8 ms·

That image of the horseshoe crabs being bled is certainly provocative. > Some of which die after being returned to the Atlantic Ocean following bleeding. I'm

That image of the horseshoe crabs being bled is certainly provocative. > Some of which die after being returned to the Atlantic Ocean following bleeding. I'm super surprised that they even bother. I would have thought this were a simple birth->death captivity cycle. Though I wouldn't be surprised if this were only out of necessity; perhaps the crabs simple don't thrive in captivity. Or perhaps we have less of an ethical standard for the animals we farm just because we like the taste of their milk on our taste buds. Unfortunately, as far as animal ethics go, it feels like progress is so slow that even etching out a comment is a waste of time. It's like being for women suffrage in the 1700s; people just roll their eyes at you, and you hope the people 100 or 200 or 300 years down the road wake up because it's not happening in your lifetime. Then again, I admit it's no simple feat for us humans to have gone from bone and fur and tribal technology to a global technological civilization in just thousands of years. And every awakening and enlightenment is always obvious and taken for granted in hindsight. There's probably even a good benefit to having such glacially evolving ethics: taking a bad fork in the road can kill a civilization.

arthurcolle 6y ago
Aren't there some ethical cow milking processes? Like regular, non-Mega AgriCorp farms?
- vegannet 6y ago
  You can sort-of argue that there are examples of ethical milking if you just consider the direct action of milking, however if we look to the bigger picture of dairy production — which includes how the cow came to be and what the milk is intended for and why the cow needs to be milked — it becomes more difficult because dairy cows have been bred to produce more milk to the detriment of their health: you’d need to find an example of the more broad “ethical dairy production” and that’s a lot more difficult, as almost all dairy production builds on the unethical behaviour of the past.
  - 0xy 6y ago
    Are you suggesting we cull dairy cows to eliminate the tainted breed?
    - nobodywasishere 6y ago
      Not OP but I'm suggesting we never breed them into existence in the first place
      - merpnderp 6y ago
        Given human survival often relied upon farmed livestock how can you say this? By using this metric for a species's survival nearly nothing should be allowed to live. If you think farming animals is bad wait until you see a Hyena eating the guts out of an animal that is still alive, and will be for most of the meal.
        svrtknst 6y ago
        hyenas or old human populations dont have the ability or opportunity to reduce harm we do farming animals is bad no matter what hyenas do, that's such a weird counterargument
        merpnderp 6y ago
        You obviously didn't even read the comment I was responding to or are misinterpreting my point so you can attack a straw man.
        jolux 6y ago
        I think the argument is that we have derived massive benefits from farming as a species that outweigh the amount of suffering we’ve caused in the process. I’m not sure I agree, but then I do eat meat.
        hombre_fatal 6y ago
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  The mental image of a green sunny pasture with an old farmer milking a cow that just magically happens to be there, ready to be milked, is a fantasy limited to package marketing on cereal boxes. When you look into the details of how a dairy cow comes into being, the reality isn't quite so charming. Though there's also the fact that, even if ethical milk existed, for 99% of people it's just a warm thought they have while they buy whatever factory-farmed milk carton their grocer sells, myself included.
  - tw04 6y ago
    I'm not sure that's entirely accurate. I grew up in small-town America and 30 years ago that was (almost) the image. While the farmers definitely didn't milk the cows by hand, they did attach the apparatus to each cow by hand and check on them. Also had plenty of green pasture for the cows to graze every day. Source: my best friend in elementary school was a "farm kid" and I thought it was fun to help do chores as a "city kid". I'm not going to sit here and claim that was EVERY farm 30 years ago, but from what I've seen of the mega-farms it was a HECK of a lot better than what's going on today.
  - wincy 6y ago
    My friend tried to do the “ideal farmer” route, rather unintentionally. He bought a cow, who escaped and mated with a bull down the road. She had a calf, so he thought he’d share the milk the mother was producing with the calf. So he woke up at 6am to milk the cow. The calf started waking up at 5:30. So he woke up at 5am. So the calf started waking up at 4:30am. You see the pattern here. Turns out, calfs aren’t a big fan of having their milk taken, and there’s a reason they’re separated from their mother if you want to milk the cow. Edit: some people are saying that dairy cows produce more than the calf can drink. I don’t know if this was a dairy cow.
  - adkadskhj 6y ago
    Isn't the same true for almost everything? Clothing, electronics, disposal of electronics, plastics, etcetc. Which isn't an excuse, it's just that - i don't know if i can throw a stick and not hit something humanity is actively and aggressively exploiting. The only way out of this that i see is to make "other things" our slaves. Eg, i don't think we can convince people to always pay for their shirts/phones/etc from ethical sources - even if they had the info to base those decisions off of. However once we get to the point where machines can outcompete slave wages that problem will start to realistically be mitigated.. i hope. Same is true for everything we're destroying i imagine. Humanity has no moral compass when beyond arms reach.. it seems.
- philistine 6y ago
  The only reasons cows give milk is because they gave birth. A cow’s life is to consistently be in a non-ending cycle of being artificially impregnated, giving birth and being milked dry while her young is not the sole drinker of her milk, as it should be. I am an avid milk drinker, who expects calcium deposits in his early 50s, and I know there is no ethical milk. I’m actively choosing the beautiful taste of cow’s milk knowing full well the pain and misery I’m inflicting on all those cows.
