Researchers successfully potty-train cows
science.org
science.org
They are certainly more intelligent than most pets (dogs/cats). They'll figure things out a lot faster and without specific training. For example, I knew one cow that learned how to open gates and doors with their tongue just by watching us open the doors/gates.
Getting a pet to do those sorts of behaviors usually takes treats and a lot of time.
Honestly, the only thing that surprises me about this is the fact that cows have bladder (and bowel?) control.
One dog noses the wire up, while another dog pushes on the gate itself with her paw.
I had to start latching it with a carabiner where the loop cannot come over the fence post.
I don't know if they learned it from watching me, or by trial and error, but I certainly did not train them to do it.
This was something I didn't believe until my mom and dad recalled what it was like growing up on small farms with a house cow in India.
The they are incredibly intelligent and excellent judges of emotion. They are protective of their owners and can be trained quite well.
This was their rational argument for asking me to not eat beef. I still eat beef, but I can imagine that it's quite distressing when a cow is no different than a pet dog to you. (religious reasons aside)
This describes my dog, two cats, and fairly often my children.
It was one of the rare times in my life where I was struck dumb and mute. I could only stare at her, and she further offered that it's Trident gum.
After a moment I asked whether Penelope swallows the gum, and the lady said no, never. She chews for an hour or two and then spits it out, presumably after it's lost its flavor.
I felt like everything I knew about life up to that point was wrong.
No way does the flavor of trident last an hour
Of course it all made sense once the make of the gum was revealed.
Speech (with cancer warning): https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/west-bengal-bjp-chief-dilip-...
https://www.superpages.com/em/basics-pot-bellied-pig-care-fe...
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/travel/other/cunning-pig-in-china-...
It's pretty variable in dogs, I've had both some real dumb ones (still great dogs, just a bit dopey) and also super intelligent ones.
Just for fun, some of the behaviors that come to mind (not all the same dog):
- opening cages, even with clips in place to "lock" it a bit
- intentionally looking pitiful/hurt only when they know a certain gullible human is around to get extra attention (access to the couch)
- turning on a light switch that gets the neighbor dog to bark, causing our other dogs to run over and look, then stealing whatever dog bed she wants
And then just in general, dogs and other pets seem really good at training humans if the human allows (most do, you really have to pay attention quite a lot to avoid it).
I have a 20 week old shiba inu (regarded as one of the most intelligent - and stubborn - breeds) and he figured out his crate's latch weeks ago. Problem is he just can't open it from the inside, but if he really wants out he will use his tongue on the latch from the inside and try for several minutes to flip it over and move it. Fortunately he's just barely not capable of actually getting it done.
Intelligence doesn't really matter. For factory farms, intelligent livestock simply have no chance of escaping.
For small time farms, the animals are generally kept pretty happy anyways, so they've often have no reason to try and escape. There's not a lot of farms inbetween at this point.
Probably not much control; they might notice they need to go about 30 seconds before they really gotta go. If your house cow can't get out by itself there might be a pie by the door and an apologetic gaze.
I've known a cow that was raised in a small pen under a hickory tree; he learned to keep a bathroom corner after the crate trained dog suggested it to him, I think.
We run a goat as part of our dog pack, she's as house trained as I expect from any puppy that age, but she needs to go out often and may have the urge hit suddenly.
We have a guy who is able to to open any stall he wants, and he opens the stalls of other horses that he likes. As evidenced by the fact that he would open his own stall and then let a certain set of horses out.
If that wasn't amazing enough... He got into a conflict with another horse (nipping at each other), and he stopped letting that guy out of his stall.
Livestock is... complicated. Horses collectively are unreasonably stupid. But some individuals are amazing. Before I came into contact with them, I thought they all were "Glassy eyed dinosaurs". It's a weird trick because you see people make declarative statements about them, up to and including they aren't able to recognize people. But, when you work with them its absolutely clear they have preferences. They prefer certain riders and certain activities.
Maybe you had the DaVinci of horses in your stable?
E.g.: Our neighbor has two cats. One is very needy and craves our attention. The other rarely acknowledges people and spends its free time in stalking mode.
Was the set independent of what stalls they were in? Or were they always in the same stalls? If the latter, it could just be that he knows he can open some stalls more readily than others.
That wouldn't account for it, since he changed who he'd let out based on his personal relationship with the individual in the stall.
It's also interesting to note that domestic cat vocalizations are used primarily to communicate with humans! They notice we use speech, so they do too! And while some meows are common, others vary between cats -- it's like their very own language to talk to their owner.
As opposed to? I read this the same as "circles, and round circles in particular...." Is there any other kind?
edit: ... but it is a very complicated topic even if most of it isn't even close to anything I'd call actual intelligence.
If karma theory is to be believed, evolution happens at the level of individual soul (called jivatma) – gradually a soul takes birth starting from the smallest microorganism and traveling all the way through 84m type of species before becoming a human. It's not exactly linear and one can be stuck in the same type of species for more than once or jump to a human being early. The difference between a human being and animal is the development of the intellect sheet of the consciousness; however, depending on what was your prominent animal tendency in past births, some humans act as lion, some as cow, some as folks, observable in their behavior. It's also possible to fall back to animal birth depending on your karma as a human or for other reasons.
Can we validate this theory? Yogic methods are there which requires mastering meditation (many enlightened beings have verified it such as Buddha). Scientifically I don't know. Maybe in future it'd be possible.
Plenty of them don't like people, though. (And many for good reason.)
What really surprised me was how friendly and fun the donkeys were. The one that did coyote patrol for the emus always made hilarious happy-donkey sounds whenever he saw me walk the fence line, and it was nice to be able to work in his paddock and have a buddy to hang out with instead of a sneak horse-nip while you're focused on something else.
There are a few houses that butt up to the area.
The horses have owners, and people stop to pet them.
One night a home owner heard a horse yelllng out his window. He didn't think that much about it, but the horse would stop yelling.
He shined a flash light on him, and decided to call one of the other horse hill owners.
The owner finally arrived, and brought a vet.
The horse's stomach twisted. The vet fixed him.
Whenever that guy goes out on his porch, the horse runs up to him. Almost out of respect?
no treats were ever given to them for this.
I wish we knew how to make them do that because he wasn't the only vomiting cat.
My dog figured how to use the lever from watching us a few times. I can barely teach her anything else though.
