Millions of US farm animals to be culled by suffocation, drowning and shooting
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Drowning doesn't seem viable.
A bullet to the head (or a bolt gun, or whatever) is probably the fastest way to remove sensation from neural tissue for large farm animals. The shock wave takes milliseconds to turn brains to soup.
Do you have a citation for this? Everything I've seen would suggest to me it's categorically less humane than using an inert gas like nitrogen or helium in the absence of oxygen.
it's so far the least-worst option: we know there are issues, but the alternatives to date so far have been worse, including inert gases.
The point of the scene is that you lose any faculties long before any unpleasantness or damage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiEJKvbpOF0
If I'm wrong, and this is completely irrelevant to the discussion, just try to enjoy seeing a Tory bought to the brink of oblivion [satire]
Does anyone have further insight on this?
(CO2 buildup, on the other hand, is inherently distressing, though the AVMA doc suggests that pigs would become unconscious in about two minutes, under proper conditions.)
Thanks for the link.
(When you need to extract Argon, you have about 100x as much N2 and O2 as a by-product.)
Given that we allow the state to execute people -- a dubious proposition in the first place -- i don't understand why we don't just push a shitton of phenobarb and xanax or whatever. "an anaesthetic overdose" is pretty darn humane if we're willing to accept the premise that anaesthetic "work" by "decoupling consciousness". Scare quotes intentional here, because we genuinely don't know how anaesthetic work but we broadly agree that when you've taken a lot of them you don't feel any pain.
(agree strongly with the dubiousnes)
edit: http://www.jpe.ox.ac.uk/papers/consistent-vegetarianism-and-...
Ethical consequentialist vegetarians believe that farmed animals have lives that are worse than non-existence. In this paper, I sketch out an argument that wild animals have worse lives than farmed animals, and that consistent vegetarians should therefore reduce the number of wild animals as a top priority.
We then do indeed kill wild animals so that their populations don't explode due to a lack of predators - in Canada and the US you typically need a "tag" to hunt wild animals, basically a ticket that allows you to kill X number of a specific species.
These tags are distributed in limited numbers, and extensive work goes into surveying populations of wild animals to distribute the right number of tags. Proceeds from selling tags go to conservation efforts, including the surveying efforts previously mentioned.
As someone trying their hardest to follow a vegan diet, I fully support hunting wild animals for food and population control. However, that situation is worlds removed from animals that are bred for the sole purpose of being raised and slaughtered in factory farms.
EDIT: to rip off another comment in this chain - the issue of hunting wild animals is orthogonal to the issue of factory farming. i.e., the two issues have little to do with each other and you cannot/should not use one as moral justification for the other.
I'm not a fan of factory farming, but I don't agree that hunting and raising farm animals are orthogonal issues. My own views are more complicated than I care to get into here, but I think it boils down to - 1) Is it always wrong to kill animals for food? and 2) Would those animals rather exist than not, prior to dying?
I think the answers to those questions are no (or else we have to declare eg lions immoral) and yes (assuming the conditions they live in aren't absolutely horrific, which also leads me to believe that factory farming should basically go away and we should reduce our meat consumption as much as we need to to make that possible).
I try to limit my meat consumption and find meat that I believe has been raised ethically, but I don't believe veganism is required (though I totally respect those beliefs!)
What burst my bubble on that idea, however, and really gave me the urge to strive towards a vegan diet, was just how completely implausible that image is. Even if your meat comes from "ethical" sources, I have three big issues:
1. Animals are typically slaughtered far short of their natural lifespans. Cows, pigs, and chickens have natural lifespans of 20, 20, and 10 years, and live 3, 2, and 0.2 years under factory farming conditions [1]. Even if the meat you're consuming comes from animals that live fantastic lives - the stereotypical image of open pastures, a "natural" diet, loving care from the farmer - those lives are almost definitely being cut short for the sake of profitability.
