It's just loss.
It's just loss.
199 comments
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And yet cats kill billions of birds each year. Wild.
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Livestock have to live through horrible agony, like the worst kind of torture. This means (by biomass, which some people correlate indirectly with moral worth), at least 60% of mammals on Earth undergo horrible torture. Bentham's Bulldog, "Factory Farming is Literally Torture."
Excess pigs were roasted to death. Specifically, these pigs were killed by having hot steam enter the barn, at around 150 degrees, leading to them choking, suffocating, and roasting to death. It’s hard to see how an industry that chokes and burns beings to death can be said to be anything other than nightmarish, especially given that pigs are smarter than dogs.
Ozy Brennan: the subjective experience of animal's suffering 10/10 intense agony is likely the same as the subjective experience of a human suffering such agony. (~6 paragraph article, well worth a read.)
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It says 60% of mammals are livestock, not 60% live in factory farms. I've been around cows in normal (non-factory) farms, and they seem fine. Way better off than wild animals that starve, die of disease, freeze to death, etc.
I have family members that have livestock and if something bad happens to them it's like someone hurt their child.
A seal in the 4% living in the wild may be eaten alive by a killer whale or torn to shreds by a great white shark.
We aren't going to prevent all animals from suffering, because how could we do that? Kill off all of the predators? Then there would be animal overpopulation and animals dying of starvation and disease.
Maybe we just focus on ending factory farms because that seems doable. But that effort won't be successful with obvious hyperbole claiming all livestock is treated like animals in the most horrible factory farms. Some people have actually been to farms that aren't like that you know.
People aren't stupid and if you misrepresent the facts, no one will believe anything else you're saying no matter how emotional you are when misrepresenting the facts.
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Not the person you are replying to, but that is severely underestimating the amount of factory farming. They are the dominant method of production
Based on the EPA's definition of a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (i.e factory farm) and USDA census data:
All fish raised in fish farms were considered to be factory-farmed. More than 98% of hens and pigs. For chickens and turkeys, the share was more than 99%. Cows were a bit more likely to be raised outside in fields, with greater space and freedom. Nonetheless, 75% were still fed in concentrated feeding operations for at least 45 days a year.
https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-are-factory-farmed
And even those that are not considered factory farmed don't always look how one may think, for instance non-factory farmed cows still use plenty of grain feed
Currently, 'grass-finished' beef accounts for less than 1% of the current US supply
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401
None of this is not limited to the US by any means. For instance in the UK:
There are more than 1,000 US-style mega-farms in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, including some holding as many as a million animals
Factory farming is unfortunately what scales well. If we want less factory farming we need the industry itself to be smaller. That is no impossible goal. Germany, for instance, has seen its overall meat consumption fall over the last decade
In 2011, Germans ate 138 pounds of meat each year. Today, it’s 121 pounds — a 12.3 percent decline. And much of that decline took place in the last few years, a time period when grocery sales of plant-based food nearly doubled.
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60 % of mammals are livestock, not 60% live in factory farms
99% of US farmed animals live in factory farms, according to this random website I just found. I don't claim to be an expert, though, and worldwide is probably lower than than 99%, but I would bet you that the vast majority of livestock is factory-farmed.
Agreed though that not all livestock are factory farmed. I should have clarified.
I'll point out though that even some non-factory-farmed livestock are likely suffering. Bentham's Bulldog talks about how hens undergo severe agony:
Egg-laying hens in conventional farms endure about 400 hours (!!!!!) of this kind of disabling agony. Remember, this is agony about as bad as the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, unless you’ve had an experience as bad as being severely tortured.
(emphasis mine.)
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A seal in the 4% living in the wild may be eaten alive by a killer whale or torn to shreds by a great white shark.
That's bad, though probably not anywhere near as much agony as being boiled alive for several hours until one's death. Regardless of whether you feel morally obligated to reduce wild animal suffering, you should admit that (a) from a utilitarian perspective, it's much easier to reduce factory farm suffering, and (b) from a deontological perspective, factory farming is (collectively) our fault, whereas the food chain isn't.
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And how many percentage of all livestock do you think is "free range" like the cows you describe?
Estimates vary from 80% to 99% are factory farmed. Which means majority of meat anyone is eating is factory farm. Unless you can verify the source of your meat yourself, you most likely are eating tortured animals.
So this whole argument that I have friends and family that care for their livestock like it's their kids is the misrepresentation since, it maybe true that you know someone that is treating animals humane, it doesn't represent majority.
