Spyke
lemm.ee

I have been seeing a lot of animal abuse posts on here lately. I hadn't noticed 196 being like that in the past on here or Reddit. Is there a trend toward that for this community in general? I'm well aware of how fucked the industry is, but I also don't sub to this community for that. I am here for little gay people shit posting in my phone. These just make me sad. I can't personally do anything to stop this. I don't want to unsub, and there's not a great way to filter, unless it's all the same OP? :(

76
shneancyreply
lemmy.world

this won't stop the fact it'll keep happening and keep making people sad

23

Yeah maybe but the infohazard got to us. We know too much and now we can only really choose between being a guilty meat eater or a depressed vegan.

2
lemmy.world

You sound like queer people in the 80s and 90s.

"What does it matter if one person accepts me? Won't change anything and it just bums me out."

Now, acceptance is the default position for most folk.

4
shneancyreply
lemmy.world

as a queer person in the now I do not think this is comparable, at all.

3

Well, as a queer vegan. Its really hard not to notice that bigots and carnists say the same sort of things.

"You're just trying to feel special." "It's unnatural, your gentials/teeth were evolved for a specific use". "Stop trying to convert kidsto your cult." "Queer/vegan people always think they are so enlighted."

But more to the point, defeatism is always an easy excuse to do nothing. But individual actions can have ripple effects through generations. Do you think that those at stonewall would expect an entire month celebrating their actions? Enough people making a choice not to support animal agriculture puts the concept out of business. Do I expect that or liberation soon? No. But it's gotten LIGHTYEARS better on both fronts in my own lifetime.

2
littlecoltreply
lemm.ee

Similar to recycling, the impact is small. There must be large systemic change. My adoption of a vegan diet, or my diligent recycling of aluminum and plastic, is a drop in the bucket.

18
dinkusmannreply
feddit.rocks

This is emphatically untrue. If you eat a few hundred fewer animals over the course of your life, that's a few hundred animals saved (even if supply and demand aren't perfectly elastic, the expected utility is 1-to-1). The fact that billions will still die is irrelevant.

Would you refuse to save a child from poverty on the grounds that billions will continue living in poverty?

14
littlecoltreply
lemm.ee

Yes, it's not my responsibility to save that child from poverty. I would also be terrible at it. I would much rather financially support organizations than will assist in saving children from poverty in a more meaningful way, as well as supporting politicians that align with my values as far as lifting not just children, but everyone, out of poverty.

7
dinkusmannreply
feddit.rocks

You can, and should, give money to animal charities and support politicians in favor of better animal welfare (if you can find one) and I will commend you for that. But that does not negate the harm you do by paying for animals to be killed. Just as giving to a women's shelter does not then mean that it becomes excusable for you to beat your wife.

And I apologize for that analogy, I don't think you're a bad person. But I do think it's an appropriate analogy and I think we live in a culture that normalizes and encourages normal people to participate in terrible atrocities. The reality is that you have nothing to lose from going vegan and, after a little research and preparation, it doesn't take any extra effort, time, or money.

7

That analogy goes so far above what's happening, at least for the average person.

Do you buy jeans or any clothing produced outside of the US? BAM, you're as bad as the people in the factories abusing local communities and child labor.

Should one attempt to find clothing that is ethical where possible? Then absolutely, and buying a pair of Levi's doesn't make you complicit in enabling child endangerment.

Same with most things, I try my best to already only buy from brands that don't: support genocide through funding or messaging, discriminate based on sex/race/gender, engage in union busting or union restrictive activities, employ under the table for children or for tax/benefit reductions. So many people try to argue from a place of Absolute Moral Supremacy, and the world is just too grey for that.

Reduce the meat you eat, yes, that's a good plan and it's good for the budget and it's good for the planet. But humans HAVE been eating animals for longer than we've walked upright, so going entirely non-consumption just isn't going to happen.

You can make stances as to why it's a good thing, why it might assist you in the long run, but to conflate it with enabling violence towards spouses? That's the kind of rhetoric that gets vegans shouted down and laughed at anytime the name is brought up. If you want to make long lasting change, changing hearts and minds will do that, and your tone/style won't win hearts and minds.

