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I’m going to go brutally murder and deep-fry my dog just to cancel out whatever grass you ate today, you extremist vegoon! something something lions something desert island grumble grumble muh canines
Hope that serves as a warning the next time you feel like
expressing an opinion that differs from minebeing preachy.Look I get you but
points at fangs
Canines though
^ Vampire! Run for your lives!!!
Look I get you but points at gums I need dentures
not sure what the edit is for… you looking to be disagreed with? are there comments I can’t see?
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I just don’t think you have anything to apologize for. so why apologize?
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Do ypu have a source for that 4 trillion?
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Source?
Im gonna go out on a limb and say this is udder cowshit. Rats are mammals, as are raccoons, squirrels, and whole fucking masses of little basically unfarmable varmints. You’re telling me that there’s like 12 farm cows for every wild rat on earth?
Horse. Shit.
The source apperently takes the percentages by biomass, not by count as it seems. So small varmints will not have as much of an impact as a human or cow would.
in the comments section. straight up ‘sourcing it’. and by ‘it’, haha, well. let’s justr say. My pnas.
Which I think is intentionally disingenuous as it massively favours the large mammals over the far higher number of species of smaller mammals.
For example you’d need over 70 squeal monkeys to make to the biomass of an average American.
Humans and other great apes can be considered mega fauna, so it doesn’t seem surprising that us and the animals we consume make up a higher percentage of bio mass. Were bigger.
I don’t think it’s disingenuous. It represents the total share of resource consumption. If something has 2x the biomass, it consumed 2x the materials needed to produce that biomass (purely in terms of the makeup of the body, that is)
I don’t think count by itself is very relevant. There’s more bacteria in a glass of water than there are humans in a country, but what does that tell you, exactly?
Although I do agree the infographic should be changed to specify biomass
It would be MUCH more than 2x resource consumption, because every action that animal takes requires greater energy to move it around. The energy required to sustain larger lifeforms is significantly greater than the proportion of their mass.
Not necessarily, many small animals have an utterly insane metabolism making them eat their entire body mass in a couple of days. For example, hummingbirds eat the human equivalent of 150,000 calories per day.
Larger animals typically cannot afford to spend so much energy - there is just no large food source that has sufficient calory density.
Good point! I’d love to see a by-genus breakdown of average metabolic rate vs body mass.
Yeah the reason why biomass is used instead of number of individuals becomes rather clear when you consider the following:
- what counts as an individual? is an unborn already an individual? (that one’s a heated debate, as you can see by the abortion debate)
- if unborns are individuals, then at what age are they?
- if they are from the moment of fertilization, then some animals, like spiders or frogs (idk any mammal examples, but there might be some), might lay a shitload number of eggs, like a million or sth, and it would drive up the number of individuals dramatically. But it would be a bullshit metric, because 99% of these individuals are never gonna survive a single year on earth. so it would be utterly confusing and misleading.
Going by mass solves all of these problems because it’s more clear and more direct. And on top of that it has the nice side-benefit of also giving an estimate of land usage. Land usage is roughly proportional to biomass, so measuring biomass is meaningful to estimate land usage as well, and that one really matters as that’s the limited resource that you’re trying to distribute among all species on earth.
Quick Internet search… https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass
They are referring to biomass.
-
1 cow ~ 1200 lbs / 545 kg
-
1 rat ~ 0.5 lbs / 0.25 kg
1 cow ~ 2400 rats by biomass
Well thats not what the infographic says. It specifies “mammals”, not “mammals by weight”.
OK so how many tons of cow are accounted for by whales?
Or does the survey cherry pick land animals too?
Why would the infographic be by number?
(I’m not dissing you, I only ask bcs I never even thought about it being my population, like, what would it compare by population in such a vast group as mammals.)Okay, so you have 240 rats and one cow in a pen on a farm. How many mammals are in the pen?
This survey would answer that the pen is 90% cow and 10% rat by weight, therefore there are 9 times as many cows as there are rats.
In reality land, where the rest of us live, we would say that there are 241 mammals in the pen and only 1 of them is a cow.
You see why I’m calling bullshit by the way this is worded?
Oh, I see now, thx.
For me (how I perceived the simplified pic) the main difference was that I didn’t think ‘in a pen on a farm’ but ‘on a planet’.
And your example also screams of ‘it’s not comparable, don’t do that, in what scenario would you need a number 241 that would made sense?’
(I really can’t think of on answer short of making a Twitch channel for each individual animal.)Also that question is leading bcs you ask how many, whereas the pic in the post doesn’t specifically say anything (which is the complaint as I gather - but we deduct the meaning of words from context all the time in all languages, if the ‘by individual’ doesn’t make sense, it’s obviously not that).
you have 240 rats and one cow in a pen on a farm
Do you not think the farmer saying he has 241 animals would be made fun of?
