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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 t

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.
  - filoeleven 5y ago
    From a 2017 article: “According to the UN, globally [concentrated animal feeding operations] account for 72% of poultry, 42% of egg, and 55% of pork production.” It’s entirely plausible that most animals live under those conditions by now, or will quite soon without intervention. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/18/rise-of-mega-farms-how-the-us-model-of-intensive-farming-is-invading-the-world https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/18/rise-of-...
    - cheese_goddess 5y ago
atweiden 5y ago
The French AOC [1] regulates what’s allowed to be marketed as Comté etc by stipulating location, breed, population density, etc; however aside from cheese, I’m not aware of a similar set of standards existing for animal products. As someone who has lived in a rural area with much animal agriculture, I can tell you labels like “free range” roughly translate to “Let’s put as many animals as we legally can fit onto this plot of land modulo our budget, then neglect them to every extent allowable by law, followed by killing them because we need the money”. You specifically give the example of the animals having a shed to shelter in, which IME is an exceptional rarity. In any case, cherrypicked examples of “free range” farms that actually provide shelter for their animals are about as irrelevant as saying hunting is “more ethical” than factory farming. We cannot feed billions more people sustainably on diets heavy in animal products, no matter the method, especially so with the more inefficient methods like free range and hunting. There’s a reason factory farming exists. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellation_d%27origine_contrôlée https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellation_d%27origine_contrô...
- cheese_goddess 5y ago
  It's true like you say that "free range" is mainly an empty label, for the reasons you say. But I'm not talking about "free range" as a label. In my comment above I've described the animals I've seen, and see around me, right now. Those range freely in the literal sense. They are left to go out on their own and eat what they want, then return to their sheds when they want. I stay in a friend's farm, with goats and chickens on the grounds. Those are not sold anywhere and are not labelled as "free range" by anyone, but they're free range alright. I can assure you. I once made the mistake of cooking one of the farm's chickens as I'd cook a chicken bought at the supermarket. Never again! You basically can't eat the meat of a really free-range chicken unless you boil it for a couple of hours. I chewed and chewed and chewed until my mouth muscles couldn't take it anymore and ate the whole thing because I absolutely didn't want to throw the poor animal away like garbage, but it was painful and unpleasant. Even properly cooked, the meat of really free-range chickens is a dark gray, very unlike the pale white meat of supermarket chickens. Most people would probably not prefer actual "free range" if they had access to it. And I know a good few people who won't eat goat meat because "it stinks". >> We cannot feed billions more people sustainably on diets heavy in animal products, no matter the method, especially so with the more inefficient methods like free range and hunting. There’s a reason factory farming exists. The good news is that there is no reason to "feed billions more people ... on diets heavy in animal products". Diets heavy in animal products characterise only certain parts of the world, not coincidentally the same ones where factory farming is the norm. The rest of the world doesn't eat that way, and doesn't need to eat that way. We can feed billions of humans on sustainably grown meat and dairy produced by small scale local farms, like we already do in most of the world. The trick is to avoid creating an artificial need for even more cheap meat and animal products in the diets of everyone. Just because Americans and some Europeans eat that way doesn't mean that everyone must mimetically do the same.
wott 5y ago
> 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). Over the last 15 years (thus quickly), this has changed a lot in France. Now the standard is having 100 cows kept most of the year in a huge shed (newly built on subsidies), on a concrete slab partially covered with straw, behind galvanised steel fences, fed from a tractor a mix of straw or hay and "powdered" soja and stuff. My place is a mountain "hay" area, meaning it's wet and ideal for cows, and yet most pastures are abandoned and we can see articulated lorries coming from Spain, loaded with straw. They don't bother cutting the hay on slopes, like they still do in Austria/Switzerland/Germany. A few farmers like my neighbour are even reluctant to cut the hay on a good, easy area; he usually waits 2 months after it's "ripe" for a first cut and lets it go bad, and then also misses the second cut. Yes, you can still see cows in the remaining meadows, but they represent a vanishing part. Also, when you had 10 or 20 cows, it was easy to take them out, or leave them out and move them from meadow to meadow; but doing the same with 100 of them? There isn't enough open meadow land around to sustain a proper rotation (this is not at all a country of huge ranches like a few other countries like the USA), and even if there were, it would require manual (foot) work, while farmers are less and less inclined to leave their tractor seat. Oh, on the paper, they have the needed surface to feed the cows, because it is mandatory to present a good ratio to get subsidies. But that's because they "took" (bought, rented or just declared as used) fields/meadows/woods here and there: 10 miles away one way, 20 or 30 miles away another way. It's not practical at all. I let you imagine how well they take care of some of them. Icing on the cake, there are quite many cheese dairies around. The good cheese for the good cows for the good pastures of our good mountain. Well, truth is 75% of the milk doesn't come from here, it is imported from other regions. How comes, in such a "cow area"? Simple: because dairy farming is more work and yet brings much less subsidies than livestock farming for meat which is a true jackpot when you live in a area like mine, classified as "difficult": most cow farmers (1-2 persons) here will get around 40,000-60,000€ subsidies a year for their 99 cows (the 100th and following do not bring more subsidies so they all have about 99 cows) and 75-90 ha declared surfaces (subsidised until the 75th, but a bit more can be needed to have the right head/ha ratio to maximize head subsidies). There can of course be a few pathological cases too in that domain: one former neighbour was a cheese maker. First they moved to a bigger village in the valley, while keeping the name of the higher altitude, smaller village for their cheese, which was already a bit of a dubious commercial practice, but well, let's say it wasn't a big deal. But then when the daughter in law took over the business, she soon got tired of actually performing the work; so she now buys ready-made cheese from a bigger factory in another area, make it grow old a bit (if you are lucky), sticks the same old brand and traditional picture over it, and sells it to tourists as a local product (except the fine print). > 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. Yeah, well, that French "Mediterranean island" is famous for its VIRTUAL cattle which only exist in documents filed for subsidies. This small area represents the majority of such frauds in the whole country.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

