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As someone who has worked on farms i can verify that such things happen. I personally witnessed sheep behaving exactly as decided in The Silence of the Lambs. O
by Daub 2y ago
As someone who has worked on farms i can verify that such things happen. I personally witnessed sheep behaving exactly as decided in The Silence of the Lambs. Our sheep were famously noisy and certainly were used to being moved around in lorries but when the abattoir lorry turned up you could almost smell their fear. I also witnessed a cow storm through four fences in order to be reunited with her calf.
The irony: The farm was run by vegetarians and as the only meat eater it became my responsibility to oversee any time an animal was taken to slaughter. This simultaneously put me off meat eating and vegetarians.
- bamboozled 2y agoWhy are the cows taken away from the calves, especially dairy cows? Just curious.
- rafaelmn 2y agoBecause you want to get the milk.
- cowfriend 2y agoAlmost this. The better answer is because we want to get ALL the milk. So instead of letting the mother cow nurse her calf for the first few months and then start taking her milk for our use, the more "modern" practice is to separate the calf immediately. Which means if you are drinking milk, you are drinking it from seriously depressed cows. I wonder how this contributes to our culture's growing mood of depression? see i.e. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/29/mums-ask-when-cows-and-their-calves-separated-rise-ethical-milk-vegan https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/29/mums-ask... or just google dairy cows separate from calves
- csomar 2y agoThe real crime is that alternatives are expensive due to how our new economy is structured. I personally prefer oatmilk (oatside) to dairy milk. However, it’s too damn expensive that I find myself only drinking it from time to time. Now how is a vegetarian milk more expensive than a full cycle of cow milk (cows are too burdening to maintain) you might ask?!? My guess is that we are seeing something along the lines of EVs. Instead of making these healthier alternatives mainstream, they are being sold as a status symbol for the rich and making them unaffordable to the common man. Here waiting for my chinese oat milk.
- vasco 2y ago> Now how is a vegetarian milk more expensive than a full cycle of cow milk (cows are too burdening to maintain) you might ask?!? Not enough scale because little demand compared to regular milk.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ValentineC 2y agoWhat's baffling is that the supply chain for non-dairy milk is so much simpler, since all non-dairy milk can be packaged as UHT which doesn't need any form of refrigeration until open.
- spondylosaurus 2y agoI don't think non-dairy milks are artificially expensive so much as cow milk is artificially cheap. At least in the US. Federal dairy subsidies and all that.
- ValentineC 2y agoOat/almond milk suppliers are definitely pricing them artificially expensive. Here in Singapore, where soy milk has been around for decades, soy milk in both fresh and UHT forms tend to be much cheaper than dairy.
- spondylosaurus 2y agoIf Singapore doesn't have dairy subsidies and/or imports a lot of dairy... that's probably why. You're paying the "real" price while US consumers are paying the "discount" price. Also, soy milk's been around for decades in the US too! I drank a lot as a kid. My mom would keep these little single-serving cartons in her purse for us, like juicebox-sized.
- dotancohen 2y agoHow much does 1 liter of almond or oat milk substitute cost in Singapore? How much does one liter of milk cost?
- sbmthakur 2y agoBack in my ancestral village the practice was to let cow nurse her calf and get the remaining for the owner's family. This kinda ensured co-existence. The modern dairy industry has all evil practices baked into its operations. It is the thing that keeps me from going vegetarian. Even with going off meat, I would still harm the livestock by consuming dairy. A lot of vegetarians (at least those who virtue signal) do not understand this.
- aziaziazi 2y agoOne way to reduce that practice is to simply reduce one consumption of meat/milk, no need to be fully gandhi to improve some cow’s life. You anyway can’t save the world alone. There’s a ton of mushrooms and fabaceae, very cheap nutritious and as much delicious if you learn to cook them well (like meat). My favorite is Tempeh which combine both! And quite cheap if you make it yourself. http://tempeh.info/ http://tempeh.info/
- bamboozled 2y agoI like the stuff, but interestingly, I found it easiest to buy in Indonesia, Australia and the USA. Outside of that, it's hard to get or very expensive.
- ornornor 2y agoYou can make your own! It’s deleicious and very cheap if you make it yourself.
- maeil 2y agoPlenty of tofu dishes in Korea and part of China. Almost never vegan, but often vegetarian.
- lotsofpulp 2y agoIn the US, almost every broth or dish at an East/southeast restaurant uses shrimp/fish sauce or other animal product like beef/chicken stock. They usually prep it in advance, so it’s rare to find one that has an actually vegan dish they don’t custom make even if it says tofu.
