My father asked for, and got, a chick for Easter once.

It grew into a rooster that took over the backyard by terrorizing the whole family. Only my grandmother, who had grown up on a farm, was willing to go into the yard.

> Your wife may one day want a chicken to live inside the house. You may one day agree to this, and then miss it when the chicken is living outside the house again...

A friend of mine complained to me a few years ago that the people in the apartment next to hers were raising a chicken. The crowing woke her up in the morning. But she consoled herself that soon enough they'd eat it.

I was pretty amused at the whole idea of raising a chicken inside an apartment.

So, if you want to keep backyard chickens, save yourself the trouble and get the red sex linked chicks. They are hybrids whose color is very reliably determined by color, so you can be pretty sure you aren't getting a rooster chick.

It's either that or brace yourself for the process of turning the occasion young rooster into fried chicken before it gets too obstreperous.

He traded it in for a more "woke" one.

When I was a kid, we also had chickens and roosters around. At one point we had a smaller, white rooster who would take any chance he could at terrorizing the family as soon as we brought them food.

Unfortunately for the bully, we also had a second, bigger rooster, who would keep an eye on him, and come running to beat his ass and chase him away as soon as he spotted nastiness.

The white bully ended up in the soup. The grey defender died of old age.

- The smell… Chicken crap is horrible. Our neighbour has chickens, we have flies. Lots of black flies.

- Bye bye garden… My dad has two chickens (did I mention the smell?) that free roam and absolutely tear up everything looking for a tasty bite.

- Can’t eat the eggs This isn’t necessarily a chicken problem but mostly a problem with chemical industry. We’ve had a lot of PFOA/PFAS contamination and public health advise says to not eat eggs from backyard chickens

The research done was mid at best. They just went "oh yeah there was huge variance in the hobby chicken PFAS data so we took the average". Most of the hobby eggs had little to no PFAS in them.

Furthermore, because of privacy laws, they weren't allowed to know where the eggs came from. They say they found no correlation between PFAS contaminations in eggs and known high PFAS areas but that's actual bullshit if you can't look at location data.

It's absolutely attrocious they were allowed to publish like this and that no one called them on their bullshit.

Overall, unless you are in a place where you know you have high PFAS concentrations, it's most likely fine? You could send off a few eggs for testing to make sure, that's a 200 euro test or something. Do that once per year just to make sure and you should be OK.

    > We’ve had a lot of PFOA/PFAS contamination and public health advise says to not eat eggs from backyard chickens

KNOWN PFAS contamination was around heavy industry, and yeah, if you live near those regions, maybe don't. Otherwise proceed with scepticism and/or some testing.

Dutch source for the thing about rain worms: https://nos.nl/artikel/2539934-hoge-concentraties-pfas-via-r...

This includes feed. Commercial animal foods literally contains waste, such as plastic, due to waste food recycling not being required to be unpacked.

Sure, you _can_ control these things, but more often than not, people don't. Semi commercial hobbyists don't have the money.

Though like many discussions about microplastics today, where "higher levels", and what microplastics, cross over into actual health issues is vague.

It's like a cat's litter box. If it smells, then clean it more often.

There were several lessons that we learned. Chicken will find dry earth to use as a bath. If one do not want that then you need to remove access and solve the underlying need. They will also dig up seeds and eat seedlings, so any fresh worked soil need to be covered/restricted. They also eat some fruits and herbs, but not others.

In term of total work they did save a lot of time and the garden was in much better shape than before.

I used the believe the same, but as I found out on HN, there are a lot of people who won't bat an eye killing animals raised on their own land. Maybe they just never develop a bond with these animals.

But then the question should be is it just the "bond" which is holding someone back from killing animals? Why can't we just not kill without relying on bonds?

But also some people who raise animald for meat hire a person to collect them for slaughter in part because of the emotional toll involved.

As to your last question.. I think you might be confused? People don't like to kill in general. Go outside and ask people how they felt getting their first kill on a hunt as a kid, you're going to realize that a unifying element is learning to deal with harming another animal.

Bonus: being vegetarian doesn't exclude you from the necessity of killing in order to live. You're just killing forms of life that you emphasize with less, which is very reasonable and rational but also not materially different.

I used to believe this.

Then I came up with a twisted question to ask people (I am fun at parties)

The question is something like, if you had to come up with a name for someone to kill within twenty four hours can you do so? The conditions are you get a full and unconditional pardon. It won't be held against you at all. If need be, we will even arrange it such that the person can't protest. However, once you agree, you must come up with a name and you must follow through. You must kill this person no matter what within a short time frame (make something up like a month).

I expected people to answer no. You can't come up with a name in a day! However, over half the people I have asked have said they have a name right now.

I don't think that's surprising, and it doesn't meant that people are okay with or blasé about killing people. Like, arguably this is just the trolley problem rephrased; there exist people whose death would clearly be a vast net benefit and would save many other lives. So is it okay to kill them? It's not an easy question.

I think it's more or less unrelated to the issue of killing one's own chickens; there is no such thing as an evil chicken who death will save thousands.

Your question is like a game, and people you ask will most probably treat it as such. People 'kill' in videogames, but most would not like to actually kill in real life.

(for a pithy version: "I've never wished anyone dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure")

But then there's the question on whether you could trust your own judgement.

E.g. I wonder how many people would choose Kim Jong Un without realizing how EXTREMELY progressive the guy is on the scale of the hell hole that is North Korea.

Allowing just anyone who wants access to the countrwide intranet with some curated and heavily censored information from the outside and ending the crackdown on user generated content? Blasphemy! Allowing a selected few foreign restaurants to open up? Witchcraft! Building semi-normal housing in the prison camps you toss entire families together with their children, grand-children and elders in? Cracking down on systematic rape and arbitrary mass executions in those camps? He's going to come for our (prison) children next! Trying to shut down the practice of high ranking officials forcing young girls into sex slavery squads? And even after inflicting an "undisclosed physical ailment" on him, he still only barely agreed to restart the squad, controls the selection of girls himself instead of allowing us to force anyone we like into it, requires parental consent, makes us wait until the girls receive an education and doesn't recruit anyone under 14 anymore? SCREW HIM!

And many other things that seem absurd to us and the Juche system for exactly opposite reasons. Like allowing other countries but China and Russia to offer work in their special economic zones, agreeing to a meeting with the US President at the border inside NK, considering negotiations with South Korea and allowing very limited cultural exchange, giving some priority to increasing living conditions for anyone but those who have the priviledge of living in the capital, turning a blind eye to tiny private markets selling some less controversial contraband, ....

The guy is just barely holding on in a system that completely vaporized anyone with even but a tiny bit less than utmost loyality to the Juche ideology. For several generations. All institutions, government bodies, civic organizations, education and corporations are under complete control of Juche extremists. And then there's this one basketball obsessed fatty raised in Switzerland.

His greatest achievement so far is probably opening up their intranet to about a quarter of their population (less than 1% were allowed to use it before him) and slowly expanding the group of people who have access to the outside internet. At this point more people have access to smartphones than to television or radio. And now social media and chatrooms are apparently being reopened after the previous government took those from the 0.1% elite who had access to the intranet back then in 2005, because they organized a spontaneous sport event with a few hundred people.

And not long ago the NK government became very worried about people accessing the global internet through their intranet enabled devices, extending the application used to connect to the intranet with spyware trying to detect foreign network accesses. So it seems VERY likely to me someone hard to stop is currently hooking their intranet to the global internet in the background. And the NK establishment is not very happy about it.

Maybe the life of North Koreans will become much better within one or two generations.

I'm not saying people have an inbuilt moral objection to the idea of killing, I'm saying most people find hurting other living things emotionally difficult.

If people don't like killing in general, or killing animals more specifically, they can live a wonderfully health(y|ier) life by going plant-based, be responsible for less killing, and today do it without having to give up the textures and experiences they've be conditioned on.

It's difficult in 2025 to conclude that a person who doesn't choose to eat this way is particularly opposed to killing, in the way that you propose.

Also, what if we increase the calories of the animal we choose to slaughter, say we start raising massive whale-sized animals instead, would that tip the scales?

However, do keep in mind that a large proportion of agricultural output is used to feed animals.

Tofu, seitan and TVP are all good, but they're extremely boring (user error attributes to this I'm sure).

Every vegetarian/vegan I've talked to is just not into weightlifting, so they sort of dismiss the diet needs we need. We always go back to chicken because of this

Have you tried various types? cannellini beans don't seem to have the same effect as others in my experience.

