Comment by pulkitsh1234
2 days ago
> If you really like eating chicken, you may end up finding it difficult to eat them again in the future after you develop a bond with them.
I used the believe the same, but as I found out on HN, there are a lot of people who won't bat an eye killing animals raised on their own land. Maybe they just never develop a bond with these animals.
But then the question should be is it just the "bond" which is holding someone back from killing animals? Why can't we just not kill without relying on bonds?
It's just the circle of life. Live in a remotely rural area with animals around and you're going to see pretty regular death. For instance foxes are beautiful, extremely intelligent, and amazing animals. They'll also systematically and sadistically kill literally every single chicken inside a henhouse, one by one, if they get in. In another instance a dog I loved more than anything as a child to young adult was killed by a wild boar - tusk straight into the lungs.
The same, by the way, applies to vegetarian stuff. The amount of critters being killed to keep them away from the veggies would probably shock you, especially in the rather inhumane way its sometimes done in industrial farms. Shooting, for some baseline, is considered one of the most humane ways of dealing with large pests.
I simply see nothing wrong, at all, with eating meat. It's a natural and normal part of life and also, by far, the easiest way to ensure you hit all your necessary nutrients without going overboard on calories - especially if you live an active life and/or are into things like weight training.
Murder is also part of the “circle of life”, whatever that may mean, given that it’s pablum that means nothing. As is disease.
We rightfully find these immoral and don’t engage in them.
That’s not a defense of the immoral act. It’s just words to describe the immoral act.
Try this then: every animal eats other living things to survive. We have been doing it for a billion years. Is a basic drive built into it DNA. After that, is just a question of which living things you are going to eat.
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Killing is part of the "circle of life". Murder is not. They are two very different concepts.
You skipped a step. Immoral acts are immoral because we deem them so. Animal slaughter in itself is not generally thought as such. Unless you think aboriginal / hunter-gatherer tribes who maintain their traditions are immoral for not modernizing.
> It's a natural and normal part of life
So is dying of smallpox.
Wikipedia:
> Smallpox is estimated to have killed up to 300 million people in the 20th century and around 500 million people in the last 100 years of its existence.
Completely natural, and completely normal.
That doesn’t mean we should be engaging in it in 2025.
The naturalistic fallacy is not justification for killing living things.
Ease cannot be used to ethically justify an action. But even so, you ignore that, according to research, people who eat meat have worse health than people who don't.
It's not that simple. High consumption of animal saturated fat can raise total blood cholesterol, but animal consumption in and of itself does not necessitate that. Notwithstanding, with a balanced diet high in vegetables and fiber, omnivores do not fare any worse than vegans in acm.
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Look up Sepp Holzer on YouTube, or really any permaculturist that eats meat. They treat their animals well, but also eat them. I think it’s healthy to feel a twang when you kill anything. It can contribute to the gratitude you have when sitting down to a meal. The native cultures seem (at least in pop culture caricatures) to have understood this.
I have a farmer friend who occasionally has to kill one of his milk cows. He names them, pets them, cares for them like a pet. It pains him to kill them, and I always know when he’s had to do it— I can see it on his face. I’ve bought some of the meat form his cows, and I was grateful for the meat, and the man who raised the cow with such care.
Past generations of my family used to name animals that they raised for meat after dishes they could end up in. There are practices people can engage in to distance themselves from the animals they interact with.
But also some people who raise animald for meat hire a person to collect them for slaughter in part because of the emotional toll involved.
As to your last question.. I think you might be confused? People don't like to kill in general. Go outside and ask people how they felt getting their first kill on a hunt as a kid, you're going to realize that a unifying element is learning to deal with harming another animal.
Bonus: being vegetarian doesn't exclude you from the necessity of killing in order to live. You're just killing forms of life that you emphasize with less, which is very reasonable and rational but also not materially different.
> being vegetarian doesn't exclude you from the necessity of killing in order to live. You're just killing forms of life that you emphasize with less, which is very reasonable and rational but also not materially different.
That’s like saying you kill chickens to eat eggs. You don’t kill a plant to eat its fruit. In fact, plants benefit from animals eating what they produce, be it oranges or tomatoes or something else and crapping the seeds somewhere else for proliferation.
The dark truth about keeping chickens and many other poultry is that they hatch in an approximately 1:1 male:female ratio, but can't be kept in that ratio without severe conflict and stress. Thus, hatching chickens to keep for egg-laying requires killing most of the male chicks. So yes, you have to kill chickens to eat eggs.
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That is pretty much just fruit. Vegetables are typically either the whole body of the plant (like carrots) or a vital part.
I killed so many slugs eating my broccoli it started to get to me. I technically didn't kill them myself, I put the cannibals in a bucket together. 1/3 to 1/2 bucket per day. About 30 full buckets for 20 broccoli plants of which about 8 were ruined.
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Admittedly this is pedantry on my part, but isn’t this only true for fruits? GP’s argument seems perfectly valid for e.g. carrots or mushrooms.
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Harvesting crops is materially different from slaughtering animals, and calorie for calorie, plant-based nutrition involves less termination of life than getting calories from animals (if you're grouping insects and non-animal life into the "forms of life" being killed).
