I"m assuming you're being sarcastic, but I would love a similar style page showing how many trees are burned and how many fish are harvested vs. how many fish are repopulated.
Thinking about memes as living organisms (infomorphic beings?) would be an interesting way to frame cultural decay.
Would it be any different? I mean, we breed as much food animals as we slaughter, the only difference is a time lag e.g. today's number of slaughtered chickens should match the the number of chickens bred in March; today's number of bred chickens will be a bit different than today's slaughtered chickens if farmers expect that in June people are going to eat more or less chicken due to Covid or something.
One problem: This website doesn't adjust for time. For example, the turkeys killed per minute is much higher in Thanksgiving than outside of Thanksgiving (like right now).
I'm sure they just take they daily average throughout a year, and don't account for cyclical events. So they are probably over-counting on a daily basis and under-counting on holidays.
People who practice Jainism try their best to avoid consuming microorganisms[0]. Not sure how effective they are, but it’s the thought that counts I guess.
It's pretty well-established that we (in the West) consume far more protein than we need. We don't need to go vegan but do need to reduce meat consumption.
On the contrary, most people would be healthier if they ate more high quality protein from a diverse range of plant and animal sources. The US RDA is enough to avoid nutritional deficiency but insufficient for optimal health and athletic performance.
Just wish it was illegal to show smiling chickens on chicken packs. It desensitize people from treating meat as previously living beings.
Ideally each animal product comes with the imagery like one you get now on cigarette packs (but of an animal in a cage/slaughterhouse) + appropriate cost increases for welfare.
Recent law introduction of putting 1, 2, 3 stars on animal product packages to signify how well animal was treated is great start but we can do so much better as species coexisting in this planet with every other animal.
In my eyes it all starts with education and awareness of alternative plant based diet but government enforced help would be great too.
Would it work like the warning labels on cigarettes in Europe with diseased lungs on them? Show what a factory farm looks like on the package and if you still want it go for it.
Meat eaters are going to want the nasty images taken off of packaging, and the cheaper option is to lobby to remove them, not pay substantially more for an idyllic, pasture-raised, humane future.
Congratulations, you now have a pro-factory-farming lobbying group with actual grassroots support.
Might also have more people on your side; might not. Worth considering the adversary in any move of this nature.
I don't think this is true. I think many people who eat meat do it because they enjoy it and in most cultures, eating meat is the default thing to do; most don't actually approve of factory farming conditions. If the pictures actually depicted animals in the conditions they were raised (humanely raised meat could depict something more humane than something factory-farmed on the packaging), many people would try to eat more humanely raised meats.
There will of course be people who don't care, and people who revel in the pictures, and people that lobby to have them removed, but overall I think those groups would be in the minority. Many people would slowly (and unconsciously) improve their consumption habits, in the same way that people didn't really notice that the tides turned on issues like gay marriage and marijuana consumption.
Part of the knee-jerk antagonism by people who eat meat to posts like this one is that most vocal vegetarians/animal activists are absolutists: eg there is no desirable path forward for most Animal Liberationists where a greater percentage of animals are raised humanely but people keep eating meat. As is often the case, everyone could benefit from agreeing to a compromise where we improve animal farming conditions but don't vilify people who choose to continue eating meat.
Another element here is that eating meat is integral to many cuisines and is extremely culturally important to most people - stating that your goal is to remove it wholesale feels like a direct attack. Claiming that people who enjoy eating meat are your adversaries seems like exactly the wrong thing to do. It's as unhelpful as saying that everyone who owns a car is contributing to climate change is therefore the enemy of environmentalism.
Consider that taxing factory meat and putting the proceeds into a subsidy of humane meats would accomplish the policy goal without the tedious social shaming.
The problem that faces is that it looks and feels more like an animal-lib play than an animal-welfare one. As you point out, the animal liberationist faction will not stop pushing until there's no meat at the market, and raising and slaughtering your own is as illegal as slavery.
Since I don't want that, I'm obliged to oppose anything that gives them power and influence. A lot of people would implicitly come to the same conclusion.
That’s a very convenient but not very ethical conclusion. You are basically saying “I believe some people will try to go further than I like,I conclude it’s best to do nothing”. I can’t agree with that but it’s a common political trick to mark things you don’t like as too extreme and therefore nothing should be done.
It actually would be a great idea if the government encouraged companies (e.g. via tax cuts) to put a photo of real animals (taken on location by an approved government inspector) on the packaging of the meat product. This would create an incentive for companies to treat animals well so that the photo also turns out well and they get a nice tax cut for participating so it can be totally voluntary for companies to participate.
I think creating incentives for companies to be more transparent by offering tax cuts would be a great model for many industries and would give ethical operators a competitive advantage.
IMO, the government should put more focus on creating incentives which encourage positive behaviors because enforcing laws is difficult, expensive and their interpretation is often subjective (hence the need for lawyers).
> Just wish it was illegal to show smiling chickens on chicken packs. It desensitize people from treating meat as previously living beings.
It should also be illegal for vegans to lie about how a vegan diet is cruelty free. Farming kills far more animals than raising livestock. Far more insects, worms, rodents, etc are killed to protect vegetation and harvest vegetation than are killed in slaughterhouses.
Every bowl of salad has more animal parts than a plate of steak.