The tvp are tasteless by design, my way is to use them to mimic sliced beef recipes therefore 1) they get different flavors depending on what I cook 2) they trigger my memories and those makes me feel more taste that they are.

For the beans digestability another tip is to remove/by dehulled beans, that’s the hardest part to digest. Also soaking them overnight is a big help for digestion.

[1] I especially like grinding up the tempeh to turn it into a plant based burger substitute, and making "Perkedel Tempeh" (tempeh fritters)

I'm curious what your targets are. I've found getting 0.8g of protein per kg of bodyweight (USDA recommendation) is easy on any diet whereas 1.5g/kg or higher on a vegan diet can be hard depending on your target macro ratio. If you're bulking or doing long-distance running/biking (i.e. carbs aren't a limiting factor) then it's totally doable. Besides tofu, seitan, and beans there's lentils, chickpeas, edamame, spinach, nuts, seeds, nooch, etc.

> beans: ... My wife gets bloated painfully

If she's committed to making beans work you could experiment with varieties and preparation methods that are more digestible, or she could try Beano. But honestly that seems like a lot of work.

> beyond meat: it's expensive, gas and bloat is still an issue, a big one

Same, I just can't digest it. I'm glad the faux meats exist for folks who want them, but I'm sad at how it's displaced other veggie burgers at restaurants.

> Tofu, seitan and TVP are all good, but they're extremely boring (user error attributes to this I'm sure).

I've come to appreciate the blank canvas they provide but that did take a lot of trial and error to get to the point where I knew what to do with them. Similar to beans it depends on how committed you are. (In my case it took a long time for the incongruence between my food choices and my ethics to grow big enough to overcome my innate laziness and affinity for barbecue.)

> Every vegetarian/vegan I've talked to is just not into weightlifting, so they sort of dismiss the diet needs we need.

I know a few vegans into powerlifting/streetlifting, and as mentioned above bulking isn't too hard -- the real issue is cutting. Every one of them supplements with protein powders, especially while cutting. Then again, so do all the omnivore lifters I know.

My partner and I have been fully plant based since 2018 and variously play rugby and train triathlons.

That’s like saying you kill chickens to eat eggs. You don’t kill a plant to eat its fruit. In fact, plants benefit from animals eating what they produce, be it oranges or tomatoes or something else and crapping the seeds somewhere else for proliferation.

I think you’ll benefit from this video. Don’t let yourself be consumed by emotions of an imaginary argument. The entirety of your point is a response to something you imagined I said and not my words or intentions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExEHuNrC8yU

The real problem is the sheer number of humans we have to feed. Hopefully another couple centuries of low birth rates will help.

And fruits are broader than most people think. Many of the things you think as vegetables are fruits: pumpkins, zucchinis, tomatoes. But even outside fruits there is food you can harvest without harming the plant, like potatoes. And we haven’t even gotten into seeds and grains, like rice.

So you can definitely live without killing what you eat.

They are the "fruiting body" of the fungus, but biologically they are not fruit.

Surely the right move here is not to play, but if you don’t get annoyed trolls can’t win either.

This whole argument is absolutely meaningless.

edit: just pointing out I'm not directly replying to you but to the whole thread.

why do you get to decide that it isn't the purpose of a cow to be eaten?

You're arguing on the Internet, it's already a waste of time and space.

If someone raises their human kid “to be eaten”, that would be the purpose of the kid.

Does that make it ok to eat the kid?

Neither you nor I get to decide what the purpose of another sentient being is.

Clearly you’ve never experienced the sight of animals in a slaughterhouse, as they realise what is happening to the animals in front and begin to panic and violently bellow and push back.

> You're arguing on the Internet, it's already a waste of time and space.

That is only true for people who don’t engage in good faith and don’t have a genuine desire to learn and are open to changing their minds. For everyone else, it can and does provide value.

Why do you get to decide that the purpose of a cow isn't to be eaten?

I guess someone could also repeatedly bash you over the head with a tire iron and break your legs, and when criticised reply “how do you know their purpose isn’t to get hurt?”

“Well, when I approached them to hit them, they cowered in fear, asked for mercy, and tried to flee.”

“Your attempt to evoke an emotion doesn’t answer the question though. How do you know their purpose is not to be ravaged?”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43113489

If you build a chair, the purpose of doing so could be to sit or to earn money by selling it. We can derive exactly which from your actions and the outcomes, but there is still an identifiable purpose. However, it is entirely different to claim your purpose is to build chairs.

Similarly, in my previous example someone can hit someone else with the purpose of harming them, but it doesn’t mean that person’s purpose is to cause harm.

Do you see the difference? I do kind of feel like I’m discussing middle school philosophy here. I surely hope that is not my purpose. This whole conversation was unnecessary with a tiny bit of steel manning on your part, don’t you think? Does it truly seem reasonable to you to claim an entire species’ purpose is to do something they do not only not pursue but actively avoid? I’m confident you are able to see the point by now.

Pretty sure it is the cow's purpose. Humans first domesticated a wild animal and then with selective breeding cows were "made". That has no weight on ethics tho.

Same with chickens that lose the ability to produce eggs.

I'd say main benefit is not doing it youself.

I guess you should just be pro child slavery and enslaved some kids to do your housework then?

Cars kill 50k Americans a year. I guess we are just ok with killing peoplr and therefore shouldn’t be against murder either?

It doesn’t even take philosophy 101 to understand there’s a significant moral gulf between killing deliberately and incidentally.

She tells a story of a wonderful pet goat. Until one day it was "gone to another farm", and they enjoyed goat curry for dinner.

The older siblings knew... and now they dont talk lol.

Straight psychopath approach to child raising. The adults were all convinced this is how you made kids grow up tough

The trope is about something different - it's about intentionally making a subject bond with an animal over long time, as with a close friend, and then finally making them kill the animal as a final test of loyalty.

Doing that in real life, and for no good reason, is just sick.

In the end it makes me feel like the people eating their nuggets but have a traumatic reaction to what created them are the odd ones.

Having them as a product does not mean you don't care for them, on the contrary, but I would say it's a completely different type of bond.

> But then the question should be is it just the "bond" which is holding someone back from killing animals? Why can't we just not kill without relying on bonds?

I would argue it's about the purpose, not the bond. You don't kill a pet, but you do kill food. And you should never kill for the sole sake of killing.

For a lot of people it's an exchange thing. You give the chicken a place to stay, food and care and in exchange you get to eat it when it gets old. They do bond with them but there's this understanding from day 1.

If you don't get that out of it it'd turn into an omlette so instead of turning into an omlette it gets to enjoy a large percentage of its life.

You develop bonds, just different ones and you learn to place limits because you know what the purpose of the animal is.

I still felt it when I was really little, but that was gone by the time I was a teenager and the reality that this was our living set in.

You needed HN to figure that out? I assume this is obvious sarcasm but almost none of the domesticated animals species would exist if almost all humans throughout history weren't willing to do that.

Even eating dogs was perfectly standard in most more "primitive" and/or destitute societies.

I have a farmer friend who occasionally has to kill one of his milk cows. He names them, pets them, cares for them like a pet. It pains him to kill them, and I always know when he’s had to do it— I can see it on his face. I’ve bought some of the meat form his cows, and I was grateful for the meat, and the man who raised the cow with such care.

The same, by the way, applies to vegetarian stuff. The amount of critters being killed to keep them away from the veggies would probably shock you, especially in the rather inhumane way its sometimes done in industrial farms. Shooting, for some baseline, is considered one of the most humane ways of dealing with large pests.

I simply see nothing wrong, at all, with eating meat. It's a natural and normal part of life and also, by far, the easiest way to ensure you hit all your necessary nutrients without going overboard on calories - especially if you live an active life and/or are into things like weight training.

We rightfully find these immoral and don’t engage in them.

That’s not a defense of the immoral act. It’s just words to describe the immoral act.

Some birds will abandon weaker chicks to focus on the ones most likely to survive. Others will allow siblicide. That these behaviors exist and have existed for billions of years is a fact orthogonal to morality because birds don’t have the capacity to reason about systems and the mortality of actions.

“Living things” is a sleight of hand, logically. When it comes down to it, everything is just atoms in the end. So why not murder? Why not steal? Why not exploit the poor? Reductionism leads us down some very dark paths indeed.

There's something missing from this analysis. Namely that animals that have many offspring generally expect most of them to die and this is part of selective pressures that keeps the population healthy. If, for example, a mouse could reason morally it might still let many of its weaker babies die because keeping them alive would not be good for mouse-kind. It's inappropriate to assume that the child rearing morals of a low-fecundity, high-parental-investment species like ourselves applies to other species with different reproductive strategies.

