even if farm animals were slaughtered in the most humane and painless of ways, the way they’re treated while they’re alive is still horrifyingly atrocious
this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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if farm animals were slaughtered in the most humane and painless of ways
This sounds like a juxtaposition to me. You cannot slaughter a healthy animal in a humane way. "Slaughter" excludes "humane". I'm not a vegan/vegetarian but it seems to me like this idea that if we just raised happy healthy animals and found a way to kill it nicely then eating meat would be ethically ok. We don't need to eat meat anymore. Any killing of an animal to make it into food is unnecessary and could be avoided. I think it is important that we meat eaters really internalize this. Every time we eat meat we caused absolutely unnecessary suffering for a quick moment of pleasure.
Culling is not cruel or even morally ambiguous. It is morally and ethically right to cull out of control populations of animals for the betterment of the whole. Culling isn't even necessarily for the sick or weak. Sometimes healthy young animals have to be put down for the betterment of the environment. Look into native American hunting practice and land conservation methodology.
Modern farming is very much none of those things though.
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You cannot slaughter a healthy animal in a humane way. “Slaughter” excludes “humane”.
this is just a semantic game. there are human slaughter laws in most of the developed world. maybe all of it. and some in the developing world, too.
Actually my point is exactly that it isn't just semantics. If anything, semantics is used to make pretty euphemisms about what is happening. You are ending the life of a sentient being that feels pain and has feelings/emotions, that has family of one kind or another, for no benefit other than your own pleasure. Whether the death is slow or fast, painful or not, anticipated or not, is very secondary.
A bit off topic but I hate that there are discussions on whether or not it is ethical to farm organs from donor pigs. Like, this at least saves a life (or multiple), while eating meat is absolutely unnecessary nowadays but it still happens all the time.
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Wtf the Meat Industry copied Auschwitz? 💀
And here I thought watching my grandma's pig slaughter was painful by just slicing their throats. Holy shit.
Holocaust survivors like Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz and Alex Hershaft have been trying to point it out but most people don't listen https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_analogy_in_animal_rights
I think it is sorta well-known that the meat industry is doing evil practices, but we just sorta unfortunately roll with it, because it would require to majorly change our lifestyle, most likely not being able to use like 50-70% of family recipes, opting for noticeably pricier free range type of meats, or growing their own chickens (with today's property sizes, it's pretty challenging) etc.
That also includes me too, I was enjoying homemade chickens for a long time, but that have came to a halt. I will definitely try out a 1 month vegetarian challenge, but I don't it would be feasible for me for the rest of my life.
I hope others will be mightier and stronger than I am tho. You are doing noble things, dear vegans and vegetarians.
I'm glad you'll try to stop eating animal products 👍
that said, any time there is systematic injustice, of course the oppressors will have to make "major lifestyle changes" to stop oppressing. That's the whole point, the oppression needs to end
Look I believe in you and remember goodness isn't a place you reach it's a path you walk. If you stray a little that's no reason to stop trying. Everyone has bad days when we don't behave to standards that we want to, the important thing is that we keep trying and do better next time.
Just follow your heart and don't give up :)
Instead, she suggests pigs could be genetically bred to have a less violent reaction to CO2
there's a lot of messed up shit in that article but this is so sinister
did anything ever happen after the videos were released?
There's been more videos about this too since. This article only looked at the US, but this stuff also exists elsewhere. In the UK they simply arrested people filming some of the slaughterhouses using CO2 gas chambers.
Ag-gag laws and similar kinds of stuff are fun. Problems apparently don't exist if you just can't film them :/
did anything ever happen after the videos were released?
What do you mean? The video shows the intended effect, I don't think any regulatory place wants to change anything about that.
Repeating the post body context in the comments: Spy Cams Reveal the Grim Reality of Slaughterhouse Gas Chambers
Also before someone comes here commenting about nitrogen as if it's a perfect painless method, it's got problems too:
Hypoxia produced by N2 and Ar appears to reduce, but not eliminate, aversive responses [escape attempts and gasping] in pigs
[...]
These gases [Nitrogen and Argon] tend to cause more convulsive wing flapping in poultry than CO2 in air mixtures
https://www.avma.org/sites/default/files/2020-02/Guidelines-on-Euthanasia-2020.pdf
I've read the article and damn, this is disturbing af. Isn't this pig killing method basically the same as what nazi used on humans?
...I'll try to reduce the amount of meat in my diet
It's actually pretty easy to. you probably wont have a great time if you try eat meatsm based dishes without the meat because they'll taste lacking and be unbalanced.
