this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Something needs to die for you to survive, what and how much is up to your individual tolerance for input/output ratio.
Death and suffering is a natural state of being in nature. I can reduce it, but I still need to survive.
I hate fishing. I don't need to fish in my current station. If I did, I would fish.
Exactly. Pretty common misconception about vegan ideology. Vegans don't think people in developing nations have a moral imperative to change their ways because they don't have an alternative.
I don't need to eat meat, so I don't.
I genuinely wasn't aware of this. Have never heard that argument made.
So their position is basically that as soon as you have a sufficiently developed supply chain to buy refrigerated lab-grown or fake meat and get it home before it smells like a rotten protein shake, that's what you should do? But until that happens, killing animals is ok?
Nah, you don't necessarily need lab grown or fake meat to have a healthy delicious varied vegan diet. Legumes like chickpeas, different kinds of beans and lentils as well as soy products can provide enough protein and variety if you put some effort into your cooking. You do need B12 supplements on a vegan diet though, as well as some specific nuts and seeds to cover omega 3. So those can be a problem if there's not a lot of variety in the stores near you and you can't order it online for whatever reason.
I don't understand why milk is avoided. You are not necessarily harming the animal.
Maybe not necessarily the dairy cow herself, but she needs to be pregnant about once per year so she doesn't stop producing milk. That means that the calves inevitably need to be slaughtered (as well as older dairy cows) or else the herd would keep growing year after year.
Not to mention the mothers are distressed that their babies have been taken away from them. It's heartbreaking to hear them screaming when they know another calf has be taken, and won't come back.
Exactly. If people reading this don't see the moral disconnect here, think back to how the US administration handled the southern border and the influx of immigrants a few years ago. Children were taken from families without any regard for keeping said families together. It's devastating no matter the species it happens to.
Never mind the practices that go into ensuring that they become pregnant.
I'm not a vegetarian, but I avoid lactose in general as my bowels get upset if I drink milk in excess. So it's either buttermilk or some vegan alternative.
Oat milk is pretty good. Has its own distinct taste tho, it tastes a bit like a hazelnut flavored milk drink. Almond and soy milk are pretty nasty tho.
I will happily drink any woman's milk if she's offering, but it's actually extremely weird that y'all steal cow milk.
I think it's extremely weird that you would happily drink any woman's milk.
But it is MUCH less weird than drinking bovine lactate and somatic cells.
I've gotten in so many heated debate on that one, as someone who grew up on a dairy farm. People see the gross factory farms in the US and get incredibly offended at me "lying" by claiming that plenty of farms are not like that, and it just comes down to ethical sourcing.
I'm not sure there is anything ethical about forcefully impregnating female cows for our gain.
Just think if we thought doing so was ethical for humans. Rape, the sex slave trade, etc. would be morally acceptable.
They're animals. Artificial insemination is no more or less rape than any other means of reproduction. Bulls don't exactly get consent, or give a shit if the cow is actively resisting for that matter. This is an instance where nature is more fucked up than what happens on farms, not less.
Since animals cannibalize others of their own species, does that mean humans should?
Artificial insemination != forceful insemination (rape).
The former requires consent that removes boundaries (as a result of conscious choice made by a couple that is incapable of reproducing - or not); the latter violates consent that destroys boundaries.
We can't communicate with animals directly so there little to no way we can ever ask for consent to do these things to animals. Any animal insemination is forceful insemination.
Cows can communicate between each other, meaning that there is a possibility that consent is given, if said concept is even comprehensible by cows.
Consent as a concept might not even be necessary for bovines, however. I'm no ethologist, but it appears that one of the main ways cows communicate that they're in heat is by emiting pheromones that bulls then cross-confirm with other signs of estrus like mounting (see Cow Talk namely Chapter 4). Outside of matings seasons, however, the source indicates that wild cows tend to separate themselves according to sex: males with males, and female with females/young. There isn't a tendency here for wild bulls to seek out heifers unless it's the right time of year and heifers communicate that they're looking for sexual interaction. This is a form of consent since some information is communicated indicating a desired behavior from the other party.
Contrast wild cattle with domesticated cattle and it's been shown that bulls tend to be put in isolation from heifers, and that primary introduction between the sexes results in isolated bulls exhibiting "excessive mounting (buller-steer syndrome)" where "injuries to the bull being ridden, decreased weight gain and even death" happen (see Social Behavior in Farm Animals, namely Chapter 5).
If anything, domestication leads to unnatural social patterns that can allow for even more suffering than in nature. Again, I'm not an ethologist so we would need to review the literature more.
We artificially inseminate cows when they are in heat. This argument of heat == consent is nonsense to pad out the argument and make it sound more grey than it is.
Uh, I only eat fake meat once every few weeks and that's just for fun. I can live off of beans and rice just fine and it's literally cheaper than meat lol
Not sure if rice and beans ticks all nutrients. Add potatoes and you're safe.
Oh yeah definitely! Also wheat, oats, nuts, vegetables, mushrooms, etc. I'm just saying, fake meat is a treat and not really necessary at all.
