even if farm animals were slaughtered in the most humane and painless of ways, the way they’re treated while they’re alive is still horrifyingly atrocious
if farm animals were slaughtered in the most humane and painless of ways
This sounds like a juxtaposition to me. You cannot slaughter a healthy animal in a humane way. "Slaughter" excludes "humane". I'm not a vegan/vegetarian but it seems to me like this idea that if we just raised happy healthy animals and found a way to kill it nicely then eating meat would be ethically ok. We don't need to eat meat anymore. Any killing of an animal to make it into food is unnecessary and could be avoided. I think it is important that we meat eaters really internalize this. Every time we eat meat we caused absolutely unnecessary suffering for a quick moment of pleasure.
Culling is not cruel or even morally ambiguous. It is morally and ethically right to cull out of control populations of animals for the betterment of the whole. Culling isn't even necessarily for the sick or weak. Sometimes healthy young animals have to be put down for the betterment of the environment. Look into native American hunting practice and land conservation methodology.
Modern farming is very much none of those things though.
Every time we eat meat we caused absolutely unnecessary suffering for a quick moment of pleasure.
you might mean "all of humanity" or "all meat eaters" caused suffering, but, in fact only the individuals who cause suffering have done so, and eating meat does not, in and of itself, cause any suffering at all. if there is any suffering involved, it happens before the meat-eating, and thus cannot be caused by the meat-eating, since an event in the future cannot cause an event in the past.
And even if they were treated well during their lifetime, the way we've bred them to produce enormous quantities of eggs, milk and meat would still result in short, horrific lives. It's atrocious any way you look at it.
We've lost so many heirloom breeds of plants and animals to industrial farming. Pigs used to be raised for their lard, but the anti-fat movement - which was caused by the food lobby - they bred them to be almost completely lean. Now they can't live outside anymore because they don't have fat or thick hair. And their meat is dry and flavorless. The pigs are less happy, and diners are less happy.
Same goes for grocery store vegetables, which aren't bred for flavor or texture but for shipping durability. Grocery store tomatoes, for example. And this must contribute to the fact that lots of people don't like vegetables.
Unless it's Halal, since they're treated from birth to death with the upmost respect.
Instead, she suggests pigs could be genetically bred to have a less violent reaction to CO2
there's a lot of messed up shit in that article but this is so sinister
did anything ever happen after the videos were released?
There's been more videos about this too since. This article only looked at the US, but this stuff also exists elsewhere. In the UK they simply arrested people filming some of the slaughterhouses using CO2 gas chambers.
Ag-gag laws and similar kinds of stuff are fun. Problems apparently don't exist if you just can't film them :/
No I don't think they can; that's how your body knows to breathe. CO2 is just the wrong gas to use to kill something if you want it done quietly. I honestly think I'd rather be strangled, there's a chance I'd die of lack of blood flow to the brain before CO2 poisoning set in.
did anything ever happen after the videos were released?
What do you mean? The video shows the intended effect, I don't think any regulatory place wants to change anything about that.
Yeah, I figured before reading this would fly like the nitrogen gas executions that some state penal systems are trying. (As revealed on _Last Week Tonight.) Sure enough it's awful.
Right now, my household is drastically reducing meat as we can (which is made easier by the rising prices of meat). Whether we have good tasty fake meat made out of vegetable matter or cultured meat that was never a full animal, I'll be glad for when it's affordable.
A somber thing about nitrogen gas executions:
People generally agree that nitrogen (or any inert) gas asphyxiation is a relatively painless and peaceful way to go. People have been using it for (animal and human) euthanasia for years without incident. Seems appropriate, right?
So how did it work in capital punishment scenario the first time around? The guards slapped the face mask on the condemned. Then they asked them for their last statement. Quote: "Mffmfmf, Mffafam fmfmfm mfffmfmf mf mfmf f mfmf mfffmfmmf. Mfffm mfm mfm mfmfffmfmf mf. Mfff mff mf mff." (Transcribed as: "Tonight, Alabama causes humanity to take a step backwards. Thank you for supporting me. Love all of you.") Then they opened the gas valves. It took too long. ...OK, it's time to pause now, let's see how many problems you can spot with this procedure.
Problem: They're continuing to use "medical" and "painless" and whatnot procedures, administered by unqualified staff, on unwilling participants. Look, I'm not an advocate of death penalty at all and I think it should be abolished everywhere, but even I know that the guillotine designers were up to something. You need to minimise the amount of fuck-ups at all levels.
Who doesn't want to leave a sparkly, effervescent corpse after dying of asphyxiation and painful organ failure due to excessive carbonic acid buildup?
I'll have the brain bullet, thanks.
Hell. O would take a bullet to the head right now if guns were legal in my country.
