this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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[–] usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 40 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Most likely more people being aware of it, and then people seeing those posts doing well leads to more posts like that

Arguably, you should be moreso concerned about the opposite. The industry runs well known astroturfing campaigns:

NCBA [National Cattlemen’s Beef Association] calls it “proactive reputation management”: a strategy that entails monitoring the internet for messaging opportunities, then leaping in to burnish beef’s image whenever it’s advantageous

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/03/beef-industry-public-relations-messaging-machine

The meat industry has helped fund research and communications initiatives to minimize its links to climate change. And it has organized astroturf attacks on initiatives like EAT-Lancet

https://newrepublic.com/article/177575/never-trust-green-meat

[–] Clent@lemmy.world 12 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You are literally the one posting these. It's all you appear to post about.

[–] usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 31 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

There are plenty of other people posting about the meat industry. I've seen people making the same comments on places. It's also in part because many people are just seeing the vegan circle jerk community posts on the all feed. That also shapes perception too

One example of someone complaining about just that on someone else's post (comment ended up getting removed by a mod because of other parts of their comment, but you can infer based on replies) https://lemmy.ml/post/16139346/11287396

[–] Martineski@lemmy.dbzer0.com 31 points 5 months ago

Don't give up on posting. I like those posts.

[–] Clent@lemmy.world 6 points 5 months ago (5 children)

Yes. Mostly one topic posters.

Vegans posting about the meat industry are the like non-gamers posting about the evils of the gaming industry with a dash of moral superiority.

It's weird for someone to center their entire online personality around something they do not do.

[–] usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 30 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The example honestly doesn't make much sense to me. You take issue with someone daring to want to talk about the worker abuses in the gaming industry? Are we to forbid someone from being passionate about an issue?

Someone caring about the harm in an industry doesn't make them think they are "morally superior". Posting about the harms in an industry is to raise awareness of that harm. It's not about one self at all

[–] Clent@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago (4 children)

Your passion is no different than that of the antiabortionists.

You won't accept nuance, you don't want to have a discussion, you want your agenda to be heard and the world to bend to your view of how things ought to be.

[–] usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 19 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

I do accept discussion, and rely heavily on source based discussion. I cite nearly everything I say. See how I cited two sources earlier when I made a claim about meat industry funded astroturfing

When people have critiques based on their own sources, or methodological/other critiques of the sources I provide, there is a good back and forth.

Even when other people never provide a single source, I still converse and provide sources for my claims

I qualify my claims to reflect what the data and research actually says. That's what nuance looks like. When people argue for a specific claim that makes things more complicated, I respond to their claim about that specific issue. That's also what nuance looks like

[–] Clent@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Antiabortionists cite sources too. The passion and certainty are the same.

Vegans aren't trying to clean up the food industry, they want to end it. Raising the issues with it just a means to that end. There are few if any vegans arguing for a cleaner animal husbandry practices.

Many vegans recognize it as a choice, like the abortion issue, they aren't against any abortions they only choose not to themselves have an abortion. They aren't discussing the horrors of the abortion industry on the internet.

[–] usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 19 points 5 months ago

> Vegans aren’t trying to clean up the food industry, they want to end it

If we're going to talk about ignoring nuance, making statements like that isn't doing any favors. Animal agriculture =/= the entire food industry. Plant agriculture exists as well

> Many vegans recognize it as a choice, like the abortion issue, they aren’t against any abortions they only choose not to themselves have an abortion

The problem with that characterization is that things can really only be a personal choice with no effects on any one else when we're talking about non-sentient beings. Without that presumption the assertion makes less sense. For instance, most in the west generally don't conceptualize killing a random healthy dog as a personal choice.

Even if we set aside the creatures themselves, the environmental factors alone make it difficult to conceptualize as a pure 100% personal choice. Is it a personal choice to let an industry keep us from climate targets on their own?

To have any hope of meeting the central goal of the Paris Agreement, which is to limit global warming to 2°C or less, our carbon emissions must be reduced considerably, including those coming from agriculture. Clark et al. show that even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, emissions from the global food system alone would make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to realize the 2°C target. Thus, major changes in how food is produced are needed if we want to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.

