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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.
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.
The problem is that the infographic says “of all the mammals on Earth”, which means individuals, not biomass. So the infographic is objectively false.
Intentionally misleading
Misleading you to what conclusion that you wouldn’t otherwise have reached?
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.
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
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.)
Carnies won’t hear it
Lmao the slurs you make up are so cute
Nobody defends factory farms they’re universally hated
Can you explain how that is a slur? Who is being unfairly oppressed/please describe the victim of the slur?
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.
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]
I don’t want to sound all Malthusian but that’s kind of fucked??
more elephants than I expected tbh
It’s by weight
I know. It’s still more elephants than I expected.
End of the Holocene, Last of the Megafauna party.
It’s so fucking surreal to me how much megafauna extinctions have happened in the past 50’000 years.
I don’t think people realise we had like giant land birds (3+ meters tall), megasloths (elephant sized), giant kangaroos roaming round not that long ago.
The garden burned. We were best adapted.
https://www.americanforests.org/article/the-trees-that-miss-the-mammoths/
(In many places, we burnt the garden).
We’ve been shaping ecosystems through fire for so long.
That article’s on my to read list now, thanks.
It’s a good one. Add this too (audio) for the hopium.
Title made me think they were doing some 4 levels deep “loss” meme. It almost has it but frame 3 isn’t close.
Yeah this has my pattern matching in scrambles like I can see it kinda??
Now even things that aren’t loss are loss :c
I just cannot imagine a functioning planet like that tbh, there’s no way cattle industries are something we can keep in the world without killing ourselves slowly.
Are these percentages referring to total biomass or population count?
Has to be biomass, rats alone are etimated to be about as numerous as humans.
Searched for the 96% number and found this study that the graphic is likely based on: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115
By mass.
This is highly depressing to see first thing in the morning.
This is very depressing. I feel science and technology has improved a lot and now people should consume lab grown meat and lab grown milk. Humans should try to reduce their imprint in the world. Human growth has become unsustainable. We produce so much food but still there is hunger. So many kids around the world are dying of hunger. Something has to change. Otherwise I feel the system will collapse.
by number of organisms, biomass,
species count, or something else?edit: ok not species count because there’s only one species of human
That YOU know of
nice, we saved cow, chicken, and pigs from extinction.
A planet used up for specific food cultivation (which left no ecosystem unaffected).
Should have invented (energy to) food replicators before having the hubris to feed 100s of millions.
You fell for the clickbait. When comparin organisms outside mammals by biomass the stydy says.
The sum of the biomass across all taxa on Earth is ≈550 Gt C, of which ≈80% (≈450 Gt C; SI Appendix, Table S2) are plants, dominated by land plants (embryophytes). The second major biomass component is bacteria (≈70 Gt C; SI Appendix, Tables S3–S7), constituting ≈15% of the global biomass. Other groups, in descending order, are fungi, archaea, protists, animals, and viruses, which together account for the remaining <10%.
Today, the biomass of humans (≈0.06 Gt C; SI Appendix, Table S9) and the biomass of livestock (≈0.1 Gt C, dominated by cattle and pigs; SI Appendix, Table S10) far surpass that of wild mammals, which has a mass of ≈0.007 Gt
We dominate the mammals space but we are barely visible in front of the plants, bacterias and fungi on the planet earth.
Oh, no, I knew that (it fascinated me before), this isn’t even the first such study, but mammals are there dominant species, a lot of other biomass is supporting it (eg oxygen, weather, etc).
Does the wild animals include insects? What about single cell animals?
