I made a website to help visualize American meat consumption in terms of animals slaughtered per second. It’s pretty insane and I think does something to help communicate just how large such industrial operations truly are.
I would add that (my maybe incorrect napkin math) shows that 5 Americans die per minute to give it scale.
My understanding is also that we destroy an absolutely phenomenal amount of chicks in an entirely gruesome way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling
I have trouble handling that.
I've seen videos of these chick grinders, from fully live chick to ground meat, it takes something like 1/10 of a second, I am not even sure their brain have time to register what happens before there is no brain anymore. Culling also happens very early, maybe after a day or so after hatching, so early it could almost be called abortion. Considered what happens after that, if I were to reincarnate, I would rather be one of these culled chicks than one that survives...
I think that focus on culled chicks is more because it looks ugly than real concerns about animal welfare.
It's casual destruction of life because it's a byproduct. It is as good evidence as any that there are no karmic forces and reality does not care.
I agree though. I would rather be the chick than a farmed chicken. In terms of deaths in the animal kingdom, it's probably pretty hard to beat fast and certain without prolonged striving or suffering.
There are definitely ways to improve the system to require a bit less cruelty.
We usually don't consider a person being born a tragedy almost regardless of what life this person had.
And we still have it in the pockets of the world where it still makes economic sense.
We would certainly have more humans being born in that case than now, is it a negative thing that we are not doing this?
I think bringing children into this world is a sin and parents atone for it to some degree by providing for children the best way they can.
We have religions that contain or contained at some point rules on how to be moral and have slaves. Some of those religions are not only still active today but are still huge.
We eat a lot because there are a lot of us.
I am rather more worried about hungry kids than dead cows.
I also don't care if people can subsist solely on vegetables; subsistence is not our aim -- we can live in appalling conditions, but we got out of those circumstances deliberately. It took a great deal of time and hard work in miserable environments to do so.
That's why there's so much meat now, we were tired of being hungry and we built a better world.
We have build such a peaceful, prosperous world now that large numbers of people are worried about the emotional state of our meat. They're not worried about hunger or violence or poverty because, for enormous numbers of people, those issues are gone. So now we worry about chicken burritos.
Sorry to break it to you, but humans just aren't that special.
I was trying to see if there's a way of "visualising" some of these numbers using audio, but at 285Hz (for chickens), we're at C#4/D4. For the other animals you can distinguish between the specific beats, but this is just uniform noise. (cue the quote about one death being a tragedy, 1000s a statistic lost in the noise)
From several sources like WHO or WEF the annual wasted pourcentage of food is around 50% in the world.
Guess where the inflation come from.
Amounts of grain or potatoes produced / consumed per second, in square kilometres of fields, would be impressive, too.
They aren't at that level at the moment, with large parts of modern agriculture more similar to a kind of mining - resources are extracted, with insufficient replenishment.
The thing with mines is that they are eventually exhausted, and stop producing.
We're not at that point right now, and we're not really prioritizing it.
From mine, it's something of a cosmic horror that people can think like this and be proud of themselves.
We are wreaking havoc on the Earth and all life on it; strip mining it to the bone for the shallowest purposes. And some people have this strange glee about it...
It's Lovecraftian to me. Like cultists worshipping death and darkness - literally.
Dramatic? Sure. But you're literally cheer-leading the death of billions and billions of lives as a strong economic indicator.
The fact is, we can't afford industrial farming (and many other 'indicators'). The bill is coming due for our lifestyle. Faster and closer every day.
What to you is "determination to enjoy life", reads to me as blissful ignorance - but only blissful for the ignorant.
Cruelty aside that is something to take so much pride in. I think it’s easy to forget the bigger picture of progress here. Are we destroying the planet, oh yeah. Have we created a machine of unfathomable cruelty, also yes. But are we well fed with exactly the food we want to be eating given the choice, hell yeah and that’s an insane accomplishment. That’s something that was not possible 150 years ago.
This is not the accomplishment you think it is. This is absolute depravity on a societal scale and the fact that we're all so okay with it is horrifying.