Is it more ethical to kill one cow to provide 1000 meals for 1000 people or kill 1000 animals to feed one vegan one meal?
You are right, every meat package and every vegetable, fruit, etc should list how many animals were killed to feed you.
Also, it should show how much environmental damage the vegan diet is causing.
Also, every food item should explicitly show that humans are natural omnivores and that the vegan diet in an unnatural diet that humans cannot survive on in nature.
I am confused. The animals killed in slaughterhouses... don't they also eat vegetation before they are killed? That vegetation doesn't need to be protected from insects?
The way you described it, it sounds like a cow appears out of thin air -- poof! -- then it is killed, and 1000 people can eat with only 1 animal killed. It's the people who step on insects while they water the salad who are the true monsters, because they kill 1000 animals for 1 lunch. But how many insects does the cow step on before it grows up and gets killed?
Probably as a result of a poor vegan diet. Your brain is probably starved of the nutrients it needs.
> The animals killed in slaughterhouses... don't they also eat vegetation before they are killed?
Yes, just like in the wild? And the vegetation they eat are vegetation that can be grown in poorer quality land.
> That vegetation doesn't need to be protected from insects?
Yes. And?
> The way you described it, it sounds like a cow appears out of thin air -- poof!
No. They don't. That's my point. Vegans make it seem like their "healthy" meals appear out of nowhere. Not only is a vegan diet the worst diet for humans ( no human can survive on it in the wild ), it's the worst for the environment
> It's the people who step on insects while they water the salad who are the true monsters
Really? Not the trillions of insects/rodents/etc killed by pesticides? Not the trillions of animals killed to clear the land for farming? Not the countless animals killed to harvest the vegetation?
> But how many insects does the cow step on before it grows up and gets killed?
You are right. Cows are evil, lets have some burgers.
Frankly, if you truly care about animals, then you should be arguing for a hunter gatherer diet. That's the most environmentally friendly and most humane diet on earth. Think about it. No farming, no raising livestock. Just gathering and hunting what is available. But I highly doubt you'd advocate for that since virtue signaling vegans don't care about the environment or animals. They care about attention
It is a fact that the hunter gather lifestyle is the best for nature. Then it's the current system. And the absolute worst for animals, environment and humans is the vegan diet.
But like a typical privileged vegan, you probably never set foot on a farm or knowing anything about agriculture. Good luck with that.
Uncomfortable thoughts: Let's say first world countries in the West get on board with not eating meat anymore. How do you exactly go about telling impoverished countries/peoples to stop eating meat? Would we ban meat and force them to eat some substitutes? But food is an important part of culture and we would be erasing their culture if we did that wouldn't we? Should we give some cultural groups the right to eat meat since they're less privileged? Of course I'm only speaking hypothetically, assuming that the goal is to reach 0 animals killed for human consumption.
Well, "we", as in "first world countries" can't "ban" meat in other countries without stepping on their sovereignty. "We" have done it before, for worse reasons (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A... and numerous other examples), but that doesn't mean "we" should do it again.
"Mostly" is a useless metric when they're eating as much meat as they can afford, and that just happens to be not much.
The only exception I'm aware of is India and since that's religious it seems difficult to scale. Islam has animal slaughter as one of its few obligate rituals.
Exporting cultural strictures rarely ends well (many historical examples, both distant and recent), so I'd say, if you can get a large number of people in the West to not eat meat, then you've reduced the suffering of animals by a tremendous amount. That alone is a perfectly fine goal. Let non-coercive cultural influence do the rest of the work, while never forcing a populace to do something against its interests or will. (After all, non-Western vegetarian cultures have influenced Western diets...)
You are welcome to believe that, but it doesn’t seem like an effective way of achieving anything, at least given the history of alcohol prohibition and drug criminalization.
But let's say hypothetically, if we stopped our people from eating meat entirely, doesn't that collapse the involved industries? Both foreign and domestic. What does that mean for impoverished countries who rely on exporting meat to other countries?
I don't understand why the goal should be 0 animals killed.
I personally don't feel shame in eating animals bread to be eaten. Having had grandparents practicing subsistence farming, also being born in Eastern Europe during communism and thus suffering from food shortages, from a young age I've seen chickens, pigs and lambs being slaughtered. Not a big deal, and in an environment in which food is in short supply, killing an animal for food is a reason for celebration.
People say that we've been desensitized due to being disconnected from our food source. But I think that's backwards. You rarely see vegans among subsistence farmers. Even when meat is a luxury, eggs and dairy are staple foods.
Unless there's a massive economic incentive for stopping meat production, no country will ever get "on board" with not eating meat.
The CO2 emissions story is the only argument that has any legs. But if you think about it, it's an argument for efficiency and for taxing CO2 emissions, with plenty of low hanging fruits, e.g. we should waste less food, prefer chickens and pigs over ruminants, etc.
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Note I'm actually a vegan 3 days per week out of 7 and I prefer to go through all periods of religious fasting, which is basically hard core veganism (no traces of animal products are acceptable) before the big holidays, e.g. Lent (I'm not religious, I just like the practice).
Meat is the most efficient protein source, per calorie, with a complete profile and unfortunately there's no equivalent unless you start taking protein extracts.
