196

if farm animals were slaughtered in the most humane and painless of ways

This sounds like a juxtaposition to me. You cannot slaughter a healthy animal in a humane way. "Slaughter" excludes "humane". I'm not a vegan/vegetarian but it seems to me like this idea that if we just raised happy healthy animals and found a way to kill it nicely then eating meat would be ethically ok. We don't need to eat meat anymore. Any killing of an animal to make it into food is unnecessary and could be avoided. I think it is important that we meat eaters really internalize this. Every time we eat meat we caused absolutely unnecessary suffering for a quick moment of pleasure.

There's been more videos about this too since. This article only looked at the US, but this stuff also exists elsewhere. In the UK they simply arrested people filming some of the slaughterhouses using CO2 gas chambers.

Ag-gag laws and similar kinds of stuff are fun. Problems apparently don't exist if you just can't film them :/

No I don't think they can; that's how your body knows to breathe. CO2 is just the wrong gas to use to kill something if you want it done quietly. I honestly think I'd rather be strangled, there's a chance I'd die of lack of blood flow to the brain before CO2 poisoning set in.

did anything ever happen after the videos were released?

What do you mean? The video shows the intended effect, I don't think any regulatory place wants to change anything about that.

Asphyxiation is a uniquely terrifying way to die. People who have lost their ability to feel most fear through the destruction of their amygdala still panicked under simulated drowning.

These gas chambers are almost certainly used for the same reasons the Nazis used them on people: they're economical. The Nazis found bullets to the back of the head and mass graves to be inadequate for dealing with the sheer volume of people they wanted to murder, so they settled on the gas chambers next to furnaces because it allowed them to kill mass quantities the quickest.

There is no way of executing living animals that cannot be botched; no ethical way to kill animals bred and caged for their entire lives. The expectation of being able to have it both ways is unreasonable. No free lunches liberals.

A somber thing about nitrogen gas executions:

People generally agree that nitrogen (or any inert) gas asphyxiation is a relatively painless and peaceful way to go. People have been using it for (animal and human) euthanasia for years without incident. Seems appropriate, right?

So how did it work in capital punishment scenario the first time around? The guards slapped the face mask on the condemned. Then they asked them for their last statement. Quote: "Mffmfmf, Mffafam fmfmfm mfffmfmf mf mfmf f mfmf mfffmfmmf. Mfffm mfm mfm mfmfffmfmf mf. Mfff mff mf mff." (Transcribed as: "Tonight, Alabama causes humanity to take a step backwards. Thank you for supporting me. Love all of you.") Then they opened the gas valves. It took too long. ...OK, it's time to pause now, let's see how many problems you can spot with this procedure.

Problem: They're continuing to use "medical" and "painless" and whatnot procedures, administered by unqualified staff, on unwilling participants. Look, I'm not an advocate of death penalty at all and I think it should be abolished everywhere, but even I know that the guillotine designers were up to something. You need to minimise the amount of fuck-ups at all levels.

I vote we eat this guy instead of the animals. Everybody wins.

Wow, not liking animal cruelty = veganism

Animal rights/sentientism/antispeciesism are the logical next step for leftist/progressive/compassionate ideologies, 196 tends to attract mostly leftist/etc folks, so it makes sense

What is wrong with vegan? Did you even read the article?

We can't show how fucked it is? Sorry that you would rather stay ignorant on the issue.

Well 196 got some uptake in terms of animal cruelty posts, but it gives a good highlight to us about this issue.

Typing as a meat eater.

It's actually pretty easy to. you probably wont have a great time if you try eat meatsm based dishes without the meat because they'll taste lacking and be unbalanced.

Almost all poverty food around the world historically is vegan or at least vegetarian though so there's huge variety to choose from. In chinese food there's Buddhist influenced food like: https://thewoksoflife.com/buddhas-delight-lo-han-jai/, lots of African food is vegetarian or vegan (Ethiopian is stand out here), much south Indian food is and a lot of the stuff with yogurt can be made with soy yoghurt (easy to diy if you like) or cashew cream and a sour note, mexican dishes are easily adaptable too.

Then there are some other hacks like black bean paste and breadcrumbs pressed into patties just works as something you can fry and chuck on a burger (add a few spices to taste), TVP will sub for mince in many saucy dishes where it can absorb the flavour.

You'll have fun, it's an adventure that will teach you so much about how food works around the world!