I agree. If a mouse could reason morally and inside the system it currently inhabits, it might reason that way because it was unconscious of or had no access to alternatives for survival.

It’s is absolutely inappropriate to assume any morals on a species that has no capacity for reason.

People generally dislike gratuitous pain and cruelty, hence we're seeing a push for cage-free hens and the like. They don't oppose slaughter in and of itself.

Slavery is an excellent cognate to this.

It’s a slippery slope, isn’t it? If you’re not careful with your compassion, you’ll end up having it for all sorts of beings you’ve come to see as like yourself.

No it's not. I always find the idea that humans are not in some way special (at least to other humans) off-putting. Even animals treat members of their own species generally better than they treat other species.

I love animals, I think we should treat them with dignity and respect as much as possible. At the same time I would not hesitate to kill an animal for food or if it endangered another human.

You said yourself:

>I think we should treat them with dignity and respect as much as possible.

It becomes more possible to treat animals with more respect and dignity every day. For vast portions of the population (Not all! Not yet!) the slaughter of animals for food is becoming less and less necessary.

So the question becomes, given that you believe we should treat animals with as much respect and dignity as possible, do you believe you have a moral imperative to take advantage of these systemic advances?

I think where we disagree is the question of whether slaughter is necessarily undignified or disrespectful. When I say "treat them with dignity and respect" I think the experience of the animal up to the point of death is what's most important. The slaughter, if done humanely and quickly, is not inherently immoral to me. For example, I think most people would agree that it's better to "put down" a suffering pet than let them die of natural causes.

My problem mainly lies with industrial farming practices like battery cages.

Yeah, we definitely have common ground here. I’ll also mention that industrial farming practices are also cruel to people. Slaughterhouses in the US are overwhelmingly staffed by migrant laborers who work in unsafe conditions, for low pay, being exposed to antibiotics that damage their long term health.

We can and should do better.

That's clearly not true, and a projection.

They don't oppose slaughter because they find no objection with killing an animal for nourishment, "necessity" having no bearing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/4_Children_for_Sale

This has no bearing on the argument. That is just as true of vegans who purchase boxed products.

It's also fairly US-centric. If you observe countries with the longest lifespan, lowest CVD incidence and overall best health outcomes, they consume a more varied whole-foods diet with animal products.

> the classic diet

This is the Americanized diet of ultra-processed foods. Whole foods are the solution, which is in no way shape or form contingent on whether animal products are included (unless the diet is "carnivore" which is not representative, and even there you can find traditional societies who fare ok even if not completely optimally).

This scales principally with excess weight gain.

> The fact is meat is often the central peace of the dish, second the carbs and then salads, cabbages and roots.

This is one meal, dinner, and the fact that it is more protein-heavy is not the problem. Nevermind ratio, some diets are devoid of fiber. The secondary "carbs" are just pasta, white bread, crackers, etc.

If you consume a whole-foods diet, with a dinner that has a larger meat component, you will easily, easily have enough fiber.

I mostly agree but not with the easy part: you thirst has a maximum and people can’t ingest as much food they want without a limit. If you have a large meat component there’s less space in your belly for the vegetables. The point for carbs is the same (they cut your satiety and you’ll be less hungry for the cauliflower). Thought I get your point that a diet including meat isn’t bad in itself, but if you look around the biggest meat eaters are not the fittest, however the opposite might often be true.

So is dying of smallpox.

Wikipedia:

> Smallpox is estimated to have killed up to 300 million people in the 20th century and around 500 million people in the last 100 years of its existence.

Completely natural, and completely normal.

That doesn’t mean we should be engaging in it in 2025.

The naturalistic fallacy is not justification for killing living things.

I love my chickens and I'm really sad when I lose some to predators. Yet I have no issue to harvest them for eating. They are not pets, I raise them for eggs and meat.

Maybe it's because I was raised on a farm, but I make a difference between pets and farm animals and that does not mean that I don't have a "bond" with some of the latter.

You have be arguing in bad faith if you claim that you don't see difference between a random cat and a cattle.

If you think it's wrong to kill animals to eat, I would ask you "By what moral standard?"

We have dropped some practices and we continue with some. We no longer leave the dead to rot, we bury/burn them, and so on. We developed religions, science, etc, and we are in a different era now, our lifestyle has completely changed, we don't have to hunt, don't have to build our own shelters, and we are no longer nomadic.

I am of the opinion that `killing animals` is a practice we can safely stop now, it was a necessity at that time, but right now it is completely optional.

There are various angles to look at this. One is sustainability and another one is morality.

Sustainability: Do you think we have enough animals to feed 8 Billion people on earth meat daily? I hope you know why we had to fallback to agriculture as a source of nutrition. Why most early settlements were started on river banks?

Morality: My moral standard is: Don't kill animals for my own sake of pleasure, kill only what's necessary for my survival, kill only what is there to kill me/hurt me.

So can I "kill" plants?: Yes (Using the term 'kill' wrt plants is just wrong, but I will continue with it for the sake of argument).

How is it morally okay to kill a plant but not okay to kill an animal?:

Let's agree on the definition of an animal. By animal, we all mean the set of (humans, pets, goat, horse, pig, lion, etc), there are no plants in this set. They are in a set called `living_beings`, which will have bacteria, viruses, insects as well (who can be further clubbed into smaller sets). Now my moral standard is "Not kill animals" (Not 'don't kill living beings'). It is on this entire set, not selectively for X or Y, which will be hypocritical. I am applying the same level of morality to everyone in this set. Now coming to plant-based food. First of all vegetarian food is not just plants. It is fruits, vegetables (akin to fruits), seeds, leaves, and other different parts. The plants are not always "killed" unlike when producing meat-based food (except eggs). The plants are "evolutionary hardened",i.e. built for harvesting, they don't die if you pluck a fruit (moreover they drop it naturally). They don't die when you take a flower or take a bunch of leaves (as long as you are within limits). The same can't be said for any animal.

Is the use of pesticides, deforestation, and killing of insects/rodents okay for producing large amounts of vegetarian food?:

No, I am against that but I don't see any other alternative to feed the calorific needs of 8 Billion people on earth. Of course there are other farming practices but they can't be commercialized or don't have high yields. As much as we can, we should try to eat locally sourced items to avoid carbon emissions due to transportation over large distances.

So what will be my ideal world that is according to my moral standards?: Ideally, everyone has a backyard where they can grow their own plant-based food. If you want better nutrition coverage, keep some chicken and eat the eggs. Let the chickens enjoy their lives, doing chicken things.

Will I eat an animal if I am stranded on an island with nothing else to eat?: Yes, at my current level of ego, I would prefer to stay alive by killing and eating the said animal.

At 2 years old my son could blind taste test tell the difference between my neighbor's chicken's eggs and store bought eggs.

He refused to eat eggs (still doesn't) until we convinced him to try one of the eggs from our neighbor's chicken's. He liked that egg. Every time we've tried to pass (fancy!) store eggs off to him as our neighbor's eggs he's called us out for lying to him.

He'll reliably eat eggs from the chickens across the street and nowhere else.

So yes, there is a difference in taste!

She eats her eggs and asks for more. If we run out and I fry up some store bought ones, she refuses to eat them - even when I don't tell her where they're from.

Same goes for chicken meat from the grocery store vs. pasture raised broilers from another neighbor.

When it happened the first time it was something of a canary-in-the-coalmine situation for me.

My 2 year old would only prefer to eat frozen chicken nuggets. That doesn’t mean they are superior to actual whole chicken.

You're trying to propagate an urban legend. HN is not the place for that.

In the United States, mechanically separated poultry has been used in poultry products since 1969, after the National Academy of Sciences found it safe.

Yes they can include mechanically separated chicken, which is basically a fancy name for saying they scraped all the meat off the bones. But that isn't "mostly skin and cartilage", it's meat. There may be trace amounts of cartilage and small amounts of skin in it, but they are nowhere near the main components.

If you're still not sure, just look at the protein content of chicken nuggets. The quantity of protein can only come from actual chicken muscle. Skin has little protein and cartilage has virtually none.

There are a lot of urban legends out there about what chicken nuggets are made of. But they're precisely that -- urban legends. They're false.

Seriously, do you think researchers are wrong on this?

Meanwhile, other studies show that inclusion of 40% mechanically separated meat does not change the appearance, taste or desirability of chicken nuggets. Do you really think the majority of producers are not going to turn that waste stream into more product and profit?