Sauce https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-are-factory-farmed
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People aren't stupid and if you misrepresent the facts, no one will believe anything else you're saying no matter how emotional you are when misrepresenting the facts.
Like, say, if you were to imply that anything less than the vast overwhelming majority of all meat consumed comes from factory farms? Ignorance is bliss I suppose...
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Do you source 100% of your meat from the one place you visited that one time? How many pounds of meat per year do you eat?
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i've been wondering for a time whether maybe, blood sacrifices didn't ever actually end but the factory farmings are just a modern decoy for the actual blood sacrifices ...
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Now introducing Tyson's CEO: Cthulhu.
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Not saying at all this isn't a problem, but I hate bullshit statements that are deliberately deceiving.
These numbers are all by mass. Not actual number. Cows are huge. So are chickens, for birds. How this comic is laid out infers that there's 60 cows for every 40 of every other mammal, and that isn't even remotely close to true.
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I think biomass is probably more important than sheer number for these comparisons. Although I would also accept 'proportion of world's arable land being used to sustain them' as I suspect the ratios come out pretty similar for obvious reasons.
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On top of that, it's an annoyingly disproportionate graphic. The cow is much wider than the human so its area is much more than 60% of the area of the graphic.
The owl might be 3cm high and the hen 6cm high, but 9cm² and 36cm² would be the rough areas, even if it weren't for the fact that again, the hen picture is much, much wider than the owl.
With 30% and 70%, the owl should just be a little under half as big as the hen, but it looks like about 1/4 or 1/5 of the size of the hen.
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Source?
Im gonna go out on a limb and say this is udder cowshit. Rats are mammals, as are raccoons, squirrels, and whole fucking masses of little basically unfarmable varmints. You're telling me that there's like 12 farm cows for every wild rat on earth?
Horse. Shit.
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The source apperently takes the percentages by biomass, not by count as it seems. So small varmints will not have as much of an impact as a human or cow would.
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in the comments section. straight up 'sourcing it'. and by 'it', haha, well. let's justr say. My pnas.
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Yeah the reason why biomass is used instead of number of individuals becomes rather clear when you consider the following:
- what counts as an individual? is an unborn already an individual? (that one's a heated debate, as you can see by the abortion debate)
- if unborns are individuals, then at what age are they?
- if they are from the moment of fertilization, then some animals, like spiders or frogs (idk any mammal examples, but there might be some), might lay a shitload number of eggs, like a million or sth, and it would drive up the number of individuals dramatically. But it would be a bullshit metric, because 99% of these individuals are never gonna survive a single year on earth. so it would be utterly confusing and misleading.
Going by mass solves all of these problems because it's more clear and more direct. And on top of that it has the nice side-benefit of also giving an estimate of land usage. Land usage is roughly proportional to biomass, so measuring biomass is meaningful to estimate land usage as well, and that one really matters as that's the limited resource that you're trying to distribute among all species on earth.
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Which I think is intentionally disingenuous as it massively favours the large mammals over the far higher number of species of smaller mammals.
For example you'd need over 70 squeal monkeys to make to the biomass of an average American.
Humans and other great apes can be considered mega fauna, so it doesn't seem surprising that us and the animals we consume make up a higher percentage of bio mass. Were bigger.
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Quick Internet search.... https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass
They are referring to biomass.
- 1 cow ~ 1200 lbs / 545 kg
- 1 rat ~ 0.5 lbs / 0.25 kg
1 cow ~ 2400 rats by biomass
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we kill 3T animals a year for food/medicine/clothing/etc. Maybe we should stop?
edit: sorry, that was quite extreme of me to suggest we don't kill 3T animals a year.
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I'm going to go brutally murder and deep-fry my dog just to cancel out whatever grass you ate today, you extremist vegoon! something something lions something desert island grumble grumble muh canines
Hope that serves as a warning the next time you feel like
expressing an opinion that differs from minebeing preachy. -
Do ypu have a source for that 4 trillion?
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it changes depends on the source. this quotes 1.2T per year. It's in the trillions anyway.
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There are too many cultural factors involved to get a majority of people to stop eating meat.
The best way to reduce the number of livestock killed is to reduce the number of humans.
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You can shift culture, at least slowly. I think our best shot at significantly reducing animals killed is probably investing more into lab-grown meat
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If you’re worried about cultural factors, you might find removing any significant percentage of the total population will likely run into even more implacable “cultural factors” than meat reduction would.
This is regardless of the method of population reduction, save perhaps “slow decline” which seems to be promising atm, but that obviously has the downside that it’ll take a few generations to really have an impact.
