5 ms·

> This is why the meat-plant closures forced American farmers to euthanize millions of animals, at a time when food banks were overwhelmed by demand. “Euthaniz

> This is why the meat-plant closures forced American farmers to euthanize millions of animals, at a time when food banks were overwhelmed by demand. “Euthanize” is a euphemism. What pig farmers have been doing due to the shutdown is not painless euthanasia, it’s industrial-scale animal cruelty. The linked article and videos are not for the faint of heart. https://theintercept.com/2020/05/29/pigs-factory-farms-ventilation-shutdown-coronavirus/ https://theintercept.com/2020/05/29/pigs-factory-farms-venti...

perfmode 6y ago
truth, brother cull gas exterminate let’s call it like it is
- cma 6y ago
  Pretty terrifying, they killed them with steam, not even something like carbon monoxide exhaust.
- bluntfang 6y ago
  but bad words make feel bad. me want feel good. me need meat and patio seating.
Pfhreak 6y ago
Stuff like this is why I don't eat meat. Combined with the ag-gag laws that prevent this from being more exposed, it's wild how inhumane our treatment of animals has become. https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missing-piglets-animal-rights-glenn-greenwald/ https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missin...
- Melting_Harps 6y ago
  > Stuff like this is why I don't eat meat. Combined with the ag-gag laws that prevent this from being more exposed, it's wild how inhumane our treatment of animals has become. I understand these concerns, but please consider that this would never happen under Organic/Permaculture and sure as hell not under Biodynamic farms. They'd all lose their certification, and most are adamant on using the most humane ways in livestock raising. The first cow herd, for meat, I ever took care of in Germany ate better than I did. They could only eat a diet of silage (fermented grass) and fruit from the farm in addition to hay. Gassing them would not only be cruel, but its also a quick way to end being able to get your beef sold at 22 Eur/Kg faster than anything. I'm not going to lie and say its perfect, their are things that I think are inefficient in all of those, but its the cost of having an actual healthy relationship with the Earth that provides the food we eat. In fact one cow we had got an utter infection because we couldn't bottle feed the calf, it just wouldn't eat and was showing signs of anemia, so we had to isolate the mother and child and get a vet to apply local antiseptics and herbal remedies to cure the infection. This required like 5 separate visits from the vet, which was the child of a local farmer and family friend. The calf was just fed from another cow that didn't let it bite it, so it quickly learned to not do that and eventually got weened to grass by Spring when they went to pasture. But that gassing is just one horrible example of many in what it entails to do a race to the bottom pricing model based on State Subsidized Ag/livestock models. It's horrible for everyone involved and should be a bigger issue than it is. Especially now that we see how ineffective they are under a severe stress test like COVID. Consumers can vote with their money, waiting for regulatory changes and practices to be enforced are simply not teneble, monetarily incentivizing farmers to move away from this model is the only real way to make this work.
  - jacobush 6y ago
    Not trying to equate pigs to humans people at all - however, see this as a parable: If these were people being tortured to death, would you say that monetarily incentivizing torturers to move away from this model is the only real way? It makes no sense to me. If it's not illegal, it should be. Soon.
    - Melting_Harps 6y ago
      > It makes no sense to me. If it's not illegal, it should be. Soon. It won't be though, most of my activism has been for farmer's rights and if you think petitioning government to go against its corporate lobbyists is not just realistic but not a total waste of time you don't understand the paradigm you're talking about. That effort is better spent to more productive ends: Food Education is key, as is story telling; just look at the explosion of foodies and Influencers on Social Media in the last 10 years, specifically because of programs from Anthony Bouradain and Chef's table. And my personal favorite Dotchi no Ryouri from Japan, which is an awesome model that I hope gets resurrected. Hell, many of my fellow cooks, be it in Europe or the US were drawn to culinary because the original Iron Chef from Japan which had more reverence for the ingredients and story telling than anything that came before it. We all wanted to do something that lived up to that narrative. The adage: 'you only win by creating a better paradigm' best sums up this situation. Not waiting for regulators and legislation to innovate should resonate deeply amongst fellow