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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

As someone raised around cattle ranches, I really don't understand the animal living conditions argument.

My understanding is that the vast majority of cattle (80%?) in the United States is raised in factory farms; the vast majority the meat Americans available to purchase grocery store, served in restaurants, and processed for fast food, is sourced from those same farms.

And my understanding is that the conditions would be horrific by almost any standard: the animals are kept confined, in extremely cramped and nasty conditions, often unable to move or turn around, all day and every day, seldom or never permitted to roam. (I'm ignoring the whole antibiotics overuse question.)

When they're ready for slaughter, they're crammed into trucks and transported for hundreds of miles, in all weather, standing in their own feces. Exhausted, terrified, and freezing or overheated after transport, many are shocked with electric prods or beaten to force them back out of the trucks. Then they are hit with bolt guns to "stun" them, after which their throats are slit.

The lucky cows are unconscious before they are sawed apart, but you can bet that the types of workers who do these dirty, low-paying jobs, hundreds of times per day, as quickly as possible, without clogging up the factory line, aren't always trained well enough nor concerned whether they cause suffering.

The bolt gun is not to stun them, but an ethical method of killing an animal.

> A captive bolt stunning gun kills the animal and reduces it instantly unconscious without causing pain.

https://www.grandin.com/humane/cap.bolt.tips.html

No, 91% of cattle ranches are family owned and about half of all cattle are raised in small herds of 50 head or less.

You are also belittling the work of these professionals. You sound like you have little knowledge of the industry in general.

Whether owned by family or raised as a member of a small herd is immaterial to where the majority of these cattle end up as adults: loaded on transport trucks to concentrated feed lots where they await processing by the factory slaughter system. Maybe the first 1/2 of their life is great, even idyllic, but that's not much of a comfort.

I'll admit phrased that last part ("types of people") very badly, so let me clarify. First, I should say that I'm very keen to believe that most of these workers are (as you say) professionals. It sounds like, in your direct experience, they are, which is great. But here's the issue:

This work is dangerous (dealing with deadly equipment and huge stressed animals), dirty (in the Mike Rowe sense), and low-paying (at or near minimum wage, per Google). So the gist of what I'm saying is, in that type of high-pressure, low-ethical-incentive situation, it's simply inevitable that:

1. Mistakes get made. 2. Corners get cut. 3. Equipment fails. 4. A worker stops caring (or didn't care to begin with).

Even if we imagine that literally all workers in these jobs are infallible, professional, and compassionate, we still have to deal with equipment working non-optimally (see the link about the bolt guns above; they ain't perfect). This means that some nonzero % of cattle processed suffer during slaughter. Even if we're charitable and say that that number must be small, like 1%, that's still a hell of a lot of cattle suffering.

In addition, you can easily find first-person accounts from slaughterhouse workers who describe exactly this imperfect system in vivid detail, where some animals end up dismembered while still "sensate". (And this is totally skipping over all of the ethical issues with confinement and slaughter in the first place!) So, to sum up:

We know logically that we make cattle suffer at scale.

We know empirically that we make cattle suffer at scale.

I would really, really like to be wrong about this.

The top result I got on google said 78% of cattle comes from factory farms. Its source doesn't cite further sources though. It sets off my BS-meter. Do you have any sources yourself on how much cattle is factory farmed?

Cattle aside, it does seem like most all small animal meat is factory farmed (poultry & pork).

https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2015/Cattl...

>Operations with 1,000 or more head of cattle on feed accounted for 75 percent of the inventory in 2007 and 77 percent in 2012.

That's from your source there. While most farms/ranches might be family owned, most cattle are in large operations.

You kind of have to think of the human toll on those workers too. Granted they are free to leave which helps but still. That’s a lot of weight on ones soul.

Ranches and feed lots are different. In the US, cows are raised on ranches until 6 months before slaughter, where they are brought to a feed lot, fattened up in crowded conditions, then slaughtered

Doesn't that end up being almost a third of their life?

