[HN Gopher] Researchers successfully potty-train cows
___________________________________________________________________
Researchers successfully potty-train cows
Author : cheese_goddess
Score : 170 points
Date : 2021-09-13 18:07 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| mostsecurection wrote:
| Why is this on _Hacker_ News?
| nathias wrote:
| It took me three comments to realize this isn't about crows.
| voiper1 wrote:
| But how does this help - they will have the same amount of
| flatulence, defecation, and urine.
|
| The issue is where it goes, and that before it went straight into
| the ground and now it can be collected and dealt with?
| rrobukef wrote:
| Disease control, livable conditions, worker safety to name all
| I could think of.
| voiper1 wrote:
| Second paragraph: ".... it could put a serious dent in the
| toxic chemicals and greenhouse gases produced by bovine
| waste."
|
| How would toilet training reduce greenhouse gases?
| apetresc wrote:
| I'm guessing by having them poop somewhere not outdoors,
| where the methane can be contained somehow.
|
| (Not that that matters - the bulk of beef cattle can barely
| move, it's not like factory farms have space for designated
| potty areas or something).
| jandrese wrote:
| Or just having them poop on a grate that goes down to a
| sewer system.
|
| Training beef cows seems like something of a waste of
| time since they get slaughtered so young. Milk cows
| however could be worthwhile.
| hinkley wrote:
| Walking on grates wearing shoes is one thing. Walking on
| grates wearing hooves is something else entirely.
| Especially if you want to make the holes big enough for
| cow patties - which are high in fiber - to fall through.
|
| In fact there's a device for letting cars through but not
| cows that is basically a grate you put on the road. The
| fence comes up to the grate on both sides and there is no
| gate. You just drive over the grate.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Also IIRC a majority of the methane is from burps.
| hinkley wrote:
| Urine and poop are only a point source if you have your cows
| corralled in, such as in a feedlot. If you can get cows to use
| a 'bathroom' you can treat it as a point source even if you are
| free-ranging your cows.
|
| More ammo against feedlots is a good thing.
| sjwalter wrote:
| This is only partly true. One of the problems with almost all
| cattle pastures, even those that do 100% pasture-raised beef,
| is that cattle are like all animals and they have habits and
| preferences, so they tend to congregate in the same areas day
| after day, nearby the watering tub or under the shade tree,
| which means their urine and poop are concentrated in small
| areas.
|
| One Regenerative Farming's emphasis, widely practiced on many
| high-quality grassfarms across America, but pioneered on Kiwi
| sheep farms, is the regular, constant movement of cattle.
| Whereas most cattle operations in the USA have some kind of
| rotational grazing system, it tends to be larger pastures
| with the livestock inside for very long periods of time. What
| this causes is a large amount of waste of the animal
| byproducts--the pee and poop are concentrated and oxidized by
| the sun and wasted. What the Kiwis pioneered was using
| temporary electrical fencing and frequent movement of the
| animals, alongside "intensive pasture management" (the
| management is the intensive part--carefully monitoring the
| sward and keeping it at optimal growing height--grass growth
| rates follow a sigmoid function, so if you graze too low, it
| takes a long time to grow back, but if you graze to just
| above the peak growth height, it regenerates much more
| quickly), allows higher stocking rates, lower environment
| impact, increased carbon sequestration, and many further
| benefits.
|
| There's an excellent book about this called Greener Pasture
| on Your Side of the Fence (https://www.amazon.com/Greener-
| Pasture-Your-Fence-Management...) that goes over the history
| of this practice.
|
| It takes more labour. Sometimes you move the cows daily,
| occasionally twice a day, rather than once a month or
| whatever. But the impact on local ecology is fantastic. Plus,
| if you move chickens into the pasture after the cows, they
| help spread the manure, eat all the fly larvae out of the
| patties, and act as a natural antibiotic (who needs a
| depreciating piece of farm equipment to spread all that poop
| when you can use appreciating livestock?).
| hinkley wrote:
| I wonder how rotation grazing plays with training them to
| go in a particular spot, though. Seems like it would be at
| cross purposes.
|
| Definitely better if you can manage sheep cows and chickens
| on the same property, but that may still be beyond some
| people to manage. Just the fact of rotation would tend to
| mean that your cows are on average farther up in the
| watershed than they would be if they have the entire area
| to themselves all the time, for some of the reasons you
| already stated.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| There's nothing more satisfying than target with a good bowel
| moo-vement.
| chickenpotpie wrote:
| Probably going to get downvoted for this, things like this are
| why I'm shocked people think veganism is a crazy idea. It's one
| thing for people to say it's expensive or not practical, but I
| can't understand how someone can see something like this and not
| agree there's at least some merit to the idea.
| webmobdev wrote:
| This argument doesn't work. I mean, people do horrible things
| to other people too (including killing them). So a dark way of
| looking at this is that people only care about things they form
| an attachment to (humans or animals or material objects).
| kelp wrote:
| People also get PTSD from killing other people. And
| militaries go to great lengths to dehumanize the enemy and
| get soldiers to be more ok with killing other humans.
|
| People still often end up traumatized after doing that
| killing.
|
| Even at a huge distance, drone pilots end up with PTSD fairly
| frequently.
|
| So I don't think it's quite so black and white as only caring
| about things we have attachment to.
| Glyptodon wrote:
| I think where I get lost is the idea that things like this
| somehow mean having a chicken in your yard and eating some eggs
| every week is evil. That there are bad impacts of animal
| derived products, over-fishing, etc., and that these things
| aren't great seem like a true thing. But I don't understand how
| every case of anything to do with animals (including insects,
| etc.) is bad follows from it. (For another example, a
| hypothetical closed, renewable energy powered, aquaponic system
| doesn't strike me as propagating great evil.)
| kelp wrote:
| This is the difference between me in my late teens, early
| 20s. hardcore vegan, avoided all animal products. Went to
| lengths to avoid leather, never ate any animal products.
|
| Now, 20 years later, I'm mostly vegetarian, and limit dairy
| and other animal products. But it doesn't have to be perfect.
| I'm just trying to consume less of it and lessen my overall
| impact.
|
| It doesn't have to be 100% pure.
| gremloni wrote:
| Vegan food is not delicious. I'm not going to stop eating meat,
| we need to figure out another way around this like lab grown
| meat or something.
| TheRealNGenius wrote:
| That is one opinion. Mine is that meat is gross and that
| vegan food is delicious.
| bavent wrote:
| I don't think you've had the right vegan food. Some is
| disgusting, just like some meat-based foods are (fermented
| shark?). Some can be made really well. I'm not a vegan but
| I've noticed what's missing in it a lot of them is umami -
| savoriness. That's an easy fix: soy sauce, kombu, tomatoes
| (paste especially), certain mushrooms, even pure MSG. Things
| with a lot of glutamate go a long way to making most dishes
| better, non-vegan ones included.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I am an omnivore, but I noticed that mushrooms can often
| satisfy my craving for meat.
| gremloni wrote:
| Mushrooms is the only thing on that list that even comes
| close and I admit they are delicious.
| bavent wrote:
| I think it's a matter of judicious use. I use a lot of
| tamari/soy sauce when I cook, but not enough that the
| food tastes overly of it. It's the savoriness I want, not
| the actual flavor. Same with tomato paste - roast it in
| the oven so it has some color and then mix it in with
| things like soups. They won't taste like tomato paste
| (unless you go overboard with it) but they will have a
| fuller mouthfeel and feel more satisfying.
|
| When I make stock at home from vegetable trimmings, I put
| mushrooms and kombu in. In Japanese cooking those two
| things make a dashi, which is a base stock for a lot of
| dishes, but even adding them to regular stocks (or if I'm
| cooking rice or quinoa or something) by tying a sheet of
| seaweed around some mushrooms and then pulling it out
| when the cooking is done, it imparts a lot of glutamate
| but not an overly seaweed-y flavor. I don't eat the
| seaweed or the mushrooms usually (dried shiitakes have a
| texture I don't like), I use them only to infuse things.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| >Vegan food is not delicious.
|
| As in, there exists no delicious food that doesn't contain
| animal products?
|
| All of the cultures that have long food histories mostly not
| based around meat must be miserable? Nobody could possibly
| enjoy vegetable pad thai or chana masala? French fries?
| gremloni wrote:
| Indian food is delicious because everything is rich in
| dairy. I honestly have never had a pad thai without meat.
| French fries are a compliment to something, I can rarely
| eat them by themselves.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Pad Thai is delicious with shrimps and also with Tofu. In
| my experience it's not the meat that adds most of the
| flavor.
| adventured wrote:
| I wouldn't downvote you for that opinion, however I am curious
| to hear your elaboration on what you mean.
|
| I'm not vegan and never will be. I don't think veganism is a
| crazy idea, I think it's great if that's what a person likes.
| And I don't see how this story, the context of it, adds
| substantial merit to veganism.
| 21eleven wrote:
| > I don't see how this story, the context of it, adds
| substantial merit to veganism.
|
| If cows are smart enough to be potty trained then maybe we
| should not confine them to feedlots and slaughter them.
| worik wrote:
| These are not feedlots, are they? They video would not play
| for me). These would be herd homes, which are a very
| different concept. Generally cattle are very happy in "herd
| homes". Happier than living in the mud.
| markstos wrote:
| Golden retrievers may live happy lives, but we don't
| slaughter them.
| s0meone wrote:
| Vegan here. Not sure if this is exactly what you are hinting
| at, but I do perceive a significant bias against veganism that
| is, to my perspective, usually just not based on a solid
| rational basis.
| worik wrote:
| Veganism has no solid basis in that there is no precedent.
|
| There is for vegetarianism, it was not invented in the
| nineteenth century, but veganism was. There are no examples
| of vegan cultures before modern times.
