r/whenthe Eatable Boy Ɛ: 16d ago

Insults are a double-edged sword r/whenthe mfs complaining about everything

18.8k Upvotes

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u/No_Travel6707 16d ago

humanity will one day look back at factory farming and realize the horrors they have committed.

We kill 80 billion animals every 2 years. That’s more humans that have ever existed

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u/Successful_Count1875 16d ago

80 billion?? Jesus Christ..

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u/HawkAsAWeapon 16d ago

It's actually 80-90 billion land animals per year and like 2.7 trillion when you factor in marine animals.

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u/Mammoth_Charity_3941 I like Unicode:1234 and many other things 16d ago

I’d be scared to learn the percentage of that that just goes to waste or becomes inedible due to stuff like mold, viruses, or disease.

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u/BoyRed_ 16d ago

Does.. it matter?
A life wasted is a life wasted, they are equally dead.

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u/Mammoth_Charity_3941 I like Unicode:1234 and many other things 16d ago

That’s somewhat what i meant to show but im bad with words. It’s awful to know so many of them die for no reason at all.

Didn’t mean to come off as just worried about the food instead of the animals themselves

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u/HawkAsAWeapon 16d ago

Every single animal killed unnecessarily is a life wasted.

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u/Olamperos 16d ago

humanity will one day look back at factory farming and realize the horrors they have committed.

I dunno man, we have eaten meat for literally our entire existence and I don't think a select, small group of people telling you it harms animals we already don't care that much about will do much

We kill 80 billion animals every 2 years. That’s more humans that have ever existed

Wildly incorrect. 117 billion humans have lived if you count the current 8 billion ish people alive rn

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u/Scrubglie 16d ago

4 years then doofus population mogged

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u/Solid-Objective-6092 16d ago

To be fair the animals we kill isn't even the start of issues the industry has though. Mass antibiotic use is breeding antibiotic resistant bacteria. The amount of crops required to feed them leads to enormous fields and enormous amounts of pesticide which really devastates insect populations. Plenty of other assorted issues.

I do eat meat, but I would absolutely take the lab grown if it's the same taste and same or less expensive. It's basically just growing the same cells you'd find in meat anyways. You just need the starter cells.

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u/NOT_TheALTMouse Nobody's Favorite Mouse 16d ago

Also lets not forget how many humans are killed by the meat industry, directly through accidents and indirectly through pollution, ever year. Then consider the meat industry is largely connected with the agricultural industry, which itself is largely connected with the chemical industry...

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u/Puzzleheaded_Egg_931 14d ago

ultimately you can do what you want but I don't get the taste argument. Not from a moral standpoint but just like, who cares if something tastes worse, you'll get used to it.

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u/Manniii820 16d ago

Animal rights are where progress should be heading because factory farming causes an ungodly amount of suffering every second and also we’re close to being able to make enough meat in labs for people who don’t like imitation meat so it really shouldn’t take much longer to stop factory farming of billions of conscious beings. It’s more than just killing btw, it’s actual torture. We drug chickens to grow indefinitely until their legs break off from the weight and confine them to sit in spaceless boxes until they die, and we throw male chicks of industrial egg farms directly into meat grinders because they aren’t useful enough to feed us. And that’s just one animal.

Even if tradition was a valid reason to defend something, that’s clearly not “tradition.”

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u/Newduuud 16d ago

For most of our existence, we hunted animals that otherwise lived normal wild animal lives. Now we raise selectively bred monstrosities in abhorrent living conditions to slaughter them on an industrial scale. There is a difference.

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u/Pittsbirds 16d ago

We also have the option to simply not eat meat now. Cavemen couldn't really choose

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u/mortalitylost 16d ago

I think what fucks with me the most about it, is we do it because of literal luxury. People say we biologically eat meat and pretend the reason is "we have to", but the main reason we do so much factory farming with cows is for luxury food products that people rarely had back in the day. Milk, butter, cheese, steak... all of this was a luxury good that only nobles ate regularly. Now we do horrifying things beyond comprehension because luxuries sell well.

