/b/ - Random

>>332705
While we often forget about these later, when they’re happening, they feel like the most significant thing in the world. They’re extremely bad, if you offered me $1,000 to get severely bitten by a dog, its teeth ripping off a chunk of my flesh, or have needles pierce my skin hundreds of times, I wouldn’t take the deal. Certainly I wouldn’t undergo childbirth for 1,000 dollars, especially if it was without anesthetic

Sadly, on average, the animals that we eat endure hundreds of hours of this kind of debilitating agony over the course of their life. They endure somewhere on the order of an hour a day of this pain.

I’ll just discuss one such case, the case of the egg-laying hen, with the facts gathered from this report. https://welfarefootprint.org/research-projects/laying-hens/Egg-laying hens in conventional farms endure about 400 hours (!!!!!) of this kind of disabling agony. Remember, this is agony about as bad as the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, unless you’ve had an experience as bad as being severely tortured. This is the agony that makes it impossible to think of anything else. The hens endure about an hour of a day of this extremely intense agony.

This intense pain comes from many sources including (this list is non-exhaustive):

Bone fractures.

The majority of hens experience a bone fracture over the course of their life. On average, they have three. Imagine if you broke the same bone three times This is, and I can’t emphasize this enough, what most hens deal with the industry that produces our eggs is so cruel that it breaks the bones of most hens multiple times.

In fact, the situation is much worse for hens than it would be for us because the area around their keel bone, which is the most common kind of fracture, has a huge number of nerves. While such experiences in humans usually produce disabling pain for about a day, for chickens, such pain lasts about a week

This means we must put chickens on birth control immediately

>>332707
This is already done at vegan animal sanctuaries to prevent osteoporosis

>>332706
>>332706
Often the bone doesn’t heal properly, leading to constant intense agony

Injurious pecking.

In a hen's natural environment, she’ll spend most of her time pecking the ground looking for food. In a modern farm, hens can’t do that, so they spend a lot of their time pecking other hens, often leading to severe injury (just imagine that you were being bitten all the time by people surrounding you). It’s not terribly uncommon for hens to be pecked to death (seriously imagine what it would be like for that to happen) or for pecking to affect a hen’s body part known as the vent which is particularly sensitive (in this case, for the males reading this, imagine someone biting your balls). Often this becomes infected.

Every one of a hen’s natural behaviors are thoroughly squashed in the farms. Hens cannot make a nest prior to laying an egg, which causes them quite severe distress. Hens are willing to undergo strong electric shocks in order to get a suitable nest, about as strong as the electric shocks they’ll endure in order to get food after being starved for 28 hours (!!!!!). Remember, hens lay an egg roughly daily! This may not seem like a big deal, but only because we don’t appreciate the experience of being a nesting hen; an alien wouldn’t understand why we care about sex so much. Konrad Lorenz, a nobel prize winner summarized:

>“The worst torture to which a battery hen is exposed is the inability to retire somewhere for the laying act. For the person who knows something about animals it is truly heart-rending to watch how a chicken tries again and again to crawl beneath her fellow-cage mates to search there in vain for cover”

>>332709
Whenever you purchase a few cartons of eggs, you are consigning a chicken to living in these horrifying, excruciating conditions. Before you next purchase eggs, or chicken, or most any other animal product, though eggs are likely the worst, remember what the worst experience of your life is like, and vividly consider the fact that your purchase will likely cause others to endure many hours of an experience just as bad.
Tragically, the true scenario is much worse than that. Even worse than these scenarios of intense yet bearable pain are experiences that the authors of the report call excruciating pain. This is the sort of pain experienced when a person is brutally tortured or slowly eaten alive or burned to death for minutes; the sorts of pain that, if you’re really brave, you can read about in some detail here. https://www.simonknutsson.com/the-seriousness-of-suffering-supplement They’re horrible enough to take on an almost qualitatively different dimension, something most of us wouldn’t trade for many decades of happy life. This kind of pain is literally inconceivable, it’s so bad that many people who experience it attempt suicide. A hen might experience this right as she’s being trampled and pecked to death.
Hens experience, on average, about two and a half minutes of this horrifying agony. The hundreds of hens that the average person eats over the course of their life (and yes, your consumption of eggs does cause more hens to be brought into existence, mistreated, and killed) mean that the average person is probably causing several hours of this unfathomable agony, the sort of agony one experiences in the minutes that they die from burning, boiling, being eaten alive, or suffocating to death; the kind of agony worse than being mauled by a dog, worse than childbirth, worse by orders of magnitude than anything you’ve ever experienced.