|
| Given that what we do not know about human metabolism is more
| important than what we do know I am sceptical of some new
| radical dietary plan.
| markstos wrote:
| Animal agriculture is a top cause of climate catastrophe.
| Is avoid global catastrophe a radical idea?
| worik wrote:
| Is it?
|
| Is not industrial agriculture generally (and more
| generally, greed) the actual problem?
|
| I do not think that intensive crop growing is better than
| pastoral farming of animals for meat. The former is
| catastrophic to the local environment the latter is all
| around me and causes very few problems.
| kelp wrote:
| I don't have the numbers at my fingertips, but growing
| animals for meat generally requires growing lots and lots
| of feed stock. Many multiples more than what it would
| require to feed humans directly.
|
| So because we want meat, more and more industrial
| agriculture has to happen to grow that meat. So yeah, I
| think having an industrial meat industry has more
| environmental impact, than just having industrial farming
| in the absence of the industrial meat industry.
| yboris wrote:
| I'm unsure what kind of an argument you are making.
| Consider a parallel that could be uttered in the past:
|
| "Letting women vote has no basis in that there is no
| precedent."
|
| We know enough about nutrition that we could get all the
| nutrients needed without animal products. If your concern
| is about health, then how many examples of vegan people
| living healthy lives into their 90s would be enough to
| convince you?
| ggm wrote:
| I feel the lmited factual objections, and they are typically
| somewhat slight, is the avoidance of problems like
| osteoporosis. Calcium is just not as bioavailable in plant
| sources. In like sense we don't synthesise some vitamins
| well, which is an indication we expect bioavailable sources
| to be in our diet, genetically speaking.
|
| Probably, insect sources would meet fat soluable needs if a
| live source was to be chosen.
|
| (Not a vegan, omnivorous, happy to consider lacto-ovo
| vegetarianism at some poibt)
| markstos wrote:
| Harvard found calcium to be more bioavailable in plants.
|
| https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/calcium/#:~:te
| x....
|
| What's your source for animal-based calcium being more
| bioavailable?
|
| I had my calcium tested as a vegetarian and later as a
| vegan and it's gone up.
| ggm wrote:
| The studies I read suggest oxalate and phylate inhibit
| absorption. For instance
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12088515/
|
| As a layperson, perhaps I misconstrued bioavailabilty and
| absorption because both come into effect.
|
| I glad your calcium levels have risen btw, I would wonder
| if other effects like exercise or overall dietary
| sufficiency have changed. If for instance you ate less
| foods with chelating agents you'd alter iron absorption,
| perhaps your dietary shift removed confounding phylate?
| And no matter why, it's great they rose.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| As a meat eater, I don't think there are too many serious
| challenges outside of religious beliefs to the ethical
| arguments for veganism. Mammals at least are clearly as
| sentient about survival and their kin as we are. But that
| doesn't mean we can't accept that their suffering is worth it
| for our gustatory pleasure. I could accept a world where I
| simply have to pay more for meat to spare the horrors of
| factory farming, but I have no personal problem with humane-
| intentioned husbandry and slaughter.
| kelp wrote:
| I think people react to veganism as a crazy idea because it's
| threatening. As an ethical choice, it's passing judgement on
| their own choices. So their (probably unconscious) reaction is
| to dismiss it at crazy. That's a defense mechanism to keep them
| from having to take a hard look at their own choices and the
| impact on other living beings.
|
| I was a pretty long time vegan and after about a decade as an
| omnivore, I'm now mostly avoid meat again, though I'm not as
| strict as I once was.
|
| When I was a serious vegan I'd keep it to myself unless I
| really had to mention it. But once it came up, people would
| frequently try to poke holes in my reasoning. It didn't take
| long before I'd heard all the arguments against.
|
| The only one that really resonated with me was: "I like meat
| too much, so I don't care to change, even if it's causing
| harm."
|
| I felt like that was honest, and I could respect it. Everything
| else felt like someone trying to defend their own ego.
|
| Now, this was all 20 years ago. So maybe people have softened
| to the idea some. Or at least are used to it enough that they
| wouldn't have as much the same reactions today.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Well, if you can't understand, I guess you should hear some
| counterpoints.
|
| 1) Quite a lot of time, we will hear from the vegan/vegetarian
| community that humans were not designed to eat meat, we were
| only designed to eat in a vegan/vegetarian manner. This is done
| by selectively ignoring a lot of evidence. This pisses people
| off when it is caught.
|
| 2) We have some real-life study evidence that
| vegans/vegetarians live less long than people who have _some_
| meat. There 's a sweet spot on the curve between deep-fried
| steaks every day and no meat ever. And yet the veggie crowd
| will over-simplify and say that their diet is the way to go if
| you want to live longer. Again, it's another case of
| manipulating the evidence and this also pisses people off when
| caught.
|
| Basically, the whackadoo types are running (and ruining) public
| relations for this kind of thing and that isn't working out.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| worik wrote:
| I eat cows. And pigs.
|
| I am not put off by this. The role of cows and pigs in this
| world is to be eaten.
|
| They would not exist otherwise.
| bavent wrote:
| Because everything on this planet and beyond exists only for
| humans to exploit and use up? That's a very narrow take on
| things.
| worik wrote:
| No. Animals that humans breed, farm, and that rely on
| humans for every aspect of their lives. They exist for
| humans to exploit.
|
| That is a very narrow part of things
| asdf3243245q wrote:
| Isn't that a circular argument?
|
| They only exist for humans to exploit because humans put
| them in that situation.
| bavent wrote:
| So because humans started exploiting them, obviously we
| can't stop. Right.
| gfody wrote:
| their roles could get more interesting once we give them
| neuralinks and higher educations
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| A science fiction story about a group of machine learning
| data labelers who get outsourced to neural interface
| outfitted livestock sounds promising.
| panzagl wrote:
| I don't think veganism is a crazy idea, but it often seems to
| devolve into some sort of purity competition that becomes
| crazy.
| [deleted]
| disneygibson wrote:
| All this illustrates is that vegetarianism is ultimately a
| human social phenomenon. Cute animals doing human-like things
| get our sympathy and fuel vegan cultural movements, while
| cockroaches replicating some other human quality are still
| treated as pests to be removed, without exception.
| spoonjim wrote:
| I can only speak for myself: I feel that killing animals is
| wrong, I don't have the self control to stop, and seeing people
| who do (and are living more ethical lives than me) makes me
| annoyed and resentful. I would, however, be extremely proud if
| my children decided to become vegan (and would prepare vegan
| meals for them).
| rhacker wrote:
| I'm having trouble parsing your sentence. You're annoyed and
| resentful of yourself or of the vegans?
| spoonjim wrote:
| Of them, for holding a mirror up to my own failings.
| corry wrote:
| Jim - I'm not vegan, but I wanted to be the voice of the
| universe telling you that you CAN do it. Start by moving to
| pescatarian or vegetarian for a month, then maybe a year.
| Then phase out the other stuff.
|
| Bask in the glow of doing something you believe is right,
| even if it's hard. Be the example for your kids even if it's
| with baby steps. Cheers.
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| Yeah, invented by people who've never worked a day on a farm!
| motohagiography wrote:
| Misread headline as: Researchers successfully train potty cows.
|
| Rather a greater accomplishment I expected.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > "These animals are capable of much more than we ask of them."
|
| I fear part of that capacity is to understand the horrors they're
| frequently subject to in industrial feed lots.
|
| I still eat meat, but I'm increasingly uncomfortable with that
| fact.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| We get all our beef from a farm nearby, grass fed & finished
| for this exact reason. Industrial feed lots are really, really
| bad.
| vmception wrote:
| Can you explain that feeling to me?
|
| I have been fully aware of the intelligence the whole time, and
| have just found the prior scientific consensus to be silly
|
| and now I keep running into people that say something like "ah
| ! they are intelligent! I lost my appetite"
|
| like... what? how or why is that related, to you. how is _that_
| the line in the sand.
|
| feel like I took acid and got stuck in this weird mostly
| similar dimension.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| There are a variety of ways to rationalize human behaviors,
| one common one is to assume that while causing suffering is
| wrong, we're not living in a global horror story because the
| animals don't actually suffer.
|
| That's easy to believe if you were taught like I was as a
| very young boy that it's OK to catch a fish with a fishhook
| and cut it up to eat because fish are not sufficiently
| intelligent to feel pain, be hurt, be scared, or suffer. It's
| easy to generalize that incapability of suffering to extend
| to all animals when you eventually learn that the same kind
| of big-eyed cow that says moo is what we eat as beef or
| hamburgers. Supermarkets make the default behavior to take
| home shrink-wrapped cuts of meat without ever getting the
| chance to gauge for yourself whether a cow can suffer; humans
| are shockingly good at not re-evaluating their priors.
|
| How do you rationalize it? There are lots of ways, you've
| ruled out that they not intelligent, which is a common one.
| But are they intelligent but not suffering? Is non-human
| suffering not wrong? Does the wrongness of causing suffering
| require the victim to have an undetectable soul, which only
| humans posses? Is "wrongness" scalar, contingent on need, or
| mitigated by intelligence, or by an intensity of suffering,
| or by some other factor not considered? Is tradition and the
| natural order relevant? Is justice preserved by karmic
| retribution in an afterlife or reincarnation? Are chickens
| just really evil and deserving of suffering? Are we actually
| villains in a global horror story?
| Sebb767 wrote:
| I think most people just weren't aware or simply ignoring it.
| Similar to how most people would not eat a dog or a cat -
| they're cute and people know they can be quite smart, so they
| anthropomorphise them.
