Well the dog farmers hang, burn, and beat the shit out of the dogs before they kill them because they believe the fear and adrenaline improves the taste and makes them more tender…so yes I’d say it’s worse.
It is, but most of the actual killing in like 90% of the world is done as fast and cleanly as possible. If only to keep the process as efficient as possible.
Fun fact, if you want ethically killed meat (if such a thing can exist), the best option is actually Kosher meat. There are religious laws and such, and the easiest way to comply with them is a sort of guillotine. It’s an instant death.
The animals of also generally better treated than most factory farm setups.
A 90% figure that is pulled out of your ass sounds a lot less compelling when billions of animals are slaughtered for food each year. How many is too many? And the killing isn’t even the worst part.
Similar, but in practice it’s quite a bit different.
Halal requires a swift cut with a sharp knife across the throat of the animal. Severing the spine is expressly forbidden.
The animal then bleeds out, which can still be a quick death, but nowhere near as fast as decapitation, which is most commonly used in kosher butchery.
The bolt pistol used in modern butchery can also be instant. You place what looks like a pneumatic drill on the cow’s forehead, and then pull the trigger. It fires a stainless steel rod forward into the cow’s skull. The rod is captive at the end of its travel, so you just have to cock the tool, and you can use it again (provided it’s actually pneumatically powered, and not powered by a blank round, or something else, there are a lot of versions, even some that are designed to not penetrate the skull.)
Now I’m not finding a source for the guillotine machine… I’ve seen one in person, and it had a spinning disc blade, because there are Jewish dietary laws that say you can’t press the blade into the neck, it must be a slice.
It might also have been a case of an enterprising butcher being inventive and sidestepping the rules…
It’s a weird dynamic. I feel no remorse eating pork or beef. I know the process, I raised farm animals as a kid. BUT, I know someone working on genetically modified pigs for human organ transplants and that makes me somehow uneasy.
In general, predators like dogs are a very inefficient way to get calories. Cattle, for example, have the benefit of turning stuff like grass that we can’t eat into something that we can (meat,) dogs on the other hand, largely tend to eat the same sorts of foods we would, so often we could just eat those foods and cut out the middleman
Now dogs are not totally obligate carnivores, theoretically they can be fed on a vegetarian diet, though it requires some careful planning to ensure they’re getting the right nutrients, you can’t just turn them loose in a field to eat grass and expect to get much out of it, by and large they’re going to need to eat the same sorts of food we’d eat- a variety of fruits and vegetables. They can also possibly fed byproducts, scraps, offal, overripe or damaged produce, etc. that is unfit or less desirable for human consumption, but that still adds a lot of complexity to managing their diet, and if animal products are part of the feed it potentially means you need to worry about spreading disease between animal populations, don’t want to be feeding your meat dogs on mad cow brains or avian flu chicken bits.
And as you move up the food chain you can have issues with bioaccumulation of toxins like heavy metals. Say from birth to slaughter a cow absorbs 1oz (pulling that number out of my ass) of lead and mercury and such that ends up in its various tissues. Cows are big, you have to eat a lot of cow to absorb that much lead and mercury from eating them. Now let’s say a dog during it’s lifetime eats the equivalent of one whole cow (again, pulled out of my ass) during it’s lifetime. That dog now has that same 1oz of lead and mercury, and dogs are much smaller so it’s at a higher concentration in their meat, you don’t have to eat nearly as much dog as you do cow to get the same amount of heavy metals.
I saw an ad on the subway once with a cute cow and a cute dog that said “you wouldn’t eat one, so why eat the other?” I ended up having a constructive discussion with a vegan on the train cause I was like “well, we don’t eat dogs because they’re our pets, but it it came to it, we would”. Throughout history, when shit hits the fan, famine, sieges, etc. The dogs are the first to go and be made food.
We’ve just kind of agreed to kill this one group of animals as opposed to killing all of them. It’s horrible but you’re never gonna stop humans from eating meat. We just gotta encourage a more humane way to get meat. I’m a vegetarian now, but I know humans are just meat eaters and we can’t change that.
You’re right. When times got hard, the dog became dinner.
I raised all my own food for a few years and fully understand the horror of having to kill to eat. It’s never pretty, despite all the arguments I can make about health of the herd, culling only the weak, and giving them the best lives they could hope for.