3

First off, I have a tendency to be an asshole in online discussions so I want you to call me out if I'm being unproductive. I also really struggle with tone so please try to interpret what I say generously. This is why I generally only discuss veganism irl. This is a throwaway account I created just because I saw some anti vegan rhetoric and my emotions got the better of me. I'm going to abandon it as soon as we're done talking. Here it goes:

As for you last point, I want you to consider things a vegan's perspective for a second. You're often forced to either package your ideas so meekly and inoffensively that they're easily ignored or express them forcefully and then be called an extremist and mocked.

We slit the throats of 90 billion land animals each year. That's billions of chickens who get theirs beaks cut off without anesthetic and get ammonia burns from living in their own shit. Billions of bulls that are branded, ear tagged, and have their testicles ripped off without anesthetic. Trillions of fish that suffocate to death or freeze to death in ice water.

And the absurdity of it all is that it's easy, cheap, and healthy to simply eat plants. Most people can wash their hands of this entirely any time they want. The idea that none of this is ethical or necessary is an idea that deserves to be presented forcefully. The idea that animals are not property to be owned and exploited is no different from the idea that human beings cannot be property of their masters or their husbands and deserves to be expressed with the same vigor. So is it really that people hate us because we're presenting our message wrong, or do people just hate us because our message is hard to hear?

I agree with most of your other points. Capitalism does force us all to be complicit in terrible things to a degree and I'm sure I absolutely could and should do more to avoid exploitative products. In fact, if you have a list of products that you avoid or a source you consult, I'd like know what it is. And if you're willing to do research on the least explorative brand of jeans, then you really should go vegan. This is an easy win and I guarantee you it's cheaper.

As for the "humans have eaten meat forever" argument. Humans have had slaves forever yet you are clearly against slavery. If you go vegan and prevent a dozen cows from being raised and killed for meat, that's worthwhile regardless of what everyone else does.

2

Buying meat is paying for animals to be killed. Just like buying flour is paying for wheat to be grown.

5
littlecoltreply
lemm.ee

There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Well, difficult.

-1

Veganism isn't difficult. And yeah my tofu exploits people in the third world, but the beef I used to eat was fed soy anyways. You're just removing a one really horrible and unnecessary step from the food supply chain.

3
lemmy.world

Would you refuse to save a child from poverty on the grounds that billions will continue living in poverty?

this is a terrible analogy because at the end of one, you can point to the person being saved. no animals are saved by eating plants.

2
dinkusmannreply
feddit.rocks

Good point. I don't think it changes my argument though. If anything, allowing a creature to come into existence just so that it can be slaughtered is way more fucked up than exploiting an existing person.

2

Couldn't that logic be used against literally any good action? Like giving $100,000 to a malaria charity isn't going to stop malaria. If everyone thought like vegans, the world would be vegan, the climate crisis would almost entirely be averted, rivers swimmable, billions of animal lives saved each year.

If during your supermarket shop, you use vegan recipes instead, you'll be one of those dominos. You could be the systemic change!

10

The issue is how then do you get that systematic change? Governments are going to be extremely hard to convince to do anything as along as people expect to consume animal products en mass. It's going to have to start with individual action until systematic change is palatable

And with systematic action, it's still going to have to involve change in consumption in the end. Factory farming is pretty much the only thing that scales. Want to avoid it? We're going to need to see great drops in production and in turn consumption

The impacts of people taking action do add up. For instance, in Germany there's been declines in per capita meat consumption over the past decade

In 2011, Germans ate 138 pounds of meat each year. Today, it’s 121 pounds — a 12.3 percent decline. And much of that decline took place in the last few years, a time period when grocery sales of plant-based food nearly doubled.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23273338/germany-less-meat-plant-based-vegan-vegetarian-flexitarian

7

Yeah, you should go vegan, and also post depressing memes on 196 that make all the carnists feel guilty. That'll have a bigger impact.