The masterclass of clicker training seems to be chickens. [1] From what I've heard of it, they don't understand positive punishment, so you only have positive reinforcement, and they're kinda dense. Still, with treat training they can learn to do some impressive tricks.
Apparently with falcons and hawks in particular you can cause them to regress with certain missteps, and have to train them again. He had said something about going out of town and having to start over with some behavioral training they'd worked out before he left.
The reason not to use averse training methods isn't effectiveness in training, punishment can teach a lot and chickens need to stay alive, it's the possible of generalization of negative experiences causes can cause unintended behavioral issues, and shaping would be a much different exercise. I hear this argument a lot of "positive only" trainers, that negative methods are somehow not effective, and it just cannot possibly be true!
I think dogs have an innate need to have their toilet not where they eat. Most dogs we got in the farm where not potty trained, but they always shit/pee in the same place which is a bit far and cornered from where they hang out/eat.
I'm not vegan and never will be. I don't think veganism is a crazy idea, I think it's great if that's what a person likes. And I don't see how this story, the context of it, adds substantial merit to veganism.
If cows are smart enough to be potty trained then maybe we should not confine them to feedlots and slaughter them.
If it has no friends/family who miss its absence, who cares?
Death is not immoral, it just is.
I honestly don't see how being smart enough to be potty trained has anything to do with whether something should be eaten. That's a truly bizarre connection to make.
We are part of nature and eat food that is part of a traditional diet or a very close substitute. Whether something is in our traditional diet has only a limited relationship to how intelligent it is. For instance, if it is so intelligent that we have not been able to catch it then it would certainly be excluded from our diet. But in general, that's not why foods are actually excluded in practice, so this is a fringe theory to explain why humans have developed as omnivores that eat meat as well as vegetables.
There is for vegetarianism, it was not invented in the nineteenth century, but veganism was. There are no examples of vegan cultures before modern times.
Given that what we do not know about human metabolism is more important than what we do know I am sceptical of some new radical dietary plan.
Is not industrial agriculture generally (and more generally, greed) the actual problem?
I do not think that intensive crop growing is better than pastoral farming of animals for meat. The former is catastrophic to the local environment the latter is all around me and causes very few problems.
So because we want meat, more and more industrial agriculture has to happen to grow that meat. So yeah, I think having an industrial meat industry has more environmental impact, than just having industrial farming in the absence of the industrial meat industry.
So eating meat is both very polluting, but once was and still could be a net positive for agricultural sustainability and reducing fossil fuel pollution.
Certain industrial techniques do.
I am surrounded by pasture with sheep (and some cattle, and even some Lama? Alpaca?...) eating grass.
Industrial agriculture is not a state of nature, it is a choice.
The industrial production of soy beans is quite horrifying also.
There are industrial farming techniques that are not so bad as there are traditional techniques that are awful.
We are intelligent creatures and we can make choices. Better choices than just giving up
"Letting women vote has no basis in that there is no precedent."
We know enough about nutrition that we could get all the nutrients needed without animal products. If your concern is about health, then how many examples of vegan people living healthy lives into their 90s would be enough to convince you?
The main finding of this review is that vegetarians develop B12 depletion or deficiency regardless of demographic characteristics, place of residency, age, or type of vegetarian diet. Vegetarians should thus take preventive measures to ensure adequate intake of this vitamin, including regular consumption of supplements containing B12.
A lot of suffering is avoided with a measly supplement.
B12 was originally sourced naturally by consuming things straight from the ground, like foraging and drinking from streams, or eating animals. Modern farming doesn't allow for a lot of this consuming straight from the wilderness though, so B12 needs to be supplemented. Either into animals so we get it via their meat, or directly, via a supplement.
Your B12 is coming from a supplement either way, though. Vegans just ask that you take out the middleman so that they don't need to die for you to get something that is found in a measly pill.
A) There is plenty of precedent for women being involved in the mechanisms of government
B) Governance is a cultural artefact and diet is a matter of biology. I do not think we perfectly understand culture, but we create it as we go along. The requirements of biology are hard, must be met, and very poorly understood. SO lack of precedent for veganism (plenty for vegetarianism) is an issue
Pick a society that didn't have women voting; imagine someone making the argument "there is no precedent", and notice how it's an absurd argument. It sounds like a conservative's wet dream, implying that whenever there is no precedent for something, it meaningfully counts against that thing. Sure, there is no precedent for surviving a guillotine, but are you saying the intention of my sentence wasn't clear?
How about this, at some point in history someone could have said "there is no precedent for the internet" -- would that have been a meaningful "con" against creating it?
As my follow up question goes: "How many examples of vegan people living healthy lives into their 90s would be enough to convince you?"
A good parallel about veganism is from the past: people were saying "hey, we shouldn't have slaves" and slave owners saying "but I like it this way". To ignore the arguments of the anti-slavery movement by gesturing at some generic concern for well being is absurd. If in fact having no slaves meant that the rich families were going to have less money and would eat less-nutritious food is not a good argument for perpetuating slavery.
Probably, insect sources would meet fat soluable needs if a live source was to be chosen.
(Not a vegan, omnivorous, happy to consider lacto-ovo vegetarianism at some poibt)
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/calcium/#:~:tex....
What's your source for animal-based calcium being more bioavailable?
I had my calcium tested as a vegetarian and later as a vegan and it's gone up.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12088515/
As a layperson, perhaps I misconstrued bioavailabilty and absorption because both come into effect.
I glad your calcium levels have risen btw, I would wonder if other effects like exercise or overall dietary sufficiency have changed. If for instance you ate less foods with chelating agents you'd alter iron absorption, perhaps your dietary shift removed confounding phylate? And no matter why, it's great they rose.
I am not put off by this. The role of cows and pigs in this world is to be eaten.
They would not exist otherwise.
That is a very narrow part of things
They only exist for humans to exploit because humans put them in that situation.
And if you let a pig out of its pen, it'll very quickly return to its instinctual lifestyle and absolutely thrive virtually anywhere. Wild pigs have no problem attacking people and even eating them.
Pigs exist just for humans as much as coyotes do. Which is to say, they don't.
Bask in the glow of doing something you believe is right, even if it's hard. Be the example for your kids even if it's with baby steps. Cheers.
People still often end up traumatized after doing that killing.
Even at a huge distance, drone pilots end up with PTSD fairly frequently.
So I don't think it's quite so black and white as only caring about things we have attachment to.
