World's first no-kill eggs go on sale in Berlin (2018)

I think it's much too early to assess the totality of (let me put this in the least inflammatory way that I can think of) Trump's long-term impact. At the very least, he has re-formed the American judiciary, delayed action on climate change by four years, and eroded or eliminated many of the societal and governmental norms that are essential for the functioning of our society (e.g. accepting the results of elections).

But even now, we have North Korea with ICBMs and more nuclear weapons than before, Iran closer to a nuclear weapon than before, and probably a hundred thousand people or so dead from Covid who might not have died if Trump had not politicized the wearing of masks. That's not "little damage" by my reckoning.

There are also a few hundred innocent children who were forcibly separated from their parents and likely will never see them again because of shoddy record-keeping. Despite the relatively small numbers, the sheer monstrousness of this makes it impossible to sweep it under the rug. Trump effectively abandoned the moral high ground that America has held since the end of World War II. America is no longer perceived as a reliable partner, leader of the free world, and beacon of hope. I suppose reasonable people can disagree in their assessment of the long-term impact of this, but in my book, that's not "little damage."

[ADDENDUM] Something else Trump has done is form a significant contingent of the citizenry who now equate the interests of the country with Trump's personal interests, i.e. who believe Trump when he says that we face existential threats that he alone can fix. Ironically, they do this in the name of patriotism and freedom, utterly oblivious to the historical precedents that show time and time again that cults of personality lead to tyranny and ruin. Thankfully, we have not yet crossed that threshold. But we were standing on the brink, and it won't take much to bring us back to it.

[ADDENDUM2] There's also this:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/11/william-barr-lam...

No, it isn't. That's exactly the problem. Trump found a bug in the system, a security hole, in the form of leveraging the non-linearity built in to the current system. The Constitution was designed to produce minority rule, on the assumption that if the minority abused that power too much the majority would rise up and force them out of power. The problem is that this bias is amplified by modern communications technologies, which allow a determined person to leverage a fairly small minority into effective dictatorial power. The Constitutional bias towards minority rule is amplified by party politics, gerrymandering, echo chambers, etc. to the point where you only need a few million motivated followers to effectively control the agenda. All you need is enough voters following you that you can pose a credible threat to unseat any politician in your party at the next primary. Those few million motivated followers are much more likely to be found at the extremes than in the center, and they are much more likely to be found in rural areas and hence be conservative. Given enough time, this influence can be leveraged into enough disenfranchisement through legitimate-seeming voter suppression efforts that unseating the minority becomes effectively impossible through any legal means. At that point, the minority no longer needs to compromise. And since it is the most radical members of the minority who are the foundation of this strategy, the result is extreme radicalization. And all this can happen without moving the center. That's the problem.

If you have a lot of pressures in your life, adding a diet change to that is not realistic. Pushing for meat alternatives in convenient places and making it easy for large groups of people to have small cognitive load (low cost of spoons) to go without meat for a meal is far more impactful than trying to convince everyone to go “full vegan or you are a monster”. If you have the time to consider your options and make a change to your habits that match your values, great, otherwise power to those trying to make those choices easier for everyone. Don’t let it weigh on you, take care of yourself and create space to make the changes you want to see in yourself.

You familiar with the concept of consent?

* unscrew the lid of a peanut butter jar to get a treat without training

* hop from one tank to another to prey on the fish in the tank. This was observed quite by accident and not part of an experiment at first. In fact the octopus waited for its human handlers to leave the room before going in for the kill; the incident was caught on camera.

* gently grasp the hand of a friendly human with their tentacles, and squirt water through their siphon at a disliked human

All spontaneously, without training or prompting.

That last bit is particularly interesting to me, because they are recognizable signs of affection and dislike. Octopuses show some semblance of an ability to bond with us, despite having vastly different brains from us.

But let me set this aside since it might obscure our dialog. What surely can be measured is the degree of immune system depression this animals experience, how far do their life cycles deviate from control, and what health an behavioral consequences they experience from being forced to live the way we make them live. We can also measure the impact this ways have on ourselves and the environment.

Would we put the family dog trough this experience just because it is not clear (to us) if it fully understands or experience what is happening, ignoring all the fairly obvious signals that it will experiment a great deal of suffering?