Repeating the post body context in the comments: Spy Cams Reveal the Grim Reality of Slaughterhouse Gas Chambers
Also before someone comes here commenting about nitrogen as if it's a perfect painless method, it's got problems too:
Hypoxia produced by N2 and Ar appears to reduce, but not eliminate, aversive responses [escape attempts and gasping] in pigs
[...]
These gases [Nitrogen and Argon] tend to cause more convulsive wing flapping in poultry than CO2 in air mixtures
https://www.avma.org/sites/default/files/2020-02/Guidelines-on-Euthanasia-2020.pdf
Asphyxiation is a uniquely terrifying way to die. People who have lost their ability to feel most fear through the destruction of their amygdala still panicked under simulated drowning.
These gas chambers are almost certainly used for the same reasons the Nazis used them on people: they're economical. The Nazis found bullets to the back of the head and mass graves to be inadequate for dealing with the sheer volume of people they wanted to murder, so they settled on the gas chambers next to furnaces because it allowed them to kill mass quantities the quickest.
There is no way of executing living animals that cannot be botched; no ethical way to kill animals bred and caged for their entire lives. The expectation of being able to have it both ways is unreasonable. No free lunches liberals.
Pignorant is another investigation into UK gas chambers for pigs that's available on Prime video btw.
Let's abolish slaughterhouses.
I've read the article and damn, this is disturbing af. Isn't this pig killing method basically the same as what nazi used on humans?
...I'll try to reduce the amount of meat in my diet
It's actually pretty easy to. you probably wont have a great time if you try eat meatsm based dishes without the meat because they'll taste lacking and be unbalanced.
Almost all poverty food around the world historically is vegan or at least vegetarian though so there's huge variety to choose from. In chinese food there's Buddhist influenced food like: https://thewoksoflife.com/buddhas-delight-lo-han-jai/, lots of African food is vegetarian or vegan (Ethiopian is stand out here), much south Indian food is and a lot of the stuff with yogurt can be made with soy yoghurt (easy to diy if you like) or cashew cream and a sour note, mexican dishes are easily adaptable too.
Then there are some other hacks like black bean paste and breadcrumbs pressed into patties just works as something you can fry and chuck on a burger (add a few spices to taste), TVP will sub for mince in many saucy dishes where it can absorb the flavour.
You'll have fun, it's an adventure that will teach you so much about how food works around the world!
Also you can start immediately by just ordering a vegan option every time you eat out. You don't have to worry about having the skills or ingredients to do that.
Good luck!
If I may give you one simple piece of advice: meat substitutes, at least in my experience, aren't the best. They're not terrible, some are actually even good, but they're not the same and it's noticable. I learned to just embrace veggie food and eat it for what it is, not as something trying to taste like meat, and found those dishes to be much tastier.
India has a large vegetarian population that doesn't try to make vegetable versions of dishes that are mostly meat, so I suggest looking at Indian cuisine for meat-free recipe ideas.
Co2 is the worst gad to suffocate in. Please just put me in a room full of nitrogen instead
Omfg I once took a hit of CO2 as I thought my CO2 capsules were my N2O capsules.
Fuckin' 'orrible
Laughing gas is sweet and soft, taking a hit of CO2 is like choking on cactuses.
I had exposure to tear gas in the army and while it was a milder version (simulating mild-moderate exposure), I definitely preferred it to CO2.
Is this another vegan circlejerk channel now?
I vote we eat this guy instead of the animals. Everybody wins.
Animal rights/sentientism/antispeciesism are the logical next step for leftist/progressive/compassionate ideologies, 196 tends to attract mostly leftist/etc folks, so it makes sense
Well 196 got some uptake in terms of animal cruelty posts, but it gives a good highlight to us about this issue.
Typing as a meat eater.
As a fellow meat eater, I appreciate the spotlight being shown on the cruelty of the meat industry at large, as well as you do. It has made me more conscious of my meat consumption, and I have reduced my consumption of it. It has also made me aware of sourcing more ethical meat from local butchers that are supplied by local free range farms.
I hope that this awareness continues to spread, and it helps speed up the development of things like lab grown meat and other more ethical sources of meat, in general.
If that's your interpretation of this post, sure.
What? Jesus man come on!
Oh yeah. The gas dissolves in the mucose around their eyes too, acidifying it like soda water.
Male chickens discarded from hatcheries are thrown live into a blender, "maceration", or gassed.
Don't ask about what happens to the male babies from dairy cow pregnancies for milk, or why veal is so tender.
There are... reasons why people go vegan despite all the vitriol we get thrown our way for daring to not be silent about this nightmare. Slaughterhouse workers get PTSD, even the people most ok with actually doing this shit have their minds recoil and fold in on themselves in the face of the sheer horror.
