we kill 3T animals a year for food/medicine/clothing/etc. Maybe we should stop?
edit: sorry, that was quite extreme of me to suggest we don’t kill 3T animals a year.
I’m going to go brutally murder and deep-fry my dog just to cancel out whatever grass you ate today, you extremist vegoon! something something lions something desert island grumble grumble muh canines
Hope that serves as a warning the next time you feel like
expressing an opinion that differs from minebeing preachy.Look I get you but
points at fangs
Canines though
^ Vampire! Run for your lives!!!
Look I get you but points at gums I need dentures
not sure what the edit is for… you looking to be disagreed with? are there comments I can’t see?
I was merely pointing out that people call people extremists for not eating animals, but they don’t recognise that killing TRILLIONS of animals a year is extreme.
I just don’t think you have anything to apologize for. so why apologize?
it was a joke.
Do ypu have a source for that 4 trillion?
it changes depends on the source. this quotes 1.2T per year. It’s in the trillions anyway.
There are too many cultural factors involved to get a majority of people to stop eating meat.
The best way to reduce the number of livestock killed is to reduce the number of humans.
You can shift culture, at least slowly. I think our best shot at significantly reducing animals killed is probably investing more into lab-grown meat
If you’re worried about cultural factors, you might find removing any significant percentage of the total population will likely run into even more implacable “cultural factors” than meat reduction would.
This is regardless of the method of population reduction, save perhaps “slow decline” which seems to be promising atm, but that obviously has the downside that it’ll take a few generations to really have an impact.
I’m not suggesting a method to reduce population its just an observation that there are simply too many people for basically anything to be sustainable.
It’s not though, seeing that a very large proportion of the world’s population get by, and that about 1/3rd of all food produced for human consumption is wasted each year. (Checked the UN source it’s 19% of food that makes it to people, and 13% of food pre-end point in the supply chain).
And this is without starting to consider the energy inefficiency of feeding livestock to feed to humans.
Also an awful lot of the world gets by with much less than US or much of Western Europe does. There’s a long way between our surplus of food and food insecurity.
Food is only one factor, and no one has the right to dictate the diet of others. Food is a core part of culture, and destruction of culture is one of the definitions of genocide.
Housing, transport, pollution, these are all problems at such collosal scales given the size of the human population that it simply isn’t sustainable.
The sooner that humanity returns to a more sustainable population the better.
There’s a long way between our surplus of food and food insecurity.
Food insecurity is mostly a logistics problem when examined globally. There is no solving that without an increase in energy usage.
But there’s about enough housing for everyone too… Just that it’s of houses are sitting empty across Europe, North America, and China.
And lots of the food wasted in those places (minus China) is imported from places with less food security, such as Brazil, India, and Morocco.
So it’s almost like the energy use and infrastructure is already part of the problem and solving it would take less.My point is that Malthusian was never correct, and the problems are ones of distribution. Not number of humans. (And Malthusian worries tend towards genocide naturally, that they’ve been shown consistently to be wrong should make them doubly suspect.)
Fair, we certainly won’t see any perfect or even good solutions given human nature and the large population, but I do think we can achieve mediocre success if we really work hard
I don’t think a single vegan is expecting animal exploitation to completely end in their lifetime. This will require a cultural shift that could take so fucking long. Despite that, we all think it is worth doing and being a part of.
I mean okay
Source?
Im gonna go out on a limb and say this is udder cowshit. Rats are mammals, as are raccoons, squirrels, and whole fucking masses of little basically unfarmable varmints. You’re telling me that there’s like 12 farm cows for every wild rat on earth?
Horse. Shit.
The source apperently takes the percentages by biomass, not by count as it seems. So small varmints will not have as much of an impact as a human or cow would.
in the comments section. straight up ‘sourcing it’. and by ‘it’, haha, well. let’s justr say. My pnas.
Which I think is intentionally disingenuous as it massively favours the large mammals over the far higher number of species of smaller mammals.
For example you’d need over 70 squeal monkeys to make to the biomass of an average American.
Humans and other great apes can be considered mega fauna, so it doesn’t seem surprising that us and the animals we consume make up a higher percentage of bio mass. Were bigger.
I don’t think it’s disingenuous. It represents the total share of resource consumption. If something has 2x the biomass, it consumed 2x the materials needed to produce that biomass (purely in terms of the makeup of the body, that is)
I don’t think count by itself is very relevant. There’s more bacteria in a glass of water than there are humans in a country, but what does that tell you, exactly?
Although I do agree the infographic should be changed to specify biomass
It would be MUCH more than 2x resource consumption, because every action that animal takes requires greater energy to move it around. The energy required to sustain larger lifeforms is significantly greater than the proportion of their mass.
