6 ms·

> 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

> 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.
    - AngryData 7mo ago
      To be fair you can keep a cow milking for LONG after it gave birth, but yields are a bit lower and baby cows are very valuable in themselves, which is generally the same kind of problem that keeps most bad farming practices going. Dairy farming is already a bottom of the barrel low margin business. And running a dairy farm while not maximizing calf output is like running a low-yield gold mine while dumping gem quality emeralds out with the tailings. Yeah it can be done, but you would be foolish not to do both, especially if it means your competitors across the road are able to squash your business with far higher capital returns after a few years.
- blks 7mo ago
  What do you think happens to a cow, when she stops producing milk? She is kept constantly pregnant, what do you think happens to most of her male offsprings? In the end, almost every single cow’s life ends in violence.
danaris 7mo ago
Many, many people disagree with you. It is not at all a logical, ethical, or emotional contradiction to say that we should have humanely-raised livestock whose purpose is to be slaughtered for meat. We can ensure that they are kept in healthy, safe, and humane ways during their lifetimes, and are killed as quickly, cleanly, and painlessly as we can reasonably manage. And, um, the meaning of "humane" is only loosely related to "treat like a human." It means "treat well, view with compassion", and similar. We talk of things being "humane" or "inhumane" in how we treat each other, too. [0] Humans have been raising meat animals with compassion and treating them well during their lifetimes for longer than we have had written language. Veganism/vegetarianism is not even physically an option for many people, excludes many cultures' traditional practices, and very, very often requires (or at least tends toward) supplementing with foods that are at least as unethical as factory farming practices. [0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/humane https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/humane
- aziaziazi 7mo ago
  > supplementing with foods that are at least as unethical as factory farming practices That's the first time I ear about supplement being unethical, let alone "compared to factory farming". Stretching the usual arguments, it may be almonds' water or soy in brazil ? I'd be glad you clarify your point.
  - danaris 7mo ago
    The harvesting of a number of the common foods used to supplement vegetarian and vegan diets—eg, soy, agave, quinoa—are variously destructive to the environment and based on labor practices exploitative enough that they sometimes verge on slavery.
    - aziaziazi 7mo ago
      Oh I understand the confusion: soy, quinoa and agave are not supplements but food. I guess we might agree on "alternative" but the word choice isn’t your point. Soy is a strange pick at it’s mostly cultivated to feed livestock (77%) and using it instead for humans instead would require substantially less crops. https://www.deforestationimportee.ecologie.gouv.fr/en/affected-products/article/soy https://www.deforestationimportee.ecologie.gouv.fr/en/affect... Agave… is mostly water and glucose, without much minerals or protein. How does vegs requires or tends toward that aliment more than other? Quinoa original region doesn’t have the same working standards as un US/UE but I’m not aware of a difference with banana, coffee, avocado, cacao, vanilla, coconut, palm oil (or soy)… however Quinoa also grow in other regions: here in France you can find local quinoa at the same price as the one from Bolivia: around 8€/kg (organic). It’s super healthy but not very popular through. Beans and lentils are more popular I think (self non-scientific estimation) but yeah soy is great and tasty.
ffsm8 7mo ago
> I doubt we'd do this to humans. So the only way to be okay with this is adhering to a form of specieism. The obvious historical pointer to the Holocaust as a well covered example of people being treated like that - and a fact often swept under the rug: people are being treated essentially like that in North Korea, today. An older interview but still good to watch https://youtu.be/ZGJm4bjRaaE?is=E2hFWYi-ynPnWGfm https://youtu.be/ZGJm4bjRaaE?is=E2hFWYi-ynPnWGfm
- Insanity 7mo ago
  Ok, I should maybe have said “I doubt we’d think it’s Okay to do this to humans”.
  - ffsm8 7mo ago
    Yeah, but it seems we do think it's okay, after all North Korea has been doing that for decades and people don't care whatsoever. NK contractors continue to be employed all over the world. Instead people are outraged about the dictators in the middle east etc. Whatever you wanna say about the Gaza atrocities - it applies 100x to North Korea. And yet, nobody cares. I think that's the real thing you can take away from these issues: nobody cares unless there is a politically motivated party that wants to achieve their goals and thus shapes the public narrative enough to get it's will through
    - unclenoriega 7mo ago
      I can't invade North Korea. I can avoid eating pigs.
      - ffsm8 7mo ago
        That may be true in your region. I myself live in Germany. Here, you get subventions by animal on the farm - hence here, you're literally paying for and enabling it wherever you actually purchase the meat or not. But I get where you're coming from.
stodor89 7mo ago
> specieism Wait, do we not agree that people are inherently more valuable than pigs?
- defrost 7mo ago
  Should we? Leaving aside pigs being intelligent creatures almost akin to humans for medical purposes, pigs fetch a lot more per kilo than humans do. I'm not sure there's even much of an open market for human meat. Unless you mean some nebulous human centic notion of "valuable" that takes no account of the pigs PoV.
