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Chile’s salmon farms may use more antibiotics than any other meat industry

oceana.org

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Re: Chile’s salmon farms may use more antibiotics than any other meat industry

#171

Post by lawlessone »

natecavanaugh wrote: post #93
enord wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When has this attitude _ever_ been the solution to a shared-resource problem? I'm not being snarky, I want to know. It feels like solving traffic mortality by pasting a "drive carefully"-sticker inside the windshield, doing nothing other than establishing who is morally responsible.

Is this a shared resource problem though? The problem, as I see it, is one of a questionable food supply or at least a contamination issue, in which case, each person should decide what matters to them, and is how this particular problem is solved in the micro, which in aggregate, does lessen the macro aspect. I'm thinking of cases like cigarettes and alcohol. However, where this falls apart is that consumers don't a…

>Is this a shared resource problem though?

The shared resources is the limited amount we can use an antibiotic before it becomes useless.

Re: Chile’s salmon farms may use more antibiotics than any other meat industry

#172

Post by dagw »

belorn wrote: post #36
swombat wrote: post #6

Do you feel helpless to stop the problem of antibiotics use in the meat industry? You’re not! Here’s a simple easy trick you can use to reduce its impact on the world: eat less meat. You don’t need meat in 3 meals a day. Reduce it to 1 meal a day and you’ve already reduced your antibiotics impact by 2/3. Cut down to one meat meal a week and that’s a 96% reduction. You’re not powerless. Vote with your wallet and your…

Since this article talk about fish farms there is very obvious solution and that is eat wild caught fish, preferable from places where there is either a overpopulation or where there are invasive species. Plenty of such meat in the world where eating it would have a net-positive on the environment. Know one lake where the price of the overpopulated fish species in it is so low that just transporting it to a cat food…

eat wild caught fish

That can have it's own (different) set of problems if the fish comes from pollute waters.

Re: Chile’s salmon farms may use more antibiotics than any other meat industry

#173

Post by xtrapolate »

enord wrote: post #156
xtrapolate wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like solving traffic mortality by pasting a "drive carefully"-sticker inside the windshield Wouldn't a better analogy here be to "solve traffic mortality" by considerably reducing your exposure to dangerous situations (as in, driving less)? There's a demand for meat, hence an industry working to supply (and profit-off-of) it. Encouraging people to eat less meat is making a difference.

I dispute that encouraging people to eat less meat will make enough of a difference in this case to, well, make a difference. It's not wrong , it's just too much self-congratulatory blame-shifting with a moral message as the end itself. These kinds of problems need results, not feel-good activist sentiment woo. People are dying.

Are you suggesting that the change is too slow/not drastic enough? Or perhaps that a change isn't taking place at-all in the first place, that it's all just hot air?

Re: Chile’s salmon farms may use more antibiotics than any other meat industry

#174

Post by enord »

xtrapolate wrote: post #173
enord wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dispute that encouraging people to eat less meat will make enough of a difference in this case to, well, make a difference. It's not wrong , it's just too much self-congratulatory blame-shifting with a moral message as the end itself. These kinds of problems need results, not feel-good activist sentiment woo. People are dying.

Are you suggesting that the change is too slow/not drastic enough? Or perhaps that a change isn't taking place at-all in the first place, that it's all just hot air?

Indeed, we have to be confident that the mechanism of intervention will have the desired effect, and in time before we run out of antibiotic alternatives.

I say that anything less than that is worse than useless, because we're spending wasted effort (mindshare, attention) when time is, to the best of our knowledge, running out.

Now i don't know that personal activism and moral campaigning will be insufficient in this case, it just smells that way to me. It also has a certain fragrance of moral superiority and virtue signalling about it, which i guess triggers me, or something.

Re: Chile’s salmon farms may use more antibiotics than any other meat industry

#176

Post by sandov »

dokein wrote: post #5
erikpukinskis wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> rapidly growing superbugs We can outsmart them. We have biochemistry and flocks of 30 year old PhD students. They have a random number generator.

Not "a" random number generator, but rather trillions of random number generators running in parallel.

And a natural machine learning algorithm.