Not necessarily, many small animals have an utterly insane metabolism making them eat their entire body mass in a couple of days. For example, hummingbirds eat the human equivalent of 150,000 calories per day.
Larger animals typically cannot afford to spend so much energy - there is just no large food source that has sufficient calory density.
Good point! I’d love to see a by-genus breakdown of average metabolic rate vs body mass.
it’s not “massively favouring” large mammals. it’s just the metric they were interested in. it’s not disingenuous to select this metric. we’re not voting for president of the mammals.
But why that metric? What makes that metric a good metric to use? Was that metric genuinely the best, or was it the best to get the answer they wanted to satisfy whoever was funding the study?
we’re not voting for president of the mammals.
No, but in general it’s worth questioning any stats and figures because people we vote for use them to make policy decisions
Clearly Big Invertabrate was behind this.
Yeah the reason why biomass is used instead of number of individuals becomes rather clear when you consider the following:
- what counts as an individual? is an unborn already an individual? (that one’s a heated debate, as you can see by the abortion debate)
- if unborns are individuals, then at what age are they?
- if they are from the moment of fertilization, then some animals, like spiders or frogs (idk any mammal examples, but there might be some), might lay a shitload number of eggs, like a million or sth, and it would drive up the number of individuals dramatically. But it would be a bullshit metric, because 99% of these individuals are never gonna survive a single year on earth. so it would be utterly confusing and misleading.
Going by mass solves all of these problems because it’s more clear and more direct. And on top of that it has the nice side-benefit of also giving an estimate of land usage. Land usage is roughly proportional to biomass, so measuring biomass is meaningful to estimate land usage as well, and that one really matters as that’s the limited resource that you’re trying to distribute among all species on earth.
Quick Internet search… https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass
They are referring to biomass.
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1 cow ~ 1200 lbs / 545 kg
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1 rat ~ 0.5 lbs / 0.25 kg
1 cow ~ 2400 rats by biomass
Well thats not what the infographic says. It specifies “mammals”, not “mammals by weight”.
OK so how many tons of cow are accounted for by whales?
Or does the survey cherry pick land animals too?
Why would the infographic be by number?
(I’m not dissing you, I only ask bcs I never even thought about it being my population, like, what would it compare by population in such a vast group as mammals.)Okay, so you have 240 rats and one cow in a pen on a farm. How many mammals are in the pen?
This survey would answer that the pen is 90% cow and 10% rat by weight, therefore there are 9 times as many cows as there are rats.
In reality land, where the rest of us live, we would say that there are 241 mammals in the pen and only 1 of them is a cow.
You see why I’m calling bullshit by the way this is worded?
Oh, I see now, thx.
For me (how I perceived the simplified pic) the main difference was that I didn’t think ‘in a pen on a farm’ but ‘on a planet’.
And your example also screams of ‘it’s not comparable, don’t do that, in what scenario would you need a number 241 that would made sense?’
(I really can’t think of on answer short of making a Twitch channel for each individual animal.)Also that question is leading bcs you ask how many, whereas the pic in the post doesn’t specifically say anything (which is the complaint as I gather - but we deduct the meaning of words from context all the time in all languages, if the ‘by individual’ doesn’t make sense, it’s obviously not that).
you have 240 rats and one cow in a pen on a farm
Do you not think the farmer saying he has 241 animals would be made fun of?
I’m basically saying that you can see from the context (the numbers) that it’s biomass - the same-ish as below even when/if the first thing you think about doesn’t make sense, you search for the way it does (again, not dissing, but strictly technically it is about literacy, which in this case the pic is at fault for not all of the audience not getting it, and you for not understanding it, an overlap just didn’t happen):
And yes, since this is pun-ish territory, it’s normal to feel some anger, puns are there worst.
The pic says “of all the mammals on earth”. It’s exactly as i said with the pen, just scaled up to a 3d spherical planetary sized pen. The numbers I’m talking about don’t change.
There are WAY more rats than cows. Period. They’re on every continent except Antarctica, and there might be some weird subterranean prehistoric voles huddled around a hydrothermal vent pool or some shit.
OP just needs to add a qualifier to the graphic. Anything along the lines of “with respect to biomass” right at the start
I was trying to think of some other meaning than ‘drinks dispensary’ for ‘bar’ and I couldn’t think of a sensible reason for putting a bar in your shower for quite a while until I realised metal bar.
-
Not saying at all this isn’t a problem, but I hate bullshit statements that are deliberately deceiving.
These numbers are all by mass. Not actual number. Cows are huge. So are chickens, for birds. How this comic is laid out infers that there’s 60 cows for every 40 of every other mammal, and that isn’t even remotely close to true.