Almost all poverty food around the world historically is vegan or at least vegetarian though so there's huge variety to choose from. In chinese food there's Buddhist influenced food like: https://thewoksoflife.com/buddhas-delight-lo-han-jai/, lots of African food is vegetarian or vegan (Ethiopian is stand out here), much south Indian food is and a lot of the stuff with yogurt can be made with soy yoghurt (easy to diy if you like) or cashew cream and a sour note, mexican dishes are easily adaptable too.
Then there are some other hacks like black bean paste and breadcrumbs pressed into patties just works as something you can fry and chuck on a burger (add a few spices to taste), TVP will sub for mince in many saucy dishes where it can absorb the flavour.
You'll have fun, it's an adventure that will teach you so much about how food works around the world!
Also you can start immediately by just ordering a vegan option every time you eat out. You don't have to worry about having the skills or ingredients to do that.
Good luck!
I don't want to learn new things, I'm just going to eat human, thanks
Sorry if anyone you like goes missing
Not only is it carbon-neutral but actually carbon-negative!
If I may give you one simple piece of advice: meat substitutes, at least in my experience, aren't the best. They're not terrible, some are actually even good, but they're not the same and it's noticable. I learned to just embrace veggie food and eat it for what it is, not as something trying to taste like meat, and found those dishes to be much tastier.
Yeah, I figured before reading this would fly like the nitrogen gas executions that some state penal systems are trying. (As revealed on _Last Week Tonight.) Sure enough it's awful.
Right now, my household is drastically reducing meat as we can (which is made easier by the rising prices of meat). Whether we have good tasty fake meat made out of vegetable matter or cultured meat that was never a full animal, I'll be glad for when it's affordable.
I'm recently diagnosed diabetic so this shit just angers me on multiple levels. Good job, body. Now we have to limit carbs, and all the meat is cruel, guess I'll live on fucking greens and cheese.
Ouch 😅 …at least a (non junk food) vegan diet has been shown to improve people’s diabetes symptoms. If you ever go for it, I hope that ends up being the case with you!
Do beans have a lot of carbs? I genuinely don't know.
Yeah, but also fiber, I know some diabetics avoid beans but I don't mind them in chili or whatnot.
I just saw that the american diabetes association has a vegan meal planning guide. Maybe that can help you? =)
https://diabetes.org/food-nutrition/meal-planning/vegan-meal-planning-tips
Typically yes, though there are some that are low enough even for people on keto in small amounts.
What? Jesus man come on!
Oh yeah. The gas dissolves in the mucose around their eyes too, acidifying it like soda water.
Male chickens discarded from hatcheries are thrown live into a blender, "maceration", or gassed.
Don't ask about what happens to the male babies from dairy cow pregnancies for milk, or why veal is so tender.
There are... reasons why people go vegan despite all the vitriol we get thrown our way for daring to not be silent about this nightmare. Slaughterhouse workers get PTSD, even the people most ok with actually doing this shit have their minds recoil and fold in on themselves in the face of the sheer horror.
The vitriol is unreal, you'll get it just for asking for the vegan option at lunch.
You should try Indian food if you haven’t yet.
They have an ungodly amount of vegan and veggie dishes.
If I do ever go vegan, I’m moving to a place with a lot of Indians
Usually I would be one of the people bitching about you shoehorning, but in this case it’s relevant
Thanks for letting us talk about one of the largest ongoing horrors as a treat.
Perhaps in time you would consider not enthusiastically supporting and partaking in it?
Well there are ethical meats out there, right? I have always eaten my grandma's homemade chickens.
I am not sure how you ethically kill someone who doesn't want to die.
On principle I don't object to scavenging, I find it repulsive but just like how if you ate your parents when they died nobody would be hurt per se collecting road kill or something is not unusually cruel. Just creepy and gross given the lack of necessity.
But chickens are bred, the excess are killed young, chickens themselves have been selected for some pretty nasty traits in favour of making them more useful to us. Their ancestors live much longer, lay 10x fewer eggs, and don't grow oversized straining their skeletons. It's like pugs and stuff, we've bred in pain. I doubt your grandmother would give them medical care and comfort aimed at optimising their lives and happiness and only eating them after natural passing.
It's like when people try to say "oh but such and such a slavery was better than this other slavery" or something. Like ok it's probably true idk Roman house slaves had better lives than medieval Russian serfs but it doesn't fundamentally change how unjust the social relation was and how unnecessary that injustice was.
I am not sure how you ethically kill someone who doesn’t want to die.
On principle I don’t object to scavenging, I find it repulsive but just like how if you ate your parents when they died nobody would be hurt per se collecting road kill or something is not unusually cruel. Just creepy and gross given the lack of necessity.
How do you feel about "this animal has to be culled for the good of the ecosystem, and incidentally makes good eating"?
