- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
Last year, I wrote a great deal about the rise of “ventilation shutdown plus” (VSD+), a method being used to mass kill poultry birds on factory farms by sealing off the airflow inside barns and pumping in extreme heat using industrial-scale heaters, so that the animals die of heatstroke over the course of hours. It is one of the worst forms of cruelty being inflicted on animals in the US food system — the equivalent of roasting animals to death — and it’s been used to kill tens of millions of poultry birds during the current avian flu outbreak.
As of this summer, the most recent period for which data is available, more than 49 million birds, or over 80 percent of the depopulated total, were killed in culls that used VSD+ either alone or in combination with other methods, according to an analysis of USDA data by Gwendolen Reyes-Illg, a veterinary adviser to the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), an animal advocacy nonprofit. These mass killings, or “depopulations,” in the industry’s jargon, are paid for with public dollars through a USDA program that compensates livestock farmers for their losses.
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We really need some humanitarian regulation in this country.
That would mean less profits for the people that run the country.
The meat industry is fucking sick and demented but people need their meats so animal ethics be damned…. Fucking bullshit, fucking human cancer
Take the subsidies from animal farming and give them to meat alternatives.
We will be awash in lentils!
This is why the core of the issue that nobody ever talks about is human overpopulation. The demented levels of factory farming we have is only a thing because 8 billion people need to be fed.
The demented level of factory farming had nothing to do with human overpopulation, but everything to do with human culture’s demand for animal products that are entirely unnecessary for survival. If we change our culture to eliminate animal products, we will eliminate a huge source of wasted resources and labor. Think of how much less plant agriculture would be required if we didn’t have to feed 33 billion chickens, almost two billion sheep, a billion and a half cattle, a billion pigs.
If we just grew food we can eat, instead of wasting land, effort, and resources both directly and indirectly supporting animal agra, we wouldn’t have such huge problems.
“But baaaaaaconnnnnn.” “I can’t liiiiiive without eeeeegggggs.” “Cheeseburgers taaaaaaaste too good give up” “it’s because there’s too many huuuuuumanssss”
Consuming meat is natural and vital for us as species.
Natural yes, vital no, as made perfectly evident by the fact vegetarians and vegans aren’t wasting away in the streets.
There are a lot of stories about malnourished vegans and even about vegans’ kids, malnourished to death.
There are similarly many stories of omnivores who have died of malnourishment. Is this a valid case against meat eating?
Similarly many stories of omnivores, who have died of malnourishment specifically because of their omnivorous diet, as vegans did?
But cheeseburgers are Delicious.
Why are you people booing this man? He’s right.
You’d better get all your meat free-range or hunt it yourself.
Um, just not eating meat is a fairly straightforward option…
I started incorporating more meat alternatives (Beyond, Impossible, Gardein, etc) into my diet for heart health reasons, but damn, it’s starting to make me feel a little better morally as well.
Good for you for working towards eating less meat, and caring about your heart health! Meat is definitely not good for the cardiovascular system, but it’s important to keep in mind that these meat alternative products are not healthier, even though they’re plant-based. Those products should still be eaten in moderation, just as with red meats, because they’re both really high in saturated fat and sodium. They, like meat, also tend to char when cooked, and char is loaded with carcinogens and oxidants. (even though that taste can be divine…)
Anyway - for me, meat alternatives were a helpful introduction to the plant-based/vegan diet, and emboldened me to try out other plant based recipes. “Vegan” can be such a loaded term, but there are a lot of good recipes out there with the term. Search for recipes incorporating tempeh as the protein source - it’s a bit easier to cook than tofu, which often gets a bad rap for being bland when it’s usually just been cooked incorrectly (it requires some preparation/a good marinade and sauce/specific handling and patience to cook it well, but I digress). Tempeh is more forgiving, in that it carries more flavors/textures of its own, which are complimented well by many sauces.
Oh cool, that’s completely horrifying. And not at all surprising from the meat industry. They’ve never cared about animal cruelty with anything else they do, so why would they care about this?
hi frick
Fourty nine million just staggers my brain. Like, thats not even a blip in the production.
…nuts.
Those are the ones that didn’t get grinded up right after hatching as well. Those numbers are truly staggering.
If aliens do come to earth, and simply enslave us, torture us then kill us for reasons we can’t comprehend, there should be absolutely no question whether we deserve it or not. They would be doing what we do to other sentient creatures en masse. We have the intelligence and ability to simply not kill these animals in a fashion that is sadistic and agonizing(im not even saying not to kill them, just do it humanely, bare minimum), yet we do it anyway because of greed and capitalist profit motives, cutting costs, etc.
Yes please. End this horrorshow
I like veganism because it forces meat-eaters to eat their own shit and perform mental gymnastics that make them worthy of an Olympic gold medal to avoid admitting their contribution to the problem.
Really shows the cognitive dissonance among average people. And they’re proud of it, lol.
They would be doing what we do to other sentient creatures en masse.
Chickens are sentient?
Yes, they are sentient. Sentience should not be confused with sapience.