I think biomass is probably more important than sheer number for these comparisons. Although I would also accept ‘proportion of world’s arable land being used to sustain them’ as I suspect the ratios come out pretty similar for obvious reasons.
The problem is that the infographic says “of all the mammals on Earth”, which means individuals, not biomass. So the infographic is objectively false.
Intentionally misleading
Misleading you to what conclusion that you wouldn’t otherwise have reached?
Sadly it’s not objectively false, it’s merely vague. There’s no equivocation whereby it actually specifies that the unit of measure is the individual animal, rather than, say, kg. It’s just playing on your assumptions (I did assume biomass fwiw, but who cares).
But anyway, the point made by sheer fucking biomass imbalance is surely the thing to focus on here? Now that we know what it means, and are in agreement that the wording should be clearer, the statistic is still egregious, isn’t it? Humans have taken far too much of the world for themselves IMO. Vastly diminishing returns for us, devestatingly larger impact on the environment, the more we push it.
I’m in fact under the impression that the “number must go up” plot was played on us as well. Humans are increasing in quantity ever since the industrial revolution, but instead we should be focusing on the quality of life.
Couldn’t agree with you more. In particular, the way most state pensions are structured imply infinite exponential growth. It’s gonna be a tough drug to wean off of.
We’re below reproduction rate in most parts of the world, and likely will fall below in the rest of the world during this century, so we’re already in the ‘find out’ era :(
On top of that, it’s an annoyingly disproportionate graphic. The cow is much wider than the human so its area is much more than 60% of the area of the graphic.
The owl might be 3cm high and the hen 6cm high, but 9cm² and 36cm² would be the rough areas, even if it weren’t for the fact that again, the hen picture is much, much wider than the owl.
With 30% and 70%, the owl should just be a little under half as big as the hen, but it looks like about 1/4 or 1/5 of the size of the hen.
Livestock have to live through horrible agony, like the worst kind of torture. This means (by biomass, which some people correlate indirectly with moral worth), at least 60% of mammals on Earth undergo horrible torture. Bentham’s Bulldog, “Factory Farming is Literally Torture.”
Excess pigs were roasted to death. Specifically, these pigs were killed by having hot steam enter the barn, at around 150 degrees, leading to them choking, suffocating, and roasting to death. It’s hard to see how an industry that chokes and burns beings to death can be said to be anything other than nightmarish, especially given that pigs are smarter than dogs.
Ozy Brennan: the subjective experience of animal’s suffering 10/10 intense agony is likely the same as the subjective experience of a human suffering such agony. (~6 paragraph article, well worth a read.)
It says 60% of mammals are livestock, not 60% live in factory farms. I’ve been around cows in normal (non-factory) farms, and they seem fine. Way better off than wild animals that starve, die of disease, freeze to death, etc.
I have family members that have livestock and if something bad happens to them it’s like someone hurt their child.
A seal in the 4% living in the wild may be eaten alive by a killer whale or torn to shreds by a great white shark.
We aren’t going to prevent all animals from suffering, because how could we do that? Kill off all of the predators? Then there would be animal overpopulation and animals dying of starvation and disease.
Maybe we just focus on ending factory farms because that seems doable. But that effort won’t be successful with obvious hyperbole claiming all livestock is treated like animals in the most horrible factory farms. Some people have actually been to farms that aren’t like that you know.
People aren’t stupid and if you misrepresent the facts, no one will believe anything else you’re saying no matter how emotional you are when misrepresenting the facts.
60 % of mammals are livestock, not 60% live in factory farms
99% of US farmed animals live in factory farms, according to this random website I just found. I don’t claim to be an expert, though, and worldwide is probably lower than than 99%, but I would bet you that the vast majority of livestock is factory-farmed.
Agreed though that not all livestock are factory farmed. I should have clarified.
I’ll point out though that even some non-factory-farmed livestock are likely suffering. Bentham’s Bulldog talks about how hens undergo severe agony:
Egg-laying hens in conventional farms endure about 400 hours (!!!) of this kind of disabling agony. Remember, this is agony about as bad as the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, unless you’ve had an experience as bad as being severely tortured.
(emphasis mine.)
–
A seal in the 4% living in the wild may be eaten alive by a killer whale or torn to shreds by a great white shark.
That’s bad, though probably not anywhere near as much agony as being boiled alive for several hours until one’s death. Regardless of whether you feel morally obligated to reduce wild animal suffering, you should admit that (a) from a utilitarian perspective, it’s much easier to reduce factory farm suffering, and (b) from a deontological perspective, factory farming is (collectively) our fault, whereas the food chain isn’t.
