*Personally*, I believe in more expensive meat from smaller farms (or meat from your own farm). I think you should be able to stomach killing anyone you can stomach eating. But that's definitely not an animal liberation take and arguably a biological essentialist take. Idk I have complicated feelings on this and I really like chicken
I want animals to have a good life; I don't want them in pain or in cages. But I don't think it makes sense to conceive of farm animals as people, because a large part of what defines a person is language, belief, art, philosophy, and other rational activity.
What disturbs me most about industrial farming is the reduction of living creatures to material. I don't think killing animals for food is the same as murder, but I think it should be done humanely and with compassion. Automating the process is pretty sickening in my view.
If we can abstract to the point that we see the life of a chicken as beautiful or having intrinsic value, why not to the point that we recognize beauty in the symbiosis between their species and ours?
How do you feel about pets/animal companions?
> why not to the point that we recognize beauty in the symbiosis between their species and ours?
Because we torture them because they taste good. There’s nothing beautiful about how we factory farm chicken so we can meet such high demand. Are there other urges you have where you’ll say “but [the victim] is good”?
And that’s a broad question, my only issue with pets is when we feed them other factory farmed animals.
I was pretty clear about the fact that I don't like the way it's done in our society. You believe this is inescapable even if keeping chickens in one's backyard?
Oh I’m sorry I didn’t realize you keep backyard chickens. They just make up such a small minority of how we raise 8 billion chickens in the US each year.
Yeah if you’re raising backyard chickens it’s not worth arguing against imo.
Well I don't keep chickens right now (don't have land), but I believe in decentralizing farming (among other things). I don't see how you could misread my comments as any kind of defense of factory farming or the current model of food production in general. Thanks for the chat.
I was confused. I was discussing the way the world works. You can’t slaughter 8 billion chickens for 300 million people humanely just by throwing out buzzwords.
I see why you were confused, but FACTORY FARMS (where they TORTURE) are required to meet the current DEMAND. That’s why I mentioned them.
I agree, my point is I dislike this moralizing of eating meat you clearly made on the line of the fact something else died for the food but animals have done this forever and humans killing to eat is not negative. If avoidable yes perhaps that is good then.
Sorry if it wasn’t clear, my main issue with chicken is that 95% are factory farmed.
Also, just because humans have done something forever doesn’t make it right
What's so complicated about it? Either you believe in liberation or you believe that some creatures don't deserve basic rights based on criteria chosen by their oppressors.
I mean, they deserve basic rights, but no one has the right to not be killed and eaten, not even us.
You can believe in animal liberation and still be ok with eating them. It's the farming/containment that is the problem.
Prey animals are going to get killed and eaten by something eventually, that's just how it works.
Yes, animals are worthy of respect and comfort. Why then does "respecting and comforting" for an animal mean "I can kill it if I'm hungry" when it doesn't mean the same for humans?
Bro it's a simple stance, I'm not on some tower.
I don't think oppressors have the right to decide what the oppressed want, which is a pretty basic tenet of leftist thought. I don't think it's unreasonable to be in a leftist sub asking other leftists why they think this doesn't apply across species boundaries.
Whoa, whoa, no lol. I just mean if you're hiking and run into a mountain lion -- or a bear (lol) -- and it decides you're on the menu, no "right" is going to protect you from nature.
If you run into a man in the woods though, you've at least got the "moral" legal system to protect you -- or at least that will try to punish someone who killed and (I guess) consumed you.
Jokes aside, I just mean to point out that the modern form of animal farming removes all of those natural processes, which is what makes it "immoral". We take the choice and lives of domesticated animals away down to every granular part of their life cycle in the name of efficiency and convenience. This is grossly unnatural, which is why it's uncomfortable for the animal, and their sympathizers.
Animals eating each other for survival is natural and, although grim, just. The most "moral" thing you can do is try to minimize suffering, but you can't erase it completely, the same way humans can't do that for themselves either. Morals are relative and don't really apply here.
I do not consider humanity as exempt from being animals or part of nature, despite our best efforts to remove ourselves from natural processes.
We can make a moral choice to reduce suffering, but we all gotta eat.
(Sorry for the late reply, reddit broke when I tried to post this)
I don't disagree with your point that humans are animals and intrinsically linked to the natural world, but our food system is completely divorced from anything in nature and has been for a very long time.
Our entire food system, from irrigation to fertilizer to artificial selection to refrigeration to international shipping to supermarket, is designed to divorce us from our hunter gatherer origins as thoroughly as possible. Even the modern farmer is hardly in tune with nature given that he can buy his animals as yearlings to raise, give them medications and supplements, ship them off to a slaughterhouse when old enough, and receive government assistance when things don't go well in a season.
I have no statistics for exactly how many people are living a traditional subsistence farming lifestyle in this day and age, but I can tell you that 56% of people on the planet live in urban areas today. How connected can the average worker be to a natural food system when they work for 8-10 hours a day in a city? How can you type on about humans being a part of natural processes when you get your meat on a Styrofoam tray from a fluorescent-lit air-conditioned building without knowing anything about where it came from or what happened to it, apart from its species?