You know when people say “there’s no such thing as a stupid question”?
I see this sentiment a lot regarding eating meat. I think a lot of people don’t realize how much these animals suffer.
Just look at your dog anytime you eat pork. Remember that that animal you’re eating is smarter than your dog. That pig used to play with its siblings, have love for its mother, and eventually live in complete terror before it is killed. People love to make fun of Asian societies for eating dogs when it is exactly the same as eating a pig.
That little bit of joy you gained from eating pork came at the cost of unfathomable suffering.
There is no excuse in 2023, I’ve been building muscle for the first time in my life and doing it on a vegetarian diet.
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It’s like normal ventilation shutdown but allows 4K streaming to 3 devices.
But only on approved devices, otherwise it’s 480p
With a mouse at the controls…
When regular old chicken suffocation won’t do, get VSD+!
I sometimes hope for aliens to come to this planet and treat us like we treat other living beings.
Humanity is such a poor excuse for civilisation
Humans are fucking disgusting. If you zoom out far enough we are just a bacterial infection of the Earth. Spreading our gray cities like bacteria in a petri dish. Growth for the sake of growth is the mentality of a cancer cell.
Well Earth is about to pitch a fever to fight us off…
Heaven forbid you actually vaccinate your livestock.There isn’t really a vaccine. One is being trialed but it is not available. The reason they are so extreme with this is that in affected birds they have about a 99% chance of dieing within 48 hours of infection. Waterfowl can carry it for longer but are still susceptible to death, they seem to be the major infection vector. HPAI highly contagious (highly pathonogenic avian influenza is the name), a bird brushing up on another is enough to spread it, due to birds cleaning their feathers with their mouths. So if a poultry farm tests positive they want to quarantine it ASAP so a sparrow doesn’t spread it to neighbors and wild populations.
And, setting up an entire culling operation, which would have to include transporting the birds, and contaminating another facility and several semi trailers, and staff, not to mention other wildlife is a huge risk. Shutting the windows and turning up the heat is probably the safest and quickest way to do things in this situation
Just pump nitrogen in the sealed pens. The animal doesn’t panic due to perceived oxygen deprivation. They just get sleepy and die.
Hell it would be the way I’d want to go if I was sick with terminal cancer. Cheap, easy, and painless.
I imagine that would be pretty difficult to do in a chicken coop. These are barns made out of corrugated steel and generally aren’t even remotely air tight. You will, ultimately, need about 10x the nitrogen you would otherwise need, and that’s if it even works.
So a special coop would need to be built for this purpose.
Chicken farmers are some of the poorest farmers in the country. They generally don’t have the means to build a special kill shed to humanely euthanize their flock. They barely have the means to keep up with Tyson and Perdue’s ridiculous bullshit.
So, while I agree, heat stroke is a fucking awful way to kill these animals, the issue isn’t just “there’s a humane method bro, just build a kill house bro”
The issue is, we are paying FAR too little for chicken, and most meat, honestly.
If you have millions of chickens to kill, you’re not so poor of a farmer that be you can’t afford to come up with a humane method to do this job.
Carbon monoxide would be cheaper. We used it for euthanizing animals that couldn’t be saved at the wildlife rehab center I worked at. Though, it was done with sealed induction box, not a drafty barn like someone mentioned
Sounds like it would be more expensive? Nitrogen is incredibly cheap to concentrate out of the air, 70% of what we breath is nitrogen after all.
Or… and this is crazy… not kill them?
This is specifically talking about mitigation for highly pathogenic avian influenza. HPAI kills chickens fairly quickly, so to contain the spread and minimize the risk of zoonotic spread to people, they kill every bird on every property that it’s detected on.
This is one of those situations where no one thinks it’s a great solution, it’s just a pragmatic one that minimizes the risk towards workers while quickly depopulating the barn. The problem is that this is one of the cheapest and least humane ways to depopulate a barn, and shouldn’t be allowed. We should insist that barns allow humane depopulation, or at least less inhumane methods.
Or, and I know this sounds even craizer… not farm them and stop this from happening to begin with?
And then do what with them?
Crazy how you can’t think past this. Maybe not factory farm them? Shocker, I know.
So you want to pay $50 for a McDonald’s chicken sandwich? I don’t think it’s right. These chickens are bred to be oversized and grow fast. They get so big that they can barely move. Full of antibiotics so they don’t get infected from sitting in their own leavings.
I am really hoping for lab grown meat personally.
And since you may have missed it, these chickens are all female. There are technically ways to determine sex before they hatch but if you really want to get upset Google ‘Chick Grinder’. It’s as horrible as it sounds so maybe don’t Google it.
That being said, I don’t want to pay for $50 chickens as much as I don’t want to pay for $2,000 iPhones because that’s what having them made without slave/child labor would probably cost…
Ugh
I was reading that Europeans actually found a way to sex the egg so they don’t hatch the male eggs, thus negating the need to destroy male chicks. I’m guessing the technology costs money so it’s unlikely that US factory farms would use it. Probably easier to kill the with the grinder.