Well most of them don’t live on “ranches” for one.

As one who also grew up and currently lives in the rural Midwest - it's people not knowing what they're talking about. They hear about the awful conditions poultry are raised in and extrapolate it to all livestock.

I welcome all companies that sell meat to publish videos of their operations. I would really like to buy meat only from companies that minimize the suffering of the livestock. Do you have any preferred livestock vendors that document their supply chain?

If you take a car trip anywhere outside the major city centres of Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, etc (and from what I hear, Texas) you'll inevitably see many, many head of cattle milling about in fields. I would put forth that no farmers really want to mistreat their animals, and will go at great lengths to keep them as safe as they can - this year's cyclone blizzard in Nebraska was especially indicative of this[0]. Farmers generally don't have a complete supply chain anyway - they sell their animals at the stockyard to whichever packing plant is buying them.

[0] https://www.omaha.com/news/plus/heavy-snow-freezing-temps-ha...

I don't think farmers really want to mistreat their animals. It is apparent that some farms put profit ahead of suffering. I would like to be able to look up a brand of meat in the grocery store and have them document how they take care of the animal. I would like to be able to make an informed decision in the marketplace. Saying it is impossible because farmers don't manage their supply chain is a way of answering my question.

I cannot imagine its economical for anyone in South Dakota to have these "factory farms".

What do you mean? Do you think "factory farms" are less capital efficient than farms that would try to minimize suffering?

When you have ranches like South Dakota, yeah, I think they are too expensive given the number of cattle.

Is this video faked? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixI7HxF0JmU

I've driven by a few factory farms in California. You know you're close to one when you're hit with the smell of manure many miles out. When you actually drive by the farms, the reality is quite depressing: the cattle are standing in their own shit with barely any space to move. I'm done with red meat myself.

So the cattle are living in the same condition as many San Franciscans? I live in TX and grew up in FL and the cattle have plenty of room to roam here.

South Dakota cattle are roaming the fields, in fact, about 100,000 died in the early winter storm in 2013. They were still in the summer pastures and had not grown their winter coat. It started as a rain and then turned into a blizzard. The winter pastures are better protected.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/100000-cattle-feared-dead-after...

Glad to hear you've given up red meat. Not to preach too much here, but why just red meat?

Poultry, for example, is no better. Male chicks are dumped onto conveyor belts and ground alive as they provide no value to the farmers (for meat or eggs).

Dairy farms are also equal to or worse than the factory farms you mentioned.

That's pretty bad, it isn't like that in other places. In fact it's better for the environment to rotate grazing lands overall. It helps deal with or reverse desertification. It's not much different than how fish farms have been changing to something closer to what nature offers in places.

My single biggest issue with these meat alternatives is I cannot understand why it's costing so much more than actual meat.

> My single biggest issue with these meat alternatives is I cannot understand why it's costing so much more than actual meat.

I'd imagine it's because of the economies of scale; once production ramps up to sufficiently-high volume, the prices should in theory go down. Availability in fast food should hopefully help with that.

Subsidies are another aspect to this, though I don't know offhand how heavily cattle ranching is subsidized v., say, corn or soy.

Cows have it pretty good (especially in my country Uruguay) - I absolutely understand it when you´re speaking about chicken and fish though.

The one ugly part for cattle is the slaughter, you need to have tough skin to work at a slaughterhouse.

There is a documentary called Dominion which might be interesting to you:

https://www.dominionmovement.com/watch

Warning: it's quite shocking / bloody.

I grew up in a rural area, with ranchers as personal friends, I don't need to watch a propaganda film. I know how cattle are raised and slaughtered. And I know butchers who have done that sort of work for decades and it doesn't bother them at all. They enjoy their work.

I've wanted to meaningfully change my diet and watching this made me realize it's time. Thanks for the reminder.

There's an interesting anti-meat psyop going around, coinciding with rising meat prices (Canada).

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