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>How were you supposed to know? It's safe to assume all animal products are unethical.
by nawitus 13y ago
>How were you supposed to know?
It's safe to assume all animal products are unethical.
- enraged_camel 13y agoWhat is so unethical about eggs or cow's milk? edit: The point I am trying to make is that not all of our food comes from unethical industrial factory farms. There are a lot of farmers who use ethical and sustainable methods. It is not too difficult to do research and find out how your food is produced.
- jghrng 13y agoIt gets unethical pretty quickly as it is produced at industrial scale.
- rosser 13y agoApparently, you're not very familiar with modern factory farming. One word: "debeaking".
- cromulent 13y agoDepends on your ethics. 9 chickens per square meter for free-range, it's a bit tight for me personally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-range_eggs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-range_eggs
- antsar 13y agoHuh, wow. It never even crossed my mind that "free-range" and "cage-free" might not mean what it sounds like it means. That was naive of me. 9 hens/meter does not sound very "free" to me either.
- asciimo 13y agoMan, do not worry about naivete. It's actually very difficult to learn the truth about the products we consume. That you are openly expressing your enlightenment is remarkable, and worth celebrating.
- Tyr42 13y agoIn addition to these requirements, free-range systems must also provide the following: One hectare of outdoor range for every 2500 hens (equivalent to 4m^2 per hen; at least 2.5 m^2 per hen must be available at any one time if rotation of the outdoor range is practiced) From the wikipedia page you linked. That's not too bad, is it?
- prof_hobart 13y agoDepends where you live. "In the EU each hen must have at least 4 square metres of space."
- dribnet 13y agoIs there anything wrong with force feeding a cow corn which makes them sick, injecting them with antibiotics so that doesn't kill them, impregnating them so that they produce milk, separating them from their calf at birth (who most likely will be used for veal) causing them distress, and making them livid a horrid life wading in cow shit their whole life until their hoofs are painfully literally rotting? Yes, what is happening to the civets is appalling. But it's really no worse than what is standard CAFO treatment. It's not entirely your fault that you don't know this because the food industry tries very hard to keep this from you, including pushing for laws that make exposing these facts acts of terrorism.
- enraged_camel 13y agoI know all of it. What you don't seem to be aware of is that there are a lot of farmers who don't follow these practices. I make an effort to do research about the food I buy and to make sure it comes only from sustainable, non-industrial farming methods. What I was trying to get at in my question is that there is nothing "safe" about the assumption that ALL animal products are unethical. It's just a blanket generalization that discourages learning more about the subject.
- deskglass 13y agoIt's a near perfect generalization depending on where you food shop. Good luck finding eggs from ethical sources at Walmart or Publix.
- integraton 13y agoAlthough most US farms are small farms, they are in decline and also far less productive, so the vast majority (85%) of output comes from large-scale farms. Furthermore, because the agricultural system and all of the regulations support large-scale farming, small-scale family farms have to work within the system. (eg, http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2009-02-05/more-on-the-size-of-regulation-the-slaughterhouse-bathroom http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2009-02-05/more-on-the-s...). The trend is toward more factory farming, not less, since small scale farms are less profitable, often not covering costs. The difficulty of making small farms sustainable is generally attributed to the regulations, infrastructure, and economic realities increasingly favoring large scale factory farming. If you doubt any of what I've said here, the USDA and others have plenty of reports available: http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err-economic-research-report.aspx http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err-economic-research-r...
- jkn 13y agoI had a discussion with someone who feels strongly about this recently, and he pointed out that even the few chickens and cows that get decent treatment during their lives are brought to the slaughter house when they're not productive anymore (except for a negligible minority of cases). Even if we assume the best slaughtering conditions (wrongly, most likely) it's not hard to see how that can be perceived as unethical. He did mention that people who take good care of their chickens and cows during their whole life are a different story.
- 300bps 13y agoI eat eggs and my kids drink milk but some people find unethical the environmental impact of using animals to convert relatively efficient vegetable production to relatively inefficient animal production. Some info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_production http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_pr... Another thing people find unethical about it are adding literally tons of needless antibiotics to the environment which can have human medical impact.
- smoyer 13y agoDo you use a fabric softener? (or a detergent with one in it?) ... sometimes is can be surprising where you find animal products.
- notjosh 13y agoThe issue of what happens to the males is often overlooked. In dairy cattle, the bulls are relatively useless (low meat yield, etc), so they're killed. Same with roosters - laying breeds are far different from meat breeds, so the males are ground up as chicks.
- SeanLuke 13y agoCows only give milk after they give birth. Ask yourself where those calves go.
- deskglass 13y agoOne such means of reseach is browsing through this site and finding what top rated brands are available where you shop. http://www.cornucopia.org/organic-egg-scorecard/ http://www.cornucopia.org/organic-egg-scorecard/ They also have a less detailed milk scorecard. Note, they only look at organic eggs and they weigh some things other than how the animals are treated based on their political beliefs. Still, they list every category and you can choose which ones you care about.
