This is an ignorant "wishful" thought/question on my part but, what would be the cost to "donate" this food instead of just killing. I think I understand that it costs money to go through the full process, but if they're in an "adult" stage and are "edible" after processing. Is it really better to just kill/accept the loss than to get some use out of it? I think logistics is the main issue anyway, costs money to transport/refrigerate.
Because of the extent of regulations on processing, chances are every part of that transaction would be illegal; from transferring the animals, transporting them, processing them (the thing we're lacking the capacity for, that is causing this need). Even if you could competently process them, you almost certainly would not be able to legally process them.
There's a lovely book called Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal that I think every American who eats food or votes should read.
"Drawing upon 40 years' experience as an ecological farmer and marketer, Joel Salatin explains with humor and passion why Americans do not have the freedom to choose the food they purchase and eat. From child labor regulations to food inspection, bureaucrats provide themselves sole discretion over what food is available in the local marketplace. Their system favors industrial, global corporate food systems and discourages community-based food commerce, resulting in homogenized selection, mediocre quality, and exposure to non-organic farming practices. Salatin's expert insight explains why local food is expensive and difficult to find and will illuminate for the reader a deeper understanding of the industrial food complex."
from https://www.bookdepository.com/Everything-I-Want-Do-is-Illeg... makes me think, given the implied negatives of child labor regulations and food inspection, that anyone reading that book should follow up with a quick read of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, the same way that I found Oliver Twist a useful tonic after my first exposure to Atlas Shrugged.
> makes me think, given the implied negatives of child labor regulations and food inspection, that anyone reading that book should follow up with a quick read of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, the same way that I found Oliver Twist a useful tonic after my first exposure to Atlas Shrugged.
It's amazing how quickly you assume that the way those laws apply to Joel's farm is reasonable, or that what Joel is doing is the sort of thing the public were interested in interfering with when they supported those laws.
Your reflex to defend the application of laws by their title is why no matter how much stink is made by people who actually read the US PATRIOT or EARN IT act for example, or any number of other brilliantly-framed pieces of legislation, there is always a gallery of opinionated people who will gladly judge a book by its cover with no less certainty, and with even more smug self-importance, than they would by its content.
If it has never occurred to you: not everyone impacted by the law is a crook.
I commend you on your reading in English despite your having a full command of the language as yet, just keep your nose to the grindstone because education is its own reward.
As an example, allow me to clarify some matters that might not be apparent to someone approaching English as a second language.
Firstly, child labor regulations and food inspection are not the titles of laws, they are classes of laws; this is why they are in lowercase instead of capitalized like the USA PATRIOT Act. So you see, it was not defending the application of laws by their title but instead by their category, an easy mistake to make and you shouldn't be embarrassed about it but I thought it should really be corrected. After all it is nice to be able to understand the difference, as subtle as it is.
Also as you will note I slightly corrected the actual title of the USA PATRIOT Act because, while also a minor quibble there are all sorts of jerks out there who will take up any arguable point and make it cause for battle! Especially when combined with the "who actually read the" bit right before.
Another thing that has probably escaped you, not having a first hand familiarity with American culture is the little nuances of the blurb talking about child labor regulations etc. Perhaps it is unintentional but there are political forces in the U.S that would like to get rid of these and other classes of laws that exist to restrict some things that businesses might otherwise like to do, like having children work in factories and selling food that has been made in unsanitary conditions, and so when I see marketing for something that seems to argue against these classes of law I worry that the book being marketed actually argues against them - I suppose you can see why that might be, right?
Anyway, as I haven't read the book, which you pointed out, I can't really say if it is like I suppose when I read the marketing for it, but as I said the marketing "makes me think" it is, if it shouldn't make me think that then the marketing is bad marketing but if it should make me think that it means that the book hopes to get people who are predisposed to side with those political forces to buy the book. Perhaps the book might even be so written as to even more convince people that these classes of regulation are a bad thing and for this reason I suggested anyone reading the book should read another book called the Jungle which was an initial cause in getting at least the food inspection class of laws passed.
So the upshot of that bit of nuance was I was not actually judging the book by it's cover, which seemed pleasant enough, but by it's marketing which perhaps only incidentally implies the book is harmful in some way. Of course I was only being facetious when I suggested anyone read The Jungle because I don't think it was actually that good but I just meant that the people who subscribe to the theories that those classes of law are bad things seem to labor under some sort of ahistoricity and as that is a lack of knowledge it would be nice if the lack could be rectified somehow.
Finally when you say "there is always a gallery of opinionated people who will gladly judge a book by its cover with no less certainty, and with even more smug self-importance, than they would by its content." oh boy, don't I know it! It really does seem some days that even the most passing and light-hearted of comments will bring some pretentious little martinet out of the woodwork, taking personal affront, and wanting to start a battle over it all.
This is really why I wrote this overly long reply to correct some of what you wrote, as admirable as it otherwise might have been, because I would hope to keep you from being drawn into a confrontation with one of these combative types, who, as I noted before, seem intent on getting the smallest mistake or deliberate misreading as a tool to spitefully attack your character.
> I commend you on your reading in English despite your having a full command of the language as yet, just keep your nose to the grindstone because education is its own reward.
As an example, allow me to clarify some matters that might not be apparent to someone approaching English as a second language.
Thank you for contributing your ridicule of ESL people, and then using that ridicule, as though you had trouble reading what was written, to say something smug about the medium of somebody's argument.
> ...I was not actually judging the book by it's cover...
By the way, since we're in the mood for making fun of people over insignificant matters of syntax, the "its" in "judging a book by its cover" isn't supposed to have an apostrophe in it.
Now I could be charitable, and notice that if you wrote this on an Android phone, it could just be that GBoard was doing that thing where it inserts an apostrophe that you didn't type; but I'll adjust to your standards here and just take it as a sign that you're illiterate, which I guess explains why you stick to reading a book's blurb, and the cover more generally, rather than the content.
> not having a first hand familiarity with American culture is the little nuances of the blurb talking about child labor regulations etc
Dude, I'm American. It's not that your insinuations are too subtle, it's that they're unfounded, given the actual content of the book.
> Perhaps it is unintentional but there are political forces in the U.S that would like to get rid of these and other classes of laws that exist to restrict some things that businesses might otherwise like to do, like having children work in factories and selling food that has been made in unsanitary conditions, and so when I see marketing for something that seems to argue against these classes of law I worry that the book being marketed actually argues against them - I suppose you can see why that might be, right?
Still here impugning the guy's motives, and talking down to me as though you're the only one here who is aware of broad U.S. political themes, with zero knowledge of the actual content of the book, judging it by the blurb... the thing that goes on the cover; you know, judging a book by its cover.
> ...the people who subscribe to the theories that those classes of law are bad things seem to labor under some sort of ahistoricity and as that is a lack of knowledge it would be nice if the lack could be rectified somehow.
If you're so concerned about lack of knowledge, why don't you just read the book? It's about eight bucks on Kindle, it's not that long; maybe your nearest municipal library is open again and you can check it out there when you make your no-doubt-frequent trip. Replace your ignorance and smugness with information and.. well probably you'll keep the smugness, but at least you'll know what you're talking about. :+ )
> This is really why I wrote this overly long reply to correct some of what you wrote, as admirable as it otherwise might have been, because I would hope to keep you from being drawn into a confrontation with one of these combative types, who, as I noted before, seem intent on getting the smallest mistake or deliberate misreading as a tool to spitefully attack your character.
Well we wouldn't want to go attacking anyone's character; for example by insinuating that their primary political motivation is to exploit vulnerable children for hard labour and produce unsanitary food to save money in a manner similar to the fictional characters of a novel about a child born in a 19th century British workhouse. We especially wouldn't want to do that by comparing a piece of mid 20th century philosophical allegory written for a broad audience, a fictional novel; to the genuine account of an independent farmer attempting to sell products that his customers are informed about a...
>Thank you for contributing your ridicule of ESL people, and then using that ridicule, as though you had trouble reading what was written, to say something smug about the medium of somebody's argument.
Actually it was more ridicule of you; I realize you didn't like my tone but I didn't like yours as well, normally I wouldn't have replied but character is situational and I'm in a bad enough mood the last week to respond. I believe the phrase tit for tat may apply here.
>insignificant matters of syntax
I think use of it's instead of its is grammatical not syntactical, but I may be wrong on that.
>a sign that you're illiterate
I never said you were illiterate, I implied that you did not seem to know certain things and used the conceit that you were a non-native speaker of the language and that this was the cause of you not knowing these things. I could have also attacked your moral character, as you started in with me on.
>judging it by the blurb... the thing that goes on the cover; you know, judging a book by its cover.
As I understand blurb it means "a short description of a book, film, or other product written for promotional purposes." I just saw the text on the website you linked to describing the book, I was unaware the same text was on the cover - if it is - but I guess if the book tells me it is a book about vampires I will judge the book to be about vampires until I open it up and read it is about the psychology of people who actually believe vampires exist. Blurbs exist to tell you what a book is about, you seem to think that this blurb has done a bad job doing that for me and it is somehow my fault for pointing it out.
Why don't you do just send an email to them and tell them "hey fix your blurb" since you have the knowledge of what the book is actually about, and you know that I took it badly, and you evidently are aware of what the trends are in American Politics that people might assume those phrases were about.
>If you're so concerned about lack of knowledge, why don't you just read the book? It's about eight bucks on Kindle,
Yeah, despite you being the best ever possible salesperson for the book, what with your attacking me for pointing out a bit of questionable marketing, I'm not paying to read a book that seems to be marketed to people I am ideologically opposed to, especially when I point out the dodgy marketing somebody on HN pops up and starts lecturing me about the US PATRIOT ACT (sic), I mean come on, those were some pretty dog-whistely terms there, and you could have gone with something like "well I understand your concern but it's really not like that, you should give it a try because it shows how even the best of intentions can get you bogged down with bureaucracy" but instead it's all you're stupid and bad and then finally it's buy the book it will make you a better person?