Otherwise a vegan diet is a diet in which you have to eat a lot of legumes every day (lentils, kidney beans, soy) for getting 60-80 grams of protein, an inadequate level if you're looking to maintain or build muscle and going over that is hard for me without being in a caloric surplus. Also, during vegan fasting periods I take B12, Calcium supplements and I strive to eat a varied diet.
My point is, from first hand experience, a healthy diet is pretty challenging and expensive, with or without meat and for poorer populations life is hard enough as it is.
A lot of these compassionate posts about protecting previously-unknown or unconscious things/creatures/human groups etc, is that they systematically have no mentioning of what they want to achieve, and the roadmap towards that.
Sure, if you want to raise awareness, but for what purpose?
To provoke meat-eating people's conscience? Or make them angry?
Edit: Comments did a great job of explaining the objectives, and rationale. Thanks!
They want to achieve a decrease in pollution, animal cruelty, heart disease, etc.
When I look at this I see 1.5 billion pigs producing insane amounts of by product that directly affects our climate and our watershed. Not to mention the impact on human health.
One is to just increase awareness that the autopilot act of going to a supermarket and buying meat has a lot of cruelty behind it and hoping that smart people realize that it's not sustainable or ethical. Eventually, no one can force a decision and a forced decision wouldn't practical in the long-term either.
I know these kinds of comments are meant to shut down conversations about meat-eating. Even if you find something delicious, it's possible to reduce consumption to have a positive impact on both the animals and the climate. After all, many of us love sugar (or alcohol or salt or fried snacks) but we control our intake.
"Animal equality" is not a great brand. Sure, maybe you can get most people to agree that they should be treated more humanely. Equal is not the right word.
If it came down to me or a chicken - I sincerely hope society would prioritize me.
This page doesn't count animals killed by other (non-human) animals. Mother nature is also cruel. I don't think that humans are the biggest animal killers. A single humpback whale likely kills millions of krill every day. One could even argue that eating whale meat is ethical because it saves millions of lives.
Also it should be noted that most of these farm animals would never have been alive if humans did not breed them in the first place so we shouldn't see death as necessarily a bad thing. We give them life and then we take it away. Every creature dies eventually - So do we.
I think the focus of animal protection movements should be based more on the ethical treatment of animals. It's important to make sure that all animals have the opportunity of a decent life before they are slaughtered; especially have room to move around in an open area with access to natural light.
I'd rate it as pretty likely that humans are the biggest animal killers. Most carnivores are supply-limited, whereas humans create billions of animals every year for the express purpose of killing them because there wouldn't be enough in the world otherwise.
> This page doesn't count animals killed by other (non-human) animals.
Because it's a silly vegan propaganda page by wealthy privileged virtue signaling crowd without any grasp on reality.
Countless quadrillions of animals are killed every year in nature. Countless billions of animals are killed every year to clear land and protect vegetation from insects, worms, rodents, etc. Countless billions of animals are killed to build homes that these privileged people live in.
Not to mention the countless billions of animals killed by pet cats and countless billions of animals killed to feed our pets ( cats, dogs, snakes, etc ).
So how about we go back to nature and live a hunter gather lifestyle? Or are you against that because you want to live a selfish and destructive vegan lifestyle just so that you can virtue signal?
How about this, go learn a thing about agriculture and how destructive that is to the environment and animals. If you truly care about the environment and animals, I guarantee you that vegans will be your #1 enemy. Good luck.
Whenever I do, it gets flagged, but I'll give it another shot. Go learn about farming. It's the most environmentally destructive human activity. Go learn about how much land we would have to destroy in order to feed a terrible vegan diet to humanity. Trillions of animals ( insects, rodents, etc ) are killed to protect vegetation. Not to mention other animals like rabbits, deer, birds, etc that have to be wiped out. After all, you don't want a herd of deer or even elephants trampling on and eating your vegetation.
"Which means humans and wildlife are competing for fertile land for production of food and vegetation,” said Kitso Mokaila, Botswana’s minister of environment."
Pretty much anywhere you have farms, you have to wipe out the animals to protect the vegetation. Whereas vegetation for livestock can be grown in poor quality land ( nebraska, dakotas, etc ), the crap that vegans eat cannot be grown there. Not only that, the crap that vegans eat - processed nuts, avocados, etc are extremely water expensive.
Ideally we'd all be hunter gatherers - pretty much 0 environmental footprint as you eat what mother nature provides. But given the human population that's unrealistic so the next best thing is livestock + vegetation ( omnivore diet ). The absolute worst thing is vegan diet as it is a terrible diet for humans, but it's also devastating for the environment as you'd need find a ridiculous amount of fertile land in warmer climates all over the world to destroy and farm since we can't raise the garbage vegans eat where we grow animal feed.
Also, if the world shifted to a vegan diet, then we'd have to get rid of pets since we'd have no source of meat for our cats, dogs, snakes, etc.
Vegans think the vegetation they eat drops down from heaven like manna. Nope, not only are trillions of animals killed to farm garbage for vegans, harvesting and processing also kills tons of animals. So much so that every bowl of salad is guaranteed to have many animal parts in them.
So oddly enough, a lone vegan eating a bowl of salad is eating more animals than a family having steaks for dinner.