2. The animal products industry puts a humongous amount of effort into keeping consumers from thinking about the origins of their food. Part of this effort is whitewashing the process as much as possible. I don't feel like finding specific examples off the top of my head, but it's cases like "cage free chicken" meaning that the birds are kept in a massive, communal shed with 24/7 artificial lighting, very little cleaning, veterinary care, etc. It's very possible that even if the meat you're buying is labelled with "humane" and "ethical" terms like free-range, cage-free, etc. that those terms mean very different things than you might assume.
3. Modern livestock are bred to produce the maximum amount of product (meat, milk, eggs, wool) as possible. This leads to chickens whose legs collapse underneath them from their weight after a few months of life, cows which have chronically infected udders from the quantity of milk they produce, etc. Even if you take these breeds and raise them under "humane" conditions, they'll still have miserable lives without extensive veterinary care.
That all said, if you do indeed source your meat from sources that you have verified give their animals fantastic comfortable lives, let them live (most) of their natural lifespan before slaughter, and only raise heritage breeds that don't suffer just from being alive, then I'm all for your meat consumption - and very curious how much your meat costs!
[1] https://www.four-paws.us/campaigns-topics/topics/farm-animal...
1. I guess it doesn't bother me so much that their lives are being cut short, for the same reasons that the killing in general doesn't bother me. I would say that waiting until they're old may make the meat taste bad enough that it would be better to not bother (in which case, veganism!)
2. I agree wholeheartedly with this point. Somewhat related, we recently bought a freshly butchered duck from a small local farm and when I looked up how long we could wait before cooking it, I was shocked at how long freshly butchered meat lasts! It makes the shelf life of meat from the store seem almost disgusting, how close it is to going bad on the day you buy it. But that information has been obscured to the point that we all think raw meat is just naturally gross.
3. I also agree completely with this point, if the animal's existence is misery, then it shouldn't happen.
We really don't eat very much meat, we buy from nice, little, local farms (and that's expensive) and we raise our own meat rabbits and try to give them as much room and freedom as we can while making sure they don't get disease from the wild rabbits in our area. I decided a while ago that I wouldn't eat meat if I wasn't willing to do at least some of the slaughtering myself. It felt too important to outsource completely.
And it may sound weird, but the slaughtering itself has made me appreciate nature way more, and really changed my relationship with death, in that I see death less as a horrible thing that happens and more as part of a cycle whereby nutrients are redistributed and renewal is allowed to occur. We happen to live long enough that lots of things will die while we live, and it's easy to forget that we'll die and something will consume us, too, even if it's just a microbe or a plant.
And factory farming is way more... extractive? It feels like it doesn't allow for the redistribution and renewal, the same way that mono-culture farming on a massive scale can leach away nutrients and destroy biodiversity.
> but the slaughtering itself has made me appreciate nature way more
Sounds like we're mostly on the same page then :)
Say you hit a deer with your car and break its hind legs. The chances you can nurse it back to health are very slim. Not least because the deer is likely to have a stress-induced response to being handled by humans that will adversely affects it chance of survival. And if the deer survives this, you are going to face a long list of further hurdles. From avoiding starvation, dehydration to avoiding infection. And eventually you would need to reintroduce the animal to the wild.
How much are you willing to pay for a deer you've hit to have its hind legs repaired and put in a cast? How much are you willing to pay a professional to nurse it back to health. Because to be frank: if you haven't taken care of a deer before, you are pretty likely to kill it. And the deer is going to be frightened and miserable the whole time.
So how much are you willing pay to keep a deer you have hit alive? $10.000? $20.000? More? What's your cutoff? Would you sell your car?
I've seen people spend that kind of money on pets. And it isn't always pretty when people squeeze more life out of a suffering pet for their own sake.
Now, if you chopped someone's arm off the chances of survival (depending on circumstance) and the willingness of someone to pay for it would usually be quite different.
There are 4 main ways an animal dies “naturally” in the wild:
1) slow starvation due to lack of food/winter
2) slow starvation due to being injured or a health issue
3) slow, painful starvation due to being maimed by a predator
4) being violently eaten alive by a predator
Any of the “killed by a human” options are far more humane.