I’m basically saying that you can see from the context (the numbers) that it’s biomass - the same-ish as below even when/if the first thing you think about doesn’t make sense, you search for the way it does (again, not dissing, but strictly technically it is about literacy, which in this case the pic is at fault for not all of the audience not getting it, and you for not understanding it, an overlap just didn’t happen):
And yes, since this is pun-ish territory, it’s normal to feel some anger, puns are there worst.
The pic says “of all the mammals on earth”. It’s exactly as i said with the pen, just scaled up to a 3d spherical planetary sized pen. The numbers I’m talking about don’t change.
There are WAY more rats than cows. Period. They’re on every continent except Antarctica, and there might be some weird subterranean prehistoric voles huddled around a hydrothermal vent pool or some shit.
OP just needs to add a qualifier to the graphic. Anything along the lines of “with respect to biomass” right at the start
I was trying to think of some other meaning than ‘drinks dispensary’ for ‘bar’ and I couldn’t think of a sensible reason for putting a bar in your shower for quite a while until I realised metal bar.
-
Livestock have to live through horrible agony, like the worst kind of torture. This means (by biomass, which some people correlate indirectly with moral worth), at least 60% of mammals on Earth undergo horrible torture. Bentham’s Bulldog, “Factory Farming is Literally Torture.”
Excess pigs were roasted to death. Specifically, these pigs were killed by having hot steam enter the barn, at around 150 degrees, leading to them choking, suffocating, and roasting to death. It’s hard to see how an industry that chokes and burns beings to death can be said to be anything other than nightmarish, especially given that pigs are smarter than dogs.
Ozy Brennan: the subjective experience of animal’s suffering 10/10 intense agony is likely the same as the subjective experience of a human suffering such agony. (~6 paragraph article, well worth a read.)
Carnies won’t hear it
Lmao the slurs you make up are so cute
Nobody defends factory farms they’re universally hated
Nobody defends factory farms they’re universally hated
But not enough for people to boycott, other than a single-digit % of the population.
Can you explain how that is a slur? Who is being unfairly oppressed/please describe the victim of the slur?
If you are describing omnivores as “carnies” then that would be a slur since most people consider people on the carnivore diet to be unhinged or misinformed.
Slurs exist to denigrate and diminish ones character.
Without argument, more vegetarians will help the world, but I don’t think name calling wins hearts and minds.
you seem misinformed, ‘carnist’ and by extension ‘carnie’ has nothing to do with the carnivore diet, but with carnism:
Carnism is a concept used in discussions of humanity’s relation to other animals, defined as a prevailing ideology in which people support the use and consumption of animal products, especially meat.[1] Carnism is presented as a dominant belief system supported by a variety of defense mechanisms and mostly unchallenged assumptions.[1][2][3][4]
The term carnism was coined by social psychologist and author Melanie Joy in 2001
I have been hearing this term used to demean meat eaters since the late 80s. I guess they were all misinformed too.
ok
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i’ve been wondering for a time whether maybe, blood sacrifices didn’t ever actually end but the factory farmings are just a modern decoy for the actual blood sacrifices …
Now introducing Tyson’s CEO: Cthulhu.
I don’t think this is loss. I’m ready to eat crow if I’m proven wrong, but I think the real joke is the amount of time people will spend staring at this image and trying to figure out how it’s loss
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This sounds like a way to cause an outbreak of Corvid-19.
Dang, beat me to it
Squirrel ain’t half bad.
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I don’t want to sound all Malthusian but that’s kind of fucked??
more elephants than I expected tbh
It’s by weight
I know. It’s still more elephants than I expected.
That’s likely the sum of all elephant species, spanning from Africa to northern Asia.
I know. It’s just still more than I expected.
Jsomae: “Really y’all I can read, I’m just surprised!” Lol
By mass.
Title made me think they were doing some 4 levels deep “loss” meme. It almost has it but frame 3 isn’t close.
Yeah this has my pattern matching in scrambles like I can see it kinda??
Now even things that aren’t loss are loss :c
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Only that we waste a ton of space that we could grow crops for humans to eat instead of feeding it to animals and wasting 90% of the energy. So saying 8 billion people need a lot of food while arguing for animal agriculture is very contradicting. Not even talking about all the greenhouse gases and the way we treat animals.
Maybe you should engage with some of the arguments these pretentious, condescending jerks are having because your comment has the same energy but none of the arguments.
yup we need to eat food. It does not have to be meat centric or involve meat.
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This is the thing - all you need to do is suggest that everyone eating less meat would be good for the environment, and people like you utterly lose their minds. It’s weird.