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    While provocative, this is the inconvenient truth that most of us have certainly accepted. I myself drink milk and eat meat while acknowledging the obvious moral superiority of veganism. It's even hard to argue against veganism without sounding rather selfish or even psychopathic, as your argument, sooner or later, is going to boil down to "but I like it". So it's amazing how hard it is to change this habit. The path of least resistance and most convenience and least personal sacrifice is hard to leave despite living in violation of my own ethical standards. There's also something weird about our relationship with animals and food. We use ethical justifications (or avoid them) that we don't use anywhere else. Our eating habits are deep cultural traditions that don't budge in the face of even the most agreeable arguments to change them. "But it just feels too good to give up! XD" or "But if I stop, everyone else is still going to do it, so why stop!" aren't arguments we'd level at the carnal pleasures of rape, but when it comes to meat, they make everyone's head nod in agreement.
    - ThrowawayIP 6y ago
      The phrase that jumps to mind is "Nobody committing atrocities thinks _they_ are a monster."
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      For the sake of accuracy of the inconvenient truth, let's remember it's not just about drinking milk, but also consuming all the products that use milk as ingredient. Want to stop the suffering of cows? Kiss cheese, yogurt and butter goodbye.
- merpnderp 6y ago
  Ethical compared to what? Coyotes eating a cow alive while she laid down in a field to calve, starting with her hind quarters? A killer whale slowly nibbling another whale's calf to death over hours? So how do we measure the ethicality of a cow that has spent most of its life pampered, fed and protected, and in the end goes to a feedlot? How do we score that? What metrics do we use to compare? Because it certainly had a better life than a wolf casually stumbling upon it as a newborn.
  - svrtknst 6y ago
    why are wild animals only used as an ethical measure tape when it comes to animal consumption?
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      What else can we use? We can compare against the natural state (as GP did), which is mostly horror. We can compare against what would happen if we suddenly left these animals to live by themselves - which is even worse, and followed by extinction. We can compare against hypothetically caring about all animals as pets - but that's beyond our logistical capabilities and thus would cause great suffering for both animals and humans. There is no good measure tape available.
      - j_kao 6y ago
        I don't disagree that animals (cows in this case) in nature (whatever that looks like at this point) do suffer and are constantly under fear of predators. However, I think saying that there is "no good measure tape available" might be intellectually dishonest since we can probably come up with a rough model to optimize for the minimization of global suffering of all beings involved. Obviously, most mental models have a higher weight biased for humans rather than animals, so a suffering factor for humans would have a higher multiple than for animals. That is where most of the controversy seems to be.
        s0rce 6y ago
- svrtknst 6y ago
  you've gotten a lot of replies regarding the lives of milk cows and how they're bred - one other factor athat I didn't see mentioned is that only about half of the calves turn into dairy oows, and the world has very little use for living bulls. The same issues arise in chicken farming, where it's impossible to have eggs or dairy without death. I saw some image of genetically modified eggs where they supposedly were able to control the sex of the chickens pre-birth, but in general, you need to kill about half of the animals born.
  - fakedang 6y ago
    Or you could raise them to adulthood and consume them for meat. Once a cow or hen passes the age for producing milk or eggs, they are often sacrificed. The issue is that mass manufacture of meat has led to many bulls being killed at birth, because it's resource inefficient to raise them to adulthood. That's where we went wrong.
  - Falling3 6y ago
    That's exactly where most veal comes from - the male offspring of dairy cows.
- pstew 6y ago
  No, to produce milk a cow needs to be pregnant or recently pregnant so milk production requires forced insemination and giving birth to the calf. After birth, the calf is separated from the mother to be caged for veal, raised as a milking cow, etc., and the mother is re-inseminated so she can keep producing milk and the process starts over.
  - jcampbell1 6y ago
    The process you describe is true for organic milk, but less true for regular milk. Modern dairy farms use sex selected semen to prevent males from being born and they use synthetic hormones to extend milk production. Not much excess calving happens in big dairy.
    - ThrowawayIP 6y ago
      I'd like to see the citation for that and an example of its application outside of a laboratory setting (if there is one.)
throwawayffffas 6y ago
> I'm super surprised that they even bother. I would have thought this were a simple birth->death captivity cycle. I'd think it's less about ethics and more about trying to minimize the damage to the crab population to avoid a potential depletion.
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  Its also about the law. Biomedical companies are required to return the horseshoe crab to the ocean. http://www.asmfc.org/species/horseshoe-crab http://www.asmfc.org/species/horseshoe-crab
- trianglem 6y ago
  From a random comment I read on reddit regarding this same issue, they made it seem like they are mostly just killed, ground down and used for bait. This bleed and release is more of a PR stunt. I have nothing to back up this claim however.
beervirus 6y ago
There's a distinction between big-brained animals vs. all the rest. Are horseshoe crabs any more conscious than ants?
MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
I'm surprised they survive this. Looking at the image [0], the amount of blood being drawn compared to the size of the crab is enormous. [0] https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/78bd72e9713cbe052ed080fe1f86987c6f52f7c1/0_0_6000_4004/master/6000.jpg?width=620&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=bb4510e58bfca2b695cbbfa520ed4cec https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/78bd72e9713cbe052ed080fe1f869...
- s0rce 6y ago
  Very dystopian. I'll file that image with the memories of dark red wildfire smoke filled skies that looked like Bladerunner as the future we want to avoid.
- CodesInChaos 6y ago
  AFAIR the crabs in that image had their tail part cut off and will not survive.

