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- cross-posted to:
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Last year, I wrote a great deal about the rise of “ventilation shutdown plus” (VSD+), a method being used to mass kill poultry birds on factory farms by sealing off the airflow inside barns and pumping in extreme heat using industrial-scale heaters, so that the animals die of heatstroke over the course of hours. It is one of the worst forms of cruelty being inflicted on animals in the US food system — the equivalent of roasting animals to death — and it’s been used to kill tens of millions of poultry birds during the current avian flu outbreak.
As of this summer, the most recent period for which data is available, more than 49 million birds, or over 80 percent of the depopulated total, were killed in culls that used VSD+ either alone or in combination with other methods, according to an analysis of USDA data by Gwendolen Reyes-Illg, a veterinary adviser to the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), an animal advocacy nonprofit. These mass killings, or “depopulations,” in the industry’s jargon, are paid for with public dollars through a USDA program that compensates livestock farmers for their losses.
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Just pump nitrogen in the sealed pens. The animal doesn’t panic due to perceived oxygen deprivation. They just get sleepy and die.
Hell it would be the way I’d want to go if I was sick with terminal cancer. Cheap, easy, and painless.
I imagine that would be pretty difficult to do in a chicken coop. These are barns made out of corrugated steel and generally aren’t even remotely air tight. You will, ultimately, need about 10x the nitrogen you would otherwise need, and that’s if it even works.
So a special coop would need to be built for this purpose.
Chicken farmers are some of the poorest farmers in the country. They generally don’t have the means to build a special kill shed to humanely euthanize their flock. They barely have the means to keep up with Tyson and Perdue’s ridiculous bullshit.
So, while I agree, heat stroke is a fucking awful way to kill these animals, the issue isn’t just “there’s a humane method bro, just build a kill house bro”
The issue is, we are paying FAR too little for chicken, and most meat, honestly.
If you have millions of chickens to kill, you’re not so poor of a farmer that be you can’t afford to come up with a humane method to do this job.
There are several documentaries on this topic, but they don’t have a lot of authority over how many chickens they buy. They’re dictated a flock size, they pay for it, and then they pay to feed and raise them, then they sell them back to the people they bought the chicks from. Inevitably every year the chicken processor, whoever it may be, makes additional demands that they also have to pay out of pocket for.
I’m not justifying their actions, I’m saying they are stuck between two masters and they have no room to wiggle.
Out of complete ignorance - do Purdue or Tyson even run their own hatcheries/coops?
No.
It’s cheaper to out source it this way because as their farmers are contractors they don’t have to adhere to the legal responsibilities they would if they ran them in their own.
They can keep their contracted farmers in debt to them indefinitely and essentially have a class of indentured servants.
I have learned more in this discussion about chicken farming than I ever thought I would.
Sometimes I just love the internet.
Welcome to the Internet, come and take a seat.
I thought that was the case. They probably own the IP rights to the breed too, so they keep the money circulating within their own pockets
You’re not wrong and nuance is often the bane of rationality. I didn’t say it was an easy solution just a more humane one.
Why would anyone get into chicken farming if it makes you one of the poorest farmers in the country? Are they stupid?
Why do people work fast food jobs if they don’t pay a living wage?
You’re blaming the poor for being poor. If you care so strongly about this, you should start financially supporting poultry farmers to change vocations.
They probably don’t have the land needed for beef or pork would be my guess.
I imagine there are a handful of ways to do it besides “long, slow heat stroke”
I imagine the long, slow, painful, heat stroke method is the cheapest, thus the suffering is capitalist-approved!
We are getting that heat stroke thing thrown back to us soon lol
Us: pumping heat into the atmosphere.
Mother earth: oh you guys cold? Don’t worry, I got you fam!
Doesn’t sound as cheap as running the heater for a few hours.
Think of the power/gas savings!
Carbon monoxide would be cheaper. We used it for euthanizing animals that couldn’t be saved at the wildlife rehab center I worked at. Though, it was done with sealed induction box, not a drafty barn like someone mentioned
Sounds like it would be more expensive? Nitrogen is incredibly cheap to concentrate out of the air, 70% of what we breath is nitrogen after all.
Monoxide is incredibly cheap to produce with a crappy farm truck or old tractor. You doing need to distill or concentrate anything, just a hose and the exhaust pipe and a couple hours of fuel for idling.
We used it to gas a nest of rats that had settled in under a grain bin floor. Only a couple rats popped out and they were dazed, the dogs quickly snacked them up. The rest expired rapidly.
A chicken barn is big and drafty but you could just use multiple tractors or detune them on purpose. Any engine running rich produces a lot of CO.
Nitrogen is expensive and these buildings aren’t airtight
These are engineering problems. The point is it’s way more humane than dying in a sweat lodge.
Eh, the atmosphere is 70% nitrogen, making liquid nitrogen is basically just a suped up AC.
There are also various methods of simply filtering the nitrogen out of the air. Having on site machines doesn’t seem too bad.
Those big coops are not anything close to airtight. Heat, however, doesn’t require it to be airtight.
wouldnt that be more expensive than just cutting off the ventilation? on top of paying for disposal afterwards & whatnot?
Disposal of what? The air we breathe is 75% nitrogen. The chickens are already going to have be disposed of.
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Or… and this is crazy… not kill them?
They are already dead. (Infected) Better to kill then now and not risk even more birds life.
Or… and this is crazy… not cram thousands of them together in such a tiny area. Then disease wouldn’t spread so rapidly.
