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Not even 3 generations ago, it was incredibly common for people to slaughter their own farm animals. My grandmother was an old farm woman, raised in the time be
by chrisco255 2y ago
Not even 3 generations ago, it was incredibly common for people to slaughter their own farm animals. My grandmother was an old farm woman, raised in the time before refrigeration. She'd slaughter and pluck her own chickens without a second thought. It's entirely a modern phenomenon of global distribution and modern conditioning that lead you to that conclusion. Some animals evolved to be prey, and that is why they have an excessive number of offspring. Fowls are among those species. They lay eggs sometimes once a day so their numbers can increase incredibly rapidly. That is an adaptation to high predation. In the absence of that predation, they can overwhelm ecosystems.
You are a descendent of millions of years of hunters. I know many hunters and have been hunting myself. I know many who like to fish and have been fishing myself, and cooked my own catch. It's quite a satisfying experience actually.
- throwup238 2y ago> Some animals evolved to be prey, and that is why they have an excessive number of offspring. Fowls are among those species. They lay eggs sometimes once a day so their numbers can increase incredibly rapidly. That is an adaptation to high predation. In the absence of that predation, they can overwhelm ecosystems. Red junglefowl, the ancestors to domesticated chickens, only lay a few clutches annually for a total of less than 20 eggs per year. Modern chickens that lay hundreds of eggs a year are a product of selective breeding, not some natural adaptation.
- ndr 2y agoOne could argue that is natural adaptation. Modern chickens are likely going to be more successful at propagating their genes into the future.
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- ben_w 2y agoOnly if you want to argue about what counts as "natural".
- Lutger 2y agoI see the case for it, but what wouldn't be natural once you allow this? Gene editing? Why not? A consequence is that 'natural' will lose all meaning. If everything is natural, then nothing is, really.
- Jcowell 2y agoI fall under the idea that yes, everything is natural, we are not special no matter what secrets of the universe we uncover and wield . Even our robot descendants , if they ever come to be, are natural too. Just because we have the ability to acknowledge material selection does not mean we are except from it
- throwup238 2y agoThat's a gross misuse of language that makes words utterly meaningless. When people say "artificial selection" they don't mean a supernatural deity is doing it. It's like going "haha gotcha! tomatoes are fruit, not vegetables!", completely missing the difference between the use of the word in a culinary versus botanical context. It's not insightful or useful in any way, it's just equivocation.
- Jcowell 2y agoI just fall under the banner that everything we do is natural since we are natural, even if we were to desires nature it self. After all it was natural selection that brought us here.
- thfuran 2y agoOnly if by natural you mean "not supernatural".
- ndr 2y agoI didn't mean that "artificial" is an artificial distinction. I meant that the evolutionary fittest chicken long-term might be the modern farmed chicken. It's a weird tradeoff their specie is managing to make.
- hombre_fatal 2y agoYou could justify any man-made breeding horror with that if it held any ethical weight, but it does not. Breeding a worse life into a sentient being isn't a victory for that being. Neither the being nor its genes should be propagated at all.
- globular-toast 2y agoYeah, I used to perform similar mental gymnastics too. Interestingly, it's very similar to the behaviour of addicts. Unfortunately, the way poor people lived 3 generations ago has absolutely nothing to do with how fat, rich people live today. What's next? No vaccines? No pasteurisation? This line of reasoning is a very slippery slope. Hunting is different for a couple of reasons. First, you're almost certainly talking about killing from a distance with a gun. But it's also quite different to hunt a wild animal rather than raise a domestic animal just to kill it. But also some "hunting" is basically a simulation using released domestic animals (see pheasant shooting in the UK). And some is just downright cruel (see fox hunting in the UK or shooting of birds in Malta). Nobody is doing the slaughter for fun, though. It's always guns or dogs doing the dirty work. Funny that.
- alt227 2y ago> Nobody is doing the slaughter for fun, though. It's always guns or dogs doing the dirty work. Funny that. But also to provide. The estate near us has shoots every season and the fowl which is killed is given to the local residents. Lots of local poorer people really look forward to shoot season because they can pack their freezer with lots of free meat. I speak to lots of older folks in the area and they say this is the way it has been done for hundreds of years.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago> It's always guns or dogs doing the dirty work. Funny that. Someone has to skin & butcher the animal though, or does that "just happen?"
- adrianN 2y agoThree generations ago it was also common to beat your children. I’m not sure that we should base moral arguments on what was common in the past.
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- b112 2y agoNo, it was not. It was common to spank your children, out of care and love, when they did things dangerous to themselves or others, and sometimes a strap or switch when something truly horrific was done. We now view this as wrong, but that wasn't beating them. Yes, some idiots did beat their children, or hit their children out of anger. That doesn't mean it was common.
- revert_to_test 2y agoFrom what I observe, although spanking is described as basically harmless, not everyone who lived through it see it as something that improved their lives. Even if it was administered by well-meaning, loving parents.