If people don't like killing in general, or killing animals more specifically, they can live a wonderfully health(y|ier) life by going plant-based, be responsible for less killing, and today do it without having to give up the textures and experiences they've be conditioned on.
It's difficult in 2025 to conclude that a person who doesn't choose to eat this way is particularly opposed to killing, in the way that you propose.
Less termination of life based on numbers or some version of (sentience * number of individuals)? I find it hard to believe the sheer number of individual insects killed during harvest could match the killing of one cow, calorie for calorie.
Also, what if we increase the calories of the animal we choose to slaughter, say we start raising massive whale-sized animals instead, would that tip the scales?
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What makes my wife and I fail every time is protein intake. We are both active and require a lot of protein. We drink whey protein 1x a day, have quinoa for salads and occasionally eat eggs. The problem is come dinnertime, we have few options. We can't eat: - beans: Yes, I rolled my eyes too. My wife gets bloated painfully and it's happened so many times that I've stopped preparing bean-primary dishes - beyond meat: it's expensive, gas and bloat is still an issue, a big one
Tofu, seitan and TVP are all good, but they're extremely boring (user error attributes to this I'm sure).
Every vegetarian/vegan I've talked to is just not into weightlifting, so they sort of dismiss the diet needs we need. We always go back to chicken because of this
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Being against child slavery doesn’t exclude you from benefitting from child slavery when you use your phone.
I guess you should just be pro child slavery and enslaved some kids to do your housework then?
Cars kill 50k Americans a year. I guess we are just ok with killing peoplr and therefore shouldn’t be against murder either?
It doesn’t even take philosophy 101 to understand there’s a significant moral gulf between killing deliberately and incidentally.
> People don't like to kill in general.
I used to believe this.
Then I came up with a twisted question to ask people (I am fun at parties)
The question is something like, if you had to come up with a name for someone to kill within twenty four hours can you do so? The conditions are you get a full and unconditional pardon. It won't be held against you at all. If need be, we will even arrange it such that the person can't protest. However, once you agree, you must come up with a name and you must follow through. You must kill this person no matter what within a short time frame (make something up like a month).
I expected people to answer no. You can't come up with a name in a day! However, over half the people I have asked have said they have a name right now.
> I expected people to answer no. You can't come up with a name in a day! However, over half the people I have asked have said they have a name right now.
I don't think that's surprising, and it doesn't meant that people are okay with or blasé about killing people. Like, arguably this is just the trolley problem rephrased; there exist people whose death would clearly be a vast net benefit and would save many other lives. So is it okay to kill them? It's not an easy question.
I think it's more or less unrelated to the issue of killing one's own chickens; there is no such thing as an evil chicken who death will save thousands.
If you got that person in front of them and put a gun in their hand, do you think they'd follow through?
Your question is like a game, and people you ask will most probably treat it as such. People 'kill' in videogames, but most would not like to actually kill in real life.
I feel like that's a different question though. Most people have at least one person they think would make the world a better place by their absence, but that's not quite the same thing as wanting to kill them, even if they would guaranteed get away with it.
(for a pithy version: "I've never wished anyone dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure")
But why? You can easily come up with a whole list. I’d ask for a week to perform research on more names I wasn’t aware of. There’s so many bastards in this world I’d specifically choose a less sharp weapon for and skip the can’t protest part. The only thing I’d worry about is getting physically exhausted and mentally unstable after such marathon, but it has to be done.
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Your game doesn't test what you say it does, but someone else already covered that.
I'm not saying people have an inbuilt moral objection to the idea of killing, I'm saying most people find hurting other living things emotionally difficult.
This doesn't sound like "liking to kill" but more so like an "I know someone who's an absolute piece of shit and the world would be better off without them" kind of deal.
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Putin and Xi immediately jumped to my mind.
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It's different perspectives.
For a lot of people it's an exchange thing. You give the chicken a place to stay, food and care and in exchange you get to eat it when it gets old. They do bond with them but there's this understanding from day 1.
If you don't get that out of it it'd turn into an omlette so instead of turning into an omlette it gets to enjoy a large percentage of its life.
One needs to decide if an animal is a product or a pet. It's difficult to have them be both.
Having them as a product does not mean you don't care for them, on the contrary, but I would say it's a completely different type of bond.
> But then the question should be is it just the "bond" which is holding someone back from killing animals? Why can't we just not kill without relying on bonds?
I would argue it's about the purpose, not the bond. You don't kill a pet, but you do kill food. And you should never kill for the sole sake of killing.
> but as I found out on HN, there are a lot of people who won't bat an eye killing animals raised on their own land
You needed HN to figure that out? I assume this is obvious sarcasm but almost none of the domesticated animals species would exist if almost all humans throughout history weren't willing to do that.
Even eating dogs was perfectly standard in most more "primitive" and/or destitute societies.
My wifes family was wicked as they would let the children bond with the animals, without letting them know they gonna be dinner.
She tells a story of a wonderful pet goat. Until one day it was "gone to another farm", and they enjoyed goat curry for dinner.
