They are certainly more intelligent than most pets (dogs/cats). They'll figure things out a lot faster and without specific training. For example, I knew one cow that learned how to open gates and doors with their tongue just by watching us open the doors/gates.
Getting a pet to do those sorts of behaviors usually takes treats and a lot of time.
Honestly, the only thing that surprises me about this is the fact that cows have bladder (and bowel?) control.
We have a guy who is able to to open any stall he wants, and he opens the stalls of other horses that he likes. As evidenced by the fact that he would open his own stall and then let a certain set of horses out.
If that wasn't amazing enough... He got into a conflict with another horse (nipping at each other), and he stopped letting that guy out of his stall.
Livestock is... complicated. Horses collectively are unreasonably stupid. But some individuals are amazing. Before I came into contact with them, I thought they all were "Glassy eyed dinosaurs". It's a weird trick because you see people make declarative statements about them, up to and including they aren't able to recognize people. But, when you work with them its absolutely clear they have preferences. They prefer certain riders and certain activities.
Intelligence, and animal intelligence in particular, is a very complicated topic. But I definitely suspect a nontrivial percentage of people who assume animals are dumb are doing it because of the mismatch in non-verbal cues. I for example often find myself completely unable to parse the facial expressions and body language of my cat, yet she is very obviously a reasonably intelligent animal.
Worse, they interpret their gestures and expressions as intentional and human -- the cat is smiling/laughing/frowning. Or the cat's failure to smile/laugh/frown (because it lacks the facial muscles to do so) are an indication of its cold, calculating nature. People interpret other people's expressions rapidly and instinctively and they unconsciously misapply this same skill to animals. Perhaps people on the spectrum understand animals better, a la Temple Grandin, not because they are more like animals, but because they aren't misapplying skills which they lack, mind blindness in this case being better than mind hallucinations.
That's a shame -- cat body language is incredibly expressive! The tail gives away so much, as does the line of the body... It's definitely worth finding a quick guide when you have the time.
It's also interesting to note that domestic cat vocalizations are used primarily to communicate with humans! They notice we use speech, so they do too! And while some meows are common, others vary between cats -- it's like their very own language to talk to their owner.
Just going to share a fascinating thing which at least to me explain that at the core, all beings are one – a conscious, eternal entity with self-awareness that experiences pain and pleasure.
If karma theory is to be believed, evolution happens at the level of individual soul (called jivatma) – gradually a soul takes birth starting from the smallest microorganism and traveling all the way through 84m type of species before becoming a human. It's not exactly linear and one can be stuck in the same type of species for more than once or jump to a human being early.
The difference between a human being and animal is the development of the intellect sheet of the consciousness; however, depending on what was your prominent animal tendency in past births, some humans act as lion, some as cow, some as folks, observable in their behavior. It's also possible to fall back to animal birth depending on your karma as a human or for other reasons.
Can we validate this theory? Yogic methods are there which requires mastering meditation (many enlightened beings have verified it such as Buddha). Scientifically I don't know. Maybe in future it'd be possible.
I believe in a version of this, what i believe to be the obvious version. And that's that reincarnation happens continually, because we don't have singular souls but rather a great many that act in concert. Through interactions with all the people we have ever had, we are influenced, and their souls (composed of all the people they have been influenced by) flows into ours... And then we, in turn, upload ourselves to others in a continual process. Who we are is distributed across many people. This leads to a karmic concern for the future (where our future souls will be in misery or bliss).
Apply falsifiability - think of how somebody might prove it wrong. If you can't even imagine any way whatsoever, no matter how unlikely, then the "theory" tells you nothing about nature and is about as useful as any fantasy or religious belief.
I was using the word "animal" in the sense of "non-human." The point is that non-human intelligence is particularly difficult and complicated for us to discuss, because no member of our species has experienced it and so we can only reason about it through complex experiments and logic. We can't lean on things like personal experience and language in our investigations of it.
"Artificial intelligence" comes to mind even if what I see from that field is more like advanced pre-trained models, incapable of learning the slightest thing from its failures or successes on its own.
edit: ... but it is a very complicated topic even if most of it isn't even close to anything I'd call actual intelligence.
Individual horses can have wonderful personalities. Once I got over how unsettling I find their physical size, I really got to enjoy their character. The ones that like people tend to be very curious and friendly.
Plenty of them don't like people, though. (And many for good reason.)
I used to live on a horse ranch, and honestly, it made me dislike horses in general. There were a few that were
enjoyable to be around (the draft horses, despite being the biggest, were genuinely friendly), but the bulk were just plain jerks.
What really surprised me was how friendly and fun the donkeys were. The one that did coyote patrol for the emus always made hilarious happy-donkey sounds whenever he saw me walk the fence line, and it was nice to be able to work in his paddock and have a buddy to hang out with instead of a sneak horse-nip while you're focused on something else.
> As evidenced by the fact that he would open his own stall and then let a certain set of horses out.
Was the set independent of what stalls they were in? Or were they always in the same stalls? If the latter, it could just be that he knows he can open some stalls more readily than others.
Also animals go through a lot of traumatic episodes as they are being raised. If like 90% of human males where castrated by other males with a power drill without anesthesia in a stage in life where they are obviously able to learn things and interact with other humans I think in general social intelligence would be lower among humans.
E.g.: Our neighbor has two cats. One is very needy and craves our attention. The other rarely acknowledges people and spends its free time in stalking mode.
This was something I didn't believe until my mom and dad recalled what it was like growing up on small farms with a house cow in India.
The they are incredibly intelligent and excellent judges of emotion. They are protective of their owners and can be trained quite well.
This was their rational argument for asking me to not eat beef. I still eat beef, but I can imagine that it's quite distressing when a cow is no different than a pet dog to you. (religious reasons aside)
A couple years ago I went to a party where a lady brought her pet pig-- a fifty pound potbellied pig named Penelope. Penelope had her hooves painted with nail polish and rode in a stroller. I noticed that Penelope was chewing something, and had been since she arrived. I later asked the lady what the pig was chewing. The lady said it's gum.
It was one of the rare times in my life where I was struck dumb and mute. I could only stare at her, and she further offered that it's Trident gum.
After a moment I asked whether Penelope swallows the gum, and the lady said no, never. She chews for an hour or two and then spits it out, presumably after it's lost its flavor.
I felt like everything I knew about life up to that point was wrong.
If we make an ultra long lasting flavor X, I believe a brain perceiving X gum will make that sensation the baseline. Like we forget the sensation of socks or a strongly smelling restaurant after a few minutes.
Pigs are smart but they have extreme "I'm prey" personalities. They will usually only be social around few people or in few circumstances. I think cows are just less shy, maybe because of their size, and they will definitely intimidate animals they don't like.
I once was hiking with friends and met a pig's family (father, mother, two small children). It was surprising (I didn't know that pigs were monogamous, let alone run a family better than half human out there); we kept looking surprised so the male came on front kinda to assert his position on or protect his family. Then he led his family into the woods. A really unusual interaction.
In my experience, dairy cows are much more personable than beeves. Don't feel too guilty about eating beef, but do try to eat happy beef. Grassfed pastured cows are happy cows, and I like my meat to have had a good life.
Now I understand why sacred cow persons "otherised" western cow breeds and okayed foreigners eating their meat. One guy even said (present day) westerners are actually eating aurochs.
> the only thing that surprises me about this is the fact that cows have bladder (and bowel?) control.
Probably not much control; they might notice they need to go about 30 seconds before they really gotta go. If your house cow can't get out by itself there might be a pie by the door and an apologetic gaze.
I've known a cow that was raised in a small pen under a hickory tree; he learned to keep a bathroom corner after the crate trained dog suggested it to him, I think.
We run a goat as part of our dog pack, she's as house trained as I expect from any puppy that age, but she needs to go out often and may have the urge hit suddenly.
I remember reading in Reader's Digest back in the 90s that some people who had the small furry pigs as pets found out they could open the refrigerator even if they taped it shut or put a latch on it. If they put the latch up high, the pig would push a chair over and climb up there! Can't find that article, but here's some supporting evidence of their intelligence:
Pigs are absurdly smart, easily smarter than most dogs. Our pigs growing up were dangerously clever, and would devise elaborate methods to escape and bully us kids.
>Getting a pet to do those sorts of behaviors usually takes treats and a lot of time.
I have a 20 week old shiba inu (regarded as one of the most intelligent - and stubborn - breeds) and he figured out his crate's latch weeks ago. Problem is he just can't open it from the inside, but if he really wants out he will use his tongue on the latch from the inside and try for several minutes to flip it over and move it. Fortunately he's just barely not capable of actually getting it done.
The reason it takes treats and lots of time usually is because usually we have to create motivation because they simply don’t want to do what we’re asking them to. If it’s something they want, like escaping a cage, they will figure it out if it’s possible just by watching how we open it.
Just for fun, some of the behaviors that come to mind (not all the same dog):
- opening cages, even with clips in place to "lock" it a bit
- intentionally looking pitiful/hurt only when they know a certain gullible human is around to get extra attention (access to the couch)
- turning on a light switch that gets the neighbor dog to bark, causing our other dogs to run over and look, then stealing whatever dog bed she wants
And then just in general, dogs and other pets seem really good at training humans if the human allows (most do, you really have to pay attention quite a lot to avoid it).
Not to discredit cows, but I wanted to insert an anecdatum about my cat: she was terrified of leaving my apartment, which I found out once when a friend carried her outside and let the door close. The cat ran to the door and immediately started leaping to try to manipulate the door handle. She failed, of course, but she could only have known how it worked by observation, and I'm sure that with a bit of time and a body physically capable of manipulating a handle she would have gotten it.
I have a weight against my door right now because my cat can open it. And I definitely never intentionally taught him to. He has also gotten through a bungy-corded cabinet door when there was food behind it, opened a Talenti screw top container once to get the leftover ice cream inside. The last one was in the middle of the night so I have no idea how he did it without opposable thumbs, but don't underestimate food motivation in some of these animals. I saw him figure out how to open a screw top large food bin made for holding pet food, one where the screw top was big enough that you don't need thumbs. He just kept trying, over and over and over for hours, until it worked. And that was just the time I saw, not counting however many months before he had done exactly the same thing when I wasn't around. We now need to use a food container with a padlock. He can't get into that. But he still tries. Kicks it onto the floor, pushes it around, pulls at every pawhold that can be pulled on. There's a sort of infinite monkeys thing where they can just try every possible approach until something works.
There was a hacker story about cat getting around the security of an automatic cat feeder, which shows that cats can be very clever when they have the motivation:
The sad part is that farm animals that are smart are a hassle so they are often "discarded". We are basically causing (un)natural selection for stupidity.
At least for food animals, we are almost always selecting based on either flavor or quantity of meat. Very rarely does any other aspect come into play.
Intelligence doesn't really matter. For factory farms, intelligent livestock simply have no chance of escaping.
For small time farms, the animals are generally kept pretty happy anyways, so they've often have no reason to try and escape. There's not a lot of farms inbetween at this point.
