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Comment by Daub | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has worked on farms i can verify that such things happen. I personally witnessed sheep behaving exactly as decided in The Silence of the Lambs. Our sheep were famously noisy and certainly were used to being moved around in lorries but when the abattoir lorry turned up you could almost smell their fear. I also witnessed a cow storm through four fences in order to be reunited with her calf.

The irony: The farm was run by vegetarians and as the only meat eater it became my responsibility to oversee any time an animal was taken to slaughter. This simultaneously put me off meat eating and vegetarians.

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It’s ironic how accepted vegetarians, who have a dietary preference, are in society, and how hated vegans, who have an ethical argument against unnecessary killing of sentient animals, are in society.

I only turned vegan a couple of years ago as something clicked and I was able to make the connection between the food I was eating and the animals who were being killed, almost certainly unnecessarily, for that food. But before then I disliked vegans a lot, and was completely fine with vegetarians. I’m honestly unable to reconcile my thinking.

It’s kind of like how I don’t understand how I strongly believed in god before I lost faith. Now the idea that I ever could, or ever did, believe in a personal god seems unbelievable to me.

Human psychology is ridiculously interesting.

My assumption is that the weight of including vegans socially is too much to bear for some. On the extreme end, you can't use store pasta because it was made in a facility that processes eggs and dairy. But even on the lighter end, social eating modification is pretty extreme: don't use butter when cooking, or eggs, or honey, etc. It's a lot easier to accommodate vegetarians than vegans.

Though I do have a vegan friend that always brings her own food to gatherings, and it does make things far easier.

butter is one of the most easily substituted things around and most vegans i know don’t care about honey.

definitely more restrictive but i think the dairy/cheese thing is the big one

people also feel that vegans are judging them morally and people are very defensive about their eating habit, hence the dislike

depends what you’re trying to do. there are plenty of alternatives for spreading on toast or frying/sauteing. but it’s still a pretty central ingredient for western cuisine. I have no idea how I’d make a vegan roux, just for example. my guess is that would break the illusion of whipped margarine pretty quickly.

I've made plenty of vegan rouxs, but I also don't have much experience making non-vegan roux... so hard for me to give an honest comparison.

Margarine burns more easily but this hasn't been a problem for me, so I imagine you are talking mostly about flavor difference or?

The problem with veganism is that, unless you grow your own food, it does not change the fact that an immense amount of pain and suffering is inflicted on other beings in the production and transportation of the food you eat. It's pure virtue signaling. If they genuinely cared about minimizing suffering, they'd be Jains, not vegans.

I think you didn’t understand veganism: the goal is not to remove all suffering but to reduce it by finding ways that are still practicable, without major economic, pleasure or whatever downside. All vegans kill insects when they walk in the wood but stoping walking altogether would make their life miserable. On the other hand, eating plants and mushroom is quite enjoyable when you get used to it. And it certainly remove a bug part of suffering inflicted. Think Pareto.

I don’t think jainism can be applied without changing your life altogether and removing many thinks you used to.

uhhhh explain?

is there some extreme amount of suffering that goes into the production of root vegetables because afaik that’s the only distinction between jainism and veganism?

Maybe the temporary foreign worker living in economic servitude to the farm that guarantees their job. /s

For many, perfect is the enemy of the good. Either you remove all suffering or you're a hypocrite. Meanwhile us that genuinely care about our impact on the environment make incremental changes to reduce our negative impact.

Veganism is about reducing suffering as much as practical and possible. Some people (you included) have a problem with that and reject it altogether because of cognitive biases.

Yes there are crop death and suffering due to veganism. A plant based diet however reduces this by about 75%.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

The problem I have always had with veganism, as someone who has had stints of vegetarianism, is the absurdity of certain restrictions. Milk, I can agree, is bad because of how it's derived. Honey and eggs (sourced ethically) are a restriction I cannot stand behind. I think the dislike of self-labeled vegans is aligned with someone publicizing an extreme decision.

eggs could easily have multiple arguments for it, honey i’ve personally never met someone who was vegan who didn’t have honey

At the risk of this devolving into a typical online veganism argument: why are eggs bad? Say I keep 3 chickens in a coop in my backyard. They're going to produce unfertilized eggs that will just go to waste

1. I have personally never met someone who only eats backyard eggs. The conditions of commercial egg producers are well documented.