That resource and logistics management problem is a direct result of people eating so much meat, the production of which is inherently inefficient for the purposes of feeding people. Of all the resources that we spend on maintaining and growing an animal, we only get back what goes into growing its muscles. The vast majority is wasted in maintaining the animal so that it doesn’t shrivel up and die before slaughter. Scale back meat production and you get a lot more food for a lot less resources, energy and land. You can’t get that efficiency otherwise. It’s precisely about what we eat.
I’m almost impressed by how much completely unsubstantiated ad hominem you managed to cram in there. Personally I couldn’t have guessed any of that from the comment you replied to. But if you wish to be taken seriously, maybe focus instead on the actual arguments next time.
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I don’t think that anyone in this chain of replies has argued for flat out ending all animal meat production. Sure, plenty of vegans are motivated primarily by animal ethics and thus want to categorically ban growing animals for food, but here almost everyone seems to be talking about the sustainability aspect of modern mass animal agriculture, myself included. Although less ethical scruples is a welcome byproduct in my opinion.
I’ll take lab grown meat seriously when it’s been proven to be financially competetive and most importantly scalable. Technofixes have a bad track record of turning out to be mostly just investor bait. Kinda like all the bullshit high-flying transportation concepts as solutions to problems where just slightly better urban planning and prioritizing public transit, cycling etc. would work wonders.
Plant based food on the other hand has been most of what we have been eating for most of history. It wasn’t that long ago when meat was still considered a relative delicacy, back when scarcity necessitated efficiency. That’s the kind of efficient, sustainable, healthy and local (so logistically simple) food production system we should try to strive for in my opinion.
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It seems unlikely that eating lab-grown meat, for example, will be as efficient, in terms of CO2 emissions, as simply being vegan in a reasonable time frame. And it is currently not something that exists in a reasonable scale, so it’s not a “religious zealot view” to advance the current most practical, efficient, and easiest solution.
And some people who are vegan would not necessarily be against lab-grown meat, but it depends on who you ask
Go reread their comment and try to find where they are being rude. Your second paragraph is just an odd projection.
What are these “rational choices” you are speaking of?
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So you don‘t have any arguments, then why are you complaining?
This would be the same logical contruction like: „There are rational choices to better the killing of kids, but I won‘t tell you, because you have to do your own research. My viewpoint is universally right, because I say so.“
It is interestingly funny to read something you are trying to attach to me, but instead is applying more to your messages.
I don‘t know how much hate you need to compensate conitive dissonance, but I wish you the best.
If you want to check for conginitve dissonance, here is the Wikipedia Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
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What is
5+4?
Exactly. Vegans promote a false dichotomy due to their religious fanaticism, intentionally ignoring all of the ways we can already mitigate the vast majority of the problems of meat production through legislation and existing technology.
At the end of the day they’re functionally equivalent to anti-abortion activists, pushing an extremist, arbitrary view of which lives humans are or are not allowed to end.
Equating people not being all good with the mass suffering and slaughter of sentient beings with religious fanaticism sure is a take, sure is interesting how hot it is it is so many places though wonder what a big cause of that might be?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4372775/ - keep on with your god given right to boil the planet though!
Blindly promoting the false dichotomy just like I mentioned, ignoring all of the research on the ways that technology and legislation can reduce the vast majority of the effects mentioned in the data you cite, while also clearly revealing your religious, dogmatic reasons for ignoring all of that research in the first sentence of your non sequitur screed.
Just like my crazy aunt in her anti-abortion Facebook rants. But do you have the self-awareness to realize that?
Nope.
Watch you don’t eat too much of your false dichotomy, you gotta leave room in your stomach for all that animal slurry :)
Don’t worry, I always leave plenty of room for my animal slurry. ^_^
your* religious food…
Comment disregarded due to spelling error.
Try again.It is really telling how YOU tell ME what i believe, how I feel and how there is no sense in talking to me. Who really is the fanatic?
I really think you are just upset about all the downvotes (when i engaged there were none btw). Not my fault and i do not hate you or other people simply because they continue doing what they grew up with. I can however hate animal cruelty and i can call out bs when i see it.
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I am grateful to have witnessed a dying breed
So, I do get where you are coming from - but there are some things to consider. Firstly: while domestication and animal husbandry are pretty old, factory farming and such is very recent and has given everything a pretty new touch. While I think it’s still valid to bring up as an argument, “X has existed as a pillar of our life for thousands of years” is usually not a great argument in and of itself, the same could easily be used to argue for slavery and a lot of other fucked up shit in history.
