Actually, you're both right, you just had different experiences. With 2-6 hens, the flock is more centered around the human, allow themselves to be touched and hand fed, and exhibit recognizable personalities. With 10-20 hens, the flock is more "wild" and establish their own pecking order by being aggressive to each other (and grabbing all the food they can grab before the others). I had a flock of 12 and saw both kinds of behavior, though because we kept the roosters for a while, it tended towards the wild side.

Of course, chicken breeds, coop environment, and owner personality are huge factors in chicken behavior as well.

BTW, this is a great article in that it reveals a little about our industrial food chain. I suppose it's popular here on HN because it has a bit of the "How things work" vibe. There should be articles like this for every type of food sold in stores.

It seems very common with animals and humans alike that we tend to exhibit "mob mentality" when in larger groups. I picture the hens in a large group attacking each other over food to be similar to going out on "Black Friday" after the US Thanksgiving or a company with a broken employee culture. Not exactly the most attractive or positive examples of human nature.

I always picture battery cages as being like a Super Max Federal prison.

Making generalizations from a single style of husbandry is a little like making generalizations about human children based on a single school. A year at many US schools might lead you to believe children are rude, avaricious, and gluttonous, but I don't think that's a fair universal characterization of kids.

A sibling comment mentions flock size as a factor, but there are many factors in chicken personality. Most farmers create scarcity across almost all resources, from food to grooming space, to running and flying room, to pasture time, and so on. Almost any creature, in constant competition for scarce resources amongst her peers, will develop a deplorable personality, sadistic or vindictive.

>I'm not against eating chicken mainly because of this experience.

I don't understand your reasoning there. To me, whether it's ok to eat an animal should depend on whether it can experience suffering, not on whether it has a good personality. I mean, is it ok to eat people who are jerks?

>>To me, whether it's ok to eat an animal should depend on whether it can experience suffering

Oh! When you get infected by a micro organisms do you kill yourself or do you take antibiotics. And what about mosquitoes? Plants?

Besides to survive as a human you have to kill something.

Jesus Christ what a dumbshit comment. You quoted him correctly, then failed to apply what you quoted, at all, to the words you wrote. Do you think bacteria suffer?

Oooh, not with my current ethics, but interesting thought experiment.

Another interesting though experiment:

A lot of people respond to the "why is it ok to eat these animals" question with, "because chickens/cows/turkeys are dumb." Following that logic, it's ok to eat people with a low enough IQ, or mental handicaps, no?

People rationalize, so comments like "something that is dumb is fine to eat" is basically their mind trying to find something to say when they should had said "I do not know".

Maybe surprising (or not), but I find people who farm/hunt/fish to be the more intelligent kind of people when discussing food and ecology. Sure there are people who just want to exploit things for money, but many others do have a understanding for maintain a balance with nature.

One answer I have received to the question about "why is it ok to eat animals", was that the ecology balance in nature would break down if humanity suddenly stopped eating meat. Not only have we forced our self to be part of almost everything, but our actions have cemented us to a central position. Farmers has chased away predators to the point where hunters are needed to maintain balance in many forests. Some lakes are so polluted with nutrients, that you need to maintain fishing just to keep some species from extincting other less common fish species.

This doesn't address however why breeding animals for meat is fine. This is speculation, but some local farmers might say that as long the animal can live a happy life, then why shouldn't we eat them. The farmer job is to maintain a happy flock of chickens/cows/turkeys, and makes sure it stay healthy and in appropriate size. If they do that, then morality should be on their side.

In this day and age:

  maintain a happy flock of chickens/cows/turkeys,
  and makes sure it stay healthy and in appropriate
  size

is practically non-existent. E.g. even "free range/cage free" chickens:

- Have their beaks burned off because they live in crowded conditions where they will attack and main / kill each other.

- Are sorted male from female as chicks, where the males are then immediately killed in bulk. The 'industry standard' way to do this is to put them all in garbage bags to suffocate them, or to toss them all into a wood chipped en masse[1].