I once witnessed an organic cow’s sacrifice and no one in its right heart can argue it didn’t experience an great deal of distress and suffering.

I don’t judge people from being meat eaters, I’m no vegan myself, but I won’t play conceptual games to ease people’s minds. If you have the heart to kill this animals and eat them (and I don’t mean this pejoratively or disrespectfully), go ahead. Just don’t pretend there is a gray area in what this animals will be experiencing and what does this means in terms of their lives. I mean, we eat calves that have been kept all their short lives strained in cages just for the taste, and we do this in mass scale.

This is not something to run from.

(To clarify, I’m not trying to make it personal, english is not my native language. On the contrary, I’m very open to talk about this topic with an open mind and a warm heart).

I invite you to come to my country and see how farmers/maquila workers live, in what conditions do they work, who they work for and which populations most benefit from this farmers/workers living conditions.

As I said before, empathy is a great quality to cultivate, and so does awareness.

Glad we had this exchange.

To put this into more laymen's terms, meat cultivation dramatically increases the total amount of plants that we need to grow.

As mentioned in my other comment:

> 70-75% of soybeans grown globally are for livestock, only 6% are used for human food products (meat eaters often try to claim that soy production is terrible for the environment; surprise, surprise, meat consumption is the main driver)

So, it's a bit counterintuitive, but globally switching to a plant-based diet would actually dramatically reduce the total amount of plants that we are raising, and therefore would dramatically reduce overall suffering of plants (if they suffer)

The only logical endpoint is that humans should just off themselves so we don't participate past one cycle of reabsorption into the Earth's environment.

One way or another, everything is going to die and be consumed by another living organism.

That's why it's absurd. You can arbitrarily pick your own resolution, but it's only arbitrary until you exit the cycle completely.

You've made interesting points, but I think the most important point here isn't one of biology but of moral philosophy: animals presumably outrank plants in terms of moral standing.

Torturing a person is presumably worse than torturing a mosquito. A person has more capacity for pain than a mosquito, and in turn the mosquito has more capacity for pain than does a heap of sand.

I figure plants lie further down the ranking than mosquitoes, for the reasons you've just explained. They're certainly further down than farmyard animals. It would be considerable moral progress to switch from torturing billions of chickens and pigs, to torturing billions of plants (and that's ignoring that a plant in a farm environment is likely 'happier', in its own terms, than a livestock animal).

A vaguely related TED talk on how brains ultimately exist to orchestrate movement, and essentially nothing else: https://youtu.be/7s0CpRfyYp8?t=15

In a less facetious sense, I do believe that insect neurology is substantially different. Crustaceans have a nervous system web, which is why you have to cut crabs and lobsters in half to kill them rather than just stabbing them in the head.

First when you grow you drink mom's milk and you are under impression drinking milk is good for health which indeed is. So people start consuming milk everywhere.

And there are advertisements which shows happy cows, chocolates made from milk. Vegetarians are under impression that its ethical. And many farmers advertises as if their cows are happy they are grass fed etc. In some religion they even worship cows etc giving impression that cows are respected etc.

And the other thing you often hear is cows babies get enough milk and farmers only sell excess milk. So from religion, society people are brain washed so much they don't even see how animals are tortured, left on road after buffalo/cows stops giving milk.

I wish media would cover this subject more especially in India which is probably top 3 vegetarian country in the world.

But what percentage of our protein?

Eventually, humanity will have to accept that going vegan is the only sustainable method.

* most plastic in the ocean is made up of abandoned fishing gear (see https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/03/great-pacifi...)

For example, freshwater consumption is important in regions which lacks freshwater. Crop agriculture is however the most common source for water pollution, occurs in all regions, and is not only a major environmental problem but also harms the supply of fresh water even if its not responsible for the primary consumption. Fertilizers and pesticides being the main culprits here. Sadly there is very little food in stores that do not have a direct link to fertilizers and pesticides except for wild fish, shellfish and seaweed.

In quite a few times I have seen studies showing that the lowest carbon emission in any food group would be either shellfish, seaweed, or insects. No fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, minimal land usage and sustainable. Vegan would exclude two of those, and seaweed is pretty rare in non-asian diets.

