• jsomae@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    Livestock have to live through horrible agony, like the worst kind of torture. This means (by biomass, which some people correlate indirectly with moral worth), at least 60% of mammals on Earth undergo horrible torture. Bentham’s Bulldog, “Factory Farming is Literally Torture.

    Excess pigs were roasted to death. Specifically, these pigs were killed by having hot steam enter the barn, at around 150 degrees, leading to them choking, suffocating, and roasting to death. It’s hard to see how an industry that chokes and burns beings to death can be said to be anything other than nightmarish, especially given that pigs are smarter than dogs.

    Ozy Brennan: the subjective experience of animal’s suffering 10/10 intense agony is likely the same as the subjective experience of a human suffering such agony. (~6 paragraph article, well worth a read.)

    • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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      1 day ago

      It says 60% of mammals are livestock, not 60% live in factory farms. I’ve been around cows in normal (non-factory) farms, and they seem fine. Way better off than wild animals that starve, die of disease, freeze to death, etc.

      I have family members that have livestock and if something bad happens to them it’s like someone hurt their child.

      A seal in the 4% living in the wild may be eaten alive by a killer whale or torn to shreds by a great white shark.

      We aren’t going to prevent all animals from suffering, because how could we do that? Kill off all of the predators? Then there would be animal overpopulation and animals dying of starvation and disease.

      Maybe we just focus on ending factory farms because that seems doable. But that effort won’t be successful with obvious hyperbole claiming all livestock is treated like animals in the most horrible factory farms. Some people have actually been to farms that aren’t like that you know.

      People aren’t stupid and if you misrepresent the facts, no one will believe anything else you’re saying no matter how emotional you are when misrepresenting the facts.

      • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml
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        20 hours ago

        Not the person you are replying to, but that is severely underestimating the amount of factory farming. They are the dominant method of production

        Based on the EPA’s definition of a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (i.e factory farm) and USDA census data:

        All fish raised in fish farms were considered to be factory-farmed. More than 98% of hens and pigs. For chickens and turkeys, the share was more than 99%. Cows were a bit more likely to be raised outside in fields, with greater space and freedom. Nonetheless, 75% were still fed in concentrated feeding operations for at least 45 days a year.

        https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-are-factory-farmed

        And even those that are not considered factory farmed don’t always look how one may think, for instance non-factory farmed cows still use plenty of grain feed

        Currently, ‘grass-finished’ beef accounts for less than 1% of the current US supply

        https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401

        None of this is not limited to the US by any means. For instance in the UK:

        There are more than 1,000 US-style mega-farms in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, including some holding as many as a million animals

        https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/18/uk-has-more-than-1000-livestock-mega-farms-investigation-reveals

        Factory farming is unfortunately what scales well. If we want less factory farming we need the industry itself to be smaller. That is no impossible goal. Germany, for instance, has seen its overall meat consumption fall over the last 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

      • jsomae@lemmy.ml
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        24 hours ago

        60 % of mammals are livestock, not 60% live in factory farms

        99% of US farmed animals live in factory farms, according to this random website I just found. I don’t claim to be an expert, though, and worldwide is probably lower than than 99%, but I would bet you that the vast majority of livestock is factory-farmed.

        Agreed though that not all livestock are factory farmed. I should have clarified.

        I’ll point out though that even some non-factory-farmed livestock are likely suffering. Bentham’s Bulldog talks about how hens undergo severe agony:

        Egg-laying hens in conventional farms endure about 400 hours (!!!) of this kind of disabling agony. Remember, this is agony about as bad as the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, unless you’ve had an experience as bad as being severely tortured.

        (emphasis mine.)

        A seal in the 4% living in the wild may be eaten alive by a killer whale or torn to shreds by a great white shark.

        That’s bad, though probably not anywhere near as much agony as being boiled alive for several hours until one’s death. Regardless of whether you feel morally obligated to reduce wild animal suffering, you should admit that (a) from a utilitarian perspective, it’s much easier to reduce factory farm suffering, and (b) from a deontological perspective, factory farming is (collectively) our fault, whereas the food chain isn’t.

        • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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          22 hours ago

          Some website I’ve never heard of before that you term as a “random website” says “We estimate…” a bunch of times without any attempt to describe the methodology used for their estimates.

          So that’s bullshit.

          The problem with the vegan animal rights movement is you’re always going for the moonshot of ending an entire industry instead of even trying to identify and shut down farms with horrible practices or outlaw those practices. To accomplish the goal of ending an industry, you’re fudging numbers and coming out as being dishonest which means no one will trust you and you’ll accomplish nothing. If animals are indeed being boiled alive (I don’t believe you about this because you’re obviously making up shit on other things) then it will continue to happen because you’re trying to accuse an entire industry of doing things that only some in the industry might do.

          If you cared about the boiling animals alive thing (if it actually happens) you’d be trying to get that particular farm shut down, get laws passed to prevent that from happening. But you’re not doing that (you’re not even identifying any particular farms) so that leads me to believe either it’s not happening, or maybe you want it to continue to happen because it somehow helps your vain cause of ending all meat.

          • cows_are_underrated@feddit.org
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            11 hours ago

            I gonna intercept here for a bit. The Problem with “shutting down single farms” is, that this virtually has no effect at all. The entire conventional farming sector is quite fucked up. Everything gets optimised for the highest possible efficiency. This means, that everything that falls out of set norms will be eliminated.

            What I mean by this is, that, as example, piglins that didnt grow that well are simply killed by the farmers, because they can’t be sold. This happens because no farmer will give you the same money for a piglin that has half the weight of the others and is much more likely to get targeted by the rest of the group. Since its illegal to kill piglins without a reason the farmers do it by themselves and then dispose them with the piglins that die when during, or shortly after, birth. Nobody notices, and it is not possible to control this (at least not realistically). The problem is, that this whole system so fucked up that by shutting down single farms you only combat symptoms of the system and not the root cause. By this I do not want to say, that we have to shut down the entire animal farming sector, but that we have to drastically reduce the intensity of the sector to shift production to quality instead of quantity.

            Source for the stuff I said: I grew up on a farm (not with piglins) and had to work in a piglin farm for 4 weeks. I have seen the stuff I said first hand and I devinetively did stuff that I’m now deeply ashamed of retrospect. The stuff I saw also matches the tuff I have heard from other sources.

          • jsomae@lemmy.ml
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            16 hours ago

            You’re right to question the boiling. I was thinking of death by suffocation in heated steam. Boiling is not the technically correct term.

            Here are some more sources that nearly all livestock live in factory farms: [Our World in Data, PETA,]; there are a lot more I can find searching the web but they mostly seem to link back to the Sentience Institute’s research. OWiD’s is based on SI’s research, and I suspect PETA’s claim is based off SI’s as well. More importantly, I haven’t found any claim that the proportion is lower than 90%, or even anyone challenging SI’s figures. Do you have reason to doubt this? And if so, can you find any source? It seems plausible to me just based on the fact that factory farming is vastly more efficient than other methods, and most people aren’t picky about such things. Just as a prior, I would expect that the vast majority of livestock are found in the most efficient types of farms.

            Without any attempt to describe the methodology used for their estimates.

            I mean they literally have their calculations available right there as an easily-viewable google sheets link. And the data source is clearly stated: “these estimates use the 2022 Census of Agriculture and EPA definitions of CAFOs to estimate the number of US farmed land vertebrates who are in CAFOs (“factory farms”).”

            You’d be trying to get that particular farm shut down, get laws passed to prevent that from happening. But you’re not doing that

            Who is not doing that? Me specifically or animal rights people in general? I don’t see why shutting down a particular farm would be very helpful, the scale of the problem is incredibly massive; passing laws would be much more effective. I would like to see laws passed, though, to stop these kinds of abuses. What would make you think I am not interested in that?

