If you live in the district of one of these people you might consider contacting them to let them know your opinion.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4673...
Meat is nice but would be better if we can skip the whole suffering thing
The problem is that it costs slightly more and our society is more concerned with cost than animal suffering.
> The problem is that it costs slightly more and our society is more concerned with cost than animal suffering.
IDK about other livestock, but this definitely doesn't hold for chickens, one of the cheaper meat sources in the US. Switching to breeds that could live more than a very-few weeks(!) before getting too overweight to walk, would increase price by far more than "slightly more", and there's no hope of anything fitting any sane definition of "humane chicken farming" without that step.
I suspect it's also true for pigs, not necessarily the "we bred them so wrong that their very existence is a crime against god and nature" part but that the price increase from a "healthy, happy life" would be a lot larger than "slightly more". Maybe also cows, dunno about that one.
Breeding animals _specifically for killing them_, no matter how they are killed, is not what I'd consider humane. If we take 'humane' literally, it means to be treated as you would treat a human. I doubt we'd do this to humans. So the only way to be okay with this is adhering to a form of specieism.
The obvious historical pointer to the Holocaust as a well covered example of people being treated like that - and a fact often swept under the rug: people are being treated essentially like that in North Korea, today.
An older interview but still good to watch
Not too different from humans in that respect; humans are bred systematically (we have dedicated hormonal supplements, birth facilities, documented birthing procedures, standardized post-birth checklists of forms of vaccination regiments, standardized mass schooling, government-subsidized feeding programs, etc) and most are used machinistically by society exclusively for productive output, regardless of whether the society is corporatist, capitalist, socialist, communist, etc.
But still, egg and dairy animals are culled when productivity drops. The human equivalent would be killing all male babies, and females after age ~40.
This does not seem more "humane" than the human equivalent of meat farming, where all human offspring would be harvested at age ~15.
And pregnancy is _hard_ on animals (including humans), it changes your physiology and psychology. Even if we take for granted that a cow isn't as conscious as a human (IMO consciousness is a sliding scale, not a binary), then they are still being primed for giving birth and taking care of offspring which never comes. Imagine doing that to a human - it's a definite form of cruelty.
It is not at all a logical, ethical, or emotional contradiction to say that we should have humanely-raised livestock whose purpose is to be slaughtered for meat. We can ensure that they are kept in healthy, safe, and humane ways during their lifetimes, and are killed as quickly, cleanly, and painlessly as we can reasonably manage.
And, um, the meaning of "humane" is only loosely related to "treat like a human." It means "treat well, view with compassion", and similar. We talk of things being "humane" or "inhumane" in how we treat each other, too. [0]
Humans have been raising meat animals with compassion and treating them well during their lifetimes for longer than we have had written language. Veganism/vegetarianism is not even physically an option for many people, excludes many cultures' traditional practices, and very, very often requires (or at least tends toward) supplementing with foods that are at least as unethical as factory farming practices.
That's the first time I ear about supplement being unethical, let alone "compared to factory farming". Stretching the usual arguments, it may be almonds' water or soy in brazil ? I'd be glad you clarify your point.
Raising animals for meat is theoretically doable with no suffering (not sure about milk), but it's not happening in practice. With pets the situation is better - a lot of people adopt and some care about how their pet was raised if they buy it from a breeder.
I also think we need to be careful with the idea that we should entirely avoid suffering because it's impossible to do.
I think most people are aware of animal cruelty in factory farms (the chicken in cages, the pigs in cages, etc.), which represents 90% of all farm animals globally (https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/global-animal-farming-est...).
For pets, I don't think you understood what GP was saying: pet breeding involves massive amounts of death of puppies/kittens that aren't pretty enough or don't manage to survive infancy, the female breeders are basically confined to cages and "producing" all their life, some short-nosed breeds of dogs and cats are even illegal in some countries because they spend their life unable to breathe properly, pets are abandoned and killed, etc. The happy pets you see in the street are not representative of what it is to be a pet. But yes, these ones are not suffering.
As for long and harmonious, as much as we tend to see anything in the distant past as innocent, I'd remind you that the systematic killing of male chicks, the killing of veals to avoid them drinking all the milk, the killing of all animals as soon as productivity drops beyond a threshold, are not new practices. No animal wants to be enslaved. Same as no human wants to be enslaved.
I'm not attacking you, just attempting to give you an idea of why other commenters believe animal domestication is not ethical.
> society is more concerned with cost than animal suffering.