No ❤
This is specifically talking about mitigation for highly pathogenic avian influenza. HPAI kills chickens fairly quickly, so to contain the spread and minimize the risk of zoonotic spread to people, they kill every bird on every property that it’s detected on.
This is one of those situations where no one thinks it’s a great solution, it’s just a pragmatic one that minimizes the risk towards workers while quickly depopulating the barn. The problem is that this is one of the cheapest and least humane ways to depopulate a barn, and shouldn’t be allowed. We should insist that barns allow humane depopulation, or at least less inhumane methods.
Or, and I know this sounds even craizer… not farm them and stop this from happening to begin with?
And then do what with them?
Crazy how you can’t think past this. Maybe not factory farm them? Shocker, I know.
Nah mate, I can totally think past it, but think past the problem doesn’t solve it.
The one today? No, but the one tomorrow? Yes
Keep moving the goal posts where ever you need to do you can sleep at night babe.
Interesting that you say that, projecting maybe?
Yeah we shouldn’t, but we did, so we are stuck having to do shit like this now. And shamefully it’s not going to change anytime soon. Corporate interests essentially control the country now to a degree that they haven’t since the late 19th century. Especially in the farming industry.
So you want to pay $50 for a McDonald’s chicken sandwich? I don’t think it’s right. These chickens are bred to be oversized and grow fast. They get so big that they can barely move. Full of antibiotics so they don’t get infected from sitting in their own leavings.
I am really hoping for lab grown meat personally.
And since you may have missed it, these chickens are all female. There are technically ways to determine sex before they hatch but if you really want to get upset Google ‘Chick Grinder’. It’s as horrible as it sounds so maybe don’t Google it.
That being said, I don’t want to pay for $50 chickens as much as I don’t want to pay for $2,000 iPhones because that’s what having them made without slave/child labor would probably cost…
Ugh
I was reading that Europeans actually found a way to sex the egg so they don’t hatch the male eggs, thus negating the need to destroy male chicks. I’m guessing the technology costs money so it’s unlikely that US factory farms would use it. Probably easier to kill the with the grinder.
I think it’s kind of a false dichotomy, between spending a lower amount of money (i.e. being poor), and being ethical. I think there’s a lot more we could take issue with, on how society is structured, than accept this false dichotomy. There’s a better universe out there where instead of having to use paper straws, we all just switch to biodegradable, and it is incentivized that people use metal straws. Same shit with this. There’s a universe out there where we eat less meat, where this meat is more sustainably sourced and is locally sourced, which cuts down on logistics, and where, as a result, we don’t have to pay 50 bucks for a frankly pretty gross chicken sandwich.
Capitalism is a race to the bottom. Maximum profit/gain and minimal loss.
Not to overly malign chicken sandwiches, but the point of capitalism is to charge the maximum that the market will bear while paying the least to extract it. And morals have nothing to do with capitalism. Even if it was mandated to have humane farming we would have a boutique pampered chicken sandwich (until they’re mechanically separated in 35 seconds) and foreign-sourced bleached chicken.
Anyway I prefer the tortured beef from Burger King.
Capitalism is a race to the bottom.
Yeah. I agree. I was kind of more on the side that we should maybe not have a race to the bottom, if you can see what I’m getting at
edit: sorry if that didn’t come across in my comment, I tend to not want to label every single thing as “capitalism is the problem bro!” because that puts people off, but then I kind of struggle with tiptoeing around the phrasing.
Jeez, either you are great at walking the line between idiotic and good sarcasm or you are not
Love them
I do love them, fried and slathered in buffalo sauce.
Let them recover from the sickness?
You seem to be vastly overestimating the general health of factory farmed poultry.
Crazy how you can’t think past this. Maybe not factory farm them? Shocker, I know.
Crazy how you went on repeat, can you not think past this argument?
If it aint broke dont fix it
I’m addressing that they’re factory farmed birds so they probably won’t get better, which makes your statement a bad idea. Don’t just move the goalpost if you want to discuss stopping factory farming because I never indicated I was wanting to talk about that.
And how is that going to happen in a coupe with 200,000 packed into it?
Crazy how you can’t think past this. Maybe not factory farm them? Shocker, I know.
We really need some humanitarian regulation in this country.
You can hope for that or you can become vegan today to no longer contribute to those industries.
I already eat very little meat just through personal preference. I think that is a reasonable way to go for the average person. Not everybody has to be vegan; they just need to consume a small amount of meat if they’re going to consume it at all.
Not contributing isn’t enough honestly. There are not enough meat alternatives, and there are way too many people unwilling to give up meat.
This. There’s people out there who would sooner commit cannibalism than give up meat.
That would mean less profits for the people that run the country.
Hello aliens I’m a vegan and condemn this bullshit
I’m not and I condemn this bullshit.
“capitalism is more effective than alternatives”
Capitalism showing why it is more effective :
Lmao how does this have more upvotes than the one you’re replying to.
Because vegans are annoying AF?
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So you’ll put your money where your mouth is and stop buying chicken then right? That’s how condemnation works.
No it’s not, you’re confusing condemnation with boycott
I raise my own chickens. I love them very much. Some of them get eaten. I am very grateful to those. You don’t have to be a vegan to be a good person.
In their eyes you do.
Also a backyard chicken owner. My ladies live well
You don’t necessarily have to be vegan to be a good person. I’m sure your chickens wouldn’t miss an egg or two every once in a while. It is pretty fucked up to claim that you love them, but also kill and eat them sometimes. Like, I love my cat, and because of that the idea of putting her dead body in my mouth makes me feel sick.