- b112 2y agoTo be clear, as this is often required on HN, I was speaking of a subset of spanking: out of care and love, when they did things dangerous to themselves or others, and sometimes a strap or switch when something truly horrific was done. In other words, never because fed up / angry. Never because of minor situations, and so on. For example, swearing isn't "dangerous to themselves or others". Spanking employed when the life of the child or others is involved, is a short-cut to locking an intense memory into long-term recall. This sort of event is rare. And to be frank? "Improved their lives" isn't necessarily important. Note how I state "dangerous to themselves or others"? Siblings and other children have to be taken into account. Lastly, and take this from someone with grey hair, it wasn't until my 30s that I started to appreciate some of the discipline I disagreed with as a child. Disagreeing, doesn't mean it was wrong.
- Galatians4_16 2y agoJust think of how much the environment would benefit if we wouldn't need to run so many refrigerators to eat fresh food…
- ars 2y agoIt would not benefit at all. Zero. It would harm the environment because all the food waste outweighs the energy cost of refrigerators by several orders of magnitude.
- Galatians4_16 2y agoFeed food waste to chickens, fish, rabbits, and worms. Feed poop to worms and bacteria, feed bacteria and worm waste to plants, which convert that dastardly CO2 to sweet wholesome Oxygen. I was always taught that recycling was good, while pumping oil out of the ground and creating new CO2 is bad, but I'm no expert.
- ars 2y agoIt's better to eat the "food waste", rather than create more waste in the first place. If I have leftover rice, I'd rather refrigerate it and eat it tomorrow, instead of feed it to chickens. Rabbits can not eat food waste, they have very sensitive digestions. Very few fish will eat food waste (mostly just tilapia will do so). > feed bacteria and worm waste to plants Plants do not eat bacteria. You can't just "feed" worm waste to plants, you would have to bury into the soil via plowing or some other method. Bacteria also make CO2 by digesting food. The fertilizer they make is minerals and nitrogen. You have a bit of a simplistic view of how this food cycle works. > I was always taught that recycling was good, while pumping oil out of the ground and creating new CO2 is bad, but I'm no expert. It's not so simple. Except for metal, recycling usually uses more oil than not recycling.
- Galatians4_16 2y agoPlants do eat bacteria waste (see aquaponics), rabbits can eat some kitchen plant waste, but should of course not solely be fed that, (same with chickens), rabbit poop can be fed to fish and chickens (rabbits themselves eat it like 3x because poor digestive tract)… There are obviously a few steps I left unmentioned, as I am keeping my comments simplistic for the format. You seem to have selective comprehension issues. Recycling is more than just throwing trash into different coloured bins and burning oil to process it; Specifically, recycling in my comment refers to the process of water and air turning into food, and back into water and air, as has been customary for terran life for a few years now. It is quite simply a natural cycle using no oil for centuries, vs. an industrial cycle using millions of tons of oil per year.
- Karrot_Kream 2y agoNot the case in many South Asian cultures. Lots of South Asians have been vegetarian for a really long time. Jain and Hindu foundational texts advocate for vegetarianism and Buddhism, also originally from the region, also treats vegetarianism as a foundational concept. These all derive from the concept of ahimsa, the principle of nonviolence. People have been horrified at killing for a very long time, in times much materially poorer than our own now. Even now a third of India is vegetarian. > You are a descendent of millions of years of hunters. I know many hunters and have been hunting myself. I know many who like to fish and have been fishing myself, and cooked my own catch. It's quite a satisfying experience actually. When I see posts like this I chuckle a bit at how steeped in their culture they are.
- seanmcdirmid 2y agoNot all Buddhists are vegetarian. It would be really hard to live in the Tibetan plateau or in Mongolia and be vegetarian, just because the land supports grazing and not much farming beyond that. Yet those areas are heavily Buddhist, even if even the monks eat meat.
- Karrot_Kream 2y agoDefinitely and despite ~ 70-80% of India being Hindu only a third of India is vegetarian, so there are more non-veg than veg Hindus. But those cultures often frown on relishing meat (much in the way Protestants "frown" on promiscuity or Muslims "frown" on showing skin even though in practice it absolutely happens) or eating meat and only meat. In a lot of Buddhist Asia you can ask for the "monk's menu" and you'll get something that is veg and can be flavorful (but not always as keeping food underspiced is part of being Buddhist.) You also find lots of households where meat is eaten sparingly or combined with other protein dense foods like tofu or seitan to make a complete meal. I contrast this with Western cultures where meat is often the centerpiece of the dish and many times your food is just meat with accompanying carbs and veggies. The kind of rhetoric the GP had about relishing hunting is a lot more absent from these cultures just because there's a general understanding that eating meat is unethical but something we all do because we aren't perfect. All that to say that culture creates a powerful framing. Obviously in places like the steppes it's very hard to live without eating meat, but in places rich with agriculture attitudes toward meat are more about the culture you're steeped in than any material nutritional issues.