3
debilreply
lemmy.world

I can't personally do anything to stop this.

You can always upvote or share a post like this to spread awaraness and hence maybe make people buy less eggs, or at least make them pause to think before they buy their next eggs.

14

What an unhelpful and antagonistic answer! You must be an utter chore to be around.

7
pyrereply
lemmy.world

"i don't want to see shit like this"

"you can upvote it so more people see shit like this as well"

thanks, very cool

4

Yes, so that maybe some day in the future this horrible shit is no more. Until then, get used to bumping into a thought provoking meme every now. The mild discomfort pales in comparison to the practice itself.

-1

That also wasn't my point at all. I'm making no statement here about veganism. I'm saying 196 isn't a vegan activism community and these bummer posts are obnoxious.

3

That's only in industrial egg production. If you're a local farmer and you need to dispose of the males, your go to quick and painless option might be a potato sack or your hands.

64
lemmy.ml

Industrial egg production is the vast majority of egg production. Using the word only there is perhaps a bit misleading when for instance, 98.2% of US egg production is from factory farms [1]

I'm not sure one can call any of those methods painless either

97
lemmy.ml

The technology for it that currently does not scale to higher egg consumption rather well among other potential problems

They have not yet tried to sell the technology to the US egg industry but, even if they did, the volume it can handle is currently too low for this technology to be used to get rid of chick culling across the board.

[…]

One issue that complicates these efforts is the difficult-to-answer question of when an embryo becomes a chick. Some researchers say day seven is when chick embryos can begin to experience pain. If that’s right, sexing the eggs eight to 10 days after incubation as Respeggt does, and 14 days as Agri-AT does, may still end up inflicting pain on the embryo, which could be trading one animal welfare problem — culling — for another

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22374193/eggs-chickens-animal-welfare-culling

19

Culling unhatched eggs seems less cruel to me than culling <1 day hatchlings. Cute-bias, I know.

Seems to scale somewhat in Europe, talking many many millions of eggs per year too.

At least trying is better than nothing.

Not saying it's perfect, but tech is advancing thought it would be interesting to add that to this thread...

20

That is because it got forbidden. They never would do something that lessens their profit without being forced to do it.

11
alxreply
lemmy.blahaj.zone

maybe, but you can’t feed a population on backyard farms. If everybody wants to eat eggs, there has to be a massive production, and it will be this kind of hell. The only logical way to prevent this is to stop treating animals as resources. We are perfectly able to feed with plants, we know how to get every necessary nutrient. Animal agriculture needs to stop, and if we’re truly leftists, we have to stand against any exploitation. How could we evolve as a society if we continue to use sentient beings as mere resources?

13

Chickens are domesticated to the point that they cannot survive in the wild / have no ecological niche. Without some small scale animal agriculture like backyard chickens they would go extinct, though you could argue it's for the best.

Personally I think small-scale egg farming is not exploitative when the chickens are treated well.

4
infosec.pub

I raised mine to roosters. I got a grey cock, a brown cock, and the biggest is my black cock.

43
CaptDustreply
sh.itjust.works

I had this same question, I learned "meat" chickens are called broiler chickens, they were bred to put on weight rapidly. Egg laying chickens are separate breed and grow slower or won't grow to the size of a broiler. The industry is limited by containment footage, so they wouldn't use a male egg laying chick where they could house a broiler.

75
sh.itjust.works

This is really unfortunate. I see the size of chicken breasts these days, and it's silly. Our society is very wasteful.

7

Wasteful of what, though?

If a particular farm can produce 1000 kg of meat and 500kg of bones/other waste in a year by raising female meat chickens, would it be a waste to devote that farm to raising 500 kg of meat and 400 kg of bones from male egg chickens? In a sense, that's a waste of the farm to produce half as much meat as it can produce through killing chicks.

It's a philosophical difference on what weight to assign to the lives of chicks, adult chickens, other resources including human labor, etc. The lazy shortcut is to maximize return on dollar investment with no regard for any of those moral, ethical, and philosophical considerations, and that's what most of the industry does today, but even if you shift to a new moral framework you'll need to decide how to weight those things.