Besides that, there is sustainability. Yes grass-fed cattle can actually be sustainable, and allow for utilising land that is otherwise not usable to produce food. Also there is plant matter and “waste” from farming and food production more broadly, that can be utilised in feeding livestock sustainably, which would otherwise be composted anyway (and in some cases, gets pre-composted pretty well by said animals). So, yes, there are ways to produce meat and other animal-derived products sustainably … but that is usually a bit of a cop-out, trying to divert attention from how the vast, vast majority of meat production is not sustainable in mostly water and CO2 numbers.
Personally speaking, I am also not vegan and not an animal rights activist - but claiming it is simply a continuation does miss some aspects.
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Dude… you are literally claiming A) that I am vegan when I explicitly wrote that I am not, and B) that I am “not open to alternatives”, when I myself mentioned two aspects concerning how animal raising can be done sustainably, only that that is not what our current system favours due to reasons of maximising profitability.
This subject is very clearly a sore point for you. It might behove you to figure out why that is, rather than spontaneously attacking people that are essentially siding with you.
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You keep thinking these people have this as a religious view when they have told you they are not vegans.
Are you willing to reduce your consumption on meat to better all these negative things of traditional livestock farming, which you mentioned?
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I mean, if you want to give livestock better living conditions, then you also must pay obviously more. This would reduce your consumption on meat, if you don‘t want to pay more. That‘s why I’m asking.
The amount of available meat to buy would also be reduced, because if livestock gets more room and freedom to live, there would be less livestock inside the farms and therefore less meat in the stores.
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I’m sorry, but you wrote your comment only one day ago, so it didn’t took me two days.
I don’t know If I can still assume that you are a rational being. So I wish you the best.
Just because things are the way they have been for ages, does not mean they are correct.
It is a brutal, awful practice and completely unnecessary.
I am not being condescending or pretentious when I say these things. I understand that it is very, very hard to alter what you’ve done your entire life, and harder still to see the issues with those things.
Those 8bn humans could be sustained by a fraction of the environmental impact, suffering to life, and land usage if they were on a plant based diet.
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Excellent retort. Please share more of your insight.
people need to eat, but do they need to eat THAT?
Something I pretty much never see pointed out is that we don’t need billions of humans. Our governments keep encouraging us to have children, but they should be working to end the culture of pressuring people (especially women) into having children because they’re somehow incomplete without them. There should be more programs offering access to birth control and family counseling services. This endless and meaningless growth is as harmful to us as it is to the rest of our planet.
Our economic systems only work with infinite growth because otherwise what would be the point of lending money if it won’t grow interest. It’s essentially a giant pyramid scheme. And that requires new blood to provide labour and consumers. This is incredibly dumb on a finite planet with limited resources, but that’s mainstream economics for you.
Also if the population shrinks too fast, then the pyramid becomes unstable with not enough younger people to take care of all the old people (while also maintaining the economy).
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this is the way it’s been for tens of thousands of years
Human population needed to be fed 10+k years ago:
> 1,000,000
vs now
10,000,000,000Which just means it has never been the way it is now. Those two numbers on a finite planet are represented by the pic perfectly.
This is clearly a sensitive topic for you, so believe me when I say that I’m only talking about myself here. Yes, humans have included meat in their diets for thousands of years, but the recent changes that I feel shift the paradigm are: the scope and scale of industrial farming, the brutal conditions animals now face, and the fact that we have a good enough concept of human dietary requirements that people can finally make the choice to remove animal products from their diets in a healthy way.
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I’d love to hear what I’ve specifically said that’s bullshit.
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Thanks for saving cows, chicken, and pigs from extinction.
Are pets livestock, or did they miss a category of mammals? In the US there are more dogs than children.
It’s intentionally misleading, like most vegan propaganda. It’s by mass, not population.
Biomass is the usual way this sort of data is presented in environmental science. I think calling it “propaganda” is a bit much. But yes if would have been better if that were clear on the infographic.
I believe pets are counted as livestock, but it’s not specifically referenced as far as I have the interest to read.
birbs are only 2/3rds unreal confirmed ✅
End of the Holocene, Last of the Megafauna party.
It’s so fucking surreal to me how much megafauna extinctions have happened in the past 50’000 years.
I don’t think people realise we had like giant land birds (3+ meters tall), megasloths (elephant sized), giant kangaroos roaming round not that long ago.
The garden burned. We were best adapted.
https://www.americanforests.org/article/the-trees-that-miss-the-mammoths/
(In many places, we burnt the garden).
We’ve been shaping ecosystems through fire for so long.
That article’s on my to read list now, thanks.
It’s a good one. Add this too (audio) for the hopium.
This is highly depressing to see first thing in the morning.
I didn’t realise rhinos were so small. No wonder I never see them.
by number of organisms, biomass,
species count, or something else?edit: ok not species count because there’s only one species of human
That YOU know of
And yet cats kill billions of birds each year. Wild.
