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Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

erichgrunewald.com

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Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

#221

Post by JoeAltmaier »

cheese_goddess wrote: post #220
nerdponx wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad most food animals are tortured, sometimes for their entire life, before being killed. The unluckiest ones are the females kept alive for breeding.

That is true of battery chickens and of meat and dairy cattle in factory farms, but not for "most animals", like you say, and certainly not the world over. On the contrary, around most of the world, farm animals are among the happiest, healthiest, best-fed and best-cared for animals on the planet. Of course you will not know that if you selectively look at the factory farms with feedlots that are the norm in the US,…

"Most animals" in the world are the animals we raise for meat. Well, mammals anyway.

60% are food animals

36% are we humans

4% are wild animals

So there's that.

Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

#222

Post by telesilla »

runawaybottle wrote: post #80
eigenket wrote: post #35

As an academic who isn't directly involved in anything close to animal testing (I'm a physicist) I always find it strange that people working in biology have to jump through incredible hoops relating to how the animals they work with are treated, but then the lunch place in the biology department sells sandwiches with chicken, ham etc in with incredibly minimal oversight for how the animals are treated. The differenc…

Death is not the same as torture. Kill me before you ever torture me.

Please, see the Animal Welfare Section on the Wikipedia page for slaughterhouses. There is nothing here sensational, just facts. It's important that those who choose to eat meat understand the contract they sign when financially supporting the industrial animal processing system.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterhouse#Animal_welfar...

Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

#223

Post by JoeAltmaier »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #221
cheese_goddess wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is true of battery chickens and of meat and dairy cattle in factory farms, but not for "most animals", like you say, and certainly not the world over. On the contrary, around most of the world, farm animals are among the happiest, healthiest, best-fed and best-cared for animals on the planet. Of course you will not know that if you selectively look at the factory farms with feedlots that are the norm in the US,…

"Most animals" in the world are the animals we raise for meat. Well, mammals anyway. 60% are food animals 36% are we humans 4% are wild animals So there's that.

In fact, we eat more animals every year than are alive at any one time. E.g. 50B chickens are eaten every year, but only 19B are alive at any moment.

Its essentially true that the only animals that matter are the ones we raise. By the numbers anyway.

Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

#224

Post by cheese_goddess »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #221
cheese_goddess wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is true of battery chickens and of meat and dairy cattle in factory farms, but not for "most animals", like you say, and certainly not the world over. On the contrary, around most of the world, farm animals are among the happiest, healthiest, best-fed and best-cared for animals on the planet. Of course you will not know that if you selectively look at the factory farms with feedlots that are the norm in the US,…

"Most animals" in the world are the animals we raise for meat. Well, mammals anyway. 60% are food animals 36% are we humans 4% are wild animals So there's that.

Numbers please. Where do they come from?

Also, it doesn't matter how many food animals we have, what matters is how the majority of them are treated. And the majority are not meat and dairy cows raised in feedlots in the US, because that kind of farm animal is a small proportion of all meat an dairy animals bred the world over. From Our World in Data:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-meat-production-by...

You can see that pork and poultry make up the largest amount of meat produced. Though the plot shows meat rather than number of animals, remember that it takes seveal pigs or goats to make the same meat as one cow, and many more chickens. There are way more pigs and chickens farmed the world over than there are cows and cow farming (cow factory farming) is concentrated in the US, Argentina, Brazil and China:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/beef-and-buffalo-meat-pro...

It is those places where the images of tortured cows, that live their whole lives connected to milking and impregnating machines come from. It is such conditions that have to be eliminated. But in most of the rest of the world, those are not typical conditions and the numbers of animals raised are many, many fewer.

Edit: which is not to whitewash the pig and poultry industries. Chickens in particular are treated horribly, even the so-called "free range" ones (in many places it's enough for the chickens to be kept in a gigantic barn with a tiny bit of yard outside for the chickens to be considered "free range", legislation is often an absolute scandal). And there are many large pig farms were pigs are kept in absolutely inhumane conditions.

But, again- that's true in some places, not the world over and not for most animals.

Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

#225

Post by cheese_goddess »

telesilla wrote: post #222
runawaybottle wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Death is not the same as torture. Kill me before you ever torture me.

Please, see the Animal Welfare Section on the Wikipedia page for slaughterhouses. There is nothing here sensational, just facts. It's important that those who choose to eat meat understand the contract they sign when financially supporting the industrial animal processing system. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterhouse#Animal_welfar...

Again, these conditions, of industrial farming and slaughtering, are only the norm in some countries in the world. For beef, that's the US, Argentina, Brazil and China, predominantly. In the rest of the world, large scale farming or slaughtering is not the norm.

