I wasn’t making a moral argument with my original statement, which was this:
“Veganism is the ultimate healthy diet for humans and it’ll save the planet too”.
This is a purely practical assertion. And it’s demonstrably false. My rants above were mainly concerned with the “save the planet” bit.
So what? Walking down the street has nothing to do with veganism, unless vegans have different shopping habits. Whatever these background kill-counts are, they’ll be the same for pretty much everyone.
Because, as I took great pains to explain, there is no other way to produce vegan food. Fossil fuels. Fertilizers. Pesticides. Technology. Take animals out of the loop and the Sustainable architecture just falls to pieces. It does not and cannot work. This is part of the reason vegans are so focused on high-tech soil-less crop production.
I should clarify that there is a massive difference between a few people being vegans as a matter of choice (seems to hold constant at 1-3% of the population) and a globally-mandated push towards everyone being vegan. Vegans can be accommodated without any problems within a sustainable farming model because it tends to produce a surplus of vegetables. But we can’t produce nothing but vegetables without big problems.
Hanging weight, because that matches the statistics for consumption. That is, if a pig weighs 100kg at slaughter and has a hanging weight of 70kg, then a human consuming 85kg of nothing-but-pig annually is responsible for 1.2 pig deaths.
It’s the wrong question. As a rough rule of thumb you can put one cow on an acre of managed pasture. But since you can’t ask “how many humans can you put on one acre of managed pasture?”, the question is meaningless.
No.
I know, but they don’t do it as a commercial proposition. It costs money to keep a pet; ergo, that pet is consuming resources that might genuinely be consumed by humans. Of course you can do this sort of thing for amusement value. But the profit margins on a working farm are such that you would be bleeding money if you kept animals in this fashion. It does not deliver enough of the required outputs to justify the inputs.
I also take issue with the idea that keeping an animal as a pet, for the owner’s entertainment, is somehow more humane than allowing it the full range of its animal behaviours (at least until it’s sausage or steak time).
Male animals fight. If you don’t want that, you neuter them or kill them.
I hope you don’t mind that I edited your post to fix the quote function malfunction (so now people joining the thread late won’t think you were talking to yourself).
I had nothing to say about your original argument there. I joined the discussion by asking you to explain the last part of this post, which is about veganism vs. the morality of killing animals.
Alrighty then!
But the foreground kill-counts are obviously different, and that’s where the vegans-are-morally-superior-if-killing-animals-is-bad argument (traditionally) comes from.
The environmentalist angle is certainly popular these days, but for some of them it’s just a footnote.
Try this thought experiment.
Step 1: Take your ideal farm with its animals and everything.
Step 2: Take out the parts where you harvest anything from the animals other than fertilizer and (perhaps) wool etc.
You’re telling me it’s now unsustainable?
I think there’s another way of looking at that, but whatever. I’ll let Leggat decide whether to respond.
I called them “pets” to make the point that their owners don’t plan to eat them. (I know, some people do eat their pets…) But just because their owners don’t see them as walking carcasses, that doesn’t mean they can’t do most of the same useful things that walking carcasses do before being slaughtered or that they’re more expensive (in the meantime) to keep around.
And if the average animal on a typical farm is not profitable now without its meat/milk/eggs being sold, that’s one thing, and I won’t argue about it. But if you want to talk about veganism growing, you need to account for what else grows or diminishes with it. I’m thinking specifically of a farm where they sell the dung at a premium because people who know them know they take good care of their cows, and the people who know them are mostly in an obscure religious group for whom premium quality cow dung is indispensable. (That’s not an argument in favor of obscure religious groups, mind you – just an example.)
Yeah, well, you’re not a cat lady, are you?
But seriously, you were arguing earlier that animal husbandry, or at least cultivated (i.e. domesticated) animal consumption, is part of human nature. Now you’re saying domestic animals should all be released into the wild, to enjoy the full range of their animal behaviors?
Would that not be going against the last ~10,000 years of their evolution?
There’s a lot that can be said about that, but afaik there’s no Holy Book of Veganism that says thou shalt not neuter.
This actually reminds me of Lovecraft’s description of the ultimate evil, which I thought was in his most famous work, but just now I skimmed through it and couldn’t find the paragraph, so I’m probably thinking of a different story of his. You wouldn’t know which one by any chance, would you?
Ah, fair enough. I must say I was losing the thread a bit.