It will depend on whether the whole chicken is chicken proper, or one reassembled from nuggets.

    > That doesn’t mean they are superior to actual whole chicken.

My kids prefer nuggets over the whole roast chicken my wife and I eat. The salt, MSG, and seasoning of the nuggets along with the fat from the oil tastes better to them. Sadly, nothing I say will convince them otherwise.

That really gets down to reheated chicken nuggets, pizza, and other classic school lunches.

The alternative would be to have a school that has a sufficiently large and trained kitchen staff to prepare diverse food, make sure that the food selection that they have meets the requirements (and that the kids aren't just eating the deserts).

I'm recalling back to my school food eating days and the kitchen had four people - two serving, one cooking, one cleaning.

High school had two or three in the cafeteria - and they were constantly putting out the fast food equivalent food items. I can't even remember if there were salads (if there were, I don't think I ever ate them). [Burger, deep fried [fish, shrimp, chicken], French fries] was my lunches for four years.

Though I'm also not entirely sure that schools are to blame for the narrowing of food preference with kids. They don't help, but I'm not entirely sure they are to blame.

The kids get used to eating it at schools and birthday parties where people go for "safe" choices like pizza.

I, too, remember in my elementary school days in the 80's, that we had real, cafeteria prepared lunches (shep's pie was my favorite). But it was also a small rural school.

    > They don't help, but I'm not entirely sure they are to blame.

https://news.cancerresearchuk.org/2003/10/07/fussy-eating-ma...

> Scientists at the Cancer Research UK Health Behaviour Unit, University College London, wondered if children were reluctant to eat any unfamiliar foods, or whether they were selectively rejecting certain types – perhaps those most likely to pose a threat to heath. Early in human history, the presence of toxins within many plants made eating fruit and vegetables risky for children, while meat carried a high risk of food poisoning.

That was from 2003... article from the same author in 2005: Age and gender differences in children's food preferences - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15975175/

And the term to look for is Neophobia (related article from 2022 Neophobia—A Natural Developmental Stage or Feeding Difficulties for Children? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9002550/ )

> 4. Causes of Food Neophobia The source of food neophobia can be traced back to evolution when a neophobic attitude protected mammals from consuming potentially poisonous food. As an omnivorous species, to survive, humans had to distinguish between safe and poisonous food. Although this ability has lost its value today, it can still be observed in children around 2 years of age (sometimes earlier), when unfamiliar foods or foods served differently than before cause anxiety in the child, and a relative preference for familiar foods is apparent.

Kids eat better in a lower-middle-class area preschool in France than they do in the most expensive daycare in the Bay Area.

I visited Taiwan recently. Small island, semi-tropical with a long growing season. Stuff grows year round. Lots of markets with fresh fruits and veggies so lots of stuff is "local". The supply chain is short.

You go to even a random food stall and it can be just a few steps removed from true "farm to table".

The US is huge (logistical challenges that favor large scale, industrial food handling for economics) and many parts have short growing seasons.

In the US, the schools have Sysco and ConAgra trucks rolling up loading pallets of prepared foods. Depending on where you are, the food prep workers are contracted out to some third party private company. In my children's school -- in a fairly affluent area -- I'd guess that almost all of the food is prepared and heated from a bag.

> ...

> Not many schools can afford gourmet offerings like Mount Diablo’s, which also benefits from California’s year-round growing season. But school menus in several places have improved in the past decade, with fresher ingredients and more ethnic dishes, said School Nutrition Association spokesperson Diane Pratt-Heavner.

> In a national survey of 1,230 school nutritiondirectors, nearly all said the rising costs of food and supplies were their top challenges this year. More than 90% said they were facing supply chain and staffing shortages.

> The survey by the nutrition association also found soaring levels of student lunch debt at schools that have returned to charging for meals. The association is urging Congress to resume free breakfast and lunch nationwide.

> “This is the worst and fastest accumulation of debt I’ve seen in my 12 years in school nutrition,” said Angela Richey, nutrition director for the Roseville and St Anthony-New Brighton school districts in Minnesota, which serve about 9,400 students. They don’t turn away a hungry child, but this year’s school meal debt has surpassed $90,000, growing at a rate of over $1,000 a day.

> Making food from scratch isn’t just healthier, it’s cheaper, many school nutrition directors say.

> But that’s only possible when schools have kitchens. A national shift away from school kitchens began in the 1980s, which ushered in an era of mass-produced, processed school food. Pre-made meals delivered by food service companies meant schools could do away with full-time cafeteria staff and kitchens.

> ...

Los Gatos High School Hires Chef Consultant to Improve Student Meals - https://youtu.be/nMMO9fBWnjc

Deciding that we need to serve food at a minimum of cost with a minimum of staff who is minimally trained according to a minimalistic nutritional guidelines, and charge children for the privilege of choosing to eat, and you aren't getting a feast full of fresh produce.

Japan is a decent model in making meals more communal and spreading the labor requirements around to students so that staff can focus on back of house work, but it starts with a higher budget basis to start with, makes meals mandatory, and provides significant subsidies.

    - 1 pack of 6 thighs or 3 breasts
    - 4 tbs corn starch + 1 tsp salt + 1/2 tsp each of curry powder, cumin, smoked paprika to coat
    - slice chicken thinly and use a mallet to flatten to make it even and cook faster (this also increases the ratio of breading to chicken which they like)
    - coat each slice in the corn starch mix
    - beat 2 eggs and then dredge the coated slices in egg
    - coat the now egg coated chicken with bread crumbs of your choice
    - fry in a flat pan with just about 4-6mm of oil
    - about 60-90 seconds each side

And there's absolutely nothing wrong with nuggets. Nobody criticizes Italian meatballs, which are ground-up beef in balls. But then for some reason ground-up chicken in a different shape isn't "real chicken"?!

https://www.mcdonalds.com/gb/en-gb/product/chicken-mcnuggets...

I'm sure there are many traditional Italian meatball recipes, but as one example, I had an AI convert the US measurements from Chef John's recipe, and it estimated 900g meat and 494g other ingredients, so 65% meat.

https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/220854/chef-johns-italian-...

Of course the ingredients differ in a lot of other ways than just the percentage of meat. That's just what I looked at.

Honestly, ground meat is ground meat. What makes you think ground chicken is "quite different"? Why are you putting it in scare quotes? The chicken breasts used to make McNuggets are literally no different from the standard chicken breasts sold at your average grocery store.

And in both cases the ground meat/chicken is mixed with binders and flavorings to keep it together and keep it moist and make it even tastier -- variously including flour, breadcrumbs, water, salt, spices, etc. depending on the recipe.

Obviously nuggets are battered and fried. But then so are traditional Italian delicacies like arancini.

Yes.

> Honestly, ground meat is ground meat. What makes you think ground chicken is "quite different"?

Because when people who don't sell chicken nuggets have looked closely, they have found that to be the case.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/10/11/232106472/wh...

https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(13)00396-3/fulltex...

> And in both cases the ground meat/chicken is mixed with binders and flavorings to keep it together and keep it moist and make it even tastier -- variously including flour, breadcrumbs, water, salt, spices, etc. depending on the recipe.

Sure, or textured soy protein concentrate[0] to fill out the meat or soy lecithin [1] to emulsify the unholy mixture

0 https://www.tysonfoodservice.com/products/tyson/chicken/nugg...

1 - https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Fully-Cooked-Chicken-...

a chicken nugget is not the same thing as whole chicken, because it has many chemicals, additives, flavouring agents, msg, organ meat, etc and is then battered or crumbed and deep fried before being packed. It also has a different texture altogether, and is eaten with the hands which children find easier than using cutlery.

compare a child tasting two different varieties of dark chocolate in comparison to a milk chocolate with caramel filling, or two varieties of whole milk to chocolate skim milk, et cetera.

What I wanted to convey is just because kids have a preference for something doesn’t mean it is better. So more a flaw in the syllogism.

It doesn't matter though, I still prefer my friend's eggs to store-bought ones, I'd rather not support that dirty industry.

While there are some taste differences in egg yolks, the taste difference in meat, between chicken that ate mostly what they had found themselves in a large area with abundant vegetation, insects and worms, and chicken that had been raised in industrial complexes, is huge.

Multiple groups have done tests on this. Kenji did a somewhat informal test, where he dyed the eggs so you couldn't discern the farm egg. The Japanese have done expert panel chicken feed tests. It's interesting stuff!