>>332710
The kind of experience that, to take a contemporary example, George Floyd probably experienced for the minutes that he was suffocating.
The average meat eater causes hours of that!
This is why factory farming is such a great moral emergency. It’s the cause of agony beyond what we could hope to imagine. Amounts we cannot fathom of agony that we cannot fathom. It’s not just egg-laying hens that experience this; it’s ubiquitous in the entire factory farming industry. As Ren says in an https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xtcgsLA2G8bn8vj99/reminding-myself-just-how-awful-pain-can-get-plus-an#Miscellaneous_thoughts_and_takeaways article that’s very worth reading, describing her own experience with fairly intense pain:
A single broiler chicken experiences fifty hoursof

https://www.pain-track.org/broilers
[disabiling] pain during their lifespan, which lasts 4-6 weeks. There are 69 billion broilersslaughtered each year. That is so many hours of pain that if you divided those hours among humanity, each human would experience about 400 hours (2.5 weeks) of disabling pain every year. Can you imagine if instead of getting, say, your regular fortnight vacation from work or study, you experienced disabling-level pain for a whole 2.5 weeks? And if every human on the planet - me, you, my friends and family and colleagues and the people living in every single country - had that same experience every year?

How hard would I work in order to avert suffering that urgent?

I dislocated my calf during a school activity and broke my nose once while riding my bike when I was a teenager. Both experiences were awful, but I think I handled the pain surprisingly well, considering I used to be a pretty fearful kid who cried a lot. But I don't think I'll ever have the guts to go through the pain of childbirth; no matter how much people say it's natural and all that bullshit, I don't consider it reasonable at all—and frankly, I don't think human life is worth such a massive sacrifice from a woman.

>>332713
But then your empathetic, intelligent and conscientious genes will die out and the people who are psychopaths, dumb, impulsive, religious fanatical Muslims, etc will reproduce and spread their genes and ideologies.

Besides you are already forcing cows and pigs and turkeys to give birth if you buy meat.

A single individual consumer choosing to buy meat regularly for the next few years or choosing to be vegan for the next few years does make an actual difference. It almost certainly means the difference between many extra animals being bred into existence and tortured their whole life in a factory farm or being spared this fate and never bred into existence and never tortured.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-209416785

if you only have enough time for one of these links then this one linked above “Being Vegan Makes a Difference“ by

“SILAS ABRAHAMSEN” / “wonderandaporia” substack is the best.

https://philarchive.org/rec/MCMAIO

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=brKhhZlUoOc (Only first few minutes of this video are relevant)

https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-causal-inefficacy-objection-is?utm_source=publication-search

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAVegan/comments/1otuhqv/individual_boycott_of_meat_does_matter/

also this https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ABKAbFUnNwU is really good

>>332713
>I don't think human life is worth such a massive sacrifice from a woman.

Is a few hundred eggs worth such an even bigger sacrifice from a hen?

>>332716
Definitely not; I am not a vegetarian and have no intention of becoming one, but I have the utmost respect and regard for animals—especially those that will become food for us humans. I believe that genetic engineering and veterinary science can create solutions to ensure that livestock in general, including laying hens, suffer as little as possible—or not at all—during their lives.

>>332716
chicken eggs that get sold are unfertilized

>>332722
>>332721
Then just donate to vegan charities if you won’t actually go vegan . Visit a local vegan animal sanctuary if you think all charities are scams

Hopefully prices for meat continue to rise and become unaffordable to point people start eating more vegetables

>>332726
YES