When I make stock at home from vegetable trimmings, I put mushrooms and kombu in. In Japanese cooking those two things make a dashi, which is a base stock for a lot of dishes, but even adding them to regular stocks (or if I’m cooking rice or quinoa or something) by tying a sheet of seaweed around some mushrooms and then pulling it out when the cooking is done, it imparts a lot of glutamate but not an overly seaweed-y flavor. I don’t eat the seaweed or the mushrooms usually (dried shiitakes have a texture I don’t like), I use them only to infuse things.
The range of tastes in mushrooms varies a lot more than most people realise - it drives me crazy how many English words are used for the same mushroom (portobello, white, brown, chestnut, crimini, champignon all refer to agaricus bisporus), and how few mushroom varieties most people have tasted.
Especially as A.bisporus is one of the most boring mushrooms in existence.
As in, there exists no delicious food that doesn't contain animal products?
All of the cultures that have long food histories mostly not based around meat must be miserable? Nobody could possibly enjoy vegetable pad thai or chana masala? French fries?
I also said tofu which tastes great and is neither seafood or meat.
I grew up in a Mediterrannean country. If you think about it, that's the one region in the entire world that has so many different nations famous for their cuisines: Spain, Italy, Greece, France, Morocco, Tunisia ... and all of them are 80% technically vegetarian or vegan. Think of Italian cuisine with all its pasta with tomato sauce and olive oil, for example, or the Greek cuisine with all its sea food, the world-famous French cheeses, Moroccan pilafs, etc.
It's funny in a way but most of those are the cuisines of traditionally piss poor people (in Italy, for example, you eat best in the -still- poor South). They say that "need is the mother of invention" and I guess if you can't rely on having steak and fries for breakfast, lunch and dinner, then you really need to get creative if you want to have some pleasure with your food.
It's a real tragedy that in the West being vegan has more or less become synonymous with fake burgers and milk substitutes. There's so many things you can eat that are vegan, or vegetarian, that aren't "fake" anything and don't "substitute" anything, they're just delicious foods in their own right. But then, there are so many people who don't even know how to cook steak and fries to begin with, let alone know how to make a good meal out of some vegetables...
1) Quite a lot of time, we will hear from the vegan/vegetarian community that humans were not designed to eat meat, we were only designed to eat in a vegan/vegetarian manner. This is done by selectively ignoring a lot of evidence. This pisses people off when it is caught.
2) We have some real-life study evidence that vegans/vegetarians live less long than people who have some meat. There's a sweet spot on the curve between deep-fried steaks every day and no meat ever. And yet the veggie crowd will over-simplify and say that their diet is the way to go if you want to live longer. Again, it's another case of manipulating the evidence and this also pisses people off when caught.
Basically, the whackadoo types are running (and ruining) public relations for this kind of thing and that isn't working out.
Now, 20 years later, I'm mostly vegetarian, and limit dairy and other animal products. But it doesn't have to be perfect. I'm just trying to consume less of it and lessen my overall impact.
It doesn't have to be 100% pure.
Or are you saying they only beg for milk in situations in which their young have been taken away?
If you've never milked cows, it may be hard to tell, but happy cows are very obvious if you know what you're looking for.
It should also be noted that stressed cows produce less milk, so it's economically advantageous to keep the cows happy.
I think that in other places sheep can be milked year-round by having them breed twice in a year, but I'd guess that this would tire the animals and reduce the quality of the milk and probably also the quantity (which is already quite low for sheep and goats). I really doubt goats can be convinced to do things the humans' way. I've never heard of anyone industrially breeding them and I can't imagine goats nicely lining up to be milked by a robot!
A lot of the lore that animal rights folks share about how dairy animals are bred and milked seems to be collected from a very particular kind of practice, focused exclusively on dairy cows in the US, and that isn't as widespread as the animal rights people would have you think. For example, I bet everyone has heard by now how cows are cruelly separated from their calves immediately when the calf is born, but I doubt as many people have heard of Salers cows that will simply not produce any milk unless their calf is touching them. Milk from Salers cows is a legal requirement for some PDO cheeses so while their numbers are few compared to Freisians, Jerseys, etc, they are no less cows and no less dairy cows. They're just the inconvenient kind (for milking, as well as for propagandising).
I think this is a great step in the right direction, if you limit your animal product consumption to stuff like this. The problem is that no one really does just this. Loads of people have chickens in their backyard that they love, and they eat the eggs, but then they order a dish with eggs out at a restaurant, or they out for ice cream, and they are still supporting the companies responsible for the terrible treatment of animals that we see in videos of factory farms.
Most vegans probs won't join you in eating the backyard eggs, but most (that I know, at least!) would commend you for limiting your consumption of animal products that don't actively support factory farms.
I was a pretty long time vegan and after about a decade as an omnivore, I'm now mostly avoid meat again, though I'm not as strict as I once was.
When I was a serious vegan I'd keep it to myself unless I really had to mention it. But once it came up, people would frequently try to poke holes in my reasoning. It didn't take long before I'd heard all the arguments against.
The only one that really resonated with me was: "I like meat too much, so I don't care to change, even if it's causing harm."
I felt like that was honest, and I could respect it. Everything else felt like someone trying to defend their own ego.
Now, this was all 20 years ago. So maybe people have softened to the idea some. Or at least are used to it enough that they wouldn't have as much the same reactions today.
A young philosophy YouTuber of all people (Alex O'Connor) was the one who put the ethics of veganism in the right light for me; I had already decreased my animal product consumption to almost nothing with it being the leading cause of deforestation and habitat loss, but was not sold on the animal rights front in the slightest. Alex dismantled all my "egotistical" arguments as you put it. I followed it by reading his recommendation of Peter Signers book 'Animal Liberation' which really nailed the coffin as it were.
I recommend these videos [1][2] and this book [3] whole-heartedly for those who are on the fence, or even far beyond it but would like a "reasoned" view of veganism rather than the shallow arguments to might hear from your hippie friend or 14 year-old newly vegan niece/nephew.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1vW9iSpLLk&t=192s [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcVR2OVxPYw [3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29380.Animal_Liberation
That point aside however, when I say threatening I mean that it's not uncommon for myself and others to get accosted by someone simply mentioning that we are vegan. Again, there is no other position I hold where I can say nothing at all (I mean this genuinely - I actively avoid the discussion to the point that I will tell people I won't talk about with them), yet I will still be talked at for 30 minutes about how my ethics are wrong. The only comparison I can give is when people are hurled racist or homophobic comments with no provocation. Even within my close friend group, of whom none are vegan, have noticed it and will swiftly interject when it happens. I mean this with all honestly, if I am at a party with say 10 people who I don't know, at least 1 person there will try to talk at me until I find an excuse to leave. To me, it seems like they hold insecurities about their own ethics and are trying to reason their way out of it, as if I were their therapist. It's happens way to often and is frankly bizarre.
