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.

  • billwashere@lemmy.world
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    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.

    • Wogi@lemmy.world
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      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.

      • Szymon@lemmy.ca
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        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.

        • Wogi@lemmy.world
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          There are several documentaries on this topic, but they don’t have a lot of authority over how many chickens they buy. They’re dictated a flock size, they pay for it, and then they pay to feed and raise them, then they sell them back to the people they bought the chicks from. Inevitably every year the chicken processor, whoever it may be, makes additional demands that they also have to pay out of pocket for.

          I’m not justifying their actions, I’m saying they are stuck between two masters and they have no room to wiggle.

      • billwashere@lemmy.world
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        You’re not wrong and nuance is often the bane of rationality. I didn’t say it was an easy solution just a more humane one.

    • jeffw@lemmy.worldOPM
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      I imagine there are a handful of ways to do it besides “long, slow heat stroke”

    • EtherWhack@lemmy.world
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      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

      • Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
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        Eh, the atmosphere is 70% nitrogen, making liquid nitrogen is basically just a suped up AC.

        There are also various methods of simply filtering the nitrogen out of the air. Having on site machines doesn’t seem too bad.

    • hglman@lemmy.ml
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      Those big coops are not anything close to airtight. Heat, however, doesn’t require it to be airtight.

      • billwashere@lemmy.world
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        Disposal of what? The air we breathe is 75% nitrogen. The chickens are already going to have be disposed of.

      • Cornpop@lemmy.world
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        They are already dead. (Infected) Better to kill then now and not risk even more birds life.

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        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.

        • MTK@lemmy.world
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          Or, and I know this sounds even craizer… not farm them and stop this from happening to begin with?

        • MTK@lemmy.world
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          Crazy how you can’t think past this. Maybe not factory farm them? Shocker, I know.

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            Yeah we shouldn’t, but we did, so we are stuck having to do shit like this now. And shamefully it’s not going to change anytime soon. Corporate interests essentially control the country now to a degree that they haven’t since the late 19th century. Especially in the farming industry.

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            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

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              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.

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              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.

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                Capitalism is a race to the bottom. Maximum profit/gain and minimal loss.

                Not to overly malign chicken sandwiches, but the point of capitalism is to charge the maximum that the market will bear while paying the least to extract it. And morals have nothing to do with capitalism. Even if it was mandated to have humane farming we would have a boutique pampered chicken sandwich (until they’re mechanically separated in 35 seconds) and foreign-sourced bleached chicken.

                Anyway I prefer the tortured beef from Burger King.

                • daltotron@lemmy.world
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                  Capitalism is a race to the bottom.

                  Yeah. I agree. I was kind of more on the side that we should maybe not have a race to the bottom, if you can see what I’m getting at

                  edit: sorry if that didn’t come across in my comment, I tend to not want to label every single thing as “capitalism is the problem bro!” because that puts people off, but then I kind of struggle with tiptoeing around the phrasing.

            • MTK@lemmy.world
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              Jeez, either you are great at walking the line between idiotic and good sarcasm or you are not

            • MTK@lemmy.world
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              Crazy how you can’t think past this. Maybe not factory farm them? Shocker, I know.

              • RedAggroBest@lemmy.world
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                I’m addressing that they’re factory farmed birds so they probably won’t get better, which makes your statement a bad idea. Don’t just move the goalpost if you want to discuss stopping factory farming because I never indicated I was wanting to talk about that.

            • MTK@lemmy.world
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              Crazy how you can’t think past this. Maybe not factory farm them? Shocker, I know.

      • HerrBeter@lemmy.world
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        “capitalism is more effective than alternatives”

        Capitalism showing why it is more effective :

          • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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            A vegan that can’t resist antagonizing others over their diet is being rather counterproductive. It’s an easier lifestyle choice to keep your mouth shut and not be snarky than it is to completely change your diet.

            It begs the question, if this person criticizing me can’t make an easier lifestyle change than what they want me to do, why should I even listen?

            (And I’m going to get replies that completely miss the point and continue to moralize at me)

            • Wogi@lemmy.world
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              Most vegans can’t keep up the lifestyle more than about 5-7 years, as health issues start to creep in.

              The diet isn’t as nutritious as they claim, and there is no good replacement for animal fat and protein.