4

The industry kills them right away because they're not selectively breeded to grow as fast as broilers do. Egg laying chicken have been selectively bred to lay high quantities of eggs instead

Due to modern selective breeding, laying hen strains differ from meat production strains (broilers).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling

As an aside, in both cases, the selective breeding has led to all kinds of health issues for these birds. Broilers can hardly walk due to being fast-growing. Egg laying chickens have all kind of bone health problems due to producing lots of eggs (takes a lot of calcium to produce an egg shell)

50

They're totally different breed designed to lay as much eggs as physically possible compared to broilers that are designed to grow edible muscle as much and as fast as possible.

More info here.

17

Because we like big chicken breasts and we cannot lie.

(Male chickens of egg-laying breeds don't have as much meat, and also the males left together often compete and can try to kill each other. You'd want around a dozen hens per rooster, compared to roughly 1:1 that would come out naturally with eggs, and have enough space for each to call their own).

11

Roosters are very aggressive and territorial and wouldn't just chill with homies.

plus Cock Meat is an awkward marketing phrase for some.

11

they can't risk letting a bunch of angry young men stage an uprising

2
lemmy.world

Don't they gender the eggs now? They just don't hatch the male ones.

25

AS far AS i know, there are experiments with identifying the gender in the egg, but it isn't practically usable on a big scale. I might be wrong, would love if someone knew more about this.

12

I mean shredding males to nuggets is also financially viable.

7

Only in a select few places. It doesn't scale super well among other potential issues

They have not yet tried to sell the technology to the US egg industry but, even if they did, the volume it can handle is currently too low for this technology to be used to get rid of chick culling across the board.

[…]

One issue that complicates these efforts is the difficult-to-answer question of when an embryo becomes a chick. Some researchers say day seven is when chick embryos can begin to experience pain. If that’s right, sexing the eggs eight to 10 days after incubation as Respeggt does, and 14 days as Agri-AT does, may still end up inflicting pain on the embryo, which could be trading one animal welfare problem — culling — for another

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22374193/eggs-chickens-animal-welfare-culling

4

I mean shredding males to nuggets is also financially viable.

2
lemmy.zip

Chicken egg farmers sell eggs.

They don't hatch those eggs.

15

Then they buy them from hatcheries

There is more to hatching an egg than just sitting on them, they need to be fertilized.

3
aussie.zone

In this case it's because if you raised them no-one would want to buy them. The egg laying breeds are a lot tougher and have a lot less meet than the ones bred for meat. They also cost more per amount of meat in the end.

The simple fact is that people don't want to buy that, so it'd just be wasteful to grow them out.

6

Not mostly, mostly consumer preferences. You wouldn't be able to sell them and it'd just be wasteful

1

That's a lie. Old chickens are tough, usually only egg laying breeds get old. "Egg laying" varieties are not tough at basic maturity. Taste better too, than the commercial meat breeds. I'm specifically getting chicken wings from egg laying breeds because the skin is thicker and crisps up better than fast growth meat breeds (run a bar)

0

I suspect the optimized egg laying DNA is different from the huge breasted good tasting chicken meat DNA.

So the male born egg laying DNA chicks are unfortunately not useful to the farmers except for whatever they used the ground up remains for, which I suspect is probably feed or fertilizer.

14

Dual purpose breeds for both egg laying and meat production are poorly optimized at either. So the industry has moved onto specialized breeds that are best at doing one of them.

Plus raising roosters together is much more logistically challenging than raising hens. So they'd need much more space and much more oversight/labor. So rather than devote some resources to raising males of breeds that are good for laying eggs, they'd rather devote those same resources to raising much more meat from females of meat breeds.

7

The hens are bred for laying as much eggs as possible, on the cost of meat production. this means, that it isn't profitable to raise them, just to get some meat, when you can raise other chicken breads to get twice the amount of meat.

5

I am guessing, only based on the fact that the immorally fast growing chickens only make a few more cents, that they are not profitable.

Also I am not sure if roosters can be kept together past a certain point maybe?