Nevertheless my final paragraph there was not really about the morality of killing animals (which, being a moral position, can be neither proved nor disproved). I was arguing against the simplistic assertion that vegans, by virtue of being vegan, always kill fewer animals than non-vegans. I was trying to show that this might be true in some cases, but is not inevitably true, and has nothing to do with the actual veganism.
The TL;DR story is that all industrial farms (including many “organic” ones) incorporate indiscriminate and widespread killing as a central part of their business model. It turns out that, if you reject this model, you find that it was never even necessary in the first place: you can reduce the number of animals deliberately or accidentally killed by meat-eating humans to an insignificantly small number - dozens, or perhaps less.
Of course, the animals that exist in a well-managed farm ecosystem will all be busy killing and eating each other instead, and I get the impression that a lot of vegans haven’t made their peace with that. Hence the push for soil-less cultivation etc.
For individual vegans, you’re probably right. However it is the primary argument behind the political push for widespread (or mandatory) veganism. We all have to eat less meat to save the Earth! Very few politicians argue that it’s more healthy, because it isn’t.
At best, you would increase the cost of the exported vegetables by a very large amount - perhaps double or treble the cost. That cost represents a real-world burden on the planet. To explain why I’d have to go into the detailed costings of keeping goats, chickens, cows etc etc. Apart from that, though, it’s incredibly wasteful. Hens pump out eggs as a matter of routine. Why not just eat them? Goats and cows can produce milk far in excess of what’s needed for the calves, so why not use it? All animals produce a surplus of males which are, frankly, dead weight, and generally unpleasant to be around : roosters make a godawful noise all the time, bucks stink and are both aggressive and stupid, intact bulls can be extremely dangerous. Castration is the solution, but at some point you have to just eat them, because otherwise they’re consuming resources while contributing nothing. It’s worth pointing out, though, that you can more-or-less breakeven on a castrated male sold for meat, even an older male. So they can still be given a life of sorts.
Note that I’m drawing a distinction here between vegetarianism (or modest consumption of meat) and straight-up veganism. The former has no ecological or economic problems. The latter is unworkable.
Not really sure what you mean here.
No, I’m saying that a properly-managed farm can allow animals more-or-less full range of expression (within certain modest constraints, eg., they stay in this bit of pasture today and they’re allowed in another bit tomorrow). Males get the short end of the stick - because as mentioned, they’re useless - but the others will live a long life before slaughter, they will be economically productive during that moderately-truncated life, and they will fetch a high price as meat because older meat is generally more tasty.
There’s a guy in Vermont (IIRC) who runs a composting operation, which basically revolves around feeding organic trash to chickens and selling the eggs (not sure what happens to culled hens). He insists that his animals are “free to leave”, and they are. But they don’t.
The only book that reminds me of is The Ultimate Heresy by John Seymour, in which he describes the consequences of the modern human belief that the human race has god-like omniscience and omnipotence, and that Creation is theirs to do with as they please.
Hang on. Any push to reduce meat consumption = a push for veganism or better yet mandatory veganism?
Unless you have evidence to the contrary, I will file this under “Collapse of civilization scaremonger announcement #345,645,829,443: They’re coming for your steak, milk, & eggs!”
Okay, briefly, to make sure I’m understanding you here: you’re saying Joe Vegan Farmer cannot possibly get enough fertilizer from his animal friends (whatever they are) to grow his crops (whatever they are) if he doesn’t buy fodder from a non-vegan farm?
Or you’re just saying Joe would need to sell his produce at higher prices?
More expensive produce is generally undesirable but not necessarily unsustainable.
No argument with that logic.
A castrated bull doesn’t produce fertilizer?
I hope you remember that next time you hear a politician or activist speak.
Market conditions are not constant. Things change. Think of all the random crap people spend money on now – the latest gadgets, donations to charities they don’t really know much about, shark fin soup because there’s a pernicious “rich people meme” that says if you don’t serve it at your wedding your family isn’t worth talking to… and even charities that campaign against the shark harvest…
The point being, all kinds of things are possible, both good and not so good, in the marketplace.
Right, and for some vegans the objection to dairy & eggs isn’t that anything from an animal is bad but that locking up and mistreating animals so that you can harvest their products is bad (and that fertilized eggs have the right to life). For them, as long as there are no roosters around, the eggs from those chickens would be fine.
Hmm, no it was definitely Lovecraft. Something like I had a vision of what would happen when this deity took over the world, people would fornicate and murder, they would do absolutely anything they wanted all day long!