The root cause of this is an unwillingness to even acknowledge the existence of a different point of view in other peoples' heads. The militatnt vegan is incapable of considering the fact that "meat is murder" is her own opinion and that it is not shared by everyone around her, in fact she wants to make everyone around her not just aware of what she thinks, but also agree with her, and if people dont' agree with her it's because they're not just murderers, they're also idiots who can't see how they're murderers. The idiot who buttonholes you to tell you your ideas are wrong similarly can't get it around his big fat head that some people think different than he does- or he's just a fucking bully who thinks he's got the majority on his side and can torment you all he likes. I'm happy to hear your friends stick up for you.
Still, what happens to you is not that strange if you see it in the context of peoples' inability to consider others' point of view and understand others' thiking, even just to disagree with it better.
And btw, I think you and the other poster above are doing that too, when you say that others are "threatened" by your veganism. Perhaps it's just me, but it sounds more like you two are bragging about your unorthodox ideas that challenge others' misconceptions, than really trying to understand what's going on in other peoples' heads.
Until someone gets hungry, and then letting the animal live a good life quickly stops being a concern, even though letting it live will result in exactly 0 nutritional problems (assuming a normal, balanced diet).
> we're no different.
But we are, no? We aren't dogs, right? Or lions, or deer, or doves, or elephants. We are humans, and can recognize moral worth and weigh the ethical concerns of a situation, such as "Is it really worth having this animal suffer and die, when I could instead just eat a veggie burger?"
> vicious circle
When do we get to the part of the circle where 10 billion humans are systematically artificially inseminated, farmed, milked, culled, processed, thumped, skinned, boiled, and cut every year to sate the appetites of pigs, geese, horses, cows, goats, sheep, fish, sharks, whales, etc?
Not to any responsible farmer. Respect in death as well as life.
>"Is it really worth having this animal suffer and die, when I could instead just eat a veggie burger?"
Yes. I have never killed an animal to eat and had it suffer. I kill sheep with a very sharp knife, and they're unconscious from blood loss before they feel the pain. I thank them for their gift once they're gone.
> When do we get to the part of the circle where 10 billion humans are systematically artificially inseminated, farmed, milked, culled, processed, thumped, skinned, boiled, and cut every year to sate the appetites of pigs, geese, horses, cows, goats, sheep, fish, sharks, whales, etc?
Whenever they get smart enough to do that to us.
Butt killing someone isn't respectful just because we say it is. If I kill you without you feeling any pain, it's hard to say I'm really respecting you, even if I say "respect in death as well".
> I have never killed an animal to eat and had it suffer
Have you ever purchased food that contained animal products? Because there is the overwhelming likelihood that the products came from a factory farm, which tend to be horrific for animals. Also, you say it _is_ worth it. Why? Why not just eat something else that doesn't involve killing an animal that doesn't want to die?
> Whenever they get smart enough to do that to us.
Ah, so not much of a circle is it then? A circle is reciprocal, and what we do to animals most definitely is _not_.
If I had to kill someone in self-defense, I'd also try to make it as humane as possible. There's no point in generating excess suffering.
> Why not just eat something else that doesn't involve killing an animal that doesn't want to die?
Because I am above that animal on the food chain, and it's my natural right to eat it. Why don't you go judge a lion instead?
> Ah, so not much of a circle is it then?
We rot in the dirt eventually, plants eat us, and then herbivores eat those plants. It's a circle.
My rancher buddies often tell me they suck at ranching because they get attached to some of their cows and just keep them instead of send them off.
I don't get this kind of choice at all. Nourishment should come from food, not from supplements. If you don't eat well enough to keep yourself healthy and fullfill your needs, you should change your diet. If there are ideological reasons, religious or political reasons, then you should re-examine those. There is nothing ethical in starving yourself. You will not care for animals and will not save the environment by not eating enough food.
What's more, being vegan achieves exactly 0 change to the suffering of animals and to the damage done to the environment. When you go to the supermarket and find a steak on a shelf, whether you buy it or not makes no difference to the suffering of the animal or the amount of greenhouse gasses produced to raise it. You can choose to buy the steak and eat it or not, but you can't change what has already happened. So whether you eat meat or not is just an empty, symbolic gesture. It may give you the warm moral fuzzies, but you haven't changed anything in reality.
The idea of course is that if everyone becomes vegan, then meat production will stop or decrease. It could work in theory, but in practice the number of vegetarians and vegans keeps rising but meat production and consumption has been increasing steadily since the 1960's:
https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production
So what is the vegan plan? Whatever it is, it's not making a dent. Everybody has heard the vegan and vegetarian claims by now: meat is murder, it destroys the environment, you're a bad person for liking meat, the goalposts keep shifting, but meat production keeps increasing, never decreasing, no matter what.
It's not just a crazy idea, it's an idea that doesn't work.
Sheep are the most blazingly stupid animals I've ever encountered, and I've watched a chicken and a turkey, respectively, run into a corner repeatedly because it didn't see the open field behind it, and literally stare upwards into rain until it inhaled water and drowned.
Cows are quite smart, but also amazingly lazy. They will lie in one spot and starve to death, because they're too lazy to walk to food. However, start milking them, and you'll learn exactly how clever they are. They'll plot for weeks just to fuck with you or put a foot in the bucket.
Horses are worse, because they can kill you easily, so you can't just punch them if they threaten you, like you can with cows. (Punching cows doesn't hurt them, just annoys them enough to leave you alone, sometimes). They're all clever, but nothing matches goats.
Goats are horrifyingly smart, and very very mischievous. They'll plan escapes from any enclosure, will manipulate you by looking cute, and will specifically knock you into muddy patches and bleat in a manner suspiciously like laughter.