arthurcolle 6y ago

Aren't there some ethical cow milking processes? Like regular, non-Mega AgriCorp farms?

vegannet 6y ago
You can sort-of argue that there are examples of ethical milking if you just consider the direct action of milking, however if we look to the bigger picture of dairy production — which includes how the cow came to be and what the milk is intended for and why the cow needs to be milked — it becomes more difficult because dairy cows have been bred to produce more milk to the detriment of their health: you’d need to find an example of the more broad “ethical dairy production” and that’s a lot more difficult, as almost all dairy production builds on the unethical behaviour of the past.
- 0xy 6y ago
  Are you suggesting we cull dairy cows to eliminate the tainted breed?
  - nobodywasishere 6y ago
    Not OP but I'm suggesting we never breed them into existence in the first place
    - merpnderp 6y ago
      Given human survival often relied upon farmed livestock how can you say this? By using this metric for a species's survival nearly nothing should be allowed to live. If you think farming animals is bad wait until you see a Hyena eating the guts out of an animal that is still alive, and will be for most of the meal.
      - svrtknst 6y ago
        hyenas or old human populations dont have the ability or opportunity to reduce harm we do farming animals is bad no matter what hyenas do, that's such a weird counterargument
        merpnderp 6y ago
        You obviously didn't even read the comment I was responding to or are misinterpreting my point so you can attack a straw man.
        jolux 6y ago
        I think the argument is that we have derived massive benefits from farming as a species that outweigh the amount of suffering we’ve caused in the process. I’m not sure I agree, but then I do eat meat.
        hombre_fatal 6y ago
hombre_fatal 6y ago
The mental image of a green sunny pasture with an old farmer milking a cow that just magically happens to be there, ready to be milked, is a fantasy limited to package marketing on cereal boxes. When you look into the details of how a dairy cow comes into being, the reality isn't quite so charming. Though there's also the fact that, even if ethical milk existed, for 99% of people it's just a warm thought they have while they buy whatever factory-farmed milk carton their grocer sells, myself included.
- tw04 6y ago
  I'm not sure that's entirely accurate. I grew up in small-town America and 30 years ago that was (almost) the image. While the farmers definitely didn't milk the cows by hand, they did attach the apparatus to each cow by hand and check on them. Also had plenty of green pasture for the cows to graze every day. Source: my best friend in elementary school was a "farm kid" and I thought it was fun to help do chores as a "city kid". I'm not going to sit here and claim that was EVERY farm 30 years ago, but from what I've seen of the mega-farms it was a HECK of a lot better than what's going on today.
- wincy 6y ago
  My friend tried to do the “ideal farmer” route, rather unintentionally. He bought a cow, who escaped and mated with a bull down the road. She had a calf, so he thought he’d share the milk the mother was producing with the calf. So he woke up at 6am to milk the cow. The calf started waking up at 5:30. So he woke up at 5am. So the calf started waking up at 4:30am. You see the pattern here. Turns out, calfs aren’t a big fan of having their milk taken, and there’s a reason they’re separated from their mother if you want to milk the cow. Edit: some people are saying that dairy cows produce more than the calf can drink. I don’t know if this was a dairy cow.
- adkadskhj 6y ago
  Isn't the same true for almost everything? Clothing, electronics, disposal of electronics, plastics, etcetc. Which isn't an excuse, it's just that - i don't know if i can throw a stick and not hit something humanity is actively and aggressively exploiting. The only way out of this that i see is to make "other things" our slaves. Eg, i don't think we can convince people to always pay for their shirts/phones/etc from ethical sources - even if they had the info to base those decisions off of. However once we get to the point where machines can outcompete slave wages that problem will start to realistically be mitigated.. i hope. Same is true for everything we're destroying i imagine. Humanity has no moral compass when beyond arms reach.. it seems.
philistine 6y ago