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.
- filoeleven 5y ago
  From a 2017 article: “According to the UN, globally [concentrated animal feeding operations] account for 72% of poultry, 42% of egg, and 55% of pork production.” It’s entirely plausible that most animals live under those conditions by now, or will quite soon without intervention. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/18/rise-of-mega-farms-how-the-us-model-of-intensive-farming-is-invading-the-world https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/18/rise-of-...
  - cheese_goddess 5y ago

atweiden 5y ago

The French AOC [1] regulates what’s allowed to be marketed as Comté etc by stipulating location, breed, population density, etc; however aside from cheese, I’m not aware of a similar set of standards existing for animal products. As someone who has lived in a rural area with much animal agriculture, I can tell you labels like “free range” roughly translate to “Let’s put as many animals as we legally can fit onto this plot of land modulo our budget, then neglect them to every extent allowable by law, followed by killing them because we need the money”. You specifically give the example of the animals having a shed to shelter in, which IME is an exceptional rarity. In any case, cherrypicked examples of “free range” farms that actually provide shelter for their animals are about as irrelevant as saying hunting is “more ethical” than factory farming. We cannot feed billions more people sustainably on diets heavy in animal products, no matter the method, especially so with the more inefficient methods like free range and hunting. There’s a reason factory farming exists. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellation_d%27origine_contrôlée https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellation_d%27origine_contrô...