Not a farmer, but from my little knowledge, I believe animals are also bred for docility, disease-resistance, and growth rate. The latter two in particular are likely higher priority than flavor. Consumers don't seem to price discriminate on meat flavor very much, so the animal that puts on the pounds the fastest makes the most money.
My family does small scale cattle ranching - we do end up selecting for some combination of dumber and more docile, just by getting rid of any cows that are aggravating ringleaders. Sure they're mostly happy, but the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, or you're weaning, and then it's really nice not having the ones who'll break free and take everyone else with them.
I had a cat that learned to open the door by watching us do. He would jump and grab the door handle with both hands. I guess one can conclude that animal intelligence is rare in all species
our two cats know how to open doors by hooking their claws underneath and pulling. we frequently come home to opened closets with folding doors. the girl cat always wants to go outside and stands up on 2 feet reaching for the latch on our sliding door while meowing and looking at us for assistance.
My rabbits can do this too. The noteworthy thing to me is that they're very good at discerning which side to pull even when encountering new doors. That is, they seem to understand the relationship to the hinge.
Door opening is common, I had several cats do it. One cat learned to vomit in the sandbox. We didn't train him to do it, he somehow understood the general vibe that we don't like him vomiting and decided to go to his sandbox to do it (and picked up on the positive feedback from that).
I wish we knew how to make them do that because he wasn't the only vomiting cat.
I'm a hobbyist dog trainer with my dogs and it's amazing how effective positive reinforcement is. These cows were trained to pee in a location with treat training, same goes for dogs. It's about telling them what you want them to do, reinforcing the behaviors you like and redirecting the ones you dislike. I'm not surprised at all that the cows are capable of this.
The masterclass of clicker training seems to be chickens. [1] From what I've heard of it, they don't understand positive punishment, so you only have positive reinforcement, and they're kinda dense. Still, with treat training they can learn to do some impressive tricks.
I met someone who was a falconer, I suspect that's a general bird trait. Punishing them doesn't compute. They just think you're a jerk.
Apparently with falcons and hawks in particular you can cause them to regress with certain missteps, and have to train them again. He had said something about going out of town and having to start over with some behavioral training they'd worked out before he left.
What? Chickens understand Positive Punishment, same with Negative Reinforcement. If it has a brain and acts in the real world, learning theory applies, and these are the fundamental by which we learn from our interaction with the world. Not understanding that avoid something that hurts you is effectively death.
The reason not to use averse training methods isn't effectiveness in training, punishment can teach a lot and chickens need to stay alive, it's the possible of generalization of negative experiences causes can cause unintended behavioral issues, and shaping would be a much different exercise. I hear this argument a lot of "positive only" trainers, that negative methods are somehow not effective, and it just cannot possibly be true!
> These cows were trained to pee in a location with treat training, same goes for dogs.
I think dogs have an innate need to have their toilet not where they eat. Most dogs we got in the farm where not potty trained, but they always shit/pee in the same place which is a bit far and cornered from where they hang out/eat.
That's cool! There's still drawbacks to keeping cows as house pets, they take up an entire couch even when small and cute, and they never lose the desire to be in your lap.
There's plenty on craigslists, but beware the ones that are "mini" because they're starved while young. They can still be fine pets and healthy animals but they're not worth what a breeding mini can be.
Probably going to get downvoted for this, things like this are why I’m shocked people think veganism is a crazy idea. It’s one thing for people to say it’s expensive or not practical, but I can’t understand how someone can see something like this and not agree there’s at least some merit to the idea.
Well, if you can't understand, I guess you should hear some counterpoints.
1) Quite a lot of time, we will hear from the vegan/vegetarian community that humans were not designed to eat meat, we were only designed to eat in a vegan/vegetarian manner. This is done by selectively ignoring a lot of evidence. This pisses people off when it is caught.
2) We have some real-life study evidence that vegans/vegetarians live less long than people who have some meat. There's a sweet spot on the curve between deep-fried steaks every day and no meat ever. And yet the veggie crowd will over-simplify and say that their diet is the way to go if you want to live longer. Again, it's another case of manipulating the evidence and this also pisses people off when caught.
Basically, the whackadoo types are running (and ruining) public relations for this kind of thing and that isn't working out.
I think people react to veganism as a crazy idea because it's threatening. As an ethical choice, it's passing judgement on their own choices. So their (probably unconscious) reaction is to dismiss it at crazy. That's a defense mechanism to keep them from having to take a hard look at their own choices and the impact on other living beings.
I was a pretty long time vegan and after about a decade as an omnivore, I'm now mostly avoid meat again, though I'm not as strict as I once was.
When I was a serious vegan I'd keep it to myself unless I really had to mention it. But once it came up, people would frequently try to poke holes in my reasoning. It didn't take long before I'd heard all the arguments against.
The only one that really resonated with me was: "I like meat too much, so I don't care to change, even if it's causing harm."
I felt like that was honest, and I could respect it. Everything else felt like someone trying to defend their own ego.
Now, this was all 20 years ago. So maybe people have softened to the idea some. Or at least are used to it enough that they wouldn't have as much the same reactions today.
I agree that the fact it's threatening is the key issue. It was threatening to me for years before I took the leap. People have softened to the idea, but it is still the only stance I hold that I still get either rigorously questioned or belittled for - despite all the commercial and cultural support that continues to grow for it. This doesn't happen for any other political, ethical, or religious stance I hold - such confrontation would be frowned upon under normal circumstances, so there must be a reason for such a trigger. We are now actively weighing the benefits versus the costs of animal agriculture in a different light, because for the first time in our history we are, by in large, no longer reliant on it for our survival as individuals.
A young philosophy YouTuber of all people (Alex O'Connor) was the one who put the ethics of veganism in the right light for me; I had already decreased my animal product consumption to almost nothing with it being the leading cause of deforestation and habitat loss, but was not sold on the animal rights front in the slightest. Alex dismantled all my "egotistical" arguments as you put it. I followed it by reading his recommendation of Peter Signers book 'Animal Liberation' which really nailed the coffin as it were.
I recommend these videos [1][2] and this book [3] whole-heartedly for those who are on the fence, or even far beyond it but would like a "reasoned" view of veganism rather than the shallow arguments to might hear from your hippie friend or 14 year-old newly vegan niece/nephew.
Sorry but have you noticed that there is a vocal minority of vegans who are very aggressive in the way they promote their ideology? For example, "meat is murder" is not exactly the kind of thing you say when you want to start a calm conversation. So perhaps what you perceive as "threatening" is not the idea of not eating meat but the behaviour of some vegans.
No doubt, many vegans are passionate to the point of aggression. However, one can understand that response if you see it through a lens of a vegan. I wouldn't expect the murder of a person to be met with calm conversation for the most part, let alone the consumption of one. For a person who sees the distinction between species as completely arbitrary, having such a conversation would be like yourself having a conversation with a child murderer. Again, I can not recommend the two videos I linked enough. It will give you a great insight to the thinking that often is behind that anger you see in the vocal minority.
That point aside however, when I say threatening I mean that it's not uncommon for myself and others to get accosted by someone simply mentioning that we are vegan. Again, there is no other position I hold where I can say nothing at all (I mean this genuinely - I actively avoid the discussion to the point that I will tell people I won't talk about with them), yet I will still be talked at for 30 minutes about how my ethics are wrong. The only comparison I can give is when people are hurled racist or homophobic comments with no provocation. Even within my close friend group, of whom none are vegan, have noticed it and will swiftly interject when it happens. I mean this with all honestly, if I am at a party with say 10 people who I don't know, at least 1 person there will try to talk at me until I find an excuse to leave. To me, it seems like they hold insecurities about their own ethics and are trying to reason their way out of it, as if I were their therapist. It's happens way to often and is frankly bizarre.
Actually, I don't think it's bizzarre. If you think it's normal that someone who
is vegan will treat ordinary people as murderers because they do something that
nobody else thinks of as "murder", except for the person who is vegan, then it's
normal for others to treat vegans as a target for their (probably clumsy)
philosophising. If we're gonna have a big old culture war, then it's a free for
all and why should only one side get to have fun with it?
The root cause of this is an unwillingness to even acknowledge the existence of
a different point of view in other peoples' heads. The militatnt vegan is
incapable of considering the fact that "meat is murder" is her own opinion and
that it is not shared by everyone around her, in fact she wants to make everyone
around her not just aware of what she thinks, but also agree with her, and if
people dont' agree with her it's because they're not just murderers, they're
also idiots who can't see how they're murderers. The idiot who buttonholes you
to tell you your ideas are wrong similarly can't get it around his big fat head
that some people think different than he does- or he's just a fucking bully who
thinks he's got the majority on his side and can torment you all he likes. I'm
happy to hear your friends stick up for you.
Still, what happens to you is not that strange if you see it in the context of
peoples' inability to consider others' point of view and understand others'
thiking, even just to disagree with it better.
And btw, I think you and the other poster above are doing that too, when you say
that others are "threatened" by your veganism. Perhaps it's just me, but it
sounds more like you two are bragging about your unorthodox ideas that challenge
others' misconceptions, than really trying to understand what's going on in
other peoples' heads.
I grew up very close with animals, and if anything, it made me like and appreciate meat more. Life is a short, vicious circle, and we're omnivores with a place in that circle. My dog will happily kill a deer (yep, I watched in shock as she did it), and eat it, and we're no different. The best thing we can do is care for the animals with respect, and give them good lives. It's far better than nature will ever provide.
> The best thing we can do is care for the animals with respect, and give them good lives.
Until someone gets hungry, and then letting the animal live a good life quickly stops being a concern, even though letting it live will result in exactly 0 nutritional problems (assuming a normal, balanced diet).
> we're no different.
But we are, no? We aren't dogs, right? Or lions, or deer, or doves, or elephants. We are humans, and can recognize moral worth and weigh the ethical concerns of a situation, such as "Is it really worth having this animal suffer and die, when I could instead just eat a veggie burger?"
> vicious circle
When do we get to the part of the circle where 10 billion humans are systematically artificially inseminated, farmed, milked, culled, processed, thumped, skinned, boiled, and cut every year to sate the appetites of pigs, geese, horses, cows, goats, sheep, fish, sharks, whales, etc?
> Until someone gets hungry, and then letting the animal live a good life quickly stops being a concern.
Not to any responsible farmer. Respect in death as well as life.
>"Is it really worth having this animal suffer and die, when I could instead just eat a veggie burger?"
Yes. I have never killed an animal to eat and had it suffer. I kill sheep with a very sharp knife, and they're unconscious from blood loss before they feel the pain. I thank them for their gift once they're gone.
> When do we get to the part of the circle where 10 billion humans are systematically artificially inseminated, farmed, milked, culled, processed, thumped, skinned, boiled, and cut every year to sate the appetites of pigs, geese, horses, cows, goats, sheep, fish, sharks, whales, etc?
Butt killing someone isn't respectful just because we say it is. If I kill you without you feeling any pain, it's hard to say I'm really respecting you, even if I say "respect in death as well".
