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Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

nytimes.com

131–140 of 261 posts

Re: Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

#131
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this is nice, but how do regular people actually find the time to care about this stuff? If you have kids, bills, a job, listen to crap from politicians all day, where do you find the time to be this empathetic. My kids school gives them milk as part of lunch, my kid likes milk now. You have to live in a very special world to get around this. I was a vegetarian for a while, I was mostly starving hungry and…

> I was mostly starving hungry What? Vegetarian doesn't necessarily mean you lose all sources of animal protein, there's no real reason to be starving on the diet.

It's pretty common for would-be vegetarians to be "carbotarians" and fail to feed themselves properly because they simply don't know any better and eat primarily bread and pasta. I also had this experience of being a ravenous carbotarian, but my roommates were all vegetarians and taught me. If you don't know vegetarians, look to athletes and home chefs for advice.

Tl;Dr combine a grain with a legume at least once a day to obtain a full protein. Beans and rice is a good staple, for example (but to reduce exposure to arsenic you should parboil the rice[1] as well as rotate through some other staples). Put peanut butter or peanut protein powder in stir fries, put hummus in your sandwiches, eat eggs, etc. And, I know it sounds obvious, but it's a reminder I needed, do actually eat vegetables.

It's not difficult but if you've eaten meat your whole life you may need to change some habits, because you have more room to get away with a poor diet if you're eating meat.

[1] https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-say-this-rice-cookin...

Re: Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

#132
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should we move towards irrationality or rationality? If being rational is marginally better we should move towards that. We want less serial killers in the society. So pointing out the fact about pets is to force meat eaters to consider their irrationality face to face. We have done this throughout our evolution. Some people notice the irrational things in our behavior and try to reason with other humans why doing th…

I hope to have the discernment to tell the difference between the irrational things I cannot change from the ones I can, and I don't think I'm changing this, so I accept it.

Few people believed slavery, a mechanism that stood for millennia, would end. Yet..

Re: Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

#133

https://freefromharm.org/animal-farmer-turned-vegan/jackie-s...

I believe this is nice, but how do regular people actually find the time to care about this stuff? If you have kids, bills, a job, listen to crap from politicians all day, where do you find the time to be this empathetic. My kids school gives them milk as part of lunch, my kid likes milk now. You have to live in a very special world to get around this. I was a vegetarian for a while, I was mostly starving hungry and…

> listen to crap from politicians all day, where do you find the time to be this empathetic.

Swap those two.

Stop listening to politicians. It's not empathy you require, it's compassion. Empathy is very tiring.

Re: Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think non-dairy milks are artificially expensive so much as cow milk is artificially cheap. At least in the US. Federal dairy subsidies and all that.

Milk is a byproduct of producing meat, and its a fallacy to see it in isolation. Plantmilks are firstorder product. This means that clinate impact of most plantmilks are higher than milks, excepting oat and ryemilk. On a cost note - : making oat milk is literally just blending some oats and let them soak a day or 2, filter the water and done, perhaps do that if cost is an issue? On a sidenote, if you drink soy, almon…

This completely ignores second order effects, which lead to the opposite conclusion.

If milk is a byproduct of producing meat that can be sold for money, this means milk subsidizes the price of meat. Even if the effect is small, this is almost certainly enough to make it worse for the environment than e.g. soy milk, as the difference between raising cattle and growing soy is orders of magnitudes.

Re: Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

#135
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this is nice, but how do regular people actually find the time to care about this stuff? If you have kids, bills, a job, listen to crap from politicians all day, where do you find the time to be this empathetic. My kids school gives them milk as part of lunch, my kid likes milk now. You have to live in a very special world to get around this. I was a vegetarian for a while, I was mostly starving hungry and…

> listen to crap from politicians all day This part I recently decided I will stop doing. It will not be easy and I may fail, but I think my mood requires it.

It's easy, first step just stop watching the news. There is no FOMO or if you really need your dosage keep it to end of the week roundup.

Because in reality there is nothing you can do.

You can't have a shot of vodka with Putin and ask him to stop war.

You can't stop Twitter and Elon from raging, nor can you can't Isreal.

What you can stop is giving these puppets headspace time and hold compassion to those who are involved in the conflicts.

Re: Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

#136
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost this. The better answer is because we want to get ALL the milk. So instead of letting the mother cow nurse her calf for the first few months and then start taking her milk for our use, the more "modern" practice is to separate the calf immediately. Which means if you are drinking milk, you are drinking it from seriously depressed cows. I wonder how this contributes to our culture's growing mood of depression?…

The real crime is that alternatives are expensive due to how our new economy is structured. I personally prefer oatmilk (oatside) to dairy milk. However, it’s too damn expensive that I find myself only drinking it from time to time. Now how is a vegetarian milk more expensive than a full cycle of cow milk (cows are too burdening to maintain) you might ask?!? My guess is that we are seeing something along the lines of…

As mentioned, the subsidies are the biggest player.

What you mentioned does probably play a role as well, with much more $/revenue being spent on marketing for non-animal milk than cow milk. None of the big milk players are trying to present themselves as a hip startup like Oatly is. Wouldn't be surprised if the latter was even VC backed.

But again, good ole' communist subsidies are the number one cause.

Re: Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One way to reduce that practice is to simply reduce one consumption of meat/milk, no need to be fully gandhi to improve some cow’s life. You anyway can’t save the world alone. There’s a ton of mushrooms and fabaceae, very cheap nutritious and as much delicious if you learn to cook them well (like meat). My favorite is Tempeh which combine both! And quite cheap if you make it yourself. http://tempeh.info/

I like the stuff, but interestingly, I found it easiest to buy in Indonesia, Australia and the USA. Outside of that, it's hard to get or very expensive.

Plenty of tofu dishes in Korea and part of China. Almost never vegan, but often vegetarian.

Re: Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are the cows taken away from the calves, especially dairy cows? Just curious.

That’s how we get all their milk, how we get meat (the calf isn’t kept around for more than a few weeks/months), and rennet to make cheese (it’s the digestion liquid that’s in their stomach while they eat milk, must kill the animal to extract it) Same with eggs, they don’t exist in a vacuum. To get eggs you have to have chickens, and to have chickens you must grind male chicks alive as they hatch because they don’t p…

> And hens aren’t supposed make eggs year round but we make them anyway with artificial lights etc, which drastically shortens their lifespan.

I kept a flock of 25-30 hens on my property for a few years. Other than moulting they produce eggs ease round. The production slows drastically in the dark winter months for the older hens (1 for 3 days, say) but some continue to produce nearly daily (I think the cycle is something like 26-28 hours). The only time we had artificial light for them was on days when it was so cold we kept their coop door shut and turned on the interior light.

Re: Orca that carried dead calf for weeks appears to be in mourning again

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are the cows taken away from the calves, especially dairy cows? Just curious.

That’s how we get all their milk, how we get meat (the calf isn’t kept around for more than a few weeks/months), and rennet to make cheese (it’s the digestion liquid that’s in their stomach while they eat milk, must kill the animal to extract it) Same with eggs, they don’t exist in a vacuum. To get eggs you have to have chickens, and to have chickens you must grind male chicks alive as they hatch because they don’t p…

Worse I’m afraid, chickens will give most eggs in their first year and are killed after, because they become unprofitable. I know an ecological farmer that charges a bit more for eggs and is able to keep them alive for 2 years, but that’s the max. They can easily live for 10 years plus.
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