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I am an unrepentant meat eater, but your visualization was absolutely fantastic. I would add that (my maybe incorrect napkin math) shows that 5 Americans die p

I am an unrepentant meat eater, but your visualization was absolutely fantastic. I would add that (my maybe incorrect napkin math) shows that 5 Americans die per minute to give it scale. My understanding is also that we destroy an absolutely phenomenal amount of chicks in an entirely gruesome way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling I have trouble handling that.

fnimick 4y ago
- notch656a 4y ago
  I think you make it sound easier than it is. I also decided over dinner one evening. Then I realized meat was in almost every meal I loved. I tried them without meat and hated it. Habit I guess. Then I realized I'd rather be a bad person than a miserable person; that it was wrong, but I'd do it anyway. This is what you're up against -- the sad but brutal reality of apathy and willful disregard. Mea culpa.
  - Scarblac 4y ago
    Try to eat fewer meals with meat first. Find recipes, try them a few days of the week. That already helps.
  - garren 4y ago
    I went vegan for about a year not too long ago. Just thought I’d try it. I ended up really liking it, mainly because it got me a bit more comfortable cooking and trying recipes and ingredients I would never have considered. I’m not vegan anymore, primarily because of a living situation (roomies.) I like meat, but I’m still thrilled to whip up a good quick vegan or vegetarian dish now and then. However, if you take a meat centered dish and just remove the meat, or throw in a meat-like substitute (beyond burgers more than something like tofu or seitan), then yeah, it’s not going to be great. Vegetarian and vegan recipes are often really good precisely because they don’t attempt replace meat with anything. Instead I think they rely more on spice and flavor combinations. You’re not going to find a replacement for a killer dry-aged ny strip steak that’s grilled to perfection. But you might find a fantastic curry, kimchi stew, roasted pepper, or black bean burger recipe that help to broaden your tastes and get comfortable eating less meat.
  - goatlover 4y ago
    Bad person according to whom, though? What makes eating meat wrong? That some people decide it is? There's no consensus or laws that make it so, unlike the case with eating humans. You decided you didn't want to be miserable, but I guess you feel guilty because you decided it was wrong? I've decided it's not wrong, and I don't see that anyone can make me think otherwise.
    - xorfish 4y ago
      So eating humans is only wrong, because other people think it is wrong and there are laws against it? I find that really shortsighted. Slavery isn't bad because we as a society have decided it so. It always has been bad.
      - goatlover 4y ago
        It’s always been bad to us living today, but it hasn’t always been bad to people in the past. I’m not a moral realist because I don’t see what sort of objective facts are moral. The universe doesn’t care. It’s humans who are moral, and what’s considered good or bad varies quite a lot. No, I wouldn’t want to be enslaved, and the golden rule seems like a good principle to live by, but nothing in nature makes it true. It’s a value judgement we moderns make.
- hayst4ck 4y ago
  Militant-ism isn't going to win people over. The great lie of capitalism is pushing a theory of personal responsibility rather than legislating these problems away. There are so many elements of my life that cause harm to other beings that addressing the harm could be a full time job. Killing rodents, mosquitos, and ants is something most people will do without a second thought. I've sprayed a wasp nest with wasp killer and one writhed on the ground for 5 minutes and I felt awful about it, but there is practically a whole aisle of it at the local hardware store. How many insects do you think have been harmed by industrial pesticides used in growing grains? What type of animal harm do you think pet ownership brings? How many wild birds do you think are killed in how many different ways? How many animals do you think are hit with cars? What do you think the effect the shipping industry has on sea life? What about trash? What about the smog? What about the chemicals dumped into the environment that are used to produce the hardware we are communicating with? How much animal testing has been done by scientists on all types of animals to have what we have today? My desire to pay as little as possible for coffee means the barista can't afford a home and likely will have their body harmed by the stress of not having enough money to operate in today's society. We send manufacturing off to poor countries were pollutants more directly harm their citizens than ours. The wikipedia article states that poultry sex can be determined before hatching and that European countries have legislated that culling must stop, so it sounds like we are able to make progress. "Beyond" shows there is at least research going into lab grown/cruelty free meats. Do I have a moral obligation to go live next to a pond feeding on what I can forage while living in a dwelling I built with my own hands or is it satisfying enough that I vote progressive and hope to make progress over time by regulating the more atrocious of our actions. FWIW, I have tried vegetarianism and I did not enjoy it at all. I found it greatly limited my food choices. It felt ascetic and I felt miserable. So while it is easy for you, I did not find it easy.
  - ETH_start 4y ago
    >>The great lie of capitalism is pushing a theory of personal responsibility rather than legislating these problems away >>There are so many elements of my life that cause harm to other beings that addressing the harm could be a full time job. The principles of a free society with private-property/contract rights do NOT exclude the right of the collective to prohibit actions that generate negative externalities, including pollution of the commons and depletion of scarce natural resources. Like most anti-capitalist arguments, yours is based on ridiculous caricatures of what you're railing against.