> I have never killed an animal to eat and had it suffer
Have you ever purchased food that contained animal products? Because there is the overwhelming likelihood that the products came from a factory farm, which tend to be horrific for animals. Also, you say it _is_ worth it. Why? Why not just eat something else that doesn't involve killing an animal that doesn't want to die?
> Whenever they get smart enough to do that to us.
Ah, so not much of a circle is it then? A circle is reciprocal, and what we do to animals most definitely is _not_.
>Butt killing someone isn't respectful just because we say it is. If I kill you without you feeling any pain, it's hard to say I'm really respecting you, even if I say "respect in death as well".
If I had to kill someone in self-defense, I'd also try to make it as humane as possible. There's no point in generating excess suffering.
> Why not just eat something else that doesn't involve killing an animal that doesn't want to die?
Because I am above that animal on the food chain, and it's my natural right to eat it. Why don't you go judge a lion instead?
> Ah, so not much of a circle is it then?
We rot in the dirt eventually, plants eat us, and then herbivores eat those plants. It's a circle.
I think where I get lost is the idea that things like this somehow mean having a chicken in your yard and eating some eggs every week is evil. That there are bad impacts of animal derived products, over-fishing, etc., and that these things aren't great seem like a true thing. But I don't understand how every case of anything to do with animals (including insects, etc.) is bad follows from it. (For another example, a hypothetical closed, renewable energy powered, aquaponic system doesn't strike me as propagating great evil.)
This is accurate. Goats and cows will literally beg you to milk them if you're late doing so. Chickens leave most of their eggs to rot, only incubating very few. Isn't it more disrespectful to the animal to let the food they provide go to waste?
Genuine question: Why do the animals beg you to milk them if they presumably have children? The animals only produce milk after having given birth, right? Are you saying that the animals produce so much milk that they still need to beg to be milked after their young have been nourished?
Or are you saying they only beg for milk in situations in which their young have been taken away?
Cows and Goats will both wean their offspring on their own, and continue to produce milk for years afterwards. Milking them keeps them from getting pregnant again too soon.
Is this true? Everything I'm reading online says that the animals will naturally "dry up" after the young have weened, and it's only by humans manually prolonging the lactation period that animals are able to give milk long after having given birth.
Yes, if you don't milk them after they wean their young, they can dry up. However, modern dairy farms let cows choose when and if they're milked, and the cows choose to be milked twice a day, and seem to really enjoy it.
We should also separate cows from sheep and goats. Where I am (prefer not to disclose exactly) sheep only produce milk between January and September and goats between April and November, the periods that coincide with their birth and weaning periods. And there's only few cows here because of the geography and the climate.
I think that in other places sheep can be milked year-round by having them breed twice in a year, but I'd guess that this would tire the animals and reduce the quality of the milk and probably also the quantity (which is already quite low for sheep and goats). I really doubt goats can be convinced to do things the humans' way. I've never heard of anyone industrially breeding them and I can't imagine goats nicely lining up to be milked by a robot!
A lot of the lore that animal rights folks share about how dairy animals are bred and milked seems to be collected from a very particular kind of practice, focused exclusively on dairy cows in the US, and that isn't as widespread as the animal rights people would have you think. For example, I bet everyone has heard by now how cows are cruelly separated from their calves immediately when the calf is born, but I doubt as many people have heard of Salers cows that will simply not produce any milk unless their calf is touching them. Milk from Salers cows is a legal requirement for some PDO cheeses so while their numbers are few compared to Freisians, Jerseys, etc, they are no less cows and no less dairy cows. They're just the inconvenient kind (for milking, as well as for propagandising).
This is the difference between me in my late teens, early 20s. hardcore vegan, avoided all animal products. Went to lengths to avoid leather, never ate any animal products.
Now, 20 years later, I'm mostly vegetarian, and limit dairy and other animal products. But it doesn't have to be perfect. I'm just trying to consume less of it and lessen my overall impact.
> this somehow mean having a chicken in your yard and eating some eggs every week is evil.
I think this is a great step in the right direction, if you limit your animal product consumption to stuff like this. The problem is that no one really does just this. Loads of people have chickens in their backyard that they love, and they eat the eggs, but then they order a dish with eggs out at a restaurant, or they out for ice cream, and they are still supporting the companies responsible for the terrible treatment of animals that we see in videos of factory farms.
Most vegans probs won't join you in eating the backyard eggs, but most (that I know, at least!) would commend you for limiting your consumption of animal products that don't actively support factory farms.
Vegan here. Not sure if this is exactly what you are hinting at, but I do perceive a significant bias against veganism that is, to my perspective, usually just not based on a solid rational basis.
Veganism has no solid basis in that there is no precedent.
There is for vegetarianism, it was not invented in the nineteenth century, but veganism was. There are no examples of vegan cultures before modern times.
Given that what we do not know about human metabolism is more important than what we do know I am sceptical of some new radical dietary plan.
Is not industrial agriculture generally (and more generally, greed) the actual problem?
I do not think that intensive crop growing is better than pastoral farming of animals for meat. The former is catastrophic to the local environment the latter is all around me and causes very few problems.
I don't have the numbers at my fingertips, but growing animals for meat generally requires growing lots and lots of feed stock. Many multiples more than what it would require to feed humans directly.
So because we want meat, more and more industrial agriculture has to happen to grow that meat. So yeah, I think having an industrial meat industry has more environmental impact, than just having industrial farming in the absence of the industrial meat industry.
It kind of goes both ways, today's factory farmed meat is grown with lots of grains and corn which is grown using artificial fertilizer, that is a lot of waste. But a bit more traditionally and on smaller scales you donn't feed cows much of any grains, that is for people to eat, they eat the alfalfa which is grown in rotation to put nutrients/fertilizer into the soil for free and without any pollution.
So eating meat is both very polluting, but once was and still could be a net positive for agricultural sustainability and reducing fossil fuel pollution.
I'm unsure what kind of an argument you are making. Consider a parallel that could be uttered in the past:
"Letting women vote has no basis in that there is no precedent."
We know enough about nutrition that we could get all the nutrients needed without animal products. If your concern is about health, then how many examples of vegan people living healthy lives into their 90s would be enough to convince you?
I'm not sure that "women should get to vote" is logically the same as "get your B12 from fortified foods like nutritional yeast and you still end up with B12 deficiency" ...
The main finding of this review is that vegetarians develop B12 depletion or deficiency regardless of demographic characteristics, place of residency, age, or type of vegetarian diet. Vegetarians should thus take preventive measures to ensure adequate intake of this vitamin, including regular consumption of supplements containing B12.
This is solved by a trivial supplement. Millions of vegans/vegetarians take them every day, and many hundreds of millions of livestock (which is how most get their B12, as well). If we didn't supplement our livestock with B12, we'd all always be deficient.
A lot of suffering is avoided with a measly supplement.
In the case of B12, yes. B12 deficiencies are a result of modern farming practices, _not_ plant-based diets. This is why our livestock are supplemented with B12.
B12 was originally sourced naturally by consuming things straight from the ground, like foraging and drinking from streams, or eating animals. Modern farming doesn't allow for a lot of this consuming straight from the wilderness though, so B12 needs to be supplemented. Either into animals so we get it via their meat, or directly, via a supplement.
Your B12 is coming from a supplement either way, though. Vegans just ask that you take out the middleman so that they don't need to die for you to get something that is found in a measly pill.
My response was to parody the statement I was responding to, specifically "Veganism has no solid basis in that there is no precedent." I was hoping replacing just one word would have made the connection as clear as possible. Is having no precedent enough of an argument to stop change? It's absurd on its face.
A) There is plenty of precedent for women being involved in the mechanisms of government
B) Governance is a cultural artefact and diet is a matter of biology. I do not think we perfectly understand culture, but we create it as we go along. The requirements of biology are hard, must be met, and very poorly understood. SO lack of precedent for veganism (plenty for vegetarianism) is an issue
Why fight over a minor problem with my example? If you can't come up with a parallel statement that shows the absurdity of the claim, you're not trying hard enough.
Pick a society that didn't have women voting; imagine someone making the argument "there is no precedent", and notice how it's an absurd argument. It sounds like a conservative's wet dream, implying that whenever there is no precedent for something, it meaningfully counts against that thing. Sure, there is no precedent for surviving a guillotine, but are you saying the intention of my sentence wasn't clear?
How about this, at some point in history someone could have said "there is no precedent for the internet" -- would that have been a meaningful "con" against creating it?
As my follow up question goes: "How many examples of vegan people living healthy lives into their 90s would be enough to convince you?"
A good parallel about veganism is from the past: people were saying "hey, we shouldn't have slaves" and slave owners saying "but I like it this way". To ignore the arguments of the anti-slavery movement by gesturing at some generic concern for well being is absurd. If in fact having no slaves meant that the rich families were going to have less money and would eat less-nutritious food is not a good argument for perpetuating slavery.
I feel the lmited factual objections, and they are typically somewhat slight, is the avoidance of problems like osteoporosis. Calcium is just not as bioavailable in plant sources. In like sense we don't synthesise some vitamins well, which is an indication we expect bioavailable sources to be in our diet, genetically speaking.
Probably, insect sources would meet fat soluable needs if a live source was to be chosen.
(Not a vegan, omnivorous, happy to consider lacto-ovo vegetarianism at some poibt)
As a layperson, perhaps I misconstrued bioavailabilty and absorption because both come into effect.
I glad your calcium levels have risen btw, I would wonder if other effects like exercise or overall dietary sufficiency have changed. If for instance you ate less foods with chelating agents you'd alter iron absorption, perhaps your dietary shift removed confounding phylate? And no matter why, it's great they rose.
As a meat eater, I don't think there are too many serious challenges outside of religious beliefs to the ethical arguments for veganism. Mammals at least are clearly as sentient about survival and their kin as we are. But that doesn't mean we can't accept that their suffering is worth it for our gustatory pleasure. I could accept a world where I simply have to pay more for meat to spare the horrors of factory farming, but I have no personal problem with humane-intentioned husbandry and slaughter.
We aren't. We have no ethical justification for why at the species level we get to cage lions for show rather than they us for food, if that's what you mean.
I think there are many compelling arguments for veganism, but the idea that "animals aren't as dumb as we think they are" is not compelling. At least not to me.
I wouldn't downvote you for that opinion, however I am curious to hear your elaboration on what you mean.
I'm not vegan and never will be. I don't think veganism is a crazy idea, I think it's great if that's what a person likes. And I don't see how this story, the context of it, adds substantial merit to veganism.
If you think that how we treat an animal should depend on its IQ, then you are heading down a road that many will find uncomfortable real quick.
I honestly don't see how being smart enough to be potty trained has anything to do with whether something should be eaten. That's a truly bizarre connection to make.
We are part of nature and eat food that is part of a traditional diet or a very close substitute. Whether something is in our traditional diet has only a limited relationship to how intelligent it is. For instance, if it is so intelligent that we have not been able to catch it then it would certainly be excluded from our diet. But in general, that's not why foods are actually excluded in practice, so this is a fringe theory to explain why humans have developed as omnivores that eat meat as well as vegetables.