[1] Note: Even the chicks sold to people raising chickens in the city go through this process. E.g. in Portland, you can only raise 6 hens on your property. Roosters are not allowed.

Industry maybe. Local farmer, heck no. If they do, don't buy from them.

It might be added, that in Europe, farmers get subsidies from the European union, and thus can keep the flock in rather low size and still earn a living on it. It is still a rather small income however, so many local farmers now days only supplement their earning with cows/chicken/eggs/sheep, and their main income comes from something else.

Yes, local farmers. Even small farmers and people who have a flock in their backyard generally get there hens from large-scale facilities that routinely kill the male chicks within hours of hatching (usually in terrible ways).

Bootstrapping is an issue, but then I have no experienced of your scenario in the wild. Small farmers tend to collect/receive hens from other small farmers, often as barter or gifts. Small farmers have a common ground which each other, which is a primary part of personal networks. It was not an uncommon chain of events in my childhood to hear during parties complements of the color of the eggs/feathers/subspecies, and see a trade emerge. Sometimes with a bottle of something expensive changing hand.

Same goes for male chicks. Those that aren't eaten (keeping the flock happy and appropriate sized), are observed closely when they reach mature age. If they don't fit well with the flock, they get bartered with a other farmers with an male from their flock. This was often the first step in handling an fight between two males that fought aggressively over dominance of the flock.

Sure, there will always exist bad apples in the world, and people should try avoid those. In the past, it was a strong asymmetrical information problem for buyers. Hopefully, with more information sharing and systems where buyers can rate sellers, we might get improvements where local suppliers that treat their animals well are encouraged.

There is a certain inescapable problem even with small farms raising layer hens. I know exactly how this plays out large-scale and some idea on a smaller farm.

There are different breeds that are raised as layers and for meat. Layers have been bred to produce more eggs than normal, and meat birds to produce more meat than usual. Layers are not raised for meat. But farmers do need to fertilize and hatch a certain number of eggs to continue to get new generations of layer hens. Somewhere around 50% of those are males. If you're lucky, you can keep 1 rooster for 6 hens, and even that is pushing it. Those numbers just don't work.

I know that many small farmers and families with small flocks already get their hens from large hatcheries. I would like to know what happens to that minority of male chicks that are hatched on small farms though.

> The 'industry standard' way to do this is to put them all in garbage bags to suffocate them, or to toss them all into a wood chipped en masse[1].

In England the standard way is to gas the chicks. Killing off the males is a problem for dairy cattle too. Cows produce milk to feed their young.

Beak trimming is normally reserved for egg laying birds. (Meat birds are slaughtered for meat before pecking becomes much of a problem).

  | In England the standard way is to gas the chicks

I'm referring to the US. Specifically, there was a case where an animal rights group (maybe PETA?) sued a farmer (in Montana?) for using one of those two techniques, and the judge threw it out as acceptable because it was standard industry practice.

  | Killing off the males is a problem for dairy
  | cattle too

My understanding is that, in the US, they send these males off to become veal (so technically people that are vegetarian for ethical reasons -- "I don't want to kill animals" -- are supporting animal killing anyway).

With veal you get further issues.

Dairy cattle males may not be suitable as commercial veal, like not all sheep breeds are suitable as meat sheep.

If they are suitable, then you've got to deal with either raising them from birth as white veal or, allowing them a bit more freedom in movement and food, as rose veal.

Just to add another animal to the mix, the same problem can be seen in dairy goat herds in countries where goat isn't consumed by the majority of the population.

http://infantici.de (NSFL)

Let's get to the softer side of Singer an the utilitarians. "It's alright to eat an animal if they were raised in a healthy and suffering free environment and killed with as minimal pain as possible, essentially giving them a life with more pleasure and less suffering than their life in nature. Plus, you get to eat them."

Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "eat your vegetables".

This is what I'm going to hell for.