>well probably you'll keep the smugness
you really seem to very concerned about smugness, in your first post you went into "and with even more smug self-importance" and now again with the smugness - I don't really know what more to say about it other than when I read your first attack based on my pointing out problems in the blurb, and your second attack here based on my retaliation, and your about which has the following "In the current harsh/repressive political climate, you can be accosted for publicly engaging a wrongthinker." for communicating with you too much I have to say... I just don't think I'm that smug.
> Actually it was more ridicule of you; I realize you didn't like my tone but I didn't like yours as well, normally I wouldn't have replied but character is situational and I'm in a bad enough mood the last week to respond. I believe the phrase tit for tat may apply here.
If you're in such a foul mood, don't let it make you write reams of nonsense. Go on Duolingo, read a book, or take it out on your text editor like the rest of us.
I don't want to have to ban you again, but if you keep posting flamewar and/or ideological-battle comments to HN we're going to have to. Would you please use HN as intended?
I'm sure that you could work a deal under the table to buy a hog or a bullock, if you were willing to redneck it up and process it yourself, but there is so fucking much red tape in the way of doing this at scale.
My local craigslist has people selling "butcher size" (~300lb) hogs at $100 and less; which is cheap. Processing a critter that size at home is a big task; unpleasant and exhausting and messy.
I think we should go even farther with our euphemisms and call it "harvesting a resource".
I love meat, even though I consider killing animals unethical, which makes me a hypocrite. Still, I think the least we can do is call the process "killing an animal".
I mean if we're going to engage in silly pedantry, critter means animal.
Also, ethics aside, the comment above was referring specifically to processing, not the act of killing. Killing is comparatively fast and far less messy. Butchering/processing a 300lb carcass is where the real effort lies.
I get the resistance to whitewashing, but the terminology of 'processing' seems more accurate. Killing the animal is only the beginning of the process and is generally the least time intensive. Properly butchering an animal while maintaining food safety, producing the proper cuts, etc. is a process that requires tooling and expertise.
I would hope that everyone understands that creating a final meat product involves killing, but we shouldn't trivialize the process requirements just to drive an emotional point home.
You're right, there's much more than just killing. It just felt weird to me to lump killing in with "processing", maybe "killing and processing" would have been better.
But the $100 300-pound hog being discussed a few posts up is already dead when you buy it. It's not a euphemism; it would actually be incorrect to change it to "killing and processing a foo of that size at home is a big task".
It's called processing because killing the animal is just the first step. Next you have to systematically dismantle their body and cut up the usable bits into manageable chunks, which (I'd assume) is a bulk of the work. Personally, I think the word processing is more vile in this context than simply killing. That said, I also eat meat, so I can't really say much.
As other people have alluded it is called processing as killing is one portion. We processed 100 chickens a month ago at my neighbor's house. The first step is to put two small slits in the artery on their neck while they hang upside down in a traffic cone; easy process as they don't fight or try to get out. Next, you put the dead chicken in hot water (temperature needs to be specific to not cook them), then the de-feather machine, then you cut the head/neck and feet off, then clean all the insides out, then they sit in ice water for a day or so before you package them. We don't sell them, we do this for ourselves and pack our freezers with the meat.
I haven't done larger animals from the killing but have butchered large cuts of meat. It is a time-consuming process while being physically tiring.
The cost would be non-zero, so it won't be done. In fact, it would be very much higher than non-zero. You can't just march these animals down the road to the market one morning and give them away. Just because there are sentient beings involved you shouldn't think that this is any different from any other huge industrial operation. A car manufacturer can't expect to be able to liquidise a bunch of parts. Without the correct tooling it's worthless to anyone. Meat is the finished product, not animals. And those animals have no more rights than a hunk of metal.
> The cost would be non-zero, so it won't be done.
There is a also cost to not doing it but your analysis implies that we shouldn't care about it, because it's not a cost accounted for by industrial practice.
>The cost would be non-zero, so it won't be done.
I would be willing to bet that the largest factory farms would be able to file an insurance claim for this type of thing (or get a large government subsidy) such that the cost will be negligible/zero/net positive.
Who would take it? If you handed me a live adult pig or steer for free, I wouldn't know how to turn it into edible meat. The only people who can do this at the scale necessary to avoid a culling are the processing plants, and their being bottlenecked is the reason we're in this situation.
Well my thought was poor people/food shelters/etc... I also realize it's even a larger joke to think "send it to "poor" countries". But I understand what you're saying, I wouldn't know how to cut apart meat and do it in a sanitized manner.
You'd have to find people willing to take them, transporting them, slaughter them, and distribute the meat.
We are talking about slaughtering and butchering millions of animals in a non-factory setting, not practical. On top of that transporting animals and/meat at that scale is not cheap or easy.
This sort of operation is very difficult to do on an ad hoc/emergency basis.
If an organization would just pick up any unwanted animals on demand, I'm sure the farmers would be happy to hand them over.
The alternative is by butchering. (E.G.) there was sufficient demand for meat/processing ability at plants.
Though I honestly wish there was a more humane alternative to culling.
These industrial farms don't have room to spare for animals that aren't wanted.
I wish there was some kind of park or nature reserve or somewhere that they could be sent to live out their lives in peace instead of the culling. Or if such places already exist, laws that mandate that they be sent there.
Releasing large quantities of animals to nature is both anti-ecological and inhumane, as it results in destruction of that ecosystem, starvation, cannibalism, etc. Like the horrible aftermath of the cases when activists have "freed" animals from fur farms, resulting in them dying within weeks but also taking all the local wildlife (e.g. nesting birds) with them. You can successfully do a controlled release of a limited number of animals given proper preparation. But if we're talking about releasing large numbers quickly, culling is much more humane than that that.
I wish so too. But honestly, space could likely be found. The problem is - and would be with your hypothetical nature reseve - that somebody has to pay for a) feeding these animals beyond their expected lifetimes, and b) fuel necessary to ship them to their reserve en-masse.
Very few animals besides apex predators in the wild live long enough to die of old age. Rather they die from starvation or disease or are eaten by something else.
Life on industrial farms sounds terrible, for sure, but death in nature is also terrible, to the point that I'm not sure it's a mercy to "set them free".
So the factory farms would have an even bigger surplus?
Vegans/vegetarians/etc. might get to claim the moral high ground but until legislation forces the market to change, the point is moot.
I'm not sure if you're purposely being silly or what.... But I will spell it out. If people stopped demanding meat, then factory farms wouldn't breed these animals, and the suffering for them would end.
I get that this is something you are passionate about but the way you move goalposts and use ad hominem against every counter argument to yours doesn't help your point, nor does constantly bashing anyone who has a differing opinion.
Make a rational argument to convince others, dont call names and avoid points you don't want to discuss, it just makes you look like a troll, and gives vegans/vegetarians a bad look by proxy.
You have consistently avoided the fact that people eat meat (whether or not you like it or agree with it, you dont get to choose for other people), that animals in the wild have far less 'humane' deaths, in the wild, ie starvation and disease, etc.
I agree this is a problem that needs a solution, but I don't see you giving one other than 'stop eating meat, morons'.
Please show me the ad hominem. I said I think you may be purposefully misunderstanding, that is not ad hominem
Where did I avoid the fact that people eat meat? And where did I avoid the fact that there are rough deaths in the wild? I addressed it specifically with "let's focus on the suffering that is CAUSED by us."
Stop eating meat is the recommendation because that is the simple solution. That is the rational argument. There is no ethical way to eat meat. I've seen zero counter arguments to that point. How can there be more of a solution? Yes there are logistics involved in getting there but that is the simple and clear solution. Accepting that is step 1, logistics of doing it is step 2. What more do you need than a simple solution?
It's also interesting that you accuse me of avoiding points then write an entire response that completely ignores the factually accurate points I have made.
Please have a read. They will help you have a civilised discussion on HN and you will be better able to get your point across. For example, the reason your post above was flagged to death was because of its aggressive and personal tone, not because of the opinion you express that is also held and expressed by many other posters on HN.
My response that got flagged was "This is the only reasonable response in this entire post." Clearly it was being flagged for disagreement to the HN echo chamber. There is nothing offensive or personal in that statement.
>> "Or we just don't eat meat..... no that's too crazy! Moron"
That is not an acceptable mode of communication on HN. The flagging has nothing to do with any "echo chamber", except perhaps for the echo chamber that reverberates with the opinion that calling your interlocutor a moron is just not on in this forum.
For small animals, CO2 is humane. It's widely used for laboratory research animals, and it's generally the least-worst option for them. I don't know how well it scales up by body mass above roughly a canada goose, so use on pigs doesn't seem immediately sane to me.
Drowning doesn't seem viable.
A bullet to the head (or a bolt gun, or whatever) is probably the fastest way to remove sensation from neural tissue for large farm animals. The shock wave takes milliseconds to turn brains to soup.
Do you have a citation for this? Everything I've seen would suggest to me it's categorically less humane than using an inert gas like nitrogen or helium in the absence of oxygen.
I think the effect of CO2 is very similar to the hypoxia from low air pressure. Here's a video of a TV presenter and ex-member of parliament undergoing the experience.
The point of the scene is that you lose any faculties long before any unpleasantness or damage.
Why is CO2 different for "small" animals than "large" animals? If CO2 is humane for chickens, say, then why do they sometimes use Nitrogen or Argon, which are more hazardous for humans and probably more expensive?
speed of onset is proportional to body size; above a certain size it's impractical to induce loss of consciousness fast enough with CO2 compared with, say, a .45 to the brainstem.
" Concern regarding animals being hypoxic prior to unconsciousness led the AVMA Panel on Euthanasia to conclude neither nitrogen nor argon is an acceptable euthanasia method for rodents."
My prior impression was that nitrogen (at high concentration) would induce unconsciousness quite rapidly, and painlessly. Obviously hypoxia is part of this, but I'd never heard of this as being distressing in itself.
Does anyone have further insight on this?
(CO2 buildup, on the other hand, is inherently distressing, though the AVMA doc suggests that pigs would become unconscious in about two minutes, under proper conditions.)