These are not feedlots, are they? They video would not play for me). These would be herd homes, which are a very different concept. Generally cattle are very happy in "herd homes". Happier than living in the mud.
I can only speak for myself: I feel that killing animals is wrong, I don’t have the self control to stop, and seeing people who do (and are living more ethical lives than me) makes me annoyed and resentful. I would, however, be extremely proud if my children decided to become vegan (and would prepare vegan meals for them).
One huge flaw with the way vegetarianism/veganism is often presented it that it's all or nothing. But that's a fallacy. Eat one less meat meal every week if you want. Have vegan Sundays. Cut out only cows.
Jim - I'm not vegan, but I wanted to be the voice of the universe telling you that you CAN do it. Start by moving to pescatarian or vegetarian for a month, then maybe a year. Then phase out the other stuff.
Bask in the glow of doing something you believe is right, even if it's hard. Be the example for your kids even if it's with baby steps. Cheers.
This argument doesn't work. I mean, people do horrible things to other people too (including killing them). So a dark way of looking at this is that people only care about things they form an attachment to (humans or animals or material objects).
People also get PTSD from killing other people. And militaries go to great lengths to dehumanize the enemy and get soldiers to be more ok with killing other humans.
People still often end up traumatized after doing that killing.
Even at a huge distance, drone pilots end up with PTSD fairly frequently.
So I don't think it's quite so black and white as only caring about things we have attachment to.
Speaking for myself, veganism is a crazy idea because it means putting yourself
in a position where you can't get all the nutrients you need from the food you
eat and you have to take supplements to make up for the deficiencies, otherwise
you risk suffering from malnourishment.
I don't get this kind of choice at all. Nourishment should come from food, not
from supplements. If you don't eat well enough to keep yourself healthy and
fullfill your needs, you should change your diet. If there are ideological
reasons, religious or political reasons, then you should re-examine those. There
is nothing ethical in starving yourself. You will not care for animals and will
not save the environment by not eating enough food.
What's more, being vegan achieves exactly 0 change to the suffering of animals
and to the damage done to the environment. When you go to the supermarket and
find a steak on a shelf, whether you buy it or not makes no difference to the
suffering of the animal or the amount of greenhouse gasses produced to raise it.
You can choose to buy the steak and eat it or not, but you can't change what has
already happened. So whether you eat meat or not is just an empty, symbolic
gesture. It may give you the warm moral fuzzies, but you haven't changed
anything in reality.
The idea of course is that if everyone becomes vegan, then meat production will
stop or decrease. It could work in theory, but in practice the number of
vegetarians and vegans keeps rising but meat production and consumption has been
increasing steadily since the 1960's:
So what is the vegan plan? Whatever it is, it's not making a dent. Everybody has
heard the vegan and vegetarian claims by now: meat is murder, it destroys the
environment, you're a bad person for liking meat, the goalposts keep shifting,
but meat production keeps increasing, never decreasing, no matter what.
It's not just a crazy idea, it's an idea that doesn't work.
I'll be vegan when hell freezes over but I think what you say means you just don't have experience with a food culture where most dishes are plant based, like the Mediterrannean or the Indian cuisine.
I grew up in a Mediterrannean country. If you think about it, that's the one region in the entire world that has so many different nations famous for their cuisines: Spain, Italy, Greece, France, Morocco, Tunisia ... and all of them are 80% technically vegetarian or vegan. Think of Italian cuisine with all its pasta with tomato sauce and olive oil, for example, or the Greek cuisine with all its sea food, the world-famous French cheeses, Moroccan pilafs, etc.
It's funny in a way but most of those are the cuisines of traditionally piss poor people (in Italy, for example, you eat best in the -still- poor South). They say that "need is the mother of invention" and I guess if you can't rely on having steak and fries for breakfast, lunch and dinner, then you really need to get creative if you want to have some pleasure with your food.
It's a real tragedy that in the West being vegan has more or less become synonymous with fake burgers and milk substitutes. There's so many things you can eat that are vegan, or vegetarian, that aren't "fake" anything and don't "substitute" anything, they're just delicious foods in their own right. But then, there are so many people who don't even know how to cook steak and fries to begin with, let alone know how to make a good meal out of some vegetables...
I don’t think you’ve had the right vegan food. Some is disgusting, just like some meat-based foods are (fermented shark?). Some can be made really well. I’m not a vegan but I’ve noticed what’s missing in it a lot of them is umami - savoriness. That’s an easy fix: soy sauce, kombu, tomatoes (paste especially), certain mushrooms, even pure MSG. Things with a lot of glutamate go a long way to making most dishes better, non-vegan ones included.
I think it’s a matter of judicious use. I use a lot of tamari/soy sauce when I cook, but not enough that the food tastes overly of it. It’s the savoriness I want, not the actual flavor. Same with tomato paste - roast it in the oven so it has some color and then mix it in with things like soups. They won’t taste like tomato paste (unless you go overboard with it) but they will have a fuller mouthfeel and feel more satisfying.
When I make stock at home from vegetable trimmings, I put mushrooms and kombu in. In Japanese cooking those two things make a dashi, which is a base stock for a lot of dishes, but even adding them to regular stocks (or if I’m cooking rice or quinoa or something) by tying a sheet of seaweed around some mushrooms and then pulling it out when the cooking is done, it imparts a lot of glutamate but not an overly seaweed-y flavor. I don’t eat the seaweed or the mushrooms usually (dried shiitakes have a texture I don’t like), I use them only to infuse things.
Improving cultivation of more types of mushroom would do a lot.
The range of tastes in mushrooms varies a lot more than most people realise - it drives me crazy how many English words are used for the same mushroom (portobello, white, brown, chestnut, crimini, champignon all refer to agaricus bisporus), and how few mushroom varieties most people have tasted.
Especially as A.bisporus is one of the most boring mushrooms in existence.
As in, there exists no delicious food that doesn't contain animal products?
All of the cultures that have long food histories mostly not based around meat must be miserable? Nobody could possibly enjoy vegetable pad thai or chana masala? French fries?
Indian food is delicious because everything is rich in dairy. I honestly have never had a pad thai without meat. French fries are a compliment to something, I can rarely eat them by themselves.
Well, the intersection of vegan food with meat is the empty set. But I get what you mean if you mean "vegan" food, the stuff that is trying to emulate the taste of meat, albeit poorly. But fruits, vegetables, mushrooms, carbs, they're great.
They're domesticated versions of wild animals that existed long before humans.
And if you let a pig out of its pen, it'll very quickly return to its instinctual lifestyle and absolutely thrive virtually anywhere. Wild pigs have no problem attacking people and even eating them.
Pigs exist just for humans as much as coyotes do. Which is to say, they don't.
All this illustrates is that vegetarianism is ultimately a human social phenomenon. Cute animals doing human-like things get our sympathy and fuel vegan cultural movements, while cockroaches replicating some other human quality are still treated as pests to be removed, without exception.
I'm a farm kid, my wife more so than I. Livestock are stupid: they embody the herd mentality. Individual animals are often very smart. The exceptions are sheep and any poultry.
Sheep are the most blazingly stupid animals I've ever encountered, and I've watched a chicken and a turkey, respectively, run into a corner repeatedly because it didn't see the open field behind it, and literally stare upwards into rain until it inhaled water and drowned.
Cows are quite smart, but also amazingly lazy. They will lie in one spot and starve to death, because they're too lazy to walk to food. However, start milking them, and you'll learn exactly how clever they are. They'll plot for weeks just to fuck with you or put a foot in the bucket.
Horses are worse, because they can kill you easily, so you can't just punch them if they threaten you, like you can with cows. (Punching cows doesn't hurt them, just annoys them enough to leave you alone, sometimes). They're all clever, but nothing matches goats.
Goats are horrifyingly smart, and very very mischievous. They'll plan escapes from any enclosure, will manipulate you by looking cute, and will specifically knock you into muddy patches and bleat in a manner suspiciously like laughter.
Thankfully, my wife's family has Great Pyrenees, one of the best breeds of dog known to man (Seriously, give them a look if you have land and are looking for a dog. Smart, amazingly gentle, and will kill a bear [literally, I've seen it] to protect you, and they got the kids out of trouble if the animals got rowdy.
tl;dr: farm animals are actually really smart, have personalities, and are absolutely wonderful to be around growing up. You learn important life lessons, and a good amount of common sense.
Oh, and Donkeys are better than almost any guard dog. They'll kick the shit out of anything that looks mean, and they can bite the head off a cougar, and will. It's nuts.
I saw dogs very much like this on a mountain in Catalonia (although not in the actual Pyrenees). There was a pack of them wandering around on their own, with whom we crossed paths several times. Once, we saw them with their mistress. It seemed she had basically deployed them as a patrol, going around checking on the sheep without human supervision! They were incredibly friendly towards us, accompanying us along the trail for a while.
They're basically wolves, but instead of hunting, their drive is to protect. They're amazing dogs, incredibly smart, and don't let the cuteness fool you, they can kill most predators without a problem. My dog's grandfather tore the entire throat out of a coyote without breaking a sweat, dragged the corpse home and tossed it under the porch, looking extremely proud of himself. Then he went back to lying down in a field with the lambs and letting them jump on him.
Not a Pyr. They aren't herding dogs, and they're not obedient. They do their job, which is living with and protecting their flock, and you don't tell them how to do it.
I think the dog in the video is a Blue Heeler or similar cattle dog. Also amazing at their jobs, and very, very well-tuned to humans.
The article mentions ammonia, but what about methane?
"Methane is the second-largest contributor to climate change and the majority of methane emissions caused by human activity comes from livestock." [1]
How much methane is emitted by the act of farting, compared to the waste decomposing?
I'm so glad that this research has succeeded, and here, because in a country like New Zealand there is political willpower (pro-environment) and industrial capacity (Fonterra dairy) to get this mooving.
I wish I could give the researcher a pat on the back.
I went on a philosophy bent for some reason years ago and read a bunch of popular philosophy reads to get a sense of what that space is. I still read a lot of philosophy but much less obsessively.
One of the things it did to me was totally transform my perception of animals, humans as animals, our relationships, and cause to me to realize I have no way to verify that animals don’t experience life in a way that’s as meaningful or as sentient as mine. I can’t even properly define those things. I do know that I share a LOT with mammals especially and they appear to possess a lot of the faculties required to feel good, suffer, have temporal awareness, relationships with other animals, etc. That’s not what was taught to me as a child.
I like to go spear fishing and that’s a very changed experience. I learned how to originally so I could be more selective about food and where I harvest it, reduce bycatch, etc. So I cared before to some degree. Now shooting a fish involves this internal struggle of deciding if it’s necessary, if it makes sense, what it means about me, what the experience will be like for the fish. It feels a lot more like killing someone rather than something. I guess that sounds silly.
It’s a rabbit hole. You can go down so far and maybe not turn up much that’s very useful. I think animals aren’t very discernible from human animals in the big picture though. I’m basically a murderer, but the legally sanctioned kind. I bought the license.