They exist. The question is what to do with them in the most humane way possible.
Unless your solution is time travel?
It appears this is one of the topics HN cannot discuss rationally.
How do you feel about mercy killings? If you find a deer in the woods that's got a gangrenous leg and is laying on the ground, I would argue that it is my obligation -- my moral responsibility -- to cut its throat or pith it, if I can.
We are part of nature. We constitute "letting nature take its course", and those options are a whole lot better than getting eaten alive by a coyote.
(And in case someone thinks I'm a vegan here to lecture: last night's dinner was Boeuf Bourgignon cooked for 5 hours)
I didn't post any numbers on purpose because I don't believe in just throwing out numbers that require a lot of context. I was being sincere when I said that "This is a good opportunity to read up...". One should spend some time trying to understand our footprint.
But yes, our food completely dominates the picture. Many places in the world most mammalian wildlife is little more than a footnote.
If this comes as a surprise to anyone, this makes me a bit upset and worried.
> Earth's LAND MAMMALS By Weight
> A graph in which one square equals 1,000,000 tons. Dark grey squares represent humans, light gray represent our pets and livestock, and green squares represent wild animals. The squares are arranged in a roughly round shape, with clusters for each type of animal. Animals represented: Humans, cattle, pigs, goats (39 squares), sheep, horses (29 squares), elephants (1 square). There are other small, unlabeled clusters also. It is clear that humans and our pets & livestock outweigh wild animals by at least a factor of 10.
The universe eats itself and I’m not really qualified to make a moral judgement on killing animals for food — I’m particularly loathe to make black and white judgements. But, I’m able to eat a mostly vegan diet, and so that’s what I do.
Though I honestly wish there was a more humane alternative to culling.
These industrial farms don't have room to spare for animals that aren't wanted.
I wish there was some kind of park or nature reserve or somewhere that they could be sent to live out their lives in peace instead of the culling. Or if such places already exist, laws that mandate that they be sent there.
Releasing large quantities of animals to nature is both anti-ecological and inhumane, as it results in destruction of that ecosystem, starvation, cannibalism, etc. Like the horrible aftermath of the cases when activists have "freed" animals from fur farms, resulting in them dying within weeks but also taking all the local wildlife (e.g. nesting birds) with them. You can successfully do a controlled release of a limited number of animals given proper preparation. But if we're talking about releasing large numbers quickly, culling is much more humane than that that.
Life on industrial farms sounds terrible, for sure, but death in nature is also terrible, to the point that I'm not sure it's a mercy to "set them free".
There's a lovely book called Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal that I think every American who eats food or votes should read.
and processing comes before transportation concerns right
"Drawing upon 40 years' experience as an ecological farmer and marketer, Joel Salatin explains with humor and passion why Americans do not have the freedom to choose the food they purchase and eat. From child labor regulations to food inspection, bureaucrats provide themselves sole discretion over what food is available in the local marketplace. Their system favors industrial, global corporate food systems and discourages community-based food commerce, resulting in homogenized selection, mediocre quality, and exposure to non-organic farming practices. Salatin's expert insight explains why local food is expensive and difficult to find and will illuminate for the reader a deeper understanding of the industrial food complex."
from https://www.bookdepository.com/Everything-I-Want-Do-is-Illeg... makes me think, given the implied negatives of child labor regulations and food inspection, that anyone reading that book should follow up with a quick read of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, the same way that I found Oliver Twist a useful tonic after my first exposure to Atlas Shrugged.
It's amazing how quickly you assume that the way those laws apply to Joel's farm is reasonable, or that what Joel is doing is the sort of thing the public were interested in interfering with when they supported those laws.
Your reflex to defend the application of laws by their title is why no matter how much stink is made by people who actually read the US PATRIOT or EARN IT act for example, or any number of other brilliantly-framed pieces of legislation, there is always a gallery of opinionated people who will gladly judge a book by its cover with no less certainty, and with even more smug self-importance, than they would by its content.
If it has never occurred to you: not everyone impacted by the law is a crook.
