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it's hard NOT to think what a horrible species we are, running killing floors
by jjtheblunt 4y ago
it's hard NOT to think what a horrible species we are, running killing floors
- nonethewiser 4y agoAnd then ripping their delicious burnt flesh of their bones with our teeth.
- scotty79 4y agoI wouldn't say it's delicious. Try preparing meat yourself without any seasoning. It's eadible but that's the best you can say about it. We have to do additional work to make it delicious.
- ambicapter 4y agoWhat? I've eaten plenty of meat without seasoning before. I question your cooking procedures if it doesn't taste good (or maybe you just don't like meat, that's a possibility too).
- scotty79 4y agoIt's possible that it's something about my tastebuds bacause I really can't relate to people saying meat tastes good. For me salt tastes good, pepper tastes good, rosmary tastes good. Without them meat is as appealing as anything vultures dine on. And even in well prepared meat the first bite is something I need to suffer through before I can start enjoying the meal. To me it tastes exactly what it is. A piece of animal that died. And I have no moral qualms. It just tastes bad to me.
- at-w 4y agoMost things we eat are chosen because they taste good in combination with other things, and better than the sum of the individual ingredients eaten separately. Eating a stick of butter probably isn't appetizing, but neither would your examples of eating pure salt or unprocessed pepper unless you have particularly odd tastes.
- scotty79 4y agoI might be weird because I love salt. I snack on it. And butter by itself is not appetizing however melted butter with just salt is delicious. As for pepper and other seasonings you are right. They don't taste good by themselves. Many foods are delicious by themselves. Fruits, nuts, vegetables, legumes. Some cooked unsalted, some raw. And in case of those, taste can be acquired. For example unsalted rice at first tastes bad, but when I ate it few times when I was hungry I started liking it.
- jker 4y agoA medium rare New York strip is, to me, delicious, and it doesn't need anything, not even salt. I don't eat such things anymore, but still: delicious.
- realo 4y agoHuh? A very high quality cut of beef, when well prepared, does not need any seasoning at all.
- throwaway0x7E6 4y ago>Try preparing meat yourself without any seasoning that's how most people eat it, unless you consider salt a seasoning drowning food in hot sauce and ranch dressing is exclusively american cuisine
- wnkrshm 4y agoIt happened with equal systematic design for our own species, for which this article prompted me to spend ten minutes to read through this [0] again. Though to be honest, the German wikipedia article paints a way more visceral picture of the systematic murders. The english version does not scare the reader, which I see as an oversight. Edit: The German version includes the deception of the victims, to keep them calm, which is what reminded me of the article. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Gas_chambers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Gas_chambers
- Firmwarrior 4y agoI couldn't find that deception, but machine translation from German to English is almost impeccable nowadays, and there's a lot more in the german sub-article Warning: Horrifying: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaskammer_(Massenmord) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaskammer_(Massenmord)
- wnkrshm 4y agoFor completeness sake what I meant by deception: > In order to process the murder of thousands of people, great pains were taken to deceive the victims concerning their fate. Jews deported from ghettos and concentration camps to the death camps were unaware of what they were facing. The Nazi planners of the operation told the victims that they were being resettled for labor, issued them work permits, told them to bring along their tools and to exchange their German marks for foreign currency. [0] > They made you believe that life was normal [in concentration camp Westerbork, a waystation to death camps]. A lady gave birth premature, and it looked—even though Westerbork had one of the best hospitals in Holland, they didn’t have an incubator. They looked all over Holland to find an incubator, and when they found one they said to the lady, “See how good care we take of you?” Only six months later, that same lady with the baby was sent to the gas chambers. [1] > Kurt Bolender, an SS guard in Sobibor, testified to this fact: “Before the Jews undressed, Oberscharführer Hermann Michel [deputy commander of the camp] made a speech to them . . . Michel announced to the Jews that they would be sent to work. But before this they would have to take baths and undergo disinfection so as to prevent the spread of diseases . . . [2] > Wilhelm Pfannensteil, a German physician and hygienist who visited Belzec and Treblinka, also described the particularly innocuous exterior of the gas chambers in Belzec: "The whole extermination centre looked just like a normal delousing institution. In front of the building there were pots of geraniums and a sign saying ‘Hackenholt Foundation’, above which there was a Star of David. The building was brightly and pleasantly painted so as not to suggest that people would be killed there. From what I saw, I do not believe that the people who had just arrived had any idea of what would happen to them." [2] [0] http://www2.dsu.nodak.edu/users/dmeier/Holocaust/killing.html http://www2.dsu.nodak.edu/users/dmeier/Holocaust/killing.htm... [1] https://usflibexhibits.omeka.net/exhibits/show/portraying-courage/deception-at-westerbork https://usflibexhibits.omeka.net/exhibits/show/portraying-co... [2] https://archive.org/details/BelzecSobiborTreblinka.HolocaustDenialAndOperationReinhard.ACritique/page/n15/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/BelzecSobiborTreblinka.Holocaust... [3] Ernst Klee, Willie Dressen, and Volker Reiss, editors. “The Good Old Days”: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders (Free Press, 1988), 241.