|
| Once you push/force them to realize that the difference
| between a cow and your dog or even a toddler is not that big,
| they start seeing cows in a completely different light and
| possibly loose appetite.
|
| A few decades ago, this was less of a problem, as people were
| close to the animals they were eating later on and it was
| always a fact that those animals would be eaten at some
| point. In our times, though, people can live for quite some
| time without seeing the intermediate steps in meat production
| or even interact with a cow for extended period of times.
| Therefore, this realization might come as quite a shock.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Well, let me engage with asking more questions. Would you be
| ok with killing another human to consume in a non-emergency
| scenario? If yes, then I understand your confusion. If not,
| then why not? Is it legal repercussions? Do you worry that
| you may upset the people who care about them? Is it just an
| ingrained idea that eating human bad, but eating animal good?
| Why is eating a human different than eating another animal?
|
| Alternative question around a similar idea: does picking
| asparagus or cutting down a tree give similar feelings as
| gutting an animal for meat?
| vmception wrote:
| I'm able to enjoy local cuisine.
|
| Human meat is not one.
|
| That is the extent of my logic and mine personally has not
| included hypotheticals.
|
| I have the same questions for others actually, because I
| don't understand the logic path: if it was shown in the
| future that "asparagus and trees" and even their separated
| fruit had bundles of nerves, conditional logic, feelings,
| intelligence, does that also exclude them from diets now?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _if it was shown in the future that "asparagus and
| trees" and even their separated fruit had bundles of
| nerves, conditional logic, feelings, intelligence, does
| that also exclude them from diets now?_
|
| Shmaybe? It seems pretty reasonable view for me, and my
| adherence to it would probably depend on availability of
| alternative food sources. Or perhaps people would dig
| deeper to identify the discriminating factors that would
| determine whether or not something can be eaten with
| clean conscience.
|
| > _That is the extent of my logic and mine personally has
| not included hypotheticals._
|
| My feeling is that it's not the logic path you're having
| trouble with, but with internalizing the concept of
| updating your moral framework based on independet
| reasoning.
|
| Human sense of morality comes partially built-in, and is
| partially supplied by the groups you live in. That second
| part is mostly your local culture, i.e. the assumptions
| and patterns of behavior in the background. Most people
| tend to keep to those two sources - independent reasoning
| about morality, while a well-known concept since the
| times of ancient philosophers, doesn't seem all that
| common. Perhaps it's because it's difficult - it often
| hurts thinking about it (i.e. you probably wouldn't be
| wondering about some chain of reasoning having moral
| implications if you knew you're in the clear with respect
| to those implications).
|
| Culture changes pretty slowly - on the order of decades.
| That humans and animals are the same thing, that animals
| aren't as dumb as they look, that animals can feel -
| those are relatively recent scientific insights. What you
| see as a minority of people using this knowledge and
| logic to stop eating meat, is the process of our culture
| slowly updating itself to catch up with the last 200
| years of science. It'll take a few more generations, but
| climate or not, I'd expect that in 100 years people would
| be mostly vegetarian by cultural pressure. Right now,
| it's mostly independent reasoners (ok, and some virtue
| signallers too).
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| So then it is my third question, which I admittedly
| reworded. Originally I meant to ask if it was a cultural
| distinction of about what is food, and that seems to be
| the answer then.
|
| Essentially you seem to have said that what you consider
| to be ok to eat is what you have already ate or what has
| been accepted to be eaten by those around you.
|
| I find that conclusion lacking, as it gives no room for
| future food discovery (unless you are ok with being
| passive and just eating whatever others tell you is ok to
| eat).
|
| But back to your question.
|
| > if it was shown in the future that "asparagus and
| trees" and even their separated fruit had bundles of
| nerves, conditional logic, feelings, intelligence, does
| that also exclude them from diets now?
|
| If it is believed that "asparagus and trees" have the
| ability to feel joy, feel pain, feel compassion, live
| some definition of a fulfilling life, and that harvesting
| them effectively killed all of that. Then yes, I think it
| would certainly bring into question the morality of mass
| farming, killing, and eating them.
|
| Of course, if it turns out that _everything_ has this
| capability, from the smallest nanobes to the largest
| mammals, and we haven 't worked out how to produce
| nutrients at scale, then maybe we just need to throw our
| hands up and say "whelp, survival of the fittest".
| nightski wrote:
| Self preservation. I am uneasy with killing a human for
| food because that means they could kill me for food. It is
| unlikely I will be killed by a cow anytime soon.
| dividuum wrote:
| I find that an odd explanation. After all you could start
| eating babies or kids.
| nightski wrote:
| I didn't mean the specific humans I eat could fight back.
| I meant that I wouldn't want to live in a world where
| humans eat humans because it would be dangerous.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Human flesh could probably give you very nasty infections
| as well. After all, it is the same flesh as yours.
|
| We can catch diseases by eating other animals, but with
| human flesh, the contagion would face much lower hurdle
| to get across.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Assuming human farms, we could likely breed out most
| contagions like we have been doing with existing farm
| animals. So that wouldn't be an issue.
| zeku wrote:
| I've recently become vegetarian because of this. I just can't
| justify the lives of these animals just so I can eat a burger
| that is only 25% better than an impossible burger or whatever.
|
| I'm not against making animals work for us, but I think they
| need to be treated with a level of dignity that their lives
| deserve.
|
| Currently find myself in-between meat eating and vegan camps so
| I don't make a lot of friends with this haha
| typon wrote:
| I've stopped eating beef/mutton since the start of corona. I
| still eat chicken/fish, but honestly it wasn't that hard. Most
| restaurants have good chicken/seafood/vegetarian options, and
| at home you can control what you eat. Give it a try, I can
| honestly say I feel much better (diet wise and psychologically)
| ssully wrote:
| I did the same thing around 2019. We do chicken once or twice
| a week, and I'll some kind of chicken or turkey cold cuts
| around for lunch sandwiches. It honestly wasn't very
| difficult.
| Zigurd wrote:
| I have no strict dietary limitations, but, for a confluence of
| reasons, have cut out regular consumption of meat: Climate
| impact, maintaining healthy weight, avoiding a logey feeling
| after a heavy meal, food safety, etc. all factor-in to not
| eating meat regularly.
|
| It started as a lockdown thing, but the way it seems to have
| helped weight loss was a big incentive to continue.
| notJim wrote:
| For me, lab grown meat can't come soon enough. I've reduced my
| meat consumption, but I really do enjoy it, and don't like the
| idea of giving it up entirely.
| sjwalter wrote:
| "Lab grown" is a marketing term that actually means "highly-
| processed plant-based food-like substance created in a
| factory".
|
| Anybody claiming that highly-processed things like this will
| have anything close to the same health impact and taste as,
| say, pasture-raised chickens (like I raise on my farm,
| https://mulligan.farm) is falling into the same trap that my
| parents fell into when they became convinced that
| hydrogenated factory-produced oils were healthier than
| butter.
| curuinor wrote:
| there's the plant-based stuff and there's the stuff that's
| genetically indistinguishable from meat. the plant-based
| stuff is available right now, the genetic meat stuff is not
| available for ordinary consumption because it's too
| expensive and there's a few material hurdles
| sjwalter wrote:
| That argument falls apart quite quickly with just a
| little thought.
|
| The taste and nutritive quality of meat has many, many
| factors going into it, and the genes are only one tiny
| part. For example, the amount of omega-3s in pasture-
| raised chicken, and their ratio to omega-6s is far better
| in pasture-raised chickens than in chickens subjected to
| confined animal feeding operations
| (https://apppa.org/The-Nutrition-of-Pasture-Raised-
| Chicken-an...).
|
| My chickens are of the same genetics as gross grocery
| store chickens, but grow more slowly, get more exercise,
| require zero antibiotics, have vastly different flavour
| and nutritive quality, than those exact same genetics
| raised in factory farms.
|
| The experience an animal has walking the earth--what kind
| of activities they engage in, what they eat, what they
| breath, what pharmaceuticals they're injected with--all
| have impact on the value of the meat.
|
| What does "lab grown" even mean in this context? Sure,
| it's genetically identical, but what "lab environment"
| produces something like grain-finished meat? Which
| produces 100% grassfed beef?
|
| It seems insanely simplistic to say that "we can grow
| this phenotype in the lab, so it'll be exactly the same
| as one raised in a barn or on a pasture."
| notJim wrote:
| Unless these factors are outside the realm of objective
| reality, we can certainly replicate them in a lab given a
| sufficiently sophisticated understanding. Obviously,
| we're not there yet, and realistically, we might never
| identically reproduce real meat, but that doesn't have to
| be the goal. We just need something affordable with a
| sufficiently similar or better nutrient and taste
| profile.
|
| Edit: None of this will replicate the romantic imagery of
| raising animals with love on a beautiful farm. There will
| likely always be a market for that to some extent, but
| that is realistically not what most of our meat
| consumption looks like today either.
| sjwalter wrote:
| > ... we can certainly replicate them in a lab...
|
| Well, maybe we can. But, for instance, a cow that is
| finished entirely on pasture--a good deal of its
| nutritive quality comes from the grasses it eats. Where
| does that nutrition come from in lab-grown meats? Do we
| have a source for the exact same nutrients as are
| provided by air, water, and sunlight and grow easily and
| freely all over many otherwise unusable bits of land?
|
| Where are the inputs to the lab coming from?
|
| It seems kind of like the lab-grown meat maximalists are
| thinking that Dow Chemical and its brethren can
| synthesize all the nutrients that are required and known
| in, say, beef, and just break out the beakers and
| Breaking Bad them into existence.
|
| As a long-time software engineer who has a deep respect
| for complex systems, this is totally insane to me. That
| the lab-grown meat maximalists think we can supplant this
| incredibly complex system, from sun to leaf to calf to
| beef, in some Dow Chemical-inputs and a factory, is
| absolutely insane.