Thankfully, my wife's family has Great Pyrenees, one of the best breeds of dog known to man (Seriously, give them a look if you have land and are looking for a dog. Smart, amazingly gentle, and will kill a bear [literally, I've seen it] to protect you, and they got the kids out of trouble if the animals got rowdy.
tl;dr: farm animals are actually really smart, have personalities, and are absolutely wonderful to be around growing up. You learn important life lessons, and a good amount of common sense.
Oh, and Donkeys are better than almost any guard dog. They'll kick the shit out of anything that looks mean, and they can bite the head off a cougar, and will. It's nuts.
I saw dogs very much like this on a mountain in Catalonia (although not in the actual Pyrenees). There was a pack of them wandering around on their own, with whom we crossed paths several times. Once, we saw them with their mistress. It seemed she had basically deployed them as a patrol, going around checking on the sheep without human supervision! They were incredibly friendly towards us, accompanying us along the trail for a while.
https://youtu.be/wrwHWgyFEks?t=559
The guy points, the dog runs. I swear, it's like the dog speaks French...
I think the dog in the video is a Blue Heeler or similar cattle dog. Also amazing at their jobs, and very, very well-tuned to humans.
"Methane is the second-largest contributor to climate change and the majority of methane emissions caused by human activity comes from livestock." [1]
How much methane is emitted by the act of farting, compared to the waste decomposing?
I'm so glad that this research has succeeded, and here, because in a country like New Zealand there is political willpower (pro-environment) and industrial capacity (Fonterra dairy) to get this mooving.
I wish I could give the researcher a pat on the back.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/03/feeding-cows-seaweed-...
I fear part of that capacity is to understand the horrors they're frequently subject to in industrial feed lots.
I still eat meat, but I'm increasingly uncomfortable with that fact.
Bio-reactors are pretty stupid.
https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/piers-anthony/47321-in_the_b...
I assure you, they are not anything like you described. And across breeds, they have wildly different cognitive capacities, so a broad-stroke description like this is inherently inaccurate.
Vs. prejudice and bigotry.
Whistling in the wind!!
However! They're identifiably, understandably stupid, like a tiny human with terrifically poor planning, observing, memorization, predicting, social, and emoting skills. It's not an alien kind of stupidity like that of a fish, insect, plant, or rock (or computer program). I can say with great confidence that chickens are quite low on the emotion/intelligence spectrum, but in saying that I'm quite confident that they're on it.
If your criteria for animal cruelty is achieving a particular level or capability on the sapience/sentience spectrum, you can feel pretty safe eating chicken. If your criteria is that they not posses intelligence or experience emotions at all, you'd better go pescatarian. Or eat mutton: if sheep have any intelligence at all it's completely undetectable to me.
https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Ameglian_Major_Cow
Here's a clip with the cow from the BBC's H2G2 TV series:
One of the things it did to me was totally transform my perception of animals, humans as animals, our relationships, and cause to me to realize I have no way to verify that animals don’t experience life in a way that’s as meaningful or as sentient as mine. I can’t even properly define those things. I do know that I share a LOT with mammals especially and they appear to possess a lot of the faculties required to feel good, suffer, have temporal awareness, relationships with other animals, etc. That’s not what was taught to me as a child.
I like to go spear fishing and that’s a very changed experience. I learned how to originally so I could be more selective about food and where I harvest it, reduce bycatch, etc. So I cared before to some degree. Now shooting a fish involves this internal struggle of deciding if it’s necessary, if it makes sense, what it means about me, what the experience will be like for the fish. It feels a lot more like killing someone rather than something. I guess that sounds silly.
It’s a rabbit hole. You can go down so far and maybe not turn up much that’s very useful. I think animals aren’t very discernible from human animals in the big picture though. I’m basically a murderer, but the legally sanctioned kind. I bought the license.
I strongly prefer to eat the food I murdered myself now. I occasionally eat farmed meat, but it’s rare and comes from local farms with unscalable high standards. I’m fortunate that I can do that. I mostly do it to appease my family - they feel weird when I skip dishes at special meals.
Anyway I wanted to share that because this thought experiment about the experience of animals in farms means a lot to me lately, and I find it all fascinating but important as well. Like you, I’m increasingly uncomfortable with it.
No it does not. Animals and fish are sentient beings with their own set of perceptions, feelings, thoughts, desires, and more.
I do not think there is a defensible way to consume animals if you're living on above-poverty wages in a developed country and don't have some extremely rare health problem.
Killing is problematic (ending a life prematurely), but worse yet is the experience animals have on factory farms.
In your case of hunting your own fish seems less morally problematic than most animal consumption, but I understand the sentiment of "do I really need to eat that when there are plenty of non-sentient alternatives". Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
Also, it's clearer to us (since we're animals) what sorts of events count as ending another animal's life. Elsewhere it's trickier (Is a field of grass one life, or is a blade of grass one life? How should mycelial networks be counted? etc).
For these reasons, I think it's that applying different logic to different kingdoms is a fairly defensible move.
Many plants have evolved specifically around being eaten by other animals.
No, that would be different organisms.
There are also several fungi and protozoans who migrate between the digestive tracts of animals that eat each other (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii for instance).
I'm not enough of a biologist to defend the point especially well, but doesn't it make sense that one would use different types of reasoning to manage relationships with different types of life?
Right, but that's not the plant, that's the fruit. If you eat the plant itself, it's dead. Same as a cow.
I'll grant that no plants come to mind that have a niche that requires them to be wholly eaten, but I still think that deciding whether to eat a plant requires totally different logic than deciding whether to eat an animal.
So what's your position? Are you here to suggest that "we shouldn't eat animals" is absurd by equating it to "we shouldn't eat plants?"
Or are you a vegan looking to take it a step further by not eating plants that have to die in order for you to eat them? Because I'd like to hear more about somebody who sincerely held that belief.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruitarianism
I just don't understand how you can have a moral outrage to killing one thing but not another. People seem to do a little dance about plants being not as alive as animals to justify it, but it doesn't make sense to me.
There are parasites for which being eaten is a part of their life cycle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leucochloridium_paradoxum
Black widow spiders are so named because the females eat their mates. Some spider mothers become food for their own children.
Not to mention that (while not exactly what you asked for, but I think it's important to recognize) carnivores kill other species as a means of survival, and even their own species at times. Wild wolves cannot feed their pups without killing other animals. Death is common in nature.
The spider thing is interesting though. It would seem that being eaten by her children is an adaptation, not just an unfortunate consequence of harsh reality. The strategy appears to be: give my nutrients to my offspring, for they carry a part of me, and the survival of that part is more important than the rest.