tech workers destined to want to disrupt the monoliths. The Truth is, Agriculture, and the Food Industry as a whole, is the proverbial Goliath and the organic/permaculture/Biodynamic farmers are the David. Its time more people realized that and acted accordingly: don't like a Law? Use your only real vote you have in the West (money) to negate it, eventually this will lead to things like Marijuana being decriminalized and regulated by individual States in defiance to the Federal Government, and Hemp going from a schedule 1 drug to being 50 state legal and having CBD products found at your local Safeway and on Amazon right now. I should know, I was there and active in that space for both of those things in the US. Lastly, livestock are not Humans; we are doing an unnatural (all Agriculture is) process, the best we can do is follow cruel-free models that enhance the animal's life that results in an amazing end product. Asking for anything more is literately impossible. And making that analogy to Humans takes us into murky waters I'd rather not venture, as its more philosophical, perhaps even bordering on sophism.
jacobush 6y ago
The people behind this should serve prison time.
- jacobush 6y ago
  I don't usually agree with this line of thinking, but just a thought experiment - if you equate 10 thousand pigs to one human being, these people just in cold blood tortured several humans worth to death, to make some money.
fractallyte 6y ago
I got downvoted for this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23290075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23290075 Nevertheless, I stand by it: "...Humans have truly monstrous traits. Occasionally, there's a question of how future generations will see us... Maybe the Fermi Paradox has a really simple, obvious explanation: "Where is everybody?" - waiting for us to become less despicable." 'Never Again!' is a phrase born of the Holocaust (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_again https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_again). Reading the parent article, that sentiment seems pretty hollow... Aren't humans supposed to be 'sentient'?
- xvector 6y ago
  We are a shortsighted species. Today we tear down statues of former slave-owners, tomorrow statues of today's carnists will also be torn down. When will we realize the universal truth that all sentience must be respected? It is getting old now, movement after civil rights movement behind which the underlying message is the exact same. Rather than fixing every instance of this problem, why do people struggle so much to see the big picture and fix it entirely?
  - perfmode 6y ago
    Amen. * We as people tend to believe our own thinking. * The ego controls all thinking. * The ego is the cause of all human sorrow and suffering. * The ego uses thought to preserve its imaginary self. * The ego can create an argument against anything. * the ego will generate arguments against any anti-ego presentation, thus blocking what is being presented. * Most humans live their entire lives without ever having observed the background of awareness.
  - fiveacres 6y ago
    this is such an oversocialized view of the world -- why do you think that all sentience 'must' be respected?
kwhitefoot 6y ago
Why did this sort of thing happen in the US? As far as I can tell nothing like it has happened in Europe. We also have all sorts of subsidies and controls on agriculture. Our supply chains here (Scandinavia specifically, but as far as I know in most of Europe as well) have been functioning almost as before except for a few minor hiccups in the first couple of weeks of the restrictions due to COVID-19 (flour and yeast were in short supply for a couple of weeks). Is it because Europe has stronger animal welfare provisions? Or something else?
- akudha 6y ago
  ag-gag laws is one reason. Many people don't even realize the cruelty that is happening, let alone on an industrial scale. The meat industry has a powerful hold on politics, gets a ton of special treatment (compared to fruit and veggie growers). I pay 3$ for a single big organic cucumber (not a pound, a single cucumber). Compared to this, meat is so cheap here, especially chicken. People are used to cheap meat for so long. It is going to be very difficult to loosen that dependence. So in effect, even if some people are aware of the cruelty, they choose to ignore because they get cheap meat. Another problem is consolidation. A few companies control a large portion of the food supply and we have the "too big to fail" problem.
- makomk 6y ago
  That is a very good question. There have definitely been large coronavirus outbreaks in slaughterhouses all over Europe that have disrupted operations, maybe not in Scandinavia but certainly in countries like Germany and France.
  - kwhitefoot 6y ago
    But did they disrupt things so badly that massive numbers of livestock had to be just destroyed?