“I love my chickens so much that I kill and eat them sometimes”
Remind me not to let you watch my dogs
Wow. I’m really fucking floored by y’all’s response. Where do you think your food comes from man? Seriously. I’m not being ugly, like you are, im trying to understand how you feel like you have less impact than I do. I am just able to take the responsibility for my own food
My food comes primarily from farms. I’m not saying I necessarily have less of an impact on anything than you, all I’m saying is that I don’t kill animals for food and I don’t pay for them to be killed.
You mocked me, man. It only hurts in the super small space that internet strangers can reach but it exists, regardless of how small. So. Bullshit.
Where the fuck do you think meat comes from? Farms.
Do you kill them?
Yes. I do. I have a separate small flock. I feed my family a proportion of our food over half that I grow, rise, and make myself. It would be impossible with out the protein from the chickens. And before anyone says some dumb shit to me, you do the math of your monoculture grown vegan food and if you still think my overall footprint is greater than yours, you are wrong.
That must be really hard on you. I’ve killed animals before and that’s why I know I never want to be part of that and I never want to make anyone else do that for me. I know the statistics, people who kill animals are more likely to abuse drugs, self harm, hurt others, and commit suicide. When you kill animals you kill part of yourself. You have to, because our human instincts make us empathize with animals.
That’s why I’m vegan. I don’t pretend like consumer choices are going to save the environment - nothing either of us do as individuals matters on that front. I’m vegan because someone has to kill those animals and it fucks people up. Maybe you’re fine. I doubt it.
Seek help.
You are an insane person and a coward. You buy your food at a supermarket and are not able to comprehend the impact of your precious soy. As a matter of fact, your not even on my level really. You are probably a child. If you ever need help, call me.
what would you think of a backyard farm where chickens are only killed once they’re dead? or, are only basically killed when they would otherwise die from old age in the next, say, 2 months, to just put a random number on it? would only be killed when they are diseased, have cancer etc. Cause we already do that with people a good amount of the time, assisted suicide, hospice, whatever.
also what do you think of if we just ate like old people
I get my chicken (and beef) from small, local neighboring farms, directly. I don’t see the problem?
If your question is genuine, these small farms you speak of are still breeding animals with intent to slaughter them. At the end of the day, the only meaningful difference with a small farm is that you can probably shake the hand of the person who needlessly killed an animal. Can’t get that at those big mean factory farms, that’s for sure.
intent to slaughter them
Assuming that’s the intent is an asshole move. What if the primary intent is to extract nutrition from land that is otherwise unproductive?
Is it not the intent? A farmer generally isn’t going to raise an animal for fun. That wouldn’t be profitable, and small farms are already difficult to make a living on.
I can entertain the idea that I could walk up to a farmer and ask them what their intent is, and they reply, “why it’s to extract nutrition from land that is otherwise unproductive, of course!”. But the end result is the same in either case regardless of stated intent: animals are being killed unnecessarily.
To be clear, none of this applies to people who rely on animal products to survive (e.g. people in the unproductive land you mentioned). I’m talking about people like myself (and likely many others here) who have access to supermarkets and other products of a globalized food system. Like Uncle Ben said, with great
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Land has more value than economic activity, such as natural habitat and biodiversity and recreation (all things farmers destroy lol)
And yet, you couldn’t resist the temptation to be aggressive and further turn off people to the idea of going meat free, vs trying to kindly convince them.
These sort of vegan evangelists have no idea the damage they do to their cause.
That’s hilarious, people have no sense of personal responsibility whatsoever. Just look at COVID.
They use the argument that one person not eating meat won’t change anything. Ignoring the fact that they are literally deriving joy from suffering. It doesn’t have to be this way. I truly believe meat can be ethical, but when 99.8% of beef is factory farmed I do not have the option to ethically eat meat.
17 years meat free and every once in awhile I reconsider adding chicken to my diet. Then I see a post like this lol
I think ethical meat can only truly exist in theory (though with cell culture meat I suspect that that will change).
Anyway, I just wanted to say 17 years is a long time. Thanks for walking the talk. Not many people do.
Some of us instead reduce consumption and buy expensive meat products which are locally and humanely raised.
Still, eating meat in today’s society is a choice you don’t have to make. Having a pleasant taste in your mouth on one hand versus climate warming, loss of biodiversity and animal cruelty. Even when locally grown. For me, the choice is not hard to make.
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You do understand you’re not doing your cause any favours by being a fundamentalist right?
“I hate cruelty to animals” buys animal products at the grocery store
This is such a common phenomenon that it has a name: cognitive dissonance. If you already knew what that was, then your comment suggests another example of it.
They’re not mutually exclusive. There’s plenty of ways to buy ethically sourced meat. Local butchers often buy pigs, chickens, and cows to butcher and cut for consumers near me. The cows typically have a central barn where they have clean bedding and recycling water troughs, get fed every morning (maybe night), and are allowed to freely roam in a pasture whenever they please.
I eat about the size of my palm of meat every day, so over the corse of a year i probably eat 5-6 chickens, a sixth of a pig, and an eight of a cow. At those numbers, it’s totally possible to make ethically sourced meat work as a business.
A substantial percentage of people have access to food systems that allow them to thrive on plants alone, freeing them from a dependence on animal products. For these individuals, is ‘ethically sourced meat’ even possible? That is to say: if we know that killing a living being is unnecessary, is it ethical to do it anyway?
It’s an interesting question that probably has an individualized answer depending on who you ask. In my opinion, we have afforded their species comforts that no other species has. So a humane death and respectful use of their body is ethical in my eyes. Most wild animals die from infection or starvation and we’ve protected our domesticated animals from that horrible drawn out death on ethical farms.
