Here’s an actually funny joke on the topic from Mitch Hedberg:
- I’m not a vegetarian because I like animals. I just really hate plants.
Oh goodie, a dumb post making fun of veganism, I’m sure the comments are going to super mature and nuanced.
Taking things a bit too seriously are we
Fun of veganism? O tempora o mores! Gods are beyond any criticism!
You should crosspost this to a boomer humor community, I’m sure they’d love it.
Right there with standing outside during a cold snap spraying aerosols in the air hoping for global warming.
Butchering animals isn’t cruel. We avoid them suffering as much as possible when doing so.
We kill them quickly but it’s mostly all bad in terms of what comes before and throughout the animals life. I still eat bacon and all, but no need to sugarcoat it.
We don’t try to avoid much of any suffering tbh. Even the fast and painless death is just so they don’t damage the equipment or the meat.
You haven’t seen how factory farms work then, which is good for your mental health probably, but you should really take time to understand the actual problems and serious it is.
The conditions that most animals live in is horrifying and they suffer a great deal before butchering, and the butchering process is often flawed and has tons of problems, with wide-scale reports of abusive conditions and botched kills, to say nothing of the massive amount of mental and physical harm it does to the people who’s job it is to kill thousands of living beings every day.
You don’t have to give up meat, but at the very least consider buying local from non-industrial farms.
factory farms
We don’t have that around here.
Lucky for you, that’s always a good thing… but that’s also kind of the idea, they don’t build them everywhere, they build a few massives ones to “process” animals on an industrial scale, so it still ends up in your local grocery store, which is why it’s worth taking a minute to check where they get their meat and dairy.
Do we really have to explain to you killing is bad?
I killed this cow because it was killing your food. You will thank me later.
I must have skipped this day in biology class
Lemmy users thinking they’re better than redditors but upvoting this
recall, most upvotes here are astrospam.
I only replied to you, because I actually enjoy your adorable comics.
what’s astrospam?
Spam via an astroturfing campaign? As far as I can tell, “astrospam” is not a term, but thrt is my best guess.
a portmanteau of what threadiverse is experiencing.
Essentially the plot of Sausage Party.
great movie. ending was insane though
The most boring take, ugh.
Well I thought it was funny :(
It is funny. It’s the vegans who are sad fucks unable to take a joke.
It might have been funny 10,000 years ago when it was first told. Now it’s just something your fox news watching uncle says to your hippy cousin every Thanksgiving with a smug grin on his face.
Vegans were around 10,000 years ago? Oh, you mean cows and sheep.
I dunno, its just the same joke Sausage Party made?
I don’t engage in sausage feasts so I don’t know. I am sure you do, though.
Millions of insects die when growing fruits and vegetables.
Is it more or less than the amount that die when you grow crops to feed to animals that you then slaughter and eat? It seems like less, but I’m not a math major.
Just throwing in Buddhas dilemma when he wanted to stop eating meat, but realized the insects that die in the process and asking himself does one life form have more value than another?
Point to where in the Pali Canon the Buddha says that. You can’t.
You’re thinking of Jain Sallekhana. It’s not a thing in Buddhism.
does one life form have more value than another?
Like with everything, there is no clear boundary and it’s up to us, the thinking, sapient creature to make these distinctions so that we can exist while minimizing our harm to the world.
We will never eliminate all harm we do to the living world, that’s ridiculous and nobody is expecting it except the most delusional people.
But we do need to draw lines somewhere. And broadly, we can make distinctions that higher animals like cows, pigs and chickens have more of an “experience” of the world than most insects, and thus their lives have more value. It’s a weird thing to say out loud but we can’t shy away from making these moral choices as long as inhabit the earth and want to remain the dominant species.
One life does have more value than another. I’ll kill a hundred cows to save a human.
But only if I have to. I won’t kill a hundred cows to save the minor inconvenience of finding something different to eat.
While I agree, I think we need an *. Some biological humans are no better than dirt and crows would be better company.
Insects are more important to our ecosystem, yet we don’t seem to care about that because they aren’t fuzzy and cute.
“we” care just fine. I don’t spray pesticide. I work with my land to keep critters out of my house. Human compassion is not in short supply.
And I’ll kill every one of those fuckers if it would save human lives.
Will not eating veggies save them? Or are they dying for other reasons?
But if the answer to that is no, then by eating meat you’re responsible for the death of the animal you eat, plus all the insects that were killed to raise crops to feed it before you ate it. For something like a cow, they’re eating significantly more crops than you would because they weigh like 1000 lbs.
If the answer is yes, then don’t eat the cow, because as far as we can tell it has more awareness and capacity for suffering than a bug.
take soy, as an example.
some 80%+ of all soy is pressed for oil, but a soybean is only about 20% oil anyway. that leaves 80% of 80% of the total crop as industrial waste. we feed that to livestock. (we call it soymeal or soycake). so no insects are harmed to produce that for livestock: they were harmed to make soybean oil. by feeding the byproduct to livestock, we are conserving resources.
so no insects are harmed to produce that for livestock: they were harmed to make soybean oil.
Sorry, this is an accounting trick. The cows are still eating an agricultural product that killed insects, we can’t decide ‘oh, actually that’s entirely for oil’ if the soy meal is also valuable enough to sell and export as a product (about 65% of production, per the wiki article you linked).
There also aren’t any livestock that live entirely off soybean meal; a huge amount of corn is also fed to livestock. So even if you want to do shoddy accounting, they’re not being raised off waste and sunlight. A lot of crops are grown exclusively for livestock consumption.
even the corn plant is a great example. people don’t eat corn leaves, cobs, or stalks, but livestock eat silage made from them.
Unless you consume the entire animal yourself and refuse to share, the math doesn’t check out.
A cow eats more crops which kill more insects over its lifetime than you will by eating plants over the same period, because you eat fewer plants. There’s no way that adding entropy by eating something that ate plants somehow kills less insects, even if you want to take into account dividing up the meat between other people.
Example: steers eat 30-40lbs of feed per day for 1-2 years. Less than half of a steer is usable beef, and will give you a little less than 500 lbs of meat from a 1200 lb steer. Assuming 1/2 lb servings, that’s a little less than 1000 servings of ~500 calories for something that took years to raise and literal tons of crops like corn to be fed to it.
My point is that is more than if one person consumes the animal the environmental impact should divided between the person, based on how large part of the animal they eat.
Some can argue insects are more important to our ecosystem.
Either way, I have personally cut back on eating red meat. Been trying to cut back on meat altogether, but strictly for my health. At this point in the world, I don’t have much hope. Climate change will dictate what we eat.