      • faintwhenfree@lemmus.org
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        24 hours ago

        And how many percentage of all livestock do you think is “free range” like the cows you describe?

        Estimates vary from 80% to 99% are factory farmed. Which means majority of meat anyone is eating is factory farm. Unless you can verify the source of your meat yourself, you most likely are eating tortured animals.

        So this whole argument that I have friends and family that care for their livestock like it’s their kids is the misrepresentation since, it maybe true that you know someone that is treating animals humane, it doesn’t represent majority.

        Sauce https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-are-factory-farmed

        • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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          22 hours ago

          Estimates with numbers like 80% and 99% are just made up on the spot. I estimate 99% of the world knows that.

      • RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works
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        23 hours ago

        People aren’t stupid and if you misrepresent the facts, no one will believe anything else you’re saying no matter how emotional you are when misrepresenting the facts.

        Like, say, if you were to imply that anything less than the vast overwhelming majority of all meat consumed comes from factory farms? Ignorance is bliss I suppose…

      • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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        22 hours ago

        Do you source 100% of your meat from the one place you visited that one time? How many pounds of meat per year do you eat?

    • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 day ago

      i’ve been wondering for a time whether maybe, blood sacrifices didn’t ever actually end but the factory farmings are just a modern decoy for the actual blood sacrifices …

      • Soulg@ani.social
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        1 day ago

        Lmao the slurs you make up are so cute

        Nobody defends factory farms they’re universally hated

        • EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com
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          21 hours ago

          Nobody defends factory farms they’re universally hated

          But not enough for people to boycott, other than a single-digit % of the population.

        • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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          22 hours ago

          Can you explain how that is a slur? Who is being unfairly oppressed/please describe the victim of the slur?

          • syreus@lemmy.world
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            21 hours ago

            If you are describing omnivores as “carnies” then that would be a slur since most people consider people on the carnivore diet to be unhinged or misinformed.

            Slurs exist to denigrate and diminish ones character.

            Without argument, more vegetarians will help the world, but I don’t think name calling wins hearts and minds.

            • itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              16 hours ago

              you seem misinformed, ‘carnist’ and by extension ‘carnie’ has nothing to do with the carnivore diet, but with carnism:

              Carnism is a concept used in discussions of humanity’s relation to other animals, defined as a prevailing ideology in which people support the use and consumption of animal products, especially meat.[1] Carnism is presented as a dominant belief system supported by a variety of defense mechanisms and mostly unchallenged assumptions.[1][2][3][4]

              • syreus@lemmy.world
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                12 hours ago

                The term carnism was coined by social psychologist and author Melanie Joy in 2001

                I have been hearing this term used to demean meat eaters since the late 80s. I guess they were all misinformed too.

        • CalipherJones@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          Have you heard of the carnivore movement? There are genuinely people saying to stop eating vegetables. It’s probably mostly ragebait, but it exists.

          • remon@ani.social
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            10 hours ago

            Have you heard of the carnivore movement?

            Apart from the 1 guy here on lemmy running his solo community … I never have.

          • syreus@lemmy.world
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            21 hours ago

            It feels like user wasn’t talking about specifically people on the carnivore diet. It came off as a slur against people on the most common diet on earth.

  • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 day ago

    Not saying at all this isn’t a problem, but I hate bullshit statements that are deliberately deceiving.

    These numbers are all by mass. Not actual number. Cows are huge. So are chickens, for birds. How this comic is laid out infers that there’s 60 cows for every 40 of every other mammal, and that isn’t even remotely close to true.

    • silasmariner@programming.dev
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      1 day ago

      I think biomass is probably more important than sheer number for these comparisons. Although I would also accept ‘proportion of world’s arable land being used to sustain them’ as I suspect the ratios come out pretty similar for obvious reasons.

      • Limonene@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        The problem is that the infographic says “of all the mammals on Earth”, which means individuals, not biomass. So the infographic is objectively false.