The “ethical” food typically cost more – what if they can’t afford it? Would you give them financial aid, or does your preaching stop at words?
The only ethically sourced meat is meat that’s hunted to prevent overpopulation. There is no ethical way to make two animals breed with the intent to cut their offspring’s life short so that you can eat it.
I hate capitalism, I still spend money
I can exist within society and still be critical of it, quite frankly I’m not sure how else one exists.
You’re aware of how we treat produce pickers right? How we treat the people who sew your clothes together? Or the people who assembled the device you’re reading this on?
Cruelty to life exists at every level. If you’ve ever eaten chocolate, or had coffee you’ve participated in slavery.
A vegan that can’t resist antagonizing others over their diet is being rather counterproductive. It’s an easier lifestyle choice to keep your mouth shut and not be snarky than it is to completely change your diet.
It begs the question, if this person criticizing me can’t make an easier lifestyle change than what they want me to do, why should I even listen?
(And I’m going to get replies that completely miss the point and continue to moralize at me)
Most vegans can’t keep up the lifestyle more than about 5-7 years, as health issues start to creep in.
The diet isn’t as nutritious as they claim, and there is no good replacement for animal fat and protein.
The meat industry has problems. Don’t get me wrong. But they’re not at the same scale most vegans will tell you they are, and as it happens herbivores are much better at turning plants in to energy than we are. Plus it’s not like we’re treating the actual humans picking tomatoes much better than we treat cattle.
Gonna cite these stats or are you just parroting Joe Rogan? Obviously there’s a large amount of gastronomic variation among humans, some people can’t go vegan easily. But the idea meat has anything you can’t get from plants is absolutely a myth: I eat dark chocolate and nuts for iron, and B12 is in all sorts of shit from mushrooms to potatoes (and is easy to supplement with vitamin water or fortified cereal if not pills). And protein? Protein is the textbook example of this. Y’all just have some weird thing against broccoli and chickpeas.
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If humans don’t commit suicide first through war or environmental abuse, I truly believe that future generations will look back on eating meat as a barbaric mistake. They’ll tell stories about how we caused epidemics and pandemics, wasted valuable resources and land, polluted air, land, and sea, and abided the suffering of billions of animals, all so we could feed our children dinosaur shaped meat nuggets and buy cheap hamburgers that we were too lazy to even get out of our cars to purchase.
“And then, even as global warming spiraled out of control, they wasted arable land and dwindling water supplies on subsidized corn to feed to the subsidized beef and poultry stock. The ones that didn’t get culled or recalled or spoil before even hitting a plate contributed to a dietary culture of heart disease. Also, the animals regularly suffered immensely, which they were aware of but preferred not to consider.”
future generations will look back on eating meat as a barbaric mistake
Primates, including humans, evolved to be omnivorous. In the 200,000 year history of the homo sapiens species, only the most recent 3% have had the benefit of agriculture. Even then, only 0.1% have had the benefit of the industrial revolution which could in theory provide enough calories and nutrients for all humans with a purely herbivorous diet.
So what? We evolved to thrive on a wide variety of diets. I don’t judge my homo erectus ancestors for doing what they needed to survive. It’s fairly apparent that the person you’re replying to is referring to modern society’s obsession with producing as much meat as we do, not the concept of eating meat as a whole.
It’s fairly apparent that the person you’re replying to is referring to modern society’s obsession with producing as much meat as we do, not the concept of eating meat as a whole.
Complete and utter bullshit. Don’t move goalposts because you don’t want to concede a point. They explicitly said:
I truly believe that future generations will look back on eating meat as a barbaric mistake
That doesn’t even remotely imply there is a quantity of meat consumption that is morally acceptable.
Right, they explicitly said that, and then in the literal next fucking sentence they explicitly said
They’ll tell stories about how we caused epidemics and pandemics, wasted valuable resources and land, polluted air, land, and sea, and abided the suffering of billions of animals, all so we could feed our children dinosaur shaped meat nuggets and buy cheap hamburgers that we were too lazy to even get out of our cars to purchase.
It sounds like what they are describing is modern society’s obsession with producing as much meat as we do
It’s me; I’m the person. I will clarify my stance. But focusing on my individual personal motivations and disregarding my overarching observations seems a little goal post manipulatey too. Even if my personal motivations fail to meet your scrutiny, the facts I present still remain: we are harming our planet, we are harming animals, and we are harming ourselves by eating meat. Which seems counterproductive at best and ripe for improvement. We can and should advance beyond this unnecessary and harmful indulgence. At the very least, we should consume a very small fraction of what we currently do.
Though I am a vegetarian, I used to eat meat. I acknowledge that it’s delicious, and I miss it sometimes. But I don’t eat it because I’ve determined that it would be logically inconsistent of me to do so.
In a vacuum I don’t think the “wrongest” part about meat is the moral/ethical implications of killing an animal to eat it. But I’m not talking about subsistence meat consumption here. Because that’s not how we eat meat on a human race scale anymore. We churn it out at disgusting scale. Imparting suffering and pollution into the world. We eat it primarily because we like it. And we eat too much of it because we are gluttonous. If your uncle shoots a buck with his bow and arrow, and make some summer sausage of it, I’m not really perturbed by that. I don’t love it, but I’m fine with it. Now, if your uncle gasses 10,000 chickens too fat and atrophied to stand, and heaps them into a pile and burns them, because the flock has an outbreak that exists solely due to our habitual over crowding of hellish enclosures, now we’ve got problems.
