371–380 of 879 posts
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I killed so many slugs eating my broccoli it started to get to me. I technically didn't kill them myself, I put the cannibals in a bucket together. 1/3 to 1/2 bucket per day. About 30 full buckets for 20 broccoli plants of which about 8 were ruined.
Same. Buckets upon buckets. You can’t even feed them to the chickens, critters who eat literally anything won‘t eat slugs.
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I do own two chickens since maybe 6 months for random reasons. Before that I thought they were pretty "stupid"/"uninteresting" animals but I was really wrong. They are in fact very lovable little beings. They have interestingly complex relationships between them, they are very social and I do have a special bond with the first I got, especially because we hadn’t the necessary hardware to keep her hot enough for multi…
It’s not the egg industry that will lose out if more people have backyard hens. It’s the poultry industry and the eating general. More people will start to find eating intelligent emotional animals as abhorrent as eating dogs or cats.
Ironically, vegetarianism really only started to become popular in the Western world once people lost their connection to farms, and meat and poultry were something you bought in pieces, plastic-wrapped.
As someone who once built a large coop [1] then just bought a pre-built shed for the 2nd coop, it's definitely _not_ the _monetary_ solution. You will probably lose money overall for quite some time. I'm still probably underwater. BUT, there are definite upsides: - Chickens are very sweet animals, and are quite intelligent. You will grow to love all the silly things they do. You can pet them, they are super soft, and…
"If you really like eating chicken, you may end up finding it difficult to eat them again in the future after you develop a bond with them." Or you might find them delicious and need to raise more of them.
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The key difference between humans and every other animal that has ever existed is our ability to reason about systems and the morality of actions. Some birds will abandon weaker chicks to focus on the ones most likely to survive. Others will allow siblicide. That these behaviors exist and have existed for billions of years is a fact orthogonal to morality because birds don’t have the capacity to reason about systems…
Morality is arrived at through value judgement. We have a social contract with each other, not animals. People generally dislike gratuitous pain and cruelty, hence we're seeing a push for cage-free hens and the like. They don't oppose slaughter in and of itself.
Slavery is an excellent cognate to this.
It’s a slippery slope, isn’t it? If you’re not careful with your compassion, you’ll end up having it for all sorts of beings you’ve come to see as like yourself.
Illegal in the UK now.
My family must be odd, we probably consume about 4 dozen of raw eggs per year. What is everyone else eating that requires so many eggs? Do you cook eggs daily?
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My mom has a dozen backyard chickens and I agree with all of these. I'll tack on two bits from my own experience: Good: Fresh unwashed eggs don't need to be refrigerated. They are perfectly safe at room temperature on the shelf for days. Bad: You can't leave them with other pets without supervision. One of the dogs got himself a taste for chicken and already ate at least three. You can't train this out of the dog, un…
Lots of countries don't wash their commercially grown eggs (and have a much lower % from factory farms), which greatly improves shelf life in shops etc.
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Murder is also part of the “circle of life”, whatever that may mean, given that it’s pablum that means nothing. As is disease. We rightfully find these immoral and don’t engage in them. That’s not a defense of the immoral act. It’s just words to describe the immoral act.
Try this then: every animal eats other living things to survive. We have been doing it for a billion years. Is a basic drive built into it DNA. After that, is just a question of which living things you are going to eat.
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Hmm. After Spurlock lied through his teeth in his first film, why would anyone trust him ever again?
Spurlock can be a fraud and the food market still be controlled by a cartel — both can be true at the same time. I’m no US citizen so I don’t really care but what I read about your potato market was wild, so I wouldn’t be surprised if eggs are also controlled by a cartel.
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"If you really like eating chicken, you may end up finding it difficult to eat them again in the future after you develop a bond with them." Or you might find them delicious and need to raise more of them.
Raising animals to eat for meat is a very different endeavor than raising them for milk/eggs. Especially if you eat meat daily (or more than once a day!), do some mental math on how many animals you'd need to sustain yourself.
Anyways, one buck and 2-3 doe rabbits can give you something like 300+ pounds of meat per year. Close to a pound a day would be sufficient for most people. Of course you aren't going to eat only one thing, so you will have other sources of meat for variety