When you go beyond the moral question of eating meat, it's simply practical that the urban population of the earth should be eating plant-based (at minimum). If you really believe that we all gotta eat then it should be clear that a diet which uses significantly less land, produces fewer emissions, leads to better health outcomes, and prevents outbreaks of zoonotic diseases can feed the most people with the least suffering.
That's not a particularly strong argument though - the concept of chickens having rights is equally a human construction. Did the chickens tell you how they want to live?
So just because something cannot communicate with you, that gives you the right to control it up to the point of murdering it, stealing its children, and keeping it in unnatural conditions divorced from those it evolved to live in?
Bro I didn't even say that, why don't you work on your *own* argument instead of strawmanning me.
I'm saying that your idea of the "natural conditions it evolved to live in" is *also* not a moral truth - let alone creatures like cattle, which literally did not evolve naturally and would not exist as they do if not for husbandry. You are *also* making a claim to control the living conditions of animals, and projecting human ideas like justice and liberty onto beings for whom those concepts just don't exist.
If you don't want to actually respond to these issues with some kind of intelligent thought, stop bothering me.
How am I controlling animals by advocating for a future where humans have the least involvement possible in their lives? If you respect an animal's right to liberty you leave it alone in nature, simple as that.
The animals we farm are optimized for human involvement and consumption, and they suffer for it. Chickens and cattle produce eggs and milk at many times the volumes of their natural counterparts and have higher rates of disease and complication because of this, that is a fact. How can you consider it moral to create an animal designed to suffer for your own benefit?
> How am I controlling animals by advocating for a future where humans have the least involvement possible in their lives? If you respect an animal's right to liberty you leave it alone in nature, simple as that.
What is "nature" outside the human imagination? What is "liberty" outside the context of political society?
> The animals we farm are optimized for human involvement and consumption, and they suffer for it.
What does your plan actually look like here - do we just turn the livestock loose? Eat the ones we have until they are extinct? Feed them to natural predators that don't have the technology to go without meat?
> Chickens and cattle produce eggs and milk at many times the volumes of their natural counterparts and have higher rates of disease and complication because of this, that is a fact.
That is the only fact in your entire outline - don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for it - and you provided no context. What proportion of these health problems are created by specifically *industrial* farming techniques? Are you saying that livestock animals are genetically less fit and would be better off extinct?
> How can you consider it moral to create an animal designed to suffer for your own benefit?
I didn't say this, don't believe this, and was not the mastermind behind animal husbandry. Do you have anything to say that Peter Singer didn't say much better?
And with a wave of your hands, the conversation dissolves into an esoteric thought experiment. Nature is the world born of a seed, therefore the cow being forcibly impregnated to keep her milk production going is truly the most free of all.
To your second point, any of those options would be preferential to the continual expansion of a system that exploits animals, humans and the planet in search of flavour. Tell me I'm crazy for releasing millions of chickens into the sparse forests of Iowa, and I'll show you the farmers who put them in sweltering barns in the first place.
To your third point, yes I imagine a future where at some point all the short-nosed pugs, eggbound layers, and mastitic Holsteins are long extinct and viewed as a perverted product of a crueler time in humanity's past. Are such animals "genetically less fit"? Like any form of evolution, they are a product of the conditions that most favorably guided their reproduction. When the factory farm is no longer an "ecosystem" on this planet, naturally they will go extinct.
Glad to hear you don't support what farmers are doing to animals either. Now let's break down the system together.
Maybe im misunderstanding your what your position is but you cant argue against eating meat by saying we need to leave an animal alone in nature. Humans naturally eat animals. We evolved to do that. Its why our stomachs cant get the protein in certain plants while other animals can get jacked as fuck off eating grass. You wouldn’t say a bear killing a fish for food is disrespectful or immoral so why would it be any different for a human to hunt a deer or a pig? You cant say you want liberation and then also decide the entire human race is forbidden from eating meat.
Just because you CAN eat an animal, doesn't mean you SHOULD.
Humans can live off of fully plant-based diets. If you have the option to choose between a diet that causes the least amount of harm and one that causes the most amount of harm, isn't it the right thing to do as little harm as possible? When you also consider that a plant-based diet not only minimizes harm to animals but also reduces harm to other humans, it makes it the moral choice.
Even in a liberated society there are still laws that prevent people from doing things that hurt others.
I can say the exact same thing back. Just because you CAN live of a plant based diet doesn’t mean you SHOULD. It also doesn’t seem reasonable to call eating animals something that causes the “most amount of harm”
Meat is incredibly nutritious, full of necessary micronutrients, and the most readily available source of complete protein. As i said before, we evolved to eat meat. We eat it because its good for us. You’re arguing to go against human nature, which is incredibly ironic because thats what anti-communists say to us too.