2. You are still essentially using another living being for resources. Why keep the chickens in the first place? They are only going to waste because you bought the chickens in the first place, probably also from an industrial breeder, essentially subsidizing the industry.

3. If your way of producing eggs is more ethical, you could sell your backyard eggs to displace the (pretty awful) commercial producers rather than eating them yourself.

I agree that the case against exclusively consuming your own backyard eggs is weaker, but I also don’t think we are describing a considerable proportion of actual egg consumers in the West.

1. how? healthy chickens lay an egg every 1-2 days. a small number of chickens produce more than enough for an entire household. everyone I know who keeps chickens gives most of the eggs away.

2. chickens are the ultimate garbage disposal. you can feed them any excess food from your household and they turn it into fresh eggs.

3. see 1. the volume of eggs gets out of control fast, but not quite on the scale that it’s viable for random people to build an FDA compliant business out of it. it’s hard to get rid of all of them, even for free.

1 -> Sure, but are they declining the omelette when they're out for brunch?

2 -> I think the subsidy point still stands.

3 -> Totally agreed but I think your point about giving away eggs applies just as much, any eggs you eat rather than give away are just going to be an additional egg from the chicken CAFOs or at best case a fractional additional egg from the CAFOs.

But I certainly agree that this is among the instances where the case is weaker.

There is a summary of veganism that follows the principle that we shouldn't take sentient things and change their lives for our own ends. There are several important bits and nuances but the overarching point is to not have a world view where you see anything and prioritize what you can get out of it, regardless of the suffering you cause. Sometimes you hear it summarized as "they arent here for us".

It is an interesting philosophical bit and it combines pretty standard modern morality with a pointed concept of not discriminating by species and instead trying to use the ability to suffer as when you decide if you should exploit something. In this paradigm the reasons not to rape or enslave people are the same as the reasons not to rape or enslave other animals.

This still has plenty of inconsistencies and weird bits, both theoretically and practically. Silly questions like eating braindead people stymie both sides until you get into the weeds about stuff like dignity. Would the theoretical cows in the hitchhikers guide that WANT to be eaten be ok to eat? Is it ok to have second hand animal products, especially if they are high quality and will prevent additional exploitation/consumption?

One of the most sticky conundrums I personally chew on is if this means we should actively try to prevent suffering, not just choose to personally try to avoid causing it. If the former, that means trying to make other people change their beliefs and behave in a way that is pretty objectively worse for them in society, which starts to edge toward causing suffering if you squint. It is easy to fall into trying to reason about which suffering is worse which is a terrible minefield where everybody loses. It's easy to SAY I value something no longer being tortured over my taste preference but is there a logical framework for that that can ever be objective and applied to harder problems? If it is only subjective then what makes it better than any other decision - people decide to eat pigs but not dogs every day but there is no more OR LESS reason behind that than the claim above. There might be answers but I haven't found them to be easy to pin down which is especially interesting because of how strongly I feel that not caring any hurting things is bad.

tl;dr being vegan sucks

I think we can agree humans tend to see reducing suffering as a good thing, and that people who we believe have caused suffering are viewed with disdain. With that in mind, here's a framework: "given two choices, is there a choice that 1) reduces suffering, and 2) is not prohibitively expensive (or in some other way too difficult to make)". "Too difficult" or "too expensive" is obviously subjective, but I don't think having objective definitions is necessary here.

An analogy that I like to illustrate this is: going shopping for clothes vs going shopping for food. Both tend to have ethics attached to them, e.g. with child labor for production of clothing, and slaughtering of animals for production of food. If you walk into a store to buy new clothes, and there are 2 sections of the store, 1 for clothes that were produced using child labor, and 1 for clothes that weren't, and both sections had clothes of the same price and quality, the decision of which section to shop in is very logical. This is how I see going shopping for food- you have sections for food that were produced using factory farming, and sections for food that weren't. Both sources of food are the same price and quality. So the decision to make about which source of food to buy is, again, a logical one. It's also a decision that most people in the developed world have to make every week, at least people who live in cities and do their shopping at grocery stores.

While we unfortunately don't have visibility into whether our clothing is produced with child labor, many of us do know if our food comes from factory farms. In the US, the estimate is that over 95% of meat sold in grocery stores is factory-farmed. Why make the decision to buy that if you could easily avoid it?