Also, humans aren't herbivore. Forcing humans to eat a herbivore diets is as wrong as forcing a herbivore to eat a carnivore diet. It's unnatural and deep down evil. But that's why some people support it so passionately I suppose. Vegans, anti-vax, flat earthers, etc are all the same type of people.
Vegetation? Really? So you're saying that animal feed isn't vegetation? And could you provide some data in your next response please, rather than just unfounded assertions?
> So you're saying that animal feed isn't vegetation?
Are you serious? Of course they are vegetation, but hardy vegetation like wheat can grow in a lot of places efficiently with harsh weather. But avocados can't.
Avocados require stable dry heat and relatively little wind. Good luck trying to find that in the midwest where most of the animal feed are grown.
> rather than just unfounded assertions?
That different vegetation grows in different environments isn't an unfounded assertion. It's an obvious fact of nature. Only a vegan wouldn't know that. But lets be honest, no amount of facts or data is going to change the mind of a vegan cultist. You just want data/facts just so you can figure out how to lie better or ignore the facts/data next time. Right?
Oh yeah, almonds and many other vegan foods are absolutely horrible for the environment.
I bet you virtue signal about the environment, climate change, etc all the time. The environmental damage and climate change are a result of globalism. Guess which diet is dependent entirely on globalism? That's right the vegan diet. A carnivore and omnivore diet can be sourced locally. A vegan diet cannot be sourced locally. A vegan in alaska or puerto rico or anywhere on earth cannot survive on locally sourced vegan diet. They need to steal vegetation from all over the world to barely survive. Yay for the cult of veganism!
Almonds and avocados are vegan. So is bread. Made from wheat. So pointing out that some crops are bad for the environment is a straw man. I'm not a vegan by the way, I just find it completely absurd to suggest that a meal consisting of vegetables kills more animals than a meal of meat, when animals raised for slaughter require huge amounts of land to be dedicated to growing feed crops. Ta.
Maybe I'm being a techno optimist but I really am rooting for Beyond Meat and all the plant based alternatives here. I've tried to go vegan a few times for both the ethical and environmental reasons but have never maintained and end up a 'reduceatarian.' I just think realistically the best chance for animal welfare is that plant based meats become cheaper, tastier, and healthier and just replace the majority of them, leaving only a high end segment of meat that was well treated; and then it doesn't seem morally wrong to eat since you're helping enable a net "good" life for an animal with your consumption rather than the horrible conditions most animals are raised in today.
I think there's real pressure on nutrition science to overlook the utility of eating 'non-essential' animal nutrients such as carnitine, creatine, and cholesterol.
I was a vegetarian for most of my life, and won't ever do it again. I will accept muscle tissue grown in culture, happily, but don't believe that plant-source nutrition can replace animal foods in (my) healthy diet.
I'm sympathetic to animal welfare arguments: I refuse to eat factory-farmed pigs, and avoid factory chicken, and eggs which aren't pasture-raised. I'm firmly convinced of the necessity of meat to my good health, I've A/B tested vegetarian and vegan diets to my own satisfaction, and won't be changing my mind on this.
While Beyond and Impossible meats are great alternatives, I don't think artificial meat will truly take off until "lab grown" actual meat becomes mass-produceable and sustainable.
I know it's far off, but I really look forward to that world.
The rough lifespan for a factory farmed chicken, from hatching to slaughter, is under 2 months. There's no plausible scenario where the entirety of America and everyone we export chicken to stops eating chicken in the span of 2 months. As demand drops, factory farms will stop hatching and raising chickens they don't expect to be able to sell. Even if it slowed within the span of a year, there would only be about 1/6 that 50Bn unless there were 10 months of absurd over production. More likely it will be a shift over many years or decades.
These types of pages and articles always draw out a bunch of weirdly sociopathic comments saying things like "mm, delicious" or "now I'm hungry", etc. Why is that?
It's possible to materially enjoy the taste of meat while simultaneously being horrified by the scope of man's destruction and industrialized cruelty. It's entirely another thing to revel in your own ignorance and disinterest of the issue. Really revolting.
We don't even have to think what we're doing isn't bad. It's enough if we think it's not as bad as it's being made out to be.
Also, just about everyone in the English-speaking world is sick of PETA's sanctimonious shenanigans. It's a bad look which rubs off on any group whose tactics rhyme with PETA's.
“[F]armed poultry today makes up 70% of all birds on the planet, with just 30% being wild. The picture is even more stark for mammals – 60% of all mammals on Earth are livestock, mostly cattle and pigs, 36% are human and just 4% are wild animals.”
My conclusion from this argument is that it should lead one to eat: sustainable wild-caught fish, pasture-raised eggs, game meats, beef, sheep, and goat.
Avoid chicken (other domestic fowl are generally ok) and pigs, which can be (and are) tortured their whole lives for profit. There is considerable room for improvement in how veal is raised as part of milk and meat production, but calves which avoid that process and end up as meat get: two good years, a couple not-great months, and one really terrifying and shitty day.
Would this be scalable? Could we replace factory farming with your suggestion?
Is our ecological footprint important as well when making food choices?
If so, why not listen to the science and try to reduce meat & dairy as much as we can.
"A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use,” said Joseph Poore, at the University of Oxford, UK, who led the research. “It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car,” he said, as these only cut greenhouse gas emissions."