That being said, my personal chief concern is environmental. The scale at which we produce meat, and the methods we use to produce it, are completely untenable and are inconsistent with continued life on this planet. In 50 years we will have another 3 billion or so people on the planet, and we’re already operating way beyond our means with our current population. We need to change our habits or die.
My third priority is health considerations. This is probably my weakest argument, because eating meat isn’t imperically unhealthy. But again, we as humans don’t just eat meat from time to time, most of us are eating it every god damned day. We’re going to a wing joint and hoovering up 15 chickens worth of wings without even thinking about it. But even if people stop packing their colons with gristle and turning their blood to paste with double bacon cheeseburgers with bacon and a fried egg, they’ll find some other garbage to eat. We don’t value healthy living in my country which is a whole nother issue beyond the meat thing.
I strongly agree on all points. In particular the inhumanity of the way animals are treated in contemporary mass ranches is troubling. DFW’s “Consider the Lobster” resonates with me.
The reason I called out the above comment is because slamming to the absolutist rails is regressive. What makes a difference isn’t going to the extremes but bringing people into the fold. It is particularly effective to highlight the issues you have and then say “you don’t need to stop eating all meat”. Most people won’t. If your points are well received then a takeaway of “choose to not eat meat more often” is much more impactful rather than “oh well nothing I can do since I am going to continue eating meat”.
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The thing about civilization is that ideally it advances. If 200k years is the sample size you wish to view, houses are fairly new. Plumbing is newer than houses. Insulation even more new. Fire safety and building regulations even more new still. Asbestos was new, and now it’s old. This is progress. To keep with this analogy, in my opinion meat will become the asbestos, the lead paint, or the knob and tube wiring, of food.
Yeah, and give it another 100 years or so, a veritable eye blink in the timeline discussed, and meat will be lab grown or replaced with something else. Essentially complaining that civilization is taking more than a generation or two to advance in specific places is mildly mind boggling, because civilization almost never moves that fast. Not everything moves at the speed of the development of powered flight, and meat has an unfathomable level of inertia being on the base of the hierarchy of needs.
That has nothing to do with what they said.
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we evolved to be capable of thriving on a wide variety of diets
”An omnivore is an animal that has the ability to eat and survive on both plant and animal matter.” - Wikipedia
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Ok, I’ll be the one to point it out.
“We didn’t evolve to be omnivorous (from Latin omnis ‘all’ and vora, from vorare ‘to eat or devour’), we evolved to be capable of thriving on a wide variety (omni) of diets (vore)”.
Just because portions of human populations do not behaviorally practice omnivorey, doesn’t mean their bodies are not omnivorous. You can feed a black or brown bear a balanced vegan diet, same with dogs, rodents, etc, and they can survive and thrive, but that doesn’t mean bears are no longer omnivores.
future
LMFAO
There will be none. Not for anything alive from here.
I don’t get how you can live with this attitude and not be suicidal. Shit’s gonna get bad, hundreds of millions of people are gonna die if we’re lucky, but to think the human race has no future? That’s past advanced pessimism
Everyone dies eventually, that’s always been the case. I don’t get why you think seeing a high chance of a particular death down the line should make people instead want death immediately. Frankly, it’s kinda pathetic that you think that’s a logical line of thought. Shit’s going to get so bad humanity might not make it, so we should all just give up?
Personally, it makes me appreciate this life even more. I might be seeing humanity’s peak, which is a pretty cool time to be alive, and maybe there won’t be many more chances to experience human life. Good or bad, that’s all this is: an experience. It might be the only one we get and will inevitably end at some point anyways, so why rush that ending?
Obviously everyone’s gonna die, but laughing at the idea that future generations won’t exist, that there is no future, just sounds miserable.
nah, I think it’s kind of a way to get rid of pessimism. it’s easier for a lot of people to conceive of humanity as just being completely dead, rather than conceiving of a humanity that persists on the face of the earth, enduring the wrath of their progenitors, condemned to a future of pain and misery for as long as the sun still burns. that scenario makes you actively, not only want to kill yourself, but maybe also [redacted] in the process, because the tradeoff seems not so bad, then. if only everyone on the earth was punished for their pride, maybe that, we could all live with, in our sort of, myopic first world “extending the guilt out to the guy in cuba or rural africa who hasn’t done shit wrong but will disproportionately be the victim of the decisions of like 5 hollow puppets at the top of power” sort of way. but of the humanity that suffers indefinitely into the future? that’s kind of harder to grapple with.
so I end up having to not really buy into either as a matter of retaining my own sanity.
I don’t do nonsense like “optimism’” or “pessimism.” I’ll stick to facts an solutions. If there be any left it would be by Richard Stallman and FOSS AI.
future
LMFAO
There will be none. Not for anything alive from here.
Where are the “facts and solutions” in this? That’s textbook pessimism. Like, googling “define pessimism” gives you “a lack of hope or confidence in the future.”
I’m not pessimistic. I know these things. I don’t fuck around with brainwashing like “optimism” either. I’ll deal with facts and you and your religious cult can fuck off with “hope.”. I’d say bullshit but mushrooms actually heal. Even the Death God won’t be back for your fucking ignorance.
Let’s stop that with prohibition. rolls eyes
Lol. “Know”.
Heh heh heh. I think we can sum up your entire persona right there.
You don’t understand that this is the exact objective of the patriarchy. Corporations and greedy are just scheme of distraction and disbelieve upon their collective suicide.
dinosaur shaped meat nuggets
You can get your animal nuggies animal free if interested. https://impossiblefoods.com/products/chicken/nuggets/wild-nuggies
I’ve had those. They’re essentially indistinguishable from regular chicken nuggets.