Because people lie to make money and keeping up with everything is exhausting. Free-range is a term regulated by the FDA but who knows the last time a regulator came by and checked the farm that the chicken came from? How do you tell the difference between a farmer that actually cares and is doing their best to be free range, and a farmer that's doing the bare minimum to meet that regulated standard when you're in the supermarket looking at a package? Is there a difference between meeting the minimum because you really care about chicken vs meeting the minimum because you care more about money? Why is the minimum in the regulation set at that level?

But more unfortunately though, they're not the same price and quality. Whole Foods is called Whole Paycheck for a reason. I can get cheaper food from a different store that's good enough.

Sorry, when I was comparing the foods, I was talking about meat versus plant-based foods. The point I was trying to make is that buying plant-based can be framed as a logical decision.

To keep it from devolving, I invite you to search for existing arguments in a search engine of your choice.

However, in a show of good-faith, here are 2 answers to your question:

1. Male chicks of laying varieties are ground in a macerator shortly after hatching. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling In your fantasy, you could get around this by getting a rooster and breeding your own hens for eggs, but then what will you do with the non-laying males? What about hens who stop laying? Keep in mind, their natural lifespan is 5-10 years.

2. Hens have been bred to produce exponentially more eggs than in the wild. Wild hens lay around 10-20 eggs per year. Domestic hens lay around 250. This development can lead to osteoporosis.

As an anecdote, I'm nearly vegan and don't have honey.

I think it's interesting how easy it is to criticize veganism as extreme when, to me (and in many anecdotes here and in the rest of the world) it is actually the result of trying to reconcile all my actions behind the same non-controversial principles.

Maybe "rigid" vs loose/flexible would be a better description but that isn't how it feels to people; vegans just existing conjures feelings of disdain and dismissals of extremism (I felt that way before as well, just like some other commenters on here).

In a general sense, people absolutely hate being told to change or that they have been wrong about something. It puts our backs up immediately and it fires up an emotional storm to start invalidating what they imply about us.

We're fascinating as humans.

Actually there’s many people defining vegan that eat eggs (me) and honey (many vegans). Vegans aren’t as extremist as people see them or as common dictionaries define them. Most don’t define themselves by « I don’t consume any animal product whatsoever », of if they do it’s just a simplification.

For the think you feel absurds:

- honey is usually done by placing queen in a room she can’t escape. Also the honey is stolen of the bees. They didn’t choose to be here and they don’t work in the purpose of human eating it. Live it in the nest and they won’t make so much honey. Less bees will die of exhaust also. I got a neighbor that participate in « honey in the village » program. She’s not vegan or vegetarian in any way. Once she saw what’s happening she decided to not harvest. It’s still a delicious product with many nutritious benefits and the bees doesn’t suffer as much as other livestocks so many vegans choose to eat it (again veganism is not about perfection or absolutism)

- I don’t know what eggs production you consider ethical. In my country, the best quality eggs you can fin in the supermarkets comes from chickens that were born in the exact same factory farms as factory chickens In the case of personal backyard poultry it really depends what’s your ethical stance. I often see people that have them in a cage not so big, with no grass (chickens destroy the grass!), no trees, etc… that’s better that a factory but it’s still a miserable cage life. When I go in a farmers market and see someone selling "fallibly farms backyard eggs" I have no way to asses how they live.

> I don’t know what eggs production you consider ethical. In my country, the best quality eggs you can fin in the supermarkets comes from chickens that were born in the exact same factory farms as factory chickens In the case of personal backyard poultry it really depends what’s your ethical stance. I often see people that have them in a cage not so big, with no grass (chickens destroy the grass!), no trees, etc… that’s better that a factory but it’s still a miserable cage life. When I go in a farmers market and see someone selling "fallibly farms backyard eggs" I have no way to asses how they live.

Many jurisdictions have well defined categories. In BC for instance [1], free range and organic ensure the animals get to spend a significant amount of time outdoors.

Where I live there are small farms you can observe and buy eggs from directly. It's totally possible it just takes some looking into and some effort.

[1] https://bcegg.com/eggs-101/egg-labels-101/

I agree those farms are somewhat better. I don’t know where you live but here in France they get the baby chickens from the exact same factories as the industrial farms. Breeding themself at scale would be such a pain that it’s not economically viable in any way. There might be exemptions thought.