              The meat industry has problems. Don’t get me wrong. But they’re not at the same scale most vegans will tell you they are, and as it happens herbivores are much better at turning plants in to energy than we are. Plus it’s not like we’re treating the actual humans picking tomatoes much better than we treat cattle.

              • kttnpunk@lemmy.world
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                Gonna cite these stats or are you just parroting Joe Rogan? Obviously there’s a large amount of gastronomic variation among humans, some people can’t go vegan easily. But the idea meat has anything you can’t get from plants is absolutely a myth: I eat dark chocolate and nuts for iron, and B12 is in all sorts of shit from mushrooms to potatoes (and is easy to supplement with vitamin water or fortified cereal if not pills). And protein? Protein is the textbook example of this. Y’all just have some weird thing against broccoli and chickpeas.

    • Rose@lemmy.world
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      You can hope for that or you can become vegan today to no longer contribute to those industries.

      • TheGalacticVoid@lemm.ee
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        Not contributing isn’t enough honestly. There are not enough meat alternatives, and there are way too many people unwilling to give up meat.

      • Drusas@kbin.social
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        I already eat very little meat just through personal preference. I think that is a reasonable way to go for the average person. Not everybody has to be vegan; they just need to consume a small amount of meat if they’re going to consume it at all.

  • Fades@lemmy.world
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    The meat industry is fucking sick and demented but people need their meats so animal ethics be damned…. Fucking bullshit, fucking human cancer

    • Seraphin 🐬@pawb.social
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      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.

      • ohitsbreadley@discuss.tchncs.de
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        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”

      • Pipoca@lemmy.world
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        Animal agriculture is very inefficient, because of tropic levels.

        Looking on Wikipedia, dressed broiler chicken carcasses have a feed conversion ratio of about 4. That is to say, a 4lb whole chicken you buy from the butchers case would have required about 12 lbs of feed over its ~2 month life.

        An online calorie counter says 4lb of raw whole chicken is 3856 calories. By contrast, a 1lb bag of cornmeal has ~3300 calories. 12 lbs of cornmeal have just over 10x the calories of 1 chicken.

        Even comparing the differences in yield between chickpeas and corn, we get way more calories per acre from hummus than Buffalo wings.

        In the US, we get 36% of our calories from animals, but use an order of magnitude more space to raise them. We grow more acreage of feed crops than crops that get directly eaten by humans. Fully 40% of the continental US is devoted to raising livestock, which is insane.

        We don’t factory farm because there’s 8 billion humans to feed. We factory farm because we want “a chicken in every pot”.

      • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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        ”The problem that nobody ever talks about is overpopulation"

        Outright untrue, in both ways. People always talk about it, and it remains not the problem. The problem is distribution, which is largely due to greed and overconsumption. The problem is that farmers breed what they can sell, and people buy so much meat just to have access to it in case they want it eventually.

        I found a third way it’s incorrect: we don’t need animal farms to feed people in the first place. We could simply eat plants instead of feeding them to animals.

      • Copatus@lemmy.world
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        Getting downvoted but you are right.

        Pretty much all of modern problems can be traced to overpopulation.

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    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.”

    • MooseBoys@lemmy.world
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      future generations will look back on eating meat as a barbaric mistake

      Primates, including humans, evolved to be omnivorous. In the 200,000 year history of the homo sapiens species, only the most recent 3% have had the benefit of agriculture. Even then, only 0.1% have had the benefit of the industrial revolution which could in theory provide enough calories and nutrients for all humans with a purely herbivorous diet.

      • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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        So what? We evolved to thrive on a wide variety of diets. I don’t judge my homo erectus ancestors for doing what they needed to survive. It’s fairly apparent that the person you’re replying to is referring to modern society’s obsession with producing as much meat as we do, not the concept of eating meat as a whole.

        • willis936@lemmy.world
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          It’s fairly apparent that the person you’re replying to is referring to modern society’s obsession with producing as much meat as we do, not the concept of eating meat as a whole.

          Complete and utter bullshit. Don’t move goalposts because you don’t want to concede a point. They explicitly said:

          I truly believe that future generations will look back on eating meat as a barbaric mistake

          That doesn’t even remotely imply there is a quantity of meat consumption that is morally acceptable.

          • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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            Right, they explicitly said that, and then in the literal next fucking sentence they explicitly said

            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.

            It sounds like what they are describing is modern society’s obsession with producing as much meat as we do

          • Hylactor@sopuli.xyz
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            It’s me; I’m the person. I will clarify my stance. But focusing on my individual personal motivations and disregarding my overarching observations seems a little goal post manipulatey too. Even if my personal motivations fail to meet your scrutiny, the facts I present still remain: we are harming our planet, we are harming animals, and we are harming ourselves by eating meat. Which seems counterproductive at best and ripe for improvement. We can and should advance beyond this unnecessary and harmful indulgence. At the very least, we should consume a very small fraction of what we currently do.

            Though I am a vegetarian, I used to eat meat. I acknowledge that it’s delicious, and I miss it sometimes. But I don’t eat it because I’ve determined that it would be logically inconsistent of me to do so.

            In a vacuum I don’t think the “wrongest” part about meat is the moral/ethical implications of killing an animal to eat it. But I’m not talking about subsistence meat consumption here. Because that’s not how we eat meat on a human race scale anymore. We churn it out at disgusting scale. Imparting suffering and pollution into the world. We eat it primarily because we like it. And we eat too much of it because we are gluttonous. If your uncle shoots a buck with his bow and arrow, and make some summer sausage of it, I’m not really perturbed by that. I don’t love it, but I’m fine with it. Now, if your uncle gasses 10,000 chickens too fat and atrophied to stand, and heaps them into a pile and burns them, because the flock has an outbreak that exists solely due to our habitual over crowding of hellish enclosures, now we’ve got problems.

            That being said, my personal chief concern is environmental. The scale at which we produce meat, and the methods we use to produce it, are completely untenable and are inconsistent with continued life on this planet. In 50 years we will have another 3 billion or so people on the planet, and we’re already operating way beyond our means with our current population. We need to change our habits or die.

            My third priority is health considerations. This is probably my weakest argument, because eating meat isn’t imperically unhealthy. But again, we as humans don’t just eat meat from time to time, most of us are eating it every god damned day. We’re going to a wing joint and hoovering up 15 chickens worth of wings without even thinking about it. But even if people stop packing their colons with gristle and turning their blood to paste with double bacon cheeseburgers with bacon and a fried egg, they’ll find some other garbage to eat. We don’t value healthy living in my country which is a whole nother issue beyond the meat thing.

            • willis936@lemmy.world
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              I strongly agree on all points. In particular the inhumanity of the way animals are treated in contemporary mass ranches is troubling. DFW’s “Consider the Lobster” resonates with me.

              The reason I called out the above comment is because slamming to the absolutist rails is regressive. What makes a difference isn’t going to the extremes but bringing people into the fold. It is particularly effective to highlight the issues you have and then say “you don’t need to stop eating all meat”. Most people won’t. If your points are well received then a takeaway of “choose to not eat meat more often” is much more impactful rather than “oh well nothing I can do since I am going to continue eating meat”.

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        The thing about civilization is that ideally it advances. If 200k years is the sample size you wish to view, houses are fairly new. Plumbing is newer than houses. Insulation even more new. Fire safety and building regulations even more new still. Asbestos was new, and now it’s old. This is progress. To keep with this analogy, in my opinion meat will become the asbestos, the lead paint, or the knob and tube wiring, of food.

        • Narauko@lemmy.world
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          Yeah, and give it another 100 years or so, a veritable eye blink in the timeline discussed, and meat will be lab grown or replaced with something else. Essentially complaining that civilization is taking more than a generation or two to advance in specific places is mildly mind boggling, because civilization almost never moves that fast. Not everything moves at the speed of the development of powered flight, and meat has an unfathomable level of inertia being on the base of the hierarchy of needs.

        • MooseBoys@lemmy.world
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          we evolved to be capable of thriving on a wide variety of diets

          ”An omnivore is an animal that has the ability to eat and survive on both plant and animal matter.” - Wikipedia

        • Narauko@lemmy.world
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          Ok, I’ll be the one to point it out.

