Calves are almost always separated from their mothers rule

You know that scene in mad Max fury road where women are pumped for their breast milk? Turns out we've been doing the same thing to cows for a while.

And now we’re doing it to the almonds smh
thank u cows for the milk 😋

Love seeing more vegan memes and content.

For most of the decade I was on Reddit, vegan support was always met with vitriolic opposition unless it was on a vegan-friendly sub. But the last year or so I was on that platform I remember being really surprised to see a trend towards anti-vegan sentiment becoming the unpopular opinion. I was surprised again once I joined Lemmy to see that anti-vegan culture seems to be the popular opinion here, though I'm noticing there is also a stronger pro-vegan culture than there had been for most of my time on Reddit.

What is with all the anti-meat industry posts popping up recently? It's starting to feel like an astroturf campaign...

Most likely more people being aware of it, and then people seeing those posts doing well leads to more posts like that

Arguably, you should be moreso concerned about the opposite. The industry runs well known astroturfing campaigns:

NCBA [National Cattlemen’s Beef Association] calls it “proactive reputation management”: a strategy that entails monitoring the internet for messaging opportunities, then leaping in to burnish beef’s image whenever it’s advantageous

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/03/beef-industry-public-relations-messaging-machine

The meat industry has helped fund research and communications initiatives to minimize its links to climate change. And it has organized astroturf attacks on initiatives like EAT-Lancet

https://newrepublic.com/article/177575/never-trust-green-meat
- You are literally the one posting these. It's all you appear to post about.
Astroturfing implies that a corporation or government agency with large amounts of funding are paying individuals or bots to spread misinformation for their employer's financial or strategic benefit.

You might not know this, but there isn't a "Big Vegan" industry with deep pockets to financially support astroturfing. Agrobusinesses that grow vegetation make more money off the meat industry than they would if they centered their produce around vegetarian or vegan diets. Businesses that do cater to vegans barely manage to scrape by and have no margins to support social media manipulation; they barely even have budget for conventional marketing.

What you're actually witnessing is legitimate grassroots efforts to inform people about the harm that the meat industry causes. You see "astroturfing" doesn't mean "a lot of people are saying things I don't like". It actually means "grassroots campaign but fake", hence the name "astroturf", which is a fake kind of grass.
- but there isn't a "Big Vegan" industry with deep pockets to financially support astroturfing.
  
  Well then who keeps sending me all this free tofu with envelopes of cash taped to it whenever I upvote a pro-vegan meme?
- Astroturfing is not exclusive to corporations or government agencies. As you said, it means a fake grassroots campaign. That is it. Normal people can do the same too.
  
  I'm not weighing on on whether THIS is astroturfing, just saying that is blatantly wrong to say it's exclusive to corporations or government agencies when human beings will also willingly put themselves into idiotic groups that do idiotic things.
Today I learned people sharing their opinions is "astroturfing"
- They are all being posted by the same account.
The fediverse is just hugely left-wing and with a lot of far-flung left wing posters to boot. It’s not an astroturf campaign just a place a lot of outsiders gather.

I don’t know who would pay for this, there isn’t really any moneyed interest that would gain from turning public opinion against meat
Trolls that primarily are active on vegan communities learning they could troll here without the mods telling them to pack it up.
- TIL caring about issues that cause unimaginable degrees of unnecessary suffering and also threaten to end human civilization as we know it is trolling.

“”Why are there so many extra quotes?””

""Yes""
They're used to emphasize the dubiousness of the thing quoted. You can search for """ on whatever instance and see various examples.

you post 2 memes like this per day and then wonder why people hate vegans

You don't have to be vegan to agree that animal farming of the 21st century is cruel and we could do better than that
- But it's easier to whinge like a reactionary at the people demanding an end to the systematic breeding into existence of animals for the sole purpose of exploiting and killing when ending that unfathomably cruel system gives me the ickies 😭

still waiting on cow school and cow college and cow work i assume?

vegans won't get me, pls slow animal testing.

More than a third of US children do not live with both of their biological parents. If we are okay with separating human children from their parents, why should we treat cows better?

What an absolutely bizarre whataboutism, so vapid and self-evidently disingenuous that I can't believe I'm about to waste my time picking it apart, but here we go:

First of all, rescuing children from traumatically abusive environments is not the same as what the meat industry does to calves. Separation from parents is inherently traumatic itself, but that needs to be weighed against the degree of harm that the abusive parent might do, on a case-by-case basis.

Secondly, there are certainly cases of the government separating children from their parents that should be protested. Like when Texas defines transgender-affirming households to be committing child abuse and uses that as a reason to forcibly separate the child. Or when immigration control separates migrant children from their parents.

This might come as a shock to you, but it's possible to care about and advocate for more than one issue at a time. I don't know if your emotional capacity might be limited to just caring about one thing, but most people don't suffer from that limitation.
What a braindead argument. Sometimes bad things happen to human children so we can excuse animal cruelty on an industrial scale.

And it's not just the separation, 99% of male calves are killed immediately after being born, while females are either filled with hormones so they can be grown for meat, or they are raped year after year so they keep producing milk.
- For some sources to back that up
  
  Some of their claims are beyond dispute: Dairy cows are repeatedly impregnated by artificial insemination and have their newborns taken away at birth. Female calves are confined to individual pens and have their horn buds destroyed when they are about eight weeks old. The males are not so lucky. Soon after birth, they are trucked off to veal farms or cattle ranches where they end up as hamburger meat.
  
  The typical dairy cow in the United States will spend its entire life inside a concrete-floored enclosure, and although they can live 20 years, most are sent to slaughter after four or five years when their milk production wanes.
  
  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/science/dairy-farming-cows-milk.html
- 99% of male calves are killed immediately after being born
  
  that's not true.
Not living with biological parents is different than being seperated, living alone in small veal cages, and ultimately being killed as a child for veal as happens for male calves

We also do not intentionally seperate all child from their parents regardless of circumstances. Maybe a tiny amount from child protective services for abusive parents, but it's not like the dairy industry is doing so because of abusive cow parents