Last year, I wrote a great deal about the rise of “ventilation shutdown plus” (VSD+), a method being used to mass kill poultry birds on factory farms by sealing off the airflow inside barns and pumping in extreme heat using industrial-scale heaters, so that the animals die of heatstroke over the course of hours. It is one of the worst forms of cruelty being inflicted on animals in the US food system — the equivalent of roasting animals to death — and it’s been used to kill tens of millions of poultry birds during the current avian flu outbreak.
As of this summer, the most recent period for which data is available, more than 49 million birds, or over 80 percent of the depopulated total, were killed in culls that used VSD+ either alone or in combination with other methods, according to an analysis of USDA data by Gwendolen Reyes-Illg, a veterinary adviser to the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), an animal advocacy nonprofit. These mass killings, or “depopulations,” in the industry’s jargon, are paid for with public dollars through a USDA program that compensates livestock farmers for their losses.
If humans don’t commit suicide first through war or environmental abuse, I truly believe that future generations will look back on eating meat as a barbaric mistake. They’ll tell stories about how we caused epidemics and pandemics, wasted valuable resources and land, polluted air, land, and sea, and abided the suffering of billions of animals, all so we could feed our children dinosaur shaped meat nuggets and buy cheap hamburgers that we were too lazy to even get out of our cars to purchase.
Primates, including humans, evolved to be omnivorous. In the 200,000 year history of the homo sapiens species, only the most recent 3% have had the benefit of agriculture. Even then, only 0.1% have had the benefit of the industrial revolution which could in theory provide enough calories and nutrients for all humans with a purely herbivorous diet.
So what? We evolved to thrive on a wide variety of diets. I don’t judge my homo erectus ancestors for doing what they needed to survive. It’s fairly apparent that the person you’re replying to is referring to modern society’s obsession with producing as much meat as we do, not the concept of eating meat as a whole.
Complete and utter bullshit. Don’t move goalposts because you don’t want to concede a point. They explicitly said:
That doesn’t even remotely imply there is a quantity of meat consumption that is morally acceptable.
Right, they explicitly said that, and then in the literal next fucking sentence they explicitly said
It sounds like what they are describing is modern society’s obsession with producing as much meat as we do
It’s me; I’m the person. I will clarify my stance. But focusing on my individual personal motivations and disregarding my overarching observations seems a little goal post manipulatey too. Even if my personal motivations fail to meet your scrutiny, the facts I present still remain: we are harming our planet, we are harming animals, and we are harming ourselves by eating meat. Which seems counterproductive at best and ripe for improvement. We can and should advance beyond this unnecessary and harmful indulgence. At the very least, we should consume a very small fraction of what we currently do.
Though I am a vegetarian, I used to eat meat. I acknowledge that it’s delicious, and I miss it sometimes. But I don’t eat it because I’ve determined that it would be logically inconsistent of me to do so.
In a vacuum I don’t think the “wrongest” part about meat is the moral/ethical implications of killing an animal to eat it. But I’m not talking about subsistence meat consumption here. Because that’s not how we eat meat on a human race scale anymore. We churn it out at disgusting scale. Imparting suffering and pollution into the world. We eat it primarily because we like it. And we eat too much of it because we are gluttonous. If your uncle shoots a buck with his bow and arrow, and make some summer sausage of it, I’m not really perturbed by that. I don’t love it, but I’m fine with it. Now, if your uncle gasses 10,000 chickens too fat and atrophied to stand, and heaps them into a pile and burns them, because the flock has an outbreak that exists solely due to our habitual over crowding of hellish enclosures, now we’ve got problems.
That being said, my personal chief concern is environmental. The scale at which we produce meat, and the methods we use to produce it, are completely untenable and are inconsistent with continued life on this planet. In 50 years we will have another 3 billion or so people on the planet, and we’re already operating way beyond our means with our current population. We need to change our habits or die.
My third priority is health considerations. This is probably my weakest argument, because eating meat isn’t imperically unhealthy. But again, we as humans don’t just eat meat from time to time, most of us are eating it every god damned day. We’re going to a wing joint and hoovering up 15 chickens worth of wings without even thinking about it. But even if people stop packing their colons with gristle and turning their blood to paste with double bacon cheeseburgers with bacon and a fried egg, they’ll find some other garbage to eat. We don’t value healthy living in my country which is a whole nother issue beyond the meat thing.
I strongly agree on all points. In particular the inhumanity of the way animals are treated in contemporary mass ranches is troubling. DFW’s “Consider the Lobster” resonates with me.
The reason I called out the above comment is because slamming to the absolutist rails is regressive. What makes a difference isn’t going to the extremes but bringing people into the fold. It is particularly effective to highlight the issues you have and then say “you don’t need to stop eating all meat”. Most people won’t. If your points are well received then a takeaway of “choose to not eat meat more often” is much more impactful rather than “oh well nothing I can do since I am going to continue eating meat”.