- thrance 7mo ago
  If so, by how much? 1.5 billion pigs are slaughtered each year, is that too few to matter? It's so normalized to think of animals as worthless that I don't blame anyone for not having thought about it, but the moral calculus is really easy. Most people wouldn't be comfortable with killing a dog, and yet, every three days, we have two more Holocaust-worths of a smarter animal (namely, pigs).
- filoeleven 7mo ago
  A high-quality diamond is worth more than its weight in gold. That does not make the gold worthless.
adrian_b 7mo ago
I happen to not eat meat, but I still think that your bar is too high. If those animals would not be grown by humans, it could still be said that in their natural conditions they are grown specifically to be killed at some time, since few animals die "of natural causes", instead of being killed either by predators or by parasites. For examples, my grandparents grew chicken. There is no doubt that those chicken had a more pleasant life than any wild chicken. During the day, they roamed through a vast space with abundant vegetation, insects and worms, where they fed exactly like any wild chicken would do. They also received from time to time some grain supplement that was greatly appreciated. They were not permanently harassed and stressed by predators, as it would have happened in their natural environment. From time to time, some chicken was caught and killed out of sight. This would shorten the lives of the chicken that were not left for egg laying, but in comparison with the lives of wild chicken, most of these domestic chicken would have still lived longer on average. So I think that as long as domestic animals do not live worse than their wild ancestors, this can be called as a "humane way", even when they are grown with the purpose of eventually being killed. At least being grown by humans has ensured the survival of the species of domesticated animals, while all species of not very small non-domesticated terrestrial animals have been reduced to negligible numbers of individuals in comparison with humans and domestic animals and for most of them extinction is very likely. Unfortunately, today it has become unlikely to see animals grown in such conditions, like at my grandparents. Most are grown in industrial farms in conditions that cannot be called anything else but continuous torture, and I despise the people who torture animals in order to increase their revenues.
scotty79 7mo ago
Improving demographics so that your country has soldiers for future wars seems in the same ballpark.
AngryData 7mo ago
I mean businesses, the government, and capital economies in general treat me like garbage to be disposed of when its convenient, so while ideally I would like to agree with you, in practice I don't see that much difference. I can't even count how many times my life has been put on the line because some asshole wanted to save $10 or 2 minutes. Also many domesticated animals would be completely extinct if we didn't eat or farm them, which isn't a great prize, but it isn't nothing either. Personally I don't believe, until energy is so plentifully produced to be approaching on free for individuals, that we can even really afford to forgo animal agriculture. Oh yeah sure, we use farmland to grow animal feed and not human feed, but the animal feed we grow is often much easier to grow, and in many cases reduces artificial fertilizer usage which is a huge usage of fossil fuels. Take cows for example, they are fed 90% grass or alfalfa to grow, yeah their last month or two of life they are given grain to fatten them up (which is optional but customers prefer it), but that alfalfa they ate for 90% of their growth required no fertilizer or pesticides, and even produces nitrogen fertilizer in the ground, while harvesting consists of mowing it down and packing it into bails, and can be stored for years almost anywhere, including outside or in just random pits or 100 year old barns. Dent corn does require fertilizer (especially if you don't rotate with alfalfa or other legumes), however dent corn can also be stored for years with no more processing than is done within 10 seconds of harvest by the combine that is harvesting it, and can be fed to animals directly, while sweet corn is far more delicate, less fertilizer efficient, and doesn't store for long without refrigeration, canning, or freezing. Also animals like pigs are often fed otherwise bad or inedible food. Meat/animals it also a great emergency store of food for disaster. A volcano can reduce global yields by 30%, and while crop subsidization will help as we might have an extra 10% growing to start with, that still may end with shortages because people keep fighting crop subsidization to keep it low not understanding why it exists (to prevent famine which it has successfully done for over 100 years in every country that implements it). But you can give yourself an extra few years of food from animal stores by slaughtering them down and feeding them on old animal feed stockpiles, either just to wait for overall crop yields to increase again, or to give time to increase farming efforts. In a more ideal world I would definitely go along with reducing or even eliminating most animal agriculture, but in the world we currently live in it seems like a liability to me. I simply don't trust the people controlling most of our capital and wielding most of the power of human civilization to manage it well enough now or anytime in the near future. Not to mention the educational requirements to most cultures to switch to a pure vegetarian diet without all sorts of side effects from poor nutritional balance.
squibonpig 7mo ago
I agree but it's also like massively enormously better and would be a first step many people would be on board with towards treating them humanely.

