farming humans as long as we treat them humanely? Or more generally, what's true of animals that if made true of humans would make it okay to farm humans? And then when you come up with a symmetry breaker, we apply it to humans and see if you're okay with the reductio. If so, you bite the bullet on a crazy human atrocity, and if not, then it's not the trait that actually matters to you.

OkayPhysicist 3y ago
That's trivially solved with shared culture. Simply by both being human, we share a level of shared experience that would make me uncomfortable eating you. To a lesser extent, we have a shared experience with our domesticated pets, which is why we find it repugnant to eat them, but unlike with Grandma it's okay to give them the Old Yeller' treatment when need be. Most edge cases you could come up with are covered by "it wouldn't necessarily be unethical to eat them, but we have a universal taboo because edge cases are so absurd and rare."
- hombre_fatal 3y ago
  You're putting forth multiple traits, btw, but I don't think it's as trivial as you think it is. One trait seems to be "shared culture" whatever that means. What about humans with cultures we don't share? What about humans with downright alien cultures we can hardly understand nor agree with? What does "shared experience" with a dog mean? What about brain-dead humans that we don't share an experience with? Another trait seems to be "being a human". What about Santa's elves or any hypothetical sentient being that's not a human? Does any alien race that discovers us have the ethical justification to farm us? > it wouldn't necessarily be unethical to eat them, but we have a universal taboo because edge cases are so absurd and rare. Would it be okay to farm or enslave humans if we simply didn't have that taboo? Or in a hypothetical world where it wasn't taboo: would it be okay then? These aren't edge cases btw, these are reductios that test for position's consistency and dispel the sort of "I'll know it when I see it" hand-waving we like to do. Any coherent position has a coherent answer to hypotheticals. There is a trivial answer that does nip it easily in the bud: we agree to value sentience thus we stop farming sentient beings whether they're human, cows, or Santa's elves. Finally, I was just offering a potential response to your question. HN is a poor place for this kind of discussion, but I hope you at least see that there is conversational meat on the bone, pun not intended.