6 ms·

Death is not the same as torture. Kill me before you ever torture me.

by runawaybottle 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
nerdponx 5y ago
Too bad most food animals are tortured, sometimes for their entire life, before being killed. The unluckiest ones are the females kept alive for breeding.
- cheese_goddess 5y ago
  That is true of battery chickens and of meat and dairy cattle in factory farms, but not for "most animals", like you say, and certainly not the world over. On the contrary, around most of the world, farm animals are among the happiest, healthiest, best-fed and best-cared for animals on the planet. Of course you will not know that if you selectively look at the factory farms with feedlots that are the norm in the US, Argentina, etc. These are indeed atrocities. But, for the time being, they are not representative of the majority of farms in most of the world. You can see that if you take a slow train ride through the French countryside, for example. You'll see houses, barns, trees, grass and small herds of cows busking in the sun, peacefully chewing cud, just like large beef and dairy industries want you to think their animals are kept (which obviously they're not). Or, if you take a walk around the countryside where I live, you'll see that every meadow and plot of land has a few sheep or goats browsing serenely, often next to the road, typically without even a fence to keep them in, because it's unnecessary. I know one particular dairy farm on a Mediterranean island, with a fully modern barn and automatic milking machine, where, if you visit during the day, you'll see maybe a dozen goats in the barn that can house a couple hundred. The rest are out in the mountains, browsing, and will return on their own in the evening. That's how terrified those allegedly mistreated animals are. The barn is their home.
  - JoeAltmaier 5y ago
    "Most animals" in the world are the animals we raise for meat. Well, mammals anyway. 60% are food animals 36% are we humans 4% are wild animals So there's that.
    - JoeAltmaier 5y ago
      In fact, we eat more animals every year than are alive at any one time. E.g. 50B chickens are eaten every year, but only 19B are alive at any moment. Its essentially true that the only animals that matter are the ones we raise. By the numbers anyway.
    - cheese_goddess 5y ago
      Numbers please. Where do they come from? Also, it doesn't matter how many food animals we have, what matters is how the majority of them are treated. And the majority are not meat and dairy cows raised in feedlots in the US, because that kind of farm animal is a small proportion of all meat an dairy animals bred the world over. From Our World in Data: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-meat-production-by-livestock-type https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-meat-production-by... You can see that pork and poultry make up the largest amount of meat produced. Though the plot shows meat rather than number of animals, remember that it takes seveal pigs or goats to make the same meat as one cow, and many more chickens. There are way more pigs and chickens farmed the world over than there are cows and cow farming (cow factory farming) is concentrated in the US, Argentina, Brazil and China: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/beef-and-buffalo-meat-production-tonnes https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/beef-and-buffalo-meat-pro... It is those places where the images of tortured cows, that live their whole lives connected to milking and impregnating machines come from. It is such conditions that have to be eliminated. But in most of the rest of the world, those are not typical conditions and the numbers of animals raised are many, many fewer. Edit: which is not to whitewash the pig and poultry industries. Chickens in particular are treated horribly, even the so-called "free range" ones (in many places it's enough for the chickens to be kept in a gigantic barn with a tiny bit of yard outside for the chickens to be considered "free range", legislation is often an absolute scandal). And there are many large pig farms were pigs are kept in absolutely inhumane conditions. But, again- that's true in some places, not the world over and not for most animals.
telesilla 5y ago
Please, see the Animal Welfare Section on the Wikipedia page for slaughterhouses. There is nothing here sensational, just facts. It's important that those who choose to eat meat understand the contract they sign when financially supporting the industrial animal processing system. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterhouse#Animal_welfare_concerns https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterhouse#Animal_welfar...
- cheese_goddess 5y ago
  Again, these conditions, of industrial farming and slaughtering, are only the norm in some countries in the world. For beef, that's the US, Argentina, Brazil and China, predominantly. In the rest of the world, large scale farming or slaughtering is not the norm. Generally my point in this discussion is that you should not bundle together factory farms and slaughterhouses in the US with, e.g. small dairy farms in the Pyrenees or Austria, or Bantu farmers in Africa, etc. There is one way that people eat meat in the Americas, Australia and China, and quite another in other parts of the world. So when you say "those who choose to eat meat" financially support the industrial animal processing system, you're painting with an overly broad brush and I don't think it's serving anyone's purposes to do so.
  - atweiden 5y ago
    > Generally my point in this discussion is that you should not bundle together factory farms and slaughterhouses in the US with, e.g. small dairy farms in the Pyrenees or Austria, or Bantu farmers in Africa, etc. There is one way that people eat meat in the Americas, Australia and China, and quite another in other parts of the world. The countries which you claim aren’t factory farming are just importing much of their meat from countries which do, see: https://oec.world/en/profile/hs92/poultry-meat https://oec.world/en/profile/hs92/poultry-meat And even if you assume the existence of supposedly “ethical” animal agriculture — which is considerably farcical given the non-consensuality of murder in any case — it’s inherently irrelevant because these niche models of food production don’t scale to feeding the world.
    - 5y ago