The only reasons cows give milk is because they gave birth. A cow’s life is to consistently be in a non-ending cycle of being artificially impregnated, giving birth and being milked dry while her young is not the sole drinker of her milk, as it should be. I am an avid milk drinker, who expects calcium deposits in his early 50s, and I know there is no ethical milk. I’m actively choosing the beautiful taste of cow’s milk knowing full well the pain and misery I’m inflicting on all those cows.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  While provocative, this is the inconvenient truth that most of us have certainly accepted. I myself drink milk and eat meat while acknowledging the obvious moral superiority of veganism. It's even hard to argue against veganism without sounding rather selfish or even psychopathic, as your argument, sooner or later, is going to boil down to "but I like it". So it's amazing how hard it is to change this habit. The path of least resistance and most convenience and least personal sacrifice is hard to leave despite living in violation of my own ethical standards. There's also something weird about our relationship with animals and food. We use ethical justifications (or avoid them) that we don't use anywhere else. Our eating habits are deep cultural traditions that don't budge in the face of even the most agreeable arguments to change them. "But it just feels too good to give up! XD" or "But if I stop, everyone else is still going to do it, so why stop!" aren't arguments we'd level at the carnal pleasures of rape, but when it comes to meat, they make everyone's head nod in agreement.
  - ThrowawayIP 6y ago
    The phrase that jumps to mind is "Nobody committing atrocities thinks _they_ are a monster."
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    For the sake of accuracy of the inconvenient truth, let's remember it's not just about drinking milk, but also consuming all the products that use milk as ingredient. Want to stop the suffering of cows? Kiss cheese, yogurt and butter goodbye.
merpnderp 6y ago
Ethical compared to what? Coyotes eating a cow alive while she laid down in a field to calve, starting with her hind quarters? A killer whale slowly nibbling another whale's calf to death over hours? So how do we measure the ethicality of a cow that has spent most of its life pampered, fed and protected, and in the end goes to a feedlot? How do we score that? What metrics do we use to compare? Because it certainly had a better life than a wolf casually stumbling upon it as a newborn.
- svrtknst 6y ago
  why are wild animals only used as an ethical measure tape when it comes to animal consumption?
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    What else can we use? We can compare against the natural state (as GP did), which is mostly horror. We can compare against what would happen if we suddenly left these animals to live by themselves - which is even worse, and followed by extinction. We can compare against hypothetically caring about all animals as pets - but that's beyond our logistical capabilities and thus would cause great suffering for both animals and humans. There is no good measure tape available.
    - j_kao 6y ago
      I don't disagree that animals (cows in this case) in nature (whatever that looks like at this point) do suffer and are constantly under fear of predators. However, I think saying that there is "no good measure tape available" might be intellectually dishonest since we can probably come up with a rough model to optimize for the minimization of global suffering of all beings involved. Obviously, most mental models have a higher weight biased for humans rather than animals, so a suffering factor for humans would have a higher multiple than for animals. That is where most of the controversy seems to be.
      - s0rce 6y ago
svrtknst 6y ago
you've gotten a lot of replies regarding the lives of milk cows and how they're bred - one other factor athat I didn't see mentioned is that only about half of the calves turn into dairy oows, and the world has very little use for living bulls. The same issues arise in chicken farming, where it's impossible to have eggs or dairy without death. I saw some image of genetically modified eggs where they supposedly were able to control the sex of the chickens pre-birth, but in general, you need to kill about half of the animals born.
- fakedang 6y ago
  Or you could raise them to adulthood and consume them for meat. Once a cow or hen passes the age for producing milk or eggs, they are often sacrificed. The issue is that mass manufacture of meat has led to many bulls being killed at birth, because it's resource inefficient to raise them to adulthood. That's where we went wrong.
- Falling3 6y ago
  That's exactly where most veal comes from - the male offspring of dairy cows.
pstew 6y ago
No, to produce milk a cow needs to be pregnant or recently pregnant so milk production requires forced insemination and giving birth to the calf. After birth, the calf is separated from the mother to be caged for veal, raised as a milking cow, etc., and the mother is re-inseminated so she can keep producing milk and the process starts over.
- jcampbell1 6y ago
  The process you describe is true for organic milk, but less true for regular milk. Modern dairy farms use sex selected semen to prevent males from being born and they use synthetic hormones to extend milk production. Not much excess calving happens in big dairy.
  - ThrowawayIP 6y ago
    I'd like to see the citation for that and an example of its application outside of a laboratory setting (if there is one.)