I think we should go even farther with our euphemisms and call it "harvesting a resource".
I love meat, even though I consider killing animals unethical, which makes me a hypocrite. Still, I think the least we can do is call the process "killing an animal".
Also, ethics aside, the comment above was referring specifically to processing, not the act of killing. Killing is comparatively fast and far less messy. Butchering/processing a 300lb carcass is where the real effort lies.
I would hope that everyone understands that creating a final meat product involves killing, but we shouldn't trivialize the process requirements just to drive an emotional point home.
I haven't done larger animals from the killing but have butchered large cuts of meat. It is a time-consuming process while being physically tiring.
You'd have to find people willing to take them, transporting them, slaughter them, and distribute the meat.
We are talking about slaughtering and butchering millions of animals in a non-factory setting, not practical. On top of that transporting animals and/meat at that scale is not cheap or easy.
This sort of operation is very difficult to do on an ad hoc/emergency basis.
If an organization would just pick up any unwanted animals on demand, I'm sure the farmers would be happy to hand them over.
Being culled through these various methods is no better or worse than they would have experienced under "normal" conditions - i.e. being raised until they are fit for slaughter and sale. No animal wants to die, and the methods used to kill them when being sold are just as cruel as the "culling" techniques listed here [1].
If you don't like what you're reading in this article, go vegan. Otherwise, you're paying for other people to inflict this sort of suffering on animals.
[1] Dominion (2018): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko
I still get fried chicken with my significant other (who follows a normal Western diet) sometimes, as a guilty comfort food when I'm struggling mentally or especially stressed.
I still eat mayonnaise and margarine when I'm visiting my parents, because I don't want to hassle them to buy the vegan variants just for me, and I decide that I am willing to use those products occasionally, knowing the suffering that went into them.
Very few people are 100% perfect in following their chosen diet - vegan, vegetarian, keto, weight-loss, etc. The important part is to try your best, and bear in mind the consequences of what you're consuming.
One can eat meat without contributing to excessive cruelty to animals. In contrast to large meat corporations, there are local farmers that do care about the methods used to slaughter their animals.
Yes animals must be killed to be eaten. But "this sort of suffering" is not a necessity.
Sure, but no animal wants to die. No matter how you kill it, you're still harming it.
> there are local farmers that do care about the methods used to slaughter their animals
The problem is that farms like that are exceedingly rare, and I think that their existence is mostly used as a mental cop-out to avoid feeling bad about the animal products one consumes.
By exceedingly rare, I mean that factory farms produce (in the USA) [1]:
* 99.9% of meat chickens
* 97% of egg-laying hens
* 99% of turkeys
* 95% of pigs
* 78% of cattle
I've also make a bunch of points relating to the natural lifespans of animals, the issues with modern breeds, and whitewashing of animal farming practices in my other comment [2]. If animals were to be raised for their products (meat, eggs, dairy, wool) in ways that do not contribute any excess cruelty to their lives - i.e. letting them live out most of their natural lives, giving them space, good food, loving care, and not raising modern breeds that suffer from their over-engineering - I would expect said products to cost an order of magnitude more than what you typically find at the grocery store these days. Odds are your "free-range" eggs that cost 30% more than the cheapest ones aren't it.
If you want to consume animal products, go ahead. But, face the consequences of your diet, and acknowledge what you are paying others to do - without imagining the magical "cruelty-free" farm. That was the point of my post: that while in theory you can have wonderful farms with happy animals, in practice they don't exist.
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/its-time-to-end-factory-f_b_1...
Since we're pretending to speak on their behalf, I posit no animal wants to not live either.
By going vegan, you are not merely sparing some animals, you are denying their very existence.
Is a miserable short life, ending in painful death, worse than no life at all?
(rhetorical, pretty sure there's no universal answer)
Since I've kept hens, it's strange but I've been a lot more "respectful" towards eggs. It's almost like they're a gift from the chicken.
I think it is sad that animals die to feed us (even though I eat meat), but for an animals meat to be wasted is a tragedy.