We're not going to get anywhere unless we can agree broadly that humans like eating meat. For all of human history it's been the most prized food and sits at the center of a lot of our rituals -- ham for Christmas, lamb for Easter, turkey for Thanksgiving, pork for New Years. I'm not assigning any value judgement to this. And so reaching a point where this thing that previously had to be savored because it was expensive and/or only available after the harvest now being a commodity is an accomplishment. You might not like the manifested will of humanity but we nonetheless did it and that's impressive in and of itself.
Rate limit edit: The fact you have to give out food for free is the opposite point. They had food lines during the great depression too. Ideally the government wouldn't have to hand any children food for free lest they not eat at all.
I am fine with the death of billions of animals to keep humans fed.
This is their job. This is the way of nature. We’ve just streamlined it a bit
I think sone people need the guilt of being alive religion gave them. But they rejected traditional methods and invented a new religion of self hatred. Humans as sinners that need to seek redemption or some other silly idea.
We may like them better, given that we are them. We may like our families more than strangers as well. That does not mean that a machine that used unfathomable cruelty to concentrate the rest of humanity into a slurry for the pleasure of our family members would not be a horror.
There is a hierarchy and although we shouldn’t torture living things, giving them “1 bad day” is totally ethical when used to endure and pleasure. I admit we don’t live up to that standard necessarily, but we should strive for it.
Ideally everyone that wants to is eating happy animals at their pleasure.
From the perspective of which species?
Does might make right? For intra-human relationships as well? Could anything evil happen as a result of embracing this outlook?
Should we kill a bunch of cows to make way for native species? Was it okay when the feral goats in the Galapagos were machine gunned down from the air so they would stop eating all the vegetation the native tortoises relied on? Should we kill off all the feral cats, or just let them continue killing birds and small mammals? Is it okay to spray for mosquitos and ticks, or do we let them carry disease and infect us and other animals?
There's a million different tradeoffs, thousands of which we have to decide no matter what.
We would need just 25% of those fields. The rest can be returned to the nature. [0]
> Should we kill a bunch of cows to make way for native species
But we're killing them already, at astonishing quantities. It's enough to not make new ones, the problem will solve itself.
> okay when the feral goats in the Galapagos were machine gunned down
Maybe don't introduce farm animals where they don't belong?
> kill off all the feral cats, or just let them continue killing birds and small mammals
Give the birds & mammals a chance to live and procreate, by giving them enough habitat to live in. In time nature will solve the feral cats problems - when bigger predators appear.
> Is it okay to spray for mosquitos and ticks
No, because you're spraying poisons and killing other species as well, and reducing the human health. That's not practical. But you know, biodiversity is the solution [1].
When you kill predators (owls, foxes, coyottes ...), mice proliferate. More mice, more ticks. Let the mice eating predators return and ticks numbers goes down.
Mosquitos? Don't spray poisons and let number of amphibians/fish go up. The problem solved.
[0] If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares - https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
[1] The biggest little farm - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8969332/ - not a scientific resource, but pretty illustrative
I think it’s important to not treat animals like humans precisely so we don’t treat humans like calorie sources.
We can get all of our nutrients from plants, most of us in the developed world don't need animals, we by and large just eat them for pleasure because we like the taste, as you noted by leading with the fact that they are delicious.
Further, if your concerns are humanitarian in nature, in terms of feeding the most humans, ensuring the greatest amount of happiness for them, then we are on the same side.
It turns out you can feed more humans with plants than you can with animals, given that the latter are largely inefficient middle men for our calories that are fundamentally sourced from plants. We feed a cow roughly 10 calories of corn and soy to get 1 calorie of meat out of it. Were we to eat those crops directly we'd be able to feed ~10x the number of people on the same agricultural output, or reduce our agricultural output by ~90% and feed the same number of people.
That latter point leads to the environmental impact of animal farming. Over 90% of the destruction of the Amazon to date has happened for two industries - beef, and soy. Over 80% of the world's soy is... turned into feed for those same animals.
We are destroying the Amazon, evicting and slaughtering the indigenous people that live within it, exacerbating climate change which is already resulting in more and more extreme droughts and famines, killing millions around the world, and as this gets worse will kill untold millions more.
Animal agriculture is one of the most environmentally destructive industries on the planet, in terms of climate emissions, resource use, and land destruction.