        • silasmariner@programming.dev
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          Sadly it’s not objectively false, it’s merely vague. There’s no equivocation whereby it actually specifies that the unit of measure is the individual animal, rather than, say, kg. It’s just playing on your assumptions (I did assume biomass fwiw, but who cares).

          But anyway, the point made by sheer fucking biomass imbalance is surely the thing to focus on here? Now that we know what it means, and are in agreement that the wording should be clearer, the statistic is still egregious, isn’t it? Humans have taken far too much of the world for themselves IMO. Vastly diminishing returns for us, devestatingly larger impact on the environment, the more we push it.

          • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
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            1 day ago

            I’m in fact under the impression that the “number must go up” plot was played on us as well. Humans are increasing in quantity ever since the industrial revolution, but instead we should be focusing on the quality of life.

            • silasmariner@programming.dev
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              1 day ago

              Couldn’t agree with you more. In particular, the way most state pensions are structured imply infinite exponential growth. It’s gonna be a tough drug to wean off of.

              • lad@programming.dev
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                16 hours ago

                We’re below reproduction rate in most parts of the world, and likely will fall below in the rest of the world during this century, so we’re already in the ‘find out’ era :(

    • Log in | Sign up@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      On top of that, it’s an annoyingly disproportionate graphic. The cow is much wider than the human so its area is much more than 60% of the area of the graphic.

      The owl might be 3cm high and the hen 6cm high, but 9cm² and 36cm² would be the rough areas, even if it weren’t for the fact that again, the hen picture is much, much wider than the owl.

      With 30% and 70%, the owl should just be a little under half as big as the hen, but it looks like about 1/4 or 1/5 of the size of the hen.

  • KingGimpicus@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    Source?

    Im gonna go out on a limb and say this is udder cowshit. Rats are mammals, as are raccoons, squirrels, and whole fucking masses of little basically unfarmable varmints. You’re telling me that there’s like 12 farm cows for every wild rat on earth?

    Horse. Shit.

    • needanke@feddit.org
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      1 day ago

      The source apperently takes the percentages by biomass, not by count as it seems. So small varmints will not have as much of an impact as a human or cow would.

      • Hellfire103@lemmy.ca
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        1 day ago

        in the comments section. straight up ‘sourcing it’. and by ‘it’, haha, well. let’s justr say. My pnas.

      • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 day ago

        Yeah the reason why biomass is used instead of number of individuals becomes rather clear when you consider the following:

        • what counts as an individual? is an unborn already an individual? (that one’s a heated debate, as you can see by the abortion debate)
        • if unborns are individuals, then at what age are they?
        • if they are from the moment of fertilization, then some animals, like spiders or frogs (idk any mammal examples, but there might be some), might lay a shitload number of eggs, like a million or sth, and it would drive up the number of individuals dramatically. But it would be a bullshit metric, because 99% of these individuals are never gonna survive a single year on earth. so it would be utterly confusing and misleading.

        Going by mass solves all of these problems because it’s more clear and more direct. And on top of that it has the nice side-benefit of also giving an estimate of land usage. Land usage is roughly proportional to biomass, so measuring biomass is meaningful to estimate land usage as well, and that one really matters as that’s the limited resource that you’re trying to distribute among all species on earth.

      • then_three_more@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Which I think is intentionally disingenuous as it massively favours the large mammals over the far higher number of species of smaller mammals.

        For example you’d need over 70 squeal monkeys to make to the biomass of an average American.

        Humans and other great apes can be considered mega fauna, so it doesn’t seem surprising that us and the animals we consume make up a higher percentage of bio mass. Were bigger.

        • SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          I don’t think it’s disingenuous. It represents the total share of resource consumption. If something has 2x the biomass, it consumed 2x the materials needed to produce that biomass (purely in terms of the makeup of the body, that is)

          I don’t think count by itself is very relevant. There’s more bacteria in a glass of water than there are humans in a country, but what does that tell you, exactly?

