Seems to be focused on formally managed cuddlies with chain-of-possession. Would be nice / arguably more modern and holistic to see some gardening related information whereby people are encouraged to restore and enhance habitats for all manner of creatures including but not limited to insects and invertebrates as such a strategy will be more self-sustaining and also tend to support native mammals and birds. Oh, and the sad reality is you need to kill or lock up any cats you see wandering around... a low-vis method is creating a tincture of true lilies in any ponds of water left lying around which will cause feline renal failure.
I am drawn to gardening and biology as a collection of complex and mutually interdependent black box systems with zero authoritative reference that constantly surprises.
One of my favorite things about the Hacker News community is the unexpected popularity of things like this, about the welfare of non-human animals. As someone who cares deeply about this issue, it's heartwarming and gives me hope.
I do wonder why this community seems to disproportionately care about this. Anyone have any thoughts?
I’d like to think so too but whenever meat or fish eating comes up, either in climate change discussions or general animal welfare, you get quite a lot of hostile and cruel answers. Some directly aimed at hurting parent who comments about compassion or alternative diets. So, yeah… I’d like to have hope as well but I think the HN crowd is very similar to the rest of the population in this respect.
People have an emotional and social attachment to food. It’s hard to have these conversations because people who care about different issues come from divergent and often partially misinformed places.
You can’t talk about animal welfare and practices without somebody chirping up about cow farts before they head home in their SUV. Many of the problems are really economic. Because the law allows a farmer in Nebraska to run a disgusting scaled feedlot, ground beef is $3/lb. The world would be a better place if we didn’t have the dysfunctional governance of the US Senate.
Instead, we have a 2023 environment with various concerned citizens screaming at each other for their pet thing.
Focusing on making regional and smaller scale farming viable is imo the best solution. You can’t make factory farming humane. Reducing consumption without changing production creates more demand - if you want less meat consumed, you have to produce it in a human and environmentally sustainable way. That means the $3 ground beef will be $8. (Which in turn lowers demand)
Yeah I don’t understand how people are so ignorant. But the system is designed to make them so—and they become mouth pieces for the big-agriculture lobby.
Make it an emotional issue and they’ll bring their pitchforks; but they’ve never worked in a slaughter house nor spent time with the animals.
That’s the problem—people are so far removed from animals these days… Farming is done by corporate machines en masse. Well, that and underpaid foreign labor.
In short—many people are dumber than the very animals they say “have no conscience.”
If you don't mind me going on a soapbox here for a minute, I want to highlight something that I suspect is hurting your cause and not helping it:
> In short—many people are dumber than the very animals they say “have no conscience.”
There's a phenomenon that I've observed over the last 20 years that seems to primarily effect progressive causes: an alienating sense of moral and intellectual superiority over the people who do not yet believe in your cause. That statement that you made there is going to do two things:
- Resonate with the people who already believe that eating meat is the epitome of evil and all that is wrong with the world
- Cause people who don't yet believe that to go "wow, those vegetarians are assholes." And... it won't be the first time they've had that thought :)
That being said, the question that has perpetually eluded me with vegetarianism is: what is a good way to promote it? If you do truly believe that people are dumb, but you still want them to start eating an animal-free diet, what's the tack for getting there? My suspicion is that one aspect of a positive approach is to just start cooking and sharing amazingly good animal-free meals. For people who are vegetarian for moral-superiority reasons, it's easy to justify sacrificing on amazing food because, well, morality; for your Uncle Joe, though, all you're telling him is "you can't have bacon on your burger, you can't even have the burger, but here's a soy-based alternative that's not nearly as good but is _moral_". I have had incredible vegetarian dishes, particularly from Middle Eastern restaurants. They are decidedly not the dishes that vegetarians bring to backyard barbecues.
> they’ve never worked in a slaughter house nor spent time with the animals
For the record, I am not a vegetarian but I do try to bias my cooking towards more sustainable ingredients. We buy our meat exclusively from local farms (which I realize is both unscalable and a privilege). I have not worked in a slaughterhouse, but I have raised and slaughtered cows and chickens with my own hands. Mostly I'm not a vegetarian because I'm not good enough at consistently cooking food that tastes nearly as good as beef or pork and I have not yet found the right combination of vegetarian dishes that doesn't leave me with a lack of energy after eating them for a week.
28 upvotes really isn't that much. It's probably a lot more to do with the principles of open and well-curated databases/libraries of knowledge around a particular topic than about the particular topic itself
That, and discussions about animal sentience being a natural outgrowth of the philosophy around artificial neural networks make this a pretty good fit for the already Silicon Valley politics-biased community
