5 ms·

This is a false dichotomy. The choice is not lab grown or suffering. Farmed animals could live happy, healthy lives and then be culled in a humane way. The pro

• hshdhdhj4444 7mo ago
  What’s the humane way you would like to be culled?
  • red-iron-pine 7mo ago
    the direction we're headed is grenade-on-drone that YT video about killbots is being proved right in Eastern Ukraine right now only a matter of time 'till those metaphorical chickens come home to roost
• block_dagger 7mo ago
  Any kind of domination of one species over another raises serious ethical questions. Avoiding suffering on the dominated side is nearly impossible.
  • sosodev 7mo ago
    Are all pets suffering?
    • diacritical 7mo ago
      I think what GP meant is that when it involves money, suffering is nearly impossible to prevent. That's why you have puppy mills, for example. Most people don't know how the puppies are raised, they just see the cute puppy in the shop. The same way people see a pretty piece of meat in the supermarket and don't know its history. Raising animals for meat is theoretically doable with no suffering (not sure about milk), but it's not happening in practice. With pets the situation is better - a lot of people adopt and some care about how their pet was raised if they buy it from a breeder.
    • mperham 7mo ago
      Don't strawman other people's comments.
      • sosodev 7mo ago
        I didn't intend to. I think that domesticated animals have long had a harmonious relationship with humans so I find it a bit difficult to believe that it's always an ethical dilemma. Pets are just the most obvious lens to identify that. I also think we need to be careful with the idea that we should entirely avoid suffering because it's impossible to do.
        • constantius 7mo ago
          I think that it is what you know of the history of animal domestication and of pets that makes you think that there is an acceptable and low amount of suffering. I think most people are aware of animal cruelty in factory farms (the chicken in cages, the pigs in cages, etc.), which represents 90% of all farm animals globally (https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/global-animal-farming-estimates https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/global-animal-farming-est...). For pets, I don't think you understood what GP was saying: pet breeding involves massive amounts of death of puppies/kittens that aren't pretty enough or don't manage to survive infancy, the female breeders are basically confined to cages and "producing" all their life, some short-nosed breeds of dogs and cats are even illegal in some countries because they spend their life unable to breathe properly, pets are abandoned and killed, etc. The happy pets you see in the street are not representative of what it is to be a pet. But yes, these ones are not suffering. As for long and harmonious, as much as we tend to see anything in the distant past as innocent, I'd remind you that the systematic killing of male chicks, the killing of veals to avoid them drinking all the milk, the killing of all animals as soon as productivity drops beyond a threshold, are not new practices. No animal wants to be enslaved. Same as no human wants to be enslaved. I'm not attacking you, just attempting to give you an idea of why other commenters believe animal domestication is not ethical.
  • JungleGymSam 7mo ago
    nah.
• diacritical 7mo ago
  That's exactly why lab grown meat is the best way to solve the issue. Society is only concerned with cost, regulations are weak and rarely enforced and companies are operating in a capitalistic market where they can't compete unless they squeeze every last cent out of each animal. That's hard to change as lots of people have an interest in keeping the status quo and the citizens who vote don't have the time to read everything that comes their way. We can't expect that society will wake up, that people will start voting with more conscience or that everyone will go vegan. Lab grown meat (or growing brainless animals or something similar) is a technological solution. When it becomes cheaper than normally-grown meat and similar in quality, the atrocities committed in the farms would cease to exist as the farms themselves would cease to exist. The same market forces that are responsible for what's happening to the animals now would prevent any future torture.
  • sosodev 7mo ago
    I'm skeptical of this claim because there's clearly a growing population that hates the idea of putting anything they don't understand in their bodies. Genetically modified vegetables, food dyes, vaccines, etc. I find it hard to believe you could convince a large portion of Americans to eat lab grown meat just to save a buck.
    • diacritical 7mo ago
      I think that population is shrinking, not growing. They're surely vocal, though. But if lab grown meat is cheaper, some part of the population would buy it. The farms would lose part of their business so economy of scale would help lab grown meat and hurt the farms. I think it would lead to a feedback loop where lab grown meat will get even cheaper and farm meat would get more expensive. With lab grown meat you also have the option not only for a perfect piece of meat, but for different kinds of tastes, textures and compositions that haven't existed before. Just like people eat processed meat (think ham or nuggets or deep fried pieces), they would love to try the new tastes. I know I would.