- ETH_start 4y ago
  - garren 4y ago
    Fact? Do you have a citation for the higher intelligence, lower rates of depression/anxiety bit?
    - hayst4ck 4y ago
      Meat has lots of Tryptophan and Tyrosine which are the precursors for serotonin and dopamine, the molecules most anti-depressents aim to modulate. I am a layman, so not an expert, and I don't have a source for you for causality, but it sounds plausible to me.
    - ETH_start 4y ago
      Mental health: https://www.psypost.org/2021/11/meat-consumption-is-associated-with-better-mental-health-meta-analysis-finds-62107 https://www.psypost.org/2021/11/meat-consumption-is-associat... Intelligence: https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/137/4/1119/4664672 https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/137/4/1119/4664672
- hayst4ck 4y ago
  nitpick: People confuse simple and easy. Losing weight is simple (don't put food in your mouth), but anyone who's obese can tell you it is not very easy to eat less. Likewise eating vegetarian is simple but to many, not easy.
  - pencilguin 4y ago
    I found it very, very easy. Giving up cheese would be hard.
- xupybd 4y ago
  You can just accept that meat is a human food. Animals die for it. The natural world involves animals eating other animals. If you have to kill male calves because you're on a dairy farm then you kill the male calves. It's really not that shocking.
  - fnimick 4y ago
    The natural world also involves species consuming their entire food supply and then going extinct. Or polluting their ecosystem until they are unable to survive. I would hope we are intelligent enough to avoid that. Meat eating is contributing to both.
    - generalizations 4y ago
      Not the first. Sounds like we're not consuming our entire food supply, but rather generating more as we need it. And there's a lot of other things besides cow farts contributing to global warming, which can have a much bigger effect for much less effort than making the world vegetarian.
      - garren 4y ago
        Clearing huge swaths of Brazilian rainforest, “the lungs of the planet”, to make way for cattle seems like a pretty significant contributing factor though, would you agree? Less demand for meat, less demand for eliminating large pieces of a rather important natural carbon sink.
        chriswarbo 4y ago
        Even more maddening: clearing land for growing crops, which are fed to cattle. We can just cut out the middle man (cow)
  - socialismisok 4y ago
    Meat is human food. But industrialization of meat is much more morally grey. Working with a local farmer to buy pasture raised pigs free from gestation crates is totally different from the hog mills with tiny cages and concrete floors.
- socialismisok 4y ago
  Or by choosing to source your meat from places that treat animals well. Local, humane farmers. It's pricier, but it's much higher quality and skips the industrial treatment of animals.
  - hunter-gatherer 4y ago
    In addition to this, and for those who live in places where this isn't feasible, I recommend some serious thought into the amount of meat consumption. I tried the vegetarianism thing, and basically felt awful the entire time. I don't know why, but I found I just needed some read meat every now and again. However, I learned I only needed a small fraction of what I had before. I end up consuming a moderate portion once a week opposed to one a day and an able to supplement the rest.
GuB-42 4y ago
Chick culling is certainly gruesome, but not so shocking to me. It terms of animal suffering, I have seen much worse, still not enough to stop me from eating meat though. I've seen videos of these chick grinders, from fully live chick to ground meat, it takes something like 1/10 of a second, I am not even sure their brain have time to register what happens before there is no brain anymore. Culling also happens very early, maybe after a day or so after hatching, so early it could almost be called abortion. Considered what happens after that, if I were to reincarnate, I would rather be one of these culled chicks than one that survives... I think that focus on culled chicks is more because it looks ugly than real concerns about animal welfare.
- cat_plus_plus 4y ago
  What happens to birds in the wild? Is it ethically significant that a particular one is predated upon by a human rather than another animal?
  - meheleventyone 4y ago
    The moral objection in this case is less around predation but the fact that humans rear the animals we kill and as such have far more control over their environment and lives. As such the cruelty of their lives and the way they meet their end is absolutely within our control as a choice. Whereas the vast majority if not all other animals aren’t in this position. You can also put this alongside the enormous amount of food waste that occurs in human society.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- hayst4ck 4y ago
  I think what really hits me about it, is that the male chicks aren't even product. They are just the exhaust out of the meat engine. It's casual destruction of life because it's a byproduct. It is as good evidence as any that there are no karmic forces and reality does not care. I agree though. I would rather be the chick than a farmed chicken. In terms of deaths in the animal kingdom, it's probably pretty hard to beat fast and certain without prolonged striving or suffering.
ReptileMan 4y ago
The idea of going full Fargo on little chickens is new to me. And that is the humane way... There are definitely ways to improve the system to require a bit less cruelty.
emptysongglass 4y ago
- sieabahlpark 4y ago

