this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 hours ago

This is highly depressing to see first thing in the morning.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 14 hours ago

And yet cats kill billions of birds each year. Wild.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 day ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 20 hours ago

I don't want to sound all Malthusian but that's kind of fucked??

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago (1 children)

more elephants than I expected tbh

[–] [email protected] 5 points 18 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

I know. It's still more elephants than I expected.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

That's likely the sum of all elephant species, spanning from Africa to northern Asia.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I know. It's just still more than I expected.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

Jsomae: "Really y'all I can read, I'm just surprised!" Lol

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 hours ago

Glad we aren't any of those things then.

[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (16 children)

Livestock have to live through horrible agony, like the worst kind of torture. This means (by biomass, which some people correlate indirectly with moral worth), at least 60% of mammals on Earth undergo horrible torture. Bentham's Bulldog, "Factory Farming is Literally Torture."

Excess pigs were roasted to death. Specifically, these pigs were killed by having hot steam enter the barn, at around 150 degrees, leading to them choking, suffocating, and roasting to death. It’s hard to see how an industry that chokes and burns beings to death can be said to be anything other than nightmarish, especially given that pigs are smarter than dogs.

Ozy Brennan: the subjective experience of animal's suffering 10/10 intense agony is likely the same as the subjective experience of a human suffering such agony. (~6 paragraph article, well worth a read.)

[–] [email protected] 16 points 23 hours ago (10 children)

It says 60% of mammals are livestock, not 60% live in factory farms. I've been around cows in normal (non-factory) farms, and they seem fine. Way better off than wild animals that starve, die of disease, freeze to death, etc.

I have family members that have livestock and if something bad happens to them it's like someone hurt their child.

A seal in the 4% living in the wild may be eaten alive by a killer whale or torn to shreds by a great white shark.

We aren't going to prevent all animals from suffering, because how could we do that? Kill off all of the predators? Then there would be animal overpopulation and animals dying of starvation and disease.

Maybe we just focus on ending factory farms because that seems doable. But that effort won't be successful with obvious hyperbole claiming all livestock is treated like animals in the most horrible factory farms. Some people have actually been to farms that aren't like that you know.

People aren't stupid and if you misrepresent the facts, no one will believe anything else you're saying no matter how emotional you are when misrepresenting the facts.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

Not the person you are replying to, but that is severely underestimating the amount of factory farming. They are the dominant method of production

Based on the EPA's definition of a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (i.e factory farm) and USDA census data:

All fish raised in fish farms were considered to be factory-farmed. More than 98% of hens and pigs. For chickens and turkeys, the share was more than 99%. Cows were a bit more likely to be raised outside in fields, with greater space and freedom. Nonetheless, 75% were still fed in concentrated feeding operations for at least 45 days a year.

https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-are-factory-farmed

And even those that are not considered factory farmed don't always look how one may think, for instance non-factory farmed cows still use plenty of grain feed

Currently, 'grass-finished' beef accounts for less than 1% of the current US supply

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401

None of this is not limited to the US by any means. For instance in the UK:

There are more than 1,000 US-style mega-farms in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, including some holding as many as a million animals

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/18/uk-has-more-than-1000-livestock-mega-farms-investigation-reveals

Factory farming is unfortunately what scales well. If we want less factory farming we need the industry itself to be smaller. That is no impossible goal. Germany, for instance, has seen its overall meat consumption fall over the last decade

In 2011, Germans ate 138 pounds of meat each year. Today, it’s 121 pounds — a 12.3 percent decline. And much of that decline took place in the last few years, a time period when grocery sales of plant-based food nearly doubled.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23273338/germany-less-meat-plant-based-vegan-vegetarian-flexitarian

[–] [email protected] 16 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (3 children)

60 % of mammals are livestock, not 60% live in factory farms

99% of US farmed animals live in factory farms, according to this random website I just found. I don't claim to be an expert, though, and worldwide is probably lower than than 99%, but I would bet you that the vast majority of livestock is factory-farmed.

Agreed though that not all livestock are factory farmed. I should have clarified.

I'll point out though that even some non-factory-farmed livestock are likely suffering. Bentham's Bulldog talks about how hens undergo severe agony:

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.

(emphasis mine.)

--

A seal in the 4% living in the wild may be eaten alive by a killer whale or torn to shreds by a great white shark.

That's bad, though probably not anywhere near as much agony as being boiled alive for several hours until one's death. Regardless of whether you feel morally obligated to reduce wild animal suffering, you should admit that (a) from a utilitarian perspective, it's much easier to reduce factory farm suffering, and (b) from a deontological perspective, factory farming is (collectively) our fault, whereas the food chain isn't.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

And how many percentage of all livestock do you think is "free range" like the cows you describe?

Estimates vary from 80% to 99% are factory farmed. Which means majority of meat anyone is eating is factory farm. Unless you can verify the source of your meat yourself, you most likely are eating tortured animals.

So this whole argument that I have friends and family that care for their livestock like it's their kids is the misrepresentation since, it maybe true that you know someone that is treating animals humane, it doesn't represent majority.

Sauce https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-are-factory-farmed

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Not saying at all this isn't a problem, but I hate bullshit statements that are deliberately deceiving.

These numbers are all by mass. Not actual number. Cows are huge. So are chickens, for birds. How this comic is laid out infers that there's 60 cows for every 40 of every other mammal, and that isn't even remotely close to true.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think biomass is probably more important than sheer number for these comparisons. Although I would also accept 'proportion of world's arable land being used to sustain them' as I suspect the ratios come out pretty similar for obvious reasons.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 day ago (5 children)

The problem is that the infographic says "of all the mammals on Earth", which means individuals, not biomass. So the infographic is objectively false.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 day ago

Intentionally misleading

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[–] [email protected] 62 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (14 children)

Source?

Im gonna go out on a limb and say this is udder cowshit. Rats are mammals, as are raccoons, squirrels, and whole fucking masses of little basically unfarmable varmints. You're telling me that there's like 12 farm cows for every wild rat on earth?

Horse. Shit.

[–] [email protected] 69 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (9 children)

The source apperently takes the percentages by biomass, not by count as it seems. So small varmints will not have as much of an impact as a human or cow would.

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