|
| Remember, from Black Swan by Taleb: Up until the 60s,
| scientists didn't think that fiber was a useful part of
| our diet. This lead to the notion that fruit juice was
| equivalent to whole fruit, from a dietary perspective.
| This contributed in some part to the obesity epidemic.
|
| The idea that we already do know exactly what makes meat
| so tasty and healthy is suspect, the idea that we can
| replicate this exactly like burning CD-ROMs in a meat CD-
| Burner is just off the wall.
| sbeckeriv wrote:
| I support my local farmers that are doing things better.
| However, I do believe lab and veggie meat is a solution
| to a volume problem. To quote your own site "Mulligan
| Farms, LLC is an agricultural concern run by a family of
| new and dedicated farmers, and has wildly fluctuating
| resources." Lab meat and even highly processed veggie
| meat is about feeding the billions. There will also be
| local farmers who can provide amazing resources no matter
| what the out come.
|
| > It seems insanely simplistic to say that "we can grow
| this phenotype in the lab, so it'll be exactly the same
| as one raised in a barn or on a pasture."
|
| It seems insanely unimaginative to think we can not.
| namdnay wrote:
| > It seems insanely simplistic to say that "we can grow
| this phenotype in the lab, so it'll be exactly the same
| as one raised in a barn or on a pasture."
|
| Why would it be exactly the same? We can probably make it
| better. Perfect marbling on every steak.
| sjwalter wrote:
| We've tried many times to make in labs and factories
| foods that are "better" than what Nature provides,
| however we've failed every single time, though we have
| created a number of large agribusinesses and marketing
| conglomerates that are really skilled at manipulating
| people and the political process into believing that
| unhealthy diets are healthy.
|
| If you're right, that would maybe be cool (but then we'd
| have to consider the inputs to the factories, which'd
| probably be GMO soybeans and corn, which means we're
| harming other animals in the process of producing them),
| but I believe your statement is full of hubris.
| ben_w wrote:
| There's nothing particularly natural about the steaks,
| burgers, nuggets or fillets you eat: even aside the
| cooking (quite possibly humanity's first invention), they
| are the product of many generations of selective breeding
| by humans, specifically to maximise value (including
| taste as a subset) for resource cost (including farmland
| and time as inputs).
|
| And then you have all of the seasoning, for example KFC's
| "secret" herbs and spices are from basically all over the
| planet.
| nitrogen wrote:
| _We 've tried many times to make in labs and factories
| foods that are "better" than what Nature provides_
|
| Wild nature doesn't provide very much that is edible by
| humans, and certainly not enough to sustain a
| civilization of humans rather than small bands of roving
| nomads.
|
| Nature doesn't care about us, it won't help us, if left
| to its own devices it would eventually wipe humanity out
| entirely. We're well, _well_ past the point where we can
| rely on nature to care for itself or for us. If we don 't
| _all_ take the initiative to intervene and engineer
| nature for its and our benefit, then only those with
| hubris will do so.
|
| Regarding the hubris of believing that a lab-grown steak
| could be better than the real thing, physics doesn't
| change just because it's inside of an animal, so there's
| no reason to think that we won't eventually be able to
| engineer muscle tissues that are indistinguishable from
| real grass-fed beef, given the time and money to do so.
| sjwalter wrote:
| You should read Euell Gibbons, one of the finest
| Americans to ever live, gourmand, gatherer, hunter, and
| writer of Stalking the Wild Asparagus. We are all much
| closer to edible food in our natural surroundings than
| you are making it seem. Some skill and processing
| required, but almost all of the American population is a
| few hours of foraging away from a nutritious meal. Nature
| provides PLENTY. Efficiently harvesting it in a
| sustainable way (i.e., stewardship) is the hard part, and
| what I believe farming should be all about.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euell_Gibbons
| mikestew wrote:
| _" Lab grown" is a marketing term that actually means..._
|
| No, "lab grown" does not mean an Impossible Burger. You've
| confused the definition with something else.
| void_mint wrote:
| > Anybody claiming that highly-processed things like this
| will have anything close to the same health impact and
| taste as, say, pasture-raised chickens (like I raise on my
| farm, https://mulligan.farm)
|
| This reads like a person that is afraid technical
| advancement will make them obsolete. Your bias is probably
| too strong to make clear and meaningful arguments.
| sjwalter wrote:
| This is Season 1 of my farm and we literally are turning
| customers away, despite our meat being ~2x more expensive
| than grocery store meat.
|
| I am not in the slightest bit afraid of factory/lab-grown
| meat supplanting my little farm. Regardless of what
| highly-processed stuff large agribusinesses can or will
| produce, there will always be a great market for
| humanely-raised, carefully processed animal protein.
|
| If anything, it's the Tyson and Smithfield Foods of the
| world that should be worried. Somehow, I don't think any
| of us are.
| void_mint wrote:
| > This is Season 1 of my farm and we literally are
| turning customers away, despite our meat being ~2x more
| expensive than grocery store meat.
|
| Congrats!
|
| > Regardless of what highly-processed stuff large
| agribusinesses can or will produce, there will always be
| a great market for humanely-raised, carefully processed
| animal protein.
|
| Yep!
|
| > If anything, it's the Tyson and Smithfield Foods of the
| world that should be worried. Somehow, I don't think any
| of us are.
|
| Great!
|
| This entire post didn't really negate mine though. Your
| post ignored huge percentages of (most of?) the
| categories of meat and food that would/could be replaced
| by lab grown food. It's like saying "My mercedes is
| wondeful, nobody would ever want an _electric car!_."
| There will always be a place for luxury items. People
| that eat at McDonald's aren't getting luxury items. Low
| wage workers that eat 4 dollar per pound chicken from
| Safeway aren't eating luxury items. If lab grown food can
| (more) ethically service lower income people with a
| reduced environmental impact, we should go all-in on that
| advancement. Your farm can and should exist as a
| commodity for those that want to pay for it.
| sjwalter wrote:
| The goal of my farm is kind of like a principle espoused
| by Ben Hunt of https://epsilontheory.com. He said we
| should create a tax regime based on the principle that
| 1000 millionaires is preferable to 1 billionaire. (The
| tax regime he recommended is quite interesting to,
| something along the lines of a progressive, lifetime
| capital gains tax, say 0% for the first $1mm, then 5% for
| the next $1mm, all the way up to, say, 95% for everything
| after $100mm.)
|
| Our regulatory environment encourages a small handful of
| very powerful and wealthy agribusinesses, with all the
| attendant horrors from absentee landlordism and contract
| farming and insanely-scaled slaughtering facilities. It
| could just as well encourage a distribution of small
| family farms (this is the case in much of the non-western
| world).
|
| Part of the way we're encouraging this outcome is
| building a platform to help small farmers directly market
| to customers, capturing vastly more of the value of their
| product.
|
| In any case, I thought your example was interesting with
| cars. Right now, we sell the equivalent of the Tesla
| Roadster version of chicken. High-end, pricey, targeted
| toward an upper-middle class customer. As we gain some
| small amount of scale, and as we encourage more
| competitors and build co-operative abattoirs, the prices
| will come down, and we'll never be cheaper than Tyson or
| whoever, but we might become not so expensive that it's a
| real reach.
| asdff wrote:
| I think what gives me peace at night, ironically, is the
| knowledge that there is no facet of my or anyone elses modern
| life that doesn't result in terrible harm to the natural state
| of the earth. If I quit eating meat its like great and I can
| pat myself on the back, but they are still going to have
| slaughterhouses, or clearcut rainforests for soy beans, or
| strip mine mountains for lithium for all the junk I have to buy
| to be a productive member of this society so I can afford to
| keep myself sheltered and fed. I have zero agency at all to do
| anything about that.
|
| I've let go of feeling like I have to fix it, because solving
| these institutional issues is ultimately not my job and that
| sense of worry will never be relieved in my lifetime, because
| once again I have no personal agency to affect institutional
| change. Us peasants in history exists to live and die as units
| of labor beholden to a course charted by people ordained since
| birth to command that ship, and its a fallacy to ever imagine
| that we might ourselves take the helm and steer ourselves to
| logically rational utopian waters free of emotional biases.
| Instead of fighting upstream fruitlessly until you die
| restless, chase personal hedonism within your lifetime and
| means as much as possible.
| elmomle wrote:
| There are actions you can take to reduce your negative
| impact. For example, you reduce your ecological footprint by
| reducing or eliminating meat from your diet. In the net it
| reduces the amount of farmland your existence requires--
| remember, those animals you eat need to eat things too, and
| plant -> you is a much more efficient way of converting
| farmland into sustenance than plant -> animal -> you.
| 7952 wrote:
| But I want to do the right thing if I can. Of course that
| won't have a global impact. But so what? Impact beyond
| oneself seems like a high bar to set.
|
| Really I think your appeal to heodinism is just a value
| system like everyone else. Some people choose vegetables over
| nihilism.
| wyager wrote:
| I would be interested in a program to breed farm animals to be
| as stupid as possible. If we could give cows the intelligence
| level of a chicken, for example, I would feel better about
| eating them.
| Diggsey wrote:
| Just going to leave this here...
|
| https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/piers-
| anthony/47321-in_the_b...
| xgulfie wrote:
| Chickens aren't as stupid as you seem to think
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Chickens are pretty stupid. They do stupid survival things
| like pooping in their feeder, but they'll then refuse to
| eat their food because they can see it's contaminated. They
| do stupid social things, like killing other chickens
| because their pecking order instinct causes them to peck at
| a visible injury, making said injury worse, but they have
| social interactions all the same. They go into a panic
| because of stupid triggers like a rag blowing in the wind
| and ignore actual dangers like a tractor, but they're
| definitely able to be scared. They don't learn many verbal
| commands like a dog could, but they recognize the face of
| their owner and will do behaviors likely to get them fed.