fnimick 4y ago

notch656a 4y ago
I think you make it sound easier than it is. I also decided over dinner one evening. Then I realized meat was in almost every meal I loved. I tried them without meat and hated it. Habit I guess. Then I realized I'd rather be a bad person than a miserable person; that it was wrong, but I'd do it anyway. This is what you're up against -- the sad but brutal reality of apathy and willful disregard. Mea culpa.
- Scarblac 4y ago
  Try to eat fewer meals with meat first. Find recipes, try them a few days of the week. That already helps.
- garren 4y ago
  I went vegan for about a year not too long ago. Just thought I’d try it. I ended up really liking it, mainly because it got me a bit more comfortable cooking and trying recipes and ingredients I would never have considered. I’m not vegan anymore, primarily because of a living situation (roomies.) I like meat, but I’m still thrilled to whip up a good quick vegan or vegetarian dish now and then. However, if you take a meat centered dish and just remove the meat, or throw in a meat-like substitute (beyond burgers more than something like tofu or seitan), then yeah, it’s not going to be great. Vegetarian and vegan recipes are often really good precisely because they don’t attempt replace meat with anything. Instead I think they rely more on spice and flavor combinations. You’re not going to find a replacement for a killer dry-aged ny strip steak that’s grilled to perfection. But you might find a fantastic curry, kimchi stew, roasted pepper, or black bean burger recipe that help to broaden your tastes and get comfortable eating less meat.
- goatlover 4y ago
  Bad person according to whom, though? What makes eating meat wrong? That some people decide it is? There's no consensus or laws that make it so, unlike the case with eating humans. You decided you didn't want to be miserable, but I guess you feel guilty because you decided it was wrong? I've decided it's not wrong, and I don't see that anyone can make me think otherwise.
  - xorfish 4y ago
    So eating humans is only wrong, because other people think it is wrong and there are laws against it? I find that really shortsighted. Slavery isn't bad because we as a society have decided it so. It always has been bad.
    - goatlover 4y ago
      It’s always been bad to us living today, but it hasn’t always been bad to people in the past. I’m not a moral realist because I don’t see what sort of objective facts are moral. The universe doesn’t care. It’s humans who are moral, and what’s considered good or bad varies quite a lot. No, I wouldn’t want to be enslaved, and the golden rule seems like a good principle to live by, but nothing in nature makes it true. It’s a value judgement we moderns make.
hayst4ck 4y ago
Militant-ism isn't going to win people over. The great lie of capitalism is pushing a theory of personal responsibility rather than legislating these problems away. There are so many elements of my life that cause harm to other beings that addressing the harm could be a full time job. Killing rodents, mosquitos, and ants is something most people will do without a second thought. I've sprayed a wasp nest with wasp killer and one writhed on the ground for 5 minutes and I felt awful about it, but there is practically a whole aisle of it at the local hardware store. How many insects do you think have been harmed by industrial pesticides used in growing grains? What type of animal harm do you think pet ownership brings? How many wild birds do you think are killed in how many different ways? How many animals do you think are hit with cars? What do you think the effect the shipping industry has on sea life? What about trash? What about the smog? What about the chemicals dumped into the environment that are used to produce the hardware we are communicating with? How much animal testing has been done by scientists on all types of animals to have what we have today? My desire to pay as little as possible for coffee means the barista can't afford a home and likely will have their body harmed by the stress of not having enough money to operate in today's society. We send manufacturing off to poor countries were pollutants more directly harm their citizens than ours. The wikipedia article states that poultry sex can be determined before hatching and that European countries have legislated that culling must stop, so it sounds like we are able to make progress. "Beyond" shows there is at least research going into lab grown/cruelty free meats. Do I have a moral obligation to go live next to a pond feeding on what I can forage while living in a dwelling I built with my own hands or is it satisfying enough that I vote progressive and hope to make progress over time by regulating the more atrocious of our actions. FWIW, I have tried vegetarianism and I did not enjoy it at all. I found it greatly limited my food choices. It felt ascetic and I felt miserable. So while it is easy for you, I did not find it easy.
- ETH_start 4y ago
  >>The great lie of capitalism is pushing a theory of personal responsibility rather than legislating these problems away >>There are so many elements of my life that cause harm to other beings that addressing the harm could be a full time job. The principles of a free society with private-property/contract rights do NOT exclude the right of the collective to prohibit actions that generate negative externalities, including pollution of the commons and depletion of scarce natural resources. Like most anti-capitalist arguments, yours is based on ridiculous caricatures of what you're railing against.
ETH_start 4y ago
- garren 4y ago
  Fact? Do you have a citation for the higher intelligence, lower rates of depression/anxiety bit?
  - hayst4ck 4y ago
    Meat has lots of Tryptophan and Tyrosine which are the precursors for serotonin and dopamine, the molecules most anti-depressents aim to modulate. I am a layman, so not an expert, and I don't have a source for you for causality, but it sounds plausible to me.
  - ETH_start 4y ago
    Mental health: https://www.psypost.org/2021/11/meat-consumption-is-associated-with-better-mental-health-meta-analysis-finds-62107 https://www.psypost.org/2021/11/meat-consumption-is-associat... Intelligence: https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/137/4/1119/4664672 https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/137/4/1119/4664672
hayst4ck 4y ago
nitpick: People confuse simple and easy. Losing weight is simple (don't put food in your mouth), but anyone who's obese can tell you it is not very easy to eat less. Likewise eating vegetarian is simple but to many, not easy.
- pencilguin 4y ago
  I found it very, very easy. Giving up cheese would be hard.
xupybd 4y ago
You can just accept that meat is a human food. Animals die for it. The natural world involves animals eating other animals. If you have to kill male calves because you're on a dairy farm then you kill the male calves. It's really not that shocking.
- fnimick 4y ago
  The natural world also involves species consuming their entire food supply and then going extinct. Or polluting their ecosystem until they are unable to survive. I would hope we are intelligent enough to avoid that. Meat eating is contributing to both.
  - generalizations 4y ago
    Not the first. Sounds like we're not consuming our entire food supply, but rather generating more as we need it. And there's a lot of other things besides cow farts contributing to global warming, which can have a much bigger effect for much less effort than making the world vegetarian.
    - garren 4y ago
      Clearing huge swaths of Brazilian rainforest, “the lungs of the planet”, to make way for cattle seems like a pretty significant contributing factor though, would you agree? Less demand for meat, less demand for eliminating large pieces of a rather important natural carbon sink.
      - chriswarbo 4y ago
        Even more maddening: clearing land for growing crops, which are fed to cattle. We can just cut out the middle man (cow)
- socialismisok 4y ago
  Meat is human food. But industrialization of meat is much more morally grey. Working with a local farmer to buy pasture raised pigs free from gestation crates is totally different from the hog mills with tiny cages and concrete floors.
socialismisok 4y ago
Or by choosing to source your meat from places that treat animals well. Local, humane farmers. It's pricier, but it's much higher quality and skips the industrial treatment of animals.
- hunter-gatherer 4y ago
  In addition to this, and for those who live in places where this isn't feasible, I recommend some serious thought into the amount of meat consumption. I tried the vegetarianism thing, and basically felt awful the entire time. I don't know why, but I found I just needed some read meat every now and again. However, I learned I only needed a small fraction of what I had before. I end up consuming a moderate portion once a week opposed to one a day and an able to supplement the rest.