Well, at least most animals don't try killing themselves, regardless of how bad their quality of life is, so they seem to prefer existence to quality of life.
Why are human skulls shown next to the cows and chickens? When cows or chickens are killed they leave behind cow skulls and chicken skulls not human skulls.
Probably because cow and chicken skulls are less immediately recognizable. Also there are likely not emojis for "chicken skull" or "cow skull", and it seems that's what this displays.
So, here's what I wonder about this. I think most people who think about it can agree that a lot of factory farming conditions are terrible. Cramped quarters, lack of outdoor time, space, exercise, poor food, etc. So working toward eliminating those problems seems incontrovertibly good to me.
However, let's say hypothetically we're only talking about farms run with a focus on animal welfare. (And not just giving animals 10 square feet of 'pasture' so they can say they're free range, but really.) So the issues of poor living conditions are removed, and we're just talking about killing animals for meat. If people stopped eating meat altogether, most farm animals simply wouldn't be born in the first place. Farmers aren't going to raise animals if they can't eventually earn money from them, obviously, and most of these animals wouldn't exist in large numbers in the wild. So what I'm wondering is, for a farm animal is it not possible that a decent life followed by being slaughtered for food might be superior to no life at all?
Obviously if we think in terms of humans, that would be horrific; we consider killing humans unnecessarily an absolute moral wrong. If someone decided they would have a child, but only if they could murder them after some period of time, that's obviously monstrous. I'm just not sure that that analogy applies to farm animals who certainly are living creatures who feel pain, but don't have the same understanding of the world and their place in it that humans do. To me that's the rational reason why the the idea of killing humans could be considered differently from killing other animals. That said, I expect the real reason we instinctively feel that killing humans is wrong is more an evolutionary drive to protect our own species.
I do grant that it's uncomfortable to think about when the analogy to humans is drawn. For some I'm sure it's uncomfortable even without consciously making that connection. I can absolutely understand why someone would therefore conclude it's morally wrong to use animals for food. I'm just not sure I agree.
> I can absolutely understand why someone would therefore conclude it's morally wrong to use animals for food. I'm just not sure I agree.
Why not? Your comment makes it clear that industrial animal agriculture is wrong (not to mention ecologically disastrous), but then your last sentence makes a 180 out of nowhere. It feels extreme at first, but I'd like to assure you that reducing your consumption of these industries is possible (and sometimes even easy!).
As I said, I'm certain many of the current industrial farming practices are wrong. I'm speaking solely about the morality of killing animals for food, and questioning whether or not that alone is unethical, even if they are raised in good conditions.
Yes, I think this is a totally valid point. Where I have come out on this (just a personal opinion) is that if the animal will have a "good" life (I know super subjective, I'll leave it to some ethicists and philosophers far smarter than me to figure out what that means) then it's logical to eat meat to create the demand so more of those animals are bred and can live "good" lives. All human lives result in death today too, I don't think we would consider parents monsters for having children because they will die someday, but we might if the children would be born into hellish conditions and the parents did it for selfish reasons and not for the child.
I am not sure if veganism and vegetarianism as preached by some religions can be practiced everywhere on the earth. Places which are very cold during the winters cannot grow trees and vegetables, and the people there need to depend on meat from the animals for their survival. What are your thoughts on that.
Absolutely. Many humans throughout time and space have used animal agriculture to survive, and there's nobody arguing against that. The question is whether that's where we are right now.
My heuristic: when given the option to choose between a vegan option and a non-vegan option, choose the vegan option. There aren't any ways to reduce our dependence on animal agriculture (or human suffering) to zero, but it's pretty easy to reduce it most of the time. I'd recommend giving it a shot. Happy to answer any questions.
"Veganism is a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose."
So the keyword here is 'practicable'.
People living in places where there are no alternatives and where people need to eat meat to survive then that would be OK.
People living in the western world don't need meat & dairy to survive.
I think you are framing the problem incorrectly. I think that is this only about sheding some light to this problem, and beeing the intelligent humans that we are, take action. We are consuming much more meat than we need, as soon as you notice that, you can act and reduce some of you meat intake by replacing it with some good source of plant protein. When was the last time you had chickpeas, for example? Or any good source of legume protein?
Animals are lossy at converting plant calories into meat calories (varies for different kinds of livestock obviously). I don’t think it’s an obvious conclusion that more agricultural land would be required.
Did you get the impression that I am speaking for abolishing agriculture?
To answer your question, almost anything will do as feed.
Byproducts of agriculture, grasslands, processed/filtered organic waste.
Animals will thrive on rotten meat too -- famously leading to the mad cow disease.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadThinking about memes as living organisms (infomorphic beings?) would be an interesting way to frame cultural decay.
Considering we have to eat, we should try to minimize the suffering.
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism
Ideally each animal product comes with the imagery like one you get now on cigarette packs (but of an animal in a cage/slaughterhouse) + appropriate cost increases for welfare.
Recent law introduction of putting 1, 2, 3 stars on animal product packages to signify how well animal was treated is great start but we can do so much better as species coexisting in this planet with every other animal.
In my eyes it all starts with education and awareness of alternative plant based diet but government enforced help would be great too.
Meat eaters are going to want the nasty images taken off of packaging, and the cheaper option is to lobby to remove them, not pay substantially more for an idyllic, pasture-raised, humane future.