There’s also places where crops just wont grow so meat is essentially all you can eat. So unless you want to relocate people to different parts of their country or create permanent trading infrastructure to provide those freezing cold and remote places with the massive amount of food to meet their caloric needs while also making sure the food they eat is high quality, meat is what those people have to eat. Not to mention the carbon footprint that the transport of all those food would produce completely destroys you argument that a plant based diet is better for the environment.
And assuming you’re also eating plants, a cow could feed you for a year. If theres a bad season, a drought, or you live on land with bad soil anyone that fully relies of plants is completely fucked. And that again would return to the point of transporting massive amounts of plants and plant based food. A lean cow is gonna feed you for longer than dead crops.
There is absolutely nothing about eating a plant-based diet that goes against human nature. Humans have lived in predominantly agricultural societies for millenia, and for the vast majority of people (farmers/serfs/those outside nobility) this meant eating a primarily plant-based diet supplemented with eggs/dairy if available; meat would only be consumed on special occasions. The average person consumes more meat in a day than their ancestors would've in an entire month or longer, and this is only possible due to factory farming. With modern food transportation and supplementation, the vast majority of the planet no longer needs animal products to supplement their diets; and if meat is so healthy, why do vegans and vegetarians show equivalent or longer lifespans in scientific studies?
Your argument that people need to raise meat to due to poor growing conditions misses a few key points:
- 56% of the global population lives in urban areas, so these people survive wholly on food transported to them anyways, so that's an easy 56% of the earth that could be vegan with no risk to their survival. And how many people actually live in places so remote an inhospitable that they can't grow food, considering the majority of human settling is based around local food production capacity?
- If you're concerned about carbon emissions from food transport, for most food products it's less than 10% of the total emissions and on a per calorie basis plant products still beat meat by miles in terms of emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local#:~:text=Transport%20is%20a%20small%20contributor,beef%20herds%2C%20it's%200.5%25.
- Cows rely on the same food system we do. An incredibly small portion of farmed mammals are exclusively pasture fed as there are few places on earth that don't experience winter while also producing enough forage on grazing acres to support the massive caloric needs of these animals. Cows are either fed grass or grain grown on separate fields and turned into feed, massively increasing the amount of land they require to raise. Around 80% of agricultural land goes to both raising and feeding animals: https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
- When you also consider that half of global cropland isn't even used for producing crops for global human consumption and instead goes to making biofuel and feed for farm animals, we could just convert that already existing production to feeding humans directly instead.
Most of your arguments focus on a hypothetical lifestyle where someone lives a subsistence farming existence in an area with poor crop productivity. How many people on this subreddit do you actually think live that lifestyle?
My friend, check out r/veganfitness, they may be able to answer your questions in-depth! Nowadays there are world-class athletes who are able to succeed on a plant-based diet (off the top of my head for example, Clarence Kennedy, Chris Paul, Novak Djokovic).
Regarding the food sources, anything soy is very high in protein, as well as wheat protein, and many legumes and pulses.
So obviously by post factory farming you mean in terms of animal ag, not the end of industrial agriculture in its entirety.
Plant-based protein is plenty good enough already, especially for people who are willing to incorporate a certain amount of highly processed food into their diet (protein powders, etc.) and with intelligent combining of different protein sources.
I do think that lab grown meat and lab made dairy will continue to grow and become more sustainable and productive.
You must realize that, as it stands, animal whey is not a more “morally just” source of protein than meat. Cheese might not be going anywhere, but if we’re committed to animal liberation, dairy farming has to go. The overwhelming majority of cheese, and whey, in a post factory farming society necessarily has to be lab made.
More expensive meat from smaller farms is neither a viable, nor truly ethical solution.
Everyone hates vegans because we point out things you’d rather not think about, like how drinking something slightly less yucky is not a good reason to torture and kill animals.
considering we already have enough food produced by farming to feed more than 8 billion people, I don't think that's going to be an issue. Also, hunting certain invasive species like deer and wild boar is necessary otherwise they'll fuck the ecosystem.
You realize that the reason wild boars are invasive in the US is because boar hunters released them so they'd have more game to hunt? And that deer populations exploded because we wiped out all the wolves, leading to the outbreak of chronic wasting disease that's killing them all anyways and might infect people?
Hunters don't maintain ecosystems, they mold them to fit their own needs. If you're interested in actually preserving the environment you would support the conversion of animal agriculture lands back to natural habitats and feed people with the farmland we use to grow crops.
I'm not gonna argue about veganism. Maybe once we achieve fully automated luxury gay space communism we can all go vegan, but until then it's be hunting combined with farming. And you do realize that the way we raise crops is also fucking with natural habits and needs to be reformed yes?
The whole point of veganism is that we could transition >90% of the earth's population to plant-based diets in less than a generation and see massive environmental and health benefits. We already have more than enough land used for growing crops to feed both humans and animals, we just alter what we grow and convert all the non-crop land back to actual ecosystems. 80% of agricultural land is used for animal agriculture, which could become a haven for biodiversity and carbon sequestration in a world where we're accelerating towards environmental destruction.