Girl-chicken (excuse my English) require to produce male-chicken, which often get killed at birth because the meat chicken are not from the same breed. Also the egg-breed is such intense that they produce eggs in an insane frequency compared to a rustic breed, which result in them being exhaust way before their lifespan. It’s very similar to the cow breeds that produce 40l milk/day compared to the 6/7l for historical breeds.

You are incorrect.

Vegans absolutely define themselves by not consuming any animal products, myself included.

"Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals."[1]

I don't know your individual circumstances, but based on your justifications in your post, you are not a vegan.

You can still be a vegetarian, an animal-lover, and a good person, but not vegan.

It is not extremist to have strongly-held ethical principles, and I hope this refutation is helpful to anyone reading both posts.

1: https://www.vegansociety.com/about-us/further-information/ke...

(My current egg consumption is ~4/year)

Thanks for sharing that thought. I strongly adhere to the vegan society definition. I think "as far as is possible and practicable" should be followed by "and beneficial to the overall goal", which is obvious but would make the phrase too cumbersome.

Let me share my situation with eggs: in the family I’m the one that leaded the shift, from flexitarian to vegetarian to (99%) vegan. My GF likes the principle and is willing to shift but also needs more time to change her habits, one by one. One of the very last habits are eggs, and she’s not ready to stop it yet, but do avoid buying them in any form. So she bring three chickens in a ~30m2 parc with a tree and plants etc… It’s still a cage and I’m not proud. The chickens are a more rustic race than the eggs producers breed because she figured out they suffer less by not being breed-ingineer eggs factories, so they lay during 2/3 weeks every 6/12 month. When that happens and she won’t be home for a while, I eat the eggs. Last time was around May I think. Someone in this thread suggest to give the eggs to a neighbor so they buy less from the store, that is a great idea I will definitely consider. Removing the chickens would create a mess in my relationship with GF, wish is not "practical" and could even in the end make her consuming more animals product because of a defensive psychological mode in reaction.

To the extremism and if people consider me (or others) vegan or not, here’s a few thoughts:

- a colleague a once told me I’ll never be a vegan because I "have" animals, which is a form of exploitation for my pleasure. There’s also many "vegans" that do have cats and dogs (in captivity) and buy food for them. Is it beneficial to the veganism goal to exclude each other’s on the last percent of our animal consumption? I don’t like them buying meat for their cats but telling them so wouldn’t help veganism progress.

- what about a "Muslim" that have a beer once per year ? An "altruist" that buy a (child made) Bangladesh apparel ? A "monogamous" that do adultery once? I don’t think they should be excluded from the definition they believe in because of a tiny deviation or not-yet-perfection. They should be listen and companion instead.

- what about vegans that use soaps in public places? Buy stuff colored in red without knowing the provenance? Buy glossy lemons?

The limit of "practical" is fuzzy and IMHO debating it doesn’t really serve the overall goal. I’m very happy to be in the same boat as you, my friend, even if we don’t share the same room.

If the muslim, altruist, and monagamist from your example knowingly continue a behavior that is antithetical to the definitions of their stated identities then they are not a muslim, altruist, and monagamist. They may like to be or strive to be, and they can change, but they aren't right now. They should be excluded from the definitions.

You're right in identifying pet food and unknown ingredients as grey areas. "Practical and practicable" provides a tremendous amount of grey area. However, knowingly consuming animal products when there's an alternative is not a grey area. It is antithetical to veganism.

99% vegan is 99% better than the alternative, and that's undeniably great. I'm pursuing this so that people reading our conversation are not confused about what veganism is.

This is just from my personal experience, but as someone who is very sympathetic to the moral/ethical arguments from vegans but is not vegan themselves (though did try it out for a bit, lost a dangerous amount of weight and developed an intolerance to potatoes which further reduces available food to absurd levels sine potatoes are in tons of vegan food), is that it's the minority of vocal/aggressive vegans that have largely (though certainly not entirely) caused the poor reception.

My reasoning: People don't like to be judged (at all, but especially when the data behind the judgment is not so clear cut correct), and even just being in the presence of vegans can make some people feel judged. Even if the vegan says nothing, people can feel like they're being judged (to be clear, this is not the vegan's fault!). Now, add a small but vocal and aggressive minority of vegans who will explicitly judge/criticize, and you have a recipe for contention. It shouldn't be this way IMHO, but it's human nature.