4
lemmy.world

Haven't really seen it mentioned here, but for those who don't know, the male chicks are not used for chicken nuggets, but primarily for pet food or plant fertilizer. Also not every country does this practice. Not only that, but eliminating eggs from the human global diet would be unfeasible. This is because eggs are the best source of protein, with only whey protein coming second. They are also the only food with such a high protein content that also contains all essential nutrients. And before someone posts "but da beans!" - no, they're not on the same level. Although beans are a good source of protein, they're neither complete nor are they actually as high as they seem, because the protein they have isn't as bioavailable as that of eggs (speaking of, this is why there's certain practices in vegan diets to gain more nutrients, such as eating leafy greens with an acid to get more iron or soaking pecans to remove the pyric acid in them to absorb the minerals they have better).

Removing eggs from the world diet would actually lead to more ecological harm, even without more ethical chicken rearing practices becoming wider spread, because the amount of farm land needed to ensure proper nutrition for everyone with a mixed vegetable diet would be significantly higher than ensuring there's just enough eggs for everyone.

You don't like baby chicks getting ground up? Don't own carnivorous pets, and buy from more ethical egg farmers. Or if you can, honestly just get your own chicken or 2. You'll have enough eggs with even a single chicken to be honest. Hens don't need much space, males can be eaten once their 4am crowing drives you crazy - although they do keep the hens happy. If you can afford it or don't have very particular diet restrictions, go vegan - you probably don't need as much protein as you think. I used to be vegan until kidney failure, and now with a transplant am back to mostly vegetarian (at least for now until I can go back to being fully vegan). I also used to raise animals for food and farm because I came from a poor family initially. If you don't care, then just consider eating less meat and eggs will ya? Too much ain't good for your health either. Plus it'll taste better if you don't eat it every day. A weekend bbq is way more special when you haven't had meat the prior everyday.

10
lemmy.ml

Land usage is still lower

we show that plant-based replacements for each of the major animal categories in the United States (beef, pork, dairy, poultry, and eggs) can produce twofold to 20-fold more nutritionally similar food per unit cropland. Replacing all animal-based items with plant-based replacement diets can add enough food to feed 350 million additional people, more than the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food loss.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1713820115

Complete proteins matter much less than you'd think. As long as you get the other proteins in at some point in the day you are fine. It doesn't take much for that as just adding rice to beans is enough to make it complete for instance

The bioavaliability of protein metrics are highly misleading when applying them to plant-based foods due to some their assumptions

While multiple strengths characterize the DIAAS, substantial limitations remain, many of which are accentuated in the context of a plant-based dietary pattern. Some of these limitations include a failure to translate differences in nitrogen-to-protein conversion factors between plant- and animal-based foods, limited representation of commonly consumed plant-based foods within the scoring framework, inadequate recognition of the increased digestibility of commonly consumed heat-treated and processed plant-based foods, its formulation centered on fast-growing animal models rather than humans, and a focus on individual isolated foods vs the food matrix. The DIAAS is also increasingly being used out of context where its application could produce erroneous results such as exercise settings. When investigating protein quality, particularly in a plant-based dietary context, the DIAAS should ideally be avoided.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s13668-020-00348-8.pdf

5

During my vegan phase I was counting calories with Cronometer - if you eat unprocessed foods you can count calories using data from food-related institutions. Because of that, the protein data is detailed and is split into the individual amino-acids rather than just saying "you ate 100g of protein today". At the end of the day, my panel was all green (meaning 100% RDA) apart from lysine which was lower. I don't see where my diet was lacking anything crucial protein-wise that necessitates eggs. I can get the micronutrient argument with B12 and dietary cholesterol, but protein?

The thread poster ridicules "da beans" but is infact "muh eggs" themselves. And I have drawn myself as Chad and them as Wojak to prove it

3

Did they use the chickens for something? I guess cat food or something like that would be useful.

3

I'd think they could genetically engineer the egg layers to only produce males in certain conditions (such as when they're incubated at a higher temperature), then only breed males when they need more roosters.