Some website I’ve never heard of before that you term as a “random website” says “We estimate…” a bunch of times without any attempt to describe the methodology used for their estimates.
So that’s bullshit.
The problem with the vegan animal rights movement is you’re always going for the moonshot of ending an entire industry instead of even trying to identify and shut down farms with horrible practices or outlaw those practices. To accomplish the goal of ending an industry, you’re fudging numbers and coming out as being dishonest which means no one will trust you and you’ll accomplish nothing. If animals are indeed being boiled alive (I don’t believe you about this because you’re obviously making up shit on other things) then it will continue to happen because you’re trying to accuse an entire industry of doing things that only some in the industry might do.
If you cared about the boiling animals alive thing (if it actually happens) you’d be trying to get that particular farm shut down, get laws passed to prevent that from happening. But you’re not doing that (you’re not even identifying any particular farms) so that leads me to believe either it’s not happening, or maybe you want it to continue to happen because it somehow helps your vain cause of ending all meat.
You’re right to question the boiling. I was thinking of death by suffocation in heated steam. Boiling is not the technically correct term.
Here are some more sources that nearly all livestock live in factory farms: [Our World in Data, PETA,]; there are a lot more I can find searching the web but they mostly seem to link back to the Sentience Institute’s research. OWiD’s is based on SI’s research, and I suspect PETA’s claim is based off SI’s as well. More importantly, I haven’t found any claim that the proportion is lower than 90%, or even anyone challenging SI’s figures. Do you have reason to doubt this? And if so, can you find any source? It seems plausible to me just based on the fact that factory farming is vastly more efficient than other methods, and most people aren’t picky about such things. Just as a prior, I would expect that the vast majority of livestock are found in the most efficient types of farms.
Without any attempt to describe the methodology used for their estimates.
I mean they literally have their calculations available right there as an easily-viewable google sheets link. And the data source is clearly stated: “these estimates use the 2022 Census of Agriculture and EPA definitions of CAFOs to estimate the number of US farmed land vertebrates who are in CAFOs (“factory farms”).”
You’d be trying to get that particular farm shut down, get laws passed to prevent that from happening. But you’re not doing that
Who is not doing that? Me specifically or animal rights people in general? I don’t see why shutting down a particular farm would be very helpful, the scale of the problem is incredibly massive; passing laws would be much more effective. I would like to see laws passed, though, to stop these kinds of abuses. What would make you think I am not interested in that?
PETA has killed more animals than I have LOL.
tbh their claim of 99% has no source. So it was really kind of pointless of me to include that link.
I gonna intercept here for a bit. The Problem with “shutting down single farms” is, that this virtually has no effect at all. The entire conventional farming sector is quite fucked up. Everything gets optimised for the highest possible efficiency. This means, that everything that falls out of set norms will be eliminated.
What I mean by this is, that, as example, piglins that didnt grow that well are simply killed by the farmers, because they can’t be sold. This happens because no farmer will give you the same money for a piglin that has half the weight of the others and is much more likely to get targeted by the rest of the group. Since its illegal to kill piglins without a reason the farmers do it by themselves and then dispose them with the piglins that die when during, or shortly after, birth. Nobody notices, and it is not possible to control this (at least not realistically). The problem is, that this whole system so fucked up that by shutting down single farms you only combat symptoms of the system and not the root cause. By this I do not want to say, that we have to shut down the entire animal farming sector, but that we have to drastically reduce the intensity of the sector to shift production to quality instead of quantity.
Source for the stuff I said: I grew up on a farm (not with piglins) and had to work in a piglin farm for 4 weeks. I have seen the stuff I said first hand and I devinetively did stuff that I’m now deeply ashamed of retrospect. The stuff I saw also matches the tuff I have heard from other sources.
I gonna intercept here for a bit. The Problem with “shutting down single farms” is, that this virtually has no effect at all. T
It would save the animals you claim are being boiled alive. Why don’t you care about the suffering of these animals?
Did you even read my comment? I clearly explained that shutting down single farms does not change the system, since the system in itself is broken.
Not the person you are replying to, but that is severely underestimating the amount of factory farming. They are the dominant method of production
Based on the EPA’s definition of a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (i.e factory farm) and USDA census data:
All fish raised in fish farms were considered to be factory-farmed. More than 98% of hens and pigs. For chickens and turkeys, the share was more than 99%. Cows were a bit more likely to be raised outside in fields, with greater space and freedom. Nonetheless, 75% were still fed in concentrated feeding operations for at least 45 days a year.
https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-are-factory-farmed
And even those that are not considered factory farmed don’t always look how one may think, for instance non-factory farmed cows still use plenty of grain feed
Currently, ‘grass-finished’ beef accounts for less than 1% of the current US supply
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401
None of this is not limited to the US by any means. For instance in the UK:
There are more than 1,000 US-style mega-farms in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, including some holding as many as a million animals
Factory farming is unfortunately what scales well. If we want less factory farming we need the industry itself to be smaller. That is no impossible goal. Germany, for instance, has seen its overall meat consumption fall over the last decade
In 2011, Germans ate 138 pounds of meat each year. Today, it’s 121 pounds — a 12.3 percent decline. And much of that decline took place in the last few years, a time period when grocery sales of plant-based food nearly doubled.