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I don't think a single vegan is expecting animal exploitation to completely end in their lifetime. This will require a cultural shift that could take so fucking long. Despite that, we all think it is worth doing and being a part of.
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I mean okay
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You forgot the citation bro.
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It's by biomass.
It's from this article: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/21/human-race-just-001-of-all-life-but-has-destroyed-over-80-of-wild-mammals-study
Which is discussing this research: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115
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I don't think this is loss. I'm ready to eat crow if I'm proven wrong, but I think the real joke is the amount of time people will spend staring at this image and trying to figure out how it's loss
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Title made me think they were doing some 4 levels deep "loss" meme. It almost has it but frame 3 isn't close.
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Yeah this has my pattern matching in scrambles like I can see it kinda??
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Now even things that aren't loss are loss :c
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I didn't realise rhinos were so small. No wonder I never see them.
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Glad we aren't any of those things then.
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End of the Holocene, Last of the Megafauna party.
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It’s so fucking surreal to me how much megafauna extinctions have happened in the past 50’000 years.
I don’t think people realise we had like giant land birds (3+ meters tall), megasloths (elephant sized), giant kangaroos roaming round not that long ago.
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The garden burned. We were best adapted.
https://www.americanforests.org/article/the-trees-that-miss-the-mammoths/
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Are pets livestock, or did they miss a category of mammals? In the US there are more dogs than children.
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I believe pets are counted as livestock, but it's not specifically referenced as far as I have the interest to read.
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It's intentionally misleading, like most vegan propaganda. It's by mass, not population.
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Biomass is the usual way this sort of data is presented in environmental science. I think calling it “propaganda” is a bit much. But yes if would have been better if that were clear on the infographic.
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Do you think this info graphic is more or less worrying if it is numbers of living beings rather than biomass?
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Are these percentages referring to total biomass or population count?
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Has to be biomass, rats alone are etimated to be about as numerous as humans.
Searched for the 96% number and found this study that the graphic is likely based on: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115
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By mass.
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I just cannot imagine a functioning planet like that tbh, there's no way cattle industries are something we can keep in the world without killing ourselves slowly.
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birbs are only 2/3rds unreal confirmed ✅
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There aren't cougars in missions!
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by number of organisms, biomass,
species count, or something else?edit: ok not species count because there's only one species of human
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That YOU know of
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Land mammal biomass and bird biomass
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They forgot to mention what percentage of birds are humans smh
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I know of at least 1 bird that is actually a human. That big yellow dude on Sesame Street.
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A planet used up for specific food cultivation (which left no ecosystem unaffected).
Should have invented (energy to) food replicators before having the hubris to feed 100s of millions.
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You fell for the clickbait. When comparin organisms outside mammals by biomass the stydy says.
The sum of the biomass across all taxa on Earth is ≈550 Gt C, of which ≈80% (≈450 Gt C; SI Appendix, Table S2) are plants, dominated by land plants (embryophytes). The second major biomass component is bacteria (≈70 Gt C; SI Appendix, Tables S3–S7), constituting ≈15% of the global biomass. Other groups, in descending order, are fungi, archaea, protists, animals, and viruses, which together account for the remaining <10%.
Today, the biomass of humans (≈0.06 Gt C; SI Appendix, Table S9) and the biomass of livestock (≈0.1 Gt C, dominated by cattle and pigs; SI Appendix, Table S10) far surpass that of wild mammals, which has a mass of ≈0.007 Gt
We dominate the mammals space but we are barely visible in front of the plants, bacterias and fungi on the planet earth.
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Oh, no, I knew that (it fascinated me before), this isn't even the first such study, but mammals are there dominant species, a lot of other biomass is supporting it (eg oxygen, weather, etc).
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Does the wild animals include insects? What about single cell animals?
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who would win: giant cow or giant chick?
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the barn owl is almost as big as the guy.
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Nearly 8,000,000,000 humans require a lot of food. And it’s better that we eat livestock then depleting the local wildlife for nourishment. That’s a whole point of farming.
It’s still baffles me that anyone, especially in the last 10 or 15 years, suddenly thinks that this is a barbaric practice that must immediately end, despite the fact that this is the way it’s been for tens of thousands of years.
Because a bunch of pretentious, condescending jerks with some sort of food fanaticism should be able to bully everyone into their way of thinking.
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This is clearly a sensitive topic for you, so believe me when I say that I'm only talking about myself here. Yes, humans have included meat in their diets for thousands of years, but the recent changes that I feel shift the paradigm are: the scope and scale of industrial farming, the brutal conditions animals now face, and the fact that we have a good enough concept of human dietary requirements that people can finally make the choice to remove animal products from their diets in a healthy way.