      • kelipso 7mo ago
• Insanity 7mo ago
  > Farmed animals could live happy, healthy lives and then be culled in a humane way. Breeding animals _specifically for killing them_, no matter how they are killed, is not what I'd consider humane. If we take 'humane' literally, it means to be treated as you would treat a human. I doubt we'd do this to humans. So the only way to be okay with this is adhering to a form of specieism.
  • anonym29 7mo ago
    Many farm animals aren't bred specifically for killing them. Think egg-laying hens and ducks, milk-producing cows and goats, etc. Not too different from humans in that respect; humans are bred systematically (we have dedicated hormonal supplements, birth facilities, documented birthing procedures, standardized post-birth checklists of forms of vaccination regiments, standardized mass schooling, government-subsidized feeding programs, etc) and most are used machinistically by society exclusively for productive output, regardless of whether the society is corporatist, capitalist, socialist, communist, etc.
    • quesera 7mo ago
      I think you misinterpreted GP's emphasis. But still, egg and dairy animals are culled when productivity drops. The human equivalent would be killing all male babies, and females after age ~40. This does not seem more "humane" than the human equivalent of meat farming, where all human offspring would be harvested at age ~15.
      • Insanity 7mo ago
        Yup exactly. And when animals are bred specifically for milk, they aren't treated well even before they are killed. Dairy cows need to be kept continuously pregnant / in lactation state through artificial insemination. They don't magically produce milk all-year round. And pregnancy is _hard_ on animals (including humans), it changes your physiology and psychology. Even if we take for granted that a cow isn't as conscious as a human (IMO consciousness is a sliding scale, not a binary), then they are still being primed for giving birth and taking care of offspring which never comes. Imagine doing that to a human - it's a definite form of cruelty.
• mrguyorama 7mo ago
  Worse. We were told we couldn't have happy, cruelty free meat because it would be expensive. We were told we couldn't have clean meat because it would be expensive. We couldn't have sustainable meat because it's too expensive. We couldn't reduce the environmental harms of meat because it's too expensive. We couldn't have locally produced meat because it's too expensive. Well we got none of those things. But beef steak is still $25 a pound. I don't really care if it gets more expensive because at current prices I can't eat it regularly anyway and rich assholes will have no problems eating their steaks every day even at $100 a pound so why don't we just have a sustainable, clean, less cruel industry? Countries reduced their demand of our meat, because of horseshit tradewar games, and yet the price went up. Demand for American industrial crops like soybeans, which is used significantly as a cattle feed, cratered, to the point we will have to hand the farms tens of billions of dollars, yet somehow beef still got more expensive. Meat processing uses illegal immigrant labor, sometimes even child labor, and all regulation of those facilities has dramatically curtailed under Trump administrations, and yet beef still gets more expensive. Here's what beef producers say: >“It’s hard as a beef producer to necessarily say that beef prices are too high. I mean, if people are paying $6 for a latte at Starbucks, but then they’re paying $6 for a pound of beef, they’re able to feed a family for a family of three with that pound of beef,” said Taylon Lienemann, co-owner of Linetics Ranch in Princeton, Nebraksa. In other words, fuck you pay me. "Starbucks makes great profit so we should make more". The reason for the price increase is a "very small herd", which producers have been reducing because of droughts and otherwise because they don't think the profit is high enough to invest in future production.
• trymas 7mo ago
  I am too lazy to do the math, but I somehow think it would cost _multiple times_ more: https://www.farmtransparency.org/kb/food/abattoirs/age-animals-slaughtered https://www.farmtransparency.org/kb/food/abattoirs/age-anima... > society is more concerned with cost than animal suffering. Yes, and it's politically very hard to change. I totally understand price sensitivity around food. At least where I live milk and meat is extremely subsidised. How can you have chicken that is grown, slaughtered, cleaned, packaged, distributed, kept cold all the way, etc. and sell it for 5eur/kg (and cheaper on discounts). There's s much human work, resources, fuel used - I cannot understand. Also - being a vegetarian/vegan is more expensive than being omnivore.
  • diacritical 7mo ago
    > being a vegetarian/vegan is more expensive than being omnivore. Being vegan is cheaper where I live regardless of whether we factor in the subsidies or not. Beans, chickpeas, lentils and sometimes soy (examples of protein sources) are pretty inexpensive. Peanuts, some other nuts (in the culinary sense of the word) and some of the vegetable oils are also inexpensive. If you factor in foods meant to replace or replicate the taste of a carnivore diet like vegan yogurt, milk or cheese, or things like Beyond Meat burgers, it might become expensive, but you don't have to limit yourself by trying to replicate what you used to eat - you can make lots of things from 10-20 basic ingredients.