| Pigs, some cows, and some goats are as intelligent,
| emotive, and personable as a family dog, but chickens are
| just not that smart.
|
| However! They're identifiably, understandably stupid, like
| a tiny human with terrifically poor planning, observing,
| memorization, predicting, social, and emoting skills. It's
| not an alien kind of stupidity like that of a fish, insect,
| plant, or rock (or computer program). I can say with great
| confidence that chickens are quite low on the
| emotion/intelligence spectrum, but in saying that I'm quite
| confident that they're on it.
|
| If your criteria for animal cruelty is achieving a
| particular level or capability on the sapience/sentience
| spectrum, you can feel pretty safe eating chicken. If your
| criteria is that they not posses intelligence or experience
| emotions at all, you'd better go pescatarian. Or eat
| mutton: if sheep have any intelligence at all it's
| completely undetectable to me.
| z3ncyberpunk wrote:
| They are also vicious, cannibalistic, practically unchanged
| dinosaurs like alligators. Don't feel too bad for them
| apetresc wrote:
| They're vicious and cannibalistic when subjected to the
| stresses of existing on factory farms. I feel plenty bad
| for them.
| noasaservice wrote:
| Humans are nearly the same when exhibited the similar
| conditions (US jails and prisons).
| Ekaros wrote:
| Or target is not part of same tribe, see exploitation,
| wars, drone strikes etc...
| Yeroc wrote:
| I grew up on a small farm with chickens. They had plenty
| of space, were free to roam the yard during the day and
| yes, they could be vicious and cannibalistic if a chicken
| was injured.
| sjwalter wrote:
| I raise chickens on my pasture on my small farm.
|
| I assure you, they are not anything like you described.
| And across breeds, they have wildly different cognitive
| capacities, so a broad-stroke description like this is
| inherently inaccurate.
| worik wrote:
| Personal experience, learned expertise.
|
| Vs. prejudice and bigotry.
|
| Whistling in the wind!!
| wyager wrote:
| I have raised chickens many times. They are dumb as hell.
| detcader wrote:
| How do you feel about mentally impaired people?
| QuantumG wrote:
| Delicious!
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Truthfully, I don't think the capacity to suffer hinges on
| intelligence. Most animals are wired with the capacity for
| suffering because it's almost always necessary for survival
| on Earth.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Aren't you effectively describing lab meat?
|
| Bio-reactors are pretty stupid.
| cpeterso wrote:
| Douglas Adams' _The Restaurant at the End of the Universe_
| includes talking cows that were bred to want to be eaten.
| worik wrote:
| It was a pig.....
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I went on a philosophy bent for some reason years ago and read
| a bunch of popular philosophy reads to get a sense of what that
| space is. I still read a lot of philosophy but much less
| obsessively.
|
| One of the things it did to me was totally transform my
| perception of animals, humans as animals, our relationships,
| and cause to me to realize I have no way to verify that animals
| don't experience life in a way that's as meaningful or as
| sentient as mine. I can't even properly define those things. I
| do know that I share a LOT with mammals especially and they
| appear to possess a lot of the faculties required to feel good,
| suffer, have temporal awareness, relationships with other
| animals, etc. That's not what was taught to me as a child.
|
| I like to go spear fishing and that's a very changed
| experience. I learned how to originally so I could be more
| selective about food and where I harvest it, reduce bycatch,
| etc. So I cared before to some degree. Now shooting a fish
| involves this internal struggle of deciding if it's necessary,
| if it makes sense, what it means about me, what the experience
| will be like for the fish. It feels a lot more like killing
| someone rather than something. I guess that sounds silly.
|
| It's a rabbit hole. You can go down so far and maybe not turn
| up much that's very useful. I think animals aren't very
| discernible from human animals in the big picture though. I'm
| basically a murderer, but the legally sanctioned kind. I bought
| the license.
|
| I strongly prefer to eat the food I murdered myself now. I
| occasionally eat farmed meat, but it's rare and comes from
| local farms with unscalable high standards. I'm fortunate that
| I can do that. I mostly do it to appease my family - they feel
| weird when I skip dishes at special meals.
|
| Anyway I wanted to share that because this thought experiment
| about the experience of animals in farms means a lot to me
| lately, and I find it all fascinating but important as well.
| Like you, I'm increasingly uncomfortable with it.
| musingsole wrote:
| > Now shooting a fish involves this internal struggle of
| deciding if it's necessary, if it makes sense, what it means
| about me, what the experience will be like for the fish.
|
| These considerations are originally critical to what it meant
| to be hunter. Hunters are shepherds to their prey, just from
| a distance. You can't kill with reckless abandon because of
| realities like supply and spoilage. Livestock can be seen as
| a practice of a hunter bringing their prey closer to home so
| as to protect them from harvest by other hunters.
| yboris wrote:
| > It feels a lot more like killing someone rather than
| something. I guess that sounds silly.
|
| No it does not. Animals and fish are sentient beings with
| their own set of perceptions, feelings, thoughts, desires,
| and more.
|
| I do not think there is a defensible way to consume animals
| if you're living on above-poverty wages in a developed
| country and don't have some extremely rare health problem.
|
| Killing is problematic (ending a life prematurely), but worse
| yet is the experience animals have on factory farms.
|
| In your case of hunting your own fish seems less morally
| problematic than most animal consumption, but I understand
| the sentiment of "do I really need to eat that when there are
| plenty of non-sentient alternatives". Thank you for sharing
| your thoughts!
| soperj wrote:
| What about killing plants (ending a life prematurely)?
| WorkLobster wrote:
| This question seems to be becoming more popular lately.
| My own understanding is that most people are apprehensive
| about killing because it involves denying another being
| self-actualisation and/or causing its suffering, both of
| which by our current understanding seem to require a
| central nervous system.
|
| I would also add though that if you want to minimize
| plant death, the best course of action is to stop eating
| meat and animal products and aim for a plant-based diet,
| since (by thermodynamics!) the number of plants needed to
| feed these animals vastly outstrips what would deliver
| the same amount of nutrients to a human eating them
| directly.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Actually deeply thinking of plant lifecycle and morality
| of it all is interesting question. Is it morally more
| wrong to feed grass to cow after it has shed its seed
| than to eat fruits and prevent their seeds from
| spreading? Clearly in first case plant is already dying,
| but has done it's life and procreation. On other hand
| later case is clear exploitation comparable to abortion.
| christkv wrote:
| I mean fruit exist to be eaten so the seeds can be shat
| out somewhere else. It's part of the reproductive cycle
| for many plants.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Probably should have been clearer about us eating them
| and shitting in toilet where it ends up in sewage
| treatment with no chances of ever sprouting...
| soperj wrote:
| Generally grazers don't kill plants though, they eat
| grasses that continue to grow.
| tkzed49 wrote:
| sure, but if your rationale is that killing a plant
| causes suffering, then would damaging it not do the same?
| numpad0 wrote:
| Easy way I found is to admit the fact that we kill a lot
| of life just to live a day, and hope it was/is/will be
| worth it.
|
| Else I might kill myself, except it is not allowed by my
| animal programming, which is out of my control, so I go
| back to that hoping phase.
|
| I also wonder what's the problem with killing sentient
| animals while we also kill fellow humans when
| "necessary". We kill for our little ego, so let's just
| keep fingers crossed that the sacrifices we force are
| worth something.
|
| Maybe this is a bit Buddhism centric but it takes off my
| mental loads a bit.
| Forbo wrote:
| Feeding animals for slaughter requires an order of
| magnitude more plant destruction, simply for the fact
| that you're passing those plants through another trophic
| level. If humans were to eat the soy that is typically
| used for feed, that would be a massive amount of harm
| reduction if you want to take into account the idea of
| "plant suffering".
| soperj wrote:
| >Feeding animals for slaughter requires
|
| It doesn't require it at all.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| It's pretty easy to find examples outside of the animal
| kingdom where an organism's lifecycle depends on it being
| eaten at some point. So far as I know, there are no
| animals with this property.
|
| Also, it's clearer to us (since we're animals) what sorts
| of events count as ending another animal's life.
| Elsewhere it's trickier (Is a field of grass one life, or
| is a blade of grass one life? How should mycelial
| networks be counted? etc).
|
| For these reasons, I think it's that applying different
| logic to different kingdoms is a fairly defensible move.
| soperj wrote:
| I disagree. What organism are you talking about exactly?
| Any plant I can think of doesn't require being eaten to
| live.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| The lifecycle of an organism includes reproduction and
| propagation.
|
| Many plants have evolved specifically around being eaten
| by other animals.
| soperj wrote:
| >The lifecycle of an organism includes reproduction and
| propagation.
|
| No, that would be different organisms.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Anything that bears fruit is relying on an animal to come
| by and eat that fruit so that the seeds will be spread
| (either because the pit is hard to eat and the animal
| drops it, or because the seeds survive the animal's
| digestive tract).
|
| There are also several fungi and protozoans who migrate
| between the digestive tracts of animals that eat each
| other (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii
| for instance).
|
| I'm not enough of a biologist to defend the point
| especially well, but doesn't it make sense that one would
| use different types of reasoning to manage relationships
| with different types of life?
| soperj wrote:
| > Anything that bears fruit is relying on an animal to
| come by and eat that fruit so that the seeds will be
| spread (either because the pit is hard to eat and the
| animal drops it, or because the seeds survive the
| animal's digestive tract).
|
| Right, but that's not the plant, that's the fruit. If you
| eat the plant itself, it's dead. Same as a cow.