OR, if sex is selected by sperm type (as with humans) artificially inseminate the hens.

I suspect there are dozens of valid technical solutions that are cost effective and would allow them to not shred male chicks.

3
dinkusmannreply
feddit.rocks

Every vegan initially dreams of a world with ethical meat. Then after a few years you realize you actually don't miss meat at all. Please believe me when I say, ethical meat really isn't worth the effort (and often mental gymnastics).

4

For now, to paraphrase Marge Simpson, I can’t afford to choose a diet that has a philosophy I'm sure that yes, unprocessed vegetable matter is cheap if I know where to go, but turning that into a run of meals that doesn't trigger my major depression and suicidality is simply not feasible. Also there's the concern that when I endeavor to do complicated things and fuck up, the cost of the disaster is exponentially greater than the cost of not doing it in the first place.

In short, getting ten pounds of legumes would be a great way for me to ruin ten pounds of legumes and stink up the street block.

I've heard that people who actually know how to cook are able to do wonderful things with vegetable matter. But I do not have access to them, and their pre-processed products at the store are more expensive than meat and eggs.

Sometimes I fantasize about a society in which one's status as a person wasn't contingent on how much money I make for someone else, who is glad to give me a tiny portion of that take, but we are a few generations, and a couple of great filters away from such a pipe dream.

0

I'm lucky in that I'm very content to pour a can of beans on rice and call it a meal. But I can sympathize with your situation. I'm very sorry to hear about your mental health. If I may offer a suggestion, if you can't be 100% vegan, then just be as vegan as you can be. Choose the shirt made from cotton and not wool. Experiment with vegan food a little bit at a time and learn what you like. Buy the fake meat when it goes on sale. Maybe it'll work out, maybe it won't. But if you take it slow and gently then you probably don't have anything to lose.

3

And if we crossbreed chickens with turtles, they might become ninjas or something worse.

1
lemmy.world

I acknowledge that food is cruel. Plants scream when you cut them, you just can't hear it. There are animals that kill their food by suffocation, drowning, spinal damage, being dismembered, impaling, and worst of all, the trauma of being devoured alive. Nature is cruel, humans are no different. We've just centralized the production and distribution.

All that said, I don't think we should make them live in cruel conditions. Let them go outside and walk around while they grow up before you take a pneumatic hammer to their skulls ffs.

2
lemmy.world

"Plants silently 'scream' when you cut them, so it's morally equivalent to shooting a bolt in to the brain of a sentient animal, right? Nature is cruel, so I guess I have no choice but to continue eating this big Mac, right?"

4

I mean if you acknowledge pain, perhaps you also acknowledge nervous systems. something plants don't seem to have.

3
lemmy.world

The amount of pseudoscience surrounding the 'plants tho' debate is just plain infuriating, I just can't with anyone who thinks harvesting wheat is morally equivalent to sticking a bolt through a cows head.

3

I am just think that for a human to be a man or woman, then there is a 50 % chance. I see no reason for it to be different for chickens...

1
lemmy.ml

?

196 is a meme/miscellaneous community. This is a meme ergo fits within the community. Pretty much the only rule of this community is "if you visit the community you must post" besides rules like no transphobia, racism, etc.

33
Daxtron2reply
startrek.website

Don't worry, that person is a "devils advocate" for Israel, Russia, and Trump so their opinion doesn't matter here.

16
lemmy.ml

Oh fun skimming through their comments shows them also dissmising climate change effects too. Comments downplaying a senario of +5°C average temperature increase

11

Of course you don't. You're told your entire life that eating animals is essential and morally permissible. You're constantly told your entire life that animal lives don't matter. Just keep an open mind. Go to watchdominion dot com.

9
lemmy.world

Hm.. chicken nuggets and tenders. Getting chick-fil-a on the way home today.

-4
lemmy.world

So you're telling me that you've never ate at chick-fil-a or that you have and you don't like their chicken with their amazing sauces??! C'mon man... you can't deny it. Its fkin good. Ngl tho, it's a tad overpriced.

-1