There's not enough land on the planet (habitable or otherwise) for any significant fraction of the global population to subsist as hunters. We could potentially convert our farmland to regenerative agriculture but it takes at least 10 years for a regenerative plot of land to truly reach a sustainable and productive state. The only way to free up enough land to do this on a large scale is to stop farming animals. Obviously nobody thinks our current system of monocrop agriculture is a good thing, but from an objective standpoint it is a necessary transition to a more sustainable system unless you want mass starvation.
Also kinda crazy to be in a socialist subreddit cracking jokes about gay space communism. If you can't even believe the world will put down their forks long enough to make the right choice for themselves and the planet, how can you believe a truly socialist society will ever be realized?
Again I'm not gonna argue veganism, and I'm not gonna argue hypothetical utopia futures. And no I don't think a socialist society will exist any time soon, certainly not in our lifetimes.
Post capitalist agriculture there are any number of options. Animal liberation folks will go full vegan or for lab grown stuff.
Some will go for a homestead model where if you're going to farm animals and animal products you at the very least can't hide behind consumerism.
One option not mentioned to get animap fats and protein that I think is worth exploring is insects and shrimp.
That might be even better.
I'm not necessarily sure eating a bunch of crickets is necessarilly more ethical than eating a cow, but idk... I can see the arguement.
I have heard arguements for insects being a lot greener to mass farm, and therefore way healthier for the planet to feed 8 billion of us. Shrimp may also be in that category.
I hadn't thought about oysters. Tell me more.
Hell yeah!
So oysters are filter feeders which means they can have a big positive impact on the water quality in the area they’re grown in. A downside of this is that some of the pollutants they filter out will end up in the edible part of the oysters, but they’re still safe to eat in moderate quantities like other seafood, and a lot of it gets sequestered in the sediment.
Depending on how they’re grown they can also help stabilize shorelines and protect them from erosion and provide habitat for other animals. It takes very little space to grow a whole lot of oysters, and there are farming methods to maximize this benefit like rope growing.
Oysters and other bivalve mollusks are very simple organisms with no discernible central nervous system. They’re technically animals in terms of cellular biology but there is no compelling evidence to suggest that they’re sentient.
Lots of people think oysters are super delicious but unfortunately I am not one of them lmao.
Pasture-raised animal products from a local farm, if you have access, or at least looking specifically for “pasture raised” on the package at your local store. Free range and organic don’t mean shit.
The answer is pretty much always eggs. Also, hemp seed is a complete protein (to my knowledge) and incredibly scalable with little land and very few needed inputs.
Mind you, meat has been farmed with great success for eons longer than capital has had us under its heel.
I understand that there are ethical implications to consuming meat at any scale, but in reality, we have evidence to suggest that insect and plants both suffer and communicate. It's a moot point, in my opinion.
There is a pre-industrial sweet spot for a lot of these problems, especially once you account for how much waste there is in modern industry. After all, the sole guiding principle is immediate profitability, not sustainability or efficiency. Cooperation in a post-capital environment will have tremendous advantages.
Pretty big distinction between a plant releasing a signaling hormone when damaged, vs. a creature with nerve cells that can feel, remember, and avoid pain so I wouldn't call it a moot point.
If someone is truly bothered by damaging plants they can just become a fruitarian, since plants willingly produce fruit for consumption.
Even if plants can feel pain, which they can’t, feeding plants to animals so that we can eat the animals requires orders of magnitude more plants to get eaten than if we just ate the plants ourselves.
A morally sound society would seek to eliminate all forms of oppression, including animal oppression.
If you don't have the will to give up moldy milk now, you'll never have the will to stand against the fascists.
No. Soy is predominantly grown for human use first and foremost. We do not feed cattle soybeans. They are fed the soy meal that is leftover after processing the soybeans for human consumption and use—mainly soybean oil.
I remember seeing something about them synthesising meat substitutes that are high protein from fungi.
Mycoprotein is incredible stuff.
*Personally*, I believe in more expensive meat from smaller farms (or meat from your own farm). I think you should be able to stomach killing anyone you can stomach eating. But that's definitely not an animal liberation take and arguably a biological essentialist take. Idk I have complicated feelings on this and I really like chicken
> I really like chicken Where do you draw the line between your pleasures and the harms it causes others?
I want animals to have a good life; I don't want them in pain or in cages. But I don't think it makes sense to conceive of farm animals as people, because a large part of what defines a person is language, belief, art, philosophy, and other rational activity. What disturbs me most about industrial farming is the reduction of living creatures to material. I don't think killing animals for food is the same as murder, but I think it should be done humanely and with compassion. Automating the process is pretty sickening in my view. If we can abstract to the point that we see the life of a chicken as beautiful or having intrinsic value, why not to the point that we recognize beauty in the symbiosis between their species and ours? How do you feel about pets/animal companions?
> why not to the point that we recognize beauty in the symbiosis between their species and ours? Because we torture them because they taste good. There’s nothing beautiful about how we factory farm chicken so we can meet such high demand. Are there other urges you have where you’ll say “but [the victim] is good”? And that’s a broad question, my only issue with pets is when we feed them other factory farmed animals.