I find the vegan arguments weak, though too. Every day we are discovering new levels of feelings and intelligence in life and that goes down to plants, too. It’s a harsh reality that in order to exist, you must make something else not exist… and unless we change something dramatically it’s never going away.
All this is why I’m cautiously optimistic about lab grown meat. It could turn this whole thing on its head.
Bring plant-based seems to result in much less overall pain. How so?
About 10% net energy goes between stages of the food ladder, so 90% of the energy in the entire cow’s diet was lost as heat. This applies to all animals.
If your goal is overall reduction in pain of others for your own survival, then eating a cow includes that cow’s death, plus the much larger amount of greenery it had to eat versus how much greenery you’d eat to comfortably live as the much smaller beings that we are.
Skipping the cow means less overall death by that logic.
I mean, arguably one could make a standard based on animal intelligence. Like, dogs are fairly smart, so one could argue that raising them for meat in farm conditions isn’t very ethical, and similarly, farming something like, say, a dolphin, might be even worse if someone was to do that, but then that farming much more simple minded creatures like shrimp, bees, mealworms etc would be much more acceptable. A standard like that still wouldn’t reflect well on most animal agriculture though given that most meat animals are mammals and birds, which can be reasonably intelligent, especially pigs to my understanding. Though I suppose the conditions of the farm matter too, like, sheep kept on adequate grazing land for their wool probably don’t have too bad a life as far as farm animals go, and it’s probably possible if more expensive and less land efficient to get milk and eggs from cows/goats and chickens in a reasonably humane way too, since those products don’t inherently require raising the animal just to kill it.
“dog farmers”, holy shit :(
Is that any worse than any other animal being farmed?
Well the dog farmers hang, burn, and beat the shit out of the dogs before they kill them because they believe the fear and adrenaline improves the taste and makes them more tender…so yes I’d say it’s worse.
Pigs, cows, and chickens also experience incredible suffering in factory farms. The whole industry is rotted.
It is, but most of the actual killing in like 90% of the world is done as fast and cleanly as possible. If only to keep the process as efficient as possible.
Fun fact, if you want ethically killed meat (if such a thing can exist), the best option is actually Kosher meat. There are religious laws and such, and the easiest way to comply with them is a sort of guillotine. It’s an instant death.
The animals of also generally better treated than most factory farm setups.
A 90% figure that is pulled out of your ass sounds a lot less compelling when billions of animals are slaughtered for food each year. How many is too many? And the killing isn’t even the worst part.
I think halal follows a lot of the same rules as well
Similar, but in practice it’s quite a bit different.
Halal requires a swift cut with a sharp knife across the throat of the animal. Severing the spine is expressly forbidden.
The animal then bleeds out, which can still be a quick death, but nowhere near as fast as decapitation, which is most commonly used in kosher butchery.
The bolt pistol used in modern butchery can also be instant. You place what looks like a pneumatic drill on the cow’s forehead, and then pull the trigger. It fires a stainless steel rod forward into the cow’s skull. The rod is captive at the end of its travel, so you just have to cock the tool, and you can use it again (provided it’s actually pneumatically powered, and not powered by a blank round, or something else, there are a lot of versions, even some that are designed to not penetrate the skull.)
https://oukosher.org/blog/news/setting-the-record-straight-on-kosher-slaughter/
This says they don’t, it’s not gospel but, it’s one of the first results.
Not fighting, I just looked more into it because I am that special kind of crazy
I look that sort of stuff up myself.
Now I’m not finding a source for the guillotine machine… I’ve seen one in person, and it had a spinning disc blade, because there are Jewish dietary laws that say you can’t press the blade into the neck, it must be a slice.
It might also have been a case of an enterprising butcher being inventive and sidestepping the rules…
It’s a weird dynamic. I feel no remorse eating pork or beef. I know the process, I raised farm animals as a kid. BUT, I know someone working on genetically modified pigs for human organ transplants and that makes me somehow uneasy.
Frankly that sounds like the sort of bullshit I’d hear from Greenpeace.
Even if that were true, have you seen say a chicken farm? Workers will cruelly abuse the ever living shit out of these animals for no reason.
I wouldn’t say it’s worse than…
https://www.news.com.au/technology/science/animals/secret-video-reveals-horrific-abuse-of-hens-inside-victorian-egg-farm/news-story/dd429e36eb2e210fc702c78663f6961d?amp
I was stationed in South Korea and saw them with my own eyeballs but you can believe whatever you like.