I don't really care about either of them - people can eat what they want, it doesn't effect me any.

But vegans of European descent are, from my anecdotal experience, the most likely to moralize towards me on the atrocities I am committing by eating meat.

(I have worked with a many many people who are vegans due to their religion. I have never had ANY of them try to lecture me on this subject.)

Why are the cows taken away from the calves, especially dairy cows? Just curious.

Because you want to get the milk.

Almost this. The better answer is because we want to get ALL the milk.

So instead of letting the mother cow nurse her calf for the first few months and then start taking her milk for our use, the more "modern" practice is to separate the calf immediately.

Which means if you are drinking milk, you are drinking it from seriously depressed cows.

I wonder how this contributes to our culture's growing mood of depression?

see i.e. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/29/mums-ask...

or just google dairy cows separate from calves

The real crime is that alternatives are expensive due to how our new economy is structured. I personally prefer oatmilk (oatside) to dairy milk. However, it’s too damn expensive that I find myself only drinking it from time to time. Now how is a vegetarian milk more expensive than a full cycle of cow milk (cows are too burdening to maintain) you might ask?!?

My guess is that we are seeing something along the lines of EVs. Instead of making these healthier alternatives mainstream, they are being sold as a status symbol for the rich and making them unaffordable to the common man.

Here waiting for my chinese oat milk.

> Now how is a vegetarian milk more expensive than a full cycle of cow milk (cows are too burdening to maintain) you might ask?!?

Not enough scale because little demand compared to regular milk.

What's baffling is that the supply chain for non-dairy milk is so much simpler, since all non-dairy milk can be packaged as UHT which doesn't need any form of refrigeration until open.

Their margin is your opportunity. If you think oat milk is overpriced then simply start making and selling it at a lower price.

I don't think non-dairy milks are artificially expensive so much as cow milk is artificially cheap. At least in the US. Federal dairy subsidies and all that.

Oat/almond milk suppliers are definitely pricing them artificially expensive.

Here in Singapore, where soy milk has been around for decades, soy milk in both fresh and UHT forms tend to be much cheaper than dairy.

If Singapore doesn't have dairy subsidies and/or imports a lot of dairy... that's probably why. You're paying the "real" price while US consumers are paying the "discount" price.

Also, soy milk's been around for decades in the US too! I drank a lot as a kid. My mom would keep these little single-serving cartons in her purse for us, like juicebox-sized.

How much does 1 liter of almond or oat milk substitute cost in Singapore? How much does one liter of milk cost?

It might be a demand issue. In Singapore a lot of people are lactose intolerant, hence the demand for dairy substitutes is greater.

So still a near perfect metaphor for EV Vs ICE. I actually thought this is what they meant at first.

Milk is a byproduct of producing meat, and its a fallacy to see it in isolation.

Plantmilks are firstorder product.

This means that clinate impact of most plantmilks are higher than milks, excepting oat and ryemilk.

On a cost note - : making oat milk is literally just blending some oats and let them soak a day or 2, filter the water and done, perhaps do that if cost is an issue?

On a sidenote, if you drink soy, almond or worse ricemilk you're actually doing something worse for the climate/environment

This completely ignores second order effects, which lead to the opposite conclusion.

If milk is a byproduct of producing meat that can be sold for money, this means milk subsidizes the price of meat. Even if the effect is small, this is almost certainly enough to make it worse for the environment than e.g. soy milk, as the difference between raising cattle and growing soy is orders of magnitudes.

This is what drives me crazy about oat milk. Oats grow everywhere. Almonds, on the other hand, take a gallon of water per almond to make[1]. Despite this, at my store anyway, almond milk is about $2.89/half gallon while oat milk is at least $4/half gallon. What in our economy makes this feasible?

[1] https://bastyr.edu/about/news/ugly-truth-about-almonds

>What in our economy makes this feasible?

What do you mean "feasible"? It's profitable to sell something for more than it costs to make. If the only companies that offer Oat milk for sale price it at $4 a gallon, that's the price you have to pay to get it.

Meanwhile there are laws around the pricing of Milk, and in my neck of the woods that includes a MINIMUM price.

People wave their hands like "the market" is magic. As long as some consumers are willing to pay $4 a gallon for oat milk, companies will not reduce the price, and plenty of people are willing to pay MORE for oat milk than for cow milk.