Congratulations, you now have a pro-factory-farming lobbying group with actual grassroots support.
Might also have more people on your side; might not. Worth considering the adversary in any move of this nature.
There will of course be people who don't care, and people who revel in the pictures, and people that lobby to have them removed, but overall I think those groups would be in the minority. Many people would slowly (and unconsciously) improve their consumption habits, in the same way that people didn't really notice that the tides turned on issues like gay marriage and marijuana consumption.
Part of the knee-jerk antagonism by people who eat meat to posts like this one is that most vocal vegetarians/animal activists are absolutists: eg there is no desirable path forward for most Animal Liberationists where a greater percentage of animals are raised humanely but people keep eating meat. As is often the case, everyone could benefit from agreeing to a compromise where we improve animal farming conditions but don't vilify people who choose to continue eating meat.
Another element here is that eating meat is integral to many cuisines and is extremely culturally important to most people - stating that your goal is to remove it wholesale feels like a direct attack. Claiming that people who enjoy eating meat are your adversaries seems like exactly the wrong thing to do. It's as unhelpful as saying that everyone who owns a car is contributing to climate change is therefore the enemy of environmentalism.
The problem that faces is that it looks and feels more like an animal-lib play than an animal-welfare one. As you point out, the animal liberationist faction will not stop pushing until there's no meat at the market, and raising and slaughtering your own is as illegal as slavery.
Since I don't want that, I'm obliged to oppose anything that gives them power and influence. A lot of people would implicitly come to the same conclusion.
I think creating incentives for companies to be more transparent by offering tax cuts would be a great model for many industries and would give ethical operators a competitive advantage.
IMO, the government should put more focus on creating incentives which encourage positive behaviors because enforcing laws is difficult, expensive and their interpretation is often subjective (hence the need for lawyers).
It should also be illegal for vegans to lie about how a vegan diet is cruelty free. Farming kills far more animals than raising livestock. Far more insects, worms, rodents, etc are killed to protect vegetation and harvest vegetation than are killed in slaughterhouses.
Every bowl of salad has more animal parts than a plate of steak.
Is it more ethical to kill one cow to provide 1000 meals for 1000 people or kill 1000 animals to feed one vegan one meal?
You are right, every meat package and every vegetable, fruit, etc should list how many animals were killed to feed you.
Also, it should show how much environmental damage the vegan diet is causing.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/aug/10/avocado...
Also, every food item should explicitly show that humans are natural omnivores and that the vegan diet in an unnatural diet that humans cannot survive on in nature.
The way you described it, it sounds like a cow appears out of thin air -- poof! -- then it is killed, and 1000 people can eat with only 1 animal killed. It's the people who step on insects while they water the salad who are the true monsters, because they kill 1000 animals for 1 lunch. But how many insects does the cow step on before it grows up and gets killed?
Probably as a result of a poor vegan diet. Your brain is probably starved of the nutrients it needs.
> The animals killed in slaughterhouses... don't they also eat vegetation before they are killed?
Yes, just like in the wild? And the vegetation they eat are vegetation that can be grown in poorer quality land.
> That vegetation doesn't need to be protected from insects?
Yes. And?
> The way you described it, it sounds like a cow appears out of thin air -- poof!
No. They don't. That's my point. Vegans make it seem like their "healthy" meals appear out of nowhere. Not only is a vegan diet the worst diet for humans ( no human can survive on it in the wild ), it's the worst for the environment
> It's the people who step on insects while they water the salad who are the true monsters
Really? Not the trillions of insects/rodents/etc killed by pesticides? Not the trillions of animals killed to clear the land for farming? Not the countless animals killed to harvest the vegetation?
> But how many insects does the cow step on before it grows up and gets killed?
You are right. Cows are evil, lets have some burgers.
Frankly, if you truly care about animals, then you should be arguing for a hunter gatherer diet. That's the most environmentally friendly and most humane diet on earth. Think about it. No farming, no raising livestock. Just gathering and hunting what is available. But I highly doubt you'd advocate for that since virtue signaling vegans don't care about the environment or animals. They care about attention
It is a fact that the hunter gather lifestyle is the best for nature. Then it's the current system. And the absolute worst for animals, environment and humans is the vegan diet.
But like a typical privileged vegan, you probably never set foot on a farm or knowing anything about agriculture. Good luck with that.
The only exception I'm aware of is India and since that's religious it seems difficult to scale. Islam has animal slaughter as one of its few obligate rituals.
Except for the westerners who disagree with this. They can be subjugated.
Cultural imperialism is so last century.
I personally don't feel shame in eating animals bread to be eaten. Having had grandparents practicing subsistence farming, also being born in Eastern Europe during communism and thus suffering from food shortages, from a young age I've seen chickens, pigs and lambs being slaughtered. Not a big deal, and in an environment in which food is in short supply, killing an animal for food is a reason for celebration.
People say that we've been desensitized due to being disconnected from our food source. But I think that's backwards. You rarely see vegans among subsistence farmers. Even when meat is a luxury, eggs and dairy are staple foods.
Unless there's a massive economic incentive for stopping meat production, no country will ever get "on board" with not eating meat.
The CO2 emissions story is the only argument that has any legs. But if you think about it, it's an argument for efficiency and for taxing CO2 emissions, with plenty of low hanging fruits, e.g. we should waste less food, prefer chickens and pigs over ruminants, etc.