          “We didn’t evolve to be omnivorous (from Latin omnis ‘all’ and vora, from vorare ‘to eat or devour’), we evolved to be capable of thriving on a wide variety (omni) of diets (vore)”.

          Just because portions of human populations do not behaviorally practice omnivorey, doesn’t mean their bodies are not omnivorous. You can feed a black or brown bear a balanced vegan diet, same with dogs, rodents, etc, and they can survive and thrive, but that doesn’t mean bears are no longer omnivores.

      • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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        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

        • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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          Everyone dies eventually, that’s always been the case. I don’t get why you think seeing a high chance of a particular death down the line should make people instead want death immediately. Frankly, it’s kinda pathetic that you think that’s a logical line of thought. Shit’s going to get so bad humanity might not make it, so we should all just give up?

          Personally, it makes me appreciate this life even more. I might be seeing humanity’s peak, which is a pretty cool time to be alive, and maybe there won’t be many more chances to experience human life. Good or bad, that’s all this is: an experience. It might be the only one we get and will inevitably end at some point anyways, so why rush that ending?

          • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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            Obviously everyone’s gonna die, but laughing at the idea that future generations won’t exist, that there is no future, just sounds miserable.

        • Chakravanti@sh.itjust.works
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          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.

        • Chakravanti@sh.itjust.works
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          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.

          • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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            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.”

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              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

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          nah, I think it’s kind of a way to get rid of pessimism. it’s easier for a lot of people to conceive of humanity as just being completely dead, rather than conceiving of a humanity that persists on the face of the earth, enduring the wrath of their progenitors, condemned to a future of pain and misery for as long as the sun still burns. that scenario makes you actively, not only want to kill yourself, but maybe also [redacted] in the process, because the tradeoff seems not so bad, then. if only everyone on the earth was punished for their pride, maybe that, we could all live with, in our sort of, myopic first world “extending the guilt out to the guy in cuba or rural africa who hasn’t done shit wrong but will disproportionately be the victim of the decisions of like 5 hollow puppets at the top of power” sort of way. but of the humanity that suffers indefinitely into the future? that’s kind of harder to grapple with.

          so I end up having to not really buy into either as a matter of retaining my own sanity.

      • RGB3x3@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’ve had those. They’re essentially indistinguishable from regular chicken nuggets.

        Because of course they are, the bar is not very high for dino nuggies.

    • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Yup. And there are gonna be arguments about how “they were a product of their time,” which will be exactly as bullshit as it is today when we talk about people of the past.

  • frickineh@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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?

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    1 year ago

    Fourty nine million just staggers my brain. Like, thats not even a blip in the production.

    …nuts.

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    1 year ago

    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

    • 4lan@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

        • 4lan@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I don’t know what rants you’re talking about. This is not a new idea and I did not frame it as a new idea. Maybe stop living your life in podcasts, that is wild that you memorized a quote from 12 years ago

    • negativeyoda@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’m looking forward to alien’s selectively breeding us for pets like we do dogs.

      It would be a trip to see how many dwarf albinos end up running around

    • tok@lemmy.zip
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      1 year ago

      maybe one of the big filters for intelligent life in the universe is greed

  • Yawweee877h444@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • IMongoose@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Confound4082@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        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

    • jeffw@lemmy.worldOPM
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      1 year ago

      Why use a method that’s illegal most other places? The description is pretty insane sounding.

      • Rapidcreek@reddthat.com
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • jeffw@lemmy.worldOPM
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          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

          • Rapidcreek@reddthat.com
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            1 year ago

            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.

        • 4lan@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            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.

            Great, so you have no issues with people eating meat then? Since animals also eat meat, and humans are animals?

            • 4lan@lemmy.world
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              Yep! I have no problem with a human eating meat. Nice try tho

              My only problem lies with the manner in which we obtain that meat.

              I have the utmost respect for hunters, they actually earned their meat.
              I have no respect for people who buy factory farmed meat in a grocery store. There is nothing natural about that.

              Calm down and have your mom make you some more tendies

    • moonsnotreal
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      1 year ago

      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.

        • moonsnotreal
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          1 year ago

          Yes but at least it’s more humane than cooking the animals for hours

          • Rapidcreek@reddthat.com
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            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.

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    Chickens don’t need to be treated ethically like people do. They’re birds ffs.