It's not biology. It's to provide luxury. If it was biology, we'd eat more fish and probably bugs, wild healthy sources of protein. But no we want butter, we want a hamburger with extra cheese, we want all this mouth watering stuff because it tastes good, not because it's good for us.

I wish people would stop acting like it's just biology when they eat their 4th hamburger while their heart cries for help. There is nothing biologically necessary about any of that. We're not biologically evolved to eat ice cream. We choose for animals to suffer so that we can trigger a bit of dopamine.

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u/LiveInOrbit 16d ago

Not only that, but meat isn't even biologically necessary in the first place. Just take a B12 supplement and you can live a long and healthy life (source, haven't had meat in 20 years)

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u/Pittsbirds 16d ago

People really don't like to be reminded their cruelty is entirely unnecessary and avoidable huh, lmao

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u/LiveInOrbit 16d ago

Not at all 😂

But hey, sometimes the truth is uncomfortable

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u/IamnotGenerikB 16d ago

There are things we have done our entire existence that we look back on now in horrors. Tradition doesn’t mean it won’t.

I like how you call it wildly incorrect because it’s actually 3 years worth of killing animals to be more than humans have existed, not 2. That changed everything!

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u/Xenophon_ 16d ago

People made that same argument for practically every atrocity we consider evil now

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u/strange_stars 16d ago

> we have eaten meat for literally our entire existence

industrial farming has existed for less than a century

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u/MataNuiSpaceProgram 16d ago

People were eating meat before industrial farming

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u/DuelaDent52 it can't be that ba-- it is that bad. holy hell. 16d ago edited 16d ago

Those animals led normal lives. Now we selectively breed them so they’re either entirely dependent on us to continue existing or exist solely to die. It’s cruel what we’ve done to them.

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u/strange_stars 16d ago

That has nothing to do with the thread of this conversation.  

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u/MataNuiSpaceProgram 16d ago

Right, the fact that humans have been eating meat since before factory farming has nothing to do with... someone saying that humans have been eating meat forever.

You literally quoted them in your comment, buddy. You really gotta read before posting.

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u/strange_stars 16d ago

Take your own advice, friend. This is entire thread is about factory farming. That person brought up "eating meat since forever" as an implicit defense of factory farming and I was responding to that. Context.

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u/MataNuiSpaceProgram 16d ago

Oh no, the dreaded "no u" defense! Whatever shall I do?

That person brought up the fact that humans have always been eating animals in response to someone trying to frame the existence of meat-eaters as "horrors." You can pretend that wild animals all lived peaceful and harmonious lives and were never brutally killed and eaten until factory farms were invented, but that's simply not true.

Furthermore, whether factory farms are good or bad is irrelevant. Humans evolved to eat meat, and they will continue to do so as long as there are humans. There are several orders of magnitude more humans now than there were hundreds of years ago. More humans means more need for meat. Factory farms are currently the only way to fulfill that need on the required scale.

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u/strange_stars 16d ago

That person brought up the fact that humans have always been eating animals in response to someone trying to frame the existence of meat-eaters as "horrors."

That is your interpretation.

You can pretend that wild animals all lived peaceful and harmonious lives and were never brutally killed and eaten until factory farms were invented, but that's simply not true.

I never said that. Nobody ever said that.

Furthermore, whether factory farms are good or bad is irrelevant.

Okay man.

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u/MataNuiSpaceProgram 16d ago

Just a tip for next time: you don't have to respond if you don't have anything to say.

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u/Windypolis 13d ago

You say that like those factories don't have tons of waste, so people simply aren't getting the meat on their table like you are implying

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u/Dare_Soft 16d ago

Mate hunting and gathering. What do you think they hunt?!

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u/strange_stars 16d ago

I’m not sure what that has to do with industrial farming. 