The older siblings knew... and now they dont talk lol.
I grew up the same for much of my childhood tho it was never hidden or explicitly stated all the time. I bear absolutely 0 resentment about any of that tbh. I just fed the chickens, petted the goats, waved the bees away from fruits and helped pluck the chickens
In the end it makes me feel like the people eating their nuggets but have a traumatic reaction to what created them are the odd ones.
My friend would spend summers at the family farm, and the youngest kids would be issued a rabbit as a pet for the duration. They'd then make the kids watch the rabbits be slaughtered and cleaned, and serve them up at the end of the vacation...
Straight psychopath approach to child raising. The adults were all convinced this is how you made kids grow up tough
That's straight from the TV trope book, this is how movies/shows portray Evil Organization training ruthless spy assassins (except usually it's a dog, and they have to kill it themselves).
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Or why should the "bond" cause us to not eat animals? They aren't pets we eat in a panic, but animals we raise with the intention of eating but still bond with them and continue the process through consuming them and letting the animal go on to fulfill a higher purpose of providing sustenance to the humans they bonded with.
> Maybe they just never develop a bond with these animals.
I love my chickens and I'm really sad when I lose some to predators. Yet I have no issue to harvest them for eating. They are not pets, I raise them for eggs and meat.
Maybe it's because I was raised on a farm, but I make a difference between pets and farm animals and that does not mean that I don't have a "bond" with some of the latter.
The first step is to acknowledge that there is something wrong here. This categorization of "pets" and "farm animals" as different sets is completely virtual. In real life, both are just animals.
It is completely virtual, but are you going to include humans into animal group too? Because we're just animals with ties and anxiety.
You have be arguing in bad faith if you claim that you don't see difference between a random cat and a cattle.
Why should they "bat an eye" about killing animals raised on their own land? It's how we've lived since the dawn of time. Death is a part of life.
If you think it's wrong to kill animals to eat, I would ask you "By what moral standard?"
This argument would be valid if humanity would continue all practices it has done "since the dawn of time".
We have dropped some practices and we continue with some. We no longer leave the dead to rot, we bury/burn them, and so on. We developed religions, science, etc, and we are in a different era now, our lifestyle has completely changed, we don't have to hunt, don't have to build our own shelters, and we are no longer nomadic.
I am of the opinion that `killing animals` is a practice we can safely stop now, it was a necessity at that time, but right now it is completely optional.
There are various angles to look at this. One is sustainability and another one is morality.
Sustainability: Do you think we have enough animals to feed 8 Billion people on earth meat daily? I hope you know why we had to fallback to agriculture as a source of nutrition. Why most early settlements were started on river banks?
Morality: My moral standard is: Don't kill animals for my own sake of pleasure, kill only what's necessary for my survival, kill only what is there to kill me/hurt me.
So can I "kill" plants?: Yes (Using the term 'kill' wrt plants is just wrong, but I will continue with it for the sake of argument).
How is it morally okay to kill a plant but not okay to kill an animal?:
Let's agree on the definition of an animal. By animal, we all mean the set of (humans, pets, goat, horse, pig, lion, etc), there are no plants in this set. They are in a set called `living_beings`, which will have bacteria, viruses, insects as well (who can be further clubbed into smaller sets). Now my moral standard is "Not kill animals" (Not 'don't kill living beings'). It is on this entire set, not selectively for X or Y, which will be hypocritical. I am applying the same level of morality to everyone in this set. Now coming to plant-based food. First of all vegetarian food is not just plants. It is fruits, vegetables (akin to fruits), seeds, leaves, and other different parts. The plants are not always "killed" unlike when producing meat-based food (except eggs). The plants are "evolutionary hardened",i.e. built for harvesting, they don't die if you pluck a fruit (moreover they drop it naturally). They don't die when you take a flower or take a bunch of leaves (as long as you are within limits). The same can't be said for any animal.
Is the use of pesticides, deforestation, and killing of insects/rodents okay for producing large amounts of vegetarian food?:
No, I am against that but I don't see any other alternative to feed the calorific needs of 8 Billion people on earth. Of course there are other farming practices but they can't be commercialized or don't have high yields. As much as we can, we should try to eat locally sourced items to avoid carbon emissions due to transportation over large distances.
So what will be my ideal world that is according to my moral standards?: Ideally, everyone has a backyard where they can grow their own plant-based food. If you want better nutrition coverage, keep some chicken and eat the eggs. Let the chickens enjoy their lives, doing chicken things.
Will I eat an animal if I am stranded on an island with nothing else to eat?: Yes, at my current level of ego, I would prefer to stay alive by killing and eating the said animal.
Just so you know I agree the "counterargument" about killing plants makes no sense at all. But thank you for your thoughtful reply. My ethical framework is different than yours but I respect how well thought out yours is.
> I used the believe the same, but as I found out on HN, there are a lot of people who won't bat an eye killing animals raised on their own land. Maybe they just never develop a bond with these animals
You develop bonds, just different ones and you learn to place limits because you know what the purpose of the animal is.
I still felt it when I was really little, but that was gone by the time I was a teenager and the reality that this was our living set in.