Because of course they are, the bar is not very high for dino nuggies.
Go vegan everyone, stand on the right side of history
Yup. And there are gonna be arguments about how “they were a product of their time,” which will be exactly as bullshit as it is today when we talk about people of the past.
The thing we can’t say is that we didn’t know better.
The meat industry is fucking sick and demented but people need their meats so animal ethics be damned…. Fucking bullshit, fucking human cancer
Take the subsidies from animal farming and give them to meat alternatives.
We will be awash in lentils!
You’d better get all your meat free-range or hunt it yourself.
Um, just not eating meat is a fairly straightforward option…
I started incorporating more meat alternatives (Beyond, Impossible, Gardein, etc) into my diet for heart health reasons, but damn, it’s starting to make me feel a little better morally as well.
Good for you for working towards eating less meat, and caring about your heart health! Meat is definitely not good for the cardiovascular system, but it’s important to keep in mind that these meat alternative products are not healthier, even though they’re plant-based. Those products should still be eaten in moderation, just as with red meats, because they’re both really high in saturated fat and sodium. They, like meat, also tend to char when cooked, and char is loaded with carcinogens and oxidants. (even though that taste can be divine…)
Anyway - for me, meat alternatives were a helpful introduction to the plant-based/vegan diet, and emboldened me to try out other plant based recipes. “Vegan” can be such a loaded term, but there are a lot of good recipes out there with the term. Search for recipes incorporating tempeh as the protein source - it’s a bit easier to cook than tofu, which often gets a bad rap for being bland when it’s usually just been cooked incorrectly (it requires some preparation/a good marinade and sauce/specific handling and patience to cook it well, but I digress). Tempeh is more forgiving, in that it carries more flavors/textures of its own, which are complimented well by many sauces.
I dunno why so many people discount hunting as a good alternative to sourcing your own meat.
Sometimes the whitetail deer populations are fucking insanely out of control because we killed off their predators like 100 years ago in some areas, and similar things happen all over because predators require larger ranges and are less able to integrate with human developments. Sort of like how we have a shit ton of crows and rats and pidgeons, and raccoons. I think it would probably make more sense to source meat from doing your part to clamp down on the populations, than the alternatives, which are predator reintroduction, which isn’t always guaranteed to work and comes with complications, as the native species are usually totally extinct, or just like. ecological collapse from overgrazing, which sucks and is bad.
This is why the core of the issue that nobody ever talks about is human overpopulation. The demented levels of factory farming we have is only a thing because 8 billion people need to be fed.
The demented level of factory farming had nothing to do with human overpopulation, but everything to do with human culture’s demand for animal products that are entirely unnecessary for survival. If we change our culture to eliminate animal products, we will eliminate a huge source of wasted resources and labor. Think of how much less plant agriculture would be required if we didn’t have to feed 33 billion chickens, almost two billion sheep, a billion and a half cattle, a billion pigs.
If we just grew food we can eat, instead of wasting land, effort, and resources both directly and indirectly supporting animal agra, we wouldn’t have such huge problems.
“But baaaaaaconnnnnn.” “I can’t liiiiiive without eeeeegggggs.” “Cheeseburgers taaaaaaaste too good give up” “it’s because there’s too many huuuuuumanssss”
Consuming meat is natural and vital for us as species.
Natural yes, vital no, as made perfectly evident by the fact vegetarians and vegans aren’t wasting away in the streets.
There are a lot of stories about malnourished vegans and even about vegans’ kids, malnourished to death.
There are similarly many stories of omnivores who have died of malnourishment. Is this a valid case against meat eating?
Similarly many stories of omnivores, who have died of malnourishment specifically because of their omnivorous diet, as vegans did?
“cOnSuMiNg MeAt Is nAtUrAl”
Setting aside the inherent ethnocentrism of this statement, which, in classic Western fashion, completely bulldozes the many cultures that have thrived on entirely plant-based diets for centuries, possibly millennia…
This is still a shit argument, when you realize that EVERYTHING humanity does aims to separate ourselves from “nature,” and move beyond what is “natural.”
If we actually lived according to nature, we wouldn’t have plastics, cell phones, cars, airplanes, air conditioning, and all the other myriad things that make our soft squishy lives easier.
But you keep chowing down on your “aLl-NaTuRaL” chicken wings and Mountain Dew, you fucking neanderthal.
You are giving mixed signals. Is separating ourselves from nature good or bad?
“cOnSuMiNg MeAt Is nAtUrAl”
Stop clowning around, please.
Though I have opinions, I will not take the bait, as it is not relevant to my point whether humans distancing themselves from nature is “good” or “bad.”
I think my signal is pretty clear - Your “it’s natural” argument fails entirely when one picks and chooses the aspects of human life to which they apply it.
As an example - you wake up in your climate controlled house, put on your synthetic fiber clothing, jump into your Ford F150 Pickup Truck, Drive to a gas station, pick up a mountain dew in a plastic bottle, and buy a slice of pizza - in all that context, your big brained argument is that it is more natural for that pizza to have animal pepperoni and dairy cheese, vs plant-based alternatives.
Tell me, who is the clown in this situation?
It’s you. You’re the clown.
Our body still is natural by all means. And omnivorous diet is natural to our body.
Natural, sure. Vital? Something like 350,000,000 Indians would like a word with you
They have chicken.
I don’t think they do, considering they’re vegetarian. Around 24% of the country consider themselves vegetarian, while about 8% consider themselves pescatarian (the ones that eat birds and fish)
And the rest 68%?
But cheeseburgers are Delicious.
Animal agriculture is very inefficient, because of tropic levels.