Yes, and it's politically very hard to change. I totally understand price sensitivity around food. At least where I live milk and meat is extremely subsidised. How can you have chicken that is grown, slaughtered, cleaned, packaged, distributed, kept cold all the way, etc. and sell it for 5eur/kg (and cheaper on discounts). There's s much human work, resources, fuel used - I cannot understand.
Also - being a vegetarian/vegan is more expensive than being omnivore.
Being vegan is cheaper where I live regardless of whether we factor in the subsidies or not. Beans, chickpeas, lentils and sometimes soy (examples of protein sources) are pretty inexpensive. Peanuts, some other nuts (in the culinary sense of the word) and some of the vegetable oils are also inexpensive.
If you factor in foods meant to replace or replicate the taste of a carnivore diet like vegan yogurt, milk or cheese, or things like Beyond Meat burgers, it might become expensive, but you don't have to limit yourself by trying to replicate what you used to eat - you can make lots of things from 10-20 basic ingredients.
I read this often but the long term vegs usually says the opposite as does the studies [0]. Bonus point: The veg options are often the cheapest in the non-vegan restaurants (although not the tastiest). I have some hypothesis where it comes from:
- Meat substitues are seen as a necessary replacement. They are transformed, which require more work - and therefore more expensive. However they are as (un)necessary as a fined-prepared piece of charcuterie, which isn't cheap neither.
- Cost is evaluated at the supermarket shelf but as you noted the animal products are extremely subsidised. Vegs pays for them but don't use it. Infrastructures like airport, rails, road and urban amenities are not free either even if you don't pay for them. How you evaluate the price is at your own discretion.
- Fancy products are placed in the most visible shelf and thats the people see first, but they compare it with the cheapest animal alternative. I'm an engineer and by my fancy organic tofu 7-20€/kg but used to buy chicken at 25-35€/kg in the same fancy segment. If I'd be on a budget I'll probably buy the bottom shelf one at 3.5€/kg, next to the 5€/kg chicken.
- Cost of change: changing habits require to re-create the optimization you build during the previous years: where to find the best price for the product X, what quantity should you get or what daily stable you can add in the routine for cheap (fake meat and fancy milk aren't).
0:
> Main findings suggest that food expenditure negatively relates to vegetarian food self-identity, and unemployment status mediates the link between vegetarianism and food expenditure.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-06353-y
Vegan diet is always the cheapest - but not in the lower income countries. However it is when including costs of climate change and health care.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...
Society is only concerned with cost, regulations are weak and rarely enforced and companies are operating in a capitalistic market where they can't compete unless they squeeze every last cent out of each animal. That's hard to change as lots of people have an interest in keeping the status quo and the citizens who vote don't have the time to read everything that comes their way. We can't expect that society will wake up, that people will start voting with more conscience or that everyone will go vegan.
Lab grown meat (or growing brainless animals or something similar) is a technological solution. When it becomes cheaper than normally-grown meat and similar in quality, the atrocities committed in the farms would cease to exist as the farms themselves would cease to exist. The same market forces that are responsible for what's happening to the animals now would prevent any future torture.
I find it hard to believe you could convince a large portion of Americans to eat lab grown meat just to save a buck.
But if lab grown meat is cheaper, some part of the population would buy it. The farms would lose part of their business so economy of scale would help lab grown meat and hurt the farms. I think it would lead to a feedback loop where lab grown meat will get even cheaper and farm meat would get more expensive.
With lab grown meat you also have the option not only for a perfect piece of meat, but for different kinds of tastes, textures and compositions that haven't existed before. Just like people eat processed meat (think ham or nuggets or deep fried pieces), they would love to try the new tastes. I know I would.
And to be glib, I'm not thrilled about the idea of catering to the bar set by "things they don't understand" from that group in particular.
Well we got none of those things. But beef steak is still $25 a pound. I don't really care if it gets more expensive because at current prices I can't eat it regularly anyway and rich assholes will have no problems eating their steaks every day even at $100 a pound so why don't we just have a sustainable, clean, less cruel industry?
Countries reduced their demand of our meat, because of horseshit tradewar games, and yet the price went up. Demand for American industrial crops like soybeans, which is used significantly as a cattle feed, cratered, to the point we will have to hand the farms tens of billions of dollars, yet somehow beef still got more expensive. Meat processing uses illegal immigrant labor, sometimes even child labor, and all regulation of those facilities has dramatically curtailed under Trump administrations, and yet beef still gets more expensive.