(emphasis mine)

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba7357

And the issue on that end is quite fundamental. It takes a lot of feed to raise non-human animals. They lose most of the energy using it to perform body functions, move around, etc. Even best case production just comes out worse than worst case plant production for humans

Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].

https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/html

If you tried to use something like grass-fed production instead, you'd find it generally does not scale and ends up with increased methane production

We model a nationwide transition [in the US] from grain- to grass-finishing systems using demographics of present-day beef cattle. In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates

[…]

If beef consumption is not reduced and is instead satisfied by greater imports of grass-fed beef, a switch to purely grass-fed systems would likely result in higher environmental costs, including higher overall methane emissions. Thus, only reductions in beef consumption can guarantee reductions in the environmental impact of US food systems.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401

Your passion is no different than that of the antiabortionists.

You won't accept nuance

These two statements juxtaposed just took 7 years off my life

[–] 5C5C5C@programming.dev 14 points 5 months ago

Your idea of nuance would have us all sitting on our hands while unsustainable industries make the world we live in uninhabitable and put an end to humanity as we know it.

[–] TheCheddarCheese@lemmy.world 14 points 5 months ago

Look at it another way - do we REALLY need that much meat production? Probably not. Vegans have been living just fine this whole tome, and meat is very resource intensive to produce anyway, so one could argue you'd get even more food from stopping.

Is it causing massive issues even aside from the suffering of animals? Yeah, agriculture plays quite a significant part in CO2 emissions. Not to mention the polluting of rivers.

Also, I don't really see your point of 'they don't want to have a discussion'. You're literally having a discussion with them right now.

Hot take: It's good when non-gamers talk about abuses in the gaming industry

[–] Martineski@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 5 months ago

I don't commit genocide in ukraine and I very much don't support it. Why would that be different for animals that are treated even worse?

[–] Sanguine@lemmy.world 13 points 5 months ago
[–] dinkusmann@feddit.rocks 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, and those abolitionists man. Like, I get it, you don't own slaves. Can't they just shut up and lay off the slave owners?

[–] Clent@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Are you comparing animal husbandry to owning slaves?

Militant vegans are a silly people.

[–] dinkusmann@feddit.rocks 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Of course not. Animals are inferior by nature and were made to be owned by humans. It's just the natural order of things. We even have a special word for it. We call it husbandry, isn't that cute? Just like how a husband owns his wife, women being creatures that act on instincts and emotions instead of reason.

[–] Clent@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You seem surprised that we have a special word for something that humans have been doing before written history.

Do you have any clever musings on the encompassing term, agriculture? Perhaps how it has culture in it and culture is emotions instead of reason.

I would like to subscribe to your newsletter. I assume the title is IaM14aNDtHisDEEP!

[–] dinkusmann@feddit.rocks 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Veganism is the logical extension of abolitionism and feminism. If you've ever wondered what side of history you would've been on, now you know.

“Animal Liberation” may sound more like a parody of other liberation movements than a serious objective. The idea of “The Rights of Animals” actually was once used to parody the case for women’s rights. When Mary Wollstonecraft, a forerunner of today’s feminists, published her Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, her views were widely regarded as absurd, and before long an anonymous publication appeared entitled A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes. The author of this satirical work (now known to have been Thomas Taylor, a distinguished Cambridge philosopher) tried to refute Mary Wollstonecraft’s arguments by showing that they could be carried one stage further. If the argument for equality was sound when applied to women, why should it not be applied to dogs, cats, and horses? The reasoning seemed to hold for these “brutes” too; yet to hold that brutes had rights was manifestly absurd. Therefore the reasoning by which this conclusion had been reached must be unsound, and if unsound when applied to brutes, it must also be unsound when applied to women, since the very same arguments had been used in each case....

Animal Liberation, Peter Singer

[–] Clent@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Difference being if we end animal husbandry Earth simply won't have those animals anymore. More a genocide really.

How many draft horse does the average farmer have now that we have tractors?

Once we lose or reduce these genetic lineages, there is no going back.

Vegans want to pretend they are protecting animals but they aren't, their ideas result in a less genetically diverse biosphere. They are hurting the longevity of our species by attempting to force others down a path that relies on technology they take for granted or more likely do not understand. You see this when they talk about animal feed corn and think we can replace those same fields at the same yields as sweet corn. They aren't agriculturists but want to tell us how agriculture ought to be.

And it's clearly an emotional position because you will reject any logic or reasoning they are present. They feel they are right and their righteousness is part of the argument.