    • adrian_b 7mo ago
      Beans, lentils etc. may be inexpensive but you skip over the fact that they and any other kind of plant source contain too little protein in comparison with the amount of energy. Being vegan is easy for someone who does hard physical work, so they have to eat more than 3000 kcal per day. In that case, eating enough proteins that come from plant sources will still leave enough in the energy budget to also eat other food, for a complete diet. On the other hand, if you have a sedentary lifestyle, working in the front of a computer, it is impossible to eat enough protein without eating too many calories. There are plant protein extracts, but those are at least 3 to 5 times more expensive than cheap animal protein, e.g. chicken breast. I have eaten for 4 years only plant-based proteins, but to satisfy simultaneously 3 constraints, enough proteins, not so many calories as to cause weight gain and price no greater than when eating chicken meat, in Europe where I live there was only 1 solution, with no alternatives. The solution was to extract at home gluten from wheat flour, to supplement the proteins provided by lentils or other legumes. Any plant-based product that I could buy for enough protein would have been more expensive than chicken meat. Extracting gluten, which is done by washing dough with abundant water, works. However it requires much time and much water. Extracting pure gluten requires so much water and so much time that I never did this regularly. I was typically removing around 75% of the starch from wheat flour, and with the result I was baking a bread that had about 50% to 60% protein content. Besides wasting a lot of water and time every day, this procedure had the additional disadvantage that the amount of calories provided by eating enough protein was still rather large. This limited severely the possible menus, e.g. any starchy vegetables, e.g. potatoes or sweet potatoes or rice, and any starchy fruits, e.g. bananas, had to be forbidden. I gain weight extremely easily if I exceed my allowable daily energy intake. These inconveniences have made me eventually abandon this approach. While I still eat mostly vegan food, I also use in cooking some whey protein concentrate, which can increase enough the protein content of plant-based food. There already exists a technology for making whey protein concentrate otherwise than by the filtration of milk, i.e. by extracting it from a culture of genetically-modified Trichoderma fungus. I hope that this technology will become viable commercially, because unlike with fake meat produced from cell cultures, it is certain that with such a fungal culture one can make proteins less costly than by growing chicken or other domestic animals. The availability of such a protein powder would solve completely the problem of vegan food for me. I do not need fake meat.
• ritlo 7mo ago
  > Farmed animals could live happy, healthy lives and then be culled in a humane way. > The problem is that it costs slightly more and our society is more concerned with cost than animal suffering. IDK about other livestock, but this definitely doesn't hold for chickens, one of the cheaper meat sources in the US. Switching to breeds that could live more than a very-few weeks(!) before getting too overweight to walk, would increase price by far more than "slightly more", and there's no hope of anything fitting any sane definition of "humane chicken farming" without that step. I suspect it's also true for pigs, not necessarily the "we bred them so wrong that their very existence is a crime against god and nature" part but that the price increase from a "healthy, happy life" would be a lot larger than "slightly more". Maybe also cows, dunno about that one.
  • penguin_booze 7mo ago
    It's not like chickens chose this way of life. Such breeds were developed for the specific purpose of meat, with no regard for their wellbeing. Don't shame the chickens for what human bastards do.
    • ritlo 7mo ago
      Oh, sure, our fault, but fact remains that modern meat-chicken breeds are so incredibly fucked up that it’s not really possible to humanely farm them. They’re like that because of what we did, yes, but step one toward comprehensive humane-farming for chickens would have to be “let those breeds entirely die out” regardless of who’s at fault (and it ain’t the chickens).
• philistine 7mo ago
  At the scale to feed the world, and at the prices we require, absolutely not. Eating meat means making another creature suffer. Don't delude yourself.
• blks 7mo ago
  This is whitewashing to make consumers happy and less concern. Nothing is humane about murdering an animal to sell its body parts for profit. Thats just marketing.
• Hammershaft 7mo ago
  Cost is not a minor thing considering the suffering that poverty creates.
• SequoiaHope 7mo ago
  Strong disagree. There absolutely are “more humane” methods but they are still not humane. Forced separation of mothers from their children (standard practice) and killing the animals before their natural death are two inhumane features of even “free range” practices. There is no humane way to kill a creature against its will. To be clear, free range represents a major improvement over the unconscionable horrors of factory farms, but it is not flatly “humane” without qualification.
• nsonha 7mo ago
  > Farmed animals could live happy, healthy lives and then be culled in a humane way Ok but why stop there