          Although I do agree the infographic should be changed to specify biomass

          • wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works
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            11 hours ago

            It would be MUCH more than 2x resource consumption, because every action that animal takes requires greater energy to move it around. The energy required to sustain larger lifeforms is significantly greater than the proportion of their mass.

            • yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de
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              9 hours ago

              Not necessarily, many small animals have an utterly insane metabolism making them eat their entire body mass in a couple of days. For example, hummingbirds eat the human equivalent of 150,000 calories per day.

              Larger animals typically cannot afford to spend so much energy - there is just no large food source that has sufficient calory density.

        • ogler@lemmynsfw.com
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          1 day ago

          it’s not “massively favouring” large mammals. it’s just the metric they were interested in. it’s not disingenuous to select this metric. we’re not voting for president of the mammals.

          • then_three_more@lemmy.world
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            1 day ago

            But why that metric? What makes that metric a good metric to use? Was that metric genuinely the best, or was it the best to get the answer they wanted to satisfy whoever was funding the study?

            we’re not voting for president of the mammals.

            No, but in general it’s worth questioning any stats and figures because people we vote for use them to make policy decisions

      • KingGimpicus@sh.itjust.works
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        1 day ago

        Well thats not what the infographic says. It specifies “mammals”, not “mammals by weight”.

        OK so how many tons of cow are accounted for by whales?

        Or does the survey cherry pick land animals too?

        • Evil_Shrubbery@lemmy.zip
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          Why would the infographic be by number?
          (I’m not dissing you, I only ask bcs I never even thought about it being my population, like, what would it compare by population in such a vast group as mammals.)

          • KingGimpicus@sh.itjust.works
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            Okay, so you have 240 rats and one cow in a pen on a farm. How many mammals are in the pen?

            This survey would answer that the pen is 90% cow and 10% rat by weight, therefore there are 9 times as many cows as there are rats.

            In reality land, where the rest of us live, we would say that there are 241 mammals in the pen and only 1 of them is a cow.

            You see why I’m calling bullshit by the way this is worded?

            • Evil_Shrubbery@lemmy.zip
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              Oh, I see now, thx.

              For me (how I perceived the simplified pic) the main difference was that I didn’t think ‘in a pen on a farm’ but ‘on a planet’.
              And your example also screams of ‘it’s not comparable, don’t do that, in what scenario would you need a number 241 that would made sense?’
              (I really can’t think of on answer short of making a Twitch channel for each individual animal.)

              Also that question is leading bcs you ask how many, whereas the pic in the post doesn’t specifically say anything (which is the complaint as I gather - but we deduct the meaning of words from context all the time in all languages, if the ‘by individual’ doesn’t make sense, it’s obviously not that).

              you have 240 rats and one cow in a pen on a farm

              Do you not think the farmer saying he has 241 animals would be made fun of?

              • Evil_Shrubbery@lemmy.zip
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                I’m basically saying that you can see from the context (the numbers) that it’s biomass - the same-ish as below even when/if the first thing you think about doesn’t make sense, you search for the way it does (again, not dissing, but strictly technically it is about literacy, which in this case the pic is at fault for not all of the audience not getting it, and you for not understanding it, an overlap just didn’t happen):

                And yes, since this is pun-ish territory, it’s normal to feel some anger, puns are there worst.

                • KingGimpicus@sh.itjust.works
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                  1 day ago

                  The pic says “of all the mammals on earth”. It’s exactly as i said with the pen, just scaled up to a 3d spherical planetary sized pen. The numbers I’m talking about don’t change.

                  There are WAY more rats than cows. Period. They’re on every continent except Antarctica, and there might be some weird subterranean prehistoric voles huddled around a hydrothermal vent pool or some shit.

                  OP just needs to add a qualifier to the graphic. Anything along the lines of “with respect to biomass” right at the start

                • Log in | Sign up@lemmy.world
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                  1 day ago

                  I was trying to think of some other meaning than ‘drinks dispensary’ for ‘bar’ and I couldn’t think of a sensible reason for putting a bar in your shower for quite a while until I realised metal bar.

