Gaia is a harsh mistress.
Posted on 09/06/2013 3:47:11 AM PDT by Renfield
In the rich world, each of us consumes or uses 30 or more animals a year (the bulk – 52 of the 59 billion – are chickens). We don't, in the nutritional sense, need these animals to feed us – certainly not in those numbers. Yet, in order to eat them at an acceptable price we have to imprison them, alter them genetically and chemically, and kill them. We have moved inexorably into ever greyer ethical territory. Any planning for a food future that still envisages using animal products and meat must debate the "moral cost".
I am not sentimental. I have killed and butchered many kinds of animals, and have been on prearranged visits to slaughterhouses in Britain and abroad. I have seen the job done carefully and kindly. It would have been better if I had just dropped in to those abattoirs, but the business of meat production is secretive; if it were public, it would lose customers. In some places, the meat trade is less shy: I've seen puppies blow-torched in tiny cages to remove their hair before butchering – a normal village practice in Vietnam.....
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
There is no “moral cost.” At least not within any moral framework I recognize.
Gaia is a harsh mistress.
That tale of using every part of the buffalo but the bellow is bullroar anyway. It was not uncommon for the Indians to stampede massive herds of bison over cliffs, then to pick off the animals that had been injured by the fall. And it was highly unlikely that a single tribe could even begin to process the thousands of animals killed in such wholesale fashion, let alone to use every part of them.
It’s just more “Dances with Wolves” mythology.
Oh Waiter, I’d like a New York Strip, medium rare!
This thread makes me want to go fix myself a nice “cannibal sandwich”.
Cheeseheads will know what that is. Yum!
Leftists stay up at night in fear that the third world will find a way to make more than $2 a day.
That’s the point I was trying to make here. I used to live like that when I lived where I had places to hunt; I’m trying to get back to that lifestyle.
Once (while on a hunting trip, coincidentally) on the eastern shore of Virginia, a friend and I had to spend some time driving right behind a truck full of chickens that had just been removed from the chicken house, and which were going to the slaughterhouse. They should have been white, but they were all a dingy grayish-brown, from having been stacked many cages high; they had been covered in each other’s excrement all of their lives. The stench was ghastly, almost indescribable, and I though we would succumb to it before we were able to pass the truck.
When you buy chicken in the store, that isn’t free-range chicken, this is what you are buying....meat from birds raised in unsanitary and unnatural conditions. We need to move away from this sort of toxic agriculture; the consequences of it are negative and long-lasting.
Yeah right, because when Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon or even American Indians drove a huge herd of mammals like Mammoth or bison over a cliff and only butchered a few and left the others to slowly die, we were SOOOOO ethical back then.
Exactly correct.
The only difference was the white man had better technology to kill more, and there were a lot more white men than Indians doing the killing toward the end of the 1800s.
I’ll bet most PETA types are pro-abortion. The next time one of them scolds you for eating meat, ask them if they’re pro-choice on abortion. When they say yes, simply say you’re pro-choice on eating meat. Then watch their heads explode.
The problem with that is factory farming is very efficient and keeps the costs down. Free range chicken is great but if that’s all there was then chicken would be $20 a pound and many wouldn’t be able to afford it.
We should find technological ways to keep some chicken’s crap off of the others but they are pretty stupid and unsanitary and will eat poo. Even chickens I have here at home peck at other animal poo—like goat, horse, dog, and I’ve even seen them dig up the cat’s outdoor area and peck at the cat poo. They don’t finish it ever so I assume they are going after the bugs, but then they are eating bugs that just dined on poo...
Eventually, the new techniques for growing meat in a lab will become widespread. A future generation will grow up eating it, think nothing of it, and the problem will be solved. Toxic agriculture is thriving right now for the same reason the toxic finance and toxic defense industries are: many if not most of our representatives are bought and paid for, and they know they have to stay bought - or else.
I’m all for PETA - People Eating Tasty Animals
Broilers and fryers are slaughtered at 6 - 8 weeks and are generally much more healthy looking when raised in confinement than in the backyard. It's not so much that poultrymen are personally all that concerned with the sensibilities of 21st Century yuppies, but it's far more efficient to feed chicks a controlled diet in a disease free environment and to slaughter them quickly, than to let them forage on their own and hope that they grow up before disease, or the neighbor's cat, removes them from inventory.
A generation or two ago, it was common knowledge that, if you fed cattle, your pigs and chickens would eat for free.
(Not being sarcastic) Due to the waste food from the cattle? I'm not familiar with this, never having spent much time on a farm.
I don’t agree. Have you ever been a farmer?
You are competing, like any business man, to sell your products to the highest bidder to maximize your profits while keeping your expenses down.
It would be great to be an organic farmer, never using chemicals, but that usually means your yield is much less compared to those who use chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. If you can find niche buyers; great, but for most farmers, this is not viable.
The fact that farmers love subsidies for corn is not because congressman voted for it, but the other way around. The farmers vote for those who give them more profit.
There are millions of farmers out there. A substantial number lose their farms due to crop failures, weather, over production during abundant years, etc, etc. So keeping costs down and getting the best yield, animal or plant, is where farmers want(and need) to be.
Factories will always out-produce home-made industries. Same goes for farming techniques.
Cheap abundant food is a mark of Western civilization. There is, however, like anything else in this world, a cost associated with that. Most are willing to pay it, or at least not worry about it.
Eggs from hens fed on such a diet made incredible noodles.
Pork was more popular than beef here in Easter NC generations ago because it cost less. I remember my friend who grew up during those times tell me that the only part of the hog that they threw away was the squeal.
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