By feeding animals to humans we are turning around and killing those same humans. Well, not the same ones actually. The poorest ones who can't even afford the meat we're gluttonously shoving into our faces.
This is all tied to the fundamental fact that the animal is a middle man for our calories, and in a time where our environment's carrying capacity is greatly exceeded by our civilization, we need to reduce these gross inefficiencies in order to save our own lives, even if that's all we care about.
So even if your primary goal is to feed people and save humanity, the rational conclusion is still to stop eating animals.
I’m just not into your religion, sorry. I love it for you though. I’m happy that you’re happy not consuming animals, and that it makes you feel good. I will continue to smoke beef briskets over live fire for hours at a time.
Between doing something just because your people have traditionally done it, in the face of all the mounting scientific evidence that that thing is destructive, and choosing to embrace that science and shirk those traditions, which course of action seems more religious?
But I guess ‘Don’t look up’, right?
I think most humans would begrudgingly agree that white men, americans, europeans, etc. are the most powerful group on Earth. I don't think they'd agree that their lives are the most valuable.
Humans are roughly interchangeable with each other, so in a wide view they can be roughly equally important.
But we're capable of so many things nothing else is.
I know. I looked to see which way the rest of the world could see us as being some synonym of important, powerful is the likely one.
The way that "important" was likely meant in this context was "valuable", which I then addressed in my comment.
Again, even the power is debatable. Single celled organisms and plants have a far greater impact on the world than we do.
Valuable is not really up for debate. A nonhuman animal would not say that the life of a human is more valuable than their own any more than a disempowered person would say that the life of a powerful person is more valuable than their own.
>Humans are roughly interchangeable with each other, so in a wide view they can be roughly equally important.
What? Some are surgeons are working for MSF saving lives with their bare hands on a daily basis, others are sex traffickers. Some are Einstein others are flat earthers. Their positive and negative impact on the world around them, their capabilities vary greatly.
Depending on how loosely you define interchangeable, you can include nonhuman animals as being interchangeable with humans.
> But we're capable of so many things nothing else is.
Can we hibernate? Can we lay eggs? Can we grow to the size of a blue whale? Can we survive naked in the vacuum of space? Do we possess biological immortality? Have we persisted for hundreds of millions of years through multiple extinction events? Etc etc. The natural world is filled with species who hold countless capabilities beyond our own.
Do you think there might be a bias at work when we decide that the traits unique to humans are those that are more "important"?
There are plenty of people I would say are more important/valuable than me. And I can imagine species that would be more important/valuable than humans; they just don't seem to exist here and now. But the boundaries within humanity are a lot narrower and I wouldn't be confident enough to label any humans as less important/valuable than me the way I would talk about a random non-endangered rodent.
> Do you think there might be a bias at work when we decide that the traits unique to humans are those that are more "important"?
Well I think "hibernate" and "eggs" are dumb metrics. But we can replicate most feats with some prep time, even if you use a big list of unique abilities that humans need technology for.
Even taking bias into account, I think the bias would have to be ridiculously large to overcome the strength of the answer.
So by this thinking humans are not interchangeable?
> And I can imagine species that would be more important/valuable than humans; they just don't seem to exist here and now.
Really? You think the single celled organisms and plants responsible for producing oxygen, those responsible for decay, even those present within the digestive tracks of all animals, are not more important/valuable than humans?
>But the boundaries within humanity are a lot narrower and I wouldn't be confident enough to label any humans as less important/valuable than me the way I would talk about a random non-endangered rodent.
Sorry I'm confused, your first quote says there are plenty of people you'd say are more impotant/valuable than you. How do you square that statement with this one? What is the range of variation within human capability that is allowed for equal consideration, but which excludes nonhuman animals? What are the boundaries of that variation defined by if not, honestly, by ex post facto rationalization?
> Well I think "hibernate" and "eggs" are dumb metrics.
Why are they any more objectively dumb than any other capability?
> But we can replicate most feats with some prep time, even if you use a big list of unique abilities that humans need technology for.