It may be different in your corner of the globe, but I’m referring to a staged plan to eliminate all animal products from the human diet (except, I assume, from the diet of those close to the Party). This is pretty big in Europe - it’s part of their package of dumbassery to “reverse climate change”. I doubt it’s a thing in either the US or in Asia. It will go nowhere, (a) because the EU is losing its grip on reality and losing the public trust and (b) veganism doesn’t have anything like the popular appeal of (say) Communism. I wasn’t suggesting it’s an actual, imminent threat to our existence, merely pointing out that the basis of this policy is a “lie that people still believe”, and it may yet gain traction as the world population continues to trend upwards.
GIYF, but here’s just a little snippet:
I’ll come back to the other stuff when I have a minute.
It is insane. @yyy has a valid point in that properly-managed farms would reduce meat consumption (somewhat - not a lot) simply because that’s the way the economics and ecology pan out. But both vegans and mainstream politicians refuse to countenance that path. It’s factory-farming or nothing, and if you stick with factory-farming, then you come to the inescapable conclusion that meat is a problem. But it isn’t. It’s the entire system around meat-raising that’s the problem. Taxing meat while keeping that system intact is like giving someone an aspirin for meningitis.
The existence of shadowy organisations like:
is a massive problem. It’s hard to tell whether they’re ideologically-motivated nutcases or a front for agribusiness; the latter stand to make a shitload of money from these anti-meat policies.
Not exactly. It’s not about “fertilizer”, or fodder. This all boils down to mass balance.
Food exported from the farm is destroyed (that is, humans consume it and flush their excreta down the toilet, and they throw their compostables in landfill). That mass is removed from the soil, and it must be replaced. The only possible source of replacement is bacterial and fungal action on inorganic substrates (i.e., rocks and minerals).
Animals - not just ruminants, but wildlife generally - drive this activity in the microbial community. Since this ecosystem is severely stunted on an industrial farm, there is a net loss of mass (fertility) from the soil. This can be replaced up to a point with chemical amendments. Fairly quickly, though, the soil becomes dead, and is abandoned (or perhaps sold for development). Every year, millions of hectares of once-viable cropland are taken out of circulation in this way.
You can put a very rough ballpark figure on the productivity of a mixed farm (livestock + wildlife + structural plants + fodder + exportable crops) which maintains its own fertility (mass balance). In temperate climates, it’s about 15 tonnes of fodder and 6-7 tonnes of human-compatible vegetables, per hectare per year … but that’s only relevant if you’re raising animals that consume fodder (non-human food), ie., cows, goats, pigs. Of course, there will be microlivestock that make their own arrangements. But most of the heavy lifting on a mixed farm is done by introducing other useful species.
Given this background, we can do a thought experiment with your suggested farming model. If you consider an enforced-vegetarian version of Airstrip One, with a best-attempt at sustainability, you can simplify things down to a single hypothetical vast farm (because all farms will be following the same model). That’s 65 million people to feed, needing perhaps 2000kCal per day, of which at minimum 800kCal from fat. Ruminants are disallowed because they “produce greenhouse gases”, so there is no milk, cheese, etc in our brave new world. People are allowed to keep chickens, and pigs are OK, but unless a black market arises for pig milk, pigs aren’t much use for anything except bacon, so it will make no economic sense to keep more than a bare minimum (for soil tillage and manure). Eating fish is disallowed for ideological reasons. Dead animals are buried on the farm (currently illegal, but it’s a safe and ecologically-sound method of disposal).
Since people have no access to the traditional/historical source of fat in vegetarian/plant-based communities (dairy and fish) they will most likely suffer from diseases associated with incorrect EFA balance, excessive carbohydrate consumption, and probably subclinical vitamin deficiency. But that’s a price we’re prepared to pay to Save The World.
Anyway. We’ve established what this mega-farm looks like: it’s vegetables on rotating paddocks, behind chickens (which we’re not allowed to eat). Eggs will be almost the sole source of animal protein. We’ve got a set of constraints (representing planes in a solution space) to solve as best we can. Here’s one possible (very simplistic) solution, on a per-hectare basis:
Pumpkin on 2500m2 yielding pumpkin flesh (3t) and oil (100kg).
Sunflower and safflower on 1500m2 yielding oil (100kg) and compostable mass.
Grains, potatoes and similar on 2000m2 yielding 0.5t wheat and 3t potatoes.
Misc. vegetables on 3000m2, intensively-managed, yielding about 4t.
I’ve been fairly generous there and allowed an output of high-quality food in the 11-12t/ha range, which is actually less likely than the optimum 15t+6t fodder+food.