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The thing about civilization is that ideally it advances. If 200k years is the sample size you wish to view, houses are fairly new. Plumbing is newer than houses. Insulation even more new. Fire safety and building regulations even more new still. Asbestos was new, and now it’s old. This is progress. To keep with this analogy, in my opinion meat will become the asbestos, the lead paint, or the knob and tube wiring, of food.
Yeah, and give it another 100 years or so, a veritable eye blink in the timeline discussed, and meat will be lab grown or replaced with something else. Essentially complaining that civilization is taking more than a generation or two to advance in specific places is mildly mind boggling, because civilization almost never moves that fast. Not everything moves at the speed of the development of powered flight, and meat has an unfathomable level of inertia being on the base of the hierarchy of needs.
That has nothing to do with what they said.
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”An omnivore is an animal that has the ability to eat and survive on both plant and animal matter.” - Wikipedia
That’s what an omnivore is. It can/does eat plants and animals
Ok, I’ll be the one to point it out.
“We didn’t evolve to be omnivorous (from Latin omnis ‘all’ and vora, from vorare ‘to eat or devour’), we evolved to be capable of thriving on a wide variety (omni) of diets (vore)”.
Just because portions of human populations do not behaviorally practice omnivorey, doesn’t mean their bodies are not omnivorous. You can feed a black or brown bear a balanced vegan diet, same with dogs, rodents, etc, and they can survive and thrive, but that doesn’t mean bears are no longer omnivores.
LMFAO
There will be none. Not for anything alive from here.
I don’t get how you can live with this attitude and not be suicidal. Shit’s gonna get bad, hundreds of millions of people are gonna die if we’re lucky, but to think the human race has no future? That’s past advanced pessimism
Everyone dies eventually, that’s always been the case. I don’t get why you think seeing a high chance of a particular death down the line should make people instead want death immediately. Frankly, it’s kinda pathetic that you think that’s a logical line of thought. Shit’s going to get so bad humanity might not make it, so we should all just give up?
Personally, it makes me appreciate this life even more. I might be seeing humanity’s peak, which is a pretty cool time to be alive, and maybe there won’t be many more chances to experience human life. Good or bad, that’s all this is: an experience. It might be the only one we get and will inevitably end at some point anyways, so why rush that ending?
Obviously everyone’s gonna die, but laughing at the idea that future generations won’t exist, that there is no future, just sounds miserable.
nah, I think it’s kind of a way to get rid of pessimism. it’s easier for a lot of people to conceive of humanity as just being completely dead, rather than conceiving of a humanity that persists on the face of the earth, enduring the wrath of their progenitors, condemned to a future of pain and misery for as long as the sun still burns. that scenario makes you actively, not only want to kill yourself, but maybe also [redacted] in the process, because the tradeoff seems not so bad, then. if only everyone on the earth was punished for their pride, maybe that, we could all live with, in our sort of, myopic first world “extending the guilt out to the guy in cuba or rural africa who hasn’t done shit wrong but will disproportionately be the victim of the decisions of like 5 hollow puppets at the top of power” sort of way. but of the humanity that suffers indefinitely into the future? that’s kind of harder to grapple with.
so I end up having to not really buy into either as a matter of retaining my own sanity.
You don’t understand that this is the exact objective of the patriarchy. Corporations and greedy are just scheme of distraction and disbelieve upon their collective suicide.
I don’t do nonsense like “optimism’” or “pessimism.” I’ll stick to facts an solutions. If there be any left it would be by Richard Stallman and FOSS AI.
Where are the “facts and solutions” in this? That’s textbook pessimism. Like, googling “define pessimism” gives you “a lack of hope or confidence in the future.”
I’m not pessimistic. I know these things. I don’t fuck around with brainwashing like “optimism” either. I’ll deal with facts and you and your religious cult can fuck off with “hope.”. I’d say bullshit but mushrooms actually heal. Even the Death God won’t be back for your fucking ignorance.
Let’s stop that with prohibition. rolls eyes
Lol. “Know”.
Heh heh heh. I think we can sum up your entire persona right there.
You can get your animal nuggies animal free if interested. https://impossiblefoods.com/products/chicken/nuggets/wild-nuggies
I’ve had those. They’re essentially indistinguishable from regular chicken nuggets.
Because of course they are, the bar is not very high for dino nuggies.
Go vegan everyone, stand on the right side of history
Yup. And there are gonna be arguments about how “they were a product of their time,” which will be exactly as bullshit as it is today when we talk about people of the past.
The thing we can’t say is that we didn’t know better.