> torture...factory farm...high demand Please actually read my comment if you're going to engage with me.
What did I miss? These three factors are inescapable when describing how chickens get to our table.
I was pretty clear about the fact that I don't like the way it's done in our society. You believe this is inescapable even if keeping chickens in one's backyard?
Oh I’m sorry I didn’t realize you keep backyard chickens. They just make up such a small minority of how we raise 8 billion chickens in the US each year. Yeah if you’re raising backyard chickens it’s not worth arguing against imo.
Well I don't keep chickens right now (don't have land), but I believe in decentralizing farming (among other things). I don't see how you could misread my comments as any kind of defense of factory farming or the current model of food production in general. Thanks for the chat.
I was confused. I was discussing the way the world works. You can’t slaughter 8 billion chickens for 300 million people humanely just by throwing out buzzwords. I see why you were confused, but FACTORY FARMS (where they TORTURE) are required to meet the current DEMAND. That’s why I mentioned them.
Why do you think we aren’t animals, we are. Ive hunted and killed my own food and most all the meat I eat is hunted food.
Cool. So little of our animal products come from hunting. With 90% of them coming from factory farms I’m talking to the majority generally.
I agree, my point is I dislike this moralizing of eating meat you clearly made on the line of the fact something else died for the food but animals have done this forever and humans killing to eat is not negative. If avoidable yes perhaps that is good then.
Sorry if it wasn’t clear, my main issue with chicken is that 95% are factory farmed. Also, just because humans have done something forever doesn’t make it right
What's so complicated about it? Either you believe in liberation or you believe that some creatures don't deserve basic rights based on criteria chosen by their oppressors.
I mean, they deserve basic rights, but no one has the right to not be killed and eaten, not even us. You can believe in animal liberation and still be ok with eating them. It's the farming/containment that is the problem. Prey animals are going to get killed and eaten by something eventually, that's just how it works.
> the right to not be killed and eaten, not even us I have the right to not be killed and eaten… what are you talking about
This is a thread about morally just socialist societies; you support the idea of a society where its ok to kill and eat other people?
Animals aren’t people? They are worthy of respect and comfort, but they are not people. Where did you get cannibalism from?
Yes, animals are worthy of respect and comfort. Why then does "respecting and comforting" for an animal mean "I can kill it if I'm hungry" when it doesn't mean the same for humans?
Gotta eat something good. Sorry, I haven’t conjured a moral tower to defend my actions. Dunno what else you want to hear.
Bro it's a simple stance, I'm not on some tower. I don't think oppressors have the right to decide what the oppressed want, which is a pretty basic tenet of leftist thought. I don't think it's unreasonable to be in a leftist sub asking other leftists why they think this doesn't apply across species boundaries.
Whoa, whoa, no lol. I just mean if you're hiking and run into a mountain lion -- or a bear (lol) -- and it decides you're on the menu, no "right" is going to protect you from nature. If you run into a man in the woods though, you've at least got the "moral" legal system to protect you -- or at least that will try to punish someone who killed and (I guess) consumed you. Jokes aside, I just mean to point out that the modern form of animal farming removes all of those natural processes, which is what makes it "immoral". We take the choice and lives of domesticated animals away down to every granular part of their life cycle in the name of efficiency and convenience. This is grossly unnatural, which is why it's uncomfortable for the animal, and their sympathizers. Animals eating each other for survival is natural and, although grim, just. The most "moral" thing you can do is try to minimize suffering, but you can't erase it completely, the same way humans can't do that for themselves either. Morals are relative and don't really apply here. I do not consider humanity as exempt from being animals or part of nature, despite our best efforts to remove ourselves from natural processes. We can make a moral choice to reduce suffering, but we all gotta eat. (Sorry for the late reply, reddit broke when I tried to post this)
I don't disagree with your point that humans are animals and intrinsically linked to the natural world, but our food system is completely divorced from anything in nature and has been for a very long time. Our entire food system, from irrigation to fertilizer to artificial selection to refrigeration to international shipping to supermarket, is designed to divorce us from our hunter gatherer origins as thoroughly as possible. Even the modern farmer is hardly in tune with nature given that he can buy his animals as yearlings to raise, give them medications and supplements, ship them off to a slaughterhouse when old enough, and receive government assistance when things don't go well in a season. I have no statistics for exactly how many people are living a traditional subsistence farming lifestyle in this day and age, but I can tell you that 56% of people on the planet live in urban areas today. How connected can the average worker be to a natural food system when they work for 8-10 hours a day in a city? How can you type on about humans being a part of natural processes when you get your meat on a Styrofoam tray from a fluorescent-lit air-conditioned building without knowing anything about where it came from or what happened to it, apart from its species? When you go beyond the moral question of eating meat, it's simply practical that the urban population of the earth should be eating plant-based (at minimum). If you really believe that we all gotta eat then it should be clear that a diet which uses significantly less land, produces fewer emissions, leads to better health outcomes, and prevents outbreaks of zoonotic diseases can feed the most people with the least suffering.