In general, predators like dogs are a very inefficient way to get calories. Cattle, for example, have the benefit of turning stuff like grass that we can’t eat into something that we can (meat,) dogs on the other hand, largely tend to eat the same sorts of foods we would, so often we could just eat those foods and cut out the middleman
Now dogs are not totally obligate carnivores, theoretically they can be fed on a vegetarian diet, though it requires some careful planning to ensure they’re getting the right nutrients, you can’t just turn them loose in a field to eat grass and expect to get much out of it, by and large they’re going to need to eat the same sorts of food we’d eat- a variety of fruits and vegetables. They can also possibly fed byproducts, scraps, offal, overripe or damaged produce, etc. that is unfit or less desirable for human consumption, but that still adds a lot of complexity to managing their diet, and if animal products are part of the feed it potentially means you need to worry about spreading disease between animal populations, don’t want to be feeding your meat dogs on mad cow brains or avian flu chicken bits.
And as you move up the food chain you can have issues with bioaccumulation of toxins like heavy metals. Say from birth to slaughter a cow absorbs 1oz (pulling that number out of my ass) of lead and mercury and such that ends up in its various tissues. Cows are big, you have to eat a lot of cow to absorb that much lead and mercury from eating them. Now let’s say a dog during it’s lifetime eats the equivalent of one whole cow (again, pulled out of my ass) during it’s lifetime. That dog now has that same 1oz of lead and mercury, and dogs are much smaller so it’s at a higher concentration in their meat, you don’t have to eat nearly as much dog as you do cow to get the same amount of heavy metals.
I saw an ad on the subway once with a cute cow and a cute dog that said “you wouldn’t eat one, so why eat the other?” I ended up having a constructive discussion with a vegan on the train cause I was like “well, we don’t eat dogs because they’re our pets, but it it came to it, we would”. Throughout history, when shit hits the fan, famine, sieges, etc. The dogs are the first to go and be made food.
We’ve just kind of agreed to kill this one group of animals as opposed to killing all of them. It’s horrible but you’re never gonna stop humans from eating meat. We just gotta encourage a more humane way to get meat. I’m a vegetarian now, but I know humans are just meat eaters and we can’t change that.
…We also sometimes eat other people when shit hits the fan. 🙁.
You’re right. When times got hard, the dog became dinner.
I raised all my own food for a few years and fully understand the horror of having to kill to eat. It’s never pretty, despite all the arguments I can make about health of the herd, culling only the weak, and giving them the best lives they could hope for.
I find the vegan arguments weak, though too. Every day we are discovering new levels of feelings and intelligence in life and that goes down to plants, too. It’s a harsh reality that in order to exist, you must make something else not exist… and unless we change something dramatically it’s never going away.
All this is why I’m cautiously optimistic about lab grown meat. It could turn this whole thing on its head.
Bring plant-based seems to result in much less overall pain. How so?
About 10% net energy goes between stages of the food ladder, so 90% of the energy in the entire cow’s diet was lost as heat. This applies to all animals.
If your goal is overall reduction in pain of others for your own survival, then eating a cow includes that cow’s death, plus the much larger amount of greenery it had to eat versus how much greenery you’d eat to comfortably live as the much smaller beings that we are.
Skipping the cow means less overall death by that logic.
You don’t know what strong arguments look like
Depends on the dog. There are lots of little mammals that survive in those situations and something like a Jack Russell might be worth keeping
I mean, arguably one could make a standard based on animal intelligence. Like, dogs are fairly smart, so one could argue that raising them for meat in farm conditions isn’t very ethical, and similarly, farming something like, say, a dolphin, might be even worse if someone was to do that, but then that farming much more simple minded creatures like shrimp, bees, mealworms etc would be much more acceptable. A standard like that still wouldn’t reflect well on most animal agriculture though given that most meat animals are mammals and birds, which can be reasonably intelligent, especially pigs to my understanding. Though I suppose the conditions of the farm matter too, like, sheep kept on adequate grazing land for their wool probably don’t have too bad a life as far as farm animals go, and it’s probably possible if more expensive and less land efficient to get milk and eggs from cows/goats and chickens in a reasonably humane way too, since those products don’t inherently require raising the animal just to kill it.
Yes
You’re a hypocrite
Okay.