And how many percentage of all livestock do you think is “free range” like the cows you describe?
Estimates vary from 80% to 99% are factory farmed. Which means majority of meat anyone is eating is factory farm. Unless you can verify the source of your meat yourself, you most likely are eating tortured animals.
So this whole argument that I have friends and family that care for their livestock like it’s their kids is the misrepresentation since, it maybe true that you know someone that is treating animals humane, it doesn’t represent majority.
Sauce https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-are-factory-farmed
Estimates with numbers like 80% and 99% are just made up on the spot. I estimate 99% of the world knows that.
People aren’t stupid and if you misrepresent the facts, no one will believe anything else you’re saying no matter how emotional you are when misrepresenting the facts.
Like, say, if you were to imply that anything less than the vast overwhelming majority of all meat consumed comes from factory farms? Ignorance is bliss I suppose…
Do you source 100% of your meat from the one place you visited that one time? How many pounds of meat per year do you eat?
I buy all of my food from Food 'n Stuff… and most of my stuff.
Weird way to dodge the question
Weird way to be judgemental.
I’m calling you out for lying about the source of your meat.
Why are you so obsessed with the source of my meat? If you must know comes from a little French town called Dublé Entendré.
Carnies won’t hear it
Lmao the slurs you make up are so cute
Nobody defends factory farms they’re universally hated
Nobody defends factory farms they’re universally hated
But not enough for people to boycott, other than a single-digit % of the population.
Can you explain how that is a slur? Who is being unfairly oppressed/please describe the victim of the slur?
If you are describing omnivores as “carnies” then that would be a slur since most people consider people on the carnivore diet to be unhinged or misinformed.
Slurs exist to denigrate and diminish ones character.
Without argument, more vegetarians will help the world, but I don’t think name calling wins hearts and minds.
you seem misinformed, ‘carnist’ and by extension ‘carnie’ has nothing to do with the carnivore diet, but with carnism:
Carnism is a concept used in discussions of humanity’s relation to other animals, defined as a prevailing ideology in which people support the use and consumption of animal products, especially meat.[1] Carnism is presented as a dominant belief system supported by a variety of defense mechanisms and mostly unchallenged assumptions.[1][2][3][4]
The term carnism was coined by social psychologist and author Melanie Joy in 2001
I have been hearing this term used to demean meat eaters since the late 80s. I guess they were all misinformed too.
Have you heard of the carnivore movement? There are genuinely people saying to stop eating vegetables. It’s probably mostly ragebait, but it exists.
It feels like user wasn’t talking about specifically people on the carnivore diet. It came off as a slur against people on the most common diet on earth.
Have you heard of the carnivore movement?
Apart from the 1 guy here on lemmy running his solo community … I never have.
It’s probably mostly ragebait, but it exists.
Not rage bait, earnest people trying to solve real problems.
ok
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i’ve been wondering for a time whether maybe, blood sacrifices didn’t ever actually end but the factory farmings are just a modern decoy for the actual blood sacrifices …
Now introducing Tyson’s CEO: Cthulhu.
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I don’t think this is loss. I’m ready to eat crow if I’m proven wrong, but I think the real joke is the amount of time people will spend staring at this image and trying to figure out how it’s loss
I’ve eaten crow. I would not recommend it.
This sounds like a way to cause an outbreak of Corvid-19.
Dang, beat me to it
Squirrel ain’t half bad.
It’s all about the seasoning
I don’t want to sound all Malthusian but that’s kind of fucked??
more elephants than I expected tbh
It’s by weight
I know. It’s still more elephants than I expected.
That’s likely the sum of all elephant species, spanning from Africa to northern Asia.
I know. It’s just still more than I expected.
Jsomae: “Really y’all I can read, I’m just surprised!” Lol
You forgot the citation bro.
It’s by biomass.
It’s from this article: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/21/human-race-just-001-of-all-life-but-has-destroyed-over-80-of-wild-mammals-study
Which is discussing this research: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115
By mass.
Title made me think they were doing some 4 levels deep “loss” meme. It almost has it but frame 3 isn’t close.