I think people want this "farm egg" thing to be true more than it really is true. People got mad at me on Twitter when I griped about those Vital Farms eggs (don't buy those eggs! they cost more than 2x as much as commodity organic eggs!).

That said, this applies to scrambled or fried eggs.

Omelettes not so much, as seasoning might play quite a big part, and even less with cakes, baked goods, etc. in which eggs are just one more ingredient.

Maybe one or two, sure, here and there, it's a big world out there, but definitely not enough for such general claims

It's not that much more expensive if you were to compare with store-bought eggs that actually match the quality.

In the warmer months, they also supplement their food from the yard when they eat a lot of grasses and fruits

As someone who lives in a country where tipping culture doesn't extend to bars, I was imagining something quite different at first

I agree that you won't make money or a profit. The coop money you will probably never earn back, but I can cover the cost of a sack of feed (£12 or so) by selling boxes to colleagues for £1 each.

I think the eggs taste better because a) what the hens eat and b) because they are much fresher.

I've had to kill chickens (and hate doing it), which is sad, but I've never taken one to a vet. It makes no sense to get a £80 vet bill on a chicken that cost £20.

We've brought chickens inside the house when they're ill (we have tiled floors) but don't do it on a regular basis. If chickens weren't incontinent, though, they would make great indoor pets. Surprisingly smart and pleasant animals. This will also sound weird but if you pick one up, they also smell nice - kind of like a new puppy smell.

[0] https://www.gardenersworld.com/how-to/maintain-the-garden/ke...

It was bad enough keeping them undercover for one winter.

This logic is confusing. You are taking a purely transactional view when it comes to the chicken’s health, but you also admitted they don’t turn a profit. In that vein, it makes no sense to get the £20 chicken in the first place.

Your utilitarian view is also the opposite of what the person you’re replying to is describing. Do you believe that if one gets a pet cat or dog for free from the street and they get sick, “it makes no sense to get an £X vet bill on a pet which was free”? And if not, what’s the difference? Neither is making you money.

I would also be very surprised if any vets ever managed to treat a hen successfully. They tend to hide any illness until very sick.

And yes, there’s a bit of the mix of pets and livestock. We only have five hens, and they all have names. If you’re naming your animal, is it a pet?

I know for a fact it is possible. I am acquainted with veterinaries and have kept chickens temporarily while they were recuperating.

> They tend to hide any illness until very sick.

Indeed. So do rabbits and other “exotic” pets. It does make treatment harder, but experienced people tend to develop a sense to notice it sooner. You yourself have probably already developed that skill to some extent and might be able to identify “strange” behaviour is specific individual chickens.

That might be hard to do with a flock of 20. If they were pets the calculation might be different.

First was one taken by a fox. My wife chased the fox and he dropped the chicken (she was too heavy for him). She had a broken leg and a broken wing. Both perfectly treatable and she went on to make a full recovery, resumed laying. As result of her closer contact with people during her recuperation she became very tame and socialized with visitors on the deck in the evening. Arguable she became a pet after her vet treatment.

Second was one with an eye infection (eyelids swollen so she couldn't see). She also made a full recovery.

I don't take every sick chicken to the vet, but if you've kept chickens for long enough you get an idea when it's likely to be mworthwhile (it's never financially worthwhilte). What's worthwhile will vary according to what you can afford and how you relate to your flock generally, the age and health of the hen and likelihood of recovery.

She somehow got one of her talons very loose and it ripped off, naturally becoming infected. The treatment was antibiotics and later full amputation of the toe in question + chicken house rest. She's still living happily, but would've died without treatment. Overall, it was a surprisingly cheap treatment ($130CAD?)

Never considered the ROI, but I built a big walk-in coop for maybe $200 in materials. Think that'd pay off with the current price of eggs, if we sold them.

They good at deterring delivery drivers though, and generally alerting people.

I guess it depends on how you look at it. By analogy, it makes no sense to have my cat go to the vet either (and pay thousands of dollars for a ~$50 cat lol), but they still go. I guess it's all about personal choice and perspective. It does feel a bit silly in a way though

> but if you pick one up, they also smell nice

Agreed, a clean chicken can smell really good!

> If chickens weren't incontinent, though, they would make great indoor pets

That's the big thing! On Japanese twitter, chicken diapers are a popular item!

And I haven't seen it discussed much, which tells a lot that the HN-ers are city dwellers with little experience in the countryside life. But the biggest, nastiest, deepest problem with anything animal is ... shit.

Animals produce shit and lots of animals produce loads of shit. And chickens don't have the notion of "this area is for eating, this one's for shitting", they will shit all over the place. So if you don't enclose them and can run to your porch, they'll shit it up so gotta be careful where you step or sit on. If you enclose them, better be prepared to wipe shit of your boots coze no way you can avoid it forever. Then the "pleasant" activity of cleaning up loads of shit from the chicken coop and dispose it somewhere.

Overall, having lived on a farm, my childhood memories of interaction with animals resume to "lots and lots of shit everywhere" :)

Yes. I volunteered at a Raptor conservancy. Fantastic animals and being trusted to help fly them in a display was one of the best things I've ever done. It made up for all of the poop cleaning. At least owls have the courtesy to cough up pellets containing the little bones of their prey - it reduces the poop volume and the pellets dry into hard nuggets that easy to pick up (and fun to pull apart later). Black Kites were okay-ish - most of their poop ended up on easily cleanable wall sheets behind their (outward facing) perches. But vultures. yeech. They are fascinating from a social perspective and some were very playful - pulling on your bootlaces until they were knotted, for example, but their poop is gross and voluminous. They also can use defensive projectile vomiting if they feel threatened, which is as (un)pleasant as it sounds.

But overall, great animals to be around.

As soon as somebody showed me this as a kid, I would constantly be looking in pine groves for pellets. There was something fascinating about pulling them apart and finding the little mouse bones. Whenever I have a chance now, I point it out to kids. Some of them are fascinated like I was, some of them can't understand why I showed them something dirty and boring <shrug>.

At the Raptor place, we used owl pellets as part of kid-focussed activities. We'd give them a couple of pellets, a pair of tweezers and a chart of bone outlines, and say "see what animals you can identify". Tiny little jawbones were always popular.

I hated chickens, the only animal I may have disliked more were sheep and that’s only because sheep are so unbelievably annoying.

Chickens to me were nothing more than noisy garbage disposals.

It's large compared to the average, but the longer we've had chickens the more we're convinced they thrive better when given appropriate space (anecdata about average age of our chickens vs all other people with chickens we know), leading me to think something like yours is still too small even for 2 chickens.

For us the minimum is now such that there's at least some of the gras/moss left throughout the year instead of the puddle of mud we used to get. Plus I'm not gonne lie: seeing their (and their ancestors) behavior 'in the wild' it feels morally/ethically better as well. Especially the younger ones are keen explorers: easy to see when let ranging free - they'll go in a radius of like 100m around their nest, but not much further than that. Apart from that one mandatory weirdo obviously.

For the second coop, we bought a pre-built shed that's about 8'x12' (much taller and roomier than the first), and even that is starting to feel too small for 13 chickens with all their various items. They have a much larger run now, but even that still feels like it might not be enough for them!

Does this also take into account the current price of eggs in the same product category? i.e., organic, free-range eggs?

For current Erewhon prices, 8 eggs a day is $11.30 in free eggs a day, so $339 in eggs a month?

https://erewhon.com/subcategory/33022/eggs - $16.99 a dozen

Still absolutely worthwhile for my mentally though and one of my major life goals

These numbers are absurd. You need a wooden box and some chicken wire, and chicks cost less than $1/bird. I don't understand why this always comes up on HN, where people are spending thousands of dollars on chickens. It's the simplest animal you can possibly own and they should pay for themselves almost immediately.

The cheapest way to build a chicken coop is to go to the local rubbish tip, or tip shop if the top doesn't let you fossick. Be a little imaginative with your design. For example, you can build them out of PVC water pipes. They are light, don't rot, wire can be pop riveted to them, and they are very easy to glue.

I also turned a 80 litre rubbish bin into a chicken feeder. Getting the design reliable was a few of weekends work of trail and error. However once done my time was paid back over and over again. A rubbish bin can hold an entire 30kg bad of food. It takes my chickens 3 months to go through a bag, so the reduces feeding to once per month. (We also gave then table scraps, which is a daily chore.) I also built a automatic water station out of an old office bin and a toilet inlet valve. The net result of all that is the chickens can got for months without you touching them, which is far longer than any family holiday.