Huh? At this point in time humans are incapable of any of the things I listed. You'll need to show proof that we are capable of these things even with all of our technological ability. As of right now it's just kind of handwaving "with the power of technology, at some indeterminate point in the future, anything is possible!" when facts don't bear that out, as we have yet to have any immortal humans, and may never have them.
> Even taking bias into account, I think the bias would have to be ridiculously large to overcome the strength of the answer.
Sorry, I don't understand what you mean by the strength of the answer. I do think it's self evident that the bias is ridiculously large though.
Weren't we talking about most important animal?
But when it comes to most important, things a million different species can do are much less important.
Let alone the fact that we can produce oxygen and decay organic matter.
As for everything else, I don't feel like you're even trying to understand my argument. But if you're that confused it's only going to be a waste of time for me to go on.
You’re right. I slipped into talking about species on the whole, my bad.
That said, I think it’s really important to clarify what we mean by important. Do we mean powerful, impactful? Or do we mean the lives of the individuals of that species are more valuable?
Back to powerful/impactful, if we’re talking about purely animals, then I’d look to pollinators. Would you argue that humans are more important to the functioning of the world than pollinators?
> But when it comes to most important, things a million different species can do are much less important.
Again, what do we mean by important? Power?
> Let alone the fact that we can produce oxygen and decay organic matter.
If we were to rely purely on humanity’s ability to produce oxygen and decay organic matter, the majority of life on Earth, humans included, would quickly die and then pile up, undecaying. There’s no comparison between our ability and the ability of the species that are specialized for this. It’s like comparing Einstein’s and a crow’s ability to flesh out physics. Sure, the crow might be able to solve some physics-based puzzles, but it’s on a very basic level.
> As for everything else, I don't feel like you're even trying to understand my argument. But if you're that confused it's only going to be a waste of time for me to go on.
I admittedly made some assumptions about your argument, and have been arguing against those assumptions. This is because I’m genuinely unclear on your argument. If you can clarify a couple things:
1) What exactly do we mean by important?
2) What are the boundaries of ability by which we can define humans as interchangeable, but humans and nonhuman animals as not, that are not rationalized after the fact?
If we establish these things I think we can make some progress instead of talking past each other.
But again this is about a single species. If you remove one random type of algae or plant it's not going to make a huge difference.
> 1) What exactly do we mean by important?
The impact they have, the breadth of skills, the monuments and constructs and art, the potential for what they can do in the future. Including spreading life through the solar system eventually, or things like that. I might be missing some parts, it's late.
> 2) What are the boundaries of ability by which we can define humans as interchangeable, but humans and nonhuman animals as not, that are not rationalized after the fact?
I don't want to double down on this too hard. I just think most humans are in a pretty narrow band and this band is pretty far away from any other species.
Prochlorococcus single-handedly produces 20% of all oxygen on Earth.[1]
> The impact they have, the breadth of skills, the monuments and constructs and art, the potential for what they can do in the future. Including spreading life through the solar system eventually, or things like that. I might be missing some parts, it's late.
No, I mean what do you mean by important, fundamentally. Is this a judgement of the objective value of the lives of the individuals of that species? Is it just an assessment of their power? Is it putting arbitrary characteristics that species happens to posses on a pedestal while simultaneously and just as arbitrarily devaluing the unique characteristics of all other species?
Are we starting from the bias that humans are more "important" (again, still unclear what that actually means) than all others, then working backwards and highlighting all the human characteristics as being evidence of that importance after the fact?
If a species with giant claws ruled the world, do you think they might wax poetic about the great importance of giant claws, and how this is the one true metric by which the value of a life can be measured?
Are giant claws, ability to produce art, or any other specific characteristic or capability in any way relevant to the question of whether or not a life has value?
> I don't want to double down on this too hard. I just think most humans are in a pretty narrow band and this band is pretty far away from any other species.
Well we're going to have to define the boundaries of this band, otherwise it doesn't seem to be based on anything concrete and seems more like circular reasoning that the boundaries of this band are those that exist within humans and therefore those humans are important because they exist within the boundaries of that band.
Yes. If we demote the value of human beings to meet the value of other species, we open the door to the legitimacy of killing human beings. If we promote the value of other species, we have swathes of carnivores to arrest and put on trial.