- 0xbadcafebee 4y agoOther animals do the same. Dolphins and whales will create bubble nets and dive into them scooping up fish or krill until they're completely full. Seabirds then swoop in in droves and devour any fish left as they panic and jump into the air. Lions and other predators would run killing floors if their prey weren't so unbelievably fast with dangerous hooves and antlers. We just do it so efficiently that it's disgusting, and we do it for profit rather than subsistence.
- abfan1127 4y agoprofit is just an intermediary of subsistence.
- ethanbond 4y agoNot really, because if we were doing it for subsistence we wouldn't be doing it like this at all. It's incredibly inefficient even aside from the ethical considerations. The only thing that overcomes that thermodynamic inefficiency is preference, and that has nothing to do with subsistence.
- abfan1127 4y agoif you didn't have a farm system to pull from, how many animals would you slaughter to subsist? Where would you raise the animal? what things would you give up for proper animal husbandry? I'd argue it is incredibly efficient!
- ethanbond 4y agoIt is incredibly efficient if you start with the assumption that raised meat is the required way to feed people. It's not, obviously, and less so every day.
- 0xbadcafebee 4y agoYep. It was the supply of cheap meat that drove demand. Before large scale animal husbandry, it was super expensive to butcher healthy animals, and comparatively cheap to keep them around for milk and cheese. Pigs and chickens are an exception because they eat everything and they thrive pretty easily.
- throwanem 4y agoFew other predators take the same trouble to ensure their prey is beyond suffering before beginning to eat.
- cpsns 4y agoNo other animal has the mental capacity that we do, the ability to reason, or ethics like us. We are not like other animals in this regard, we have the option to do better.
- scotty79 4y agoSo far our option we went for is to reduce undue suffering of our prey.
- cpsns 4y agoI think anyone who’s been in a slaughterhouse would find it difficult to agree with that statement and even so, the sheer scale means that the amount of suffering is unfathomable.
- chrisweekly 4y agoTemporarily putting personal feelings aside, I think you've touched on interesting philosophical questions: can something so subjective as suffering ever be fathomed, does it scale, can you do math on it...
- notch656a 4y agoSheep are stunned and are pretty much out instantly. IDK if you've ever slaughtered a sheep the non-slaughterhouse way done where most of the people live (i.e. the third world). I've done it out in rural asia. You take a long blade and pierce the heart / surrounding blood vessels straight through the chest. It takes a second or two for it to pass out. The slaughterhouse is a slight upgrade with basically no suffering at the time of death as they're instantly knocked out by electrical impulse. If I were the sheep I would definitely pick the slaughterhouse over being shipped alive to the average end customer which is someone in the third world with a long blade.
- DeWilde 4y agoAll species that consume other life forms are, we are just more efficient.
- diydsp 4y agoThere are 31,557,600 seconds in a year. And every year, 55 * 10^9 animals are killed (in the U.S.). That means at a frequency of 1.743kHz, life is extinguished, day and night. Just image a single wince of pain coming from getting punched unconscious. And then in the semi-hazy state, throat is slit as life grinds to halt, skin is removed. But it doesn't happen just once... it happens so often that if there was a single faint tick of clock each time, it would blur together into a high-pitched whine in the center of the most sensitive portion of hearing (between 1kHz and 4 kHz). 24 hours per day, every day of the year! dsp@diydsp:~/sim$ bc -l bc 1.07.1 Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2012-2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. For details type `warranty'. 5510^9 ( 3.17*10^-8) 1743.50000000000000000000
- brezelgoring 4y agoWhat a macabre calculation, and as poetic as it is, so befitting its own passage in a Harlan Ellison novel, I feel nothing as I read it. I still like chops.