Like some others here, I don't quite get the cost aspect. A carton of 12 eggs in about $6 here, and 3 chickens produce about 2 cartons a week. The food costs about $10/month. If you have a yard, food costs can be reduced by about 1/2 allowing them out during the day. Allowing them to graze can automated too - you just need a 12v electric car window opener connected to a battery, solar cell and timer. Again, if you get these things second hand they will cost you less than the $60 of food they save in a year.

All that said, yes it will take a few years to repay the costs, and even if you automate to the degree I did taking the table scraps out to them and getting the eggs remains a daily chore. To me the engineering project of "how can I automate this at least cost" was as interesting as the chickens themselves.

If you're building a chicken coop out of materials you didn't find lying around on the ground, you're doing it wrong.

Traditionally it's done by decapitation. Head dies instantly. No need to suffer. Body runs for a while. Don't forget to ask for forgiveness...

It does require a bit of technique though, and the consequences of not doing it right at first can be very upsetting.

And thank them for their help and for providing you with food.

I've had mine for about 6 months now and they've totally won me over...

They're far more friendly and intelligent than ever I imagined. Mine love hanging out with me in the garden. One of them is very affectionate and will sometimes decide to sit on my shoulder and is happy to be held. They're all totally different and have very unique personalities which I didn't expect. Their personality will depends a lot on the breed of chicken you get too and some are much more tame than others so it's worth thinking about the type of chicken you want.

I've trained mine to come to me when I whistle which can be super useful when I need to get them back in the run. Obviously you can't train them like dogs, but they're surprisingly smart and will learn things.

They've very curious animals. Mine like to fly up onto my window sill to watch us in the kitchen which is quite sweet.

They'll eat pretty much anything so they're very cheap to keep once you have your coop built. I have 3 (getting a 4th soon) and it's costing us about £3 per month for their feed which makes up about half of their diet, and for that they'll give us about 60-90 eggs. I wouldn't get them for the price of eggs though. If you want to give them a good home it's going to cost you. They're also quite a lot of work. I need to clean mine weekly, feed them daily and provide them general care. Buying an automatic coop door is a good way to reduce some of the hassle of having to let them out and shut them in every day.

I don't eat mammal meat, but I do eat chicken and fish and its been hard for me to eat chicken recently. I'm trying to reduce the amount of chicken I eat in favour of eggs.

Chickens are ruthless and will not hesitate for a moment to kill and then cannibalize their coop mates. The best way to avoid it is to have a single breed as they tend to start by attacking anything different, literally spots or discolorations, on other birds.

Yes, chickens will eat other chickens.

> I'm told the eggs taste way better, I don't really notice it because I really only eat my own eggs, but perhaps I just got used to them.

All eggs taste the same. Which is great because eggs taste great.

> Your wife may one day want a chicken to live inside the house. You may one day agree to this, and then miss it when the chicken is living outside the house again...

Chickens are filthy animals and the thought of having one indoors is disgusting.

It’s one of the reasons factory farms clip the beaks.

And regarding egg taste, have fun reading this: https://www.seriouseats.com/what-are-the-best-eggs

Send me as many papers as you want, but respectfully, I have empirically tasted the difference. I have no interest on imposing my opinion on anyone, but to me it's pretty obvious and easy to understand and accept that a better fed, better cared for chicken will produce better eggs.

A bit like with Wagyu steak, no?

There have been many studies on this and in true blind tests people do not prefer one over the other. The Kenji tests are interesting as he even dyes the eggs green to prevent the color from giving it away.

> Send me as many papers as you want, but respectfully, I have empirically tasted the difference.

You think it tastes better because you know the provenance of the egg. It's like a placebo effect. Try your own blind study and see if you can actually tell the difference.

> I have no interest on imposing my opinion on anyone, but to me it's pretty obvious and easy to understand and accept that a better fed, better cared for chicken will produce better eggs.

There's plenty of non-taste reasons that they're better. You might care about the welfare of the animal. And the vitamins or balance of fatty acids might be different. But they all taste the same.

> A bit like with Wagyu steak, no?

A Wagyu would be significantly more marbled than your off the shelf USDA Choice steak. So of course it would taste different. The balance of protein v.s. fats and distribution throughout the meat would be completely different.

They are in fact very lovable little beings. They have interestingly complex relationships between them, they are very social and I do have a special bond with the first I got, especially because we hadn’t the necessary hardware to keep her hot enough for multiple days, we had to literally keep her warm between our hands.

Now she is a grown up chicken and she loves it when I go outside.

Also they are in fact pretty intelligent animals, and they are really curious about what happens around them.

I’d ever go as far as saying that they could be the perfect household pets if only the evolution gave them sphincters.

That was a nice personal discovery.

Ironically, vegetarianism really only started to become popular in the Western world once people lost their connection to farms, and meat and poultry were something you bought in pieces, plastic-wrapped.

Having actually slaughtered and butchered chickens I raised, I'd rather raise my own. I know the chickens I raised had a better life and death than factory farmed chickens.

What will they think of next man versus self? What if the thing that man creates in his hubris isn’t actually better?

We are the ultimate result of 4 billion years of evolution. Nature has made itself redundant in some ways.

Actually, transcend is the wrong word we are still a part of nature of course but we can literally leave the planet and have the ability to irradiate this globe to erase most macroscopic life.

We are an outside context problem as an Iain Banks Ship Mind would say.

It’s a huge responsibility and opportunity that we will almost certainly squander.

Our culture and foresight has brought us into such misalignment that 25% of the US population is on psychiatric drugs, you have a lot of homeless, a drug epidemic, there's a general crisis of meaning, males have given up on finding partners, women are all competing for a few men or think they're all animals and stay away from them. To be able to eat quality food costs a lot and few people have the time or energy to cook anyway because city life is so stressful to most.

We are living in a profoundly sick society and economy all over the world. WW3 is knocking on the door, one wrong move and we fuck up the only ecosystem we have in the galaxy.

I'd bet if people were given the choice between living in a small fishing village from 2000 years ago and modern lower middle class the choice would be obvious.

So to say we have mastered nature and we know better requires a lot of hubris.

These are not the same thing. You're interpreting "uncaring" as inherently cruel, but it's not; just uncaring.

Whether or not it is moral or ethical to eat animals is an arbitrary decision made by emotional beings. There is no right or wrong there, only what people feel.

Someone who is vegetarian or vegan for moral reasons is making a choice, not living some sort of universal truth. Someone who eats meat is also making a choice.

Someone who eats meat but criticizes others for eating the "wrong" kind of meat is a hypocrite.

Certainly the way we farm animals for food can be sustainable or unsustainable. I wish people would focus more on that aspect than pointing fingers and making it a moral issue.

You're defining the word cruel to narrowly. Per Merriam-Webster "causing or conducive to injury, grief, or pain" and Cambridge "(of an event) causing suffering". Natural forces can be cruel. So can fate and life.

- a shortcut : “I don’t eat animals” instead of “I avoid encouraging the farming process by consuming the product of those farms: […]”

- and/or a following philosophic stance, that seems logical (debatable) when someone avoid encouraging the farming process.

Few are the vegans that claims that an animal eating another animal is not natural, or that they cats wouldn’t eat them in the condition you describe (which to be honest, rarely happens).

(I personally think there's nothing wrong with home/farm egg laying as long as the animals are taken care of well and the male ones aren't killed. That's why I'm vegetarian rather than vegan.)

I think we agree the term “natural” should almost always be questioned and unpacked. It often serves as a rhetorical device instead of a nugget of wisdom.

Dismissing an idea solely for being “unnatural” is premature. Or vice versa.

At the same time, there is wisdom in being curious about weirdness that seems nonsensical. Some weird things have a backstory and even rationale that is non-obvious. Or maybe their benefit is subtle or hidden to those who only look narrowly. (Chesterton’s Fence)

Slight topic shift, but conceptually related: I hope the slash and burn “reformers” we’re seeing have the humility to recognize that institutional knowledge is diffused in ways they do not understand as outsiders. It doesn’t grow back quickly. Just because Chaos Monkey works at Netflix doesn’t mean it works for Congressionally-authorized government agencies. Rapid destruction can be far worse than measured reprioritization.

I get it though — as a programmer I sometimes prefer to throw out a previous code base and start a-fresh, and this can help with clearing out technical debt. Such a rewrite is risky though, as is well known. Besides, technical abstractions are often orthogonal to domain knowledge and expertise.

If all meat was produced the way it was farmed 100 years ago, youd see way less vegans.