I find it interesting that different methods are used for death penalty and for farm animals. You should think that whatever is considered as humane for one should be ok for the other.
There's increasing consensus that capital punishment methods, at least in the US, are not appropriate!
Given that we allow the state to execute people -- a dubious proposition in the first place -- i don't understand why we don't just push a shitton of phenobarb and xanax or whatever. "an anaesthetic overdose" is pretty darn humane if we're willing to accept the premise that anaesthetic "work" by "decoupling consciousness". Scare quotes intentional here, because we genuinely don't know how anaesthetic work but we broadly agree that when you've taken a lot of them you don't feel any pain.
That is illogical. That's like saying: I chopped someone's arm off so the only humane thing is to shoot them. Maybe don't do the terrible thing in the first place (breeding them to be slaughtered), and you won't have this issue.
Doesn't it follow from this that it would be beneficial to kill wild animals so that their far more numerous offspring won't die grisly natural deaths?
There was an ethics paper that won a student prize at oxford ..? or cambridge ..? that argued this exact position. I can't put my fingers on it right now though, it's really annoying.
Ethical consequentialist vegetarians believe that farmed animals have lives that are worse than non-existence. In this paper, I sketch out an argument that wild animals have worse lives than farmed animals, and that consistent vegetarians should therefore reduce the number of wild animals as a top priority.
Yes, but only because we (humans) wiped out the natural predators of many wild animals - the typical example being wolves and deer in North America.
We then do indeed kill wild animals so that their populations don't explode due to a lack of predators - in Canada and the US you typically need a "tag" to hunt wild animals, basically a ticket that allows you to kill X number of a specific species.
These tags are distributed in limited numbers, and extensive work goes into surveying populations of wild animals to distribute the right number of tags. Proceeds from selling tags go to conservation efforts, including the surveying efforts previously mentioned.
As someone trying their hardest to follow a vegan diet, I fully support hunting wild animals for food and population control. However, that situation is worlds removed from animals that are bred for the sole purpose of being raised and slaughtered in factory farms.
EDIT: to rip off another comment in this chain - the issue of hunting wild animals is orthogonal to the issue of factory farming. i.e., the two issues have little to do with each other and you cannot/should not use one as moral justification for the other.
I meant kill them in general so that they don't have offspring at all, as most animals in nature die what we would consider grisly deaths. (Which, to be clear, I think is wrong.)
I'm not a fan of factory farming, but I don't agree that hunting and raising farm animals are orthogonal issues. My own views are more complicated than I care to get into here, but I think it boils down to - 1) Is it always wrong to kill animals for food? and 2) Would those animals rather exist than not, prior to dying?
I think the answers to those questions are no (or else we have to declare eg lions immoral) and yes (assuming the conditions they live in aren't absolutely horrific, which also leads me to believe that factory farming should basically go away and we should reduce our meat consumption as much as we need to to make that possible).
I try to limit my meat consumption and find meat that I believe has been raised ethically, but I don't believe veganism is required (though I totally respect those beliefs!)
Thank you for your thorough and thoughtful response. I'd agree with you that I'd be OK with meat consumption if the animals being raised for meat were raised under "optimal" conditions for their happiness, and only slaughtered at the end of long, fulfilling lives.
What burst my bubble on that idea, however, and really gave me the urge to strive towards a vegan diet, was just how completely implausible that image is. Even if your meat comes from "ethical" sources, I have three big issues:
1. Animals are typically slaughtered far short of their natural lifespans. Cows, pigs, and chickens have natural lifespans of 20, 20, and 10 years, and live 3, 2, and 0.2 years under factory farming conditions [1]. Even if the meat you're consuming comes from animals that live fantastic lives - the stereotypical image of open pastures, a "natural" diet, loving care from the farmer - those lives are almost definitely being cut short for the sake of profitability.
2. The animal products industry puts a humongous amount of effort into keeping consumers from thinking about the origins of their food. Part of this effort is whitewashing the process as much as possible. I don't feel like finding specific examples off the top of my head, but it's cases like "cage free chicken" meaning that the birds are kept in a massive, communal shed with 24/7 artificial lighting, very little cleaning, veterinary care, etc. It's very possible that even if the meat you're buying is labelled with "humane" and "ethical" terms like free-range, cage-free, etc. that those terms mean very different things than you might assume.
3. Modern livestock are bred to produce the maximum amount of product (meat, milk, eggs, wool) as possible. This leads to chickens whose legs collapse underneath them from their weight after a few months of life, cows which have chronically infected udders from the quantity of milk they produce, etc. Even if you take these breeds and raise them under "humane" conditions, they'll still have miserable lives without extensive veterinary care.
That all said, if you do indeed source your meat from sources that you have verified give their animals fantastic comfortable lives, let them live (most) of their natural lifespan before slaughter, and only raise heritage breeds that don't suffer just from being alive, then I'm all for your meat consumption - and very curious how much your meat costs!
1. I guess it doesn't bother me so much that their lives are being cut short, for the same reasons that the killing in general doesn't bother me. I would say that waiting until they're old may make the meat taste bad enough that it would be better to not bother (in which case, veganism!)
2. I agree wholeheartedly with this point. Somewhat related, we recently bought a freshly butchered duck from a small local farm and when I looked up how long we could wait before cooking it, I was shocked at how long freshly butchered meat lasts! It makes the shelf life of meat from the store seem almost disgusting, how close it is to going bad on the day you buy it. But that information has been obscured to the point that we all think raw meat is just naturally gross.
3. I also agree completely with this point, if the animal's existence is misery, then it shouldn't happen.
We really don't eat very much meat, we buy from nice, little, local farms (and that's expensive) and we raise our own meat rabbits and try to give them as much room and freedom as we can while making sure they don't get disease from the wild rabbits in our area. I decided a while ago that I wouldn't eat meat if I wasn't willing to do at least some of the slaughtering myself. It felt too important to outsource completely.
And it may sound weird, but the slaughtering itself has made me appreciate nature way more, and really changed my relationship with death, in that I see death less as a horrible thing that happens and more as part of a cycle whereby nutrients are redistributed and renewal is allowed to occur. We happen to live long enough that lots of things will die while we live, and it's easy to forget that we'll die and something will consume us, too, even if it's just a microbe or a plant.
And factory farming is way more... extractive? It feels like it doesn't allow for the redistribution and renewal, the same way that mono-culture farming on a massive scale can leach away nutrients and destroy biodiversity.
That's an orthogonal issue. They were bred, they are here now; there's no possibility in their immediate future for something other than death, but there are options available for how that death happens.
That's a fair point, but if we want to truly reduce animal suffering, we have to reengineer the entire biosphere. We have to take control of the "circle of life" to ensure a humane end for all animals. Because natural life isn't in any way better for animals; your options there are to suffer and die of starvation, or suffer and die by being torn apart and eaten. The life and suffering of wild animals is the ultimate "out of sight, out of mind".
This is a red herring. Let's start with the suffering that we are purposely creating, in mass. The numbers of factory-farmed animals dying dwarfs anything else.
The difference comes down to cost and chance of success.
Say you hit a deer with your car and break its hind legs. The chances you can nurse it back to health are very slim. Not least because the deer is likely to have a stress-induced response to being handled by humans that will adversely affects it chance of survival. And if the deer survives this, you are going to face a long list of further hurdles. From avoiding starvation, dehydration to avoiding infection. And eventually you would need to reintroduce the animal to the wild.
How much are you willing to pay for a deer you've hit to have its hind legs repaired and put in a cast? How much are you willing to pay a professional to nurse it back to health. Because to be frank: if you haven't taken care of a deer before, you are pretty likely to kill it. And the deer is going to be frightened and miserable the whole time.
So how much are you willing pay to keep a deer you have hit alive? $10.000? $20.000? More? What's your cutoff? Would you sell your car?
I've seen people spend that kind of money on pets. And it isn't always pretty when people squeeze more life out of a suffering pet for their own sake.
Now, if you chopped someone's arm off the chances of survival (depending on circumstance) and the willingness of someone to pay for it would usually be quite different.
I'm not sure if you're purposely trying to miss the point or not. Yes, there are no good options for the bad situation we are now in. My point is that we can avoid situations like this in the future. I hope your snarky comment about time travel made you feel super smart! It made me think so.
You'd have to define that, but I think it's a great and practical solution. As more people find out about factory farming and think through the implications of their purchases, they will continue to switch over.
I'm willing to grant that animals are capable to some degree of wanting at all. It's a perfectly reasonable assumption.
How do you feel about mercy killings? If you find a deer in the woods that's got a gangrenous leg and is laying on the ground, I would argue that it is my obligation -- my moral responsibility -- to cut its throat or pith it, if I can.
We are part of nature. We constitute "letting nature take its course", and those options are a whole lot better than getting eaten alive by a coyote.
Sure it is. There are perfectly humane ways to kill an animal quickly with respect. My grandparents and uncles used to do it all the time. What's inhumane is the mass factory farming way of slaughtering. Killing animals is as old as humanity. Torturing animals is new to factory farming. Anyway, it's just a matter of opinion. Most of humanity doesn't care, never will, and no amount of moral grandstanding, vegetarianism, veganism, protest, or anything will change that. That's why I gave up being a vegetarian after fifteen years. That and the negative health effects of constantly eating mostly carbs, but that's besides the point.
Keep in mind that sometimes killing the animal might be the humane option. I certainly wouldn't want a cow left to starve in what's essentially some guy's backyard box. I've seen enough dogs kept in such conditions.
This is a crazy thought so please keep an open mind........ if we didn't mass produce animals to kill and eat them.... we wouldn't have this issue in the first place.
There aren't that many family farms, and they're going to tend to have about as many animals as they can support already, unless there's some reason they don't want more (just like any business—otherwise you're wasting capital). You might find some hobbyist-types who have extra capacity and would take a cow or three hoping to sell them later since they're relatively easy to care for if you have fenced land (pigs are a bit more specialized; chickens are already cheap and most probably want the egg-laying kind, not the mutant factory farm meat kind), but that wouldn't go very far.