I strongly prefer to eat the food I murdered myself now. I occasionally eat farmed meat, but it’s rare and comes from local farms with unscalable high standards. I’m fortunate that I can do that. I mostly do it to appease my family - they feel weird when I skip dishes at special meals.
Anyway I wanted to share that because this thought experiment about the experience of animals in farms means a lot to me lately, and I find it all fascinating but important as well. Like you, I’m increasingly uncomfortable with it.
> It feels a lot more like killing someone rather than something. I guess that sounds silly.
No it does not. Animals and fish are sentient beings with their own set of perceptions, feelings, thoughts, desires, and more.
I do not think there is a defensible way to consume animals if you're living on above-poverty wages in a developed country and don't have some extremely rare health problem.
Killing is problematic (ending a life prematurely), but worse yet is the experience animals have on factory farms.
In your case of hunting your own fish seems less morally problematic than most animal consumption, but I understand the sentiment of "do I really need to eat that when there are plenty of non-sentient alternatives". Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
Nature is brutal. For animals in the wild, survival is a struggle on a whole different level. The predators hunt the young of other species, or their own children starve. The prey are in constant danger, and may be suffering their own shortage of food while trying to avoid being eaten. Species killing other species is the norm. Meanwhile, we hide from death, and we use words like "beef" to forget what it is. But the real wild treats animals much worse than a fishing hook or a conscientious local farm.
This question seems to be becoming more popular lately. My own understanding is that most people are apprehensive about killing because it involves denying another being self-actualisation and/or causing its suffering, both of which by our current understanding seem to require a central nervous system.
I would also add though that if you want to minimize plant death, the best course of action is to stop eating meat and animal products and aim for a plant-based diet, since (by thermodynamics!) the number of plants needed to feed these animals vastly outstrips what would deliver the same amount of nutrients to a human eating them directly.
Actually deeply thinking of plant lifecycle and morality of it all is interesting question. Is it morally more wrong to feed grass to cow after it has shed its seed than to eat fruits and prevent their seeds from spreading? Clearly in first case plant is already dying, but has done it's life and procreation. On other hand later case is clear exploitation comparable to abortion.
Probably should have been clearer about us eating them and shitting in toilet where it ends up in sewage treatment with no chances of ever sprouting...
Plants are alive, in that they reproduce and react to stimulus, but I don't have any reason to suspect them of awareness, feelings, thoughts, or desires. Everyone's morals here will be different, but I have to eat something, and I'll choose to eat a lettuce over a puppy any day.
>brains is clearly the part that enables us humans to have conscious experiences
I didn't claim that plants were conscious, and we have no idea what causes the conscious experience. I personally wouldn't say that all humans actually experience consciousness. So no, no clear connection, and no burden either.
It's pretty easy to find examples outside of the animal kingdom where an organism's lifecycle depends on it being eaten at some point. So far as I know, there are no animals with this property.
Also, it's clearer to us (since we're animals) what sorts of events count as ending another animal's life. Elsewhere it's trickier (Is a field of grass one life, or is a blade of grass one life? How should mycelial networks be counted? etc).
For these reasons, I think it's that applying different logic to different kingdoms is a fairly defensible move.
> It's pretty easy to find examples outside of the animal kingdom where an organism's lifecycle depends on it being eaten at some point. So far as I know, there are no animals with this property.
There are parasites for which being eaten is a part of their life cycle.
Black widow spiders are so named because the females eat their mates. Some spider mothers become food for their own children.
Not to mention that (while not exactly what you asked for, but I think it's important to recognize) carnivores kill other species as a means of survival, and even their own species at times. Wild wolves cannot feed their pups without killing other animals. Death is common in nature.
I thought of the parasite angle later, touche. But the parasite survives the transition between hosts, so it doesn't really count from an "end a life" perspective.
The spider thing is interesting though. It would seem that being eaten by her children is an adaptation, not just an unfortunate consequence of harsh reality. The strategy appears to be: give my nutrients to my offspring, for they carry a part of me, and the survival of that part is more important than the rest.
Given that most of the cells in a human body are passengers, and not cells with human DNA in their nucleus (if they have nuclei at all), it seems pretty likely that something, somewhere, is making the same kind of sacrifice, and using a hungry human as the vehicle. And I think that ending a life on those terms falls in a different domain--both from an ethics perspective, and from a "how adversarial of an environment do you want to create for yourself"-perspective, than mere predation.
Strategies of that sort are more popular outside of the animal kingdom than in it (I think), which I think justifies a "different rules for different things" approach.
> So far as I know, there are no animals with this property.
Ultimately, many grazing animals have their property. If their numbers grow too large from lack of predators, they'll consume all available food and then starve en-masse.
Yeah, but starving en-masse isn't some kind of adaptation that they've developed in order to survive. I was thinking more about plants whose seeds germinate in the digestive tract of an animal.
Anything that bears fruit is relying on an animal to come by and eat that fruit so that the seeds will be spread (either because the pit is hard to eat and the animal drops it, or because the seeds survive the animal's digestive tract).
I'm not enough of a biologist to defend the point especially well, but doesn't it make sense that one would use different types of reasoning to manage relationships with different types of life?
> Anything that bears fruit is relying on an animal to come by and eat that fruit so that the seeds will be spread (either because the pit is hard to eat and the animal drops it, or because the seeds survive the animal's digestive tract).
Right, but that's not the plant, that's the fruit.
If you eat the plant itself, it's dead. Same as a cow.
I'll grant that no plants come to mind that have a niche that requires them to be wholly eaten, but I still think that deciding whether to eat a plant requires totally different logic than deciding whether to eat an animal.
So what's your position? Are you here to suggest that "we shouldn't eat animals" is absurd by equating it to "we shouldn't eat plants?"
Or are you a vegan looking to take it a step further by not eating plants that have to die in order for you to eat them? Because I'd like to hear more about somebody who sincerely held that belief.
I just don't understand how you can have a moral outrage to killing one thing but not another. People seem to do a little dance about plants being not as alive as animals to justify it, but it doesn't make sense to me.
Easy way I found is to admit the fact that we kill a lot of life just to live a day, and hope it was/is/will be worth it.
Else I might kill myself, except it is not allowed by my animal programming, which is out of my control, so I go back to that hoping phase.
I also wonder what’s the problem with killing sentient animals while we also kill fellow humans when “necessary”. We kill for our little ego, so let’s just keep fingers crossed that the sacrifices we force are worth something.
Maybe this is a bit Buddhism centric but it takes off my mental loads a bit.
Feeding animals for slaughter requires an order of magnitude more plant destruction, simply for the fact that you're passing those plants through another trophic level. If humans were to eat the soy that is typically used for feed, that would be a massive amount of harm reduction if you want to take into account the idea of "plant suffering".
Fobo's point wasn't about which parts of the plant get destroyed, it was just about how much food you have to put into a cow in order to get different food out of a cow.
Additionally, lots of factory farmed beef doesn't involve grazing. Instead they feed them corn and soy. Factory farming makes up 98.66% of meat production comes from factory farms. 70.4% of beef comes from factory farms.
And along those lines, what if we only slaughtered animals for food consumption right at the end of their natural life? Would that not satisfy the morality issues?
This is done with dairy cows somewhere (I can't recall) but I found it nice in a sense. They put a lot of care into making the dairy cows' lives good by giving them pasture, caring for them, and having relatively low expectations for their output.
There are still inherent issues with dairy, such as forced impregnation and abduction and murder of the offspring, so it isn't great no matter how you slice it. But if we're to compare dairy operations, this one was pretty good I guess.
When the cows stopped producing much milk, they had some way of pasturing them for around 2 years before they'd then slaughter them for meat. In total the cows had quite long and low pressure lives. The dairy and meat was very expensive, though. I think that's the realistic outcome of treating animals more morally. It isn't cheap.
That’s the issue with vegetarianism. It’s not really about “the animals”, it’s about things that happen to resemble human beings. The more similar to a human, the more “sentience” it has. Isn’t that an odd coincidence? Or perhaps plants are just as sentient as humans but are a different form of life too distant from humans for us to empathize with.
The whole thing is a massive exercise in human myopia.
> Or perhaps plants are just as sentient as humans
The burden of proof is on you. Humans are animals. We have evolution linking us together at a more-recent junction than we do when compared to plants. Humans and animals have brains; brains is the seat of sentience.
Finally; even if you are right that plants are sentient, are you then claiming that there is no difference in the amount of sentience between humans, bees, and plants? If so, should we be indifferent whether I kill you or burn a dandelion?
I think vegetarianism is about a whole lot more than sentience. I aspire to vegetarianism for energy reasons. It comes down to how many square meters of sunlight-on-chlorophyll is required to support a meat eater vs a vegetarian, vs how many are available.
But even if it were just about not wanting to kill things that resemble us--it still doesn't have to be a false elevation of human sentience.
If there are fungi that make decisions, I'd expect them to look out for their fungus-buddies more than they look out for me. If Jupiter's red spot can be asked, I'd expect that it cares more for the weird hexagon on the poles of Saturn than anything going on on earth. Seeking kinship with similar things and being indifferent to alien things is common in biology, and it gets along just fine without sentience in the mix.
I agree and I think your position is legitimate. My issue is just with those vegetarians who claim a universal moral superiority over meat eaters. This attitude is extremely prevalent, just reading the comments here. “No justification”, “no excuse”, on and on.
I think vegetarianism makes a ton of sense from an environmental and ecological point of view, but this has nothing to do with the moral one.
I think the focus on sentience is misplaced. Rather, the value should be rationality, meaning here the ability use one's mind to survive and to live by reason alone. This is valuable to any other rational living creature because rationality allows one to eschew violence and live cooperatively, so it is in the best interest of every rational creature to, at least on a basic level, value and respect the life of any other rational creature. The reason we don't apply and respect rights to animals and plants is because they are incapable of doing the same to us, or even being aware of the concept of 'rights'. You should interact with other forms of life on the highest level it is capable of interacting with you.
> Now shooting a fish involves this internal struggle of deciding if it’s necessary, if it makes sense, what it means about me, what the experience will be like for the fish.
These considerations are originally critical to what it meant to be hunter. Hunters are shepherds to their prey, just from a distance. You can't kill with reckless abandon because of realities like supply and spoilage. Livestock can be seen as a practice of a hunter bringing their prey closer to home so as to protect them from harvest by other hunters.
For me, lab grown meat can't come soon enough. I've reduced my meat consumption, but I really do enjoy it, and don't like the idea of giving it up entirely.
"Lab grown" is a marketing term that actually means "highly-processed plant-based food-like substance created in a factory".
Anybody claiming that highly-processed things like this will have anything close to the same health impact and taste as, say, pasture-raised chickens (like I raise on my farm, https://mulligan.farm) is falling into the same trap that my parents fell into when they became convinced that hydrogenated factory-produced oils were healthier than butter.
> Anybody claiming that highly-processed things like this will have anything close to the same health impact and taste as, say, pasture-raised chickens (like I raise on my farm, https://mulligan.farm)
This reads like a person that is afraid technical advancement will make them obsolete. Your bias is probably too strong to make clear and meaningful arguments.