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.
  - AngryData 7mo ago
    To be fair you can keep a cow milking for LONG after it gave birth, but yields are a bit lower and baby cows are very valuable in themselves, which is generally the same kind of problem that keeps most bad farming practices going. Dairy farming is already a bottom of the barrel low margin business. And running a dairy farm while not maximizing calf output is like running a low-yield gold mine while dumping gem quality emeralds out with the tailings. Yeah it can be done, but you would be foolish not to do both, especially if it means your competitors across the road are able to squash your business with far higher capital returns after a few years.
blks 7mo ago
What do you think happens to a cow, when she stops producing milk? She is kept constantly pregnant, what do you think happens to most of her male offsprings? In the end, almost every single cow’s life ends in violence.

danaris 7mo ago

Many, many people disagree with you. It is not at all a logical, ethical, or emotional contradiction to say that we should have humanely-raised livestock whose purpose is to be slaughtered for meat. We can ensure that they are kept in healthy, safe, and humane ways during their lifetimes, and are killed as quickly, cleanly, and painlessly as we can reasonably manage. And, um, the meaning of "humane" is only loosely related to "treat like a human." It means "treat well, view with compassion", and similar. We talk of things being "humane" or "inhumane" in how we treat each other, too. [0] Humans have been raising meat animals with compassion and treating them well during their lifetimes for longer than we have had written language. Veganism/vegetarianism is not even physically an option for many people, excludes many cultures' traditional practices, and very, very often requires (or at least tends toward) supplementing with foods that are at least as unethical as factory farming practices. [0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/humane https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/humane

aziaziazi 7mo ago
> supplementing with foods that are at least as unethical as factory farming practices That's the first time I ear about supplement being unethical, let alone "compared to factory farming". Stretching the usual arguments, it may be almonds' water or soy in brazil ? I'd be glad you clarify your point.
- danaris 7mo ago
  The harvesting of a number of the common foods used to supplement vegetarian and vegan diets—eg, soy, agave, quinoa—are variously destructive to the environment and based on labor practices exploitative enough that they sometimes verge on slavery.
  - aziaziazi 7mo ago
    Oh I understand the confusion: soy, quinoa and agave are not supplements but food. I guess we might agree on "alternative" but the word choice isn’t your point. Soy is a strange pick at it’s mostly cultivated to feed livestock (77%) and using it instead for humans instead would require substantially less crops. https://www.deforestationimportee.ecologie.gouv.fr/en/affected-products/article/soy https://www.deforestationimportee.ecologie.gouv.fr/en/affect... Agave… is mostly water and glucose, without much minerals or protein. How does vegs requires or tends toward that aliment more than other? Quinoa original region doesn’t have the same working standards as un US/UE but I’m not aware of a difference with banana, coffee, avocado, cacao, vanilla, coconut, palm oil (or soy)… however Quinoa also grow in other regions: here in France you can find local quinoa at the same price as the one from Bolivia: around 8€/kg (organic). It’s super healthy but not very popular through. Beans and lentils are more popular I think (self non-scientific estimation) but yeah soy is great and tasty.

ffsm8 7mo ago

> I doubt we'd do this to humans. So the only way to be okay with this is adhering to a form of specieism. The obvious historical pointer to the Holocaust as a well covered example of people being treated like that - and a fact often swept under the rug: people are being treated essentially like that in North Korea, today. An older interview but still good to watch https://youtu.be/ZGJm4bjRaaE?is=E2hFWYi-ynPnWGfm https://youtu.be/ZGJm4bjRaaE?is=E2hFWYi-ynPnWGfm

Insanity 7mo ago
Ok, I should maybe have said “I doubt we’d think it’s Okay to do this to humans”.
- ffsm8 7mo ago
  Yeah, but it seems we do think it's okay, after all North Korea has been doing that for decades and people don't care whatsoever. NK contractors continue to be employed all over the world. Instead people are outraged about the dictators in the middle east etc. Whatever you wanna say about the Gaza atrocities - it applies 100x to North Korea. And yet, nobody cares. I think that's the real thing you can take away from these issues: nobody cares unless there is a politically motivated party that wants to achieve their goals and thus shapes the public narrative enough to get it's will through
  - unclenoriega 7mo ago
    I can't invade North Korea. I can avoid eating pigs.
    - ffsm8 7mo ago
      That may be true in your region. I myself live in Germany. Here, you get subventions by animal on the farm - hence here, you're literally paying for and enabling it wherever you actually purchase the meat or not. But I get where you're coming from.

stodor89 7mo ago

> specieism Wait, do we not agree that people are inherently more valuable than pigs?