Given that most of the cells in a human body are passengers, and not cells with human DNA in their nucleus (if they have nuclei at all), it seems pretty likely that something, somewhere, is making the same kind of sacrifice, and using a hungry human as the vehicle. And I think that ending a life on those terms falls in a different domain--both from an ethics perspective, and from a "how adversarial of an environment do you want to create for yourself"-perspective, than mere predation.
Strategies of that sort are more popular outside of the animal kingdom than in it (I think), which I think justifies a "different rules for different things" approach.
Ultimately, many grazing animals have their property. If their numbers grow too large from lack of predators, they'll consume all available food and then starve en-masse.
I don't have any reason to suspect that they don't.
With animals there's a clear connection: they have brains and brains is clearly the part that enables us humans to have conscious experiences.
The burden of proof of the claim "plants are conscious" is on you.
I didn't claim that plants were conscious, and we have no idea what causes the conscious experience. I personally wouldn't say that all humans actually experience consciousness. So no, no clear connection, and no burden either.
I would also add though that if you want to minimize plant death, the best course of action is to stop eating meat and animal products and aim for a plant-based diet, since (by thermodynamics!) the number of plants needed to feed these animals vastly outstrips what would deliver the same amount of nutrients to a human eating them directly.
Else I might kill myself, except it is not allowed by my animal programming, which is out of my control, so I go back to that hoping phase.
I also wonder what’s the problem with killing sentient animals while we also kill fellow humans when “necessary”. We kill for our little ego, so let’s just keep fingers crossed that the sacrifices we force are worth something.
Maybe this is a bit Buddhism centric but it takes off my mental loads a bit.
It doesn't require it at all.
It's a lossy conversion.
There are still inherent issues with dairy, such as forced impregnation and abduction and murder of the offspring, so it isn't great no matter how you slice it. But if we're to compare dairy operations, this one was pretty good I guess.
When the cows stopped producing much milk, they had some way of pasturing them for around 2 years before they'd then slaughter them for meat. In total the cows had quite long and low pressure lives. The dairy and meat was very expensive, though. I think that's the realistic outcome of treating animals more morally. It isn't cheap.
That’s the issue with vegetarianism. It’s not really about “the animals”, it’s about things that happen to resemble human beings. The more similar to a human, the more “sentience” it has. Isn’t that an odd coincidence? Or perhaps plants are just as sentient as humans but are a different form of life too distant from humans for us to empathize with.
The whole thing is a massive exercise in human myopia.
The burden of proof is on you. Humans are animals. We have evolution linking us together at a more-recent junction than we do when compared to plants. Humans and animals have brains; brains is the seat of sentience.
Finally; even if you are right that plants are sentient, are you then claiming that there is no difference in the amount of sentience between humans, bees, and plants? If so, should we be indifferent whether I kill you or burn a dandelion?
But even if it were just about not wanting to kill things that resemble us--it still doesn't have to be a false elevation of human sentience.
If there are fungi that make decisions, I'd expect them to look out for their fungus-buddies more than they look out for me. If Jupiter's red spot can be asked, I'd expect that it cares more for the weird hexagon on the poles of Saturn than anything going on on earth. Seeking kinship with similar things and being indifferent to alien things is common in biology, and it gets along just fine without sentience in the mix.
I think vegetarianism makes a ton of sense from an environmental and ecological point of view, but this has nothing to do with the moral one.
No defense needed, all animals are ultimately consumed and to imagine an alternative is to indulge in fantasy.
We can debate the timing and manner of consumption, but not the idea of consumption.
We are animals too you know. If all animals are "ultimately consumed", so perhaps there is no problem if I kill and eat some close friend of yours?
When people start defending their meat consumption, they seem to make all sorts of bizarre claims. Could you explain yours?
So if an animal dies of a disease, is it "consumed"? Could you explain your claim?
These considerations are originally critical to what it meant to be hunter. Hunters are shepherds to their prey, just from a distance. You can't kill with reckless abandon because of realities like supply and spoilage. Livestock can be seen as a practice of a hunter bringing their prey closer to home so as to protect them from harvest by other hunters.
I have been fully aware of the intelligence the whole time, and have just found the prior scientific consensus to be silly
and now I keep running into people that say something like "ah ! they are intelligent! I lost my appetite"
like... what? how or why is that related, to you. how is that the line in the sand.
feel like I took acid and got stuck in this weird mostly similar dimension.
Alternative question around a similar idea: does picking asparagus or cutting down a tree give similar feelings as gutting an animal for meat?
We can catch diseases by eating other animals, but with human flesh, the contagion would face much lower hurdle to get across.
Human meat is not one.
That is the extent of my logic and mine personally has not included hypotheticals.
I have the same questions for others actually, because I don’t understand the logic path: if it was shown in the future that “asparagus and trees” and even their separated fruit had bundles of nerves, conditional logic, feelings, intelligence, does that also exclude them from diets now?
Essentially you seem to have said that what you consider to be ok to eat is what you have already ate or what has been accepted to be eaten by those around you.
I find that conclusion lacking, as it gives no room for future food discovery (unless you are ok with being passive and just eating whatever others tell you is ok to eat).
But back to your question.
> if it was shown in the future that “asparagus and trees” and even their separated fruit had bundles of nerves, conditional logic, feelings, intelligence, does that also exclude them from diets now?
If it is believed that “asparagus and trees” have the ability to feel joy, feel pain, feel compassion, live some definition of a fulfilling life, and that harvesting them effectively killed all of that. Then yes, I think it would certainly bring into question the morality of mass farming, killing, and eating them.
Of course, if it turns out that everything has this capability, from the smallest nanobes to the largest mammals, and we haven't worked out how to produce nutrients at scale, then maybe we just need to throw our hands up and say "whelp, survival of the fittest".
Shmaybe? It seems pretty reasonable view for me, and my adherence to it would probably depend on availability of alternative food sources. Or perhaps people would dig deeper to identify the discriminating factors that would determine whether or not something can be eaten with clean conscience.
> That is the extent of my logic and mine personally has not included hypotheticals.
My feeling is that it's not the logic path you're having trouble with, but with internalizing the concept of updating your moral framework based on independet reasoning.