From those crops, the chickens must be fed, and unfortunately chickens eat mostly “human food” because of their rudimentary digestion. While they can theoretically eat potato peelings and whatnot, our present society makes no provision for this; nor are there any plans to make it happen.
We have a very low chicken turnover rate (average lifespan: 7 years) with a lifetime output of 600 eggs (30kg) and consumption of 300kg fresh feed. This poor feed conversion (10%) means that the farmer will want to keep his chicken population to a bare minimum required for fertility maintenance. You’ll have to just take my word for it that it’s around 100 per hectare, implying ~4t of feed, which is subtracted directly from the total yield, producing 8500 eggs (average) in exchange. In practice those 4t would be the unsaleable, ugly or pest-blighted fraction. So from each hectare, we’ve got about:
7m kCalories, of which
250kg fat
350kg protein
… or enough for 7 vegetarians per hectare, albeit with inadequate fat and protein and far too many carbs. Therefore Airstrip One needs 9 million hectares (90,000km2, 37% of the total land area) to be food-sufficient.
Somewhere within that area must be a chicken-breeding operation to replace those chickens that die. And in fact that alters the math above: half of those chickens will be castrated males (a complicated surgical procedure, btw) which means a useful food output for maybe 6ppl/ha, not 7, fewer eggs, and a whole bunch of completely useless, but potentially tasty, capons. Each person will probably have a ration book allowing them a generous 1.6 eggs per day. Since so much land area is required, most of the population will be peasants doing drudgework.
There are at least two additional subtleties:
“bit rot” in the chicken gene pool. Breeders normally cull aggressively to maintain whatever characteristics are needed (eg., egg output). In this scenario, where every fertilized egg is sacred, the chicken would basically revert to its wild form, producing far fewer eggs. After ten years or so, people would be down to an egg per day.
The chickens in this scenario are receiving inadequate protein for high egg output. Chickens normally need a certain amount of meat in their diet. They will get some of this from foraged bugs, but not the optimum amount. The system could be improved by breeding microlivestock for chicken feed. But of course that raises ethical questions that the vegan will have to brush under the rug.
Vegans would rather focus their efforts on mitigating the massive problems with this hobbled system rather than admit that it is inherently capable of producing a surplus of edible animals/animal protein.
Once again, Comrade F, the article does not say what you say it says.
It gives a pile of stats on veggie trends in the market – you know, that pillar of capitalism and individualism – and throws in a link to a report of 24 MEP’s (out of ~750) publishing an open letter calling for a reduction of animal product consumption.
As you yourself said, vegetarianism or moderate consumption of animal products is not the same as veganism. Oh, unless it happens in the EU, in which case it’s 100% certified Communism.
Second article: Furious row! Disarray! Run for your bunker!
What actually happened? Almost no information on that in the article, which turns out to be a hyped up summary of a Telegraph article about discord in Merkel’s government – obviously not scary enough for Express readers – and though the source article is behind a paywall, it seems the fuss was over someone trying to get “official functions” to serve only vegetarian (remember vegetarian =/= vegan) food. Presumably those would be government functions, i.e. paid for with tax money. So it’s like banning soft drinks in public school vending machines – a horrible assault on the freedom of soft drink companies, I know – but doesn’t actually ban anything outside of the government sphere, and in this case it apparently wasn’t even a real internal ban at all.
So in other words, nope.
As for Andrew’s article…
EU urged to adopt meat tax to tackle climate emergency
…the passive voice there means someone other than the EU is doing the urging. And again, it’s not talking about veganism. And again, it’s not talking about a ban.
Also . I mean I get your point, but as long as (in people’s minds) it’s all about the carbon, methane (in their minds) doesn’t exist. Or they would be selective about how they control it. If they can ban incandescent bulbs while saying nothing about TV’s that are left on all day long with no-one watching them, they can ban the keeping of livestock under certain conditions while allowing it under certain other conditions.
In any case, veganism per se =/= any kind of policy on climate change.
Oh, I see. Go vegan and die of malnutrition. It used to be go vegetarian and die of malnutrition – what happened to that? And while we’re at it, does, um, “self abuse” cause blindness and insanity?
Sorry, you lost me. There’s a law against feeding potato peels to chickens?
Yeah, about that… I’m sorry, Comrade, but in my books your track record is just not that trustworthy. Independent contracting is illegal, Uber would save the world if only the stupid governments would let it do whatever it wants, people doing whatever they want is evil unless they’re megacorporations, public education should be abolished in order to rescue the poor oppressed children of developed countries, rich people memes will save the poor from their own stupidity…
The point being, you keep missing the forest for the trees.