The point of my original comment was that in the vast majority of cases, the way they are being treated right now - i.e. culled with these various methods - is par for the course for the modern animal products industry.
That said, I hope you give your hens a good home, and if you do I applaud you. Despite trying my best to maintain a vegan diet right now, I would love to one day raise (heritage breed, that lay infrequently) hens in my backyard - assuming I have one, as a city-dweller.
Other than that, they have space outside to roam, and we even have some "freeloaders" - hens that have become too old to lay, but we keep them on anyway.
That's no reason not to try to improve slaughter methods (and emergency culling methods).
Also, I've eaten vegan for a few years. I don't anymore, but it's worth doing, just as an experience.
Sure, but that says nothing about the suffering these animals experience during their (short [1]) lives, which is typically immense [2] - >=97% of farm animals are raised on factory farms (except for cows, at 78%) [3]. So yes, people should be aware of the facts.
Out of curiosity, why did you shift away from a vegan diet?
[1] https://www.four-paws.us/campaigns-topics/topics/farm-animal...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko
[3] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/its-time-to-end-factory-f_b_1...
You’re moving the goalposts.
Also, upon (even more) lengthy consideration, the ethical considerations seemed less compelling. Having children, for example, seems far more unethical than eating meat, etc. Obviously, opinions vary.
This is wasteful and it is the wastefulness of it that turns the killing of animals that were going to die anyway into an atrocity.
It turns out you need an economy to fight the virus.
All these knock on effects will be great learnings. Probably will turn out that future policy will be a local function of population density, public transportation usage, etc.
The economy is how people survive, it is not wall street like many people seem to believe, no economy == no food. No amount of government money printing will solve that
Economics isn't Wall Street, and we've learned it's impossible to do a clean split between essential and non-essential businesses, as the connections upstream in the supply chain are convoluted and non-obvious (and often enough, companies themselves don't have visibility into their own chains). But that doesn't mean we would be better off pretending the pandemic isn't happening, and just enduring the cost in lives.
Yes but much of this could have been mitigated by an actual mitigation plan not this failed policy of "stay at home" and attempting to arbitrarily define essential and non-essential.
You know things like Mask wearing that was advised against by the government and "The Experts"™ we are all suppose to surrender our lives to
>>we've learned it's impossible to do a clean split between essential and non-essential businesses
That is because every business is essential to the people that own, work, and consume goods / sevices from those business. The idea that the government is the best entity to to choose what is and is not essential is just asinine on its face
>>But that doesn't mean we would be better off pretending the pandemic isn't happening
the number of people saying that is statically 0, sure you have some nut cases that CNN and MSNBC love to parade out on the nightly news as an example of the "average person" that is agaist the lock down orders, but in reality there are more people like me that are using logic and reason to see through the emotional panic and fear that is at the core of the lock down orders to see how irrational and ineffective they really are. We are also advocating for actual mitigation that is proportional to the risk that this virus poses based on actual data, and revision of those plans as new data comes in
In Feb and march based on the data at that time the lockdowns made sense. As we have learned more about how it spreads, who is at risk, what can be done to mitigate the spread and about 100 other things complete shutdowns make less and less sense outside of a few high dense area's of population.
Unless and until we can develop rapid identification and mediation technology mass international travel is a thing of the past. Covid-19 isn't the only virus in the world. In computer terms, our "attack surface" is too large.
I'm a proponent of applied ecology (Permaculture, et. al.) but not a virologist or epidemiologist, I like to think that a biomemetic agriculture would be both more humane and safer. (FWIW) I think we will have to create a kind of "cellular" society.
https://www.hcn.org/articles/covid-19-will-covid-19-help-sav...
"Will COVID-19 help save small slaughterhouses?"
> As laborers for the Big Four meatpackers fall ill, small slaughterhouses see unprecedented demand.