Generally my point in this discussion is that you should not bundle together factory farms and slaughterhouses in the US with, e.g. small dairy farms in the Pyrenees or Austria, or Bantu farmers in Africa, etc. There is one way that people eat meat in the Americas, Australia and China, and quite another in other parts of the world.

So when you say "those who choose to eat meat" financially support the industrial animal processing system, you're painting with an overly broad brush and I don't think it's serving anyone's purposes to do so.

Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

#226

Post by atweiden »

cheese_goddess wrote: post #220
nerdponx wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad most food animals are tortured, sometimes for their entire life, before being killed. The unluckiest ones are the females kept alive for breeding.

That is true of battery chickens and of meat and dairy cattle in factory farms, but not for "most animals", like you say, and certainly not the world over. On the contrary, around most of the world, farm animals are among the happiest, healthiest, best-fed and best-cared for animals on the planet. Of course you will not know that if you selectively look at the factory farms with feedlots that are the norm in the US,…

The French AOC [1] regulates what’s allowed to be marketed as Comté etc by stipulating location, breed, population density, etc; however aside from cheese, I’m not aware of a similar set of standards existing for animal products. As someone who has lived in a rural area with much animal agriculture, I can tell you labels like “free range” roughly translate to “Let’s put as many animals as we legally can fit onto this plot of land modulo our budget, then neglect them to every extent allowable by law, followed by killing them because we need the money”. You specifically give the example of the animals having a shed to shelter in, which IME is an exceptional rarity.

In any case, cherrypicked examples of “free range” farms that actually provide shelter for their animals are about as irrelevant as saying hunting is “more ethical” than factory farming. We cannot feed billions more people sustainably on diets heavy in animal products, no matter the method, especially so with the more inefficient methods like free range and hunting. There’s a reason factory farming exists.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellation_d%27origine_contrô...

Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

#227

Post by aflag »

skak wrote: post #209
thaumasiotes wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's worse for beef (~10) but you have to consider that half the cows are creating milk which has a high protein conversion ratio. Half?

Only female cows produce milk.

All cows are female.

Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

#228

Post by lurquer »

eigenket wrote: post #217
EvilEy3 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speak for yourself bud. We only have one life, and it is not for you to decide what other person should eat based on your moralist principles.

Moralist principles aren't really my issue here. Its kinda sad that animals suffer but I understand that not many people care about that. My issue is the massive ecological harm done by eating other animals compared to eating plants. Climate change and ecosystem collapse are real, concrete problems that are coming home to roost, and I find it incredibly sad that educated, prosperous people don't do the bare minimum t…

I want the climate to change.

Why do you assume things you believe are ‘problems’ are problems to others?

Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

#229

Post by pvaldes »

carbocation wrote: post #26
freddie_mercury wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article specifically talks about this and you haven't really made a concrete reply to anything they say. The quality of discourse on HN goes up when we all meaningfully engage with the content. The goal shouldn't be to see who is fastest to post a dismissal of the headline.

The article doesn’t actually talk about it in any meaningful way. They talk about it in a statistical fashion: most animal studies are underpowered, most don’t publish, etc. And sure, I think we can all agree that nobody should be doing useless experiments, whether on animals or not. But that in no way proves the article’s argument, and it hardly even supports it. Are we going to test out new CRISPR therapeutic deliv…

Failing experiments and learning something in the process is the bread and butter of science

Re: Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

#230

Post by cheese_goddess »

_Microft wrote: post #106
chr1 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't eat the plants that are eaten by the animals. Not all pastures can be converted to fields, and converting the rest will actually reduce biodiversity and cause more sustainability issues.

Only a fraction (and sometimes even tiny fraction ) of the land is needed to supply the same amount of protein and calories when replacing animals sources with plant sources. That means that you actually will not need to convert all these pastures to fields because they are just not needed anymore. Here are charts that compare land use of different foods normalized per calorie / grams of protein: https://ourworldinda…

>> Only a fraction (and sometimes even tiny fraction) of the land is needed to supply the same amount of protein and calories when replacing animals sources with plant sources.

That's a quick dodge, but still, a dodge of the OP's point: you can't eat all the plants that animals eat. For example, I eat primarily sheep and goat and their dairy products. The goats eat shrubs and the sheep browse inedible grasses. In fact, funny story, but I know a girl (not me) who tried to eat the grass the sheep were eating and her mouth filled with sores. I mean duh.

Anyway ruminants have four stomachs just so they can digest plant matter that is impossible for omnivores to digest. Industrially farmed animals are fed soy and corn, that can be digested by humans, but those are not those animals' natural feed. Left to their own devices, outside of factory farming, browsing freely, farm animals would exclusively eat plants that are inedible to humans and so they would convert plant matter to food way, way more efficiently than any human stomach ever could.

Four stomachs and rumination is the most efficient plant-to-meat production mechanism known to anyone.

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