this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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[–] [email protected] 91 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well there wouldn't be that many dogs if you didin't farm them in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 62 points 1 year ago

stares angrily at dog breeders in the US

Exactly.

[–] [email protected] 68 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Wouldn't have guessed that it was Korean farmers who let the dogs out

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Didn’t have it on my Bingo card either

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Woo let the dogs out

[–] [email protected] 62 points 1 year ago

Joo Young-bong, head of the Korea Dog Meat Farmers’ Association, said the group would release two million dogs in the capital – especially near significant governmental locations and outside the homes of politicians.

Okay. Now they can hold this dipshit personally responsible for every dog released. He could be financially ruined, spend years in prison, or possibly both.

Tip: if you’re going to threaten the government with what could be considered domestic terrorism, do it anonymously.

[–] Hanabie 59 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"dog farmers", holy shit :(

[–] [email protected] 73 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Is that any worse than any other animal being farmed?

[–] [email protected] 77 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Well the dog farmers hang, burn, and beat the shit out of the dogs before they kill them because they believe the fear and adrenaline improves the taste and makes them more tender....so yes I'd say it's worse.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Pigs, cows, and chickens also experience incredible suffering in factory farms. The whole industry is rotted.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (6 children)

It is, but most of the actual killing in like 90% of the world is done as fast and cleanly as possible. If only to keep the process as efficient as possible.

Fun fact, if you want ethically killed meat (if such a thing can exist), the best option is actually Kosher meat. There are religious laws and such, and the easiest way to comply with them is a sort of guillotine. It's an instant death.

The animals of also generally better treated than most factory farm setups.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

A 90% figure that is pulled out of your ass sounds a lot less compelling when billions of animals are slaughtered for food each year. How many is too many? And the killing isn't even the worst part.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think halal follows a lot of the same rules as well

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Similar, but in practice it's quite a bit different.

Halal requires a swift cut with a sharp knife across the throat of the animal. Severing the spine is expressly forbidden.

The animal then bleeds out, which can still be a quick death, but nowhere near as fast as decapitation, which is most commonly used in kosher butchery.

The bolt pistol used in modern butchery can also be instant. You place what looks like a pneumatic drill on the cow's forehead, and then pull the trigger. It fires a stainless steel rod forward into the cow's skull. The rod is captive at the end of its travel, so you just have to cock the tool, and you can use it again (provided it's actually pneumatically powered, and not powered by a blank round, or something else, there are a lot of versions, even some that are designed to not penetrate the skull.)

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

It’s a weird dynamic. I feel no remorse eating pork or beef. I know the process, I raised farm animals as a kid. BUT, I know someone working on genetically modified pigs for human organ transplants and that makes me somehow uneasy.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Frankly that sounds like the sort of bullshit I’d hear from Greenpeace.

Even if that were true, have you seen say a chicken farm? Workers will cruelly abuse the ever living shit out of these animals for no reason.

I wouldn’t say it’s worse than…

The chickens at the farm were filmed being kicked, thrown to the ground and having their necks broken for fun.

“I hate it when their heads come off,” one female worker says in a clip.

“Yeah, it feels good, look,” a male worker replies.

“Oh, you’re cruel,” the woman say as a chicken writhes on the ground. The other workers can be heard laughing as they all watch the hen

https://www.news.com.au/technology/science/animals/secret-video-reveals-horrific-abuse-of-hens-inside-victorian-egg-farm/news-story/dd429e36eb2e210fc702c78663f6961d?amp

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I was stationed in South Korea and saw them with my own eyeballs but you can believe whatever you like.

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In general, predators like dogs are a very inefficient way to get calories. Cattle, for example, have the benefit of turning stuff like grass that we can't eat into something that we can (meat,) dogs on the other hand, largely tend to eat the same sorts of foods we would, so often we could just eat those foods and cut out the middleman

Now dogs are not totally obligate carnivores, theoretically they can be fed on a vegetarian diet, though it requires some careful planning to ensure they're getting the right nutrients, you can't just turn them loose in a field to eat grass and expect to get much out of it, by and large they're going to need to eat the same sorts of food we'd eat- a variety of fruits and vegetables. They can also possibly fed byproducts, scraps, offal, overripe or damaged produce, etc. that is unfit or less desirable for human consumption, but that still adds a lot of complexity to managing their diet, and if animal products are part of the feed it potentially means you need to worry about spreading disease between animal populations, don't want to be feeding your meat dogs on mad cow brains or avian flu chicken bits.