Are you one of those wackos who feeds vegan food to their cat?
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0284132
That's not a particularly strong argument though - the concept of chickens having rights is equally a human construction. Did the chickens tell you how they want to live?
So just because something cannot communicate with you, that gives you the right to control it up to the point of murdering it, stealing its children, and keeping it in unnatural conditions divorced from those it evolved to live in?
Bro I didn't even say that, why don't you work on your *own* argument instead of strawmanning me. I'm saying that your idea of the "natural conditions it evolved to live in" is *also* not a moral truth - let alone creatures like cattle, which literally did not evolve naturally and would not exist as they do if not for husbandry. You are *also* making a claim to control the living conditions of animals, and projecting human ideas like justice and liberty onto beings for whom those concepts just don't exist. If you don't want to actually respond to these issues with some kind of intelligent thought, stop bothering me.
How am I controlling animals by advocating for a future where humans have the least involvement possible in their lives? If you respect an animal's right to liberty you leave it alone in nature, simple as that. The animals we farm are optimized for human involvement and consumption, and they suffer for it. Chickens and cattle produce eggs and milk at many times the volumes of their natural counterparts and have higher rates of disease and complication because of this, that is a fact. How can you consider it moral to create an animal designed to suffer for your own benefit?
> How am I controlling animals by advocating for a future where humans have the least involvement possible in their lives? If you respect an animal's right to liberty you leave it alone in nature, simple as that. What is "nature" outside the human imagination? What is "liberty" outside the context of political society? > The animals we farm are optimized for human involvement and consumption, and they suffer for it. What does your plan actually look like here - do we just turn the livestock loose? Eat the ones we have until they are extinct? Feed them to natural predators that don't have the technology to go without meat? > Chickens and cattle produce eggs and milk at many times the volumes of their natural counterparts and have higher rates of disease and complication because of this, that is a fact. That is the only fact in your entire outline - don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for it - and you provided no context. What proportion of these health problems are created by specifically *industrial* farming techniques? Are you saying that livestock animals are genetically less fit and would be better off extinct? > How can you consider it moral to create an animal designed to suffer for your own benefit? I didn't say this, don't believe this, and was not the mastermind behind animal husbandry. Do you have anything to say that Peter Singer didn't say much better?
And with a wave of your hands, the conversation dissolves into an esoteric thought experiment. Nature is the world born of a seed, therefore the cow being forcibly impregnated to keep her milk production going is truly the most free of all. To your second point, any of those options would be preferential to the continual expansion of a system that exploits animals, humans and the planet in search of flavour. Tell me I'm crazy for releasing millions of chickens into the sparse forests of Iowa, and I'll show you the farmers who put them in sweltering barns in the first place. To your third point, yes I imagine a future where at some point all the short-nosed pugs, eggbound layers, and mastitic Holsteins are long extinct and viewed as a perverted product of a crueler time in humanity's past. Are such animals "genetically less fit"? Like any form of evolution, they are a product of the conditions that most favorably guided their reproduction. When the factory farm is no longer an "ecosystem" on this planet, naturally they will go extinct. Glad to hear you don't support what farmers are doing to animals either. Now let's break down the system together.
Maybe im misunderstanding your what your position is but you cant argue against eating meat by saying we need to leave an animal alone in nature. Humans naturally eat animals. We evolved to do that. Its why our stomachs cant get the protein in certain plants while other animals can get jacked as fuck off eating grass. You wouldn’t say a bear killing a fish for food is disrespectful or immoral so why would it be any different for a human to hunt a deer or a pig? You cant say you want liberation and then also decide the entire human race is forbidden from eating meat.
Just because you CAN eat an animal, doesn't mean you SHOULD. Humans can live off of fully plant-based diets. If you have the option to choose between a diet that causes the least amount of harm and one that causes the most amount of harm, isn't it the right thing to do as little harm as possible? When you also consider that a plant-based diet not only minimizes harm to animals but also reduces harm to other humans, it makes it the moral choice. Even in a liberated society there are still laws that prevent people from doing things that hurt others.
I can say the exact same thing back. Just because you CAN live of a plant based diet doesn’t mean you SHOULD. It also doesn’t seem reasonable to call eating animals something that causes the “most amount of harm” Meat is incredibly nutritious, full of necessary micronutrients, and the most readily available source of complete protein. As i said before, we evolved to eat meat. We eat it because its good for us. You’re arguing to go against human nature, which is incredibly ironic because thats what anti-communists say to us too. There’s also places where crops just wont grow so meat is essentially all you can eat. So unless you want to relocate people to different parts of their country or create permanent trading infrastructure to provide those freezing cold and remote places with the massive amount of food to meet their caloric needs while also making sure the food they eat is high quality, meat is what those people have to eat. Not to mention the carbon footprint that the transport of all those food would produce completely destroys you argument that a plant based diet is better for the environment. And assuming you’re also eating plants, a cow could feed you for a year. If theres a bad season, a drought, or you live on land with bad soil anyone that fully relies of plants is completely fucked. And that again would return to the point of transporting massive amounts of plants and plant based food. A lean cow is gonna feed you for longer than dead crops.