I think it’s kind of a false dichotomy, between spending a lower amount of money (i.e. being poor), and being ethical. I think there’s a lot more we could take issue with, on how society is structured, than accept this false dichotomy. There’s a better universe out there where instead of having to use paper straws, we all just switch to biodegradable, and it is incentivized that people use metal straws. Same shit with this. There’s a universe out there where we eat less meat, where this meat is more sustainably sourced and is locally sourced, which cuts down on logistics, and where, as a result, we don’t have to pay 50 bucks for a frankly pretty gross chicken sandwich.
If humans don’t commit suicide first through war or environmental abuse, I truly believe that future generations will look back on eating meat as a barbaric mistake. They’ll tell stories about how we caused epidemics and pandemics, wasted valuable resources and land, polluted air, land, and sea, and abided the suffering of billions of animals, all so we could feed our children dinosaur shaped meat nuggets and buy cheap hamburgers that we were too lazy to even get out of our cars to purchase.
“And then, even as global warming spiraled out of control, they wasted arable land and dwindling water supplies on subsidized corn to feed to the subsidized beef and poultry stock. The ones that didn’t get culled or recalled or spoil before even hitting a plate contributed to a dietary culture of heart disease. Also, the animals regularly suffered immensely, which they were aware of but preferred not to consider.”
future
LMFAO
There will be none. Not for anything alive from here.
I don’t get how you can live with this attitude and not be suicidal. Shit’s gonna get bad, hundreds of millions of people are gonna die if we’re lucky, but to think the human race has no future? That’s past advanced pessimism
I don’t do nonsense like “optimism’” or “pessimism.” I’ll stick to facts an solutions. If there be any left it would be by Richard Stallman and FOSS AI.
future
LMFAO
There will be none. Not for anything alive from here.
Where are the “facts and solutions” in this? That’s textbook pessimism. Like, googling “define pessimism” gives you “a lack of hope or confidence in the future.”
I’m not pessimistic. I know these things. I don’t fuck around with brainwashing like “optimism” either. I’ll deal with facts and you and your religious cult can fuck off with “hope.”. I’d say bullshit but mushrooms actually heal. Even the Death God won’t be back for your fucking ignorance.
Let’s stop that with prohibition. rolls eyes
Lol. “Know”.
Heh heh heh. I think we can sum up your entire persona right there.
You don’t understand that this is the exact objective of the patriarchy. Corporations and greedy are just scheme of distraction and disbelieve upon their collective suicide.
Chickens don’t need to be treated ethically like people do. They’re birds ffs.
Condoning animal abuse? You’re a cool one. Hope you don’t have pets lol
Culling animals is never compassionate, but it must be done.
Why use a method that’s illegal most other places? The description is pretty insane sounding.
They never answer the question
Why is it illegal? I suppose in this instance you contain the birds in a barn that might be deseased and withdraw their oxygen. Probably the cleanest way to do it.
Right. So why are they normalizing this method? It’s illegal because it’s so cruel, that’s like the entire point of the article lol
They used to drive cattle into a pit and shoot them until they were all dead. Like I said at the outset, it’s always cruel.
I fail to see how shooting something in the head is the same as hours of torture. There are reasons we have animal welfare standards.
You think they were head shots? That’s funny,
This is equivalent of leaving a child in a hot car in cruelty.
But it’s not a child. It’s an animal that must be killed to stop the spread of disease.
What if a kid had an incurable spreadable disease? Throw them in the hot summer car?
Let me make it simple. It has nothing to do with a child. It’s about the food you eat and if you want any more of it.
Okay, so only cannibals can lock their children in hot cars?
Did you know that humans are animals? We are not some sort of godly being separated from nature, we came from it and we are a part of it.
You noticed that no one in here is arguing that these diseased animals should be kept alive, right? Your argument is in bad faith and it’s clear you barely thought about it before typing.
Our problem is with how it is done, euthanasia is supposed to be humane and fast. This is an extremely slow and painful process in which the chicken is subjected to extreme distress needlessly. Just to save a few bucks.
They could have at least incapacitated the birds first. They didn’t need to be awake for their brutal slow death.
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Sometimes yes, farmers do have to cull animals. All of the farmers I’ve met try to do it in a quick way at least, like cutting off the head of a chicken or a cattle gun to knock the animal out first.
Cutting off the heads of a thousand diseased chickens would take a bit of time, don’t you think?
Yes but at least it’s more humane than cooking the animals for hours
Culling isn’t humane. Culling is a necessity. Farmers and ranchers don’t like to cull, they lose money doing it. You give them a cleaner and cheaper way to do it, and they’ll do that. Culling prevents disease from spreading into the entire food system. Sitting on your couch and deciding the best tactic to do it is ridiculous.
So profit is the motivation. Huh.
Sigh. The reason that you cull is a transmittable disease is present within a group of livestock. That livestock can not be eaten, so you take it out of the food supply before it infects other groups. Not so hard to understand is it?