Re: Chile’s salmon farms may use more antibiotics than any other meat industry

#177

Post by hueving »

jdietrich wrote: post #161
hueving wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree with the attribution of drunk driving reductions to the culture. The culture is a byproduct of how significant the punishment has become, which is what really led to the reduction. Back in the 70s getting pulled over drunk was punished like running a red light (i.e. a nominal fine). The punishments were ratcheted up to now where a DUI results in a 10k fine in some states and an immediate license s…

The correlation just isn't there. In the UK, the standard penalty for drink-driving has been the same since the early 70s - a 12 month driving ban and a modest fine for the first offence, a three year ban for a second offence and a possible prison sentence of up to 6 months for further repeat offences. The penalties haven't changed in years, but the rate of drink driving has fallen drastically. What has changed is th…

That might be the case in the UK, but it's definitely not in the US. People didn't get serious about avoiding drinking and driving until the punishments got serious.

It still wouldn't be considered honorable here to turn in a friend for drunk driving (unless it was obscenely over the limit). It would be mainly considered a failure of friendship that you didn't confront them and instead called it in.

Even in rural Ireland there was a relatively recent backlash because they could keep driving home drunk down the side of the road with the hazard lights on.

Also, with a 12-month ban in the UK, they must not have been enforcing it much because it wouldn't take long to have most of the drunk drivers banned. So my suspicion is that enforcement increased as well. People rarely fall for propaganda alone when there is nothing that makes it concrete.

Re: Chile’s salmon farms may use more antibiotics than any other meat industry

#178

Post by ace_of_spades »

enord wrote: post #14
swombat wrote: post #6

Do you feel helpless to stop the problem of antibiotics use in the meat industry? You’re not! Here’s a simple easy trick you can use to reduce its impact on the world: eat less meat. You don’t need meat in 3 meals a day. Reduce it to 1 meal a day and you’ve already reduced your antibiotics impact by 2/3. Cut down to one meat meal a week and that’s a 96% reduction. You’re not powerless. Vote with your wallet and your…

When has this attitude _ever_ been the solution to a shared-resource problem? I'm not being snarky, I want to know. It feels like solving traffic mortality by pasting a "drive carefully"-sticker inside the windshield, doing nothing other than establishing who is morally responsible.

I don’t have the first-hand source right now but according to Doing good better [1] a book by William McAskill on the topic of Effective Altruism, there is a strong correlation between individual choices and economic outcomes. For example, if you refrain from buying an egg you would normally buy, egg production is reduced by 0.7 eggs or something close to that number.

The logic of this being that you as an individual might have a small probability of affecting change but if you do that impact is rather big. So the first person not buying an egg doesn’t change the situation but the 50th person does lead to one pallet less being bought (and so on). If you attribute the effect across individuals you arrive at a reasonably high impact each individual choice has. The same argument goes for voting!

[1]: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/doing-good-better/

Re: Chile’s salmon farms may use more antibiotics than any other meat industry

#179

Post by jopsen »

macspoofing wrote: post #154
jopsen wrote: post #151

> Consumers are key to change Consumers are given responsibility for too many things. When I buy something I have to check how it impacts the environment, animal welfare, fair trade, worker impact, company social responsibility, price, antibiotic usage, palm oil usage, health impacts, allergens, various toxins, suspected list of toxic substances, company reputation, etc. When will it end? IMO this doesn't scale... Th…

>When will it end? When you want it to end. You're putting those burdens on yourself.

No, the people who say that this is up to the consumers, rather than being a regulatory issue.

Those people are doing big-corporations a favor, by trying to shift the burden to me, who we all know can't possibly do this.

Re: Chile’s salmon farms may use more antibiotics than any other meat industry

#180

Post by jopsen »

Feniks wrote: post #164
jopsen wrote: post #151

> Consumers are key to change Consumers are given responsibility for too many things. When I buy something I have to check how it impacts the environment, animal welfare, fair trade, worker impact, company social responsibility, price, antibiotic usage, palm oil usage, health impacts, allergens, various toxins, suspected list of toxic substances, company reputation, etc. When will it end? IMO this doesn't scale... Th…

I cut down on eating meat to 3 times a week but Burgers won't like that. An alternative is organic free range meat but damn that's too expensive.

Nice, move... But you also have to choose the right shampoo :)

And some shampoos might have organic ingredients, while the contents is manufactured in an environmental damaging fashion... Others might be environmentally responsible, but not organic. Some might be both, but nighter of those is a guarantee that it's good for you. Organic snake poison, might be organic, but it's still very unhealthy :)

Point being that consumer choice is not a good way to solve these problems.

That said, eating less meat is generally a good approach. But replacing it with organic free range meat is not a perfect solution without a study. Could we feed the entire planet this way? Is it as efficient in terms of fodder needed? Is free range better than caged in terms of animal welfare (usually, yes, but there could be caveats).

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