There's even a small amount of vegans that consider lab meat to be something immoral (how they loop their head around that one, I do not know).

I'm currently dating a girl that's vegan and is super chill about it, but when I was 16 I dated a vegan girl also. My mother made two separate dishes for her, one specifically with esoteric stuff she would like (Christmas being special and all that). Then my mother made the mistake of quickly flipping some burning food with some meat in it, then using the same spatula to muddle the vegan dish. That girlfriend immediately said she would not eat that dish.

I nearly decided to break up with her at that moment.

I'm never quite sure it it's anecdata, but it always feels like there are much more obnoxiously stringent vegans than there are obnoxious meat eaters.

On the other hand, I've seen firsthand how vegans have to consistently defend their lifestyle choice, because by making that choice they reveal the "default" was never really that. Same with those who chose to be sober.

As I grow up I am beginning to realize just how many "bad personalities" and "horrible life choices" are really just driven by a poor environment - and that speaks more of our society and governance than the individuals.

If after that you still can't make yourself eat it then you should apologize, explain it to them, tell them you tried to make yourself but couldn't and I bet you'd get a LOT more sympathy.

I've never met any other kind of vegan person. If they were concerned only about the living conditions of the animals, then they would eat free-range ethically-raised meat. They don't. Even if it's really free-range and not what the government allows to be called "free-range."

And on top of that it does make a statement about one's values. Even if someone was ok with doing all that homework, they might want to give up meat as a form of protest against all the factory animal farming out there.

Factory farming has been around for more than 100 years. Upton Sinclair published The Jungle in 1906.

The meat industry has done a pretty good job keeping the horrors of slaughter houses out of the public eye, especially in the days before almost everyone was walking around with a video recorder in their pocket.

I'm sure exposure to what's really involved in modern meat production has increased the popularity of veganism, but veganism has been around for at least a thousand years.

Still other vegans are motivated by concerns about the environment. For them too, "classical husbandry" will not be a winning argument. If anything the opposite, since it requires more land.

Neither is using fire to cook food.

Your point? (Or are you recommending a raw food diet?)

IMO everyone should read it, regardless of your stance on eating animals.

But definitionally a vegetarian is someone who abstain from eating meat period, regardless of the source. Someone can avoid eating unethically sourced meat but still eat ethically sourced meat and thus definitionally not be a vegetarian. So it's fair to assume that ethical vegetarians (those who practice it for ethical reasons) believe that all meat consumption is unethical. Otherwise they wouldn't be vegetarians.

I acknowledge there is probably a caveat of people who practice vegetarianism because they don't believe they can find ethically sourced meat and thus forgo meat consumption entirely. I find that strange though as cage free meat is pretty widely sold, at least in the USA per my experience.

Even chicken eggs really are not cruelty free - if you truly love animals, you would stop eating all animal products imo. Otherwise you are simply lying to yourself.

Converse opinion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YFz99OT18k

Millions of Indian people have been vegetarian for hundreds (if not thousands) of years now. I guess there are manufactured meat replacements now, but I prefer to just eat things like legumes over factory made vegan food.

Vegetarianism (voluntary) didn't become more than an edge case until food was heavily commoditized and readily available.

"Between 1960 and 2000, the average share of Americans’ disposable personal income (DPI) spent on food fell from 17.0 percent to 9.9 percent." [1]

I am not going to look for a source right now but I would venture that since the 1960's were part of the industrial era that food was even more expensive before the creation of the Haber process and gas powered farm tools.

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2020/november/average-s...

You are correct that it used to be even higher. The US BLS estimates around 40% of DPI was spent on food at the turn of the century (1901). [1]

[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/100-years-of-u-s-consumer-spending....

As did dental care and cars. Correlation is not causation.

A classic case of mixing up correlation with causation?

Also, as gruesome as a backyard slaughter might seem, it's nothing compared to the industrial equivalent.

Ever notice how the English words for animals have Germanic roots but the words for their meats have French roots?

Chicken -> poultry

Cow -> beef

Pig -> pork

That's because the peasantry, the ones raising the animals, spoke Old English, and the nobility, the ones eating the meat, spoke French.

Poor people ask if you got enough to eat. Middle class people ask if it tasted good. Wealthy people ask if it looked good.

Which correspond to points on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I think we can use that framework to understand where vegetarianism and veganism fit in. You might say that they are either related to personal feelings of being ethical or status symbols, or both.

It does however makes factory farmed animals much less fun to eat, both in term of taste and the knowledge of how much better backyard hens has it. It is like buying clothes manufactured from countries with less-than-stellar working environment.

I was living in San Jose in a dense suburban neighborhood. It became legal to have backyard chickens so I jumped at getting three chickens. (We had three young daughters, see.)

One mysteriously died. Of the remaining two, the bossy one decided she was a rooster and started crowing, of a sort, in the morning hours.

So we had one asshole neighbor complain and I was obliged to send them off to live with a friend who had some property in the Santa Cruz mountains. Sad. And afterward, neighbors strolling by said they missed the chicken sounds in the neighborhood.

I'll spare you the unfortunate ends for the two. I'll say the Santa Cruz mountains represent more predators and require someone with a little more responsibility than my friend showed. (I don't blame him. It was really my fault — having more or less dumped them on him.)

Livestock guard dogs work better, but then you're dealing with a large dog that isn't a pet and isn't socialized like a house dog.

Not really, because you want to dog to be bonded to the livestock, not the humans. The dog lives outside amongst the other farm animals. They tend to be more territorial and protective than pet dogs. All that said, I've seen them used more with sheep than poultry.

We've given up and are switching to bantams in an enclosed run.

That said there are places where dog is eaten usually as a stew because that makes it more tender.

Whatever they taste like is very very secondary to that.

I am absolutely not advocating that we start eating pets. I would feel terrible about it too. And if I have an option, besides starving to death, I would take it.

The other reason why predators have become pets is because they had a strong additive value in terms of hunting or protection. Dogs in term protection, and hunting and cats in terms of pest control. Groups with these kind of pets tended to fair better.

...that roosters are total assholes.

There's room for exactly one in the flock, and I have no emotional difficulty turning the rest into stew. The "chickens are cute" narrative only works in a carefully curated frame.

Not to mention the meat of such animals tastes much worse.

If people realise they are still comfortable eating intelligent emotional animals like chickens, the dogs and cats of this world should watch their backs!

That said there are places where dog is eaten usually as a stew because that makes it more tender.

Strongly disagree with this part of your statement. The scale of suffering from industrial animal processing far exceeds anything from past centuries. The one-on-one cruelty of past centuries exists today as well (there are plenty of hidden camera videos to that effect), but what's really different is that now we treat animals as if they are mere inputs to industrial processes, as if they have no feelings or emotions or capacity for suffering.

In past centuries, chickens roamed free, sheep and cattle grazed on fields, etc. It was an idyllic experience compared to today's factory farm hellscape.

There's not really any human analogue to industrial meat factories, except maybe like Nazi concentration camps, or ... I mean really only that, right? Maybe something Genghis Khan did might occupy that same space.

Like Eazy-E famously said, it's not how you die, it's how the moments from your birth, all the way through to the end of your life in this world, add up. Do you get a positive number?

Chicken/horse born on a ranch? Yeah.

Chicken/horse/cow born in a concrete meat factory? I mean, I don't think so...

Our favorite meat lately has been roadkill deer. Two days ago a friend was traveling to a job site up route 89 on the side of the lake when they hit a deer. He called us on his cell but we didn't want to drive that far that day. The next day my wife was planning to drive out in that direction to help a friend, the friend welched out but she went to see if the deer was still there, it was, so she loaded it into the back of our Honda Fit and I was told, when she picked me up at the bus stop, to stash all my stuff with me in the passenger seat.

Turned out the intestines didn't splatter, it was cold, and there wasn't serious tissue damage from the crash so we're going to get a huge amount of meat out of it. Between roadkill deer and deer my son hunts and deer other people hunt on our land we might need to get a bigger freezer.

Why do you think that people abjuring consumption of emotionally observable animals is more likely that the opposite: growing an acceptance of eating other sentient beings as part of the cycle of life?

I liked to play with the chicken, and by rewarding them with maize grains I have succeeded to train some of them to respond to a few simple commands, like coming to me when called and sitting down, waiting to be petted, and standing up upon commands. (Because those chicken were used to roam freely, they were shy of human contact. Normally it was difficult to catch any one of them.)

My grandparents and their neighbors were astonished, despite the fact that they have kept chicken for all their lives, because they believed that chicken are too dumb to act like this.

