this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
521 points (94.8% liked)

News

23406 readers
3278 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Last year, I wrote a great deal about the rise of “ventilation shutdown plus” (VSD+), a method being used to mass kill poultry birds on factory farms by sealing off the airflow inside barns and pumping in extreme heat using industrial-scale heaters, so that the animals die of heatstroke over the course of hours. It is one of the worst forms of cruelty being inflicted on animals in the US food system — the equivalent of roasting animals to death — and it’s been used to kill tens of millions of poultry birds during the current avian flu outbreak.

As of this summer, the most recent period for which data is available, more than 49 million birds, or over 80 percent of the depopulated total, were killed in culls that used VSD+ either alone or in combination with other methods, according to an analysis of USDA data by Gwendolen Reyes-Illg, a veterinary adviser to the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), an animal advocacy nonprofit. These mass killings, or “depopulations,” in the industry’s jargon, are paid for with public dollars through a USDA program that compensates livestock farmers for their losses.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] starman2112@sh.itjust.works 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

So what? We evolved to thrive on a wide variety of diets. I don't judge my homo erectus ancestors for doing what they needed to survive. It's fairly apparent that the person you're replying to is referring to modern society's obsession with producing as much meat as we do, not the concept of eating meat as a whole.

[–] willis936@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It’s fairly apparent that the person you’re replying to is referring to modern society’s obsession with producing as much meat as we do, not the concept of eating meat as a whole.

Complete and utter bullshit. Don't move goalposts because you don't want to concede a point. They explicitly said:

I truly believe that future generations will look back on eating meat as a barbaric mistake

That doesn't even remotely imply there is a quantity of meat consumption that is morally acceptable.

[–] starman2112@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Right, they explicitly said that, and then in the literal next fucking sentence they explicitly said

They'll tell stories about how we caused epidemics and pandemics, wasted valuable resources and land, polluted air, land, and sea, and abided the suffering of billions of animals, all so we could feed our children dinosaur shaped meat nuggets and buy cheap hamburgers that we were too lazy to even get out of our cars to purchase.

It sounds like what they are describing is modern society's obsession with producing as much meat as we do

[–] Hylactor@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It's me; I'm the person. I will clarify my stance. But focusing on my individual personal motivations and disregarding my overarching observations seems a little goal post manipulatey too. Even if my personal motivations fail to meet your scrutiny, the facts I present still remain: we are harming our planet, we are harming animals, and we are harming ourselves by eating meat. Which seems counterproductive at best and ripe for improvement. We can and should advance beyond this unnecessary and harmful indulgence. At the very least, we should consume a very small fraction of what we currently do.

Though I am a vegetarian, I used to eat meat. I acknowledge that it's delicious, and I miss it sometimes. But I don't eat it because I've determined that it would be logically inconsistent of me to do so.

In a vacuum I don't think the "wrongest" part about meat is the moral/ethical implications of killing an animal to eat it. But I'm not talking about subsistence meat consumption here. Because that's not how we eat meat on a human race scale anymore. We churn it out at disgusting scale. Imparting suffering and pollution into the world. We eat it primarily because we like it. And we eat too much of it because we are gluttonous. If your uncle shoots a buck with his bow and arrow, and make some summer sausage of it, I'm not really perturbed by that. I don't love it, but I'm fine with it. Now, if your uncle gasses 10,000 chickens too fat and atrophied to stand, and heaps them into a pile and burns them, because the flock has an outbreak that exists solely due to our habitual over crowding of hellish enclosures, now we've got problems.

That being said, my personal chief concern is environmental. The scale at which we produce meat, and the methods we use to produce it, are completely untenable and are inconsistent with continued life on this planet. In 50 years we will have another 3 billion or so people on the planet, and we're already operating way beyond our means with our current population. We need to change our habits or die.

My third priority is health considerations. This is probably my weakest argument, because eating meat isn't imperically unhealthy. But again, we as humans don't just eat meat from time to time, most of us are eating it every god damned day. We're going to a wing joint and hoovering up 15 chickens worth of wings without even thinking about it. But even if people stop packing their colons with gristle and turning their blood to paste with double bacon cheeseburgers with bacon and a fried egg, they'll find some other garbage to eat. We don't value healthy living in my country which is a whole nother issue beyond the meat thing.

[–] willis936@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I strongly agree on all points. In particular the inhumanity of the way animals are treated in contemporary mass ranches is troubling. DFW's "Consider the Lobster" resonates with me.

The reason I called out the above comment is because slamming to the absolutist rails is regressive. What makes a difference isn't going to the extremes but bringing people into the fold. It is particularly effective to highlight the issues you have and then say "you don't need to stop eating all meat". Most people won't. If your points are well received then a takeaway of "choose to not eat meat more often" is much more impactful rather than "oh well nothing I can do since I am going to continue eating meat".