- puchatek 4y agoIt's not weird that you like the taste of meat. But being unable to empathize with the sentient animals that we kill so thoughtlessly, and at such a scale, even when you're confronted with that fact in this poetic yet concise fashion is more than a little callous.
- sillysaurusx 4y agoHappy thanksgiving!
- la64710 4y agohttps://bigthink.com/surprising-science/dissatisfied-with-your-life-try-eating-more-veggies/ https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/dissatisfied-with-yo... Veggies is good
- tenebrisalietum 4y agoIf we can digest it and gain nutrition from it, then we are meant to eat it. We didn't design ourselves.
- eru 4y agoNot sure many people would approve of eg eating their kids?
- CelestialTeapot 4y agoWell, nobody designed us. We're a product of evolution. Had we been designed, and the designer was not a cruel monster, I'm sure they could have thought of a way for all beings to feed themselves without the monumental suffering that exists in the world.
- chasil 4y agoThis is true of everything excepting contagious prions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease) Luckily, scrapie doesn't seem to be infectious to humans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapie
- CelestialTeapot 4y agoThere would be far less suffering if we all lived on a plant-based diet. As well it would help in the fight against climate change, reducing environmental impacts.
- LocalH 4y agoThat's not at all a given. What about people whose tongues reject most vegetables before the signal can even make it to the brain?
- knutzui 4y agoI'm don't understand this sentence. What signal are you talking about and how do tongues reject vegetables?
- LocalH 4y agoI’m referring to those for whom the initial response to the flavor of most vegetables is disgust. I’m talking about the signal between your taste buds and your brain, which like all signals the body uses to communicate, has a processing delay.
- myshpa 4y agoIt's a learned response. Sometimes children have strange food preferences. Eg. can't stand chunks in their food, some food seems foreign to them so they won't eat it, somebody won't eat pasta, others fruits or vegetables. I've just this week read about some moms trying to reverse this in young children (in adults it's worse, but not impossible), the article was not in english, so i won't link it here. Their solution was to change the disgust with play. Like you don't like pasta? Come here, you don't have to eat it, just try if it will stick to the window. The kid plays with it, and in time it may change his perception of the food enough to try a small bite, their timescale iirc was two weeks. They explained some unexplainable occurences with prenatal conditioning ... like mum ate something and then fell, and those two unrelated things got written into child's brain. Anecdotal evidence - my son when very young was suspicious to some fruits and veggies also. My solution was to eat the vegetables & fruits while watching tv shows with him. I've eaten whole apple, and gave him very thin, see-through slices of apple to play with, to look through, to suck and to nibble on. In a week time he was eating regular pieces with me and loves the fruits now. Small/thin pieces were the key for us. TLDR: don't force children to eat something, it will only strenghten the problem.
- pfdietz 4y agoIf we weren't meant to eat animals they wouldn't be so darned tasty. The argument that animals suffer so we can eat them tells me that sentimentality has its limits.
- ben_w 4y agoIt is said, and I don't care to find out if this is correct, that those who have tasted human flesh say it is similar to pork. Humans definitely aren't meant to eat human flesh, regardless of the taste, thus your argument is invalid.
- mandarax8 4y agoI think he meant it from an evolutionary standpoint, if it wasn't good for us it would be so tasty. We're animals too so we inevitably taste similar.
- jjtheblunt 4y agoYou can watch Jeffrey Dahmer documentaries and hear him say how it tastes.
- ben_w 4y agoI literally wrote that I don't care to find out. The topic is revolting to me.
- metta2uall 4y agoOur tastes mostly come from our distant ancestors. Some of them are clearly harmful in the modern world, e.g. people eating too much delicious sugar leading to obesity, diabetes, etc. Just as we evolved to mostly eat cooked meat rather than raw meat, we can also evolve to stop eating killed meat altogether.. A more environmentally sustainable & compassionate world is critically important for our future well-being (and possibly survival).
- myshpa 4y agoSome of the most poisonous fungi are very tasty. Does it mean we should switch to eating them?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]