Hacker News with Generative AI: Animal Welfare

US egg industry kills 350M chicks a year. New tech offers an alternative (tampabay.com)
Every year the U.S. egg industry kills about 350 million male chicks because, while the fuzzy little animals are incredibly cute, they will never lay eggs, so have little monetary value.

Animal Welfare, Agriculture, Technology, Business

36 points by howard941 30 days ago | 62 comments

Animals as Chemical Factories (worksinprogress.co)
Horses bled for antivenom, crabs drained for endotoxin tests, and silkworms boiled for silk. Science can now replace these practices with synthetic alternatives — but we need to find ways to scale them.

Animals, Science, Biotechnology, Animal Welfare, Sustainability

47 points by royalroad 35 days ago | 62 comments

How should we treat beings that might be sentient? (arstechnica.com)
If you aren’t yet worried about the multitude of ways you inadvertently inflict suffering onto other living creatures, you will be after reading The Edge of Sentience by Jonathan Birch. And for good reason. Birch, a Professor of Philosophy at the London College of Economics and Political Science, was one of a team of experts chosen by the UK government to establish the Animal Welfare Act (or Sentience Act) in 2022—a law that protects animals whose sentience status is unclear.

Artificial Intelligence, Animal Welfare, Ethics

27 points by rbanffy 47 days ago | 21 comments

The shrimp welfare project (benthams.substack.com)
Imagine that you came across 1,500 shrimp about to be painfully killed. They were going to be thrown onto ice where slowly, agonizingly, over the course of 20 minutes, they’d suffocate and freeze to death at the same time, a bit like suffocating in a suitcase in the middle of Antarctica. Imagine them struggling, gasping, without enough air, fighting for their lives, but it’s no use.

Animal Welfare, Food Production, Ethical Consumption

82 points by 0xDEAFBEAD 61 days ago | 168 comments

Singapore's Cat Problem (nytimes.com)
The reversal of a 35-year ban on cats in public housing won’t be a quick fix for cat-related problems. It’s not even clear how many cats live in the city-state.

Singapore, Animal Welfare, Policy, Urban Planning

3 points by paulpauper 67 days ago | 0 comments

'Vegetarian' salmon might lead the way to better health for humans and fish (phys.org)
Salmon are natural carnivores. In the wild, they eat insects, insect larvae, small herring, crustaceans, and animal plankton. However, in farming, salmon are also fed seafood-based feed, making production dependent on resource-intensive fishmeal and fish oil.

Sustainable Food, Aquaculture, Animal Welfare, Human Health, Nutrition

8 points by PaulHoule 84 days ago | 0 comments

'That's a bloodbath': How a federal program kills wildlife for private interests (npr.org)
A federal program kills hundreds of thousands of wild animals a year. Documents obtained by NPR show that many of those animals were killed in places where no damage to livestock was reported.

Wildlife Conservation, Government Programs, Environmental Issues, Animal Welfare

21 points by thunderbong 99 days ago | 5 comments

US man, 81, sentenced to six months for creating giant hybrid sheep for hunting (theguardian.com)
An 81-year-old Montana man was sentenced on Monday to six months in federal prison for illegally using tissue and testicles from large sheep hunted in central Asia and the US to create hybrid sheep for captive trophy hunting in Texas and Minnesota.

Wildlife Conservation, Animal Welfare, Crime, Law Enforcement, Genetics

58 points by wwarner 108 days ago | 34 comments

Self-cleaning Litterbox kills cats [video] (youtube.com)

Pets, Technology, Humor, Animal Welfare

3 points by andrei-akopian 126 days ago | 0 comments

Is My Cat a Prisoner? (thecut.com)

Pets, Ethics, Animal Welfare

14 points by jbegley 158 days ago | 2 comments

Animal Abuse Is Taking over YouTube [video] (youtube.com)

Animal Welfare, YouTube, Online Content, Social Media

13 points by Rinzler89 167 days ago | 0 comments

Improving cat food flavors with the help of feline taste-testers (phys.org)