Human sense of morality comes partially built-in, and is partially supplied by the groups you live in. That second part is mostly your local culture, i.e. the assumptions and patterns of behavior in the background. Most people tend to keep to those two sources - independent reasoning about morality, while a well-known concept since the times of ancient philosophers, doesn't seem all that common. Perhaps it's because it's difficult - it often hurts thinking about it (i.e. you probably wouldn't be wondering about some chain of reasoning having moral implications if you knew you're in the clear with respect to those implications).
Culture changes pretty slowly - on the order of decades. That humans and animals are the same thing, that animals aren't as dumb as they look, that animals can feel - those are relatively recent scientific insights. What you see as a minority of people using this knowledge and logic to stop eating meat, is the process of our culture slowly updating itself to catch up with the last 200 years of science. It'll take a few more generations, but climate or not, I'd expect that in 100 years people would be mostly vegetarian by cultural pressure. Right now, it's mostly independent reasoners (ok, and some virtue signallers too).
It seems that I have already accepted the probability that most organisms have the things that people are just discovering.
“Well I eat this because it doesn’t have central nervous systems and cant feel pain”
Narrator: it can feel pain and other consumers already assumed that
That's easy to believe if you were taught like I was as a very young boy that it's OK to catch a fish with a fishhook and cut it up to eat because fish are not sufficiently intelligent to feel pain, be hurt, be scared, or suffer. It's easy to generalize that incapability of suffering to extend to all animals when you eventually learn that the same kind of big-eyed cow that says moo is what we eat as beef or hamburgers. Supermarkets make the default behavior to take home shrink-wrapped cuts of meat without ever getting the chance to gauge for yourself whether a cow can suffer; humans are shockingly good at not re-evaluating their priors.
How do you rationalize it? There are lots of ways, you've ruled out that they not intelligent, which is a common one. But are they intelligent but not suffering? Is non-human suffering not wrong? Does the wrongness of causing suffering require the victim to have an undetectable soul, which only humans posses? Is "wrongness" scalar, contingent on need, or mitigated by intelligence, or by an intensity of suffering, or by some other factor not considered? Is tradition and the natural order relevant? Is justice preserved by karmic retribution in an afterlife or reincarnation? Are chickens just really evil and deserving of suffering? Are we actually villains in a global horror story?
Once you push/force them to realize that the difference between a cow and your dog or even a toddler is not that big, they start seeing cows in a completely different light and possibly loose appetite.
A few decades ago, this was less of a problem, as people were close to the animals they were eating later on and it was always a fact that those animals would be eaten at some point. In our times, though, people can live for quite some time without seeing the intermediate steps in meat production or even interact with a cow for extended period of times. Therefore, this realization might come as quite a shock.
It started as a lockdown thing, but the way it seems to have helped weight loss was a big incentive to continue.
Anybody claiming that highly-processed things like this will have anything close to the same health impact and taste as, say, pasture-raised chickens (like I raise on my farm, https://mulligan.farm) is falling into the same trap that my parents fell into when they became convinced that hydrogenated factory-produced oils were healthier than butter.
The taste and nutritive quality of meat has many, many factors going into it, and the genes are only one tiny part. For example, the amount of omega-3s in pasture-raised chicken, and their ratio to omega-6s is far better in pasture-raised chickens than in chickens subjected to confined animal feeding operations (https://apppa.org/The-Nutrition-of-Pasture-Raised-Chicken-an...).
My chickens are of the same genetics as gross grocery store chickens, but grow more slowly, get more exercise, require zero antibiotics, have vastly different flavour and nutritive quality, than those exact same genetics raised in factory farms.
The experience an animal has walking the earth--what kind of activities they engage in, what they eat, what they breath, what pharmaceuticals they're injected with--all have impact on the value of the meat.
What does "lab grown" even mean in this context? Sure, it's genetically identical, but what "lab environment" produces something like grain-finished meat? Which produces 100% grassfed beef?
It seems insanely simplistic to say that "we can grow this phenotype in the lab, so it'll be exactly the same as one raised in a barn or on a pasture."
Why would it be exactly the same? We can probably make it better. Perfect marbling on every steak.
If you're right, that would maybe be cool (but then we'd have to consider the inputs to the factories, which'd probably be GMO soybeans and corn, which means we're harming other animals in the process of producing them), but I believe your statement is full of hubris.
And then you have all of the seasoning, for example KFC’s “secret” herbs and spices are from basically all over the planet.
Wild nature doesn't provide very much that is edible by humans, and certainly not enough to sustain a civilization of humans rather than small bands of roving nomads.
Nature doesn't care about us, it won't help us, if left to its own devices it would eventually wipe humanity out entirely. We're well, well past the point where we can rely on nature to care for itself or for us. If we don't all take the initiative to intervene and engineer nature for its and our benefit, then only those with hubris will do so.
Regarding the hubris of believing that a lab-grown steak could be better than the real thing, physics doesn't change just because it's inside of an animal, so there's no reason to think that we won't eventually be able to engineer muscle tissues that are indistinguishable from real grass-fed beef, given the time and money to do so.
While I can easily believe most specific individual humans could (with skill and training) get a good meal after a few hours spent foraging if considered separately, that is very different from saying that all of the population can be fed that way at the same time.
The carrying capacity of the planet if we’re “in tune with nature” is the pre-farming population, because even neolithic farms were very unnatural things.
Edit: None of this will replicate the romantic imagery of raising animals with love on a beautiful farm. There will likely always be a market for that to some extent, but that is realistically not what most of our meat consumption looks like today either.
Well, maybe we can. But, for instance, a cow that is finished entirely on pasture--a good deal of its nutritive quality comes from the grasses it eats. Where does that nutrition come from in lab-grown meats? Do we have a source for the exact same nutrients as are provided by air, water, and sunlight and grow easily and freely all over many otherwise unusable bits of land?
Where are the inputs to the lab coming from?
It seems kind of like the lab-grown meat maximalists are thinking that Dow Chemical and its brethren can synthesize all the nutrients that are required and known in, say, beef, and just break out the beakers and Breaking Bad them into existence.
As a long-time software engineer who has a deep respect for complex systems, this is totally insane to me. That the lab-grown meat maximalists think we can supplant this incredibly complex system, from sun to leaf to calf to beef, in some Dow Chemical-inputs and a factory, is absolutely insane.
Remember, from Black Swan by Taleb: Up until the 60s, scientists didn't think that fiber was a useful part of our diet. This lead to the notion that fruit juice was equivalent to whole fruit, from a dietary perspective. This contributed in some part to the obesity epidemic.