| zeven7 wrote:
| > It's pretty easy to find examples outside of the animal
| kingdom where an organism's lifecycle depends on it being
| eaten at some point. So far as I know, there are no
| animals with this property.
|
| There are parasites for which being eaten is a part of
| their life cycle.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leucochloridium_paradoxum
|
| Black widow spiders are so named because the females eat
| their mates. Some spider mothers become food for their
| own children.
|
| Not to mention that (while not exactly what you asked
| for, but I think it's important to recognize) carnivores
| kill other species as a means of survival, and even their
| own species at times. Wild wolves cannot feed their pups
| without killing other animals. Death is common in nature.
| com2kid wrote:
| > So far as I know, there are no animals with this
| property.
|
| Ultimately, many grazing animals have their property. If
| their numbers grow too large from lack of predators,
| they'll consume all available food and then starve en-
| masse.
| kemiller wrote:
| Fruit is generally evolved to be eaten as a seed-
| dispersal and -fertilization technique. Not sure about
| other parts of the plant.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Plants are alive, in that they reproduce and react to
| stimulus, but I don't have any reason to suspect them of
| awareness, feelings, thoughts, or desires. Everyone's
| morals here will be different, but I have to eat
| something, and I'll choose to eat a lettuce over a puppy
| any day.
| soperj wrote:
| > I don't have any reason to suspect them of awareness,
| feelings, thoughts, or desires.
|
| I don't have any reason to suspect that they don't.
| yboris wrote:
| Do you suspect rocks have conscious experiences?
|
| With animals there's a clear connection: they have brains
| and brains is clearly the part that enables us humans to
| have conscious experiences.
|
| The burden of proof of the claim "plants are conscious"
| is on you.
| soperj wrote:
| >brains is clearly the part that enables us humans to
| have conscious experiences
|
| I didn't claim that plants were conscious, and we have no
| idea what causes the conscious experience. I personally
| wouldn't say that all humans actually experience
| consciousness. So no, no clear connection, and no burden
| either.
| disneygibson wrote:
| Why does sentience somehow imply value?
|
| That's the issue with vegetarianism. It's not really about
| "the animals", it's about things that happen to resemble
| human beings. The more similar to a human, the more
| "sentience" it has. Isn't that an odd coincidence? Or
| perhaps plants are just as sentient as humans but are a
| different form of life too distant from humans for us to
| empathize with.
|
| The whole thing is a massive exercise in human myopia.
| big_curses wrote:
| I think the focus on sentience is misplaced. Rather, the
| value should be rationality, meaning here the ability use
| one's mind to survive and to live by reason alone. This
| is valuable to any other rational living creature because
| rationality allows one to eschew violence and live
| cooperatively, so it is in the best interest of every
| rational creature to, at least on a basic level, value
| and respect the life of any other rational creature. The
| reason we don't apply and respect rights to animals and
| plants is because they are incapable of doing the same to
| us, or even being aware of the concept of 'rights'. You
| should interact with other forms of life on the highest
| level it is capable of interacting with you.
| yboris wrote:
| > Or perhaps plants are just as sentient as humans
|
| The burden of proof is on you. Humans are animals. We
| have evolution linking us together at a more-recent
| junction than we do when compared to plants. Humans and
| animals have brains; brains is the seat of sentience.
|
| Finally; even if you are right that plants are sentient,
| are you then claiming that there is no difference in the
| amount of sentience between humans, bees, and plants? If
| so, should we be indifferent whether I kill you or burn a
| dandelion?
| [deleted]
| zeven7 wrote:
| Nature is brutal. For animals in the wild, survival is a
| struggle on a whole different level. The predators hunt the
| young of other species, or their own children starve. The
| prey are in constant danger, and may be suffering their own
| shortage of food while trying to avoid being eaten. Species
| killing other species is the norm. Meanwhile, we hide from
| death, and we use words like "beef" to forget what it is.
| But the real wild treats animals much worse than a fishing
| hook or a conscientious local farm.
| cmckn wrote:
| My perspective on this was shifted significantly by a college
| course focusing on the (un)sustainability of modern
| consumption. If you're interested, check out Eating Animals by
| Jonathan Safran Foer. I still eat meat, and don't really plan
| on stopping; but I am now less precious about pets and more
| respectful of livestock.
|
| edit: PDF of the book:
| https://bc.instructure.com/courses/1745066/files/115253047?m...
| BigTex420 wrote:
| You can potty train anything. I potty trained my hamster
| throwaway889900 wrote:
| I tried potty training my pet rock. Just never wants to go.
| whoomp12342 wrote:
| so you can get them to poop in a bin for fertilizer now?
| mhh__ wrote:
| I heard that cows can even build primitive tools
| h2odragon wrote:
| 'The Far Side" documented a bovine rocket program, iirc
| yboris wrote:
| Subtitle is "Advance could help solve a messy environmental
| problem"
|
| You know what would _solve_ the messy environmental problem?
| Reducing one 's meat consumption.
|
| Once you wake up from the society-wide hallucination you begin to
| see how schizophrenic our world is with respect to animals.
| Things that are routinely allowed to happen in factory farms
| would land you in federal prison if you do it to a pet. Pets are
| considered belongings, so if you kill one, the owner isn't owed
| much beyond monetary damages. We rape cows, feed more than 60% of
| our pharmaceuticals to animals to keep them from dying.
|
| In a generation or two, children will look with disgust on the
| aging adults who routinely ignored the horrors of ongoing animal
| abuse (by consuming meat).
| sjwalter wrote:
| You're making "consuming meat" equivalent to "consuming factory
| farmed meat". I agree with you on the horrors of factory farms,
| but farms like mine (https://mulligan.farm), wherein we raise
| our chickens on pasture, require vastly less pharmaceuticals
| (other than their Marek's disease leaky vaccine they get at
| birth, our chickens need no more antibiotics than simple
| sunlight and fresh air) than factory farmed meat.
|
| In the 50s, Americans on average spent ~20% of their budgets on
| food and 10% on healthcare. Today, it's about 18% on healthcare
| and 9% on food. If we swapped back to the model from the 50s,
| wherein our food was a bigger proportion of the budget and we
| were less fat and unhealthy as a result, we could easily have,
| say, 10,000 small farms supplying healthy, environmentally-
| sane, meat to local communities, rather than a concentrated
| agribusiness selling gross, tortured flesh to the entire
| country.
| namdnay wrote:
| That's a good first step, but I feel you're skipping over
| some of the issues here... At the end of the day, you're
| still raping and killing animals.
|
| I love meat, but I'm pretty sure my grandchildren (or maybe
| their grandchildren) will look back at us in the same way we
| look back at public executions
| sjwalter wrote:
| I have no ethical qualms with killing animals. I do all my
| own slaughter and processing and exclusively eat meat that
| I either killed myself (pigs & chickens on my farm), or
| that I traded with farmer friends for (sheep & beef) who
| have similar standards as we do.
|
| Once you are actually in contact with the food you're
| raising and agriculture in general, I think this becomes
| much, much simpler an ethical question. I mean, even just
| the animal impact on a vegetarian diet becomes much more
| questionable after you witness a finish mower grinding up a
| half-dozen foals during cutting, when you witness the mass
| habitat destruction wrought by GMO soybean monoculture,
| etc.
|
| It becomes even more questionable when you bring up
| livestoc raised on land otherwise unusable for agriculture
| --dryland farming in Montana, wherein stocking rates are
| very low, land is intensively managed, and the alternatives
| presented by the lab-grown meat folks tend to always rely
| on rowcrops destroying otherwise great animal habitats.
|
| Finally, the more we learn about plants, the more it seems
| they're far more capable of what we might call "cognition"
| than we did in the past.
|
| Nature is competitive, and we are the peak species of
| evolution on earth. To me, this doesn't mean we try to walk
| the lands while sparing all life possible. Rather, to me,
| it means we become stewards of the land and its
| inhabitants. Hunters are, to me, the prime example of this.
| Hunters are responsible for vastly more improvement to
| natural habitats and maintenance of trophy species than
| vegans, and I'd bet have a much greater positive impact on
| the environment than animal-lovers who eat tonnes of
| rowcropped vegetables.
| farmyearn wrote:
| Your farm is an outlier though, not representative. The
| current consumption levels of meat can only be sustained with
| factory farming, it's impossible for your type of farm to
| contribute a meaningful amount of production. Meat is, in the
| context of mass consumption, factory farmed. Your farming
| method could not serve even a tiny fraction of demand, so
| while it is better than factory farming, it's not an
| alternative.
| sjwalter wrote:
| It is currently an outlier, but my goal with the farm is to
| be riding the currently-growing wave of small farms
| directly marketing to consumers, who care deeply about
| their land, the local ecology, and the welfare of their
| animals.
|
| Our customers are so passionate about our product, it's
| quite shocking (this is Season 1 for us). As we get towards
| winter, we're going to start building a platform upon which
| we can foster competition--that's right, we want to have
| more and more small farms compete with us on pasture-
| raised, quality animal proteins.
|
| Over time, we want to be part of the vanguard that leads to
| Americans spending double on their diets and half on their
| healthcare.
|
| What's that quote about a small group of dedicated people?
|
| Farming, small farming in particular, is becoming trendy.
| Our product is in higher demand than we can produce. We've
| turned away customers. So we need to scale up a little bit,
| but more importantly, grow the numbers of our competitors
| and, year after year, eat the meat business. Healthcare
| premiums go down, slowly slowly, as people get healthier.
