The thing is - lobsters are an easy problem. We can (theoretically) collectively decide that lobsters shouldn't be touched at all and nobody will be hurt (some fishers maybe?). But the same logic about "feeling" pain is applicable to practically anything as is demonstrated in the comments below. And then it becomes a humanity problem - can we kill living organisms for ANY reason?

There is no easy, or even hard answer at all for this. And won't be in the nearest future, simply due to a sheer scope of the problem, number of different kinds of organisms and numbers of reasons they are being killed today.

Killing is one thing, Killing by boiling alive is on a whole another level of cruelty, like unit 731 level, nazi level cruelty. I don’t eat meat, so I don’t know why only lobsters are boiled alive and not other sea food. Whatever the reason, it is hard to justify.

If we are going to kill something, the least we could do is kill it painlessly. At the beginning of COVID-19, some farm in the Midwest killed hundreds of pigs by steaming. Could you imagine the suffering?

Serious question here... but, are you sure that's a cruel method of killing lobsters? (I'm 100% with you on the pigs but here me out on the lobsters.)

I think when you're evaluating killing methods based on how humane they are, one thing to keep in mind is that how something looks to the executioner is NOT a good metric. As an example: Consider the oft repeated anecdote about how being hanged is only "humane" if you break someones neck during the hanging. If you don't, the subject with jerk and spasm wildly. HOWEVER... I have been choked out in jiu-jitsu.... it's like going to sleep. However, I can only imagine the uncommunicateable horror of having my neck broken and then having to endure 2 minutes of consciousness before I succumb to not breathing and pass out. One looks distressing but is suffering-free. One looks great, but is probably terrifying.

For a lobster, there are a couple of metrics I'd be concerned with: - time experiencing a sense of alarm - time experiencing what is likely pain

If I take a lobster, and I suddenly plunge them into fully boiling water, full submerged, how long do you think it is before they succumb? Keep in mind, that movement isn't necessarily a good cue here, because the physical structures will move in response to heat even if consciousness is long gone. Smaller animals have a high surface area to volume ratio. The heat transfer is likely pretty fast. I have experience cooking dungeness crabs, and I can say from experience, the time between putting them in the water and when they stop moving entirely is quite quick... I'd say no more than ~5-10 seconds. The last part of that movement seems uncoordinated as well so may not represent conscious effort.

For lobsters, would you prefer they be decapitated first? There's likely some consciousness that will remain for a similar time period in the head, so you should probably behead them, AND plunge the head into boiling water. BUT... then you also have to consider the "time experiencing alarm"... Wrestling them still to behead them will undoubtedly be alarming.

This is a good question. I don't have an answer. I don't eat meat, never have, never killed anything in my life, other than mosquitoes. I assumed that boiling alive is a horrific way to die.

As for pigs, I found the article https://theintercept.com/2020/05/29/pigs-factory-farms-venti...

That is from last year.

Yeah, I have no defense against the pig incident. Horrifying.

Yeah, ffs, just kill the lobster quickly right before you boil it, and stop whining about how not getting to boil it alive infringes "muh freedumbs".

Instructions: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/how-to-k...

From the HN guidelines:

Be kind. Don't be snarky.

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says

Please don't post shallow dismissals

I’d be happy if we started at simply not killing lobsters and other animals for food (or for any other industrial purpose). You’re right that we could spend a lot of time debating the finer points of it but as you said: lobsters are easy. By that logic I would imagine so are chickens and cows and baby sheep (lamb) and pigs. So let’s start with the “easy” stuff. Whether or not we allow ourselves to harm insects or something while harvesting grains is another question. We could ponder whether it’s ethical to kill bacteria, but we’d die if we didn’t do that so let’s not fret about that.

A lot of people in this thread seem to be suggesting that since we can’t pin down an absolute answer we should what… do nothing? If you really mean to say that deciding not to eat lobsters is easy then let’s go with that logic and stop eating all the bigger animals too. Seems an easy place to start.

>A lot of people in this thread seem to be suggesting that since we can’t pin down an absolute answer we should what… do nothing?

I don't think this is the most generous take. I think what most people are trying to find is the underlying principles. Consider the following potential first principles:

1) Minimize suffering

2) Minimize animal death

3) Minimize charismatic mega fauna death

4) Minimize climate impacts

5) Maximize human health

6) Maximize human performance

7) Maximize human longevity (healthspan or lifespan)

Each of those can lead down different, sometimes competing tracts. Can vegan/vegetarianism be compatible with any of those? Sure. Can it optimize all of them at the same time? I'm doubtful. It's certainly possible that in the rush to do something we end up on the wrong trade-off. That's why it's import to drill down on exactly what one is claiming is ultimately important.

As a vegan how do you reconcile the thousands of insects and field animals that get culled during harvesting those lentils?

I don't really have a problem with vegetarians but I do struggle to understand the lines they seemingly draw at random.

Minimising harm should be a given for all but that doesn't rule out all meat eating that veganism somehow does.

Eating farm animals requires you to grow 9 times as many crops to feed them as if you had just eaten the crops directly, since only about 9% of the food they eat is converted into edible flesh.

So even if you take this argument seriously, the insects and field animals are better off if you grow fewer crops, which you accomplish by directly eating the crops you grow, not feeding them to livestock.