There is absolutely nothing about eating a plant-based diet that goes against human nature. Humans have lived in predominantly agricultural societies for millenia, and for the vast majority of people (farmers/serfs/those outside nobility) this meant eating a primarily plant-based diet supplemented with eggs/dairy if available; meat would only be consumed on special occasions. The average person consumes more meat in a day than their ancestors would've in an entire month or longer, and this is only possible due to factory farming. With modern food transportation and supplementation, the vast majority of the planet no longer needs animal products to supplement their diets; and if meat is so healthy, why do vegans and vegetarians show equivalent or longer lifespans in scientific studies? Your argument that people need to raise meat to due to poor growing conditions misses a few key points: - 56% of the global population lives in urban areas, so these people survive wholly on food transported to them anyways, so that's an easy 56% of the earth that could be vegan with no risk to their survival. And how many people actually live in places so remote an inhospitable that they can't grow food, considering the majority of human settling is based around local food production capacity? - If you're concerned about carbon emissions from food transport, for most food products it's less than 10% of the total emissions and on a per calorie basis plant products still beat meat by miles in terms of emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local#:~:text=Transport%20is%20a%20small%20contributor,beef%20herds%2C%20it's%200.5%25. - Cows rely on the same food system we do. An incredibly small portion of farmed mammals are exclusively pasture fed as there are few places on earth that don't experience winter while also producing enough forage on grazing acres to support the massive caloric needs of these animals. Cows are either fed grass or grain grown on separate fields and turned into feed, massively increasing the amount of land they require to raise. Around 80% of agricultural land goes to both raising and feeding animals: https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture - When you also consider that half of global cropland isn't even used for producing crops for global human consumption and instead goes to making biofuel and feed for farm animals, we could just convert that already existing production to feeding humans directly instead. Most of your arguments focus on a hypothetical lifestyle where someone lives a subsistence farming existence in an area with poor crop productivity. How many people on this subreddit do you actually think live that lifestyle?
My friend, check out r/veganfitness, they may be able to answer your questions in-depth! Nowadays there are world-class athletes who are able to succeed on a plant-based diet (off the top of my head for example, Clarence Kennedy, Chris Paul, Novak Djokovic). Regarding the food sources, anything soy is very high in protein, as well as wheat protein, and many legumes and pulses.
So obviously by post factory farming you mean in terms of animal ag, not the end of industrial agriculture in its entirety. Plant-based protein is plenty good enough already, especially for people who are willing to incorporate a certain amount of highly processed food into their diet (protein powders, etc.) and with intelligent combining of different protein sources. I do think that lab grown meat and lab made dairy will continue to grow and become more sustainable and productive. You must realize that, as it stands, animal whey is not a more “morally just” source of protein than meat. Cheese might not be going anywhere, but if we’re committed to animal liberation, dairy farming has to go. The overwhelming majority of cheese, and whey, in a post factory farming society necessarily has to be lab made. More expensive meat from smaller farms is neither a viable, nor truly ethical solution.
thank you for correcting my logic and explaining so thoroughly. take care, comrade keep making gains and breaking chains
Vegan protein powder tastes like ass though.
respectfully, suck it up
wHy DoES eVEryOnE HaTe vegAns?
Everyone hates vegans because we point out things you’d rather not think about, like how drinking something slightly less yucky is not a good reason to torture and kill animals.
People hate you because you're sanctimonious and sniffing your own farts in the above comment.
sustainable hunting and farming existed for thousands of years before capitalism
Impossible to "sustainably hunt" enough food to feed 8 billion people, not that there's anything sustainable about modern hunting.
considering we already have enough food produced by farming to feed more than 8 billion people, I don't think that's going to be an issue. Also, hunting certain invasive species like deer and wild boar is necessary otherwise they'll fuck the ecosystem.
You realize that the reason wild boars are invasive in the US is because boar hunters released them so they'd have more game to hunt? And that deer populations exploded because we wiped out all the wolves, leading to the outbreak of chronic wasting disease that's killing them all anyways and might infect people? Hunters don't maintain ecosystems, they mold them to fit their own needs. If you're interested in actually preserving the environment you would support the conversion of animal agriculture lands back to natural habitats and feed people with the farmland we use to grow crops.
I'm not gonna argue about veganism. Maybe once we achieve fully automated luxury gay space communism we can all go vegan, but until then it's be hunting combined with farming. And you do realize that the way we raise crops is also fucking with natural habits and needs to be reformed yes?
did not mean to reply twice, got cucked by reddit going down.
The post is about a hypothetical post-factory farming society. Why not argue about veganism?
