even if farm animals were slaughtered in the most humane and painless of ways, the way they’re treated while they’re alive is still horrifyingly atrocious
this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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if farm animals were slaughtered in the most humane and painless of ways
This sounds like a juxtaposition to me. You cannot slaughter a healthy animal in a humane way. "Slaughter" excludes "humane". I'm not a vegan/vegetarian but it seems to me like this idea that if we just raised happy healthy animals and found a way to kill it nicely then eating meat would be ethically ok. We don't need to eat meat anymore. Any killing of an animal to make it into food is unnecessary and could be avoided. I think it is important that we meat eaters really internalize this. Every time we eat meat we caused absolutely unnecessary suffering for a quick moment of pleasure.
Culling is not cruel or even morally ambiguous. It is morally and ethically right to cull out of control populations of animals for the betterment of the whole. Culling isn't even necessarily for the sick or weak. Sometimes healthy young animals have to be put down for the betterment of the environment. Look into native American hunting practice and land conservation methodology.
Modern farming is very much none of those things though.
Honestly, culling is besides the point I am making, since the primary goal of culling is not meat production.
There are morally more ambiguous cases (than with slaughter for meat) in which killing an animal can be arguably better than to let it live. Putting down a terminally sick pet is an example. Culling might also be argued, but I would not say that it is "not cruel or even morally ambiguous".
With culling, my thoughts on it are these. When we refer to culling, we most often talk about culling in farm animal situation. As in, there is a sick animal that has to be culled so that the population doesn't become infected. Or we kill the male chicks because we cannot raise them to become egg producing hens and keeping a lot of roosters together can cause problems. The killing of farm cows that underproduce is also a form of culling. I would argue that none of these killings would be necessary in the first place if we didn't have big scale farming (or, for that matter, farming of any kind) of lifestock. My guess is that with
Modern farming is very much none of those things though.
we agree here.
Culling of wild animals is more controversial. As far as I am aware of, hunters are being told how many animals of a certain species and sex they can kill in a hunting season and it is regardes as population control. (Whilst we ofter created conditions in which the population cannot control itself.) Or they get an order from a farmer etc. to kill a chicken ripping wolf. If you have to kill a wolf because it regularly attacks your chicken farm, then the chicken farm is the actual problem, not the wolf. Apart from that, you'll end up fucking with natural selection. Arguably not very great. But since we can't just go back to the caves and restore nature the way it was before civilization and so on, some form of culling of wild animals will probably stay necessary for human survival and artifical balance of and artificialized nature - even without farming of lifestock. I would not call this ethical or morally right, but a realistic, awful necessity.
I'm not sure about the point you're making with native americans. When I search for native american hunting practices the first thing that pops up is how they hunted bisons and nearly drove them to extinction, which is also the most prominent example I know of. This goes into the territory of the idea of the Noble Native. But I doubt you meant that as an example.
Native Americans curated bison populations for thousands of years. Idk where you're getting "almost drove the bison to extinction" from. In 1850, there were between 30 and 60 million bison on the plains. By 1870, there were less than 500 wild bison left. That's not native American hunting. That's white genocide. Don't get it confused. Some plains Indians even claim kinship with the Bison as their spiritual totem.
Look into accounts by settlers first traveling the America's. They often wonder at how the forests seem to have wild orchards of berries and fruits, or how certain woods seem to have been maintained almost as if by a forester. It's no coincidence. The plagues brought by the settlers killed 95% of my people, and those same settlers came and occupied the same space where me and mine had lived for eons. And then they had the temerity to call it divine providence. Filthy diseased savages tend to build filthy diseased societies, and here we are now.
Native Americans curated bison populations for thousands of years. Idk where you're getting "almost drove the bison to extinction" from. In 1850, there were between 30 and 60 million bison on the plains. By 1870, there were less than 500 wild bison left. That's not native American hunting. That's white genocide. Don't get it confused. Some plains Indians even claim kinship with the Bison as their spiritual totem.
Yep, I was totally wrong about that. I apologize. I don't know where I had that info from, I think either school or I was distracted at the point about bison when I listened to Guns Germs and Steel. Anyway, I take that back and you are absolutely right here.
And I'm very sorry about what happened to your people.
But to go back to meat eating, I'm not sure it plays a big role for today. Hunting bison without rifles while living with rather low population density in nature is not the same as farming. I'm not sure whether meat eating was necessary for survival back then, it probably was an important source of nutrients. Plus the sacred aspects, the cultural ones, the actual gratitude, the use of the whole animal... But this is not how we use livestock today at all. And most importantly: we don't need it. We have an abundance of alternatives.
But again, I don't ask anyone to quit meat all together. I don't think it is fair to ask this from individuals and attribute all of the responsibility to them. If we want to decrease meat production and consumption, we need to do this from a regulatory basis. So all I am saying is that we meat eaters should simply be aware of it. That it is neither necessary from a nutritional point of view, nor that any kind of farming and slaughtering can be seen as "humane". We cause suffering with our choice and keep promoting a system that will always be cruel. You take away babies from their mothers. You raise animals in unnatural conditions. If they are lucky, they end up at the butcher healthy enough so that their short and miserable life will be terminated untimely and with them very likely experiencing existential threat. For nothing more than us having a moment of joy, convenience, pleasure. Their carcass becomes a banality.