Here's what beef producers say:
>“It’s hard as a beef producer to necessarily say that beef prices are too high. I mean, if people are paying $6 for a latte at Starbucks, but then they’re paying $6 for a pound of beef, they’re able to feed a family for a family of three with that pound of beef,” said Taylon Lienemann, co-owner of Linetics Ranch in Princeton, Nebraksa.
In other words, fuck you pay me. "Starbucks makes great profit so we should make more". The reason for the price increase is a "very small herd", which producers have been reducing because of droughts and otherwise because they don't think the profit is high enough to invest in future production.
If you support this, visit one of the handful of restaurants selling it to show interest and support the companies. The salmon I had was ready for prime time in the right context, and if you didn't know, you probably wouldn't have noticed.
I'd assumed it would mostly be limited to cultured ground beef and chicken nuggets.
From my own little box I think that that if lab grown meat was available and affordable, I would never eat a bit of real chicken, pork or beef again. I know veganism is an option too, but... I grew up with meat and it's very difficult to give up.
But debrained animals are certainly more plausible.
You just need a miminum interface to keep their bodies running. Cruelty free meat.
I hope that never takes off. I’m not eating that shit for sure.
In a proper rending facility, a captive bolt pneumatic/hydraulic pistol punctures their skull and sends a shockwave through their brains, killing them like Tony in the last scene of the Sopranos.
Not super interested in pink slime style concoctions either
As a whole, more humans are medically biologically incompatible with plant consumption than animal consumption.
Note that I'm talking about adverse medical reactions that range from worsening of chronic disease to acute death, not merely gastric discomfort, like with lactose intolerance.
Not everyone has the privilege of enjoying buttered cabbage.
Humans eat animals because they are a denser faster nutrition than plants. More bang for your buck. Trying to act like humans “only eat animals because” is ignoring reality.
There is a need for something like it, though. A sow will absolutely lay down on her piglets and suffocate them.
This makes me really curious because that behavior seems very maladaptive for a species. That leads me to wonder if something else, ie. the environment or domestication, is leading to this behavior rather than pigs being really, really prone to wiping out their own species. Does anyone know why they do this in a farm environment?
This used to really bother me, but lately I'm thinking it is probably for the best.
The older I get, the more careful I am to remember there's young people left in my wake and I get to decide whether I owe them anything or not - and, I make a personal belief that I do, a very great deal in fact. So getting comfortable that the whole system is damned and worth tossing is very convenient but too cavalier for me to find comfort in
I don't disagree with this at all, and on a personal level I do everything I can to reasonably leave things as good or better than I found them. I just no longer believe anything I do is going to pull humanity as a whole back from the edge.
I've always enjoyed that line. I also find it interesting how people interpret it. I take it to mean that each raindrop should still try to not cause a flood, and at some point, the flood will be prevented. Others take it to say there are simply too many other raindrops and they won't try, so there is no point in any drop trying. I don't care for that version.
Some people get caught in minutiae about downstream effects, I tell them it can go however they want (house pets are free or gone too, planes land harmlessly, etc)
In my circles, I've found it's about 50/50 button pushers to non-button pushers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, vegetarians are more likely to be button pushers.
But Most Vegans I Know (tm) regard human life as valuabe, speak in terms of harm reduction, and tend not to fantasize about making Vault Tec real.
I just think we are going to absolutely deserve the outcome as we collectively and metaphorically push that button... which we continue to do and are regressing on stopping ourselves from doing so a handful of super wealthy can watch gamified number go up.
I’m not saying I’d be one to push the button, but I think it’s worth trying to understand the mindset of someone who would. It’s very arguable that pushing it would be the ethical thing to do.
If you were locked in a room and being tortured, would you think it'd be appropriate for me to go: "they feed you at the end of each torture session, isn't it worth it to keep going for that?"
Speaking as a lifelong atheist, I cannot stand this genre of nihilistic post-Christianity, all questionable moral baggage with none of the guidance. Here's a tip for you: humanity did not introduce evil to the world. If you don't understand this, find a church, it'll be better for us all.
I you don't like the conversation you're also free to ignore it.
I mean I know you understand what an abstract argument, is but you've chosen to interpret it in the laziest way possible for maximum rage. There are better ways to spend your time.
Extra points for calling yourself a vegan atheist to appeal to credibility.
Of course, I personally have higher hopes for intelligent life than merely not causing massive suffering. That brings me to another tangent: Are you vegan?