Looking on Wikipedia, dressed broiler chicken carcasses have a feed conversion ratio of about 4. That is to say, a 4lb whole chicken you buy from the butchers case would have required about 12 lbs of feed over its ~2 month life.
An online calorie counter says 4lb of raw whole chicken is 3856 calories. By contrast, a 1lb bag of cornmeal has ~3300 calories. 12 lbs of cornmeal have just over 10x the calories of 1 chicken.
Even comparing the differences in yield between chickpeas and corn, we get way more calories per acre from hummus than Buffalo wings.
In the US, we get 36% of our calories from animals, but use an order of magnitude more space to raise them. We grow more acreage of feed crops than crops that get directly eaten by humans. Fully 40% of the continental US is devoted to raising livestock, which is insane.
We don’t factory farm because there’s 8 billion humans to feed. We factory farm because we want “a chicken in every pot”.
”The problem that nobody ever talks about is overpopulation"
Outright untrue, in both ways. People always talk about it, and it remains not the problem. The problem is distribution, which is largely due to greed and overconsumption. The problem is that farmers breed what they can sell, and people buy so much meat just to have access to it in case they want it eventually.
I found a third way it’s incorrect: we don’t need animal farms to feed people in the first place. We could simply eat plants instead of feeding them to animals.
Why are you people booing this man? He’s right.
Because they aren’t right. People talk about overpopulation constantly. Overpopulation isn’t the problem, distribution is. We don’t need to grow animals to feed people in the first place; that turns plants into food less efficiently than just feeding the plants to people.
You know how people who eat meat are uncomfortable about animal cruelty in farms and don’t like to think about it?
It’s the same here with people who think animal lives are completely equivalent to human lives. This is the logical conclusion they don’t like to think about. If you had mass human death to correct for overpopulation, it would solve the food demand issue – and if mass human death is no different from mass animal death, then this would be the fewest deaths of living things to solve the issue.
It’s a common thread in these comments. You see people blaming poor farmers for being poor, and not considering the higher prices for meat alternatives and vitamin supplements. Factory processed food is the cheapest, and vegan meals are as far from that as possible. People will beat around the misanthropy, but they won’t look it in the face like the population issue forces them to.
It’s the same here with people who think animal lives are completely equivalent to human lives. This is the logical conclusion they don’t like to think about. If you had mass human death to correct for overpopulation, it would solve the food demand issue – and if mass human death is no different from mass animal death, then this would be the fewest deaths of living things to solve the issue.
I don’t know if that really holds up. I don’t think we’re tapped out totally in ecological terms. I’m willing to be proven wrong on that (I kind of doubt I can, alternatives are kind of under-researched as a matter of principle), but if we’re not tapped out in ecological terms, then I think the main limitation on food demand would be the level of labor available for food production. i.e. more people can provide for more people. I kind of struggle to think of a scenario in which misanthropy, or, I guess lack of it, is the problem here, and not like. Mass industrialized production. I don’t wanna say capitalism is the problem cause that seems kind of tropey, and it isn’t really accurate, but it’s certainly not helping the issue, in any case.
Getting downvoted but you are right.
Pretty much all of modern problems can be traced to overpopulation.
Oh cool, that’s completely horrifying. And not at all surprising from the meat industry. They’ve never cared about animal cruelty with anything else they do, so why would they care about this?
As an industry they necessitate not caring about cruelty, so anything they do isn’t surprising
hi frick
Fourty nine million just staggers my brain. Like, thats not even a blip in the production.
…nuts.
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If aliens do come to earth, and simply enslave us, torture us then kill us for reasons we can’t comprehend, there should be absolutely no question whether we deserve it or not. They would be doing what we do to other sentient creatures en masse. We have the intelligence and ability to simply not kill these animals in a fashion that is sadistic and agonizing(im not even saying not to kill them, just do it humanely, bare minimum), yet we do it anyway because of greed and capitalist profit motives, cutting costs, etc.
Yes please. End this horrorshow
They would be doing what we do to other sentient creatures en masse.
Chickens are sentient?
Yes, they are sentient. Sentience should not be confused with sapience.
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I see this sentiment a lot regarding eating meat. I think a lot of people don’t realize how much these animals suffer.
Just look at your dog anytime you eat pork. Remember that that animal you’re eating is smarter than your dog. That pig used to play with its siblings, have love for its mother, and eventually live in complete terror before it is killed. People love to make fun of Asian societies for eating dogs when it is exactly the same as eating a pig.
That little bit of joy you gained from eating pork came at the cost of unfathomable suffering.
There is no excuse in 2023, I’ve been building muscle for the first time in my life and doing it on a vegetarian diet.Vegetarian diet or vegan diet?
Vegetarian, no dairy though because casein intolerance
There is evidence that plants may be sentient. How should we handle that consideration?
Conjecture isn’t evidence. Plants lack both the means to have thoughts and the reason to evolve those means in the first place. They react to stimuli in the same way my phone does. Should I be as worried that I’m hurting my phone by not charging it as I am that I’m hurting my cat by not feeding her?
Or is the entire premise stupid in the first place and we should stop wasting everyone’s time with it?
Also, if plant suffering is a concern, you should definitely be vegan, because trophic levels are a thing, and every calorie worth of meat you eat is 10 calories worth of plants that had to die.
Oh my god I’ve had this conversation more times than I can count.
Robots can react to stimulus too, are they sentient? No
Plants are biological machines devoid of the capacity suffering, as far as we know. There is no evidence that plants grieve the loss of their young or fear for their lives.
You know when people say “there’s no such thing as a stupid question”?