No, because even a highly handicapped person is capable of pieces of higher thought. They have an intact brain, after all. More or less the only way to remove them from the 'human mind' category is if they are completely braindead. In which case, sure it's okay to eat people that are already dead from natural causes.

It's not okay to eat people because cannibal populations develop spongiform encephalopathy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease)

So it's ok for the immune population mentioned in that article to eat people?

Well we generally share susceptance to the same diseases and parasites as humans, so it's a bad idea to be eating them.

However, prepared correctly with enough heat, possibly also frozen beforehand (that's what works on pork), I hear humans can actually be quite tasty.

It's seen as a bit of a social faux pas in our society though, so you might want to find a different society first if you'd like to enjoy tasty humans.

>It's seen as a bit of a social faux pas in our society though, so you might want to find a different society first if you'd like to enjoy tasty humans.

Are you honestly this much of a relativist?

I don't see a problem with eating humans, if you want to and they/their families are okay with it. Killing humans is what is unethical.

Right, killing is what I was talking about. This thread started with someone mentioning the morality of "eating chickens", and I just copied that phrasing.

Well I can't really tell, I've grown up knowing that eating humans is bad. It's just the way it's always been.

I've also grown up knowing that cats and dogs are not for eating. And yet, even just a hundred kilometers away, I hear Italians eat plenty of cats and even consider it normal in some areas.

You're witnessing firsthand the stupidity people concoct when they are operating under cognitive dissonance.

Eating people is bad because it creates an environment where you might get eaten yourself.

So it's ok to eat people as long as you only eat people who belong to a group which is different from you in some way?

No. If you eat people that are different, then other groups of people might want to eat you because you are different, so an environment where eating any people is ok creates an environment where you might be eaten yourself.

The argument maratd gives thus is a justification for eating animals that are not smart enough to to look at our behaviour and decide whether or not we're fair based on whether or not we also eat animals.

But it explicitly rules out cannibalism (or eating intelligent aliens).

If I find a homeless person in an alleyway, ask him about his friends and family, and he tells me that no one knows or cares that he's alive, it's ok to eat him, as long as I don't tell anyone about it?

No. What the gp is saying is basically the categorical imperative. "It is bad to eat people because I don't want to live in a world where I could be eaten (me also being people)".

He's not saying it's okay as long as you don't get eaten he's saying "as a human, I do not want to get eaten. Therefore, I do not want to inflict this on other humans either".

But why is "human" the privileged class? We could use a subclass, like "human with an IQ above 100", or a superclass, like "animal". You're just restating where he or she is drawing the line, not explaining why that's the right place to draw it.

The privileged class is not human. The logic was handed to you, you just ignored it.

"smart enough to to look at our behaviour and decide whether or not we're fair based on whether or not we also eat animals"

Yes of course an IQ number is a ridiculous way to draw a line; moving on.

'Animal' is a logical measure but 1. who cares about sea sponges and 2. it's not universal, what if aliens show up.

Drawing the line at creatures that are intelligent enough to draw this same line is a very clean and clever solution to the problem. Anything with minimal critical thinking skills is saved. Any dumb brute is fair game.

Oh, I found a problem in your clean solution: nobody knows how to detect, in non-humans, the presence or absence of a mind sufficiently capable to pass your test. Or have you been interviewing all the animals you eat?

It's pretty easy to do some basic tests for intelligence in social animals. The test concept is quite sophisticated, so you can definitely rule out species. Humans raise a lot of dumb animals. Just don't ask me to eat dolphin.

The question you propose to ask is "can this species understand its own fairness to other species?"

That is absolutely not testable by our current means, not for any rigorous definition of knowledge. There are numerous instances, for example, of mothers of one species nursing the young of another species. Sometimes even of predator mothers nursing prey young. So, prima facie, assuming a reasonable definition of "fairness" it would seem that a vast number of species are capable of exhibiting this trait, including many of the ones you eat.