cheese_goddess 5y ago
It's true like you say that "free range" is mainly an empty label, for the reasons you say. But I'm not talking about "free range" as a label. In my comment above I've described the animals I've seen, and see around me, right now. Those range freely in the literal sense. They are left to go out on their own and eat what they want, then return to their sheds when they want. I stay in a friend's farm, with goats and chickens on the grounds. Those are not sold anywhere and are not labelled as "free range" by anyone, but they're free range alright. I can assure you. I once made the mistake of cooking one of the farm's chickens as I'd cook a chicken bought at the supermarket. Never again! You basically can't eat the meat of a really free-range chicken unless you boil it for a couple of hours. I chewed and chewed and chewed until my mouth muscles couldn't take it anymore and ate the whole thing because I absolutely didn't want to throw the poor animal away like garbage, but it was painful and unpleasant. Even properly cooked, the meat of really free-range chickens is a dark gray, very unlike the pale white meat of supermarket chickens. Most people would probably not prefer actual "free range" if they had access to it. And I know a good few people who won't eat goat meat because "it stinks". >> We cannot feed billions more people sustainably on diets heavy in animal products, no matter the method, especially so with the more inefficient methods like free range and hunting. There’s a reason factory farming exists. The good news is that there is no reason to "feed billions more people ... on diets heavy in animal products". Diets heavy in animal products characterise only certain parts of the world, not coincidentally the same ones where factory farming is the norm. The rest of the world doesn't eat that way, and doesn't need to eat that way. We can feed billions of humans on sustainably grown meat and dairy produced by small scale local farms, like we already do in most of the world. The trick is to avoid creating an artificial need for even more cheap meat and animal products in the diets of everyone. Just because Americans and some Europeans eat that way doesn't mean that everyone must mimetically do the same.

wott 5y ago

> 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). Over the last 15 years (thus quickly), this has changed a lot in France. Now the standard is having 100 cows kept most of the year in a huge shed (newly built on subsidies), on a concrete slab partially covered with straw, behind galvanised steel fences, fed from a tractor a mix of straw or hay and "powdered" soja and stuff. My place is a mountain "hay" area, meaning it's wet and ideal for cows, and yet most pastures are abandoned and we can see articulated lorries coming from Spain, loaded with straw. They don't bother cutting the hay on slopes, like they still do in Austria/Switzerland/Germany. A few farmers like my neighbour are even reluctant to cut the hay on a good, easy area; he usually waits 2 months after it's "ripe" for a first cut and lets it go bad, and then also misses the second cut. Yes, you can still see cows in the remaining meadows, but they represent a vanishing part. Also, when you had 10 or 20 cows, it was easy to take them out, or leave them out and move them from meadow to meadow; but doing the same with 100 of them? There isn't enough open meadow land around to sustain a proper rotation (this is not at all a country of huge ranches like a few other countries like the USA), and even if there were, it would require manual (foot) work, while farmers are less and less inclined to leave their tractor seat. Oh, on the paper, they have the needed surface to feed the cows, because it is mandatory to present a good ratio to get subsidies. But that's because they "took" (bought, rented or just declared as used) fields/meadows/woods here and there: 10 miles away one way, 20 or 30 miles away another way. It's not practical at all. I let you imagine how well they take care of some of them. Icing on the cake, there are quite many cheese dairies around. The good cheese for the good cows for the good pastures of our good mountain. Well, truth is 75% of the milk doesn't come from here, it is imported from other regions. How comes, in such a "cow area"? Simple: because dairy farming is more work and yet brings much less subsidies than livestock farming for meat which is a true jackpot when you live in a area like mine, classified as "difficult": most cow farmers (1-2 persons) here will get around 40,000-60,000€ subsidies a year for their 99 cows (the 100th and following do not bring more subsidies so they all have about 99 cows) and 75-90 ha declared surfaces (subsidised until the 75th, but a bit more can be needed to have the right head/ha ratio to maximize head subsidies). There can of course be a few pathological cases too in that domain: one former neighbour was a cheese maker. First they moved to a bigger village in the valley, while keeping the name of the higher altitude, smaller village for their cheese, which was already a bit of a dubious commercial practice, but well, let's say it wasn't a big deal. But then when the daughter in law took over the business, she soon got tired of actually performing the work; so she now buys ready-made cheese from a bigger factory in another area, make it grow old a bit (if you are lucky), sticks the same old brand and traditional picture over it, and sells it to tourists as a local product (except the fine print). > 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. Yeah, well, that French "Mediterranean island" is famous for its VIRTUAL cattle which only exist in documents filed for subsidies. This small area represents the majority of such frauds in the whole country.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]