I like veganism because it forces meat-eaters to eat their own shit and perform mental gymnastics that make them worthy of an Olympic gold medal to avoid admitting their contribution to the problem.
Really shows the cognitive dissonance among average people. And they’re proud of it, lol.
Eat shit, die, get in my belly!
I sometimes hope for aliens to come to this planet and treat us like we treat other living beings.
Humanity is such a poor excuse for civilisation
Humans are fucking disgusting. If you zoom out far enough we are just a bacterial infection of the Earth. Spreading our gray cities like bacteria in a petri dish. Growth for the sake of growth is the mentality of a cancer cell.
Well Earth is about to pitch a fever to fight us off…
It’s the “mentality” of most everything. We just have the ability to reflect upon it and, perhaps, change it.
Fun fact: this Joe Rogan rant from 2011 you plagiarized wasn’t even written by him.
I don’t know what rants you’re talking about. This is not a new idea and I did not frame it as a new idea. Maybe stop living your life in podcasts, that is wild that you memorized a quote from 12 years ago
maybe one of the big filters for intelligent life in the universe is greed
The ferengi agree.
I’m looking forward to alien’s selectively breeding us for pets like we do dogs.
It would be a trip to see how many dwarf albinos end up running around
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It’s like normal ventilation shutdown but allows 4K streaming to 3 devices.
But only on approved devices, otherwise it’s 480p
With a mouse at the controls…
When regular old chicken suffocation won’t do, get VSD+!
Ventilation shutdown is just what it sounds like.
VSD+ is something like VSD + CO2 or VSD + heat, where they add a little something to speed things along just a little bit.
Firefighting foam is full of PFAS that tends to pollute groundwater. The last thing we need is more uses for it.
Heaven forbid you actually vaccinate your livestock.There isn’t really a vaccine. One is being trialed but it is not available. The reason they are so extreme with this is that in affected birds they have about a 99% chance of dieing within 48 hours of infection. Waterfowl can carry it for longer but are still susceptible to death, they seem to be the major infection vector. HPAI highly contagious (highly pathonogenic avian influenza is the name), a bird brushing up on another is enough to spread it, due to birds cleaning their feathers with their mouths. So if a poultry farm tests positive they want to quarantine it ASAP so a sparrow doesn’t spread it to neighbors and wild populations.
Today I learned. Here’s hoping they have a vaccine soon.
And, setting up an entire culling operation, which would have to include transporting the birds, and contaminating another facility and several semi trailers, and staff, not to mention other wildlife is a huge risk. Shutting the windows and turning up the heat is probably the safest and quickest way to do things in this situation
Truly heartbreaking… No words💔
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Culling animals is never compassionate, but it must be done.
Why use a method that’s illegal most other places? The description is pretty insane sounding.
They never answer the question
Why is it illegal? I suppose in this instance you contain the birds in a barn that might be deseased and withdraw their oxygen. Probably the cleanest way to do it.
Right. So why are they normalizing this method? It’s illegal because it’s so cruel, that’s like the entire point of the article lol
They used to drive cattle into a pit and shoot them until they were all dead. Like I said at the outset, it’s always cruel.
I fail to see how shooting something in the head is the same as hours of torture. There are reasons we have animal welfare standards.
You think they were head shots? That’s funny,
This is equivalent of leaving a child in a hot car in cruelty.
But it’s not a child. It’s an animal that must be killed to stop the spread of disease.
What if a kid had an incurable spreadable disease? Throw them in the hot summer car?
Let me make it simple. It has nothing to do with a child. It’s about the food you eat and if you want any more of it.
Okay, so only cannibals can lock their children in hot cars?
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Did you know that humans are animals? We are not some sort of godly being separated from nature, we came from it and we are a part of it.
You noticed that no one in here is arguing that these diseased animals should be kept alive, right? Your argument is in bad faith and it’s clear you barely thought about it before typing.
Our problem is with how it is done, euthanasia is supposed to be humane and fast. This is an extremely slow and painful process in which the chicken is subjected to extreme distress needlessly. Just to save a few bucks.
They could have at least incapacitated the birds first. They didn’t need to be awake for their brutal slow death.
Did you know that humans are animals? We are not some sort of godly being separated from nature, we came from it and we are a part of it.
Great, so you have no issues with people eating meat then? Since animals also eat meat, and humans are animals?
Yep! I have no problem with a human eating meat. Nice try tho
My only problem lies with the manner in which we obtain that meat.
I have the utmost respect for hunters, they actually earned their meat.
I have no respect for people who buy factory farmed meat in a grocery store. There is nothing natural about that.Calm down and have your mom make you some more tendies
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Sometimes yes, farmers do have to cull animals. All of the farmers I’ve met try to do it in a quick way at least, like cutting off the head of a chicken or a cattle gun to knock the animal out first.
Cutting off the heads of a thousand diseased chickens would take a bit of time, don’t you think?
Yes but at least it’s more humane than cooking the animals for hours
Culling isn’t humane. Culling is a necessity. Farmers and ranchers don’t like to cull, they lose money doing it. You give them a cleaner and cheaper way to do it, and they’ll do that. Culling prevents disease from spreading into the entire food system. Sitting on your couch and deciding the best tactic to do it is ridiculous.
So profit is the motivation. Huh.
Sigh. The reason that you cull is a transmittable disease is present within a group of livestock. That livestock can not be eaten, so you take it out of the food supply before it infects other groups. Not so hard to understand is it?
They could have just not made the chickens in the first place
Then it wouldn’t need to be done
Gawd. That doesn’t make a lick of sense