I feel like the vitriol also in large part comes from this. A lot of people know that it is unethical and wrong but in order to acknowledge that they would either have to change their behaviour radically or acknowledge that according to their own morals they are bad people. Most people can pretend that they don't really have a choice or can't really change, but when they meet someone who has made these radical changes, they get confronted with the reality and get instantly defensive in order to keep the illusion intact that they are "morally good", taking out their own insecurity on the person that made the choice that they haven't made.
Couldn't care less about killing and eating animals, but it's pretty fucked how we go about it.
I'm recently diagnosed diabetic so this shit just angers me on multiple levels. Good job, body. Now we have to limit carbs, and all the meat is cruel, guess I'll live on fucking greens and cheese.
Ouch 😅 …at least a (non junk food) vegan diet has been shown to improve people’s diabetes symptoms. If you ever go for it, I hope that ends up being the case with you!
Are you totally fine with the moral consequences of enforced veganism on the entire human population? I'm asking this because you must also understand that there are going to be seriously detrimental and inescapable outcomes associated with that as well. Life only comes from death. You can fundamentally dislike the arrangement, but as far as we are aware that is a necessary input-output relationship. Choosing which deaths you are okay with is simply trading one Faustian bargain for another.
This is the argument that I used when I was an adolescent who thought himself very wise and smart but in reality just wanted an excuse to not have to change the lifestyle that I was comfortable with.
Saying "life only comes from death" is a cowardly reductionism. It creates a false equivalence between plant and animal life that lets you ignore the fact that sustaining human life does not require the wanton suffering of animals. And it certainly doesn't require animals to be suffering at such massive scales and in such cruel ways.
You're probably someone who will cite studies which indicate that plants emit distress signals when they take physical damage, and you'll argue that therefore plants suffer the same as animals. But that's an intellectually dishonest argument. Suffering as we understand it is more than just a chemical reaction to stimulus; it emerges from an awareness of being alive and an instinctual desire to remain alive and unharmed. Plants do not have that kind of awareness.
There are predators in nature that only know how to hunt to survive. Their digestive systems are specialized to consume the bodies of other smaller animals. And their ecosystems depend on those predators to balance out the reproductive cycles of their prey, otherwise the prey animals would become overpopulated and wipe out life forms lower on the food chain.
The fact of the matter is that humans have not been a collaborative member of any ecosystem for tens of thousands of years. We cause massive harm to every ecosystem that we're a part of, and the mass slaughter of farm animals is the worst thing we've done to this planet yet, even more harmful overall than CO2 emissions. We're eroding the soil and using up the fresh water in ways we can't sustain, and then to top it all off we're inflicting the largest scale unnecessary suffering in the history of this planet. And all of it is being done so that humans can enjoy a pleasure that is both unnecessary and easily replaced with a small amount of agricultural and supply chain reform.
Humans are omnivores and the simple reality is that as an omnivore with options at your disposal you have a choice about whether the process of sustaining your life involves wanton suffering at a massive scale or not. If you think the suffering of animals is worth the pleasure you derive from eating their flesh then just be honest and say so. Don't be a coward like I used to be by pretending that animals and plants are the same.
First, I just want to say that this isn't personal to me. I am concerned with the overarching ramifications of dismantling the current industrial meat, animal, and agricultural industries without first having sufficiently scalable solutions to replace them. This will kill a lot of people, and they will die in horrible ways. If you want to stop the suffering of animals you better know how to do so in a way that won't cause additional suffering to humanity, otherwise you are never going to reach the critical mass necessary to make the change. I'm also more than willing to admit that the greed and corruption in the governmental and economic systems of the world would need to be changed as well. Good luck with that, I fully support it.
Saying "life only comes from death" is a cowardly reductionism.
No, it is an objectively verifiable fact that is backed up by even the most basic level of scientific literacy. You are confusing the higher order ethical dilemmas of sentient consciousness with the fundamental realities of nature. You can dislike it, and I understand that. I don't like it either, but I am also not naive enough to simply ignore reality because it makes me feel bad. You are using the same kind of blind dogmatism in your response that you are accusing me of using even though I did no such thing.
sustaining human life does not require the wanton suffering of animals.
That is entirely dependant upon your interpretation of "wanton". There is currently no other way for us to sustain life on this planet with the same degree of convenience that is afforded to us by the industrialization of the food system. Can it be made better? Sure, and I am 1000% in favor of that. But suggesting that we are going to be able to eliminate the need for animals in the supply chain anytime soon is a complete fantasy. Even if we could, there will be other health considerations that come from that which need to be researched, and well understood before we bank our survival on them. That will take many decades at best.
Don't be a coward like I used to be by pretending that animals and plants are the same.
I literally never said that. You're projecting here, which is whatever honestly. I get people make this argument. I'm just not one of them.