So, like, your trip into town, do you take the short bus right through death valley to get there, or do you walk?
It's about reducing harm imho. So if you can reduce overall harm by cutting one of your friend's arm, do that.
Yup that’s why I still buy clothes from sweatshops with kids working in them.
In all seriousness you’re right, but I believe people have a much lower tolerance than they think they do, but they just avoid thinking about it
Ignorance is bliss, you're absolutely right.
In my experience I need to kill 1 large cow every 2 years to personally survive. That's good, because that's about my personal limit for how long I'm happy to have a cow in my freezer without charging it rent.
I need to kill an absolutely obscene number of avocados, tomatoes and other fruits and vegetable too otherwise that cow will not last me 2 years. Those are the screams that truly bother me. The daily cries of my vegetables going to slaughter.
You see, I'm not even sure if you're:
Gotta applaud you for that
I have been all of those things at various points in my life.
I really struggled with the vegan lifestyle. I can't really eat bread or pasta because they upset my guts, and I hate potatoes. As a result, most of the free kicks in terms of energy density were off the table.
I'm a pretty big guy, and I have a super active job and active hobbies. I ended up having to eat an inhuman amount of roughage to get to the point where I stopped losing weight.
Further still I constantly felt as if I were actively fermenting some kind of wicked brew inside me. I could NOT stop farting. For almost 12 months I lived with this. All the time: In work meetings, in bed with my wife, in my motorcycle gear, in the work truck...farting. Worst of all was in the shower. I'd let a dirty vegan fart rip through sheer necessity, already knowing that the hot water would keep pounding it down and recirculating it through my nostrils but not being able to do anything about it. It was in the shower one day where I burst into tears from chewing my own farts at four o'clock in the morning that I decided I'd had enough.
I then went in completely the opposite direction and ate nothing BUT meat for 3 months. All of my digestive symptoms cleared up, my skin and hair looked amazing and I'd developed the ability to chase down wild game in the dead of night. Overall though I didn't feel all that healthy and I could not stand the sight of another plate of meat so I threw that in the bin too and went back to being an omnivore.
At some point during this whole charade I hooked up with one of my rural neighbours who offered to sell me half a beast. Here's where the 2 year thing comes from. Most people do not realise how much meat is in a cow. It is a fucking shitload.
HALF a cow easily fed me for an entire year when I mixed it with a wide array of vegetables, eggs, nuts and legumes - and I gave a heap of it away!
Therefore, I have had to accept that the cost of sustaining my life on this planet is 0.5 large cows per year. I do my best to return that value or greater to the world every year, and one of my acts of service is making confusing internet posts on forums that I don't remember signing up for.
Factory farming is deplorable and extremely difficult to avoid when you shop at grocery stores. The fact that it has to exist as an industry at all whispers to me that there might just be a few too many billion omnivores on this planet to feed. My own personal problems stem from the fact that I've contributed to that issue: there are now 4 mouths to feed in my house! They don't need as much meat in their diet as I do, but that still increases my household footprint above 0.5 cows per year.
If I look out of the window behind me right now, I can see old Bessy lounging by the dam in a paddock filled with lush green grass. Sometimes birds land on her but she doesn't seem to mind, she's pretty chill like that. She has a deep love of carrots but is unreasonably afraid of whole cabbages. I assume they make her fart.
I've watched Bessy enjoy life for the last 2 years, but come mid spring a loud report will echo off the hillside. I will have to deal with the mess, and the emotional upset of my children who haven't quite mastered the art of passive detachment just yet.
One day when they are old enough, they will have to participate in the butchering if they want to eat meat. I expect I will raise a household of vegetarians and I'm ok with that. They don't mind collecting the chicken's eggs and we usually have at least 4 or 5 who survive their free range life long enough to reproduce. We don't eat a lot of chickens because the maths isn't very good.
That sounds like one hell of a journey.
Also I agree that factory farming is a poison we should eradicate. Everything about that process is as harmful as it can get to everything involved. The animals are in unnecessary pain from disease and lack of space. The ground gets poisoned by the sheer amount of manure if not from chemicals they use to reduce disease. Our antibiotics get less and less effective because we waste them "healing" ill animals that wouldn't have gotten ill in the first place were they not cramped together like that. On top of that the meat usually tastes like shit because the unbalanced diet of the animals (usually manifests as "watery" meat).
My parents and I decided to cut down on meat consumption and instead get less but more expensive meat from a local butcher. Tastes a lot better and surprisingly we don't even want as much meat anymore. Where previously a piece of bread had to have 2 layers of sausage on it to taste like anything now it only takes 1 layer of sausage that's cut thinner.
Meat isn't even the only food affected by those problems, we've had a similar experience with Pasta. The ones bought in stores doesn't sate because it's stretched with cheap ingredients, now we get it from a friend who runs an Italian delicacy store and despite the pasta costing 2x as much we run cheaper because we only need 1/4 to 1/3 as much per person.