As a Brit who is old enough to remember the BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy/mad cow disease) epidemic, this is astonishingly reckless and dangerous. This is how you get prion diseases. And you don't necessarily know you have a build-up of deformed prions until decades later.
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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I will never understand how people can treat other creatures like this.
And then still eat them.
Not just evil, it's dangerous. This is how we get prions, like the one that caused Mad Cow Disease and subsequently tainted an entire generation of British people who can't be proven not to be carriers, and forced an enormous cull of affected livestock.
It's good that you won't. Being able to understand this is probably a cognitohazard.
The real prions were the cognito hazards we fell into along the way
Isn't this why mad cow disease was ever a real problem in the first place?
Yep feeding dead cows to cows is the main way that mad cow disease shows up (there is also sometimes atypical mad cow disease where it shows up randomly too)
Well, since MCD is caused by prions, which can occur spontaneously in any healthy animal, it makes sense.
Prions are an amazing thing, the Wikipedia has a whole rabbit hole about them.
They come from naturally occurring protein building blocks, which unlike most proteins, are "flexible", so they can flex into different shapes to join with multiple different proteins.
Well, it turns out sometimes they flex in an unusual way, matching proteins they weren't supposed to, forming a "prion" protein that causes more of the flexible ones join proteins they shouldn't, in a cascading effect.
There is no predicting when this could happen, and no way of preventing it since the flexible building blocks are essential for the normal functioning of many proteins. They just have a certain possibility of catastrophic failure, and that's it.
Yeah, they're really cool!
The meat industry is unethical, water is wet, and the pope is a Catholic. More at 11.
Animal cruelty and reading stuff like this hurts my soul deeply
Fuck sake.
Good lord. So glad my country has strict animal welfare standards for livestock. Uncomfortable that we still import and slaughter pigs from countries without those standards. (And yes, we import-and-slaughter because we don't import pork itself. We do however, allow the import/export of live animals, so international trade buys our sheep for 'breeding', and sell us their pigs for 'NZ-made pork'. I suppose it at least enforces abattoir health standards..?)
I'm extra glad now that I don't eat pork.
To drive down costs, the meat industry relies on practices that can increase the spread of disease, like overcrowding and intensive breeding, which can trigger the need for gruesome practices like feedback to work around the problems it’s created.
Americans eat more animals than practically any other country — around 264 pounds of red and white meat, 280 eggs, 667 pounds of dairy, and around 20.5 pounds of seafood per person each year.
Insane amounts, horrible -mostly unseen- reality to support them.