You’re free to choose your lifestyle of course and I’m grateful to live in a place and time where that’s possible. But I don’t subscribe to your beliefs. I have access to the same information you do. I possibly have a more critical appraisal of it and I don’t believe the hype.
People have acted like you since the dawn of time. They might be right one day but they’ve been wrong every time so far. Line the guys who claim the market is crashing every month.
If you keep the fat trim that's maybe ~600-700 pounds of usable meat.
That's about 0.01666 of a month's salary for a pound of meat. So if you were willing to spend 10% of your salary on meat, you could have a quarter pounder everyday. Not cheap, but if you really liked meat and you had a semi-skilled job you could afford to eat it everyday.
[0] https://www.money.org/uploads/pdfs/press-releases/ANAPR.10.1...
https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/roman-economy/roman-goods-pric...
Of course now we feed cows mostly corn.
If everyone gave up eating meat from animals fed farm output, the looming climate catastrophe would just fade away.
Just because we can produce (and consume) vast amounts of meant doesn't mean we must. Restraint is a virtue.
What is the point of restraint? To what end? I should suffer to make your ideal of how the works ought to be a reality?
I’m not into your religion.
You know, stopping climate change. The thing that's gonna keep your grandchildren from eating meat at all if people don't stop consuming so much of it.
Seriously, it's a bit tiring that [vegetarians] people that want to control what I eat get a pass for posting the same tired stuff every time it came up. If any other fanatic jumped in with their own agenda at every conceivable juncture, you'd expect it to be shut down. (I suppose cyclists may get a similar pass)
If I could trap all the "unrepentant meat eaters" in a dome and let you ruin your own environment without broiling the rest of us, I wouldn't have a problem with your choices.
Our lifestyle is unsustainable. Take your head out of the sand.
It’s like posting a bible passage that god is going to smite us because sone dudes like fucking each other. It’s nonsense.
Apparently now we're in upside-down world were the richest and most highly consuming people on the planet believe that the production that supports their lifestyles is now immoral, and the idea that poorer people might increase their wealth and consumption a bit is so horrible to contemplate.
But even if you set aside meat, modern lifestyles necessitate the killing of other life.
Take your protein-rich plant food, for example. Do you know how modern cereal and vegetable farming is carried out? The idea is basically to create a holocaust of chemical poisons that exterminates all animal, plant, and fungal life except the crop, over millions of acres, and that is after the land has been cleared and the native plants and animals killed and wiped away. Housing, water, energy, mining, all that costs lives as well.
You can't absolve yourself just by not eating meat.
If the option is eating cows that eat some grass and feed from a couple of acres of desolation vs. eating beans and grains from a quarter acre of desolation, then the option is obvious. You can still eat the tenth of the cows that can survive on the grass alone.
Reducing the desolation and increasing the yield by building an ecosystem rather than monocrop is better, but that is a harder transition.
Sure you can eat the beans and grains instead. You can also stop driving, stop heating and cooling your house, stop buying computers and phones and cars, stop air travel, live in a small apartment you share with several other people.
I don't have a problem with the idea of reducing environmental footprint or moving consumption patterns to more efficient products. Great ideas. What I have a problem with is making choices for or passing moral judgement on other people.
Your lifestyle results in the death of life and animals, and you do not do everything physically possible to minimize that, therefore you simply do not have that moral high ground. If killing animals is "wrong", then we are all wrong. "Oh but I try to minimize" is not an defense because you are minimizing according to what is convenient or valuable to you. You'll accept some killing of animals because you fly to Europe once a year or have a smartphone or heat your house and that's okay, but somebody who chooses to eat more meat than you would prefer?
Your implicit thesis is that you should not be held to account to do the extremely easy things if anyone else is asserting their right to exist at all is transparent reprehensible.
> You can also stop driving, stop heating and cooling your house, stop buying computers and phones and cars, stop air travel, live in a small apartment you share with several other people.
If I already do all those things (with the exception of a second hand phone I use with a 10yo monitor when I need a desktop). Then do I get to tell you to maybe drive a slightly smaller SUV or stop opposing renewable energy?
If.
> Your implicit thesis is that you should not be held to account to do the extremely easy things if anyone else is asserting their right to exist at all is transparent reprehensible.