The idea that we already do know exactly what makes meat so tasty and healthy is suspect, the idea that we can replicate this exactly like burning CD-ROMs in a meat CD-Burner is just off the wall.
> It seems insanely simplistic to say that "we can grow this phenotype in the lab, so it'll be exactly the same as one raised in a barn or on a pasture."
It seems insanely unimaginative to think we can not.
No, "lab grown" does not mean an Impossible Burger. You've confused the definition with something else.
This reads like a person that is afraid technical advancement will make them obsolete. Your bias is probably too strong to make clear and meaningful arguments.
I am not in the slightest bit afraid of factory/lab-grown meat supplanting my little farm. Regardless of what highly-processed stuff large agribusinesses can or will produce, there will always be a great market for humanely-raised, carefully processed animal protein.
If anything, it's the Tyson and Smithfield Foods of the world that should be worried. Somehow, I don't think any of us are.
Congrats!
> Regardless of what highly-processed stuff large agribusinesses can or will produce, there will always be a great market for humanely-raised, carefully processed animal protein.
Yep!
> If anything, it's the Tyson and Smithfield Foods of the world that should be worried. Somehow, I don't think any of us are.
Great!
This entire post didn't really negate mine though. Your post ignored huge percentages of (most of?) the categories of meat and food that would/could be replaced by lab grown food. It's like saying "My mercedes is wondeful, nobody would ever want an _electric car!_." There will always be a place for luxury items. People that eat at McDonald's aren't getting luxury items. Low wage workers that eat 4 dollar per pound chicken from Safeway aren't eating luxury items. If lab grown food can (more) ethically service lower income people with a reduced environmental impact, we should go all-in on that advancement. Your farm can and should exist as a commodity for those that want to pay for it.
Our regulatory environment encourages a small handful of very powerful and wealthy agribusinesses, with all the attendant horrors from absentee landlordism and contract farming and insanely-scaled slaughtering facilities. It could just as well encourage a distribution of small family farms (this is the case in much of the non-western world).
Part of the way we're encouraging this outcome is building a platform to help small farmers directly market to customers, capturing vastly more of the value of their product.
In any case, I thought your example was interesting with cars. Right now, we sell the equivalent of the Tesla Roadster version of chicken. High-end, pricey, targeted toward an upper-middle class customer. As we gain some small amount of scale, and as we encourage more competitors and build co-operative abattoirs, the prices will come down, and we'll never be cheaper than Tyson or whoever, but we might become not so expensive that it's a real reach.
edit: PDF of the book: https://bc.instructure.com/courses/1745066/files/115253047?m...
I've let go of feeling like I have to fix it, because solving these institutional issues is ultimately not my job and that sense of worry will never be relieved in my lifetime, because once again I have no personal agency to affect institutional change. Us peasants in history exists to live and die as units of labor beholden to a course charted by people ordained since birth to command that ship, and its a fallacy to ever imagine that we might ourselves take the helm and steer ourselves to logically rational utopian waters free of emotional biases. Instead of fighting upstream fruitlessly until you die restless, chase personal hedonism within your lifetime and means as much as possible.
Really I think your appeal to heodinism is just a value system like everyone else. Some people choose vegetables over nihilism.
These are the realities of the modern world. You can either spend every second of your life stressing out about how it continually gets worse, and promises made decades ago by leaders are always broken in time, or you could try to block it out and take a more stoic approach to it all, and who knows maybe you might actually luck out and fool your brain into feeling legitimately good about things.
I'm not against making animals work for us, but I think they need to be treated with a level of dignity that their lives deserve.
Currently find myself in-between meat eating and vegan camps so I don't make a lot of friends with this haha
The issue is where it goes, and that before it went straight into the ground and now it can be collected and dealt with?
How would toilet training reduce greenhouse gases?
(Not that that matters - the bulk of beef cattle can barely move, it's not like factory farms have space for designated potty areas or something).
Training beef cows seems like something of a waste of time since they get slaughtered so young. Milk cows however could be worthwhile.
In fact there's a device for letting cars through but not cows that is basically a grate you put on the road. The fence comes up to the grate on both sides and there is no gate. You just drive over the grate.
> Scattered excrement can cause bacterial infections in cows. And when their poop mixes with pee, it creates an environmental hazard: ammonia, which can transform into the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide. Half of the ammonia produced in Europe comes from cattle farms, says study co-author Jan Langbein, an applied ethologist at the Leibniz Institute for Farm Animal Biology. Given the hundreds of millions of dairy cows in the world, he says, studies have shown that capturing 80% of cow urine would lead to a 56% reduction in ammonia emissions.
More ammo against feedlots is a good thing.
One Regenerative Farming's emphasis, widely practiced on many high-quality grassfarms across America, but pioneered on Kiwi sheep farms, is the regular, constant movement of cattle. Whereas most cattle operations in the USA have some kind of rotational grazing system, it tends to be larger pastures with the livestock inside for very long periods of time. What this causes is a large amount of waste of the animal byproducts--the pee and poop are concentrated and oxidized by the sun and wasted. What the Kiwis pioneered was using temporary electrical fencing and frequent movement of the animals, alongside "intensive pasture management" (the management is the intensive part--carefully monitoring the sward and keeping it at optimal growing height--grass growth rates follow a sigmoid function, so if you graze too low, it takes a long time to grow back, but if you graze to just above the peak growth height, it regenerates much more quickly), allows higher stocking rates, lower environment impact, increased carbon sequestration, and many further benefits.
There's an excellent book about this called Greener Pasture on Your Side of the Fence (https://www.amazon.com/Greener-Pasture-Your-Fence-Management...) that goes over the history of this practice.
It takes more labour. Sometimes you move the cows daily, occasionally twice a day, rather than once a month or whatever. But the impact on local ecology is fantastic. Plus, if you move chickens into the pasture after the cows, they help spread the manure, eat all the fly larvae out of the patties, and act as a natural antibiotic (who needs a depreciating piece of farm equipment to spread all that poop when you can use appreciating livestock?).
Definitely better if you can manage sheep cows and chickens on the same property, but that may still be beyond some people to manage. Just the fact of rotation would tend to mean that your cows are on average farther up in the watershed than they would be if they have the entire area to themselves all the time, for some of the reasons you already stated.
Rather a greater accomplishment I expected.