Where I live, Australia, we have the issue that kangaroos have few predators (dingoes and wedge-tailed eagles have to attack in groups to even bring down one (plus both are rare nowadays and prefer to poach farm animals now anyway) and the predators who could have soloed a kangaroo, like thylacoleo, megalania, and quinkana, are all 40000 years extinct, give or take), but they still breed like animals expecting to meet their end to some manner of predator. So in place of the predators that would usually keep their numbers down, hunting quotas are used to keep their numbers at an appropriate level. And as a side effect of this, a large amount of kangaroo meat enters the market, because they're not exactly small animals and they're perfectly edible.
We also have issues with feral pigs, rabbits, cats, camels and horses (among other animals, most of which are either too small to eat and/or have horrible fucking toxins in their flesh) that should not be here at all, given the horrific amount of damage they do to the native ecosystem on account of evolving in a far more competitive environment. The end goal is that they all fucking die, so it's not a totally sustainable business to hunt them for meat, plus the pigs and rabbits are disease-ridden (some of which we gave them in order to achieve the objective of total eradication) and the public has issues with eating cat meat, but we could totally do the same with the camels and horses, at least until the feral populations cease existing.
I always find this kind of thought process fascinating because I'm also australian and as aussies we use much more than our fair share of resources in this planet. We pollute excessively, drive cars that are much too large, have excessively large homes and use ridiculous amounts of energy. I don't belong in our ecosystem, my ancestors were brought over by the english same as the bunnies, cats and foxes. Well half the line anyway, the other half is a more recent transplant from post war Poland.
So uhhh I'm pretty sure I'm fucking terrible for the environment, and odds are you are too. Here's the sticky point though: I actually don't want to die. I would be pretty fucking upset if you told me I had to get culled to preserve ecosystem balance and prevent "overhousing" of bushland or whatever. Now the way I see it, any right I might have to exist unmolested is predicated on the notion that sentient beings' desire to live matters, that while I'm not free to do whatever I like and have some responsibility to try and mitigate the harm to others I cause by being alive I am allowed to be alive.
So I'd ask you: why is it OK to shoot kangaroos but not humans? Why are we special? I think I have a life a little more complex than a kangaroo but I'm just guessing and that's scary anyway because some humans might have more complex lives than me, and some less (e.g. the very young, old, or people with brain injuries) and that seems like a fucked up to all hell calculus to start doing. The kangaroos seem to want to keep being alive, I mean they eat, drink, run away when people start shooting them (the few that jump in front of traffic might be suicidal I'll pay that but we can't know).
Also like, those kangaroos are a way lower ecological load than idk all the animal ag we have and we actually have a way to reduce that load without murder. We can just stop breeding them! A plant based agriculture would be much less hard on the land which would allow us a lot more time to find some other way to manage populations, the same compassion we extend to ourselves! Maybe we could teach them about birth control, or less flippantly maybe we could reduce fertility somehow.
Shit maybe the only way for the next little while is killing but that doesn't mean each death is ethical. They didn't do anything wrong, it's just doing a mass murder to avoid a complete murder and tbh if we think we're being reasonable we ought to be completely comfortable applying the same reasoning to ourselves and I see absolutely nobody signing up eagerly to be population controlled.
Except in rare circumstances, mostly human ones, animals (including humans) don't want to die, and die anyways.
The best we can give them is a ~~fervent (typo)~~ decent life and a humane death. The meat industry is atrocious at this, and carbon dioxide is a terrible idea - particularly when nitrogen is readily available, humane, and cheap.
I'm not sure how you get "Breeding people to kill them in their prime and eat their bodies" from "death is inevitable".
Could you step through your chain of reasoning please?
Well said. People like you make me wish I could follow users on lemmy
You bookmark my profile, show up randomly to just say nice things to me like this so I feel less like I'm begging into a void (￣▽￣)ノ <3
For real though thanks for the kind words. Because controversy generates engagement saying anything against eating meat gets you inundated with replies, like 1 in 40 of which seem remotely good faith.
I've saved your comment, if I'm going through my saved stuff hopefully I'll remember to look at your stuff again and chime in 🤞😊 in the meantime, keep it up!
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It’s always nice when someone knows their place and waits for permission to speak.
Good job!
I ate a steak for dinner from a local farm where the cows get to just walk around and eat all they want, my milk is usually raw, my eggs are local and unwashed, and the freezer is full of deer that spent their lives in the woods until the very last second, and even that is a cleaner death than nature would give.
I’m handling my meat consumption pretty well I would say.
I am hoping to get into some kind of poultry other than chickens soon to have access to meat.
My chicken meat consumption does still come from the store unfortunately.
Couldn't care less about killing and eating animals, but it's pretty fucked how we go about it.
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