> From 1990 to 2016, the U.S. lost more than 1800 livestock slaughterhouses, 40% of the industry. As small slaughterhouses closed, the so-called “Big Four” meatpacking companies — Tyson, Cargill, JBS and National Beef — came to dominate the industry. Today, these four companies process more than 80% of beef in the U.S.
There it is: optimization of one metric to the detriment of others, resulting in overfitting, and exposed during a pandemic to rare-but-predictable crisis, it falls over.
This comment thread assumes the omnipotent entity (aliens) exists, and so you'd be taking a coin flip as to what behaviour they find pleasing. Pascal's Wager resolves to:
(infinite gain * non-zero probability of success) > (finite gain * non-zero probability of failure)
While this situation is more like:
(infinite gain * non-zero probability of success) ~= (infinite gain * non-zero probability of failure).
- Obviously kind of sentient or intelligent, but
- Totally uninterested in communication.
- Recognize others only as resources to consume for reproduction.
- No other goals, just blind reproduction/consumption
- Remake the environment into our own image, no other life forms can live there. (our cities look like scabs or disease crust from orbit.)
- Violent, invasive, destructive, pointless.
So why don't they "take off and nuke the entire site from orbit?" Because that's human-thinking, it literally wouldn't occur to non-human sentients because they're not sick. Instead we're just quarantined (that's the answer to the Fermi Paradox) and they study us and hope for the best. The Martians evacuated Mars when they realized Sir Percival Lowell could see them.
You should read (if you haven't) The State of the Art by Iain M. Banks, particularly the eponymous novella. Summary from the wikipedia page:
"The State of the Art"
At 100 pages long, the title novella makes up the bulk of the book. The novella chronicles a Culture mission to Earth in the late 1970s, and also serves as a prequel of sorts to Use of Weapons by featuring two of that novel's characters, Diziet Sma and the drone Skaffen-Amtiskaw. Here, Sma argues for contact with Earth, to try to fix the mess the human species has made of it; another Culture citizen, Linter, goes native, choosing to renounce his Culture body enhancements so as to be more like the locals; and Li, who is a Star Trek fan, argues that the whole "incontestably neurotic and clinically insane species" should be eradicated with a micro black hole. The ship Arbitrary has ideas, and a sense of humour, of its own.
'Also while I'd been away, the ship had sent a request
on a postcard to the BBC's World Service, asking for
'Mr David Bowie's "Space Oddity" for the good ship
Arbitrary and all who sail in her.' (This from a machine
that could have swamped Earth's entire electro-magnetic
spectrum with whatever the hell it wanted from somewhere
beyond Betelgeuse.) It didn't get the request played. The
ship thought this was hilarious.'[2]
I've read a couple of Iain Banks' books but he doesn't quite gel for me somehow. These days I don't read fiction because it can't compete with reality. ;-)
But instead, They're prohibited from doing so by hundreds if not thousands of laws.
This is more like Corporate-Capitalism, or Crony-Capitalism, or I don't even know. But it's not just Capitalism.
To be honest I think we should also challenge the assumption that capitalism is incompatible with sustainable production. For example, wikipedia tells me that "Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit". I think most people living in the West today would not consider private ownership and operation of the means of production to be directly responsible for, e.g. the destruction of the environment, or atrocities like the currently discussed cull of farm animals in the US. Different processes seem to be at play here. But I don't exactly have the knowledge to discuss this issue at depth.
Edit: I'm 100% with you on the exasperation with the situation, whaterver caused it. It makes me want to pull my hair out just to think about it. People are starving and animals are being culled instead of being slaughtered to feed them. Because profit margins. That is the absolute pinnacle of stupidity.
If they can use CO2 they should be able to use CO or Nitrogen. Both of these cause a completely painless death in mammals. It was shown in a BBC documentary called How to Kill a Human. The topic was how to execute prisoners for the purpose of capital punishment, but the effects of Nitrogen were shown on a pig. It was completely oblivious to anything happening and voluntarily subjected itself to more Nitrogen after losing consciousness.
How can you argue it did anything voluntarily if it was not conscious?
I'd think it was merely subjected to more nitrogen because it was unable to move away, no?