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Only that we waste a ton of space that we could grow crops for humans to eat instead of feeding it to animals and wasting 90% of the energy. So saying 8 billion people need a lot of food while arguing for animal agriculture is very contradicting. Not even talking about all the greenhouse gases and the way we treat animals.
Maybe you should engage with some of the arguments these pretentious, condescending jerks are having because your comment has the same energy but none of the arguments.
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yup we need to eat food. It does not have to be meat centric or involve meat.
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The problem is, as you describe, poor resource and logistics management. Not what we actually eat. But you don’t care about that. You have a quasi, religious viewpoint, and you hate everyone who disagrees with you just because they disagree with you.
I’m sorry, you’re religious food fanaticism has blinded you to more rational options for dealing with greenhouse gases and animal cruelty. Your black-and-white approach is, clearly, not convincing me enough people to make a difference. So maybe you should focus on something that will make an actual difference: stop being a domineering, asshole, and lecturing people on how they should live their lives.
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So, I do get where you are coming from - but there are some things to consider. Firstly: while domestication and animal husbandry are pretty old, factory farming and such is very recent and has given everything a pretty new touch. While I think it's still valid to bring up as an argument, "X has existed as a pillar of our life for thousands of years" is usually not a great argument in and of itself, the same could easily be used to argue for slavery and a lot of other fucked up shit in history.
Besides that, there is sustainability. Yes grass-fed cattle can actually be sustainable, and allow for utilising land that is otherwise not usable to produce food. Also there is plant matter and "waste" from farming and food production more broadly, that can be utilised in feeding livestock sustainably, which would otherwise be composted anyway (and in some cases, gets pre-composted pretty well by said animals). So, yes, there are ways to produce meat and other animal-derived products sustainably ... but that is usually a bit of a cop-out, trying to divert attention from how the vast, vast majority of meat production is not sustainable in mostly water and CO2 numbers.
Personally speaking, I am also not vegan and not an animal rights activist - but claiming it is simply a continuation does miss some aspects.
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The only people who believe that animals cannot be raised as livestock in a sustainable fashion are the closed minded food, fanatics known as vegans.
It can be done, but not with your limited imagination and viewpoint on the world.
The problem is that people like you don’t want a solution. You want to be able to simultaneously claim victimhood while also lecturing and condescending to the entire world. Veganism is nothing more than an addiction to the sense of superiority over others.
If you actually cared about greenhouse gases, or animal cruelty, you’d be willing to explore other options. But vegans are extremists. It’s their way or no way.
I (and most people), on the other hand, care about greenhouse, gases, and animal, cruelty, and all of the other downsides to factory farming, but I’m not so stupid, I don’t have a big chunk of my brain, scooped out by religious fanaticism, so I can actually see alternatives.
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Just because things are the way they have been for ages, does not mean they are correct.
It is a brutal, awful practice and completely unnecessary.
I am not being condescending or pretentious when I say these things. I understand that it is very, very hard to alter what you've done your entire life, and harder still to see the issues with those things.
Those 8bn humans could be sustained by a fraction of the environmental impact, suffering to life, and land usage if they were on a plant based diet.
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this is the way it’s been for tens of thousands of years
Human population needed to be fed 10+k years ago:
\> 1,000,000
\ vs now
\10,000,000,000Which just means it has never been the way it is now. Those two numbers on a finite planet are represented by the pic perfectly.
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Something I pretty much never see pointed out is that we don't need billions of humans. Our governments keep encouraging us to have children, but they should be working to end the culture of pressuring people (especially women) into having children because they're somehow incomplete without them. There should be more programs offering access to birth control and family counseling services. This endless and meaningless growth is as harmful to us as it is to the rest of our planet.
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Our economic systems only work with infinite growth because otherwise what would be the point of lending money if it won't grow interest. It's essentially a giant pyramid scheme. And that requires new blood to provide labour and consumers. This is incredibly dumb on a finite planet with limited resources, but that's mainstream economics for you.
Also if the population shrinks too fast, then the pyramid becomes unstable with not enough younger people to take care of all the old people (while also maintaining the economy).
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The only reason that governments keep pushing for us to breed is because it feeds the capitalist engine which relies on a never-ending supply of laborers.
And, yes, all economies require laborers, capitalism is unique in how it consumes everything, even workers, as a resource rather than simply utilizing them.
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199 comments
This is highly depressing to see first thing in the morning.