I am. You might be, but I'm estimating you probably aren't. You can go vegan, it's easier than you think, and if you don't think you can commit, being 90% vegan is 90% as good as being 100% vegan. All thought experiments aside, you can be a part of making a better world, right now.
You can also make donations: https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/animal-welfare
It requires a sense of morality to divide good from evil, and I don't think that existed on Earth before humans. Digging into the Hominid tree might add some qualifications, but I don't see that as a meaningful distinction.
Where do you think animals live?
I'm not going to argue with someone who works this hard to be a contrarian.
I don't think it's explicit, that's why I put the quip in there about assisted suicide. This thread is showing me that perhaps a lot of people would be okay with the "complainers" offing themselves but I'm not sure... my gut feeling is that a lot of optimists hold conflicting beliefs around this.
I don't want most "complainers" to kill themselves, nor would I recommend them to, but I support their right to. And if they showed me convincing evidence their life contains too much suffering to be worthwhile, I would agree with their decision.
Life is a gift. A painless life has no value. In fact, if you are genetically immune to pain, your lifetime survival rate is something like the teens.
Did any one ever state that there was? Religious types will argue, but my counter is just humanity came up with religion as a stop gap in knowledge.
As an Iowan, it is obligatory to show love for Herbert Hoover and our pig population when called upon.
But how can I comprehend people who eat meat and okay with killing animals, but get outraged by so and so practices of growing them? Isn’t it a textbook definition of inconsistency and hypocrisy?
And for reasons of arbitrary weight increase, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ractopamine is used in the USA. Doesnt degrade when cooked, so humans also get fat from it amongst other bad side effects. Banned in most countries, but not the USA. This is also why pork export is banned in most countries.
I know 1 person who is "allergic to pork". But European pork is fine. Even Canadian pork is fine. But what's different with US pork? Ractopamine.
To me, this is yet another reason why capitalism initially was great at making an economy, but profit-seeking behavior gets legally and ethically worse and one trades ethics for money.
Ractopamine is used in Canada.
This sounds like a possible case of the nocebo effect: Someone experiences symptoms based on a belief that an ingredient is bad for them. When they consume the same thing without the belief that the ingredient is present, the effects are absent even though the ingredient is present.
This happens with people who believe they have WiFi sensitivity disorders, too. If you put them next to a WiFi router with blinking lights they will experience the pain of their condition. If you turn off the lights on the router but leave the WiFi transmitting, they stop feeling the effects.
Generally I look at EU for what's good/bad to consume though. It's scary how much stuff is banned there that's in everyday US products.
"European Union’s Parliament and Council, the bloc’s governing body, reached a provisional deal in December to “simplify” the process for marketing plants bred through new genomic techniques, such as by scrapping the need to label them any differently from conventional ones."
Initially it wasn't that great either if you were a slave or worked 14 hours a day .
Hmm? Capitalism neither precludes nor predates slavery.
https://www.kcrg.com/2026/03/06/rep-hinson-speaks-iran-confl...
There are not enough consumers to care? Or maybe with legislation we get better outcomes due to scaling effects?
If we are willing to use legislation, could we tax such gestation crates, and use that tax revenue to breed unconscious pigs? Or find a way to disable consciousness in their brain? Or fund lab meat? I'm sure small labs are doing this, but if we are at the point of legislation, I imagine there is enough willpower to solve this problem rather than bandaids.
Also in an economy of rising costs, people are going to choose affordable options even if they might be vaguely aware of worse conditions happening somewhere else, far away from the grocery store aisle where they are making that choice for their family.
This is the kind of "big government libertarian" thinking that you only find on HN. It's like virtue signalling but the virtue is contrarianism. What you've suggested is more complicated, less ethical, less effective, and likely to be opposed by just about everyone across the political spectrum.
But I think I'd push back that this is less ethical.
All sorts of things are unpopular, but the masses can't logic their way through it.
I think "a provision that would condemn millions of pigs to a lifetime in gestation crates" is in fact horrific, however, outrage is the currency on places like X.
Posting a page number sounds specific, but then why not post the page (or quote it)? Particularly in any even remotely political environment where the default is "vote for (or oppose) this bill or you want [insert cute animal, baby, person, minority group] to die."
Just a tiny bit of source referencing could go a long way to help people better understand what you want them to support (or oppose).
The insane language in the sponsor's own press release tells me all I need to know about who the evil side on this bill is.
California prop 12: https://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/nu/fd/mb-fdp-03-2022-a.asp