This is Season 1 of my farm and we literally are turning customers away, despite our meat being ~2x more expensive than grocery store meat.
I am not in the slightest bit afraid of factory/lab-grown meat supplanting my little farm. Regardless of what highly-processed stuff large agribusinesses can or will produce, there will always be a great market for humanely-raised, carefully processed animal protein.
If anything, it's the Tyson and Smithfield Foods of the world that should be worried. Somehow, I don't think any of us are.
> This is Season 1 of my farm and we literally are turning customers away, despite our meat being ~2x more expensive than grocery store meat.
Congrats!
> Regardless of what highly-processed stuff large agribusinesses can or will produce, there will always be a great market for humanely-raised, carefully processed animal protein.
Yep!
> If anything, it's the Tyson and Smithfield Foods of the world that should be worried. Somehow, I don't think any of us are.
Great!
This entire post didn't really negate mine though. Your post ignored huge percentages of (most of?) the categories of meat and food that would/could be replaced by lab grown food. It's like saying "My mercedes is wondeful, nobody would ever want an _electric car!_." There will always be a place for luxury items. People that eat at McDonald's aren't getting luxury items. Low wage workers that eat 4 dollar per pound chicken from Safeway aren't eating luxury items. If lab grown food can (more) ethically service lower income people with a reduced environmental impact, we should go all-in on that advancement. Your farm can and should exist as a commodity for those that want to pay for it.
The goal of my farm is kind of like a principle espoused by Ben Hunt of https://epsilontheory.com. He said we should create a tax regime based on the principle that 1000 millionaires is preferable to 1 billionaire. (The tax regime he recommended is quite interesting to, something along the lines of a progressive, lifetime capital gains tax, say 0% for the first $1mm, then 5% for the next $1mm, all the way up to, say, 95% for everything after $100mm.)
Our regulatory environment encourages a small handful of very powerful and wealthy agribusinesses, with all the attendant horrors from absentee landlordism and contract farming and insanely-scaled slaughtering facilities. It could just as well encourage a distribution of small family farms (this is the case in much of the non-western world).
Part of the way we're encouraging this outcome is building a platform to help small farmers directly market to customers, capturing vastly more of the value of their product.
In any case, I thought your example was interesting with cars. Right now, we sell the equivalent of the Tesla Roadster version of chicken. High-end, pricey, targeted toward an upper-middle class customer. As we gain some small amount of scale, and as we encourage more competitors and build co-operative abattoirs, the prices will come down, and we'll never be cheaper than Tyson or whoever, but we might become not so expensive that it's a real reach.
there's the plant-based stuff and there's the stuff that's genetically indistinguishable from meat. the plant-based stuff is available right now, the genetic meat stuff is not available for ordinary consumption because it's too expensive and there's a few material hurdles
That argument falls apart quite quickly with just a little thought.
The taste and nutritive quality of meat has many, many factors going into it, and the genes are only one tiny part. For example, the amount of omega-3s in pasture-raised chicken, and their ratio to omega-6s is far better in pasture-raised chickens than in chickens subjected to confined animal feeding operations (https://apppa.org/The-Nutrition-of-Pasture-Raised-Chicken-an...).
My chickens are of the same genetics as gross grocery store chickens, but grow more slowly, get more exercise, require zero antibiotics, have vastly different flavour and nutritive quality, than those exact same genetics raised in factory farms.
The experience an animal has walking the earth--what kind of activities they engage in, what they eat, what they breath, what pharmaceuticals they're injected with--all have impact on the value of the meat.
What does "lab grown" even mean in this context? Sure, it's genetically identical, but what "lab environment" produces something like grain-finished meat? Which produces 100% grassfed beef?
It seems insanely simplistic to say that "we can grow this phenotype in the lab, so it'll be exactly the same as one raised in a barn or on a pasture."
Unless these factors are outside the realm of objective reality, we can certainly replicate them in a lab given a sufficiently sophisticated understanding. Obviously, we're not there yet, and realistically, we might never identically reproduce real meat, but that doesn't have to be the goal. We just need something affordable with a sufficiently similar or better nutrient and taste profile.
Edit: None of this will replicate the romantic imagery of raising animals with love on a beautiful farm. There will likely always be a market for that to some extent, but that is realistically not what most of our meat consumption looks like today either.
Well, maybe we can. But, for instance, a cow that is finished entirely on pasture--a good deal of its nutritive quality comes from the grasses it eats. Where does that nutrition come from in lab-grown meats? Do we have a source for the exact same nutrients as are provided by air, water, and sunlight and grow easily and freely all over many otherwise unusable bits of land?
Where are the inputs to the lab coming from?
It seems kind of like the lab-grown meat maximalists are thinking that Dow Chemical and its brethren can synthesize all the nutrients that are required and known in, say, beef, and just break out the beakers and Breaking Bad them into existence.
As a long-time software engineer who has a deep respect for complex systems, this is totally insane to me. That the lab-grown meat maximalists think we can supplant this incredibly complex system, from sun to leaf to calf to beef, in some Dow Chemical-inputs and a factory, is absolutely insane.
Remember, from Black Swan by Taleb: Up until the 60s, scientists didn't think that fiber was a useful part of our diet. This lead to the notion that fruit juice was equivalent to whole fruit, from a dietary perspective. This contributed in some part to the obesity epidemic.
The idea that we already do know exactly what makes meat so tasty and healthy is suspect, the idea that we can replicate this exactly like burning CD-ROMs in a meat CD-Burner is just off the wall.
> It seems insanely simplistic to say that "we can grow this phenotype in the lab, so it'll be exactly the same as one raised in a barn or on a pasture."
Why would it be exactly the same? We can probably make it better. Perfect marbling on every steak.
We've tried many times to make in labs and factories foods that are "better" than what Nature provides, however we've failed every single time, though we have created a number of large agribusinesses and marketing conglomerates that are really skilled at manipulating people and the political process into believing that unhealthy diets are healthy.
If you're right, that would maybe be cool (but then we'd have to consider the inputs to the factories, which'd probably be GMO soybeans and corn, which means we're harming other animals in the process of producing them), but I believe your statement is full of hubris.
We've tried many times to make in labs and factories foods that are "better" than what Nature provides
Wild nature doesn't provide very much that is edible by humans, and certainly not enough to sustain a civilization of humans rather than small bands of roving nomads.
Nature doesn't care about us, it won't help us, if left to its own devices it would eventually wipe humanity out entirely. We're well, well past the point where we can rely on nature to care for itself or for us. If we don't all take the initiative to intervene and engineer nature for its and our benefit, then only those with hubris will do so.
Regarding the hubris of believing that a lab-grown steak could be better than the real thing, physics doesn't change just because it's inside of an animal, so there's no reason to think that we won't eventually be able to engineer muscle tissues that are indistinguishable from real grass-fed beef, given the time and money to do so.
You should read Euell Gibbons, one of the finest Americans to ever live, gourmand, gatherer, hunter, and writer of Stalking the Wild Asparagus. We are all much closer to edible food in our natural surroundings than you are making it seem. Some skill and processing required, but almost all of the American population is a few hours of foraging away from a nutritious meal. Nature provides PLENTY. Efficiently harvesting it in a sustainable way (i.e., stewardship) is the hard part, and what I believe farming should be all about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euell_Gibbons
The US population has almost doubled since he wrote that book.
While I can easily believe most specific individual humans could (with skill and training) get a good meal after a few hours spent foraging if considered separately, that is very different from saying that all of the population can be fed that way at the same time.
The carrying capacity of the planet if we’re “in tune with nature” is the pre-farming population, because even neolithic farms were very unnatural things.
There’s nothing particularly natural about the steaks, burgers, nuggets or fillets you eat: even aside the cooking (quite possibly humanity’s first invention), they are the product of many generations of selective breeding by humans, specifically to maximise value (including taste as a subset) for resource cost (including farmland and time as inputs).
And then you have all of the seasoning, for example KFC’s “secret” herbs and spices are from basically all over the planet.
I support my local farmers that are doing things better. However, I do believe lab and veggie meat is a solution to a volume problem. To quote your own site "Mulligan Farms, LLC is an agricultural concern run by a family of new and dedicated farmers, and has wildly fluctuating resources." Lab meat and even highly processed veggie meat is about feeding the billions. There will also be local farmers who can provide amazing resources no matter what the out come.
> It seems insanely simplistic to say that "we can grow this phenotype in the lab, so it'll be exactly the same as one raised in a barn or on a pasture."
It seems insanely unimaginative to think we can not.
I think what gives me peace at night, ironically, is the knowledge that there is no facet of my or anyone elses modern life that doesn't result in terrible harm to the natural state of the earth. If I quit eating meat its like great and I can pat myself on the back, but they are still going to have slaughterhouses, or clearcut rainforests for soy beans, or strip mine mountains for lithium for all the junk I have to buy to be a productive member of this society so I can afford to keep myself sheltered and fed. I have zero agency at all to do anything about that.
I've let go of feeling like I have to fix it, because solving these institutional issues is ultimately not my job and that sense of worry will never be relieved in my lifetime, because once again I have no personal agency to affect institutional change. Us peasants in history exists to live and die as units of labor beholden to a course charted by people ordained since birth to command that ship, and its a fallacy to ever imagine that we might ourselves take the helm and steer ourselves to logically rational utopian waters free of emotional biases. Instead of fighting upstream fruitlessly until you die restless, chase personal hedonism within your lifetime and means as much as possible.
There are actions you can take to reduce your negative impact.
For example, you reduce your ecological footprint by reducing or eliminating meat from your diet. In the net it reduces the amount of farmland your existence requires--remember, those animals you eat need to eat things too, and plant -> you is a much more efficient way of converting farmland into sustenance than plant -> animal -> you.
I just don't think that my individual choice does anything when the issues are systemic and entrenched at this point. Whether I buy a pack of sausages a week or not, the grocery store orders the same amount of meat and probably just throws away what doesn't sell, the taco truck buys the same amount of meat whether I go there this week or not. What would do something is if literally everyone in the entire city did it, but that's a fantasy.
I still think its a little bit of a fallacy to think that eating vegetables is somehow better or worse for the world. Where did that carrot come from? A field in idaho that was once a forest hosting thousands of deer and other animals, that's since been clearcut and overfertilized to the point where the runoff is polluting the local river systems and making downstream ecosystems barren of life. There is blood on everyone's hands unless you set out to grow your own food on land that's already been scarred by someone else's poor behavior.
These are the realities of the modern world. You can either spend every second of your life stressing out about how it continually gets worse, and promises made decades ago by leaders are always broken in time, or you could try to block it out and take a more stoic approach to it all, and who knows maybe you might actually luck out and fool your brain into feeling legitimately good about things.
I've recently become vegetarian because of this. I just can't justify the lives of these animals just so I can eat a burger that is only 25% better than an impossible burger or whatever.
I'm not against making animals work for us, but I think they need to be treated with a level of dignity that their lives deserve.
Currently find myself in-between meat eating and vegan camps so I don't make a lot of friends with this haha
My perspective on this was shifted significantly by a college course focusing on the (un)sustainability of modern consumption. If you’re interested, check out Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. I still eat meat, and don’t really plan on stopping; but I am now less precious about pets and more respectful of livestock.
