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.
This is highly depressing to see first thing in the morning.
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.
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.)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
PETA has killed more animals than I have LOL.
tbh their claim of 99% has no source. So it was really kind of pointless of me to include that link.
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
Estimates with numbers like 80% and 99% are just made up on the spot. I estimate 99% of the world knows that.
Carnies won’t hear it
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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
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.
I mean okay
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
Glad we aren’t any of those things then.
You forgot the citation bro.
It’s by biomass.
It’s from this article: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/21/human-race-just-001-of-all-life-but-has-destroyed-over-80-of-wild-mammals-study
Which is discussing this research: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115
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
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.
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.
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