Also you can start immediately by just ordering a vegan option every time you eat out. You don't have to worry about having the skills or ingredients to do that.

Good luck!

This is the argument that I used when I was an adolescent who thought himself very wise and smart but in reality just wanted an excuse to not have to change the lifestyle that I was comfortable with.

Saying "life only comes from death" is a cowardly reductionism. It creates a false equivalence between plant and animal life that lets you ignore the fact that sustaining human life does not require the wanton suffering of animals. And it certainly doesn't require animals to be suffering at such massive scales and in such cruel ways.

You're probably someone who will cite studies which indicate that plants emit distress signals when they take physical damage, and you'll argue that therefore plants suffer the same as animals. But that's an intellectually dishonest argument. Suffering as we understand it is more than just a chemical reaction to stimulus; it emerges from an awareness of being alive and an instinctual desire to remain alive and unharmed. Plants do not have that kind of awareness.

There are predators in nature that only know how to hunt to survive. Their digestive systems are specialized to consume the bodies of other smaller animals. And their ecosystems depend on those predators to balance out the reproductive cycles of their prey, otherwise the prey animals would become overpopulated and wipe out life forms lower on the food chain.

The fact of the matter is that humans have not been a collaborative member of any ecosystem for tens of thousands of years. We cause massive harm to every ecosystem that we're a part of, and the mass slaughter of farm animals is the worst thing we've done to this planet yet, even more harmful overall than CO2 emissions. We're eroding the soil and using up the fresh water in ways we can't sustain, and then to top it all off we're inflicting the largest scale unnecessary suffering in the history of this planet. And all of it is being done so that humans can enjoy a pleasure that is both unnecessary and easily replaced with a small amount of agricultural and supply chain reform.

Humans are omnivores and the simple reality is that as an omnivore with options at your disposal you have a choice about whether the process of sustaining your life involves wanton suffering at a massive scale or not. If you think the suffering of animals is worth the pleasure you derive from eating their flesh then just be honest and say so. Don't be a coward like I used to be by pretending that animals and plants are the same.

If you have concerns about plant agriculture, they are only magnified by animal agriculture which uses a lot more of it for animal feed

1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2 for monogastrics

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013

Or in environmental terms:

we show that plant-based replacements for each of the major animal categories in the United States (beef, pork, dairy, poultry, and eggs) can produce twofold to 20-fold more nutritionally similar food per unit cropland. Replacing all animal-based items with plant-based replacement diets can add enough food to feed 350 million additional people, more than the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food loss.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1713820115

To produce 1 kg of protein from kidney beans required approximately eighteen times less land, ten times less water, nine times less fuel, twelve times less fertilizer and ten times less pesticide in comparison to producing 1 kg of protein from beef

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25374332/

or for overall diets

The diet containing more animal products required an additional 10 252 litres of water, 9910 kJ of energy, 186 g of fertilizer and 6 g of pesticides per week in comparison to the diet containing less animal products

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/public-health-nutrition/article/comparing-the-water-energy-pesticide-and-fertilizer-usage-for-the-production-of-foods-consumed-by-different-dietary-types-in-california/14283C0D55AB613D11E098A7D9B546EA

I think you're reaching there a bit, because no one said anything about forced veganism. You can eat meat and be against the horrors of (the vast majority of) the meat industry.

(If I read your reply wrong, let me know and I will delete this)

Life only comes from death.

No? The recombination of genetic material results in complex life forms. That’s why we have multicellular organisms. Heck, in fact mitochondrial DNA proves that humans have a symbiotic relationship with microbes. So I guess I’d say the quoted text above is an unqualified statement.

Besides all that, humans are the only living organism that we know of capable of probing the nature of reality and existence. So simply put, it’s okay for us to hold ourselves to higher standard than the “reptile” or “monkey” brain.

Imagine if there was a life form stronger or smarter than humans, what would you want to say to it? “Life only comes from death so eat me or abuse me”. We can and should do better.

Oh yeah. The gas dissolves in the mucose around their eyes too, acidifying it like soda water.

Male chickens discarded from hatcheries are thrown live into a blender, "maceration", or gassed.

Don't ask about what happens to the male babies from dairy cow pregnancies for milk, or why veal is so tender.

There are... reasons why people go vegan despite all the vitriol we get thrown our way for daring to not be silent about this nightmare. Slaughterhouse workers get PTSD, even the people most ok with actually doing this shit have their minds recoil and fold in on themselves in the face of the sheer horror.