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Co2 is the worst gad to suffocate in. Please just put me in a room full of nitrogen instead
Omfg I once took a hit of CO2 as I thought my CO2 capsules were my N2O capsules.
Fuckin' 'orrible
Laughing gas is sweet and soft, taking a hit of CO2 is like choking on cactuses.
I had exposure to tear gas in the army and while it was a milder version (simulating mild-moderate exposure), I definitely preferred it to CO2.
Instead, she suggests pigs could be genetically bred to have a less violent reaction to CO2
there's a lot of messed up shit in that article but this is so sinister
did anything ever happen after the videos were released?
No I don't think they can; that's how your body knows to breathe. CO2 is just the wrong gas to use to kill something if you want it done quietly. I honestly think I'd rather be strangled, there's a chance I'd die of lack of blood flow to the brain before CO2 poisoning set in.
did anything ever happen after the videos were released?
What do you mean? The video shows the intended effect, I don't think any regulatory place wants to change anything about that.
There's been more videos about this too since. This article only looked at the US, but this stuff also exists elsewhere. In the UK they simply arrested people filming some of the slaughterhouses using CO2 gas chambers.
Ag-gag laws and similar kinds of stuff are fun. Problems apparently don't exist if you just can't film them :/
Go vegan
No
You're so brave
Bravest thing I've done today is engage with the trolls in this thread.
OP is a troll for saying go vegan on an animal cruelty thread huh?...ok...
Couldn't care less about killing and eating animals, but it's pretty fucked how we go about it.
It's all fucked, from the way we've bred them, to how we treat them while they're alive, to how we kill them. To me, perhaps the worst part is we do it almost exclusively for enjoyment.
What? The meat industry is for food. What are you actually talking about
It's an inefficient form of food, requiring more nutrients than we get out of it. But we like eating meat (it's delicious after all), so in theory it is purely for our enjoyment.
Though we also use it to feed our cats I suppose.
Most people eat animal products because they enjoy them more than the available plant-based alternatives.
I appreciate the B99 reference, but the difference between animal products and the plant based alternatives is small and getting smaller by the day. At the end of the day, it's that difference in enjoyment you get that you are weighing against supporting inhumane practices like the one in this post
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Wtf the Meat Industry copied Auschwitz? 💀
And here I thought watching my grandma's pig slaughter was painful by just slicing their throats. Holy shit.
Holocaust survivors like Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz and Alex Hershaft have been trying to point it out but most people don't listen https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_analogy_in_animal_rights
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Yeah, I figured before reading this would fly like the nitrogen gas executions that some state penal systems are trying. (As revealed on _Last Week Tonight.) Sure enough it's awful.
Right now, my household is drastically reducing meat as we can (which is made easier by the rising prices of meat). Whether we have good tasty fake meat made out of vegetable matter or cultured meat that was never a full animal, I'll be glad for when it's affordable.
A somber thing about nitrogen gas executions:
People generally agree that nitrogen (or any inert) gas asphyxiation is a relatively painless and peaceful way to go. People have been using it for (animal and human) euthanasia for years without incident. Seems appropriate, right?
So how did it work in capital punishment scenario the first time around? The guards slapped the face mask on the condemned. Then they asked them for their last statement. Quote: "Mffmfmf, Mffafam fmfmfm mfffmfmf mf mfmf f mfmf mfffmfmmf. Mfffm mfm mfm mfmfffmfmf mf. Mfff mff mf mff." (Transcribed as: "Tonight, Alabama causes humanity to take a step backwards. Thank you for supporting me. Love all of you.") Then they opened the gas valves. It took too long. ...OK, it's time to pause now, let's see how many problems you can spot with this procedure.
Problem: They're continuing to use "medical" and "painless" and whatnot procedures, administered by unqualified staff, on unwilling participants. Look, I'm not an advocate of death penalty at all and I think it should be abolished everywhere, but even I know that the guillotine designers were up to something. You need to minimise the amount of fuck-ups at all levels.
Repeating the post body context in the comments: Spy Cams Reveal the Grim Reality of Slaughterhouse Gas Chambers
Also before someone comes here commenting about nitrogen as if it's a perfect painless method, it's got problems too:
Hypoxia produced by N2 and Ar appears to reduce, but not eliminate, aversive responses [escape attempts and gasping] in pigs
[...]
These gases [Nitrogen and Argon] tend to cause more convulsive wing flapping in poultry than CO2 in air mixtures
https://www.avma.org/sites/default/files/2020-02/Guidelines-on-Euthanasia-2020.pdf
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I tend to focus more of their quality of life before their death day. Like, a swift needle to the brain seems pretty okay compared to being stacked nearly on top of each other in their own waste for much of their lives.
Pignorant is another investigation into UK gas chambers for pigs that's available on Prime video btw.
Let's abolish slaughterhouses.
Are you totally fine with the moral consequences of enforced veganism on the entire human population? I'm asking this because you must also understand that there are going to be seriously detrimental and inescapable outcomes associated with that as well. Life only comes from death. You can fundamentally dislike the arrangement, but as far as we are aware that is a necessary input-output relationship. Choosing which deaths you are okay with is simply trading one Faustian bargain for another.
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Who doesn't want to leave a sparkly, effervescent corpse after dying of asphyxiation and painful organ failure due to excessive carbonic acid buildup?
I'll have the brain bullet, thanks.
Hell. O would take a bullet to the head right now if guns were legal in my country.
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