CO2 and drowning are horrific ways to die. To anyone who disagrees why not try waterboarding or taking a breath of CO2. Neither one will kill you, but they'll be the most uncomfortable things you've ever felt in your life.
If they can use CO2 they should be able to use CO or Nitrogen. Both of these cause a completely painless death in mammals. It was shown in a BBC documentary called How to Kill a Human. The topic was how to execute prisoners for the purpose of capital punishment, but the effects of Nitrogen were shown on a pig. It was completely oblivious to anything happening and voluntarily subjected itself to more Nitrogen after losing consciousness.
I sadly can't find the video right now (there are other clips available on Youtube). The experiment involved putting some food in a gas chamber into which the pig could stick its head. The pig voluntarily went for the food and the chamber was filled with Nitrogen. The pig lost consciousness and fell backwards away from the chamber. Now breathing air the pig regains consciousness and after fully waking up goes right back to the food.
Really hope information like this regarding our meat-industrial complex disappears into obscurity before the aliens visit, or that they at least don't judge us by the biblical "sins of your forefathers"
Assuming universal ethics onto a human is the subject of whole fields of study. Doing so onto something that isn't even from the same evolutionary tree seems silly. An alien evolved from predators might find vegetarians merely dinner and not worthy of talking to.
Good point of course, however irrational it might be, I can only imagine the scenario where there's a really awkward confrontation between us and the ETs over one of these articles. Will take the bravest of us to start throwing bacon jokes.
Same as the problem with Pascal's Wager: if you don't know the motivations and values of the entity you're trying to please and can't even really narrow the possibilities down much, you might find the "wrong" behavior/belief is actually the one that pleases them, and the "right" one pisses them off.
I disagree, Pascal's Wager deals with the situation where you don't know whether the (omnipotent) entity you're trying to please exists or not.
This comment thread assumes the omnipotent entity (aliens) exists, and so you'd be taking a coin flip as to what behaviour they find pleasing. Pascal's Wager resolves to:
(infinite gain * non-zero probability of success) > (finite gain * non-zero probability of failure)
While this situation is more like:
(infinite gain * non-zero probability of success) ~= (infinite gain * non-zero probability of failure).
Pascal's Wager hits precisely the same problem because it's not knowable what might make one eligible for "infinite gain", including not believing in gods. There's no way to differentiate between "finite gain" behavior and "infinite gain" behavior.
From the POV of the rest of the galaxy we seem like the xenomorphs in the "Alien" movies.
- Obviously kind of sentient or intelligent, but
- Totally uninterested in communication.
- Recognize others only as resources to consume for reproduction.
- No other goals, just blind reproduction/consumption
- Remake the environment into our own image, no other life forms can live there. (our cities look like scabs or disease crust from orbit.)
- Violent, invasive, destructive, pointless.
So why don't they "take off and nuke the entire site from orbit?" Because that's human-thinking, it literally wouldn't occur to non-human sentients because they're not sick. Instead we're just quarantined (that's the answer to the Fermi Paradox) and they study us and hope for the best. The Martians evacuated Mars when they realized Sir Percival Lowell could see them.
You should read (if you haven't) The State of the Art by Iain M. Banks, particularly the eponymous novella. Summary from the wikipedia page:
"The State of the Art"
At 100 pages long, the title novella makes up the bulk of the book. The novella chronicles a Culture mission to Earth in the late 1970s, and also serves as a prequel of sorts to Use of Weapons by featuring two of that novel's characters, Diziet Sma and the drone Skaffen-Amtiskaw. Here, Sma argues for contact with Earth, to try to fix the mess the human species has made of it; another Culture citizen, Linter, goes native, choosing to renounce his Culture body enhancements so as to be more like the locals; and Li, who is a Star Trek fan, argues that the whole "incontestably neurotic and clinically insane species" should be eradicated with a micro black hole. The ship Arbitrary has ideas, and a sense of humour, of its own.
'Also while I'd been away, the ship had sent a request
on a postcard to the BBC's World Service, asking for
'Mr David Bowie's "Space Oddity" for the good ship
Arbitrary and all who sail in her.' (This from a machine
that could have swamped Earth's entire electro-magnetic
spectrum with whatever the hell it wanted from somewhere
beyond Betelgeuse.) It didn't get the request played. The
ship thought this was hilarious.'[2]
It's just a thought that occurred to me one day and haunted me ever since.
I've read a couple of Iain Banks' books but he doesn't quite gel for me somehow. These days I don't read fiction because it can't compete with reality. ;-)
UNICEF is now predicting 6,000 child deaths per day due to food and medical supply issues.
It turns out you need an economy to fight the virus.
All these knock on effects will be great learnings. Probably will turn out that future policy will be a local function of population density, public transportation usage, etc.
Hopefully this will shutdown all the "if you want to talk about the economy you want people to die" rhetoric i keep seeing all over the place.
The economy is how people survive, it is not wall street like many people seem to believe, no economy == no food. No amount of government money printing will solve that
It's not as simple as that either. There was no option for COVID-19 to not cause problems like these, unless every nation cooperated to pretend the virus doesn't exist and sweep the deaths under the rug. As it is HoReCa sector was going to have very tough times with or without a lockdown, most of the demand for eating out would've evaporated anyway, and to the extent they didn't, you'd have that many more temporary closures as infected people were traced back to various venues. Consider also that meat processing plants weren't going through shutdowns due to being non-essential, but because they had actual outbreaks on-site.
Economics isn't Wall Street, and we've learned it's impossible to do a clean split between essential and non-essential businesses, as the connections upstream in the supply chain are convoluted and non-obvious (and often enough, companies themselves don't have visibility into their own chains). But that doesn't mean we would be better off pretending the pandemic isn't happening, and just enduring the cost in lives.
>> Consider also that meat processing plants weren't going through shutdowns due to being non-essential, but because they had actual outbreaks on-site.
Yes but much of this could have been mitigated by an actual mitigation plan not this failed policy of "stay at home" and attempting to arbitrarily define essential and non-essential.
You know things like Mask wearing that was advised against by the government and "The Experts"™ we are all suppose to surrender our lives to
>>we've learned it's impossible to do a clean split between essential and non-essential businesses
That is because every business is essential to the people that own, work, and consume goods / sevices from those business. The idea that the government is the best entity to to choose what is and is not essential is just asinine on its face
>>But that doesn't mean we would be better off pretending the pandemic isn't happening
the number of people saying that is statically 0, sure you have some nut cases that CNN and MSNBC love to parade out on the nightly news as an example of the "average person" that is agaist the lock down orders, but in reality there are more people like me that are using logic and reason to see through the emotional panic and fear that is at the core of the lock down orders to see how irrational and ineffective they really are. We are also advocating for actual mitigation that is proportional to the risk that this virus poses based on actual data, and revision of those plans as new data comes in
In Feb and march based on the data at that time the lockdowns made sense. As we have learned more about how it spreads, who is at risk, what can be done to mitigate the spread and about 100 other things complete shutdowns make less and less sense outside of a few high dense area's of population.
It's like an invisible fire. If you can't see the fire the best you can do is isolate the flammable materials from each other. Once we can see the fire we can be more sophisticated in how we fight it.
The problem is that our economy is not as resilient to a pandemic as we would hope. Centralization of meat supply was economically desirable in a perfect world that doesn't contain e.g. Covid-19. However, since the world does contain that virus (and many others!) it behooves us to arrange our economic systems is ways that are resilient to viral pandemics.
Unless and until we can develop rapid identification and mediation technology mass international travel is a thing of the past. Covid-19 isn't the only virus in the world. In computer terms, our "attack surface" is too large.
I'm a proponent of applied ecology (Permaculture, et. al.) but not a virologist or epidemiologist, I like to think that a biomemetic agriculture would be both more humane and safer. (FWIW) I think we will have to create a kind of "cellular" society.
> As laborers for the Big Four meatpackers fall ill, small slaughterhouses see unprecedented demand.
> From 1990 to 2016, the U.S. lost more than 1800 livestock slaughterhouses, 40% of the industry. As small slaughterhouses closed, the so-called “Big Four” meatpacking companies — Tyson, Cargill, JBS and National Beef — came to dominate the industry. Today, these four companies process more than 80% of beef in the U.S.
There it is: optimization of one metric to the detriment of others, resulting in overfitting, and exposed during a pandemic to rare-but-predictable crisis, it falls over.
To anyone reading this thread and thinking "The horror!":
Being culled through these various methods is no better or worse than they would have experienced under "normal" conditions - i.e. being raised until they are fit for slaughter and sale. No animal wants to die, and the methods used to kill them when being sold are just as cruel as the "culling" techniques listed here [1].
If you don't like what you're reading in this article, go vegan. Otherwise, you're paying for other people to inflict this sort of suffering on animals.
Thank you. In the spirit of full disclosure, I'm not successful in following a 100% vegan diet myself.
I still get fried chicken with my significant other (who follows a normal Western diet) sometimes, as a guilty comfort food when I'm struggling mentally or especially stressed.
I still eat mayonnaise and margarine when I'm visiting my parents, because I don't want to hassle them to buy the vegan variants just for me, and I decide that I am willing to use those products occasionally, knowing the suffering that went into them.
Very few people are 100% perfect in following their chosen diet - vegan, vegetarian, keto, weight-loss, etc. The important part is to try your best, and bear in mind the consequences of what you're consuming.
I would disagree with that point of view, I see no respect for the animals in a modern factory farming process - which produces the vast majority of animal products consumed in the Western world (see the documentary I linked in my original comment).
One can eat meat without contributing to excessive cruelty to animals. In contrast to large meat corporations, there are local farmers that do care about the methods used to slaughter their animals.
Yes animals must be killed to be eaten. But "this sort of suffering" is not a necessity.
Sure, but no animal wants to die. No matter how you kill it, you're still harming it.
> there are local farmers that do care about the methods used to slaughter their animals
The problem is that farms like that are exceedingly rare, and I think that their existence is mostly used as a mental cop-out to avoid feeling bad about the animal products one consumes.
