I believe this is just a great example of why cattle shouldn't be raised in such high volume industrial processes.
Have you ever been around cattle? Or helped them calve? Or slaughtered one for meat?
I know every one of my animals and understand the herd dynamics, from who the lead cow is to who is the asshole that is the one often starting fights and annoying the others.
We shouldn't be throwing so many animals into such a controlled and confined system that they are reduced to numbers on a spreadsheet. We shouldn't raise an animal for slaughter after dedicating at most 24 minutes to them.
"cattle not pets" is about computer servers, it's not about ethical treatment of living creatures. Whether or not living animals should be numbers on a spreadsheet, servers can be without ethical concerns[1]. "I treat my cattle like pets" is respectable, but not relevant - unless you are also saying "therefore you should treat your servers like pets", which you would need to expand on.
> "I know every one of my animals"
And you are still dodging the part where there is a point at which you could not do that if you had more and more animals. You can choose not to have more animals, but a company cannot avoid having more servers if they are to digitise more workflows, serve more customers, offer more complex services, have higher reliability failovers, DR systems, test systems, developer systems, monitoring and reporting and logging and analysis of all of the above - and again the analogy is not saying "the way companies treat cows is the right way to treat cows", it's saying "the ruthless, ROI-focused, commodity way companies actually do treat cows is a more scalable and profitable way to think about the computer servers/services that you currently think about like family pets".
[1] at least, first order ones in a pre-AI age. Energy use, pollution, habitat damage, etc. are another matter.
Have you ever been around cattle? Or helped them calve? Or slaughtered one for meat?
I know every one of my animals and understand the herd dynamics, from who the lead cow is to who is the asshole that is the one often starting fights and annoying the others.
We shouldn't be throwing so many animals into such a controlled and confined system that they are reduced to numbers on a spreadsheet. We shouldn't raise an animal for slaughter after dedicating at most 24 minutes to them.