The difference here of course is that you’re talking about math, but it’s not pure math. It’s math mixed with other things, things that you do know about from your own experience in the field (it seems), but I still don’t trust you to grasp the big picture. Especially when you insist on cutting down some very useful trees at the start, because of ideological reasons that are beside the point of the thought experiment.
*They’re definitely not perfect. For example, what are all those labels on fruit peels made of, and how many people bother removing them before tossing the peels in the green bin? But it still seems like a step in the right direction.
The American Dream is the exception not the rule. That’s why it’s a lie. Some have great success; and for every success story there are hundreds who weren’t successful. Not making it personal. I’m glad your family had success. I know many immigrants who haven’t. I met many working in restaurants who would do 16 hour days just to pay the rent. They weren’t lazy, that’s for sure.
TBF, Korea has come a long way since these people came over. It really a success story of how a country that was poorer than most African countries decades ago have built a economic powerhouse today. I don’t blame Koreans for wanting to retire back home.
The country rewards people who takes risks. You are not going to become rich working at restaurants, that’s just the reality. And it may take a generation to build wealth. Competition is tougher all around, but I think the article didn’t take into account how much more competitive Korea is. One of the highest suicide rates, I think the highest in recent year. School is so much harder, more competitive. If you get to go to a good school, congrats, you get to work at Samsung or LG.
I’m trying to give you a flavour of the thought patterns running through Europe, the reasons being offered up for policies, and the nature of the organisations behind them. The driving forces of policy. You are, perhaps, familar with a little feature of human psychology that salesmen and politicians love : ask people for a small favour, and they’re more likely to comply with a subsequent request for a large favour. All we’re asking you now is to eat a little less meat. Tomorrow we’re going to make draconian laws that prevent you eating meat. You’ll laugh and say “oh, that Finley, always sees conspiracies and slippery-slopes everywhere”, but look around you at the Covid-19 scenario. This shit happens. The veneer of Democracy is very, very thin. Don’t imagine your country is immune to ideologically-driven social engineering just because it’s not a banana republic.
No, it’s not like that at all. Banning soft drinks has a solid scientific reason. Banning meat at government mealtimes is based on faulty logic. If you have a product that consumes ten times more resources in its production than it embodies, then eating less of it doesn’t alter the fact that it’s being produced unsustainably.
Of course not. There just aren’t many of them, and most governments aren’t interested in such things.
I’m describing a hypothetical scenario in which meat-eating is heavily restricted across a wide jurisdiction. I’m trying to describe to you why individual instances of veganism are harmless but widespread, legally-mandated restrictions are Bad.
No. The politicians are specifically targeting the beef industry because of methane emissions. They’re not too bothered about poultry.
This is also partly to keep the example manageable.
I never asserted otherwise. I’m all for climate-change mitigation, but I want it based on sound reasoning, not superstition and ignorance.
If you think the numbers (that I spent a great deal of time compiling for you) do not show precisely this, then criticize the numbers. Snarky remarks don’t constitute an argument.
Yes, there is. There are many, many laws that basically make sustainable farming illegal, or at least unprofitable. IMO, that is their intent.
And yet I clearly know a whole shedload more about this than you do, because (a) I’ve spent many years doing the research and (b) it’s my job to know; and if you’d sit down and pay attention, Bond, instead of just fiddling with the scenery, you might actually learn something.
I know the maximum ecological load that you can impose with chickens, and I know the minimum that you need for basic fertility maintenance. Those limits vary dramatically depending on the soil and climate, but 100 per hectare is a reasonable starting point for an average bit of land on an average part of the globe.
Of course it bloody isn’t. There are too many factors. These are back-of-a-napkin estimates. I’ve tried to strip away the complexity so I can boil a 300-page book down to a forum post that you can read in 2 minutes, while still giving you some hard numerical handles to hold onto. Inevitably some details will get lost.
Where did I say this? And in any case, if you do cut down trees, the aim is to (a) jumpstart microbiological action and (b) replace native trees with economically-productive trees; because, if you don’t, your farm is even less profitable - which means you either need more land area for your mega-farm, or you need to charge people more money for their food.
I’ve put a lot of effort into trying to give you some sensible information, but I don’t see this argument going anywhere because your general position is “finley is always wrong about everything”.
Climate-change mitigation is just a convenient excuse, rather like COVID-19. I do not understand why they’re doing this, unless we really are in the endgame scenario:
"Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
– but doesn’t actually ban anything outside of the government sphere, and in this case it apparently wasn’t even a real internal ban at all.