By exceedingly rare, I mean that factory farms produce (in the USA) [1]:
* 99.9% of meat chickens
* 97% of egg-laying hens
* 99% of turkeys
* 95% of pigs
* 78% of cattle
I've also make a bunch of points relating to the natural lifespans of animals, the issues with modern breeds, and whitewashing of animal farming practices in my other comment [2]. If animals were to be raised for their products (meat, eggs, dairy, wool) in ways that do not contribute any excess cruelty to their lives - i.e. letting them live out most of their natural lives, giving them space, good food, loving care, and not raising modern breeds that suffer from their over-engineering - I would expect said products to cost an order of magnitude more than what you typically find at the grocery store these days. Odds are your "free-range" eggs that cost 30% more than the cheapest ones aren't it.
If you want to consume animal products, go ahead. But, face the consequences of your diet, and acknowledge what you are paying others to do - without imagining the magical "cruelty-free" farm. That was the point of my post: that while in theory you can have wonderful farms with happy animals, in practice they don't exist.
I'd agree with you here, these animals already exist and I think it's extremely sad that their lives will have been entirely for waste.
The point of my original comment was that in the vast majority of cases, the way they are being treated right now - i.e. culled with these various methods - is par for the course for the modern animal products industry.
That said, I hope you give your hens a good home, and if you do I applaud you. Despite trying my best to maintain a vegan diet right now, I would love to one day raise (heritage breed, that lay infrequently) hens in my backyard - assuming I have one, as a city-dweller.
We cull the very sick (because vets by and large don't know about chickens, and entering the vets cost about 3 times the cost of the chicken) and the roosters (because you really only need one per flock).
Other than that, they have space outside to roam, and we even have some "freeloaders" - hens that have become too old to lay, but we keep them on anyway.
People should be aware of the facts. That said, in general, slaughter methods involve less suffering than all of us are likely to experience at our deaths, and likewise less than animals in nature generally experience.
That's no reason not to try to improve slaughter methods (and emergency culling methods).
Also, I've eaten vegan for a few years. I don't anymore, but it's worth doing, just as an experience.
> slaughter methods involve less suffering than all of us are likely to experience at our deaths, and likewise less than animals in nature generally experience
Sure, but that says nothing about the suffering these animals experience during their (short [1]) lives, which is typically immense [2] - >=97% of farm animals are raised on factory farms (except for cows, at 78%) [3]. So yes, people should be aware of the facts.
Out of curiosity, why did you shift away from a vegan diet?
It was a variety of factors. I lived in a very meat-eating city, and just finding sufficiently vegan things to eat was a real chore. And I missed it quite a bit, both personally, and as a social activity.
Also, upon (even more) lengthy consideration, the ethical considerations seemed less compelling. Having children, for example, seems far more unethical than eating meat, etc. Obviously, opinions vary.
Fair enough, I know that even in a city with lots of vegan options I sometimes miss the option of just throwing a pork chop in a pan and serving it with some steamed veggies and rice.
Personally, I'm not so much concerned about the means of culling. I'm much more horrified that those animals die for nothing. They could be slaughtered and sold for food and there are many people who would appreciate that food, especially if it was sold at cut price. But they're just destroyed because that's the only profitable thing to do.
This is wasteful and it is the wastefulness of it that turns the killing of animals that were going to die anyway into an atrocity.
This is the breakdown of capitalism as a resource-routing mechanism. On the one hand, a vital resource with much needed demand. On the other hand, someone having to throw that resource away at a cost. I'm pretty sure people starving would volunteer to take animals away, but after the whole process was optimized to the cents before the crisis, there is just no room for flexibility during the crisis.
This isn't capitalism. Capitalism would mean that instead of culling these animals, The farms would be able to butcher and sell the resources to people nearby and far.
But instead, They're prohibited from doing so by hundreds if not thousands of laws.
This is more like Corporate-Capitalism, or Crony-Capitalism, or I don't even know. But it's not just Capitalism.
I'm not sure whether it's capitalism at fault here, or not. For example, the EU is far from a communist utopia but so far I haven't heard anything about farm animals being culled over here. That's certainly not because we lack industrial farming. I don't pretend to understand how industrial farming processes work and I wouldn't be surprised if the same news surfaces about the EU soon, but so far that's not been on the radar. So it's still possible that two capitalist economies can manage their resources in different ways.
To be honest I think we should also challenge the assumption that capitalism is incompatible with sustainable production. For example, wikipedia tells me that "Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit". I think most people living in the West today would not consider private ownership and operation of the means of production to be directly responsible for, e.g. the destruction of the environment, or atrocities like the currently discussed cull of farm animals in the US. Different processes seem to be at play here. But I don't exactly have the knowledge to discuss this issue at depth.
Edit: I'm 100% with you on the exasperation with the situation, whaterver caused it. It makes me want to pull my hair out just to think about it. People are starving and animals are being culled instead of being slaughtered to feed them. Because profit margins. That is the absolute pinnacle of stupidity.
This is a good opportunity to read up on the balance of livestock to wild animals in terms of sheer numbers and have a good think about what this means.
(And in case someone thinks I'm a vegan here to lecture: last night's dinner was Boeuf Bourgignon cooked for 5 hours)
I'm guessing they mean that the population of livestock is orders of magnitude greater than the population of wild (mammals and birds) animals on this planet. I forget the exact figures and am lazy to Google them, but I remember that cows, pigs, and chickens far outnumber even the population of people on this planet.
I've seen various estimates over the years as well as various ways of measuring this. I think that the most useful is to look at the resource draw, which roughly is about biomass.
I didn't post any numbers on purpose because I don't believe in just throwing out numbers that require a lot of context. I was being sincere when I said that "This is a good opportunity to read up...". One should spend some time trying to understand our footprint.
But yes, our food completely dominates the picture. Many places in the world most mammalian wildlife is little more than a footnote.
If this comes as a surprise to anyone, this makes me a bit upset and worried.
Yes, not the OP but Beef Bourguignon is a beef stew braised in red wine, often red Burgundy, and beef stock, generally flavoured with carrots, onions, garlic, and a bouquet garni, and garnished with pearl onions, mushrooms, and bacon.
> A graph in which one square equals 1,000,000 tons. Dark grey squares represent humans, light gray represent our pets and livestock, and green squares represent wild animals. The squares are arranged in a roughly round shape, with clusters for each type of animal. Animals represented: Humans, cattle, pigs, goats (39 squares), sheep, horses (29 squares), elephants (1 square). There are other small, unlabeled clusters also. It is clear that humans and our pets & livestock outweigh wild animals by at least a factor of 10.
I was reading Carl Sagan’s “Dragons of Eden” years ago and realized that while humans may have intellect, emotionally we’re very similar to other animals. Then I had the thought: when it comes to being slaughtered, what’s worse; having an intellect, or having emotion? I know that if I were subjected to confinement and ultimately slaughter, it would be my emotional response — not my intellect — which would define my experience.
The universe eats itself and I’m not really qualified to make a moral judgement on killing animals for food — I’m particularly loathe to make black and white judgements. But, I’m able to eat a mostly vegan diet, and so that’s what I do.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 190 ms ] threadThere's a lovely book called Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal that I think every American who eats food or votes should read.
and processing comes before transportation concerns right
"Drawing upon 40 years' experience as an ecological farmer and marketer, Joel Salatin explains with humor and passion why Americans do not have the freedom to choose the food they purchase and eat. From child labor regulations to food inspection, bureaucrats provide themselves sole discretion over what food is available in the local marketplace. Their system favors industrial, global corporate food systems and discourages community-based food commerce, resulting in homogenized selection, mediocre quality, and exposure to non-organic farming practices. Salatin's expert insight explains why local food is expensive and difficult to find and will illuminate for the reader a deeper understanding of the industrial food complex."
from https://www.bookdepository.com/Everything-I-Want-Do-is-Illeg... makes me think, given the implied negatives of child labor regulations and food inspection, that anyone reading that book should follow up with a quick read of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, the same way that I found Oliver Twist a useful tonic after my first exposure to Atlas Shrugged.
It's amazing how quickly you assume that the way those laws apply to Joel's farm is reasonable, or that what Joel is doing is the sort of thing the public were interested in interfering with when they supported those laws.
Your reflex to defend the application of laws by their title is why no matter how much stink is made by people who actually read the US PATRIOT or EARN IT act for example, or any number of other brilliantly-framed pieces of legislation, there is always a gallery of opinionated people who will gladly judge a book by its cover with no less certainty, and with even more smug self-importance, than they would by its content.
If it has never occurred to you: not everyone impacted by the law is a crook.
As an example, allow me to clarify some matters that might not be apparent to someone approaching English as a second language.
Firstly, child labor regulations and food inspection are not the titles of laws, they are classes of laws; this is why they are in lowercase instead of capitalized like the USA PATRIOT Act. So you see, it was not defending the application of laws by their title but instead by their category, an easy mistake to make and you shouldn't be embarrassed about it but I thought it should really be corrected. After all it is nice to be able to understand the difference, as subtle as it is.
Also as you will note I slightly corrected the actual title of the USA PATRIOT Act because, while also a minor quibble there are all sorts of jerks out there who will take up any arguable point and make it cause for battle! Especially when combined with the "who actually read the" bit right before.
Another thing that has probably escaped you, not having a first hand familiarity with American culture is the little nuances of the blurb talking about child labor regulations etc. Perhaps it is unintentional but there are political forces in the U.S that would like to get rid of these and other classes of laws that exist to restrict some things that businesses might otherwise like to do, like having children work in factories and selling food that has been made in unsanitary conditions, and so when I see marketing for something that seems to argue against these classes of law I worry that the book being marketed actually argues against them - I suppose you can see why that might be, right?
Anyway, as I haven't read the book, which you pointed out, I can't really say if it is like I suppose when I read the marketing for it, but as I said the marketing "makes me think" it is, if it shouldn't make me think that then the marketing is bad marketing but if it should make me think that it means that the book hopes to get people who are predisposed to side with those political forces to buy the book. Perhaps the book might even be so written as to even more convince people that these classes of regulation are a bad thing and for this reason I suggested anyone reading the book should read another book called the Jungle which was an initial cause in getting at least the food inspection class of laws passed.