If you wonder why nobody starts a company that undercuts the $4 oat milk, the simple answer is that the second you are done spending $1 million on a factory to make cheap oat milk, the producers already in the market drop their price and your business fails. This is why Google Fiber for example struggled. There is no technical reason prices are high. There's just no competition because the current producers are so massive and have such giant war chests that they can just kill your brand new competitive business, and soon your business will be dead and they can slowly ratchet up prices again.

There's also the fact that homemade oat milk is trivial to produce, results in a great product, and is cheaper than even that mythical competitive industry would produce.

I mean maybe you're right. Maybe people are like, "Oat milk is so different than almond milk that I am going to pay twice the price." I'm like uhhh it's white, vegan, and I can dunk a cookie in it. I'll buy what's cheaper.

> if you drink soy, almond or worse ricemilk you're actually doing something worse for the climate/environment

In what way? Data seems to suggest otherwise but maybe I'm misunderstanding

https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milks

Do It Yourself! You can beat milk price:

You already got the oat. Got a blender? Grind those little flakes with water and a spoon of your favorite oil. Et voilà !

Pro tips:

- filter for extra smoothness but no need if you intent to mix with whole oat flakes

- 1h in the fridge and mix again for double extra smoothness

- pinch of salt or cinnamon or cacao… yummi

- bored of oat? Check your supermarket shelf for other ideas. (Soy need to be cooked then blend then filter).

Doesn't milk contain protein ? Do oats contain the same amount of protein?

Quick search says milk contains twice protein as oat milk, and moreover more complete one. However for protein intake I would recommend soy products that are super healthy, cheap and contains fibers. The only plant milk I drink is a dip in my morning beverage and for cooking cakes.

But if you’re protein intake comes substantially from milk, indeed you should consider that.

As mentioned, the subsidies are the biggest player.

What you mentioned does probably play a role as well, with much more $/revenue being spent on marketing for non-animal milk than cow milk. None of the big milk players are trying to present themselves as a hip startup like Oatly is. Wouldn't be surprised if the latter was even VC backed.

But again, good ole' communist subsidies are the number one cause.

Back in my ancestral village the practice was to let cow nurse her calf and get the remaining for the owner's family. This kinda ensured co-existence. The modern dairy industry has all evil practices baked into its operations. It is the thing that keeps me from going vegetarian. Even with going off meat, I would still harm the livestock by consuming dairy. A lot of vegetarians (at least those who virtue signal) do not understand this.

One way to reduce that practice is to simply reduce one consumption of meat/milk, no need to be fully gandhi to improve some cow’s life. You anyway can’t save the world alone.

There’s a ton of mushrooms and fabaceae, very cheap nutritious and as much delicious if you learn to cook them well (like meat). My favorite is Tempeh which combine both! And quite cheap if you make it yourself.

http://tempeh.info/

I like the stuff, but interestingly, I found it easiest to buy in Indonesia, Australia and the USA. Outside of that, it's hard to get or very expensive.

You can make your own! It’s deleicious and very cheap if you make it yourself.

Plenty of tofu dishes in Korea and part of China. Almost never vegan, but often vegetarian.

In the US, almost every broth or dish at an East/southeast restaurant uses shrimp/fish sauce or other animal product like beef/chicken stock.

They usually prep it in advance, so it’s rare to find one that has an actually vegan dish they don’t custom make even if it says tofu.

What if no one was strictly vegan or vegetarian but everyone refused to buy food created by inhumane suffering and tortured conditions. Can't make it illegal but can make it very unfashionable. Just need more people to see things people see on a farm, then you gotta be a psycho to not care. Just no one properly lived on a farm next to animals these days when most people move to megapolises...

> Just need more people to see things people see on a farm

There's many "educational farms" to show kids live farms animals and sometimes pick the eggs and milk a cow. I'm very confused about them: it's good to let urban kids see-smell-touch real farms animals. However they have nothing in common with modern farming, even the not-inhumane ones.

BUT telling a 6yo toddler "look that cute cow, this is where your morning milk is from" will engrave it deep in the way they see farming. One day or another they will learn about factory farming but what you learn at 16yo doesn't "engrave" as easy and deep as at 6. I mean yes you quickly understand that education farms are not the reality but it require a big mental shift to overcome the feeling that the milk you drink in the morning is from an inhumane famr, especially when everyone around keeps doing it (I don't blame them, it's cheap, easy, convenient, traditional, delicious, practical...).