  • That Weird Vegan@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    we kill 3T animals a year for food/medicine/clothing/etc. Maybe we should stop?

    edit: sorry, that was quite extreme of me to suggest we don’t kill 3T animals a year.

    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      I’m going to go brutally murder and deep-fry my dog just to cancel out whatever grass you ate today, you extremist vegoon! something something lions something desert island grumble grumble muh canines

      Hope that serves as a warning the next time you feel like expressing an opinion that differs from mine being preachy.

    • Cypher@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      There are too many cultural factors involved to get a majority of people to stop eating meat.

      The best way to reduce the number of livestock killed is to reduce the number of humans.

      • CybranM@feddit.nu
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        1 day ago

        You can shift culture, at least slowly. I think our best shot at significantly reducing animals killed is probably investing more into lab-grown meat

      • scratchee@feddit.uk
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        1 day ago

        If you’re worried about cultural factors, you might find removing any significant percentage of the total population will likely run into even more implacable “cultural factors” than meat reduction would.

        This is regardless of the method of population reduction, save perhaps “slow decline” which seems to be promising atm, but that obviously has the downside that it’ll take a few generations to really have an impact.

        • Cypher@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          I’m not suggesting a method to reduce population its just an observation that there are simply too many people for basically anything to be sustainable.

          • Semjaza@lemmynsfw.com
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            9 hours ago

            It’s not though, seeing that a very large proportion of the world’s population get by, and that about 1/3rd of all food produced for human consumption is wasted each year. (Checked the UN source it’s 19% of food that makes it to people, and 13% of food pre-end point in the supply chain).

            And this is without starting to consider the energy inefficiency of feeding livestock to feed to humans.

            Also an awful lot of the world gets by with much less than US or much of Western Europe does. There’s a long way between our surplus of food and food insecurity.

            • Cypher@lemmy.world
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              9 hours ago

              Food is only one factor, and no one has the right to dictate the diet of others. Food is a core part of culture, and destruction of culture is one of the definitions of genocide.

              Housing, transport, pollution, these are all problems at such collosal scales given the size of the human population that it simply isn’t sustainable.

              The sooner that humanity returns to a more sustainable population the better.

              There’s a long way between our surplus of food and food insecurity.

              Food insecurity is mostly a logistics problem when examined globally. There is no solving that without an increase in energy usage.

              • Semjaza@lemmynsfw.com
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                7 hours ago

                But there’s about enough housing for everyone too… Just that it’s of houses are sitting empty across Europe, North America, and China.

                And lots of the food wasted in those places (minus China) is imported from places with less food security, such as Brazil, India, and Morocco.
                So it’s almost like the energy use and infrastructure is already part of the problem and solving it would take less.

                My point is that Malthusian was never correct, and the problems are ones of distribution. Not number of humans. (And Malthusian worries tend towards genocide naturally, that they’ve been shown consistently to be wrong should make them doubly suspect.)

          • scratchee@feddit.uk
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            1 day ago

            Fair, we certainly won’t see any perfect or even good solutions given human nature and the large population, but I do think we can achieve mediocre success if we really work hard

      • ComradeSharkfucker@lemmy.ml
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        1 day ago

        I don’t think a single vegan is expecting animal exploitation to completely end in their lifetime. This will require a cultural shift that could take so fucking long. Despite that, we all think it is worth doing and being a part of.

  • Bosht@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Title made me think they were doing some 4 levels deep “loss” meme. It almost has it but frame 3 isn’t close.

  • Gustephan@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    I don’t think this is loss. I’m ready to eat crow if I’m proven wrong, but I think the real joke is the amount of time people will spend staring at this image and trying to figure out how it’s loss

  • graycube@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Are pets livestock, or did they miss a category of mammals? In the US there are more dogs than children.