No it isn't.
Not eating meat, by itself, does not give you any moral high ground about killing animals or consuming resources or impacting the environment.
I'm saying we should stop factory farming cattle that are fed with heavily subsidized, fossil fuel grown crops, stop clearing land for more cattle, return about half of the land currently used for feed and ethanol to conservation, and hold the meat industry to some basic environmental and animal welfare standards.
You're welcome to continue eating what meat is available in such a world and should thank anyone you meet who eats less so that your combined share of a sustainable world can meet your personal demands.
Wonderful.
> I'm saying we should stop factory farming cattle that are fed with heavily subsidized, fossil fuel grown crops, stop clearing land for more cattle, and hold the meat industry to some basic environmental and animal welfare standards.
Oh, I didn't see where you were saying that.
Almost all global food production has large fossil fuel based inputs, land clearing is the unfortunate reality of growing population and consumption but at least the market allocates it somewhat efficiently, and its quite fungible, so it makes no more sense to say no more land to be used for cows than it does to say no more land to be used for almonds or tomatoes or quinoa. And in the western world at least animal farming and the meat industry is held to some basic environmental and animal welfare standards.
> You're welcome to continue eating what meat is available in such a world and should thank anyone you meet who eats less so that your combined share of a sustainable world can meet your personal demands.
I don't know or care about your fantasy world, but I am quite welcome to eat meat that is available in the world I find myself living in. Just like you are quite welcome to buy a new iphone every year or go on frivolous vacations to ski or sight-see whenever you choose to.
Well no it's not. Said population (which we should be stabilizing) can be sustained on a fraction of the land used today by eliminating the inefficient uses such as ethanol, cattle and almonds.
> but at least the market allocates it somewhat efficiently,
Nice slight of hand. Markets optimise for the goals of the people with capital. Efficiency is only meaningful once an objective is selected, and wellbeing of the majority is a different objective to increase in wealth of the already wealthy.
> And in the western world at least animal farming and the meat industry is held to some basic environmental and animal welfare standards.
This is patently untrue. The penalties for even recording or photographing factory farm operations are much bigger and more consistently enforced than the penalties for violating what scant animal welfare laws there are.
> I don't know or care about your fantasy world, but I am quite welcome to eat meat that is available in the world I find myself living in. Just like you are quite welcome to buy a new iphone ever year or go on frivolous vacations to ski or sight-see.
So we're back to you having no accountability for your personal actions and no change to the system that enables and subsidizes them being permissable. This is just a reframing of you getting to do whatever you want if you are powerful enough to do it.
So I guess I am asserting the moral high ground after all. Because I'm not lying and gasghting and demanding you subsidize my lifestyle while I and the systems I support destroy the lives of everyone around you.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cereal-crop-yield-vs-fert...
Yep, fossil fuel based fertilizers and other chemicals aren't going away.
> Said population (which we should be stabilizing) can be sustained on a fraction of the land used today by eliminating the inefficient uses such as ethanol, cattle and almonds.
How about computer games and instagram and google searches and air travel and cars including EVs, electricity, more than 50 square feet of housing per person, etc etc.? We're back to judgements excusing our own preferences and consumption and denouncing others.
> Nice slight of hand. Markets optimise for the goals of the people with capital. Efficiency is only meaningful once an objective is selected, and wellbeing of the majority is a different objective to increase in wealth of the already wealthy.
It's not a slight of hand, you brought it up. I don't think markets are perfect or even all that great, but they sure are better than you (or I).
> This is patently untrue.
Your wild conspiratorial fringe theories and claims are just false. For example The US Animal Welfare Act (AWA) was signed into law on August 24, 1966. Name any country and you'll be able to find laws and regulations for basic environmental and animal welfare standards.
> So we're back to you having no accountability for your personal actions and no change to the system that enables and subsidizes them being permissable. This is just a reframing of you getting to do whatever you want if you are powerful enough to do it.
No, we're at everybody else not being accountable to you.
> So I guess I am asserting the moral high ground after all.
Yes it always seemed so.
> Because I'm not lying and gasghting and demanding you subsidize my lifestyle while I and the systems I support destroy the lives of everyone around you.