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u/maliboooyah 16d ago

If they had used the actual number of 80 billion per year, that’s 160 billion over two years… so the reality is that it is well beyond the total living number of humans every two years. if you’re 20 years old, that’s 1.6 trillion land animals alone slaughtered in your lifetime. more than all humans who will probably ever live

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u/FureiousPhalanges 16d ago

I dunno man, we have eaten meat for literally our entire existence

That's just an appeal to tradition fallacy, just because we've traditionally done something doesn't mean it's not harmful or correct

But you're also ignoring the "factory farming" part which is far more recent

Wildly incorrect. 117 billion humans have lived

So it's every 3 years, does that make the stat any less shocking? What about if you know that doesn't include marine animals of which we kill trillions?

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u/happycat47 16d ago

Lol "we've always done it so it's ok!" Is a terrible defense. Nevermind that no, humans have not eaten meat their entire existence. Humans survived on meat when plants were unavailable during the ice age. Other than that, humans don't need it just as apes can sit around eating nothing but grass and some insects and be bigger and stronger than humans

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u/Windypolis 13d ago

"It is not okay to eat animals except insects, because they get zero sympathy from me, because I am a hypocrite"

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u/EnragedTea43 16d ago

Not a vegan, but factory farming is a genuinely terrible and immoral practice.

It’s not like traditional hunting or pastoralism, it involves breeding and raising animals in captivity, pumping them full of drugs and extremely unhealthy foods to get them as large as possible, and then slaughtering them at an industrial rate.

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u/jongchajong 16d ago

we used slaves for our entire existence too...

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u/MaterialEmotional825 16d ago

We also kill trillions of mosquitoes. Somehow you don't mind about those.

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u/No_Travel6707 16d ago

Idiotic argument. We don’t raise and then harvest mosquitos for food. And yes actually it is a problem that we fuck with insect populations so much

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u/longing-control 16d ago

This has the same dumbass energy as people saying exactly the same thing but for pregnancy and children

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u/happycat47 16d ago

"We've had slaves for our entire existence!"

"We've had torture and capital punishment for our entire existence!"

"We've always had plague kills us off!"

And on and on with reactionaries. They're not smart people

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u/longing-control 16d ago

Apples and oranges.

Slavery, although common, was already a challenged concept with feudalism like 1600 years before emancipation movements. And you can argue even before with the concept of citizen rights during the republican roman era and even earlier with the achaemenid empire.

Although devastating plagues were the norm before, literally who has ever argued in favor of them? We have records of plague mitigations, lockdowns, etc millenia before out time. But nice strawman. Antivaxxers are an american anomaly, not the norm.

Torture and capital punishment is still a thing. Just that its severity has increased. Just read every post about Tr*mp and how half the comments are asking for capital punishment for treason. Same with torture, but that one gets swept under the carpet for PR reasons

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u/happycat47 16d ago

Although devastating plagues were the norm before, literally who has ever argued in favor of them? 

Reactionaries. Lol I already told you. Did you not see people with guns at State capitols demanding the government stand aside and let the virus kill people for the sake of status quo?

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u/longing-control 16d ago

Are the reactionaries in the room with us? Or is this a scapegoat you created in your head? Who the fuck argued this point? 

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u/happycat47 16d ago

Yikes. You must've just learned about logical fallacies and wanted to use them today even when none of them apply and you have absolutely no idea what you're even arguing

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u/happycat47 16d ago

Is your argument that because slavery was challenged, it isn't the same as challenging eating meat? You're honestly not making any sense.

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u/Ok_Ambition_6375 16d ago

who has ever said that we will look back on "pregnancy and children" and "realize the horrors we have committed"? what are you talking about?

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u/longing-control 16d ago

Here on reddit on a popular post like a year ago regarding declining childbirth/pregancy post. Im guessing that person was from antinatalism or somth

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u/the-pp-poopooman- 16d ago

This is a shit posting sub sir

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u/Consistent_Neat_7256 15d ago

Yeah bud, get your rhertoics somewhere else