- nawitus 13y agohttp://www.reddit.com/r/vegan/comments/1ayed6/is_milkegg_production_inherently_unethical_or/ http://www.reddit.com/r/vegan/comments/1ayed6/is_milkegg_pro... http://www.reddit.com/r/vegan/comments/1kkn05/as_a_non_vegan_why_do_you_presonally_dont_want_to/ http://www.reddit.com/r/vegan/comments/1kkn05/as_a_non_vegan...
- joel_perl_prog 13y agoI may have already missed the window where people will read this reply, but let me tell you the basic error in your thinking. Yes it's true that Old MacDonald actually does exist. He may be your neighbor. He's certainly my father's neighbor, out in the country, in Michigan. And you can buy eggs. And a few other people, too. But guess what. Well into the 90s percent of people don't do that. Probably high 90s percent. And they never could either, because as soon as they tried, you'd see it can't scale up. The only thing that can scale up is the rotten situation we currently have--the one that produces that 90s percentage of the eggs and milk (and meat, which you didn't mention, but it's likewise a parallel here for people who believe in "humane" meat).
- bdcravens 13y agoIntrinsically nothing is wrong. Obviously you appreciate the value of research. It's amazing that people will research the purchase of a new phone more than what they eat?
- narwally 13y agoThat's not exactly an obvious conclusion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_realism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_realism
- Pxtl 13y agoWhat do you think happens to the useless males. The little infant bulls and roosters?
- turing 13y agoThere are a lot of farmers who use ethical and sustainable methods. Depends on how you define "a lot". The vast majority of eggs and milk produced in the United States are not in any way ethically produced.
- dinkumthinkum 13y agoYou all are making some bold claims about what is and is not ethical ... Does everyone not realize that ethics and the derivation of ethics is a fairly complex issue?
- oneeyedpigeon 13y agoExactly. Most people's arguments are "you say that X is unethical for these reasons, and you therefore avoid X, but Y has similarities with X and you don't avoid Y - that makes you wrong to avoid X" which is plainly ridiculous. This shouldn't be about absolutes.
- blahedo 13y ago> It's statistically reasonable to assume any particular animal product, that was bought in a store, in the US, and doesn't advertise any particular affiliation with ethical-treatment or other specialty causes, is unethical. I think this is roughly what you meant, right? There are lots of exceptions to the totally blanket assertion, although I think the underlying sentiment (as carefully caveatted above) is basically correct.
- nawitus 13y agoI don't think there's lots of exceptions. In fact, the exceptions are exceedingly rare.
- asciimo 13y agoOne exception that comes to mind: A cow approaches you and graciously hands you a gallon of milk it excreted from its own udder, expressly as a gift to you.
- 4hthth4 13y agoThat's just silly, they don't even have opposable thumbs. It would have to squirt the milk into your mouth.
- tedks 13y ago...so it's safe to assume all animal products are unethical. According to that statement, the ethical value of any animal product is a function of some huge number of variables, and the upper bound on that value is the minimum of that set. So, it's safe to assume that all animal products you encounter as a human are unethical. Regardless of where you buy them, or what their advertising is, you should assume they are unethical and be very, very difficult to persuade. Anything else is just unsafe.
- blahedo 13y agoI agree, and I understood the careful phrasing ("safe", "assume") in the original remark---but given the number of people who apparently didn't understand, I wanted to give a clarified version.
- venomsnake 13y agoAlso eating plants is unethical. For them to be developed we needed to destroy habitats, displace species and cause suffering too. We are invasive species. What we should aim is low impact farming. To extract the most food with the least possible amount of suffering caused and resources expended.
- nawitus 13y agoTechnically speaking my point was "it's more unethical to consume animal products than it is to consume plant-based products".
- venomsnake 13y agoThat is interesting question. Is it more unethical to torture a species and ensure its survival because it is tasty, or to push a species to extinction to farm on its former habitat? And why? This is one of those questions that drink a lot of beer and lead to violence among friends late in the evenings. With no good answer.
- tedks 13y agoDo you think a species as a unit has preferences? It seems like your friends are conflating genetics and utilitarian ethics. There's a way of explaining genetics in terms of preferences, but genes don't really have preferences. Species, by extension, don't have preferences. Cows as a species want nothing. Individual cows do. So personally, as a vegan, I wouldn't see the death of the last cow on earth as a huge loss, as long as the cow was safe, happy, and comfortable.
- refurb 13y agoI never understood the "humans are an invasive species". If a beaver builds a dam and floods a habitat forcing out the native species thats "natural". Humans do the same thing and it's "invasive". I take the view that humans are as natural as any other animal on the planet. We obviously have a goal to sustain the ecosystems we value, but we're just as much a part of the ecosystem as any other animal.
- peterwwillis 13y agoThe original way this was marketed was (paraphrasing): "civets roam the forest, eat cherries, poop, and we collect the poop." In other words, not farmed at all. Sounded ethical to me at the time.
- theorique 13y agoWhat about some kind of artisanal steak, locally-curated by genuine Brooklyn hipsters? Or Kobe beef - those cattle get massages!