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Note I'm actually a vegan 3 days per week out of 7 and I prefer to go through all periods of religious fasting, which is basically hard core veganism (no traces of animal products are acceptable) before the big holidays, e.g. Lent (I'm not religious, I just like the practice).
Meat is the most efficient protein source, per calorie, with a complete profile and unfortunately there's no equivalent unless you start taking protein extracts.
Otherwise a vegan diet is a diet in which you have to eat a lot of legumes every day (lentils, kidney beans, soy) for getting 60-80 grams of protein, an inadequate level if you're looking to maintain or build muscle and going over that is hard for me without being in a caloric surplus. Also, during vegan fasting periods I take B12, Calcium supplements and I strive to eat a varied diet.
My point is, from first hand experience, a healthy diet is pretty challenging and expensive, with or without meat and for poorer populations life is hard enough as it is.
Yeah but chickens - that given number corresponds to 50B per year. But there are more than 65B (though less than 20B at any one time exist).
Sure, if you want to raise awareness, but for what purpose?
To provoke meat-eating people's conscience? Or make them angry?
Edit: Comments did a great job of explaining the objectives, and rationale. Thanks!
When I look at this I see 1.5 billion pigs producing insane amounts of by product that directly affects our climate and our watershed. Not to mention the impact on human health.
If it came down to me or a chicken - I sincerely hope society would prioritize me.
Also it should be noted that most of these farm animals would never have been alive if humans did not breed them in the first place so we shouldn't see death as necessarily a bad thing. We give them life and then we take it away. Every creature dies eventually - So do we.
I think the focus of animal protection movements should be based more on the ethical treatment of animals. It's important to make sure that all animals have the opportunity of a decent life before they are slaughtered; especially have room to move around in an open area with access to natural light.
Because it's a silly vegan propaganda page by wealthy privileged virtue signaling crowd without any grasp on reality.
Countless quadrillions of animals are killed every year in nature. Countless billions of animals are killed every year to clear land and protect vegetation from insects, worms, rodents, etc. Countless billions of animals are killed to build homes that these privileged people live in.
Not to mention the countless billions of animals killed by pet cats and countless billions of animals killed to feed our pets ( cats, dogs, snakes, etc ).
No more than industrial farming and globalism.
So how about we go back to nature and live a hunter gather lifestyle? Or are you against that because you want to live a selfish and destructive vegan lifestyle just so that you can virtue signal?
How about this, go learn a thing about agriculture and how destructive that is to the environment and animals. If you truly care about the environment and animals, I guarantee you that vegans will be your #1 enemy. Good luck.
"Which means humans and wildlife are competing for fertile land for production of food and vegetation,” said Kitso Mokaila, Botswana’s minister of environment."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/man-vs-elephant/
Pretty much anywhere you have farms, you have to wipe out the animals to protect the vegetation. Whereas vegetation for livestock can be grown in poor quality land ( nebraska, dakotas, etc ), the crap that vegans eat cannot be grown there. Not only that, the crap that vegans eat - processed nuts, avocados, etc are extremely water expensive.
Ideally we'd all be hunter gatherers - pretty much 0 environmental footprint as you eat what mother nature provides. But given the human population that's unrealistic so the next best thing is livestock + vegetation ( omnivore diet ). The absolute worst thing is vegan diet as it is a terrible diet for humans, but it's also devastating for the environment as you'd need find a ridiculous amount of fertile land in warmer climates all over the world to destroy and farm since we can't raise the garbage vegans eat where we grow animal feed.
Also, if the world shifted to a vegan diet, then we'd have to get rid of pets since we'd have no source of meat for our cats, dogs, snakes, etc.
Vegans think the vegetation they eat drops down from heaven like manna. Nope, not only are trillions of animals killed to farm garbage for vegans, harvesting and processing also kills tons of animals. So much so that every bowl of salad is guaranteed to have many animal parts in them.
https://www.livescience.com/55459-fda-acceptable-food-defect...
So oddly enough, a lone vegan eating a bowl of salad is eating more animals than a family having steaks for dinner.
Also, humans aren't herbivore. Forcing humans to eat a herbivore diets is as wrong as forcing a herbivore to eat a carnivore diet. It's unnatural and deep down evil. But that's why some people support it so passionately I suppose. Vegans, anti-vax, flat earthers, etc are all the same type of people.
Are you serious? Of course they are vegetation, but hardy vegetation like wheat can grow in a lot of places efficiently with harsh weather. But avocados can't.
https://homeguides.sfgate.com/climate-avocado-tree-need-grow...
Avocados require stable dry heat and relatively little wind. Good luck trying to find that in the midwest where most of the animal feed are grown.
> rather than just unfounded assertions?
That different vegetation grows in different environments isn't an unfounded assertion. It's an obvious fact of nature. Only a vegan wouldn't know that. But lets be honest, no amount of facts or data is going to change the mind of a vegan cultist. You just want data/facts just so you can figure out how to lie better or ignore the facts/data next time. Right?
Oh yeah, almonds and many other vegan foods are absolutely horrible for the environment.
https://www.motherjones.com/food/2014/07/your-almond-habit-s...