perfmode 6y ago

truth, brother cull gas exterminate let’s call it like it is

cma 6y ago
Pretty terrifying, they killed them with steam, not even something like carbon monoxide exhaust.
bluntfang 6y ago
but bad words make feel bad. me want feel good. me need meat and patio seating.

Pfhreak 6y ago

Stuff like this is why I don't eat meat. Combined with the ag-gag laws that prevent this from being more exposed, it's wild how inhumane our treatment of animals has become. https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missing-piglets-animal-rights-glenn-greenwald/ https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missin...

Melting_Harps 6y ago
> Stuff like this is why I don't eat meat. Combined with the ag-gag laws that prevent this from being more exposed, it's wild how inhumane our treatment of animals has become. I understand these concerns, but please consider that this would never happen under Organic/Permaculture and sure as hell not under Biodynamic farms. They'd all lose their certification, and most are adamant on using the most humane ways in livestock raising. The first cow herd, for meat, I ever took care of in Germany ate better than I did. They could only eat a diet of silage (fermented grass) and fruit from the farm in addition to hay. Gassing them would not only be cruel, but its also a quick way to end being able to get your beef sold at 22 Eur/Kg faster than anything. I'm not going to lie and say its perfect, their are things that I think are inefficient in all of those, but its the cost of having an actual healthy relationship with the Earth that provides the food we eat. In fact one cow we had got an utter infection because we couldn't bottle feed the calf, it just wouldn't eat and was showing signs of anemia, so we had to isolate the mother and child and get a vet to apply local antiseptics and herbal remedies to cure the infection. This required like 5 separate visits from the vet, which was the child of a local farmer and family friend. The calf was just fed from another cow that didn't let it bite it, so it quickly learned to not do that and eventually got weened to grass by Spring when they went to pasture. But that gassing is just one horrible example of many in what it entails to do a race to the bottom pricing model based on State Subsidized Ag/livestock models. It's horrible for everyone involved and should be a bigger issue than it is. Especially now that we see how ineffective they are under a severe stress test like COVID. Consumers can vote with their money, waiting for regulatory changes and practices to be enforced are simply not teneble, monetarily incentivizing farmers to move away from this model is the only real way to make this work.
- jacobush 6y ago
  Not trying to equate pigs to humans people at all - however, see this as a parable: If these were people being tortured to death, would you say that monetarily incentivizing torturers to move away from this model is the only real way? It makes no sense to me. If it's not illegal, it should be. Soon.
  - Melting_Harps 6y ago
    > It makes no sense to me. If it's not illegal, it should be. Soon. It won't be though, most of my activism has been for farmer's rights and if you think petitioning government to go against its corporate lobbyists is not just realistic but not a total waste of time you don't understand the paradigm you're talking about. That effort is better spent to more productive ends: Food Education is key, as is story telling; just look at the explosion of foodies and Influencers on Social Media in the last 10 years, specifically because of programs from Anthony Bouradain and Chef's table. And my personal favorite Dotchi no Ryouri from Japan, which is an awesome model that I hope gets resurrected. Hell, many of my fellow cooks, be it in Europe or the US were drawn to culinary because the original Iron Chef from Japan which had more reverence for the ingredients and story telling than anything that came before it. We all wanted to do something that lived up to that narrative. The adage: 'you only win by creating a better paradigm' best sums up this situation. Not waiting for regulators and legislation to innovate should resonate deeply amongst fellow tech workers destined to want to disrupt the monoliths. The Truth is, Agriculture, and the Food Industry as a whole, is the proverbial Goliath and the organic/permaculture/Biodynamic farmers are the David. Its time more people realized that and acted accordingly: don't like a Law? Use your only real vote you have in the West (money) to negate it, eventually this will lead to things like Marijuana being decriminalized and regulated by individual States in defiance to the Federal Government, and Hemp going from a schedule 1 drug to being 50 state legal and having CBD products found at your local Safeway and on Amazon right now. I should know, I was there and active in that space for both of those things in the US. Lastly, livestock are not Humans; we are doing an unnatural (all Agriculture is) process, the best we can do is follow cruel-free models that enhance the animal's life that results in an amazing end product. Asking for anything more is literately impossible. And making that analogy to Humans takes us into murky waters I'd rather not venture, as its more philosophical, perhaps even bordering on sophism.

jacobush 6y ago

The people behind this should serve prison time.

jacobush 6y ago
I don't usually agree with this line of thinking, but just a thought experiment - if you equate 10 thousand pigs to one human being, these people just in cold blood tortured several humans worth to death, to make some money.

fractallyte 6y ago

I got downvoted for this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23290075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23290075 Nevertheless, I stand by it: "...Humans have truly monstrous traits. Occasionally, there's a question of how future generations will see us... Maybe the Fermi Paradox has a really simple, obvious explanation: "Where is everybody?" - waiting for us to become less despicable." 'Never Again!' is a phrase born of the Holocaust (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_again https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_again). Reading the parent article, that sentiment seems pretty hollow... Aren't humans supposed to be 'sentient'?

xvector 6y ago
We are a shortsighted species. Today we tear down statues of former slave-owners, tomorrow statues of today's carnists will also be torn down. When will we realize the universal truth that all sentience must be respected? It is getting old now, movement after civil rights movement behind which the underlying message is the exact same. Rather than fixing every instance of this problem, why do people struggle so much to see the big picture and fix it entirely?
- perfmode 6y ago
  Amen. * We as people tend to believe our own thinking. * The ego controls all thinking. * The ego is the cause of all human sorrow and suffering. * The ego uses thought to preserve its imaginary self. * The ego can create an argument against anything. * the ego will generate arguments against any anti-ego presentation, thus blocking what is being presented. * Most humans live their entire lives without ever having observed the background of awareness.
- fiveacres 6y ago
  this is such an oversocialized view of the world -- why do you think that all sentience 'must' be respected?

kwhitefoot 6y ago

Why did this sort of thing happen in the US? As far as I can tell nothing like it has happened in Europe. We also have all sorts of subsidies and controls on agriculture. Our supply chains here (Scandinavia specifically, but as far as I know in most of Europe as well) have been functioning almost as before except for a few minor hiccups in the first couple of weeks of the restrictions due to COVID-19 (flour and yeast were in short supply for a couple of weeks). Is it because Europe has stronger animal welfare provisions? Or something else?

akudha 6y ago
ag-gag laws is one reason. Many people don't even realize the cruelty that is happening, let alone on an industrial scale. The meat industry has a powerful hold on politics, gets a ton of special treatment (compared to fruit and veggie growers). I pay 3$ for a single big organic cucumber (not a pound, a single cucumber). Compared to this, meat is so cheap here, especially chicken. People are used to cheap meat for so long. It is going to be very difficult to loosen that dependence. So in effect, even if some people are aware of the cruelty, they choose to ignore because they get cheap meat. Another problem is consolidation. A few companies control a large portion of the food supply and we have the "too big to fail" problem.
makomk 6y ago
That is a very good question. There have definitely been large coronavirus outbreaks in slaughterhouses all over Europe that have disrupted operations, maybe not in Scandinavia but certainly in countries like Germany and France.
- kwhitefoot 6y ago
  But did they disrupt things so badly that massive numbers of livestock had to be just destroyed?