throwawayffffas 6y ago

> I'm super surprised that they even bother. I would have thought this were a simple birth->death captivity cycle. I'd think it's less about ethics and more about trying to minimize the damage to the crab population to avoid a potential depletion.

s1artibartfast 6y ago
Its also about the law. Biomedical companies are required to return the horseshoe crab to the ocean. http://www.asmfc.org/species/horseshoe-crab http://www.asmfc.org/species/horseshoe-crab
trianglem 6y ago
From a random comment I read on reddit regarding this same issue, they made it seem like they are mostly just killed, ground down and used for bait. This bleed and release is more of a PR stunt. I have nothing to back up this claim however.

beervirus 6y ago

There's a distinction between big-brained animals vs. all the rest. Are horseshoe crabs any more conscious than ants?

MrBuddyCasino 6y ago

I'm surprised they survive this. Looking at the image [0], the amount of blood being drawn compared to the size of the crab is enormous. [0] https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/78bd72e9713cbe052ed080fe1f86987c6f52f7c1/0_0_6000_4004/master/6000.jpg?width=620&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=bb4510e58bfca2b695cbbfa520ed4cec https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/78bd72e9713cbe052ed080fe1f869...

s0rce 6y ago
Very dystopian. I'll file that image with the memories of dark red wildfire smoke filled skies that looked like Bladerunner as the future we want to avoid.
CodesInChaos 6y ago
AFAIR the crabs in that image had their tail part cut off and will not survive.