Second, it's also completely arbitrary. Why test for fairness? Why not ability to generate a profit on the stock market, or to do square roots, or tie shoes? It's a stupidly chosen metric that, at its heart, embodies circular logic -- choose a human trait, and then apply a human-centric test (which we don't even do by the way) to see if the species can be eaten. What do you expect the result would be? Even dolphins can fail this exam.

The bottom line is, your criteria is arbitrary and untestable. And it cannot even be applied consistently, as you would have to admit the consumption of severely encephalitic fetuses and the like -- which is something only a person arguing an abstraction could endorse. No socially well-adjusted person can seriously admit that they want such a thing to be permissible in their civilization.

So it's ok to eat sufficiently mentally-retarded humans?

I already answered that one way http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5329829

Another way of going about it would be to allow/disallow in aggregate, not in specific cases. AKA all humans or no humans. In which case it wouldn't be allowed even with a braindead person.

There exist people who aren't braindead, but who don't have sufficient intelligence to have a concept of "being fair". I don't know where you got the idea that they don't exist. (You may counter that even the least intelligent person will get angry if you attack them, and that's largely true; but the same is true of any animal, so we must be talking about a more complex understanding of fairness than that.)

And you could say that being part of a species gives you special moral standing if other members of your species have the attributes required for it, even if you don't personally have them, but it would be a completely arbitrary thing to say.

They exist but they are far rarer than mere retardation. Rare enough that I'm just going to punt. The answer for them doesn't matter in the big picture.

Maybe not, but whether it's ok to eat animals does, and so does consistency. If the criteria you previously gave is really the criteria you believe makes it ok to kill/eat something, why aren't you willing to say it's ok to eat humans who meet the criteria?

I'm resistant because it's so hard to do a prudent level of testing on a single individual. If you have some method of determining that there is no shred of full-functioning in their brain, that they truly have the mind of a lower animal, that you can show this to others, then okay it's viable to eat them.

But it still gives a misleading impression when someone hears you ate "a human".

I think the parent was explaining why "don't eat humans" exists as a social faux pas.

It's ok to eat people, but you won't want to once you've seen what they eat and how they live.

> I mean, is it ok to eat people who are jerks?

It's the death that's required to eat them not the eating itself. And yes, I feel much less bad when jerks die vs non-jerks.

Feeling less bad when someone dies is not the same as thinking it's ok to kill them.

> is it ok to eat people who are jerks?

Of course not! But there are a few people for whom I wouldn't shed a tear, if they were devoured by a giant chicken.

This is some really terrible generalizing. I've spent a lot of time with a lot of different chickens (hens and roosters). If you spend a fair amount of time with them, you really do see individual personalities strongly emerge. I've known many chickens to learn their names and excitedly come running up when called. I've also known a few who enjoyed being held.

Now, I've also spent some time with ducks and I'm not going to do any sort of contrast like you have. Ducks can be just as pleasant to be around. They can also be horrible to each other. I knew one duck who was prone to getting picked on by his flock mates, who occasionally attempted to drown him.

I've gotta laugh a bit at your use of the word avaricious to describe a chicken. I'm not sure where that could even be coming from. I'm not trying to discount your experience, but it really doesn't seem to me that you spent the time getting to know the animals in any way. And using that as a justification to eat them. Well I've got some coworkers you might be interested in too...

Having kept both ducks and chickens myself, the ducks were a noisy undifferentiated mass of (delicious) hassle. The chickens were fascinating and all had distinct personalities; they were vicious to bugs and occasionally each other, but always friendly with people.

Go figure.

>Wow! I kept 20-25 laying hens in yearly batches when I was between the ages of 13 and 18. I found them to be singularly repulsive, all having the same rude, avaricious, gluttonous personality, and all behaving in the most horrible manner possible.

Get yourself some Silkies. They lay smaller eggs but have a very pleasant disposition.

Different personalities all right. Recall the Ig Nobel Prize-winning observations of mallard necrophilia; https://moeliker.wordpress.com/the-duck/

One of my drakes would commit homosexual rape on the other drake, so I actual found that Ig Nobel article fascinating.

That could just be projection! 8)