>Eating farm animals requires you to grow 9 times as many crops to feed them as if you had just eaten the crops directly

This applies to industrial meat production. Do your thoughts change in regards to hunting/fishing which doesn't (necessarily*) rely on industrial crop agriculture?

(I realize a lot of species population numbers - especially deer in the Midwest - are inflated due to the availability of crops for them to feed upon. But there are other species where this isn't necessarily the case.)

Yes, I'd say hunting and fishing don't have this problem. I have other ethical issues with eating animals, but hunting wildlife is orders of magnitude better than industrial agriculture.

But you get 10 times the nutrition density from animal protein.

That sort of claim is going to require some numbers for what you define as "nutrition density". Picking at random 100g of steak vs 100g of kidney beans you get more calories, equal protein, far more potassium, vitamin c, iron, vitamin b, calcium, and magnesium from the beans. I enjoy a good steak too, but I know it's a luxury.

> Minimising harm should be a given for all but that doesn't rule out all meat eating that veganism somehow does.

I'm not a vegan but from my perspective if minimizing harm is your goal then veganism is the only valid choice.

Any meat consumption will unquestionably increase the misery and pain the consumed animals had. Both while alive and at their final end. You're lying to yourself if you cannot admit to that.

Your argument wrt the insects and land animals is super strange too... What do you think the animals are going to eat until they're butchered? Love and good feelings?

In my opnion focusing on ethical farming is more promising (under an utilitarian perspective).

If the focus is to reduce suffering and exploitation of animals the best action is to ban the most cruel practices by law pushing stricter ethical standards.

People will continue to eat meat everywhere they can afford it (maybe less, maybe more) veganism is not going to change that.

People love to ask me this. One guy said deer are being run over by tractors so as a vegan I’m killing deer.

I don’t really see how only eating plants is a random line. As I said in my original comment living in an industrialized society includes some amount of harming animals (for example carbon dioxide emissions harm animals).

I’m actually designing a solar powered farming robot for regenerative agriculture so we don’t have to use harmful chemicals to do farming.

But in my mind there is a clear distinction between accidentally harming insects while harvesting lentils and intentionally breeding animals in cages for slaughter.

If you think that line is arbitrary and you can’t understand it, I’m not sure I can help.

I can't speak for the person you're replying to, but some people adhere to a consequentialist worldview, where intent does not matter (or matters relatively little). It's the same outlook that creates the need for good Samaritan laws. I don't agree with it in whole form, but it should be recognized as a valid philosophical framework.

I understand that, but I have a hard time believing a vegan diet could possibly harm animals more than an omnivore diet. Like it just sound so absurd and I run in to a lot of people online that just seem to want to bullshit themselves about veganism for some reason. Like the guy that said I was killing deer by eating only plants because it means more tractors and tractors can run over deer… that seems to me to be a shoddy leap of logic, not a genuine point I should consider.

>bullshit themselves about veganism for some reason

I think this is also the most likely reason because humans try to rationalize cognitive dissonance. But in the nature of the HN guidelines to try and take the strongest possible interpretation of someone's comments, I'll try to reframe it.

Suppose someone has a foundational principle that all animal life is sacred. Also suppose that person is a consequentialist. Following the first point, the life of an insect is every bit as valuable as the life of an elk*. It's easily conceivable to me that farming, in the current form that most of use get our food, kills many more animal lives per calorie than eating the elk. If one is a consequentialist, it doesn't matter if there was the specific intent to kill those thousands of insects (and fawns, and fish from runoff etc.), it only matters that my choice led to their deaths. Compare that to the hunting of the elk, where it's conceivable that only one life was lost. From that perspective, a vegetarian/vegan diet could be considered more detrimental to animal life.

(I specifically chose elk to avoid the complication of how much farming goes into livestock feed, but hopefully you understood the point)

If you're like me and don't necessarily agree with the above framework, it still highlights that most of us have unarticulated assumptions that may not hold as we go about our daily choices. E.g., even if people claim that they think all animal life is sacred, their actions display an assumption of a hierarchy to that value.

I don't know if this is helpful, but this 2003 research estimates about 6 animal deaths per acre of agricultural harvest, or about 7.3 million animals.[1] That puts it about on par with industrial animal consumption. But granted it seems much more difficult to have accurate estimates.

I think part of the problem is that most people in industrialized economies are extremely far removed from the food supply. I don't think it's super common, but also not unheard of for deer (especially fawns) to be killed by harvesting machinery as they bed down in fields. Considering hunting a deer may yield 60-70 lbs of meat, it might be possible to claim that reduces total animal deaths. Now I don't know how you'd arrive at a final number because most people are omnivores and still eat plants, but I don't know if I'd immediately dismiss their claim as absurd.

I see from your profile that you work in the farming machinery business so I'd be curious if there are any specific mitigations you would consider to alleviate this problem?

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10806-018-9733-8

Funfact you didn't want to know today:

Figs are technically not vegan (nor vegetarian) as during the (highly complex) pollination process some fig-wasps have a wild time in the fruit, where eventually some of the wasps die and get absorbed by the fruit.

The wasp is completely digested. You're no more eating a wasp when eating a fig, than you are eating grass when eating beef.

Hmm ... how does that work? We are obviously not eating cow stomach when eating a steak?

Hmmm...I see you've never had menudo or haggis :-)

(Yes, I know tripe is not really stomach.)