Yeah this has my pattern matching in scrambles like I can see it kinda??
Now even things that aren’t loss are loss :c
Are pets livestock, or did they miss a category of mammals? In the US there are more dogs than children.
It’s intentionally misleading, like most vegan propaganda. It’s by mass, not population.
Biomass is the usual way this sort of data is presented in environmental science. I think calling it “propaganda” is a bit much. But yes if would have been better if that were clear on the infographic.
Do you think this info graphic is more or less worrying if it is numbers of living beings rather than biomass?
I believe pets are counted as livestock, but it’s not specifically referenced as far as I have the interest to read.
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Nearly 8,000,000,000 humans require a lot of food. And it’s better that we eat livestock then depleting the local wildlife for nourishment. That’s a whole point of farming.
It’s still baffles me that anyone, especially in the last 10 or 15 years, suddenly thinks that this is a barbaric practice that must immediately end, despite the fact that this is the way it’s been for tens of thousands of years.
Because a bunch of pretentious, condescending jerks with some sort of food fanaticism should be able to bully everyone into their way of thinking.
Only that we waste a ton of space that we could grow crops for humans to eat instead of feeding it to animals and wasting 90% of the energy. So saying 8 billion people need a lot of food while arguing for animal agriculture is very contradicting. Not even talking about all the greenhouse gases and the way we treat animals.
Maybe you should engage with some of the arguments these pretentious, condescending jerks are having because your comment has the same energy but none of the arguments.
yup we need to eat food. It does not have to be meat centric or involve meat.
The problem is, as you describe, poor resource and logistics management. Not what we actually eat. But you don’t care about that. You have a quasi, religious viewpoint, and you hate everyone who disagrees with you just because they disagree with you.
I’m sorry, you’re religious food fanaticism has blinded you to more rational options for dealing with greenhouse gases and animal cruelty. Your black-and-white approach is, clearly, not convincing me enough people to make a difference. So maybe you should focus on something that will make an actual difference: stop being a domineering, asshole, and lecturing people on how they should live their lives.
This is the thing - all you need to do is suggest that everyone eating less meat would be good for the environment, and people like you utterly lose their minds. It’s weird.
That resource and logistics management problem is a direct result of people eating so much meat, the production of which is inherently inefficient for the purposes of feeding people. Of all the resources that we spend on maintaining and growing an animal, we only get back what goes into growing its muscles. The vast majority is wasted in maintaining the animal so that it doesn’t shrivel up and die before slaughter. Scale back meat production and you get a lot more food for a lot less resources, energy and land. You can’t get that efficiency otherwise. It’s precisely about what we eat.
I’m almost impressed by how much completely unsubstantiated ad hominem you managed to cram in there. Personally I couldn’t have guessed any of that from the comment you replied to. But if you wish to be taken seriously, maybe focus instead on the actual arguments next time.
That’s not really arguing against my point. YES, people should eat less meat, and part of the logistics problem is that too much is currently required. The obvious answer to that isn’t veganism, it’s ramping up the production of lab grown meat. We have an answer, and this is it. T-Totaling meat is just a religious zealot view of how to solve a problem that has better, more rational solutions.
I don’t think that anyone in this chain of replies has argued for flat out ending all animal meat production. Sure, plenty of vegans are motivated primarily by animal ethics and thus want to categorically ban growing animals for food, but here almost everyone seems to be talking about the sustainability aspect of modern mass animal agriculture, myself included. Although less ethical scruples is a welcome byproduct in my opinion.
I’ll take lab grown meat seriously when it’s been proven to be financially competetive and most importantly scalable. Technofixes have a bad track record of turning out to be mostly just investor bait. Kinda like all the bullshit high-flying transportation concepts as solutions to problems where just slightly better urban planning and prioritizing public transit, cycling etc. would work wonders.
Plant based food on the other hand has been most of what we have been eating for most of history. It wasn’t that long ago when meat was still considered a relative delicacy, back when scarcity necessitated efficiency. That’s the kind of efficient, sustainable, healthy and local (so logistically simple) food production system we should try to strive for in my opinion.
It isn’t a zealot view to want to cause less suffering. When you have a choice to not eat meat and you choose to eat meat you’re the problem.
It is definitely a religious zealot of view that the only way to prevent animal suffering is to be vegan. Also, an extraordinary lack of imagination.
It seems unlikely that eating lab-grown meat, for example, will be as efficient, in terms of CO2 emissions, as simply being vegan in a reasonable time frame. And it is currently not something that exists in a reasonable scale, so it’s not a “religious zealot view” to advance the current most practical, efficient, and easiest solution.