I bet you virtue signal about the environment, climate change, etc all the time. The environmental damage and climate change are a result of globalism. Guess which diet is dependent entirely on globalism? That's right the vegan diet. A carnivore and omnivore diet can be sourced locally. A vegan diet cannot be sourced locally. A vegan in alaska or puerto rico or anywhere on earth cannot survive on locally sourced vegan diet. They need to steal vegetation from all over the world to barely survive. Yay for the cult of veganism!
Oh man, now I want a chicken sandwich with bacon on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXrh8rQWDxg
I think there's real pressure on nutrition science to overlook the utility of eating 'non-essential' animal nutrients such as carnitine, creatine, and cholesterol.
I was a vegetarian for most of my life, and won't ever do it again. I will accept muscle tissue grown in culture, happily, but don't believe that plant-source nutrition can replace animal foods in (my) healthy diet.
I'm sympathetic to animal welfare arguments: I refuse to eat factory-farmed pigs, and avoid factory chicken, and eggs which aren't pasture-raised. I'm firmly convinced of the necessity of meat to my good health, I've A/B tested vegetarian and vegan diets to my own satisfaction, and won't be changing my mind on this.
I know it's far off, but I really look forward to that world.
50Bn chickens each taking 1 square foot of space in an endless battery farm makes an area about the size of Delaware. Per year.
Save them, and then what?
It's possible to materially enjoy the taste of meat while simultaneously being horrified by the scope of man's destruction and industrialized cruelty. It's entirely another thing to revel in your own ignorance and disinterest of the issue. Really revolting.
We don't even have to think what we're doing isn't bad. It's enough if we think it's not as bad as it's being made out to be.
Also, just about everyone in the English-speaking world is sick of PETA's sanctimonious shenanigans. It's a bad look which rubs off on any group whose tactics rhyme with PETA's.
“[F]armed poultry today makes up 70% of all birds on the planet, with just 30% being wild. The picture is even more stark for mammals – 60% of all mammals on Earth are livestock, mostly cattle and pigs, 36% are human and just 4% are wild animals.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/21/human-ra...
https://xkcd.com/1338/
If so, do you think factory farmed animals have a good of quality life?
Avoid chicken (other domestic fowl are generally ok) and pigs, which can be (and are) tortured their whole lives for profit. There is considerable room for improvement in how veal is raised as part of milk and meat production, but calves which avoid that process and end up as meat get: two good years, a couple not-great months, and one really terrifying and shitty day.
Is our ecological footprint important as well when making food choices?
If so, why not listen to the science and try to reduce meat & dairy as much as we can.
"A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use,” said Joseph Poore, at the University of Oxford, UK, who led the research. “It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car,” he said, as these only cut greenhouse gas emissions."
From: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...
However, let's say hypothetically we're only talking about farms run with a focus on animal welfare. (And not just giving animals 10 square feet of 'pasture' so they can say they're free range, but really.) So the issues of poor living conditions are removed, and we're just talking about killing animals for meat. If people stopped eating meat altogether, most farm animals simply wouldn't be born in the first place. Farmers aren't going to raise animals if they can't eventually earn money from them, obviously, and most of these animals wouldn't exist in large numbers in the wild. So what I'm wondering is, for a farm animal is it not possible that a decent life followed by being slaughtered for food might be superior to no life at all?
Obviously if we think in terms of humans, that would be horrific; we consider killing humans unnecessarily an absolute moral wrong. If someone decided they would have a child, but only if they could murder them after some period of time, that's obviously monstrous. I'm just not sure that that analogy applies to farm animals who certainly are living creatures who feel pain, but don't have the same understanding of the world and their place in it that humans do. To me that's the rational reason why the the idea of killing humans could be considered differently from killing other animals. That said, I expect the real reason we instinctively feel that killing humans is wrong is more an evolutionary drive to protect our own species.
I do grant that it's uncomfortable to think about when the analogy to humans is drawn. For some I'm sure it's uncomfortable even without consciously making that connection. I can absolutely understand why someone would therefore conclude it's morally wrong to use animals for food. I'm just not sure I agree.
Why not? Your comment makes it clear that industrial animal agriculture is wrong (not to mention ecologically disastrous), but then your last sentence makes a 180 out of nowhere. It feels extreme at first, but I'd like to assure you that reducing your consumption of these industries is possible (and sometimes even easy!).
It’s horrific in terms of animals as well.
My heuristic: when given the option to choose between a vegan option and a non-vegan option, choose the vegan option. There aren't any ways to reduce our dependence on animal agriculture (or human suffering) to zero, but it's pretty easy to reduce it most of the time. I'd recommend giving it a shot. Happy to answer any questions.
"Veganism is a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose."
So the keyword here is 'practicable'.
People living in places where there are no alternatives and where people need to eat meat to survive then that would be OK.
People living in the western world don't need meat & dairy to survive.
The sort of one dimensional thought process presented here is somewhat dangerous.
In comparison, animal rearing is feasible in pretty desolate places as long as you can transport feed and water.
Just claiming it's a lossy energy conversion is pretty irrelevant. Not all the 'calories' here are created equal.
To answer your question, almost anything will do as feed. Byproducts of agriculture, grasslands, processed/filtered organic waste. Animals will thrive on rotten meat too -- famously leading to the mad cow disease.