And as you move up the food chain you can have issues with bioaccumulation of toxins like heavy metals. Say from birth to slaughter a cow absorbs 1oz (pulling that number out of my ass) of lead and mercury and such that ends up in its various tissues. Cows are big, you have to eat a lot of cow to absorb that much lead and mercury from eating them. Now let's say a dog during it's lifetime eats the equivalent of one whole cow (again, pulled out of my ass) during it's lifetime. That dog now has that same 1oz of lead and mercury, and dogs are much smaller so it's at a higher concentration in their meat, you don't have to eat nearly as much dog as you do cow to get the same amount of heavy metals.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

I mean, if we're talking about 'efficient ways to get calories', then farming any animal is a stupid way to do that.

You lose so much energy feeding them than if you just ate the food yourself or used the land to grow food.

Always funny watching where meat-eaters draw the line with their abuse. There is more cognitive dissonance among ya'll than conservatives.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

The question posed was whether farming dogs is worse than farming other animals, and that is the question I attempted to answer.

The question was not whether farming any animal for food is ethical or justifiable, and so I didn't attempt to answer that.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I saw an ad on the subway once with a cute cow and a cute dog that said "you wouldn't eat one, so why eat the other?" I ended up having a constructive discussion with a vegan on the train cause I was like "well, we don't eat dogs because they're our pets, but it it came to it, we would". Throughout history, when shit hits the fan, famine, sieges, etc. The dogs are the first to go and be made food.

We've just kind of agreed to kill this one group of animals as opposed to killing all of them. It's horrible but you're never gonna stop humans from eating meat. We just gotta encourage a more humane way to get meat. I'm a vegetarian now, but I know humans are just meat eaters and we can't change that.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

...We also sometimes eat other people when shit hits the fan. 🙁.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

You're right. When times got hard, the dog became dinner.

I raised all my own food for a few years and fully understand the horror of having to kill to eat. It's never pretty, despite all the arguments I can make about health of the herd, culling only the weak, and giving them the best lives they could hope for.

I find the vegan arguments weak, though too. Every day we are discovering new levels of feelings and intelligence in life and that goes down to plants, too. It's a harsh reality that in order to exist, you must make something else not exist... and unless we change something dramatically it's never going away.

All this is why I'm cautiously optimistic about lab grown meat. It could turn this whole thing on its head.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Bring plant-based seems to result in much less overall pain. How so?

About 10% net energy goes between stages of the food ladder, so 90% of the energy in the entire cow's diet was lost as heat. This applies to all animals.

If your goal is overall reduction in pain of others for your own survival, then eating a cow includes that cow's death, plus the much larger amount of greenery it had to eat versus how much greenery you'd eat to comfortably live as the much smaller beings that we are.

Skipping the cow means less overall death by that logic.

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The farmers argued that banning the controversial dog meat from menus across the country would deprive them of their livelihoods.

All make this argument.

People have to decide if "livelihood" is the highest moral priority.

Signed: The Dark Brotherhood

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

They're going to ruin my family if I can't sell human meat! How can my company Larry's Long Pig survive this travesty!?

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago

The ban would take effect in 2027. It seems the idea is that upon it's passing they would simply stop raising new dogs for meat.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm sure they can find some other way to be useful to society.

Always sad to see people trying to stifle progress so they can avoid adapting. That's not how work works, lol. You do what society deems useful, and then you get paid. If what you're doing is no longer making you money, then you have to find something else to do.

You work for society. Society doesn't work for you unless you're paying them.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes! Please! 2 million dogs getting a better fate anyway

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I can't imagine eating a dog.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

How is it different from eating any other animal? And I don't mean that like it's ok to eat dogs, but that you should feel the same about any other animals.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Because humans have had dogs as companions for millenia? Yeah I get that as a civilized society we should probably be working toward respecting all species of animals but every time I see this 'how is it different than eating any other animal" argument, I cringe. Because cats and dogs in particular have been domesticated companions of humans for thousands of years. So we see them differently than animals we don't have that relationship with...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Humanity has coexisted with cows as well, but we still eat them. Its part of the same reason why cows are revered as holy in India.

There are likely many who look at beef eaters as general westerners look at dog eaters.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Because

  • it is a predator and thus a huge waste of calories
  • It is smart and social
  • People generally like dogs
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

People make a distinction between pets and cattle.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

This is not the newstory I expected to read today

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Eating a dog is no different than eating a cow. Meat is meat. If the cow farmers in the US decided to unleash their herds in a populated place it would also be a bad time...

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