291–300 of 307 posts
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> Equate others' continued faith in said government with naivety To be fair, most people's trust/reliance in the Federal government is based out of naivity or lack of knowledge. Considering most news today is just regurgitating government press conference talking points, it's not surprising most people's knowledge stops at naivity.
To be faaaaaairrrr...
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I've literally just not purchased a single egg since this started. I'll live. Turns out one can go a substantially long time without eating a very specific single food item. Companies that bulk buy eggs to put into their own products don't seem to be getting as gouged as the normal consumer, so it hasn't affected my grocery shopping much. In fact I've benefited quite a bit from this. Chicken is pretty cheap right now…
As a protein they are a unique combination of nutritious, consistent, versatile, easy to cook, and a long refrigerated shelf life. The fact that you replaced them in your diet doesn't make them easy to replace in all diets.
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I mean, 60 million sounds like a big number, but it seems that the average number of chickens slaughtered per day in the US is somewhere around 24 million birds. I think you may underestimate the scale of poultry slaughter in the US.
Those are culls, not slaughters. They aren't the same thing. You cannot sell culled chickens for food, they are culled due to disease and are considered biohazard, because they can infect other parts of the flock or other flocks, and in the case of bird flu are also infectious to humans. Generally, the USDA requires a full cull of flocks if any birds are affected. My sister is into urban chickens and bird flu is very…
Now, if you had different numbers, that would be a thing worth discussing.
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At best, layers take 10 more weeks to produce. The egg price spiked almost a year ago. Focusing on meat vs egg chickens is beside the point. Cal-Maine’s profit has skyrocketed, even as prices on other things have come back down, so clearly they’re not merely passing their expenses on to the consumer. Read the link at top.
Cory Doctorow is no expert on the US egg/chicken industry. He's writing political opinion pieces here. Occasionally he writes science fiction. He also has big problems with hyperbole in his work. The egg price spiked almost a year ago because we've been dealing with H5N1 since over a year ago and it has only gotten worse since.
https://www.agriculture.com/news/business/record-breaking-eg...
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Though the ethical choice is better in your case, I came to realize that chickens (as they exist for agriculture) are kind of strange abominations of what they came from, and they really do live bizarre lives of eating and pumping out eggs. As soon as they're spent they get turned into dog food or similar. Ethically it's better if they aren't trucked around and crammed in cages, but the end result is still servitude…
I am fine with a chicken living in a servitude that involves walking around in nature, getting fed as much as they want, having shelter and warmth at night, having plenty of social interactions, having human caretakers watching them every day, and getting a quick painless death after a few years. I agree, ideally we wouldn't kill animals for the convenience and satisfaction of our diet. However, I fully recognize the…
I suppose I could argue that you don't even need to spend time thinking about it; you can just stop eating chickens. You aren't faced with a challenge here because the solution is clear and freely available.
> If I believed chickens had a greater sense of sentience, self awareness, and experienced life much at all beyond...
The more I learn about birds the more I think they're far more sentient and aware than we give them credit. Some certainly seem to possess more mental acuity than others, but I no longer believe chickens are vacant little meat vehicles.
One thing to consider is that the chickens you're familiar with have been raised in conditions which are conducive to them appearing fairly stupid. They're trained to expect very regular conditions, and are never given a chance to exercise their brains in order to become sharper or display more awareness.
If you met humans who lived a similarly deprived life, I suspect they would also appear useless and stupid.
We've also bred chickens to be a certain way, and that aspect of it is a bit unsettling to me. If we've in fact created a creature which is that stupid and vacant so we can consume it without feeling bad, there's something disturbing about that picture. It's like removing the soul from something so you can abuse it freely. In order to spare our conscience we effectively had to "kill" an entire lineage of living things. We know that the bird chickens originated from is not a grain-pecking zombie, so... What have we really done, and why? Is that something we should perpetuate? I find it quite a disturbing concept if it were to be true, though I do doubt that chickens truly are so mentally dull that their living or dying is irrelevant.
> I am fine with a chicken living in a servitude that involves walking around in nature, getting fed as much as they want, having shelter and warmth at night, having plenty of social interactions, having human caretakers watching them every day, and getting a quick painless death after a few years.
One interesting thing to me here is: If you think it's okay to kill the chicken eventually, why does it matter if its life prior was good or not? Where do you draw these lines and why? If you care about the chicken a _bit_, why do you, and why don't you _more_? What qualities would a chicken need to possess in order for you to decide it's not okay to eat it?
Upon asking myself this I realized I didn't have good answers. I prefer witnessing chickens being alive over having them on my plate to enjoy for a fleeting moment.
I'm not arguing at all; most people disagree, so I realize I'm probably wrong. It's very much a "feels"-based discussion.
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Those are culls, not slaughters. They aren't the same thing. You cannot sell culled chickens for food, they are culled due to disease and are considered biohazard, because they can infect other parts of the flock or other flocks, and in the case of bird flu are also infectious to humans. Generally, the USDA requires a full cull of flocks if any birds are affected. My sister is into urban chickens and bird flu is very…
None of this disproves the point that the parent poster is making. 60MM = 2.5 daily culls. that's not a lot, in context. Now, if you had different numbers, that would be a thing worth discussing.
That, and the numbers from slaughters are chickens being slaughtered for food. Other cull counts are related to male chicks being culled in prepping for egg laying, which is also not relevant.
These are full adult flocks of active egg-layers being culled. It has SIGNIFICANT impact on egg production.
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Cory Doctorow is no expert on the US egg/chicken industry. He's writing political opinion pieces here. Occasionally he writes science fiction. He also has big problems with hyperbole in his work. The egg price spiked almost a year ago because we've been dealing with H5N1 since over a year ago and it has only gotten worse since.
You're just wrong. https://www.agriculture.com/news/business/record-breaking-eg...
It's literally their mission to make this claim.
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Whole Foods is a very large grocer with contractual obligations to buy a certain quantity of eggs. They also have declining foot traffic and price-sensitive customers. At the moment, eggs are probably a loss-leader for them and they're encouraged to still move on volume. If you look at the data in this app as a whole, the stores with the highest egg prices are small chains with low buying-power.
Whole Foods does not have price sensitive customers.
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You're just wrong. https://www.agriculture.com/news/business/record-breaking-eg...
An accusation brought to the FTC by an organization whose founding mission statement is that all of the problems in the farm industry are because of monopolistic corporations. Only a single member of their board/staff even owns a farm. It's literally their mission to make this claim.
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I think it’s because you pick government. I don’t have faith in any large organization public or private not being corrupted. So if you merely don’t have faith in government, it implies you do have faith in non-government entities.
Sorry, I just don't see how that follows. You have no clue what I think about public or private institutions based on one view about the government.