How many animals get slaughtered every day?
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
If everyone turned vegetarian—or better still, vegan—we could easily return 75% of current cropland to nature[1], and still feed more people than we do today. Meat is just ridiculously water- and resource-intensive; plus, the animals that are reared for said meat are non-trivial contributors to CO2 and CH4 in the atmosphere.
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
> we can’t create a meal without hurting animals
This is a Western problem. India, for instance, contains more vegetarians than the rest of the world put together, times five.
The reason the DA couldn't go with burglary is because that would require the object taken to have positive value, and those companies don't want to claim they also sell slaughtered animals who were diseased to the verge of death. If they discard their bodies as they corpses they do, they are of no value to the farmers and thus could not have been the subject of a burglary.
Honestly though, more labor and lower yields with the promise that future generations will have healthy soil is a reasonable trade off to me.
Monoculture is what's new and weird.
The earliest crop-raising cultures for which we have decent records (Mesopotamia, Egypt, China) all had specialized fields for different crops.
"We found some evidence for" does not equal " All crops were raised this way".
I.e. just because they found some evidence of specialized fields in the remains of those civilizations, does not mean they grew all their food exclusively that way.
Also, you are simply wrong.
"Three Sisters" The Three Sisters are the three main agricultural crops of various Indigenous peoples of North America: squash, maize ("corn"), and climbing beans (typically tepary beans or common beans). In a technique known as companion planting, the maize and beans are often planted together in mounds formed by hilling soil around the base of the plants each year; squash is typically planted between the mounds. The cornstalk serves as a trellis for climbing beans, the beans fix nitrogen in their root nodules and stabilize the maize in high winds, and the wide leaves of the squash plant shade the ground, keeping the soil moist and helping prevent the establishment of weeds. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture)
And then when you go to the companion planting wiki article it highlights that it's been in use around the world for many years, China, etc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Companion_planting
To say this, to say that humans just started off right from monoculture is crazy. We just went straight from hunter gatherers to having large curated monoculture fields that are cultivated and specifically planted.
No.
"Though the transition from wild harvesting was gradual, the switch from a nomadic to a settled way of life is marked by the appearance of early Neolithic villages with homes equipped with grinding stones for processing grain." https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/developmen...
Philosophical take: Every day animals kill other animals to survive. We can't change that. Why should humans be forbidden to kill & eat animals?
Adopting the moral code of animals, as justification for killing them, while simultaneously leaning on our supremely advanced intelligence to separate us from them so that we don't feel bad about it. Ironic.
We have higher-order thinking as well as choice - can use those to choose not to cause terrible suffering to sentient beings where we don't have to.
As a human, I can live a perfectly happy, healthy life without eating animals. Statistically it’s healthier, cheaper, and has no downside other than taste (meat tastes good, no argument here).
So ethically, how is eating meat any different than torturing and killing animals for pleasure?
That’s completely false: a life without bacon is less happy than a life with bacon, and thus imperfectly happy.
> So ethically, how is eating meat any different than torturing and killing animals for pleasure?
The former involves deriving pleasure from eating flesh; the latter involves deriving pleasure from inflicting pain.
Not all that different to an animal, though.
Exactly 0% of my enjoyment of eating meat comes from inflicting pain to animals.
Exactly 0% of why you eat animals changes the pain inflicted on animals.
Other than health, taste, tradition, habit and convenience, what has meat ever done for us?
But we don't need meat for health.
American Dietetic Association
"It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes."
NHS UK
"A vegetarian or vegan diet can be suitable for everyone, regardless of their age."
British Dietetic Association
"[I]t is possible to follow a well-planned, plant-based, vegan friendly diet that supports healthy living in people of all ages, and during pregnancy and breastfeeding."
> Meat is a package of pre-processed vitamins, minerals and energy sources.
In addition to saturated fats, cholesterol, and common additives like nitrates and preservatives, meat consumption can also entail exposure to antibiotics, hormones, bioaccumulated pesticides and herbicides, and ethical concerns related to cruelty and mistreatment in the meat production industry.