Some schools or parents brings their child in real farms which is a bit better, but it still doesn't depict the reality for 99% of consumption (think gelatin candies, croissants, cakes, ice creams...).

For the courageous -- DONT SHOW THAT TO YOUR TODDLER (yet) -- 8 hours of pigs in a typical/normal gas chamber that probably will end up in soap/jelly/bacon. : https://www.farmtransparency.org/videos?id=hg8cyu393v

When I was a small child in a rural environment, my uncle slaughtered a lamb for eating. It was a bloody messy hell. It was an eye opener but it didn't have the impact you think it had, if anything it desensitizes you. My uncle also showed respect and gratefulness to the animals and I also understood why we don't waste animal products.

Ok I admit all I write is only guess... in fact what you said makes me relate to some of my mother stories about her childhood. Thanks for remind me that.

I grew up doing a lot of diving, I'd put myself into the ocean, there were sharks and other dangers, but I caught my own fish and I never ever felt bad about it. I could selective take what I needed, I'd never take a mother / pregnant fish if I could help it. I could tell most of the time.

You also get to see how the wild world works, and most fish would prefer to be taken by a skilled spear fisherman than have their face mauled off by a squid, at least as far as I could tell.

Unfortunately we live in a world with 9 billion people on it, which means we don't have the room to grow and harvest all our own food. In my opinion, that's the issue. Sourcing all our food "ethically" is basically not possible.

I'd much prefer to be producing and hunting my own food.

I know someone who is hard core vegetarian because of impression from childhood, it all depends.

Maybe you see a normal farm and get to know the animals then see an actual factory where it is industrialized...

> It is the thing that keeps me from going vegetarian. Even with going off meat, I would still harm the livestock by consuming dairy.

You could go vegan.

Veal.

That’s how we get all their milk, how we get meat (the calf isn’t kept around for more than a few weeks/months), and rennet to make cheese (it’s the digestion liquid that’s in their stomach while they eat milk, must kill the animal to extract it)

Same with eggs, they don’t exist in a vacuum. To get eggs you have to have chickens, and to have chickens you must grind male chicks alive as they hatch because they don’t produce eggs. And hens aren’t supposed make eggs year round but we make them anyway with artificial lights etc, which drastically shortens their lifespan.

> And hens aren’t supposed make eggs year round but we make them anyway with artificial lights etc, which drastically shortens their lifespan.

I kept a flock of 25-30 hens on my property for a few years. Other than moulting they produce eggs ease round. The production slows drastically in the dark winter months for the older hens (1 for 3 days, say) but some continue to produce nearly daily (I think the cycle is something like 26-28 hours). The only time we had artificial light for them was on days when it was so cold we kept their coop door shut and turned on the interior light.

the way eggs are industrially farmed is generally not like this

I think they are addressing the claim "hens aren’t supposed make eggs year round"

Worse I’m afraid, chickens will give most eggs in their first year and are killed after, because they become unprofitable. I know an ecological farmer that charges a bit more for eggs and is able to keep them alive for 2 years, but that’s the max. They can easily live for 10 years plus.

> to have chickens you must grind male chicks alive as they hatch because they don’t produce eggs

Bit of a leap there.

How so? What do you think breeders who sell hens do with male chicks?

Some places sex the eggs. Germany, France, Switzerland and many other places completely do without so it is hardly mandatory.

Other places use male chickens for meat, despite them being sub-optimal.

I think the grinding of male chicks is an interesting case because it's actually pretty low on the suffering and distress spectrum, but high on the visceral reaction scale

> grinding of male chicks is an interesting case because it's actually pretty low on the suffering and distress spectrum, but high on the visceral reaction scale

And nothing requires they be ground alive versus e.g. introduced into a nitrogen atmosphere and then minced. (Or simply neutered, raised and sold as capon.)

or feed them live to an alligator farm or zoo

Why would the calves be kept near the cows?

They’re not gonna feed the milk that their mothers are producing for them, because that would mean less milk to sell and less milk for people to consume.

And so why keep the calves in the milking side of the facility when you can move them to the fattening side for meat/leather or to get them to age so you can forcibly impregnate them every year for their milk, depending on their gender.

That reads like dark satire.

Thats pretty much how I now see it.

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