alt Hacker NewsI don't know, but I wonder if your parent commenter is making a philosophical point about the potentially illusory nature of owning a group of semi-wild animals. Like, if the only way you have of asserting your ownership is to use them as a food source, then do you really "own" them? Or do they exist outside and apart from human ideas of property?
Or like owning a mountain or a centuries-old tree. Does that even mean anything?
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This is a very generous read of the original comment - but that is what we’re supposed to do here, and I regret not doing it in my comment.
Do you and they not have any vague understanding of how ranching works? Indeed, there seems to be misunderstandings here.
The philosophical question is interesting, but eating them once in a while is not what ranching is, and ignorance of where your food comes from isn’t cool.
Pierson v. Post 3 Cai. R. 175 (1805) is instructive. Your post is a great starting point for exploration of basic property law. TLDR ownership consists of a varied bundle of many different kinds of rights which can arise in many different and possibly conflicting ways.
Owning is, like, a human construct man. If you can slaughter a herd of animals without facing any human imposed consequences, it's probably fair within the bounds of language and meaning to say that you own them.