So the upshot of that bit of nuance was I was not actually judging the book by it's cover, which seemed pleasant enough, but by it's marketing which perhaps only incidentally implies the book is harmful in some way. Of course I was only being facetious when I suggested anyone read The Jungle because I don't think it was actually that good but I just meant that the people who subscribe to the theories that those classes of law are bad things seem to labor under some sort of ahistoricity and as that is a lack of knowledge it would be nice if the lack could be rectified somehow.
Finally when you say "there is always a gallery of opinionated people who will gladly judge a book by its cover with no less certainty, and with even more smug self-importance, than they would by its content." oh boy, don't I know it! It really does seem some days that even the most passing and light-hearted of comments will bring some pretentious little martinet out of the woodwork, taking personal affront, and wanting to start a battle over it all.
This is really why I wrote this overly long reply to correct some of what you wrote, as admirable as it otherwise might have been, because I would hope to keep you from being drawn into a confrontation with one of these combative types, who, as I noted before, seem intent on getting the smallest mistake or deliberate misreading as a tool to spitefully attack your character.
on edit: minor grammatical fixes.
Thank you for contributing your ridicule of ESL people, and then using that ridicule, as though you had trouble reading what was written, to say something smug about the medium of somebody's argument.
> ...I was not actually judging the book by it's cover...
By the way, since we're in the mood for making fun of people over insignificant matters of syntax, the "its" in "judging a book by its cover" isn't supposed to have an apostrophe in it.
Now I could be charitable, and notice that if you wrote this on an Android phone, it could just be that GBoard was doing that thing where it inserts an apostrophe that you didn't type; but I'll adjust to your standards here and just take it as a sign that you're illiterate, which I guess explains why you stick to reading a book's blurb, and the cover more generally, rather than the content.
> not having a first hand familiarity with American culture is the little nuances of the blurb talking about child labor regulations etc
Dude, I'm American. It's not that your insinuations are too subtle, it's that they're unfounded, given the actual content of the book.
> Perhaps it is unintentional but there are political forces in the U.S that would like to get rid of these and other classes of laws that exist to restrict some things that businesses might otherwise like to do, like having children work in factories and selling food that has been made in unsanitary conditions, and so when I see marketing for something that seems to argue against these classes of law I worry that the book being marketed actually argues against them - I suppose you can see why that might be, right?
Still here impugning the guy's motives, and talking down to me as though you're the only one here who is aware of broad U.S. political themes, with zero knowledge of the actual content of the book, judging it by the blurb... the thing that goes on the cover; you know, judging a book by its cover.
> ...the people who subscribe to the theories that those classes of law are bad things seem to labor under some sort of ahistoricity and as that is a lack of knowledge it would be nice if the lack could be rectified somehow.
If you're so concerned about lack of knowledge, why don't you just read the book? It's about eight bucks on Kindle, it's not that long; maybe your nearest municipal library is open again and you can check it out there when you make your no-doubt-frequent trip. Replace your ignorance and smugness with information and.. well probably you'll keep the smugness, but at least you'll know what you're talking about. :+ )
> This is really why I wrote this overly long reply to correct some of what you wrote, as admirable as it otherwise might have been, because I would hope to keep you from being drawn into a confrontation with one of these combative types, who, as I noted before, seem intent on getting the smallest mistake or deliberate misreading as a tool to spitefully attack your character.
Well we wouldn't want to go attacking anyone's character; for example by insinuating that their primary political motivation is to exploit vulnerable children for hard labour and produce unsanitary food to save money in a manner similar to the fictional characters of a novel about a child born in a 19th century British workhouse. We especially wouldn't want to do that by comparing a piece of mid 20th century philosophical allegory written for a broad audience, a fictional novel; to the genuine account of an independent farmer attempting to sell products that his customers are informed about a...
Actually it was more ridicule of you; I realize you didn't like my tone but I didn't like yours as well, normally I wouldn't have replied but character is situational and I'm in a bad enough mood the last week to respond. I believe the phrase tit for tat may apply here.
>insignificant matters of syntax
I think use of it's instead of its is grammatical not syntactical, but I may be wrong on that.
>a sign that you're illiterate
I never said you were illiterate, I implied that you did not seem to know certain things and used the conceit that you were a non-native speaker of the language and that this was the cause of you not knowing these things. I could have also attacked your moral character, as you started in with me on.
>judging it by the blurb... the thing that goes on the cover; you know, judging a book by its cover.
As I understand blurb it means "a short description of a book, film, or other product written for promotional purposes." I just saw the text on the website you linked to describing the book, I was unaware the same text was on the cover - if it is - but I guess if the book tells me it is a book about vampires I will judge the book to be about vampires until I open it up and read it is about the psychology of people who actually believe vampires exist. Blurbs exist to tell you what a book is about, you seem to think that this blurb has done a bad job doing that for me and it is somehow my fault for pointing it out.
Why don't you do just send an email to them and tell them "hey fix your blurb" since you have the knowledge of what the book is actually about, and you know that I took it badly, and you evidently are aware of what the trends are in American Politics that people might assume those phrases were about.
>If you're so concerned about lack of knowledge, why don't you just read the book? It's about eight bucks on Kindle,
Yeah, despite you being the best ever possible salesperson for the book, what with your attacking me for pointing out a bit of questionable marketing, I'm not paying to read a book that seems to be marketed to people I am ideologically opposed to, especially when I point out the dodgy marketing somebody on HN pops up and starts lecturing me about the US PATRIOT ACT (sic), I mean come on, those were some pretty dog-whistely terms there, and you could have gone with something like "well I understand your concern but it's really not like that, you should give it a try because it shows how even the best of intentions can get you bogged down with bureaucracy" but instead it's all you're stupid and bad and then finally it's buy the book it will make you a better person?
>well probably you'll keep the smugness
you really seem to very concerned about smugness, in your first post you went into "and with even more smug self-importance" and now again with the smugness - I don't really know what more to say about it other than when I read your first attack based on my pointing out problems in the blurb, and your second attack here based on my retaliation, and your about which has the following "In the current harsh/repressive political climate, you can be accosted for publicly engaging a wrongthinker." for communicating with you too much I have to say... I just don't think I'm that smug.
If you're in such a foul mood, don't let it make you write reams of nonsense. Go on Duolingo, read a book, or take it out on your text editor like the rest of us.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think we should go even farther with our euphemisms and call it "harvesting a resource".
I love meat, even though I consider killing animals unethical, which makes me a hypocrite. Still, I think the least we can do is call the process "killing an animal".
Also, ethics aside, the comment above was referring specifically to processing, not the act of killing. Killing is comparatively fast and far less messy. Butchering/processing a 300lb carcass is where the real effort lies.
I would hope that everyone understands that creating a final meat product involves killing, but we shouldn't trivialize the process requirements just to drive an emotional point home.
I haven't done larger animals from the killing but have butchered large cuts of meat. It is a time-consuming process while being physically tiring.
There is a also cost to not doing it but your analysis implies that we shouldn't care about it, because it's not a cost accounted for by industrial practice.
You'd have to find people willing to take them, transporting them, slaughter them, and distribute the meat.
We are talking about slaughtering and butchering millions of animals in a non-factory setting, not practical. On top of that transporting animals and/meat at that scale is not cheap or easy.
This sort of operation is very difficult to do on an ad hoc/emergency basis.
If an organization would just pick up any unwanted animals on demand, I'm sure the farmers would be happy to hand them over.
Though I honestly wish there was a more humane alternative to culling.
These industrial farms don't have room to spare for animals that aren't wanted.
I wish there was some kind of park or nature reserve or somewhere that they could be sent to live out their lives in peace instead of the culling. Or if such places already exist, laws that mandate that they be sent there.
Releasing large quantities of animals to nature is both anti-ecological and inhumane, as it results in destruction of that ecosystem, starvation, cannibalism, etc. Like the horrible aftermath of the cases when activists have "freed" animals from fur farms, resulting in them dying within weeks but also taking all the local wildlife (e.g. nesting birds) with them. You can successfully do a controlled release of a limited number of animals given proper preparation. But if we're talking about releasing large numbers quickly, culling is much more humane than that that.
Life on industrial farms sounds terrible, for sure, but death in nature is also terrible, to the point that I'm not sure it's a mercy to "set them free".
EDIT: Downvote to your heart's content! Truth is not decided by consensus. What I said is true, even if you don't like it.
Make a rational argument to convince others, dont call names and avoid points you don't want to discuss, it just makes you look like a troll, and gives vegans/vegetarians a bad look by proxy.
You have consistently avoided the fact that people eat meat (whether or not you like it or agree with it, you dont get to choose for other people), that animals in the wild have far less 'humane' deaths, in the wild, ie starvation and disease, etc.
I agree this is a problem that needs a solution, but I don't see you giving one other than 'stop eating meat, morons'.
Where did I avoid the fact that people eat meat? And where did I avoid the fact that there are rough deaths in the wild? I addressed it specifically with "let's focus on the suffering that is CAUSED by us."
Stop eating meat is the recommendation because that is the simple solution. That is the rational argument. There is no ethical way to eat meat. I've seen zero counter arguments to that point. How can there be more of a solution? Yes there are logistics involved in getting there but that is the simple and clear solution. Accepting that is step 1, logistics of doing it is step 2. What more do you need than a simple solution?
It's also interesting that you accuse me of avoiding points then write an entire response that completely ignores the factually accurate points I have made.
What you wrote was "I'm not sure if you're purposely being silly or what". Also, you called the other poster a "moron".
I see your account is relatively new so here is a link to the HN guidelines:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please have a read. They will help you have a civilised discussion on HN and you will be better able to get your point across. For example, the reason your post above was flagged to death was because of its aggressive and personal tone, not because of the opinion you express that is also held and expressed by many other posters on HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23236141
It says:
>> "Or we just don't eat meat..... no that's too crazy! Moron"
That is not an acceptable mode of communication on HN. The flagging has nothing to do with any "echo chamber", except perhaps for the echo chamber that reverberates with the opinion that calling your interlocutor a moron is just not on in this forum.