defrost 7mo ago
Should we? Leaving aside pigs being intelligent creatures almost akin to humans for medical purposes, pigs fetch a lot more per kilo than humans do. I'm not sure there's even much of an open market for human meat. Unless you mean some nebulous human centic notion of "valuable" that takes no account of the pigs PoV.
thrance 7mo ago
If so, by how much? 1.5 billion pigs are slaughtered each year, is that too few to matter? It's so normalized to think of animals as worthless that I don't blame anyone for not having thought about it, but the moral calculus is really easy. Most people wouldn't be comfortable with killing a dog, and yet, every three days, we have two more Holocaust-worths of a smarter animal (namely, pigs).
filoeleven 7mo ago
A high-quality diamond is worth more than its weight in gold. That does not make the gold worthless.

adrian_b 7mo ago

I happen to not eat meat, but I still think that your bar is too high. If those animals would not be grown by humans, it could still be said that in their natural conditions they are grown specifically to be killed at some time, since few animals die "of natural causes", instead of being killed either by predators or by parasites. For examples, my grandparents grew chicken. There is no doubt that those chicken had a more pleasant life than any wild chicken. During the day, they roamed through a vast space with abundant vegetation, insects and worms, where they fed exactly like any wild chicken would do. They also received from time to time some grain supplement that was greatly appreciated. They were not permanently harassed and stressed by predators, as it would have happened in their natural environment. From time to time, some chicken was caught and killed out of sight. This would shorten the lives of the chicken that were not left for egg laying, but in comparison with the lives of wild chicken, most of these domestic chicken would have still lived longer on average. So I think that as long as domestic animals do not live worse than their wild ancestors, this can be called as a "humane way", even when they are grown with the purpose of eventually being killed. At least being grown by humans has ensured the survival of the species of domesticated animals, while all species of not very small non-domesticated terrestrial animals have been reduced to negligible numbers of individuals in comparison with humans and domestic animals and for most of them extinction is very likely. Unfortunately, today it has become unlikely to see animals grown in such conditions, like at my grandparents. Most are grown in industrial farms in conditions that cannot be called anything else but continuous torture, and I despise the people who torture animals in order to increase their revenues.

scotty79 7mo ago

Improving demographics so that your country has soldiers for future wars seems in the same ballpark.

AngryData 7mo ago

I mean businesses, the government, and capital economies in general treat me like garbage to be disposed of when its convenient, so while ideally I would like to agree with you, in practice I don't see that much difference. I can't even count how many times my life has been put on the line because some asshole wanted to save $10 or 2 minutes. Also many domesticated animals would be completely extinct if we didn't eat or farm them, which isn't a great prize, but it isn't nothing either. Personally I don't believe, until energy is so plentifully produced to be approaching on free for individuals, that we can even really afford to forgo animal agriculture. Oh yeah sure, we use farmland to grow animal feed and not human feed, but the animal feed we grow is often much easier to grow, and in many cases reduces artificial fertilizer usage which is a huge usage of fossil fuels. Take cows for example, they are fed 90% grass or alfalfa to grow, yeah their last month or two of life they are given grain to fatten them up (which is optional but customers prefer it), but that alfalfa they ate for 90% of their growth required no fertilizer or pesticides, and even produces nitrogen fertilizer in the ground, while harvesting consists of mowing it down and packing it into bails, and can be stored for years almost anywhere, including outside or in just random pits or 100 year old barns. Dent corn does require fertilizer (especially if you don't rotate with alfalfa or other legumes), however dent corn can also be stored for years with no more processing than is done within 10 seconds of harvest by the combine that is harvesting it, and can be fed to animals directly, while sweet corn is far more delicate, less fertilizer efficient, and doesn't store for long without refrigeration, canning, or freezing. Also animals like pigs are often fed otherwise bad or inedible food. Meat/animals it also a great emergency store of food for disaster. A volcano can reduce global yields by 30%, and while crop subsidization will help as we might have an extra 10% growing to start with, that still may end with shortages because people keep fighting crop subsidization to keep it low not understanding why it exists (to prevent famine which it has successfully done for over 100 years in every country that implements it). But you can give yourself an extra few years of food from animal stores by slaughtering them down and feeding them on old animal feed stockpiles, either just to wait for overall crop yields to increase again, or to give time to increase farming efforts. In a more ideal world I would definitely go along with reducing or even eliminating most animal agriculture, but in the world we currently live in it seems like a liability to me. I simply don't trust the people controlling most of our capital and wielding most of the power of human civilization to manage it well enough now or anytime in the near future. Not to mention the educational requirements to most cultures to switch to a pure vegetarian diet without all sorts of side effects from poor nutritional balance.

squibonpig 7mo ago

I agree but it's also like massively enormously better and would be a first step many people would be on board with towards treating them humanely.