And some people who are vegan would not necessarily be against lab-grown meat, but it depends on who you ask
Go reread their comment and try to find where they are being rude. Your second paragraph is just an odd projection.
What are these “rational choices” you are speaking of?
I’m not a university professor, and you aren’t paying me for my time.
Do your own research. Don’t blame me for your ignorance.
So you don‘t have any arguments, then why are you complaining?
This would be the same logical contruction like: „There are rational choices to better the killing of kids, but I won‘t tell you, because you have to do your own research. My viewpoint is universally right, because I say so.“
It is interestingly funny to read something you are trying to attach to me, but instead is applying more to your messages.
I don‘t know how much hate you need to compensate conitive dissonance, but I wish you the best.
If you want to check for conginitve dissonance, here is the Wikipedia Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
How frightening this world must be for you when there’s not someone to spoon-feed your beliefs to you.
I would pity people like you, but you’re not worth it.
What is
5+4?
Exactly. Vegans promote a false dichotomy due to their religious fanaticism, intentionally ignoring all of the ways we can already mitigate the vast majority of the problems of meat production through legislation and existing technology.
At the end of the day they’re functionally equivalent to anti-abortion activists, pushing an extremist, arbitrary view of which lives humans are or are not allowed to end.
Equating people not being all good with the mass suffering and slaughter of sentient beings with religious fanaticism sure is a take, sure is interesting how hot it is it is so many places though wonder what a big cause of that might be?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4372775/ - keep on with your god given right to boil the planet though!
Blindly promoting the false dichotomy just like I mentioned, ignoring all of the research on the ways that technology and legislation can reduce the vast majority of the effects mentioned in the data you cite, while also clearly revealing your religious, dogmatic reasons for ignoring all of that research in the first sentence of your non sequitur screed.
Just like my crazy aunt in her anti-abortion Facebook rants. But do you have the self-awareness to realize that?
Nope.
Watch you don’t eat too much of your false dichotomy, you gotta leave room in your stomach for all that animal slurry :)
Don’t worry, I always leave plenty of room for my animal slurry. ^_^
your* religious food…
Comment disregarded due to spelling error.
Try again.It is really telling how YOU tell ME what i believe, how I feel and how there is no sense in talking to me. Who really is the fanatic?
I really think you are just upset about all the downvotes (when i engaged there were none btw). Not my fault and i do not hate you or other people simply because they continue doing what they grew up with. I can however hate animal cruelty and i can call out bs when i see it.
If you projected any harder, this comment would’ve been available in IMAX
I am grateful to have witnessed a dying breed
So, I do get where you are coming from - but there are some things to consider. Firstly: while domestication and animal husbandry are pretty old, factory farming and such is very recent and has given everything a pretty new touch. While I think it’s still valid to bring up as an argument, “X has existed as a pillar of our life for thousands of years” is usually not a great argument in and of itself, the same could easily be used to argue for slavery and a lot of other fucked up shit in history.
Besides that, there is sustainability. Yes grass-fed cattle can actually be sustainable, and allow for utilising land that is otherwise not usable to produce food. Also there is plant matter and “waste” from farming and food production more broadly, that can be utilised in feeding livestock sustainably, which would otherwise be composted anyway (and in some cases, gets pre-composted pretty well by said animals). So, yes, there are ways to produce meat and other animal-derived products sustainably … but that is usually a bit of a cop-out, trying to divert attention from how the vast, vast majority of meat production is not sustainable in mostly water and CO2 numbers.
Personally speaking, I am also not vegan and not an animal rights activist - but claiming it is simply a continuation does miss some aspects.
The only people who believe that animals cannot be raised as livestock in a sustainable fashion are the closed minded food, fanatics known as vegans.
It can be done, but not with your limited imagination and viewpoint on the world.
The problem is that people like you don’t want a solution. You want to be able to simultaneously claim victimhood while also lecturing and condescending to the entire world. Veganism is nothing more than an addiction to the sense of superiority over others.
If you actually cared about greenhouse gases, or animal cruelty, you’d be willing to explore other options. But vegans are extremists. It’s their way or no way.
I (and most people), on the other hand, care about greenhouse, gases, and animal, cruelty, and all of the other downsides to factory farming, but I’m not so stupid, I don’t have a big chunk of my brain, scooped out by religious fanaticism, so I can actually see alternatives.
Dude… you are literally claiming A) that I am vegan when I explicitly wrote that I am not, and B) that I am “not open to alternatives”, when I myself mentioned two aspects concerning how animal raising can be done sustainably, only that that is not what our current system favours due to reasons of maximising profitability.
This subject is very clearly a sore point for you. It might behove you to figure out why that is, rather than spontaneously attacking people that are essentially siding with you.