In general I try to look for marks of sustainability when buying food. Small producers, non-factory farm operations, local, crops that are in season, and so on. The article here focus on the issue of sex determining the eggs, but my primary priority is the area that the hen has. In EU you can have 16 hens located in a small box the size of 0.2m². That is plain cruelty and so I choose eggs under the mark that require 4m², a requirement for outside area, always access to natural lighting, and given crops grown without chemical fertilizers, pesticides or herbicides.

Is it perfect? No. Not using fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides is still being debated and researched if they are better for the environment or worse since land usage increases from it, but since I regularly dive in the Baltic sea I am constantly reminded by the harm done already by the revolution of chemical fertilizers produced primarily by natural gas.

But I do question how much of some the things you reference are actually problems.

We have plenty of fresh water. Distribution is often our problem when it comes to getting that water to humans everywhere, but stopping livestock production will not fix that.

Does it really matter how much of the USA is used for livestock grazing? Are we missing out on using that land for other things that are important to us?

I have no opinion on soybean production, but, again, does it matter that the lion's share of soybean production goes toward feeding livestock? And if soybean cultivation really is that bad for the environment, are there other things we could be feeding livestock that don't have such bad effects?

The carbon emissions suck, but are there ways to reduce these through better process?

I don't think any of these problems are unsolvable, but likely they're expensive, and there's no political will to tax the bad behavior to the point that it becomes financially better to do the right thing. Getting around that is likely easier than getting a significant chunk of the world to go vegan.

And that's the issue I have with most logical arguments around veganism. Meat production and consumption has a lot of problems, certainly, but vegans seem to believe that the only way to fix those problems is to throw the baby out with the bathwater, when there are almost certainly solutions or at least mitigations to those problems. I get that as an individual, you aren't going to fix those problems, so personally going vegan is a way for people to avoid being a part of the problem. That is a satisfying route for some people, but not for everyone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxW-JKLeu1k

Blog version w/ reference links: https://www.sapien.org/blog/why-we-should-be-eating-more-mea...

An appeal to authority. I'm mean surgeon general once called for not wearing masks until he changed his mind completely.

"* Animal agriculture is responsible for 20-33% of all freshwater consumption globally"

Why would that be problematic? There is no shortage of water where they raise animals. On the other hand there is a shortage of water in California where they grow crops on a massive scale.

"* Mass cultivation of animals increases the chances of pandemic"

That is a true, but the same can be said of large fields of monoculture crops where disease can quickly spread and destroy everything resulting in hunger.

"* 41% of mainland USA is used for grazing livestock, yet meat only provides 18% of our calories; feeding the world on a vegan diet could reduce farmland use by 75% or more"

Only if that 41% of mainland is suitable for plowing and you don't mind destroying other habitats for food production. Live stock can graze, humans cannot. Plus we don't need pesticides and insecticides on grasslands which are destroying our fresh water supplies.

"* Going plant-based for two-thirds of meals could reduce food-related carbon emissions by 60% (the way we produce, distribute, and refrigerate food is a huge contributor of global emissions)"

That is already true for vast majority of people on this planet. Think of the food pyramid.

"* 70-75% of soybeans grown globally are for livestock, only 6% are used for human food products (meat eaters often try to claim that soy production is terrible for the environment; surprise, surprise, meat consumption is the main driver) "

I don't know how real the numbers are, regardless it is not an ideal situation and we should strive towards less monulture.

There is a big moralizing streak in veganism, and a lot of vegans are into it from ethical, moralizing or emotional reasons, which leads to activism and trying to ban, tax and reduce meat eating. We see where the puck is heading.

I'd say most vegans at this point think "harm reduction" is just a form of "green washing" and does not deserve our support or attention.

Not deliberately, of course. Either hawks or coyotes (not sure; we're in the process of setting up cameras) have taken several of our flock. We're still figuring out what to do about it.

We've tried the broomstick method but it's hard. What works best for us is to take a traffic cone, cut off the top of it, mount it upside down, stuff the chicken in it so their head is poking out the bottom, and slit their throat with a very sharp knife. It's gruesome and if your family is squeamish it won't go well. But they go quick and drain out, so cleaning is easier.

Which would still feed 18,000,000 million people in Africa for a year.