GuB-42 4y ago

Chick culling is certainly gruesome, but not so shocking to me. It terms of animal suffering, I have seen much worse, still not enough to stop me from eating meat though. I've seen videos of these chick grinders, from fully live chick to ground meat, it takes something like 1/10 of a second, I am not even sure their brain have time to register what happens before there is no brain anymore. Culling also happens very early, maybe after a day or so after hatching, so early it could almost be called abortion. Considered what happens after that, if I were to reincarnate, I would rather be one of these culled chicks than one that survives... I think that focus on culled chicks is more because it looks ugly than real concerns about animal welfare.

cat_plus_plus 4y ago
What happens to birds in the wild? Is it ethically significant that a particular one is predated upon by a human rather than another animal?
- meheleventyone 4y ago
  The moral objection in this case is less around predation but the fact that humans rear the animals we kill and as such have far more control over their environment and lives. As such the cruelty of their lives and the way they meet their end is absolutely within our control as a choice. Whereas the vast majority if not all other animals aren’t in this position. You can also put this alongside the enormous amount of food waste that occurs in human society.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
hayst4ck 4y ago
I think what really hits me about it, is that the male chicks aren't even product. They are just the exhaust out of the meat engine. It's casual destruction of life because it's a byproduct. It is as good evidence as any that there are no karmic forces and reality does not care. I agree though. I would rather be the chick than a farmed chicken. In terms of deaths in the animal kingdom, it's probably pretty hard to beat fast and certain without prolonged striving or suffering.

ReptileMan 4y ago

The idea of going full Fargo on little chickens is new to me. And that is the humane way... There are definitely ways to improve the system to require a bit less cruelty.

emptysongglass 4y ago

sieabahlpark 4y ago