Oh yes, your food-bad religious extremism is somehow my fault. Just another thing that vegans love about being vegan: false victimhood.
Go get your own identity. This one is boring.
You keep thinking these people have this as a religious view when they have told you they are not vegans.
Are you willing to reduce your consumption on meat to better all these negative things of traditional livestock farming, which you mentioned?
Are you willing to give up your false sense of moral superiority and stop judging people?
Didn’t think so
I mean, if you want to give livestock better living conditions, then you also must pay obviously more. This would reduce your consumption on meat, if you don‘t want to pay more. That‘s why I’m asking.
The amount of available meat to buy would also be reduced, because if livestock gets more room and freedom to live, there would be less livestock inside the farms and therefore less meat in the stores.
And look at that. It only took you two days to work out the answer for yourself.
I’m sorry, but you wrote your comment only one day ago, so it didn’t took me two days.
I don’t know If I can still assume that you are a rational being. So I wish you the best.
Factory farming has never been done sustainably. Give an example if you disagree. Or are you one of those homesteader guys who thinks he can raise two cows and four sheep on an acre alongside your field of corn and miniature orchard?
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Just because things are the way they have been for ages, does not mean they are correct.
It is a brutal, awful practice and completely unnecessary.
I am not being condescending or pretentious when I say these things. I understand that it is very, very hard to alter what you’ve done your entire life, and harder still to see the issues with those things.
Those 8bn humans could be sustained by a fraction of the environmental impact, suffering to life, and land usage if they were on a plant based diet.
lol
Excellent retort. Please share more of your insight.
this is the way it’s been for tens of thousands of years
Human population needed to be fed 10+k years ago:
> 1,000,000
vs now
10,000,000,000Which just means it has never been the way it is now. Those two numbers on a finite planet are represented by the pic perfectly.
people need to eat, but do they need to eat THAT?
Its not as easy to go eat the wild ones, and people frown at eating from the human population. Those are all the options in the graphic.
well damn, i guess ill have to eat a shoe since there’s only a picture of a shoe in my pantry
Good luck! Some of the soles can be a real challenging chew.
Or I guess if you want to be extra literal you could eat the picture?
Something I pretty much never see pointed out is that we don’t need billions of humans. Our governments keep encouraging us to have children, but they should be working to end the culture of pressuring people (especially women) into having children because they’re somehow incomplete without them. There should be more programs offering access to birth control and family counseling services. This endless and meaningless growth is as harmful to us as it is to the rest of our planet.
The only reason that governments keep pushing for us to breed is because it feeds the capitalist engine which relies on a never-ending supply of laborers.
And, yes, all economies require laborers, capitalism is unique in how it consumes everything, even workers, as a resource rather than simply utilizing them.
Our economic systems only work with infinite growth because otherwise what would be the point of lending money if it won’t grow interest. It’s essentially a giant pyramid scheme. And that requires new blood to provide labour and consumers. This is incredibly dumb on a finite planet with limited resources, but that’s mainstream economics for you.
Also if the population shrinks too fast, then the pyramid becomes unstable with not enough younger people to take care of all the old people (while also maintaining the economy).
This is clearly a sensitive topic for you, so believe me when I say that I’m only talking about myself here. Yes, humans have included meat in their diets for thousands of years, but the recent changes that I feel shift the paradigm are: the scope and scale of industrial farming, the brutal conditions animals now face, and the fact that we have a good enough concept of human dietary requirements that people can finally make the choice to remove animal products from their diets in a healthy way.
That’s some crazy projection you have there. But thank you for confirming that your entire belief system is based off of complete and total bullshit, just like any religious zealot. Lol.
How sad for you
I’d love to hear what I’ve specifically said that’s bullshit.
Wow. Terrible reading comprehension, too.
While this trip down Insanity Lane has been amusing, I’ve better things to do than listen to religious zealots describe their delusions.
Tell it to your therapist. My bore others needlessly?
Thanks for saving cows, chicken, and pigs from extinction.
I didn’t realise rhinos were so small. No wonder I never see them.
End of the Holocene, Last of the Megafauna party.
It’s so fucking surreal to me how much megafauna extinctions have happened in the past 50’000 years.
I don’t think people realise we had like giant land birds (3+ meters tall), megasloths (elephant sized), giant kangaroos roaming round not that long ago.
The garden burned. We were best adapted.
https://www.americanforests.org/article/the-trees-that-miss-the-mammoths/
(In many places, we burnt the garden).
We’ve been shaping ecosystems through fire for so long.
That article’s on my to read list now, thanks.
It’s a good one. Add this too (audio) for the hopium.
birbs are only 2/3rds unreal confirmed ✅
This is highly depressing to see first thing in the morning.