I would be interested in a program to breed farm animals to be as stupid as possible. If we could give cows the intelligence level of a chicken, for example, I would feel better about eating them.
Truthfully, I don't think the capacity to suffer hinges on intelligence. Most animals are wired with the capacity for suffering because it's almost always necessary for survival on Earth.
Chickens are pretty stupid. They do stupid survival things like pooping in their feeder, but they'll then refuse to eat their food because they can see it's contaminated. They do stupid social things, like killing other chickens because their pecking order instinct causes them to peck at a visible injury, making said injury worse, but they have social interactions all the same. They go into a panic because of stupid triggers like a rag blowing in the wind and ignore actual dangers like a tractor, but they're definitely able to be scared. They don't learn many verbal commands like a dog could, but they recognize the face of their owner and will do behaviors likely to get them fed. Pigs, some cows, and some goats are as intelligent, emotive, and personable as a family dog, but chickens are just not that smart.
However! They're identifiably, understandably stupid, like a tiny human with terrifically poor planning, observing, memorization, predicting, social, and emoting skills. It's not an alien kind of stupidity like that of a fish, insect, plant, or rock (or computer program). I can say with great confidence that chickens are quite low on the emotion/intelligence spectrum, but in saying that I'm quite confident that they're on it.
If your criteria for animal cruelty is achieving a particular level or capability on the sapience/sentience spectrum, you can feel pretty safe eating chicken. If your criteria is that they not posses intelligence or experience emotions at all, you'd better go pescatarian. Or eat mutton: if sheep have any intelligence at all it's completely undetectable to me.
I grew up on a small farm with chickens. They had plenty of space, were free to roam the yard during the day and yes, they could be vicious and cannibalistic if a chicken was injured.
Have you ever seen free range chickens should something like a lizard runs by? They're pretty vicious on their own without the need for any factory conditions.
Aaaaand your point? Humans are all of these things without being subject to such conditions as jails, war, or enslavement. And while US prisons have no shortage of terrible faults, most prisons around the world are far worse both in their living conditions and their treatment of prisoners, so no idea why you're choosing a single out US prisons specifically.
I assure you, they are not anything like you described. And across breeds, they have wildly different cognitive capacities, so a broad-stroke description like this is inherently inaccurate.
I too have raised chickens and grew up with many people with their own small farms raising chickens along with other animals and speak from my own experience, so please realize that you're assurances are purely anecdotal. Please step outside of your bubble world.
I have no strict dietary limitations, but, for a confluence of reasons, have cut out regular consumption of meat: Climate impact, maintaining healthy weight, avoiding a logey feeling after a heavy meal, food safety, etc. all factor-in to not eating meat regularly.
It started as a lockdown thing, but the way it seems to have helped weight loss was a big incentive to continue.
Joel Salatin, holistic farmer. I think you'll like his work, he's an author and has been on Joe Rogan. Key to his credo is "Respecting the pigness of the pig, and the cowness of the cow". He's almost the precise opposite of a factory farmer.
I've stopped eating beef/mutton since the start of corona. I still eat chicken/fish, but honestly it wasn't that hard. Most restaurants have good chicken/seafood/vegetarian options, and at home you can control what you eat. Give it a try, I can honestly say I feel much better (diet wise and psychologically)
I did the same thing around 2019. We do chicken once or twice a week, and I'll some kind of chicken or turkey cold cuts around for lunch sandwiches. It honestly wasn't very difficult.
Well, let me engage with asking more questions. Would you be ok with killing another human to consume in a non-emergency scenario? If yes, then I understand your confusion. If not, then why not? Is it legal repercussions? Do you worry that you may upset the people who care about them? Is it just an ingrained idea that eating human bad, but eating animal good? Why is eating a human different than eating another animal?
Alternative question around a similar idea: does picking asparagus or cutting down a tree give similar feelings as gutting an animal for meat?
Self preservation. I am uneasy with killing a human for food because that means they could kill me for food. It is unlikely I will be killed by a cow anytime soon.
I didn't mean the specific humans I eat could fight back. I meant that I wouldn't want to live in a world where humans eat humans because it would be dangerous.
That is the extent of my logic and mine personally has not included hypotheticals.
I have the same questions for others actually, because I don’t understand the logic path: if it was shown in the future that “asparagus and trees” and even their separated fruit had bundles of nerves, conditional logic, feelings, intelligence, does that also exclude them from diets now?
So then it is my third question, which I admittedly reworded. Originally I meant to ask if it was a cultural distinction of about what is food, and that seems to be the answer then.
Essentially you seem to have said that what you consider to be ok to eat is what you have already ate or what has been accepted to be eaten by those around you.
I find that conclusion lacking, as it gives no room for future food discovery (unless you are ok with being passive and just eating whatever others tell you is ok to eat).
But back to your question.
> if it was shown in the future that “asparagus and trees” and even their separated fruit had bundles of nerves, conditional logic, feelings, intelligence, does that also exclude them from diets now?
If it is believed that “asparagus and trees” have the ability to feel joy, feel pain, feel compassion, live some definition of a fulfilling life, and that harvesting them effectively killed all of that. Then yes, I think it would certainly bring into question the morality of mass farming, killing, and eating them.
Of course, if it turns out that everything has this capability, from the smallest nanobes to the largest mammals, and we haven't worked out how to produce nutrients at scale, then maybe we just need to throw our hands up and say "whelp, survival of the fittest".
> if it was shown in the future that “asparagus and trees” and even their separated fruit had bundles of nerves, conditional logic, feelings, intelligence, does that also exclude them from diets now?
Shmaybe? It seems pretty reasonable view for me, and my adherence to it would probably depend on availability of alternative food sources. Or perhaps people would dig deeper to identify the discriminating factors that would determine whether or not something can be eaten with clean conscience.
> That is the extent of my logic and mine personally has not included hypotheticals.
My feeling is that it's not the logic path you're having trouble with, but with internalizing the concept of updating your moral framework based on independet reasoning.
Human sense of morality comes partially built-in, and is partially supplied by the groups you live in. That second part is mostly your local culture, i.e. the assumptions and patterns of behavior in the background. Most people tend to keep to those two sources - independent reasoning about morality, while a well-known concept since the times of ancient philosophers, doesn't seem all that common. Perhaps it's because it's difficult - it often hurts thinking about it (i.e. you probably wouldn't be wondering about some chain of reasoning having moral implications if you knew you're in the clear with respect to those implications).
Culture changes pretty slowly - on the order of decades. That humans and animals are the same thing, that animals aren't as dumb as they look, that animals can feel - those are relatively recent scientific insights. What you see as a minority of people using this knowledge and logic to stop eating meat, is the process of our culture slowly updating itself to catch up with the last 200 years of science. It'll take a few more generations, but climate or not, I'd expect that in 100 years people would be mostly vegetarian by cultural pressure. Right now, it's mostly independent reasoners (ok, and some virtue signallers too).
I think most people just weren't aware or simply ignoring it. Similar to how most people would not eat a dog or a cat - they're cute and people know they can be quite smart, so they anthropomorphise them.
Once you push/force them to realize that the difference between a cow and your dog or even a toddler is not that big, they start seeing cows in a completely different light and possibly loose appetite.
A few decades ago, this was less of a problem, as people were close to the animals they were eating later on and it was always a fact that those animals would be eaten at some point. In our times, though, people can live for quite some time without seeing the intermediate steps in meat production or even interact with a cow for extended period of times. Therefore, this realization might come as quite a shock.
There are a variety of ways to rationalize human behaviors, one common one is to assume that while causing suffering is wrong, we're not living in a global horror story because the animals don't actually suffer.
That's easy to believe if you were taught like I was as a very young boy that it's OK to catch a fish with a fishhook and cut it up to eat because fish are not sufficiently intelligent to feel pain, be hurt, be scared, or suffer. It's easy to generalize that incapability of suffering to extend to all animals when you eventually learn that the same kind of big-eyed cow that says moo is what we eat as beef or hamburgers. Supermarkets make the default behavior to take home shrink-wrapped cuts of meat without ever getting the chance to gauge for yourself whether a cow can suffer; humans are shockingly good at not re-evaluating their priors.
How do you rationalize it? There are lots of ways, you've ruled out that they not intelligent, which is a common one. But are they intelligent but not suffering? Is non-human suffering not wrong? Does the wrongness of causing suffering require the victim to have an undetectable soul, which only humans posses? Is "wrongness" scalar, contingent on need, or mitigated by intelligence, or by an intensity of suffering, or by some other factor not considered? Is tradition and the natural order relevant? Is justice preserved by karmic retribution in an afterlife or reincarnation? Are chickens just really evil and deserving of suffering? Are we actually villains in a global horror story?
Urine and poop are only a point source if you have your cows corralled in, such as in a feedlot. If you can get cows to use a 'bathroom' you can treat it as a point source even if you are free-ranging your cows.
This is only partly true. One of the problems with almost all cattle pastures, even those that do 100% pasture-raised beef, is that cattle are like all animals and they have habits and preferences, so they tend to congregate in the same areas day after day, nearby the watering tub or under the shade tree, which means their urine and poop are concentrated in small areas.
One Regenerative Farming's emphasis, widely practiced on many high-quality grassfarms across America, but pioneered on Kiwi sheep farms, is the regular, constant movement of cattle. Whereas most cattle operations in the USA have some kind of rotational grazing system, it tends to be larger pastures with the livestock inside for very long periods of time. What this causes is a large amount of waste of the animal byproducts--the pee and poop are concentrated and oxidized by the sun and wasted. What the Kiwis pioneered was using temporary electrical fencing and frequent movement of the animals, alongside "intensive pasture management" (the management is the intensive part--carefully monitoring the sward and keeping it at optimal growing height--grass growth rates follow a sigmoid function, so if you graze too low, it takes a long time to grow back, but if you graze to just above the peak growth height, it regenerates much more quickly), allows higher stocking rates, lower environment impact, increased carbon sequestration, and many further benefits.
It takes more labour. Sometimes you move the cows daily, occasionally twice a day, rather than once a month or whatever. But the impact on local ecology is fantastic. Plus, if you move chickens into the pasture after the cows, they help spread the manure, eat all the fly larvae out of the patties, and act as a natural antibiotic (who needs a depreciating piece of farm equipment to spread all that poop when you can use appreciating livestock?).
I wonder how rotation grazing plays with training them to go in a particular spot, though. Seems like it would be at cross purposes.
Definitely better if you can manage sheep cows and chickens on the same property, but that may still be beyond some people to manage. Just the fact of rotation would tend to mean that your cows are on average farther up in the watershed than they would be if they have the entire area to themselves all the time, for some of the reasons you already stated.
> Scattered excrement can cause bacterial infections in cows. And when their poop mixes with pee, it creates an environmental hazard: ammonia, which can transform into the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide. Half of the ammonia produced in Europe comes from cattle farms, says study co-author Jan Langbein, an applied ethologist at the Leibniz Institute for Farm Animal Biology. Given the hundreds of millions of dairy cows in the world, he says, studies have shown that capturing 80% of cow urine would lead to a 56% reduction in ammonia emissions.