Drowning doesn't seem viable.
A bullet to the head (or a bolt gun, or whatever) is probably the fastest way to remove sensation from neural tissue for large farm animals. The shock wave takes milliseconds to turn brains to soup.
Do you have a citation for this? Everything I've seen would suggest to me it's categorically less humane than using an inert gas like nitrogen or helium in the absence of oxygen.
it's so far the least-worst option: we know there are issues, but the alternatives to date so far have been worse, including inert gases.
The point of the scene is that you lose any faculties long before any unpleasantness or damage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiEJKvbpOF0
If I'm wrong, and this is completely irrelevant to the discussion, just try to enjoy seeing a Tory bought to the brink of oblivion [satire]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5605172/
Does anyone have further insight on this?
(CO2 buildup, on the other hand, is inherently distressing, though the AVMA doc suggests that pigs would become unconscious in about two minutes, under proper conditions.)
Thanks for the link.
(When you need to extract Argon, you have about 100x as much N2 and O2 as a by-product.)
Given that we allow the state to execute people -- a dubious proposition in the first place -- i don't understand why we don't just push a shitton of phenobarb and xanax or whatever. "an anaesthetic overdose" is pretty darn humane if we're willing to accept the premise that anaesthetic "work" by "decoupling consciousness". Scare quotes intentional here, because we genuinely don't know how anaesthetic work but we broadly agree that when you've taken a lot of them you don't feel any pain.
(agree strongly with the dubiousnes)
edit: http://www.jpe.ox.ac.uk/papers/consistent-vegetarianism-and-...
Ethical consequentialist vegetarians believe that farmed animals have lives that are worse than non-existence. In this paper, I sketch out an argument that wild animals have worse lives than farmed animals, and that consistent vegetarians should therefore reduce the number of wild animals as a top priority.
We then do indeed kill wild animals so that their populations don't explode due to a lack of predators - in Canada and the US you typically need a "tag" to hunt wild animals, basically a ticket that allows you to kill X number of a specific species.
These tags are distributed in limited numbers, and extensive work goes into surveying populations of wild animals to distribute the right number of tags. Proceeds from selling tags go to conservation efforts, including the surveying efforts previously mentioned.
As someone trying their hardest to follow a vegan diet, I fully support hunting wild animals for food and population control. However, that situation is worlds removed from animals that are bred for the sole purpose of being raised and slaughtered in factory farms.
EDIT: to rip off another comment in this chain - the issue of hunting wild animals is orthogonal to the issue of factory farming. i.e., the two issues have little to do with each other and you cannot/should not use one as moral justification for the other.
I'm not a fan of factory farming, but I don't agree that hunting and raising farm animals are orthogonal issues. My own views are more complicated than I care to get into here, but I think it boils down to - 1) Is it always wrong to kill animals for food? and 2) Would those animals rather exist than not, prior to dying?
I think the answers to those questions are no (or else we have to declare eg lions immoral) and yes (assuming the conditions they live in aren't absolutely horrific, which also leads me to believe that factory farming should basically go away and we should reduce our meat consumption as much as we need to to make that possible).
I try to limit my meat consumption and find meat that I believe has been raised ethically, but I don't believe veganism is required (though I totally respect those beliefs!)
What burst my bubble on that idea, however, and really gave me the urge to strive towards a vegan diet, was just how completely implausible that image is. Even if your meat comes from "ethical" sources, I have three big issues:
1. Animals are typically slaughtered far short of their natural lifespans. Cows, pigs, and chickens have natural lifespans of 20, 20, and 10 years, and live 3, 2, and 0.2 years under factory farming conditions [1]. Even if the meat you're consuming comes from animals that live fantastic lives - the stereotypical image of open pastures, a "natural" diet, loving care from the farmer - those lives are almost definitely being cut short for the sake of profitability.
2. The animal products industry puts a humongous amount of effort into keeping consumers from thinking about the origins of their food. Part of this effort is whitewashing the process as much as possible. I don't feel like finding specific examples off the top of my head, but it's cases like "cage free chicken" meaning that the birds are kept in a massive, communal shed with 24/7 artificial lighting, very little cleaning, veterinary care, etc. It's very possible that even if the meat you're buying is labelled with "humane" and "ethical" terms like free-range, cage-free, etc. that those terms mean very different things than you might assume.
3. Modern livestock are bred to produce the maximum amount of product (meat, milk, eggs, wool) as possible. This leads to chickens whose legs collapse underneath them from their weight after a few months of life, cows which have chronically infected udders from the quantity of milk they produce, etc. Even if you take these breeds and raise them under "humane" conditions, they'll still have miserable lives without extensive veterinary care.
That all said, if you do indeed source your meat from sources that you have verified give their animals fantastic comfortable lives, let them live (most) of their natural lifespan before slaughter, and only raise heritage breeds that don't suffer just from being alive, then I'm all for your meat consumption - and very curious how much your meat costs!
[1] https://www.four-paws.us/campaigns-topics/topics/farm-animal...
1. I guess it doesn't bother me so much that their lives are being cut short, for the same reasons that the killing in general doesn't bother me. I would say that waiting until they're old may make the meat taste bad enough that it would be better to not bother (in which case, veganism!)
2. I agree wholeheartedly with this point. Somewhat related, we recently bought a freshly butchered duck from a small local farm and when I looked up how long we could wait before cooking it, I was shocked at how long freshly butchered meat lasts! It makes the shelf life of meat from the store seem almost disgusting, how close it is to going bad on the day you buy it. But that information has been obscured to the point that we all think raw meat is just naturally gross.
3. I also agree completely with this point, if the animal's existence is misery, then it shouldn't happen.
We really don't eat very much meat, we buy from nice, little, local farms (and that's expensive) and we raise our own meat rabbits and try to give them as much room and freedom as we can while making sure they don't get disease from the wild rabbits in our area. I decided a while ago that I wouldn't eat meat if I wasn't willing to do at least some of the slaughtering myself. It felt too important to outsource completely.
And it may sound weird, but the slaughtering itself has made me appreciate nature way more, and really changed my relationship with death, in that I see death less as a horrible thing that happens and more as part of a cycle whereby nutrients are redistributed and renewal is allowed to occur. We happen to live long enough that lots of things will die while we live, and it's easy to forget that we'll die and something will consume us, too, even if it's just a microbe or a plant.
And factory farming is way more... extractive? It feels like it doesn't allow for the redistribution and renewal, the same way that mono-culture farming on a massive scale can leach away nutrients and destroy biodiversity.
> but the slaughtering itself has made me appreciate nature way more
Sounds like we're mostly on the same page then :)
Say you hit a deer with your car and break its hind legs. The chances you can nurse it back to health are very slim. Not least because the deer is likely to have a stress-induced response to being handled by humans that will adversely affects it chance of survival. And if the deer survives this, you are going to face a long list of further hurdles. From avoiding starvation, dehydration to avoiding infection. And eventually you would need to reintroduce the animal to the wild.
How much are you willing to pay for a deer you've hit to have its hind legs repaired and put in a cast? How much are you willing to pay a professional to nurse it back to health. Because to be frank: if you haven't taken care of a deer before, you are pretty likely to kill it. And the deer is going to be frightened and miserable the whole time.
So how much are you willing pay to keep a deer you have hit alive? $10.000? $20.000? More? What's your cutoff? Would you sell your car?
I've seen people spend that kind of money on pets. And it isn't always pretty when people squeeze more life out of a suffering pet for their own sake.
Now, if you chopped someone's arm off the chances of survival (depending on circumstance) and the willingness of someone to pay for it would usually be quite different.
There are 4 main ways an animal dies “naturally” in the wild:
1) slow starvation due to lack of food/winter
2) slow starvation due to being injured or a health issue
3) slow, painful starvation due to being maimed by a predator
4) being violently eaten alive by a predator
Any of the “killed by a human” options are far more humane.
They exist. The question is what to do with them in the most humane way possible.
Unless your solution is time travel?
It appears this is one of the topics HN cannot discuss rationally.
How do you feel about mercy killings? If you find a deer in the woods that's got a gangrenous leg and is laying on the ground, I would argue that it is my obligation -- my moral responsibility -- to cut its throat or pith it, if I can.
We are part of nature. We constitute "letting nature take its course", and those options are a whole lot better than getting eaten alive by a coyote.
If they can use CO2 they should be able to use CO or Nitrogen. Both of these cause a completely painless death in mammals. It was shown in a BBC documentary called How to Kill a Human. The topic was how to execute prisoners for the purpose of capital punishment, but the effects of Nitrogen were shown on a pig. It was completely oblivious to anything happening and voluntarily subjected itself to more Nitrogen after losing consciousness.
How can you argue it did anything voluntarily if it was not conscious?
I'd think it was merely subjected to more nitrogen because it was unable to move away, no?
This comment thread assumes the omnipotent entity (aliens) exists, and so you'd be taking a coin flip as to what behaviour they find pleasing. Pascal's Wager resolves to:
(infinite gain * non-zero probability of success) > (finite gain * non-zero probability of failure)
While this situation is more like:
(infinite gain * non-zero probability of success) ~= (infinite gain * non-zero probability of failure).
- Obviously kind of sentient or intelligent, but
- Totally uninterested in communication.
- Recognize others only as resources to consume for reproduction.
- No other goals, just blind reproduction/consumption
- Remake the environment into our own image, no other life forms can live there. (our cities look like scabs or disease crust from orbit.)
- Violent, invasive, destructive, pointless.
So why don't they "take off and nuke the entire site from orbit?" Because that's human-thinking, it literally wouldn't occur to non-human sentients because they're not sick. Instead we're just quarantined (that's the answer to the Fermi Paradox) and they study us and hope for the best. The Martians evacuated Mars when they realized Sir Percival Lowell could see them.
