• Quokka@quokk.au
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    10 months ago

    Is that any worse than any other animal being farmed?

    • teft@startrek.website
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      10 months ago

      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.

      • Orvorn@slrpnk.net
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        10 months ago

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

        • Overzeetop@sopuli.xyz
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          10 months 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.

      • Quokka@quokk.au
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        10 months ago

        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

        • teft@startrek.website
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          10 months ago

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

          • interceder270@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            Even if that were true, have you seen say a chicken farm?

            Completely ignored this part, as expected.

            • teft@startrek.website
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              10 months ago

              I grew up in farmland. I’ve seen numerous animals killed. We didn’t beat our goats before we killed them. Same with our chickens.

    • Fondots@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      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.

      • interceder270@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        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.

        • Fondots@lemmy.world
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          10 months 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.

        • abstractastronaut@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Just a small pointer: If the goal was to convince the person you replied to, the third condescending paragraph is a surefire way to make them not listen, which is a shame because the first two paragraphs are actually solid arguments.

          • interceder270@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            No, my goal was to say what I wanted to say and I accomplished that to a tee.

            Just a small pointer: nobody cares about your pointers. Lol.

              • abstractastronaut@lemmy.world
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                10 months ago

                I wouldn’t spend any more energy on them. They made it clear that they’re here to talk at people rather than talking with people.

    • Son_of_dad@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      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.

    • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
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      10 months ago

      I mean, arguably one could make a standard based on animal intelligence. Like, dogs are fairly smart, so one could argue that raising them for meat in farm conditions isn’t very ethical, and similarly, farming something like, say, a dolphin, might be even worse if someone was to do that, but then that farming much more simple minded creatures like shrimp, bees, mealworms etc would be much more acceptable. A standard like that still wouldn’t reflect well on most animal agriculture though given that most meat animals are mammals and birds, which can be reasonably intelligent, especially pigs to my understanding. Though I suppose the conditions of the farm matter too, like, sheep kept on adequate grazing land for their wool probably don’t have too bad a life as far as farm animals go, and it’s probably possible if more expensive and less land efficient to get milk and eggs from cows/goats and chickens in a reasonably humane way too, since those products don’t inherently require raising the animal just to kill it.