Walking on grates wearing shoes is one thing. Walking on grates wearing hooves is something else entirely. Especially if you want to make the holes big enough for cow patties - which are high in fiber - to fall through.
In fact there's a device for letting cars through but not cows that is basically a grate you put on the road. The fence comes up to the grate on both sides and there is no gate. You just drive over the grate.
> In a generation or two, children will look with disgust on the aging adults who routinely ignored the horrors of ongoing animal abuse (by consuming meat).
I suppose you can teach disgust, so once it becomes the cultural norm that will probably be true.
But the crux of the matter seems to be that some people just don't have that visceral reaction to the suffering of others. Group 1 (feels compassion for others' suffering) and Group 2 (does not) just talk past each other because of this. I imagine similar discussions happened regarding slavery.
Elsewhere in this thread [0]:
> Would you be ok with killing another human to consume in a non-emergency scenario? If yes, then I understand your confusion. If not, then why not?
> Self preservation. I am uneasy with killing a human for food because that means they could kill me for food. It is unlikely I will be killed by a cow anytime soon. (...) I meant that I wouldn't want to live in a world where humans eat humans because it would be dangerous.
Pure self-preservation. The sensations of other beings are simply not a factor to the responder above and many people think like this (usually justified by the classic "plants could also feel pain for all I know, I don't care either way").
> In a generation or two, children will look with disgust on the aging adults who routinely ignored the horrors of ongoing animal abuse (by consuming meat).
I suspect it's hard to find a place to watch it, but "Carnage" addresses this very point. I highly recommend it for meat eaters and non-meat eaters alike.
> Carnage is a 2017 mockumentary directed by Simon Amstell. Set in the year 2067, when veganism is the norm, the film looks back on meat-eating today.
As they say, science fiction doesn’t predict the future, it just communicates what present people think about the future.
The “future generations will look back at us in horror” and “we’re on the Right Side of history” are both nonsensical positions that have zero historical basis and function more as a religious eschatology than as a serious scientific prediction.
I must be misunderstanding you, because your claim sounds absurd to me.
You seem to be claiming that making a prediction about the future is inappropriate. I don't understand what "zero historical basis" even means.
A prediction is just that -- a claim of what the person uttering it expects will happen in the future. The prediction is falsifiable (could turn out to be false). So what's the problem with making a claim about how you think the future will be?
No, I am claiming that the narrative of ever-marching progress (of which vegetarianism is a often participant) is just a narrative and not a serious prediction based on analysis and data.
You can see a similar thing with religion. The progress narrative says we will outgrow these supposedly outdated myths, while the actual data indicates that religion is growing, largely due to birth rates.
You are claiming that people who make predictions of this sort are not making a "serious" prediction. And I am claiming that you don't get to say that.
You may dismiss their predictions; you may feel they are worthless to listen to; you might have an explanation for why we shouldn't take such predictions seriously. I can agree with all that. But none of this makes my claim any less of a prediction.
My claim is that in the future people will have a certain point of view. That is what a prediction is.
I am confident you know that predictions can be false, and calling something a prediction doesn't mean "it will come true" or "it is more likely to come true than not".
I'm just puzzled about your use of the word "prediction" -- perhaps we mean different things.
No futuristic films have come true when they try to predict society changing - ideas and beliefs are passed on from generation to generation. Food is much more sticky since meat-eating humans are likely to feed their children meat. When they come of age to understand things like veganism (beyond "vegans choose not to eat meat"), the fact that they've been eating meat for years will play a large part in whether or not they even consider taking on those new morals.
vegetarians choose not to eat meat. vegans choose not to consume animal products, e.g. often also avoid leather shoes and similar products not necessarily limited to food
Sure, that would be great if everyone suddenly ate less meat, but until we have a global cultural shift, aren't solutions like this much more valuable?
One time a project manager asked told the developers that they shouldn't introduce any new bugs in the next release, this feels like the same kind of argument.
You're making "consuming meat" equivalent to "consuming factory farmed meat". I agree with you on the horrors of factory farms, but farms like mine (https://mulligan.farm), wherein we raise our chickens on pasture, require vastly less pharmaceuticals (other than their Marek's disease leaky vaccine they get at birth, our chickens need no more antibiotics than simple sunlight and fresh air) than factory farmed meat.
In the 50s, Americans on average spent ~20% of their budgets on food and 10% on healthcare. Today, it's about 18% on healthcare and 9% on food. If we swapped back to the model from the 50s, wherein our food was a bigger proportion of the budget and we were less fat and unhealthy as a result, we could easily have, say, 10,000 small farms supplying healthy, environmentally-sane, meat to local communities, rather than a concentrated agribusiness selling gross, tortured flesh to the entire country.
Your farm is an outlier though, not representative. The current consumption levels of meat can only be sustained with factory farming, it's impossible for your type of farm to contribute a meaningful amount of production. Meat is, in the context of mass consumption, factory farmed. Your farming method could not serve even a tiny fraction of demand, so while it is better than factory farming, it's not an alternative.
This is just not true, or at least extremely US-centric. In large parts of the world most meat consumed by the public still comes from small to medium farms and family agriculture. The globalized neoliberal agro-industrial complex has been whittling away at that, but it's still true in a lot of places, and it could be made true again in the US; the population density of the US is pretty low, there's a lot of land on which family farmers could produce meat humanely and sustainably. The only reason it doesn't happen is because agro-industry doesn't allow it, and they have captured the regulatory framework in their favor.
If you changed the regulatory framework in a way that penalizes (or downright prohibits) a lot of these horrendous industrial practices sufficiently, then sustainable and human agriculture absolutely could fill the demand even of the very carnivorous American public (at somewhat higher prices, but not more than say double the price.) I'm not saying we shouldn't reduce mean consumption, just that the argument that sustainable and humane methods couldn't meet the demand are BS.
This is a great point. One of the things several of our customers who hail from India have told us is that our chickens remind them of the chickens they got back home, and can still get back home, but are aside from small producers like us, unavailable widely in the USA.
It is currently an outlier, but my goal with the farm is to be riding the currently-growing wave of small farms directly marketing to consumers, who care deeply about their land, the local ecology, and the welfare of their animals.
Our customers are so passionate about our product, it's quite shocking (this is Season 1 for us). As we get towards winter, we're going to start building a platform upon which we can foster competition--that's right, we want to have more and more small farms compete with us on pasture-raised, quality animal proteins.
Over time, we want to be part of the vanguard that leads to Americans spending double on their diets and half on their healthcare.
What's that quote about a small group of dedicated people?
Farming, small farming in particular, is becoming trendy. Our product is in higher demand than we can produce. We've turned away customers. So we need to scale up a little bit, but more importantly, grow the numbers of our competitors and, year after year, eat the meat business. Healthcare premiums go down, slowly slowly, as people get healthier.
This being true doesn't invalidate their point of the GP representing "consuming meat" in a bad light based on the acts of those cultivating factory-farmed meat. Nuance doesn't have to always be front-and-center, but when discussing a topic, i'd rather see major counter-points considered rather than omitted. Preferably with numbers and percentages stacked next to it.
> Mulligan Farms, LLC maintains a copyright notice (below), though we're not sure what it really means for us from a legal perspective. What we do know that a bunch of small text in a page's footer lends an air of gravitas and professionalism. To boot, as far as we can tell, nobody reads this stuff, so we're rolling with this.
I'm afraid you on the other hand vastly underestimate what an outlier farms like yours are when taking the whole population into account. For the amount of meat that is consumed, such production also wouldn't be feasible to provide for everybody - that's why i think OPs point is very valid, without _reducing_ total consumption, there simply is no "not factory farmed meat".
Considering the population has grown, and cost of life (specially rent) is inflated compared to the 50s, I don't really see any path to achieve what you propose without really reducing consumption.
That's a good first step, but I feel you're skipping over some of the issues here... At the end of the day, you're still raping and killing animals.
I love meat, but I'm pretty sure my grandchildren (or maybe their grandchildren) will look back at us in the same way we look back at public executions
I have no ethical qualms with killing animals. I do all my own slaughter and processing and exclusively eat meat that I either killed myself (pigs & chickens on my farm), or that I traded with farmer friends for (sheep & beef) who have similar standards as we do.
Once you are actually in contact with the food you're raising and agriculture in general, I think this becomes much, much simpler an ethical question. I mean, even just the animal impact on a vegetarian diet becomes much more questionable after you witness a finish mower grinding up a half-dozen foals during cutting, when you witness the mass habitat destruction wrought by GMO soybean monoculture, etc.
It becomes even more questionable when you bring up livestoc raised on land otherwise unusable for agriculture--dryland farming in Montana, wherein stocking rates are very low, land is intensively managed, and the alternatives presented by the lab-grown meat folks tend to always rely on rowcrops destroying otherwise great animal habitats.
Finally, the more we learn about plants, the more it seems they're far more capable of what we might call "cognition" than we did in the past.
Nature is competitive, and we are the peak species of evolution on earth. To me, this doesn't mean we try to walk the lands while sparing all life possible. Rather, to me, it means we become stewards of the land and its inhabitants. Hunters are, to me, the prime example of this. Hunters are responsible for vastly more improvement to natural habitats and maintenance of trophy species than vegans, and I'd bet have a much greater positive impact on the environment than animal-lovers who eat tonnes of rowcropped vegetables.
Do you think you are comfortable with your role in the food system only because the mainstream option is way worse? If lab grown meat becomes viable, aren't you next in line to be demonized?
I think the notion of "lab-grown meat" is laughable. As mentioned in another reply, it seems to be based on this idea that we can somehow grow in a lab something that requires an incredibly complex environment to grow into healthy food, that we can somehow simulate these conditions, and that the result will somehow be just as good as, e.g., 100% pasture-raised Angus.
It doesn't need to be as good as the grass fed kobe beefsteak, it just needs to be as good as the feedlot mcdonalds hamburger. I'm optimistic about lab meat -- not because it will make everybody vegan (it won't), but because it might be able to create an alternative to the cheap factory-farmed meat we have today, enabling us to pass legislation to ban abusive factory farming practices without severely affecting consumers. The people who want quality meat will go to farmers like you, the people who want a chicken tender will buy it from the lab-grown folks, and the net amount of suffering in the universe decreases just a little.
Impossible's rumored $10B valuation[0] and BYND's current market cap of $7B would say otherwise. Once you have a product, the only limiting factor is how much you can scale.
These, I've learned upthread, are not "lab-grown meat" producers, at least not yet. They're in the factory-produced GMO soy-based, highly-processed meatlike substance business, currently.
They are certainly more intelligent than most pets (dogs/cats). They'll figure things out a lot faster and without specific training. For example, I knew one cow that learned how to open gates and doors with their tongue just by watching us open the doors/gates.
Getting a pet to do those sorts of behaviors usually takes treats and a lot of time.
Honestly, the only thing that surprises me about this is the fact that cows have bladder (and bowel?) control.