Death is not the same as torture. Kill me before you ever torture me.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

nerdponx 5y ago

Too bad most food animals are tortured, sometimes for their entire life, before being killed. The unluckiest ones are the females kept alive for breeding.

cheese_goddess 5y ago
That is true of battery chickens and of meat and dairy cattle in factory farms, but not for "most animals", like you say, and certainly not the world over. On the contrary, around most of the world, farm animals are among the happiest, healthiest, best-fed and best-cared for animals on the planet. Of course you will not know that if you selectively look at the factory farms with feedlots that are the norm in the US, Argentina, etc. These are indeed atrocities. But, for the time being, they are not representative of the majority of farms in most of the world. You can see that if you take a slow train ride through the French countryside, for example. You'll see houses, barns, trees, grass and small herds of cows busking in the sun, peacefully chewing cud, just like large beef and dairy industries want you to think their animals are kept (which obviously they're not). Or, if you take a walk around the countryside where I live, you'll see that every meadow and plot of land has a few sheep or goats browsing serenely, often next to the road, typically without even a fence to keep them in, because it's unnecessary. I know one particular dairy farm on a Mediterranean island, with a fully modern barn and automatic milking machine, where, if you visit during the day, you'll see maybe a dozen goats in the barn that can house a couple hundred. The rest are out in the mountains, browsing, and will return on their own in the evening. That's how terrified those allegedly mistreated animals are. The barn is their home.
- JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  "Most animals" in the world are the animals we raise for meat. Well, mammals anyway. 60% are food animals 36% are we humans 4% are wild animals So there's that.
  - JoeAltmaier 5y ago
    In fact, we eat more animals every year than are alive at any one time. E.g. 50B chickens are eaten every year, but only 19B are alive at any moment. Its essentially true that the only animals that matter are the ones we raise. By the numbers anyway.
  - cheese_goddess 5y ago
    Numbers please. Where do they come from? Also, it doesn't matter how many food animals we have, what matters is how the majority of them are treated. And the majority are not meat and dairy cows raised in feedlots in the US, because that kind of farm animal is a small proportion of all meat an dairy animals bred the world over. From Our World in Data: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-meat-production-by-livestock-type https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-meat-production-by... You can see that pork and poultry make up the largest amount of meat produced. Though the plot shows meat rather than number of animals, remember that it takes seveal pigs or goats to make the same meat as one cow, and many more chickens. There are way more pigs and chickens farmed the world over than there are cows and cow farming (cow factory farming) is concentrated in the US, Argentina, Brazil and China: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/beef-and-buffalo-meat-production-tonnes https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/beef-and-buffalo-meat-pro... It is those places where the images of tortured cows, that live their whole lives connected to milking and impregnating machines come from. It is such conditions that have to be eliminated. But in most of the rest of the world, those are not typical conditions and the numbers of animals raised are many, many fewer. Edit: which is not to whitewash the pig and poultry industries. Chickens in particular are treated horribly, even the so-called "free range" ones (in many places it's enough for the chickens to be kept in a gigantic barn with a tiny bit of yard outside for the chickens to be considered "free range", legislation is often an absolute scandal). And there are many large pig farms were pigs are kept in absolutely inhumane conditions. But, again- that's true in some places, not the world over and not for most animals.

telesilla 5y ago

Please, see the Animal Welfare Section on the Wikipedia page for slaughterhouses. There is nothing here sensational, just facts. It's important that those who choose to eat meat understand the contract they sign when financially supporting the industrial animal processing system. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterhouse#Animal_welfare_concerns https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterhouse#Animal_welfar...

cheese_goddess 5y ago
Again, these conditions, of industrial farming and slaughtering, are only the norm in some countries in the world. For beef, that's the US, Argentina, Brazil and China, predominantly. In the rest of the world, large scale farming or slaughtering is not the norm. Generally my point in this discussion is that you should not bundle together factory farms and slaughterhouses in the US with, e.g. small dairy farms in the Pyrenees or Austria, or Bantu farmers in Africa, etc. There is one way that people eat meat in the Americas, Australia and China, and quite another in other parts of the world. So when you say "those who choose to eat meat" financially support the industrial animal processing system, you're painting with an overly broad brush and I don't think it's serving anyone's purposes to do so.
- atweiden 5y ago
  > Generally my point in this discussion is that you should not bundle together factory farms and slaughterhouses in the US with, e.g. small dairy farms in the Pyrenees or Austria, or Bantu farmers in Africa, etc. There is one way that people eat meat in the Americas, Australia and China, and quite another in other parts of the world. The countries which you claim aren’t factory farming are just importing much of their meat from countries which do, see: https://oec.world/en/profile/hs92/poultry-meat https://oec.world/en/profile/hs92/poultry-meat And even if you assume the existence of supposedly “ethical” animal agriculture — which is considerably farcical given the non-consensuality of murder in any case — it’s inherently irrelevant because these niche models of food production don’t scale to feeding the world.
  - 5y ago