| jbotz wrote:
| This is just not true, or at least extremely US-centric. In
| large parts of the world most meat consumed by the public
| still comes from small to medium farms and family
| agriculture. The globalized neoliberal agro-industrial
| complex has been whittling away at that, but it's still
| true in a lot of places, and it _could_ be made true again
| in the US; the population density of the US is pretty low,
| there 's a lot of land on which family farmers could
| produce meat humanely and sustainably. The only reason it
| doesn't happen is because agro-industry doesn't allow it,
| and they have captured the regulatory framework in their
| favor.
|
| If you changed the regulatory framework in a way that
| penalizes (or downright prohibits) a lot of these
| horrendous industrial practices sufficiently, then
| sustainable and human agriculture absolutely could fill the
| demand even of the very carnivorous American public (at
| somewhat higher prices, but not more than say double the
| price.) I'm not saying we shouldn't reduce mean
| consumption, just that the argument that sustainable and
| humane methods couldn't meet the demand are BS.
| sjwalter wrote:
| This is a great point. One of the things several of our
| customers who hail from India have told us is that our
| chickens remind them of the chickens they got back home,
| and can still get back home, but are aside from small
| producers like us, unavailable widely in the USA.
| judge2020 wrote:
| This being true doesn't invalidate their point of the GP
| representing "consuming meat" in a bad light based on the
| acts of those cultivating factory-farmed meat. Nuance
| doesn't have to always be front-and-center, but when
| discussing a topic, i'd rather see major counter-points
| considered rather than omitted. Preferably with numbers and
| percentages stacked next to it.
| krsdcbl wrote:
| I'm afraid you on the other hand vastly underestimate what an
| outlier farms like yours are when taking the whole population
| into account. For the amount of meat that is consumed, such
| production also wouldn't be feasible to provide for everybody
| - that's why i think OPs point is very valid, without
| _reducing_ total consumption, there simply is no "not factory
| farmed meat".
|
| Considering the population has grown, and cost of life
| (specially rent) is inflated compared to the 50s, I don't
| really see any path to achieve what you propose without
| really reducing consumption.
| criddell wrote:
| Do you think you are comfortable with your role in the food
| system only because the mainstream option is way worse? If
| lab grown meat becomes viable, aren't you next in line to be
| demonized?
| sjwalter wrote:
| I think the notion of "lab-grown meat" is laughable. As
| mentioned in another reply, it seems to be based on this
| idea that we can somehow grow in a lab something that
| requires an incredibly complex environment to grow into
| healthy food, that we can somehow simulate these
| conditions, and that the result will somehow be just as
| good as, e.g., 100% pasture-raised Angus.
| harpersealtako wrote:
| It doesn't need to be as good as the grass fed kobe
| beefsteak, it just needs to be as good as the feedlot
| mcdonalds hamburger. I'm optimistic about lab meat -- not
| because it will make everybody vegan (it won't), but
| because it might be able to create an alternative to the
| cheap factory-farmed meat we have today, enabling us to
| pass legislation to ban abusive factory farming practices
| without severely affecting consumers. The people who want
| quality meat will go to farmers like you, the people who
| want a chicken tender will buy it from the lab-grown
| folks, and the net amount of suffering in the universe
| decreases just a little.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Impossible's rumored $10B valuation[0] and BYND's current
| market cap of $7B would say otherwise. Once you have a
| product, the only limiting factor is how much you can
| scale.
|
| 0: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/imposs
| ible-f...
| sjwalter wrote:
| These, I've learned upthread, are not "lab-grown meat"
| producers, at least not yet. They're in the factory-
| produced GMO soy-based, highly-processed meatlike
| substance business, currently.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Thanks for the good chuckle
|
| > Mulligan Farms, LLC maintains a copyright notice (below),
| though we're not sure what it really means for us from a
| legal perspective. What we do know that a bunch of small text
| in a page's footer lends an air of gravitas and
| professionalism. To boot, as far as we can tell, nobody reads
| this stuff, so we're rolling with this.
| vlunkr wrote:
| Sure, that would be great if everyone suddenly ate less meat,
| but until we have a global cultural shift, aren't solutions
| like this much more valuable?
|
| One time a project manager asked told the developers that they
| shouldn't introduce any new bugs in the next release, this
| feels like the same kind of argument.
| farmyearn wrote:
| > In a generation or two, children will look with disgust on
| the aging adults who routinely ignored the horrors of ongoing
| animal abuse (by consuming meat).
|
| I suspect it's hard to find a place to watch it, but "Carnage"
| addresses this very point. I highly recommend it for meat
| eaters and non-meat eaters alike.
|
| > Carnage is a 2017 mockumentary directed by Simon Amstell. Set
| in the year 2067, when veganism is the norm, the film looks
| back on meat-eating today.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnage_(2017_film)
| judge2020 wrote:
| No futuristic films have come true when they try to predict
| society changing - ideas and beliefs are passed on from
| generation to generation. Food is much more sticky since
| meat-eating humans are likely to feed their children meat.
| When they come of age to understand things like veganism
| (beyond "vegans choose not to eat meat"), the fact that
| they've been eating meat for years will play a large part in
| whether or not they even consider taking on those new morals.
| mahathu wrote:
| vegetarians choose not to eat meat. vegans choose not to
| consume animal products, e.g. often also avoid leather
| shoes and similar products not necessarily limited to food
| disneygibson wrote:
| As they say, science fiction doesn't predict the future, it
| just communicates what present people _think_ about the
| future.
|
| The "future generations will look back at us in horror" and
| "we're on the Right Side of history" are both nonsensical
| positions that have zero historical basis and function more
| as a religious eschatology than as a serious scientific
| prediction.
| yboris wrote:
| I must be misunderstanding you, because your claim sounds
| absurd to me.
|
| You seem to be claiming that making a prediction about the
| future is inappropriate. I don't understand what "zero
| historical basis" even means.
|
| A prediction is just that -- a claim of what the person
| uttering it expects will happen in the future. The
| prediction is falsifiable (could turn out to be false). So
| what's the problem with making a claim about how you think
| the future will be?
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| > As they say, science fiction doesn't predict the future,
| it just communicates what present people think about the
| future.
|
| What is a prediction, other than a statement about what
| present people think about the future?
| pedrosorio wrote:
| > In a generation or two, children will look with disgust on
| the aging adults who routinely ignored the horrors of ongoing
| animal abuse (by consuming meat).
|
| I suppose you can teach disgust, so once it becomes the
| cultural norm that will probably be true.
|
| But the crux of the matter seems to be that some people just
| don't have that visceral reaction to the suffering of others.
| Group 1 (feels compassion for others' suffering) and Group 2
| (does not) just talk past each other because of this. I imagine
| similar discussions happened regarding slavery.
|
| Elsewhere in this thread [0]:
|
| > Would you be ok with killing another human to consume in a
| non-emergency scenario? If yes, then I understand your
| confusion. If not, then why not?
|
| > Self preservation. I am uneasy with killing a human for food
| because that means they could kill me for food. It is unlikely
| I will be killed by a cow anytime soon. (...) I meant that I
| wouldn't want to live in a world where humans eat humans
| because it would be dangerous.
|
| Pure self-preservation. The sensations of other beings are
| simply not a factor to the responder above and many people
| think like this (usually justified by the classic "plants could
| also feel pain for all I know, I don't care either way").
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28515559
| tomohawk wrote:
| Flying sheep
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrB_D_3IXOU
| cogman10 wrote:
| I've worked with cows.
|
| They are certainly more intelligent than most pets (dogs/cats).
| They'll figure things out a lot faster and without specific
| training. For example, I knew one cow that learned how to open
| gates and doors with their tongue just by watching us open the
| doors/gates.
|
| Getting a pet to do those sorts of behaviors usually takes treats
| and a lot of time.
|
| Honestly, the only thing that surprises me about this is the fact
| that cows have bladder (and bowel?) control.
| mod wrote:
| My dogs tag-team my gate and its latch. It's a very simple
| latch, with a loop of wire that goes over the top of the fence
| post.
|
| One dog noses the wire up, while another dog pushes on the gate
| itself with her paw.
|
| I had to start latching it with a carabiner where the loop
| cannot come over the fence post.
|
| I don't know if they learned it from watching me, or by trial
| and error, but I certainly did not train them to do it.
| ghostbrainalpha wrote:
| I'd love to see a video of them tag-teaming the problem like
| that. That's pretty amazing.
| screye wrote:
| > more intelligent than most pets
|
| This was something I didn't believe until my mom and dad
| recalled what it was like growing up on small farms with a
| house cow in India.
|
| The they are incredibly intelligent and excellent judges of
| emotion. They are protective of their owners and can be trained
| quite well.
|
| This was their rational argument for asking me to not eat beef.
| I still eat beef, but I can imagine that it's quite distressing
| when a cow is no different than a pet dog to you. (religious
| reasons aside)
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Most people that have had pigs as pets will also tell you
| that they are ridiculously smart - and in many ways similar
| to dogs.
| pvarangot wrote:
| Pigs are smart but they have extreme "I'm prey"
| personalities. They will usually only be social around few
| people or in few circumstances. I think cows are just less
| shy, maybe because of their size, and they will definitely
| intimidate animals they don't like.
| leeoniya wrote:
| a coworker who has 2 pet pigs says they are smart but are
| not particularly eager to please their masters, as dogs
| are.
| nate_meurer wrote:
| A couple years ago I went to a party where a lady brought
| her pet pig-- a fifty pound potbellied pig named Penelope.
| Penelope had her hooves painted with nail polish and rode
| in a stroller. I noticed that Penelope was chewing
| something, and had been since she arrived. I later asked
| the lady what the pig was chewing. The lady said it's gum.
|
| It was one of the rare times in my life where I was struck
| dumb and mute. I could only stare at her, and she further
| offered that it's Trident gum.
|
| After a moment I asked whether Penelope swallows the gum,
| and the lady said no, never. She chews for an hour or two
| and then spits it out, presumably after it's lost its
| flavor.
