161–170 of 427 posts
So, they're still culling fertilized eggs with males, they just do it before they hatch now. I guess it's a little more visually appealing to the public, but it literally changes nothing. The same number of chickens are still culled, they still get turned into animal feed. Honestly, what difference does it really make if male chickens are shredded and ground up into feed pre or post hatching? It's the same result in…
It's the whole abortion vs infanticide debate. People almost universally feel that infanticide is wrong. Abortion for whatever reason is easier for people to stomach. Basically it's easier for people to feel good about preventing an embryo from turning into a cute little baby than it is for them to immediately kill that cute little baby once it's born.
A bird embryo is much more independent, pretty much only needing some heat.
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It's the whole abortion vs infanticide debate. People almost universally feel that infanticide is wrong. Abortion for whatever reason is easier for people to stomach. Basically it's easier for people to feel good about preventing an embryo from turning into a cute little baby than it is for them to immediately kill that cute little baby once it's born.
It's not though, we're talking about chickens that are for the most part destined to live in a cage and end up on someone's plate.
1. Killing an 8 day old chicken embryo
2. Killing a 2 month old human embryo
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I value ethics and empathy deeply but, I don't understand vegans and vegetarians. Their biggest line of defense is "animals are alive and they have feelings and senses, we abuse them for food". That's sadly right. And they implicitly say that "eating plants are OK because, plants are not animals and they're just happen to grow. They don't feel, they don't understand". On the contrary, there's a growing mountain of re…
There are several responses to the "plants have senses" rebuttal: If you care about the well being of plants, you should still prefer to eat plants rather than animals. The trophic level of animals in the food chain necessitates that they will eat more calories of plant matter than would provide calories of food upon being eaten. Secondly, you should look at the sorts of plants being consumed and where they fall in t…
To put this into more laymen's terms, meat cultivation dramatically increases the total amount of plants that we need to grow.
As mentioned in my other comment:
> 70-75% of soybeans grown globally are for livestock, only 6% are used for human food products (meat eaters often try to claim that soy production is terrible for the environment; surprise, surprise, meat consumption is the main driver)
So, it's a bit counterintuitive, but globally switching to a plant-based diet would actually dramatically reduce the total amount of plants that we are raising, and therefore would dramatically reduce overall suffering of plants (if they suffer)
Orbem from Munich is creating an MRI based approach to determining chicks genders and egg fertility which may be more scalable. https://orbem.ai/
So, they're still culling fertilized eggs with males, they just do it before they hatch now. I guess it's a little more visually appealing to the public, but it literally changes nothing. The same number of chickens are still culled, they still get turned into animal feed. Honestly, what difference does it really make if male chickens are shredded and ground up into feed pre or post hatching? It's the same result in…
The chickens we raise on our hobby farm are "dual purpose" birds in that they are good for both meat and eggs. That is traditionally how all poultry was raised, really, on family farms, etc. Roosters were raised and fattened until a few months in, and then slaughtered and eaten, while a portion of the hens were kept for laying. The meat from roosters isn't as good, but it's frankly fine overall. There's no reason the…
That said, as you noted, on an industrial scale you would separate the roosters. But it's not clear that there's any market at all for rooster meat. Chicken meat is incredibly cheap and adds surprisingly little margin above the main input cost - feed. Roosters consume just as much feed but produce a lesser quantity of inferior meat. The margins are likely to be negative.
It's an efficiency story yes, but of the "you'll go bankrupt with this idea" sort.
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Nothing's ever enough for vegans. > Would be more interested in seeing more means of producing tasty food without using animals and at reduced costs to the environment. There is increasingly more of that all the time. > On the other hand it just seems like another step into the direction of turning the chickens into optimized food machines. Another step? They aren't getting any more optimized, if anything new availab…
> Nothing's ever enough for vegans. That's a weird complaint on a site about eternal disruption, eternal improvement of things that are basically fine already. I'm an omnivore, and I'm comfortable with it. But that doesn't keep me from recognizing the ethical issues with killing and controlling other beings to survive. I really appreciate people pushing the envelope on this. If I could eat basically the same diet but…
We don't undergo photosynthesis, so fundamentally we have to kill and eat other beings to survive. Plants are other living beings too. And a revolution is underway in learning about plant intelligence -- while not a nervous system, trees communicate with each other and share resources. [1]
My primary reason for trying to eat less meat is the environmental harms -- not the individual rights of animals -- as I think might eventually find ourselves in a place where we recognize that we cannot escape denying the rights of another organism (plants included) for our own nourishment given that we aren't photosynthesizers. Unless we become fruitarians and only eat fruit that naturally falls from the tree -- but obviously that is ludicrous.
Tell that to the kids literally starving in Yemen... Or the 8 Million people that died of starvation last year. Your holier than thou stance is kind of disgusting in the face of immense human suffering.