> Other than health, taste, tradition, habit and convenience, what has meat ever done for us?
If everyone on Earth adopted the American or European diet, we would require more than five Earths to feed everyone [0]. Animal agriculture is already the leading cause of deforestation [1], biodiversity loss [2] [3], and water pollution [4]. Our current agricultural practices are pushing over a million species towards extinction [5].
Switching to plant-based diets could free up an area equivalent to the combined size of both Americas [6], allowing us to reforest it and promote biodiversity recovery. By reforesting this vast area, we could sequester enough carbon to potentially reverse climate change [7] [8] (assuming a simultaneous phase-out of fossil fuels, of course) [9].
This approach represents the only sustainable way to feed a population of 10 billion [10] while reducing our agricultural land requirements from 4 billion hectares to 1 billion hectares [11]. Animal agriculture is one of the major culprits pushing six out of nine Earth boundaries beyond safe levels [12] [13].
So ... it does a lot.
[0] https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/sustainability...
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation
[2] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-glob...
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/
[4] https://blogs.ubc.ca/makingwaves/2017/02/07/cows-pigs-and-po...
[5] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01448-4
[6] https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/10/World-Map-by-Land...
[7] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/8/08...
[8] https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal...
[9] https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
[10] https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/917471
[11] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
[12] https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/research-news/2...
[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries#Nine_boun...
This study estimates 7.3 billion animals die each year from harvested cropland in the US alone (not including insects).
Can we agree to stop raising animals >specifically< for killing and consumption?
Subsequently, we can tackle the problem of accidental killing of animals through farming practices.
No, because we omnivores enjoy eating animals, and there are not enough which die of natural causes to go around, and many natural causes make the meat unsafe to eat.
This is controversial, but I feel that eating animals is fundamental to being human and that to eat only plants is less than human — perhaps paradoxically, like an animal. I know many, many people disagree, but it’s how I feel, and no amount of rational argument will change that.
No. "Let's all do exactly what I want" isn't an "agreement", or a "compromise" or anything remotely related.
How many sentient lives are you ending each year through your plant diet?
Crop fields do indeed disrupt the habitats of wild animals, and wild animals are also killed when harvesting plants. However, this point makes the case for a plant-based diet and not against it, since many more plants are required to produce a measure of animal flesh for food (often as high as 12:1) than are required to produce an equal measure of plants for food (which is obviously 1:1). Because of this, a plant-based diet causes less suffering and death than one that includes animals.
https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/
which facilitates bulk data downloads in XML | JSON and additional hosts a BETA data explorer interactive web front end:
I have no opinion on the accuracy of the article linked, had I the time ATM I'd work through this myself (as I often do for all manner of things).
Edit: typo
https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass
> I wouldn’t be surprised if that number is less than the number of animals humans slaughter
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-glob...
Our global food system is the primary driver of biodiversity loss
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/
Biodiversity conservation: The key is reducing meat consumption
> Like, I’ve heard that there are more chickens alive right now than all other birds combined
https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass#global...
We have twice as much poultry by weight as wild birds.
> We have twice as much poultry by weight as wild birds.
https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/the-truth-about-cats-and-...
In a paper published today in the journal PLOS One, Okin says he found that cats and dogs are responsible for 25 to 30 percent of the environmental impact of meat consumption in the United States. If Americans’ 163 million Fidos and Felixes comprised a separate country, their fluffy nation would rank fifth in global meat consumption
Nevertheless I'd recommend reading "The Extended Circle: An Anthology of Humane Thought" (Jon Wynne Tyson). It's one of only a handful of books I've kept a copy of for a very many years and peruse regularly, taking the form of quotes from famous people, not so famous people, historical personages, and founding texts, all concerning the human relationship to animals. A very moving and wounding book.
There’s 300M people in the US. Think of how many chickens you need to slaughter a day.
That's... just how food works?