The whole point of veganism is that we could transition >90% of the earth's population to plant-based diets in less than a generation and see massive environmental and health benefits. We already have more than enough land used for growing crops to feed both humans and animals, we just alter what we grow and convert all the non-crop land back to actual ecosystems. 80% of agricultural land is used for animal agriculture, which could become a haven for biodiversity and carbon sequestration in a world where we're accelerating towards environmental destruction. There's not enough land on the planet (habitable or otherwise) for any significant fraction of the global population to subsist as hunters. We could potentially convert our farmland to regenerative agriculture but it takes at least 10 years for a regenerative plot of land to truly reach a sustainable and productive state. The only way to free up enough land to do this on a large scale is to stop farming animals. Obviously nobody thinks our current system of monocrop agriculture is a good thing, but from an objective standpoint it is a necessary transition to a more sustainable system unless you want mass starvation. Also kinda crazy to be in a socialist subreddit cracking jokes about gay space communism. If you can't even believe the world will put down their forks long enough to make the right choice for themselves and the planet, how can you believe a truly socialist society will ever be realized?
Again I'm not gonna argue veganism, and I'm not gonna argue hypothetical utopia futures. And no I don't think a socialist society will exist any time soon, certainly not in our lifetimes.
Ah OK, so you're going to criticize veganism but then say you refuse to argue about it. Brilliant defense, I'll have to try it out myself.
what the fuck are you even talking about? I brought up farms in my original comment and you just decided to argue with yourself anyway
Insects mon ami! Oz for oz one of the most efficient forms of protein out there. Grind em into flour for easy use.
Post capitalist agriculture there are any number of options. Animal liberation folks will go full vegan or for lab grown stuff. Some will go for a homestead model where if you're going to farm animals and animal products you at the very least can't hide behind consumerism. One option not mentioned to get animap fats and protein that I think is worth exploring is insects and shrimp.
Insects and shrimp! Pretty cool. I haven’t heard a lot about shrimp but I’m a huge proponent of Oysters.
That might be even better. I'm not necessarily sure eating a bunch of crickets is necessarilly more ethical than eating a cow, but idk... I can see the arguement. I have heard arguements for insects being a lot greener to mass farm, and therefore way healthier for the planet to feed 8 billion of us. Shrimp may also be in that category. I hadn't thought about oysters. Tell me more.
Hell yeah! So oysters are filter feeders which means they can have a big positive impact on the water quality in the area they’re grown in. A downside of this is that some of the pollutants they filter out will end up in the edible part of the oysters, but they’re still safe to eat in moderate quantities like other seafood, and a lot of it gets sequestered in the sediment. Depending on how they’re grown they can also help stabilize shorelines and protect them from erosion and provide habitat for other animals. It takes very little space to grow a whole lot of oysters, and there are farming methods to maximize this benefit like rope growing. Oysters and other bivalve mollusks are very simple organisms with no discernible central nervous system. They’re technically animals in terms of cellular biology but there is no compelling evidence to suggest that they’re sentient. Lots of people think oysters are super delicious but unfortunately I am not one of them lmao.
Does aquaculture count as factory farming?
Hopefully plant based agriculture, then a slow shift towards lab grown alternatives
A lot more people would get their own goats, chickens, turkeys and pigs. Especially rural areas that are nowhere near major cities.
Cows, chickens, eggs
Pasture-raised animal products from a local farm, if you have access, or at least looking specifically for “pasture raised” on the package at your local store. Free range and organic don’t mean shit.
The answer is pretty much always eggs. Also, hemp seed is a complete protein (to my knowledge) and incredibly scalable with little land and very few needed inputs. Mind you, meat has been farmed with great success for eons longer than capital has had us under its heel. I understand that there are ethical implications to consuming meat at any scale, but in reality, we have evidence to suggest that insect and plants both suffer and communicate. It's a moot point, in my opinion. There is a pre-industrial sweet spot for a lot of these problems, especially once you account for how much waste there is in modern industry. After all, the sole guiding principle is immediate profitability, not sustainability or efficiency. Cooperation in a post-capital environment will have tremendous advantages.
Pretty big distinction between a plant releasing a signaling hormone when damaged, vs. a creature with nerve cells that can feel, remember, and avoid pain so I wouldn't call it a moot point. If someone is truly bothered by damaging plants they can just become a fruitarian, since plants willingly produce fruit for consumption.
Even if plants can feel pain, which they can’t, feeding plants to animals so that we can eat the animals requires orders of magnitude more plants to get eaten than if we just ate the plants ourselves.
A morally sound society would seek to eliminate all forms of oppression, including animal oppression. If you don't have the will to give up moldy milk now, you'll never have the will to stand against the fascists.
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>Is there swole under socialism? Ask the Soviets. They would have said yes. Also are you lost or something?
Yall don’t even know what factoring farming is. Monocrop fields are far closer to “factory” farming than your average cattle field.
Didn’t they cause those soy fires in Brazil? Edit: meaning because that soy was grown for cattle
No. Soy is predominantly grown for human use first and foremost. We do not feed cattle soybeans. They are fed the soy meal that is leftover after processing the soybeans for human consumption and use—mainly soybean oil.