Funny I know some people who grew up with chickens who think they are nasty, aggressive and disagreeable. Like little dragons.

A mean rooster has a surprisingly high terror-to-size ratio, and can easily draw blood with its spurs. And they carry grudges, and they’ll stalk you.

I learned from that, and other experience of hand-to-hand combat with birds, wildcrafting eggs [1], and such, to "never let a bird see your back". I like it how those little red-wing blackbirds like to sit on POSTED: NO TRESSPASSING signs because that is their attitude. They'll dive bomb you but also flap really hard up high at the sky to nip at the wings of hawks who are lazily cruising. You might not even notice they have a nest to protect if they weren't getting in your face about it.

[1] at least seven years ago, I think...

They can't figure out obstacles very well if they can see where they want to go, but are impeded. They just pace back and forth, frustrated, instead of walking around the obstacle.

They are very social, recognize people, and can be trained in some limited ways (eg. to return to the coop with whistles, if you associate it with treats).

A upside that was not mention is that chickens are excellent in cutting grass and keeping weed out of bushes, especially roses bushes. They generally don't eat fruits on bushes like raspberries, but our strawberries was not safe so we used a gardening net over those (also keeps other birds out). Smaller plants/seed may also need a net until they grown in size large enough that the chickens are not interested anymore.

A major big upside we also got is that they hunt down slugs and other insects that otherwise can cause major damage to a garden or lawn. Even ant colonies, which can often be a pain to remove and a major annoyance if they invade your home.

On the downside, chicken hierarchy is a very real thing and they can get into quite bloody fights with each other.

We've had other times where one might appear a bit sluggish, but then the next day are back to normal. Probably ate something bad?

uh, speaking hypothetically and not at all of our own family chicken adventure when I was a kid/teen.

Also, if you have to kill a chicken, study how to do it and practice beforehand. Botching it will also live with you - I learned this one the hard way.

All that said, I'm glad I had the experience of (helping) raise chickens. It was an adventure, and the eggs were great. I've pondered it on and off again as an adult but have thus far resisted the temptation.

Good: Fresh unwashed eggs don't need to be refrigerated. They are perfectly safe at room temperature on the shelf for days.

Bad: You can't leave them with other pets without supervision. One of the dogs got himself a taste for chicken and already ate at least three. You can't train this out of the dog, unfortunately. I had to put down one poor chicken that was deeply injured but still alive. We constantly stay vigilant to keep the dogs and chickens separate.

Speaking from experience, I can say "Yes, you absolutely can train this out of a dog." However, it is not easy and it is only marginally more easy if you start at a young age of the dog. Furthermore, there are breeds that have no interest in chickens at all, anyway. LGD may actually even protect them.

My GR goes into livestock guardian mode whenever the rabbits are free roaming in the garden (even though he's a bit scared of them ever since one bit him on the nose), but some dogs, terriers especially, will just instinctively chase and kill a rabbit.

I assume it's fairly similar with chickens.

Personally, I find them rather savory. Although deep fried with a bit of honey is good too.

Or you might find them delicious and need to raise more of them.

Anyways, one buck and 2-3 doe rabbits can give you something like 300+ pounds of meat per year. Close to a pound a day would be sufficient for most people. Of course you aren't going to eat only one thing, so you will have other sources of meat for variety

see https://www.zmescience.com/feature-post/how-chickens-tripled...

Before the industrial revolution, 80% of us worked the land, most familiar with animal agriculture.

Are you trying to power your whole house during a power outage, or just a few necessities like a space heater, a few lamps, and maybe a hotplate?

Isn't the more likely case that they shit everywhere but the family loves them so much they won't let you put it back outside?

They did tests on chickens, and apparently they understand the concept of showing restraint on a current action, with the view on having a larger reward later.

Something along the lines of: "If you don't eat these grains now, we'll reward you with twice as many grains later".

That's something that dogs can't do, for instance.

This one is something I think people maybe don't consider. My brother has chickens, they have a coop but pretty much have the run of his property in a rural area. He has had to kill a coyote and a bob cat so far. Not a reason not to get them, but something to consider before doing so.

Housespiders and cacti might be easier.

You need to use quail proof feeders, tho, or you're going to spend a fortune on kitchen scraps or whatever you intend to feed them. They eat just about anything peckable except oats (if you didn't end up with picky ones). Cookef rice, seeds, peas, boiled eggs, sometimes nibbling on each other (-.-), or dirt cheap quail feed. Also mealworms ... its catnip for quails.

> You may have to euthanize a chicken, likely by hand (literally) via cervical dislocation.

I recommend cutting the head off with a pair of high quality, large and well maintained scissors.

Put a bucket in front of you, put the scissors from behind on the neck, just below the head, and cut in a single strong motion.

The lil birdy will not understand what is happening and wont feel uncomfortable during the process. Its head then looses consciousness in sbout 15 seconds, compared to about 30 seconds for the cervical dislocation method. (It'll loose the ability to feel pain MUCH faster than 15s, but I dont think we know how quickly. But probably faster than it'll realize that there's pain in the first place. You've probably cut yourself before and noticed that the pain only kicks in after a moment.)

It is also way easier to not screw up. Just remember to ALWAYS cut the head off completely, as fast as possible. Lil birdie wont die from bloodloss, but sudden loss of spinal fluid, which is WAY faster.

The cervical dislocation method is also very effective, but also much easier to screw up, a bit more uncomfortable for the birdy and could introduce quite some anxiety for the birdy if you hesitate for even but a moment.

On the other hand the cute little critters dont understand how scissors work or what they're for. Even if the method is much less pretty, it's by far the most peaceful method for the birdy.

One other advantage is that they will absolutely hoover up the ticks out of a yard. I’ve tried to talk my various friends who move upstate into getting some for this reason… but yeah it’s a couple grand up front and a new hobby.

In my case, we had too many roosters and their competitive/protective behaviour was causing serious injuries to the hens, so we had to make the tough decision to reduce their numbers. Being in the middle of nowhere, there weren't many options for the rooster in question, so it seemed like the most humane thing to do at the time.

This made me smile very wide, thank you for sharing :-)

Can confirm. My dad's cousin is a little bit country and has had meat and egg chickens for years. She comes to visit sometimes, and always brings eggs. Store-bought quite literally pales in comparison, which is to say that the dandelion yellow yolks of store bought eggs have nothing on the rich, flavorful orange-as-a-child's-drawing-of-the-sun yolks from her eggs.

I eat fresh laid eggs very rarely (though have been thinking of raising my own), but can confirm that every time I've had truly fresh chicken eggs the taste is notably superior.

With some distance it’s quite amusing, but it’s claimed a large part of his life, being the obstinate bugger he is.

You can't tunnel in pea gravel.

Whenever someone mentions how unique you can be with language and come up with amazing unique sentences never uttered by anyone before...I shall think of this

I wouldn't leave them in a small coupe without a run for that long.

I didn't notice a significant difference in taste either. Eggs taste like eggs, it is one of the foods where there is the fewest difference between home grown and store bought, and also between different grades of store bought. And if there is any difference, I think that freshness is more significant.

One big difference, though it doesn't matter much when you eat it is the shell. Good quality eggs, including those from backyard chicken tend to have a stronger shell that breaks cleanly.

Maybe if you give your chicken specific food, your eggs can have a specific taste. How you feed them can affect the color of the yolk, which can matter for presentation, but it doesn't tell much else.

You don't have to eat your chickens, it’s up to you.

predators and rats and avian flu are the tough problems.

how hard would it be to break even with 200 chickens in a typical European town (excluding land costs)? i am just imagining if a small company decides to raise its own chickens-eggs for lunch time...

I visited a farm as a kid and we had fresh chicken for dinner one day. They had one of those orange road cones with the top cut off a bit to fit the chicken in upside down so they could easily chop off its head. They then run around for awhile after that because their nervous system is still working for a minute or so. Just something to interesting to learn as a 5th grader, I guess.

Looking online on reasons to euthanize chickens, it seems to be about not prolonging their suffering when ill.

I don't really know much on farming practices, and I'm not commenting to say that things should be one way or the other. However, I do note that with a human, euthanasia is not a common practice, specially without consent, and one would typically just numb the pain until they pass on their own, i.e. hospice care.

Maybe that's not possible with animals because chickens can't really communicate on the effectiveness of drugs...

Still much better treatment than factory farming.

Saying all of that, I would rather eat eggs from chickens that had a half-decent life than those kept in horrible conditions.