3 ms·
Oh for the love of Christ. Unless you go fully Jainist, and eat only what you grow, after painstakingly removing insect pests and placing them elsewhere gently,
by EdwardDiego 5y ago
Oh for the love of Christ. Unless you go fully Jainist, and eat only what you grow, after painstakingly removing insect pests and placing them elsewhere gently, nothing you eat is pain/suffering free.
Modern agricultural harvesting and processing always has a bykill of small mammals and ground nesting birds.
Organic farming often uses companion planting to attract natural predators of insect pests, so that insecticides don't need to be used (as much anyway, there's plenty of rather toxic compounds that are perfectly natural and organic yet kill things well, like derris dust).
How, though, do you distinguish between the suffering of cows, and the suffering of a dormouse, or the suffering of caterpillars that are being eaten from inside by the larvae of a parasitic wasp?
Are you basing your morality on "there's an arbitrary level of suffering I'll accept" or "I'm only opposed to the suffering of life that has at least N neurons?"
Or are you sweeping the path as you walk lest an ant be harmed?
- WithinReason 5y agoI read somewhere that the death ratio of meat vs vegan diet is about 1 cow vs 30 mice, not sure if it was a reliable figure.
- erk__ 5y agoThat sounds incorrect since around 3/4 of the agriculture production is used to feed lifestock
- EdwardDiego 5y agoIn your country. In my country, we don't advertise beef as "grass fed" as a market segmentation tactic, because all our beef is grass fed, that's the only way we feed stock raised for beef. Once again, it's not just a simple case of "all animal husbandry is unsustainable", but we need to pick apart why the unsustainable practices have been developed into what they are now. My gut feeling is that Government subsidies of corn in the US create an oversupply of it, so sure, why not feed it to cattle? It's not like the American beef industry was predicated on grain feeding, it started with ranchers grazing them on prairies. So what changed?
- erk__ 5y agoNo, it is the worldwide use. In my country it is around 80% for lifestock and 10% for human food.
- EdwardDiego 5y agoAverages are terrible across widely disparate data points.
- erk__ 5y agoIt is not a average, it is the total global use of farming. Just because a few countries does better does not mean that it is okay. And that does not also change the fact that the 1 cow vs. 30 mice sounds like nonsense. And that if everyone ate less meat we would need less space for farming.