Yes, it is exactly because you claim that you are not doing that and that I am.
Yes that sentence was definitely about the fossil fuel bit and not the land use of cattle vs other protein sources.
Try a piece of intellectual honesty. How much human edible protein can be produced on an acre of land being used for corn and soy cow feed? Now how much on the same land with the same fertiliser input with a combination of plants and free range chickens? How much even if you sacrifice some yield to use organic methods?
> Your wild conspiratorial fringe theories and claims are just false. For example The US Animal Welfare Act (AWA) was signed into law on August 24, 1966. Name any country and you'll be able to find laws and regulations for basic environmental and animal welfare standards.
And almost all of those countries have laws specifically criminalising whistleblowing or documenting violations or turns the burden of proof for libel onto the defendant. Here's one that criminalises having footage.
http://coolice.legis.state.ia.us/Cool-ICE/default.asp?Catego...
You directed it generally. Now you're upset that I replied to what you wrote.
> Try a piece of intellectual honesty. How much human edible protein can be produced on an acre of land being used for corn and soy cow feed? Now how much on the same land with the same fertiliser input with a combination of plants and free range chickens? How much even if you sacrifice some yield to use organic methods?
I don't know the numbers. Chicken is a very cheap source of protein, much cheaper than a huge range of plant based protein actually. Are we moving the bar for sinning to "thou shalt not consume any plant protein more expensive than chicken"? How about bugs? You have to kill them to eat them, right? Or does the holy book have some kind of complicated sin taxonomy here?
> And almost all of those countries have laws specifically criminalising whistleblowing or documenting violations or turns the burden of proof for libel onto the defendant. Here's one that criminalises having footage.
That does not support your false claim that these countries do not have basic animal right or environmental regulation though.
More dishonesty.
> I don't know the numbers. Chicken is a very cheap source of protein, much cheaper than a huge range of plant based protein actually. Are we moving the bar for sinning to "thou shalt not consume any plant protein more expensive than chicken"? How about bugs? You have to kill them to eat them, right? Or does the holy book have some kind of complicated sin taxonomy here?
Yes. That's the entire point. Grain fed factory cattle farming is cruel and unsustainable. Option two is much less cruel and can be done for the same cost with solar derived hydrogen and takes a fraction of the land. There are organic methods that would see the same yield as option two with a slightly larger fraction of the land and would do less damage to the soil.
> That does not support your false claim that these countries do not have basic animal right or environmental regulation though.
A law that is never enforced and which whistleblowing of is criminalised is not holding anyone to any standard. I never claimed there was no law. I correctly claimed that farms were not held to account.
Reality says otherwise, check the thread.
> Yes. That's the entire point.
So we're back here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33368082
Do you admit you choose to inflict pain and suffering and death on animals for your own comfort, as you condemn others for doing the same?
> A law that is never enforced
Source on the wild conspiratorial claim that environmental and animal rights laws are never enforced? Don't make me google a counter example that proves you wrong for the nth time.
Yet I do not desire it.
> "Do you know how modern cereal and vegetable farming is carried out?"
I do know. The food I eat is not, in fact, produced that way.
I do not need or want absolution. But I know my carbon footprint is a tiny fraction of yours. You are, in other words, personally responsible for overwhelmingly more suffering in the world than I know, by direct experience, is necessary for your level of comfort.
Irrelevant.
> I do know. The food I eat is not, in fact, produced that way.
Maybe. Maybe not grown in a way that's sustainably capable of feeding the world's population or even accessible to many.
> I do not need or want absolution. But I know my carbon footprint is a tiny fraction of yours.
You think it is, I'm sure. And you believe yourself to have the moral high ground.
> You are, in other words, personally responsible for overwhelmingly more suffering in the world than I know, by direct experience, is necessary for your level of comfort.
And so are you. Unlike your assumptions about my carbon footprint, I actually do know that with certainty because you are posting this message here which consumes energy. What's more your level of comfort itself is almost certainly far beyond most people on earth, and far beyond what you need to barely keep yourself alive, therefore you have made choices for your own comfort at the expense of many other life forms.
It seems much more moral to be eating beef than chicken. Fewer consciousnesses demolished.