21–30 of 58 posts
This article is unimaginably bleak. Fascinating, morbid, and just plain gruesome. I wonder how long until descendants of ours look back on our existence with similar gut-wrenching sensations of "that's...evil" .
Sounds pretty gnarly when you put it that way.
This article is unimaginably bleak. Fascinating, morbid, and just plain gruesome. I wonder how long until descendants of ours look back on our existence with similar gut-wrenching sensations of "that's...evil" .
If you look at how sausages are made I think it won't be long until that happens: "We used to kill animals, grind their bodies into a paste and then stuff that paste back into their own bowels." Sounds pretty gnarly when you put it that way.
The article lacks IMO the most gruesome tool that was used for processing penguins, the penguin press : https://ssz.fr/brdl/presse-manchots.jpg I took it on Kerguelen island, that's not a very good picture but you get the idea, a nice engineering detail is that the handle that turns the spiked rollers also has a blade and slices the pressed penguins into smaller slices. Most of the time though (at least on Kerguelen)…
Do you put the whole thing in there live or only the “oily” parts?
Whether for using as fuel or for rendering their fat, they were not butchered to get only the useful parts and were processed whole instead (which is why the oil was often contaminated with feathers as the article says).
But I wasn't there then of course, and it's not described in "15,000 Miles in a Ketch", one of the best accounts of the era that I know of. Maybe it's better talked about in "Narrative of the Wreck of the Favorite on the Island of Desolation" because the author, John Nunn, was taking part in a more "industrial" seal harvesting operation but I haven't read it yet. In any case I recommend reading at least the first of these books, and the second book is likely interesting as well if one is curious about that era.
This article is unimaginably bleak. Fascinating, morbid, and just plain gruesome. I wonder how long until descendants of ours look back on our existence with similar gut-wrenching sensations of "that's...evil" .
The image of thousands of penguins every day being rendered into oil makes me deeply sad, and I've no idea why it affects me more than the other animals we raise as livestock. It's not just that they're cute - since cows are IMO quite adorable - I cannot put my finger on it.
That's not to say what was done to the penguins and what is done to cows isn't truely horrible. Just that human emotional responses to widespread atrocities are surprisingly fleeting, and those emotional responses don't reliabily indicate moral objection and can't be relied upon to bring change.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The image of thousands of penguins every day being rendered into oil makes me deeply sad, and I've no idea why it affects me more than the other animals we raise as livestock. It's not just that they're cute - since cows are IMO quite adorable - I cannot put my finger on it.
The other thing I don't entirely get -- and I am not entirely sure I want to know -- is why penguins . The article highlights that they're a bad "oil" animal. Rendering livestock remains down is not a new idea and is something that would have been done industrially on land at the time of this expedition. I am a lifelong vegetarian, but I am not sure that my partner would let me get away with going totally vegan. Thin…
As for cheering up, remember that being vegetarian and vegan does make a large difference at the individual level, not just at a collective level. Every chicken you don't eat is practically a full animal that didn't have to suffer. The animal agriculture industry does react to demand, and on average, you're individual effect is at least equal to the animals you would otherwise consume.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you look at how sausages are made I think it won't be long until that happens: "We used to kill animals, grind their bodies into a paste and then stuff that paste back into their own bowels." Sounds pretty gnarly when you put it that way.
Or honestly this can apply to much of the commercial meat industry. It usually isn't pretty.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The other thing I don't entirely get -- and I am not entirely sure I want to know -- is why penguins . The article highlights that they're a bad "oil" animal. Rendering livestock remains down is not a new idea and is something that would have been done industrially on land at the time of this expedition. I am a lifelong vegetarian, but I am not sure that my partner would let me get away with going totally vegan. Thin…
You should go vegan. As a lifelong vegetarian, it will be easier than you think, since you're already used to resisting the temptation of foods with animal ingredients. While it's easy to imagine that dairy and egg industries don't require killing animals, they're only economically viable if they do kill animals. As for cheering up, remember that being vegetarian and vegan does make a large difference at the individu…
This article is unimaginably bleak. Fascinating, morbid, and just plain gruesome. I wonder how long until descendants of ours look back on our existence with similar gut-wrenching sensations of "that's...evil" .
If you look at how sausages are made I think it won't be long until that happens: "We used to kill animals, grind their bodies into a paste and then stuff that paste back into their own bowels." Sounds pretty gnarly when you put it that way.
Best served drizzled with bee vomit.
Might want to slap a NSFW tag on this title.