- doublerabbit 2y agoVeal.
- ornornor 2y agoThat’s how we get all their milk, how we get meat (the calf isn’t kept around for more than a few weeks/months), and rennet to make cheese (it’s the digestion liquid that’s in their stomach while they eat milk, must kill the animal to extract it) Same with eggs, they don’t exist in a vacuum. To get eggs you have to have chickens, and to have chickens you must grind male chicks alive as they hatch because they don’t produce eggs. And hens aren’t supposed make eggs year round but we make them anyway with artificial lights etc, which drastically shortens their lifespan.
- voisin 2y ago> And hens aren’t supposed make eggs year round but we make them anyway with artificial lights etc, which drastically shortens their lifespan. I kept a flock of 25-30 hens on my property for a few years. Other than moulting they produce eggs ease round. The production slows drastically in the dark winter months for the older hens (1 for 3 days, say) but some continue to produce nearly daily (I think the cycle is something like 26-28 hours). The only time we had artificial light for them was on days when it was so cold we kept their coop door shut and turned on the interior light.
- whimsicalism 2y agothe way eggs are industrially farmed is generally not like this
- s1artibartfast 2y agoI think they are addressing the claim "hens aren’t supposed make eggs year round"
- throwaway_5633 2y agoWorse I’m afraid, chickens will give most eggs in their first year and are killed after, because they become unprofitable. I know an ecological farmer that charges a bit more for eggs and is able to keep them alive for 2 years, but that’s the max. They can easily live for 10 years plus.
- addicted 2y agoWhy would the calves be kept near the cows? They’re not gonna feed the milk that their mothers are producing for them, because that would mean less milk to sell and less milk for people to consume. And so why keep the calves in the milking side of the facility when you can move them to the fattening side for meat/leather or to get them to age so you can forcibly impregnate them every year for their milk, depending on their gender.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago[flagged]
- mystified5016 2y agoMost vegetarians decide to choose that diet after contemplating the suffering of the animals involved. Or had you never thought to ask why someone would be vegetarian?
- lotsofpulp 2y agoI think the confusion is because Daub might have meant vegetarianism (the idea) instead of vegetarians (the people).
- shadow28 2y agoHumans aren't always rational and that's okay, we're all human after all :)
- lotsofpulp 2y agoIt’s considered not okay if we replace vegetarian with skin tone.
- mrguyorama 2y agoOne is something you were born with and cannot change, and the other is a choice of lifestyle you make. If you can't see the difference between those two scenarios, that's a huge problem.
- lotsofpulp 2y agoThe cause or mutability the attribute has nothing to do with the reasonableness of ascribing a certain prior probability to the attribute. Also, many hundreds of millions of people in the world are born into families that raise them as vegetarians, is that so dissimilar from being born with a certain skin tone?
- addicted 2y agoIt’s ironic how accepted vegetarians, who have a dietary preference, are in society, and how hated vegans, who have an ethical argument against unnecessary killing of sentient animals, are in society. I only turned vegan a couple of years ago as something clicked and I was able to make the connection between the food I was eating and the animals who were being killed, almost certainly unnecessarily, for that food. But before then I disliked vegans a lot, and was completely fine with vegetarians. I’m honestly unable to reconcile my thinking. It’s kind of like how I don’t understand how I strongly believed in god before I lost faith. Now the idea that I ever could, or ever did, believe in a personal god seems unbelievable to me. Human psychology is ridiculously interesting.
- hellojesus 2y agoMy assumption is that the weight of including vegans socially is too much to bear for some. On the extreme end, you can't use store pasta because it was made in a facility that processes eggs and dairy. But even on the lighter end, social eating modification is pretty extreme: don't use butter when cooking, or eggs, or honey, etc. It's a lot easier to accommodate vegetarians than vegans. Though I do have a vegan friend that always brings her own food to gatherings, and it does make things far easier.
- whimsicalism 2y agobutter is one of the most easily substituted things around and most vegans i know don’t care about honey. definitely more restrictive but i think the dairy/cheese thing is the big one people also feel that vegans are judging them morally and people are very defensive about their eating habit, hence the dislike
- leetcrew 2y agodepends what you’re trying to do. there are plenty of alternatives for spreading on toast or frying/sauteing. but it’s still a pretty central ingredient for western cuisine. I have no idea how I’d make a vegan roux, just for example. my guess is that would break the illusion of whipped margarine pretty quickly.
- tomcam 2y agoThat reads like dark satire.
- Daub 2y agoThats pretty much how I now see it.