Reality check: Vegetarians, there's more animal blood on your hands
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Reality check: Vegetarians, there's more animal blood on your hands
We should choose the way that causes the least unnecessary harm to animals. And research shows that a purely vegetarian diet results in more loss of life than an omnivorous one.
https://scroll.in/article/740188/reality-check-vegetarians-theres-more-animal-blood-on-your-hands
Guest- Guest
Re: Reality check: Vegetarians, there's more animal blood on your hands
I only read a segment of your article but it seems like a bull shit argument. Most meat that is eaten is not free range meat, but farm-raised. In other words if there was no need for meat, these animals wouldn't exist; they wouldn't have been born. Far fewer animals are required for milk products. With far fewer animals raised expressly for meat production, we will not require as much grazing land. That defeats the argument made in this silly blog.
MaxEntropy_Man- Posts : 14702
Join date : 2011-04-28
Re: Reality check: Vegetarians, there's more animal blood on your hands
MaxEntropy_Man wrote:I only read a segment of your article but it seems like a bull shit argument. Most meat that is eaten is not free range meat, but farm-raised. In other words if there was no need for meat, these animals wouldn't exist; they wouldn't have been born. Far fewer animals are required for milk products. With far fewer animals raised expressly for meat production, we will not require as much grazing land. That defeats the argument made in this silly blog.
from the article at the link:
Producing protein from wheat means ploughing pasture land and planting it with seed. Anyone who has sat on a ploughing tractor knows the predatory birds that follow you all day are not there because they have nothing better to do. Ploughing and harvesting kill small mammals, snakes, lizards and other animals in vast numbers. In addition, millions of mice are poisoned in grain storage facilities every year.
However, the largest and best-researched loss of sentient life is the poisoning of mice during plagues.
Each area of grain production in Australia has a mouse plague on average every four years, with 500-1000 mice per hectare. Poisoning kills at least 80% of the mice.
At least 100 mice are killed per hectare per year (500/4 × 0.8 ) to grow grain. Average yields are about 1.4 tonnes of wheat/hectare; 13% of the wheat is useable protein. Therefore, at least 55 sentient animals die to produce 100kg of useable plant protein: 25 times more than for the same amount of rangelands beef.
Some of this grain is used to “finish” beef cattle in feed lots (some is food for dairy cattle, pigs and poultry), but it is still the case that many more sentient lives are sacrificed to produce useable protein from grains than from rangelands cattle.
There is a further issue to consider here: the question of sentience – the capacity to feel, perceive or be conscious.
You might not think the billions of insects and spiders killed by grain production are sentient, though they perceive and respond to the world around them. You may dismiss snakes and lizards as cold-blooded creatures incapable of sentience, though they form pair bonds and care for their young. But what about mice?
Mice are far more sentient than we thought. They sing complex, personalised love songs to each other that get more complex over time. Singing of any kind is a rare behaviour among mammals, previously known only to occur in whales, bats and humans.
Girl mice, like swooning human teenagers, try to get close to a skilled crooner. Now researchers are trying to determine whether song innovations are genetically programmed or or whether mice learn to vary their songs as they mature.
Baby mice left in the nest sing to their mothers — a kind of crying song to call them back. For every female killed by the poisons we administer, on average five to six totally dependent baby mice will, despite singing their hearts out to call their mothers back home, inevitably die of starvation, dehydration or predation.
When cattle, kangaroos and other meat animals are harvested they are killed instantly. Mice die a slow and very painful death from poisons. From a welfare point of view, these methods are among the least acceptable modes of killing. Although joeys are sometimes killed or left to fend for themselves, only 30% of kangaroos shot are females, only some of which will have young (the industry’s code of practice says shooters should avoid shooting females with dependent young). However, many times this number of dependent baby mice are left to die when we deliberately poison their mothers by the millions.
Replacing red meat with grain products leads to many more sentient animal deaths, far greater animal suffering and significantly more environmental degradation. Protein obtained from grazing livestock costs far fewer lives per kilogram: it is a more humane, ethical and environmentally-friendly dietary option.
Guest- Guest
Re: Reality check: Vegetarians, there's more animal blood on your hands
Still doesn't answer the point I raised. This reads like an opinion piece rather than a peer-reviewed researched article, the kind of which I posted some years ago which contradicts the conclusions raised by this opinion piece.
MaxEntropy_Man- Posts : 14702
Join date : 2011-04-28
Re: Reality check: Vegetarians, there's more animal blood on your hands
reached, not raised.
MaxEntropy_Man- Posts : 14702
Join date : 2011-04-28
Re: Reality check: Vegetarians, there's more animal blood on your hands
I don't think this article has any merit or worth as any scientific reference.
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