[–] dinkusmann@feddit.rocks 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Animal agriculture is the main cause of deforestation and a leading contributor to CO2 emissions. And we don't need to replace every acre of farm land grown for animal feed with farms for human consumption. Animal calories and protein are, at best, 15% efficient. As in it one calorie of meat requires 6 calories of crops. We only need 15% of that farm land to be useable for human edible crops and the rest can be returned to nature. And domesticated animals are selectively bred monsters. Chickens so huge that 70% of them have debilitating leg issues. Pigs are constantly hungry, so much so that pigs intended to live longer than a few weeks (i.e. for breeding) need to be denied food so they don't eat themselves to death. This denial of food often results self multination and aggression. Extinction would be a mercy for these animals. And there should never have been billions of pigs or chickens or cows to begin with. One species of bird should not account for 70% of bird biomass. The majority of mammal biomass should not be found in factory farms.

[–] commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

one calorie of meat requires 6 calories of crops.

ah, but much of the crops that are fed to animals are the byproducts of our own agricultural processes. by feeding them to cattle we get more calories than we would, since we won't eat, for instance, cottonseeds and corn stalks.

[–] dinkusmann@feddit.rocks 1 points 5 months ago (2 children)

That's some of it but not the majority. Our demand for meat is far far greater than byproducts can supply. And we really don't need the extra calories from meat. We could grow far more food by repurposing that land.

[–] commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 months ago

https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/5c433cba-a635-48ab-b875-3b5530480e89.webp

this seems to say (near the bottom there) that basically everything a cow eats (52 of 54 units or there about) is either grazed grass or crop residues, with only like 2 or 3 of those units (so about 4-6%, in round numbers) comes from crops grown to feed them. i don't really know the dietary composition of a chicken or swine, but, cattle, at least, get essentially no direct crops at all.

[–] commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

We could grow far more food by repurposing that land.

if that were the case, why aren't we? it seems there must be a good reason that in the over half decade since this paper's publication, surely we could have revolutionized our food production. instead, even though veganism saw a steady rise from before the publication of that paper until 2020, it's been in decline since then. somehow i don't think that paper captured the whole scope of our agricultural system.

[–] dinkusmann@feddit.rocks 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

People don't go hungry because no one's figured out how to produce enough food. People go hungry because of our current economic system. All I'm trying to show is that it is possible to feed a vegan world, and it would actually be easier. Actually creating a world where everyone is fed is a separate topic entirely and for people much smarter than myself.

[–] commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

it is possible to feed a vegan world, and it would actually be easier

it's even easier to feed a world with no living creatures. that doesn't make it desirable

[–] dinkusmann@feddit.rocks 1 points 5 months ago

We can live in a world where we hurt animals for food. Or we can live in a world where we don't hurt animals for food.

[–] Clent@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

To be clear, that's a yes on genocide, cloaked by eugenics.

I can only assume you view farmers has evil since they are the ones breeding these animals.

You believe all farm animals are treated poorly and spend their lives suffering or are willing to genocide them all because some are based on information that either you cherry picked or was cherry picked for you. Likely the later

You belief without doubt these animals would rather not exist than be born. That alone more closely aligns you with "the wrong side of history" -- I am unaware of any reports on animals mass suiciding so I'm guessing they are happier than humans, who coincidently commit suicide a large rates...maybe we should cull that herd instead, they are the ones responsible for deforesting the Amazon. I know you'd rather blame the existence of animals but I'm not aware of any cows reasonable for cutting down trees.

The reality is that you care more about how these animals make you feel than how they feel. You've clearly never asked a pig if it wanted to die.

You may be surprised to know that if you were to chase a pig with knife while calmly explaining it's what's best for her, she would be content to trample you rather than accept your mercy killing for being of a sullied bloodline.

[–] dinkusmann@feddit.rocks 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I'm not saying we kill every pig tomorrow. I'm saying we stop raping them to balloon their populations to absurd numbers which are inherently unsustainable. You think it's genocide not to artificially inseminate billions of pigs?

[–] Clent@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Raping? You think farmers are raping their cows? That's the hysteria I was referring to earlier.

Vegans find a talking point that causes them to upset themselves and demands everyone else see it from their perspective. It's emotionally manipulative at best.

Personally, I find it hilarious how you've upset yourself over imagined grievances. Watching a new religion being created in real time is fascinating. Dogma forming and shifting to fill the voids of logic. Sociologically, amazing.

There also aren't a billion pigs in the world. Billions of chickens, yes. Billions of cows, yes. Around three quarters of a billion pigs.

Your inability to do some basic research on your position is incredible. Feelings over facts. Emotions over reason. Project these failings in the other.

[–] dinkusmann@feddit.rocks 1 points 5 months ago

If putting bull sperm on the end of a stick and ramming it up a cow's vagina isn't rape then nothing is.