The fact of the matter is that humans have not been a collaborative member of any ecosystem for tens of thousands of years.
I'm not sure it has been quite that long, but I agree with your general premise. Overall humanity is a destructive force if you consider the preservation of nature in its pre-industrial form to be optimal. I can appreciate that argument. I'm not entirely convinced that human life is more valuable than any other life. I'm also not entirely convinced that the proliferation of life more generally has any objectively quantifiable value. That is a philosophical argument that is beyond the scope of this conversation. Again, I'm only interested in logistically feasible goals that can be realistically implemented.
Humans are omnivores and the simple reality is that as an omnivore with options at your disposal you have a choice about whether the process of sustaining your life involves wanton suffering at a massive scale or not.
Not really. What I do personally is entirely inconsequential. Systems matter. People don't. I don't enjoy killing things. I don't "derive pleasure" from the suffering of others in the way you are accusing me of. However, I am willing to accept the ethical realities of eating animal protein, and I understand that I would not be alive today if my ancestors had not done the same for billions of years. So no, I don't enjoy it, but unlike you I do accept it. I am perfectly willing to facilitate moving the system in a more humane direction in whatever small ways I can make an impact, but I'm also not stressing about livestock having to die in order to feed people either. On some level it just is what it is.
If you have concerns about plant agriculture, they are only magnified by animal agriculture which uses a lot more of it for animal feed
1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2 for monogastrics
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013
Or in environmental terms:
we show that plant-based replacements for each of the major animal categories in the United States (beef, pork, dairy, poultry, and eggs) can produce twofold to 20-fold more nutritionally similar food per unit cropland. Replacing all animal-based items with plant-based replacement diets can add enough food to feed 350 million additional people, more than the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food loss.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1713820115
To produce 1 kg of protein from kidney beans required approximately eighteen times less land, ten times less water, nine times less fuel, twelve times less fertilizer and ten times less pesticide in comparison to producing 1 kg of protein from beef
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25374332/
or for overall diets
The diet containing more animal products required an additional 10 252 litres of water, 9910 kJ of energy, 186 g of fertilizer and 6 g of pesticides per week in comparison to the diet containing less animal products
Data for the production of alfalfa( Reference Mathews, Canevari and Frate 51 , Reference Vargas, Mueller and Frate 52 ) and maize( Reference Vargas, Frate and Mathews 53 , Reference Brittan, Muiner and Klonsky 54 ) used for animal feed were obtained from CRS and were added to the direct water used by the animals using a net feed consumption rate of 5·62 kg maize/kg beef and 2·66 kg alfalfa/kg beef. A feed conversion efficiency of 7·0 was assumed( Reference Horrigan, Lawrence and Walker 10 ). Soya in the feed formulations for beef and poultry was excluded.
since most beef cattle graze for the first year, where they put on the majority of their weight, then why would you attribute all the meat production to feedlots? shouldn't it be halved at least?
I think you're reaching there a bit, because no one said anything about forced veganism. You can eat meat and be against the horrors of (the vast majority of) the meat industry.
(If I read your reply wrong, let me know and I will delete this)
I was using that as an extreme hypothetical. You can call that disingenuous if you like. I just don't see how you can remove "animal suffering" from the equation without enforcing that measure. Otherwise all you are doing is drawing a subjective line around what suffering is acceptable and what isn't. I'm personally fine with trying to make that determination in the least arbitrary way possible with the best technology possible so we can progress society forward, but let's not act like there still won't be people who see that cost as unacceptable.
Life only comes from death.
No? The recombination of genetic material results in complex life forms. That’s why we have multicellular organisms. Heck, in fact mitochondrial DNA proves that humans have a symbiotic relationship with microbes. So I guess I’d say the quoted text above is an unqualified statement.
Besides all that, humans are the only living organism that we know of capable of probing the nature of reality and existence. So simply put, it’s okay for us to hold ourselves to higher standard than the “reptile” or “monkey” brain.
Imagine if there was a life form stronger or smarter than humans, what would you want to say to it? “Life only comes from death so eat me or abuse me”. We can and should do better.
Imagine if there was a life form stronger or smarter than humans, what would you want to say to it? “Life only comes from death so eat me or abuse me”. We can and should do better.
As far as we know the propagation of life requires the consumption of other life as inputs, or in other words every single living thing on this planet must consume material from other organic life to subsist.
Therefore, in your hypothetical I would expect that any life form that required the domestication and industrial consumption of sentient life-forms or their byproducts as a matter of survival to absolutely do so regardless of the ethical implications. If it was a matter of survival, we would become an input. Absolutely zero question about it.
I tend to focus more of their quality of life before their death day. Like, a swift needle to the brain seems pretty okay compared to being stacked nearly on top of each other in their own waste for much of their lives.