|
| I felt like everything I knew about life up to that point
| was wrong.
| stephenhuey wrote:
| I remember reading in Reader's Digest back in the 90s that some
| people who had the small furry pigs as pets found out they
| could open the refrigerator even if they taped it shut or put a
| latch on it. If they put the latch up high, the pig would push
| a chair over and climb up there! Can't find that article, but
| here's some supporting evidence of their intelligence:
|
| https://www.superpages.com/em/basics-pot-bellied-pig-care-fe...
|
| https://www.msn.com/en-gb/travel/other/cunning-pig-in-china-...
| kadoban wrote:
| I've had dogs able to do similar things without training
| (typically things we _really_ did not want them to do).
|
| It's pretty variable in dogs, I've had both some real dumb ones
| (still great dogs, just a bit dopey) and also super intelligent
| ones.
| conductr wrote:
| The reason it takes treats and lots of time usually is
| because usually we have to create motivation because they
| simply don't want to do what we're asking them to. If it's
| something they want, like escaping a cage, they will figure
| it out if it's possible just by watching how we open it.
| kadoban wrote:
| Yeah, agreed.
|
| Just for fun, some of the behaviors that come to mind (not
| all the same dog):
|
| - opening cages, even with clips in place to "lock" it a
| bit
|
| - intentionally looking pitiful/hurt only when they know a
| certain gullible human is around to get extra attention
| (access to the couch)
|
| - turning on a light switch that gets the neighbor dog to
| bark, causing our other dogs to run over and look, then
| stealing whatever dog bed she wants
|
| And then just in general, dogs and other pets seem really
| good at training humans if the human allows (most do, you
| really have to pay attention quite a lot to avoid it).
| slim wrote:
| I had a cat that learned to open the door by watching us do. He
| would jump and grab the door handle with both hands. I guess
| one can conclude that animal intelligence is rare in all
| species
| bronzeage wrote:
| Door opening is common, I had several cats do it. One cat
| learned to vomit in the sandbox. We didn't train him to do
| it, he somehow understood the general vibe that we don't like
| him vomiting and decided to go to his sandbox to do it (and
| picked up on the positive feedback from that).
|
| I wish we knew how to make them do that because he wasn't the
| only vomiting cat.
| leeoniya wrote:
| our two cats know how to open doors by hooking their claws
| underneath and pulling. we frequently come home to opened
| closets with folding doors. the girl cat always wants to go
| outside and stands up on 2 feet reaching for the latch on our
| sliding door while meowing and looking at us for assistance.
|
| no treats were ever given to them for this.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| My rabbits can do this too. The noteworthy thing to me is
| that they're very good at discerning which side to pull
| even when encountering new doors. That is, they seem to
| understand the relationship to the hinge.
| oceanghost wrote:
| I am tangentially involved with horses--
|
| We have a guy who is able to to open any stall he wants, and he
| opens the stalls of other horses _that he likes_. As evidenced
| by the fact that he would open his own stall and then let a
| certain set of horses out.
|
| If that wasn't amazing enough... He got into a conflict with
| another horse (nipping at each other), and he stopped letting
| that guy out of his stall.
|
| Livestock is... complicated. Horses collectively are
| unreasonably stupid. But some individuals are amazing. Before I
| came into contact with them, I thought they all were "Glassy
| eyed dinosaurs". It's a weird trick because you see people make
| declarative statements about them, up to and including they
| aren't able to recognize people. But, when you work with them
| its absolutely clear they have preferences. They prefer certain
| riders and certain activities.
| cushychicken wrote:
| Individual horses can have wonderful personalities. Once I
| got over how unsettling I find their physical size, I
| _really_ got to enjoy their character. The ones that like
| people tend to be very curious and friendly.
|
| Plenty of them _don 't_ like people, though. (And many for
| good reason.)
| teawrecks wrote:
| > As evidenced by the fact that he would open his own stall
| and then let a certain set of horses out.
|
| Was the set independent of what stalls they were in? Or were
| they always in the same stalls? If the latter, it could just
| be that he knows he can open some stalls more readily than
| others.
| planet-and-halo wrote:
| Intelligence, and animal intelligence in particular, is a
| very complicated topic. But I definitely suspect a nontrivial
| percentage of people who assume animals are dumb are doing it
| because of the mismatch in non-verbal cues. I for example
| often find myself completely unable to parse the facial
| expressions and body language of my cat, yet she is very
| obviously a reasonably intelligent animal.
| chasd00 wrote:
| i've wondered if the intelligence in animals varies just like
| the intelligence in humans. I don't see any reason why not.
|
| Maybe you had the DaVinci of horses in your stable?
| pvarangot wrote:
| Also animals go through a lot of traumatic episodes as they
| are being raised. If like 90% of human males where
| castrated by other males with a power drill without
| anesthesia in a stage in life where they are obviously able
| to learn things and interact with other humans I think in
| general social intelligence would be lower among humans.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Of course, everything varies.
|
| E.g.: Our neighbor has two cats. One is very needy and
| craves our attention. The other rarely acknowledges people
| and spends its free time in stalking mode.
| air7 wrote:
| The sad part is that farm animals that are smart are a hassle
| so they are often "discarded". We are basically causing
| (un)natural selection for stupidity.
| cogman10 wrote:
| At least for food animals, we are almost always selecting
| based on either flavor or quantity of meat. Very rarely does
| any other aspect come into play.
|
| Intelligence doesn't really matter. For factory farms,
| intelligent livestock simply have no chance of escaping.
|
| For small time farms, the animals are generally kept pretty
| happy anyways, so they've often have no reason to try and
| escape. There's not a lot of farms inbetween at this point.
| elmomle wrote:
| Not to discredit cows, but I wanted to insert an anecdatum
| about my cat: she was terrified of leaving my apartment, which
| I found out once when a friend carried her outside and let the
| door close. The cat ran to the door and immediately started
| leaping to try to manipulate the door handle. She failed, of
| course, but she could only have known how it worked by
| observation, and I'm sure that with a bit of time and a body
| physically capable of manipulating a handle she would have
| gotten it.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| I have a similar anecdote about my cat. He tried to twist the
| handle but couldn't get enough traction with his paw pads (it
| was a round handle.)
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I have a weight against my door right now because my cat can
| open it. And I definitely never intentionally taught him to.
| He has also gotten through a bungy-corded cabinet door when
| there was food behind it, opened a Talenti screw top
| container once to get the leftover ice cream inside. The last
| one was in the middle of the night so I have no idea how he
| did it without opposable thumbs, but don't underestimate food
| motivation in some of these animals. I saw him figure out how
| to open a screw top large food bin made for holding pet food,
| one where the screw top was big enough that you don't need
| thumbs. He just kept trying, over and over and over for
| hours, until it worked. And that was just the time I saw, not
| counting however many months before he had done exactly the
| same thing when I wasn't around. We now need to use a food
| container with a padlock. He can't get into that. But he
| still tries. Kicks it onto the floor, pushes it around, pulls
| at every pawhold that can be pulled on. There's a sort of
| infinite monkeys thing where they can just try every possible
| approach until something works.
| spike021 wrote:
| >Getting a pet to do those sorts of behaviors usually takes
| treats and a lot of time.
|
| I have a 20 week old shiba inu (regarded as one of the most
| intelligent - and stubborn - breeds) and he figured out his
| crate's latch weeks ago. Problem is he just can't open it from
| the inside, but if he really wants out he will use his tongue
| on the latch from the inside and try for several minutes to
| flip it over and move it. Fortunately he's just barely not
| capable of actually getting it done.
| h2odragon wrote:
| > the only thing that surprises me about this is the fact that
| cows have bladder (and bowel?) control.
|
| Probably not _much_ control; they might notice they need to go
| about 30 seconds before they _really_ gotta go. If your house
| cow can 't get out by itself there might be a pie by the door
| and an apologetic gaze.
|
| I've known a cow that was raised in a small pen under a hickory
| tree; he learned to keep a bathroom corner after the crate
| trained dog suggested it to him, I think.
|
| We run a goat as part of our dog pack, she's as house trained
| as I expect from any puppy that age, but she needs to go out
| often and may have the urge hit suddenly.
| carom wrote:
| I'm a hobbyist dog trainer with my dogs and it's amazing how
| effective positive reinforcement is. These cows were trained to
| pee in a location with treat training, same goes for dogs. It's
| about telling them what you want them to do, reinforcing the
| behaviors you like and redirecting the ones you dislike. I'm not
| surprised at all that the cows are capable of this.
|
| The masterclass of clicker training seems to be chickens. [1]
| From what I've heard of it, they don't understand positive
| punishment, so you only have positive reinforcement, and they're
| kinda dense. Still, with treat training they can learn to do some
| impressive tricks.
|
| 1. https://www.clickertraining.com/node/1906
| hinkley wrote:
| I met someone who was a falconer, I suspect that's a general
| bird trait. Punishing them doesn't compute. They just think
| you're a jerk.
|
| Apparently with falcons and hawks in particular you can cause
| them to regress with certain missteps, and have to train them
| again. He had said something about going out of town and having
| to start over with some behavioral training they'd worked out
| before he left.
| h2odragon wrote:
| That's cool! There's still drawbacks to keeping cows as house
| pets, they take up an entire couch even when small and cute, and
| they never lose the desire to be in your lap.
| harpersealtako wrote:
| I wonder how long it will be before someone breeds a miniature
| cow like those mini pigs you sometimes hear about.
| h2odragon wrote:
| There's plenty on craigslists, but beware the ones that are
| "mini" because they're starved while young. They can still be
| fine pets and healthy animals but they're not worth what a
| breeding mini can be.
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