You should read (if you haven't) The State of the Art by Iain M. Banks, particularly the eponymous novella. Summary from the wikipedia page:
"The State of the Art"
At 100 pages long, the title novella makes up the bulk of the book. The novella chronicles a Culture mission to Earth in the late 1970s, and also serves as a prequel of sorts to Use of Weapons by featuring two of that novel's characters, Diziet Sma and the drone Skaffen-Amtiskaw. Here, Sma argues for contact with Earth, to try to fix the mess the human species has made of it; another Culture citizen, Linter, goes native, choosing to renounce his Culture body enhancements so as to be more like the locals; and Li, who is a Star Trek fan, argues that the whole "incontestably neurotic and clinically insane species" should be eradicated with a micro black hole. The ship Arbitrary has ideas, and a sense of humour, of its own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_State_of_the_ArtI've read a couple of Iain Banks' books but he doesn't quite gel for me somehow. These days I don't read fiction because it can't compete with reality. ;-)
It turns out you need an economy to fight the virus.
All these knock on effects will be great learnings. Probably will turn out that future policy will be a local function of population density, public transportation usage, etc.
The economy is how people survive, it is not wall street like many people seem to believe, no economy == no food. No amount of government money printing will solve that
Economics isn't Wall Street, and we've learned it's impossible to do a clean split between essential and non-essential businesses, as the connections upstream in the supply chain are convoluted and non-obvious (and often enough, companies themselves don't have visibility into their own chains). But that doesn't mean we would be better off pretending the pandemic isn't happening, and just enduring the cost in lives.
Yes but much of this could have been mitigated by an actual mitigation plan not this failed policy of "stay at home" and attempting to arbitrarily define essential and non-essential.
You know things like Mask wearing that was advised against by the government and "The Experts"™ we are all suppose to surrender our lives to
>>we've learned it's impossible to do a clean split between essential and non-essential businesses
That is because every business is essential to the people that own, work, and consume goods / sevices from those business. The idea that the government is the best entity to to choose what is and is not essential is just asinine on its face
>>But that doesn't mean we would be better off pretending the pandemic isn't happening
the number of people saying that is statically 0, sure you have some nut cases that CNN and MSNBC love to parade out on the nightly news as an example of the "average person" that is agaist the lock down orders, but in reality there are more people like me that are using logic and reason to see through the emotional panic and fear that is at the core of the lock down orders to see how irrational and ineffective they really are. We are also advocating for actual mitigation that is proportional to the risk that this virus poses based on actual data, and revision of those plans as new data comes in
In Feb and march based on the data at that time the lockdowns made sense. As we have learned more about how it spreads, who is at risk, what can be done to mitigate the spread and about 100 other things complete shutdowns make less and less sense outside of a few high dense area's of population.
Unless and until we can develop rapid identification and mediation technology mass international travel is a thing of the past. Covid-19 isn't the only virus in the world. In computer terms, our "attack surface" is too large.
I'm a proponent of applied ecology (Permaculture, et. al.) but not a virologist or epidemiologist, I like to think that a biomemetic agriculture would be both more humane and safer. (FWIW) I think we will have to create a kind of "cellular" society.
https://www.hcn.org/articles/covid-19-will-covid-19-help-sav...
"Will COVID-19 help save small slaughterhouses?"
> As laborers for the Big Four meatpackers fall ill, small slaughterhouses see unprecedented demand.
> From 1990 to 2016, the U.S. lost more than 1800 livestock slaughterhouses, 40% of the industry. As small slaughterhouses closed, the so-called “Big Four” meatpacking companies — Tyson, Cargill, JBS and National Beef — came to dominate the industry. Today, these four companies process more than 80% of beef in the U.S.
There it is: optimization of one metric to the detriment of others, resulting in overfitting, and exposed during a pandemic to rare-but-predictable crisis, it falls over.
Being culled through these various methods is no better or worse than they would have experienced under "normal" conditions - i.e. being raised until they are fit for slaughter and sale. No animal wants to die, and the methods used to kill them when being sold are just as cruel as the "culling" techniques listed here [1].
If you don't like what you're reading in this article, go vegan. Otherwise, you're paying for other people to inflict this sort of suffering on animals.
[1] Dominion (2018): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko
I still get fried chicken with my significant other (who follows a normal Western diet) sometimes, as a guilty comfort food when I'm struggling mentally or especially stressed.
I still eat mayonnaise and margarine when I'm visiting my parents, because I don't want to hassle them to buy the vegan variants just for me, and I decide that I am willing to use those products occasionally, knowing the suffering that went into them.
Very few people are 100% perfect in following their chosen diet - vegan, vegetarian, keto, weight-loss, etc. The important part is to try your best, and bear in mind the consequences of what you're consuming.
One can eat meat without contributing to excessive cruelty to animals. In contrast to large meat corporations, there are local farmers that do care about the methods used to slaughter their animals.
Yes animals must be killed to be eaten. But "this sort of suffering" is not a necessity.
Sure, but no animal wants to die. No matter how you kill it, you're still harming it.
> there are local farmers that do care about the methods used to slaughter their animals
The problem is that farms like that are exceedingly rare, and I think that their existence is mostly used as a mental cop-out to avoid feeling bad about the animal products one consumes.
By exceedingly rare, I mean that factory farms produce (in the USA) [1]:
* 99.9% of meat chickens
* 97% of egg-laying hens
* 99% of turkeys
* 95% of pigs
* 78% of cattle
I've also make a bunch of points relating to the natural lifespans of animals, the issues with modern breeds, and whitewashing of animal farming practices in my other comment [2]. If animals were to be raised for their products (meat, eggs, dairy, wool) in ways that do not contribute any excess cruelty to their lives - i.e. letting them live out most of their natural lives, giving them space, good food, loving care, and not raising modern breeds that suffer from their over-engineering - I would expect said products to cost an order of magnitude more than what you typically find at the grocery store these days. Odds are your "free-range" eggs that cost 30% more than the cheapest ones aren't it.
If you want to consume animal products, go ahead. But, face the consequences of your diet, and acknowledge what you are paying others to do - without imagining the magical "cruelty-free" farm. That was the point of my post: that while in theory you can have wonderful farms with happy animals, in practice they don't exist.
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/its-time-to-end-factory-f_b_1...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23237599
Since we're pretending to speak on their behalf, I posit no animal wants to not live either.
By going vegan, you are not merely sparing some animals, you are denying their very existence.
Is a miserable short life, ending in painful death, worse than no life at all?
(rhetorical, pretty sure there's no universal answer)
Since I've kept hens, it's strange but I've been a lot more "respectful" towards eggs. It's almost like they're a gift from the chicken.
I think it is sad that animals die to feed us (even though I eat meat), but for an animals meat to be wasted is a tragedy.
The point of my original comment was that in the vast majority of cases, the way they are being treated right now - i.e. culled with these various methods - is par for the course for the modern animal products industry.
That said, I hope you give your hens a good home, and if you do I applaud you. Despite trying my best to maintain a vegan diet right now, I would love to one day raise (heritage breed, that lay infrequently) hens in my backyard - assuming I have one, as a city-dweller.
Other than that, they have space outside to roam, and we even have some "freeloaders" - hens that have become too old to lay, but we keep them on anyway.
That's no reason not to try to improve slaughter methods (and emergency culling methods).
Also, I've eaten vegan for a few years. I don't anymore, but it's worth doing, just as an experience.
Sure, but that says nothing about the suffering these animals experience during their (short [1]) lives, which is typically immense [2] - >=97% of farm animals are raised on factory farms (except for cows, at 78%) [3]. So yes, people should be aware of the facts.
Out of curiosity, why did you shift away from a vegan diet?
[1] https://www.four-paws.us/campaigns-topics/topics/farm-animal...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko
[3] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/its-time-to-end-factory-f_b_1...
You’re moving the goalposts.
Also, upon (even more) lengthy consideration, the ethical considerations seemed less compelling. Having children, for example, seems far more unethical than eating meat, etc. Obviously, opinions vary.
This is wasteful and it is the wastefulness of it that turns the killing of animals that were going to die anyway into an atrocity.
But instead, They're prohibited from doing so by hundreds if not thousands of laws.
This is more like Corporate-Capitalism, or Crony-Capitalism, or I don't even know. But it's not just Capitalism.
To be honest I think we should also challenge the assumption that capitalism is incompatible with sustainable production. For example, wikipedia tells me that "Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit". I think most people living in the West today would not consider private ownership and operation of the means of production to be directly responsible for, e.g. the destruction of the environment, or atrocities like the currently discussed cull of farm animals in the US. Different processes seem to be at play here. But I don't exactly have the knowledge to discuss this issue at depth.
Edit: I'm 100% with you on the exasperation with the situation, whaterver caused it. It makes me want to pull my hair out just to think about it. People are starving and animals are being culled instead of being slaughtered to feed them. Because profit margins. That is the absolute pinnacle of stupidity.
(And in case someone thinks I'm a vegan here to lecture: last night's dinner was Boeuf Bourgignon cooked for 5 hours)
I didn't post any numbers on purpose because I don't believe in just throwing out numbers that require a lot of context. I was being sincere when I said that "This is a good opportunity to read up...". One should spend some time trying to understand our footprint.
But yes, our food completely dominates the picture. Many places in the world most mammalian wildlife is little more than a footnote.
If this comes as a surprise to anyone, this makes me a bit upset and worried.
> Earth's LAND MAMMALS By Weight
> A graph in which one square equals 1,000,000 tons. Dark grey squares represent humans, light gray represent our pets and livestock, and green squares represent wild animals. The squares are arranged in a roughly round shape, with clusters for each type of animal. Animals represented: Humans, cattle, pigs, goats (39 squares), sheep, horses (29 squares), elephants (1 square). There are other small, unlabeled clusters also. It is clear that humans and our pets & livestock outweigh wild animals by at least a factor of 10.
The universe eats itself and I’m not really qualified to make a moral judgement on killing animals for food — I’m particularly loathe to make black and white judgements. But, I’m able to eat a mostly vegan diet, and so that’s what I do.