I personally find the "animals killed since you opened this page" number to be the most unsettling. YTD numbers are so large, I find them hard to process.
If you choose to eat meat, please be aware of the conditions most of these animals exist in and how they die. I'll spare you more numbers, because they don't do the cruel reality justice anyway. Instead, I'll leave you with some video material: https://animalequality.org/blog/factory-farming-facts/
I went vegan six months ago after being exposed to numbers like this and thinking about it a bit. In particular, imagining extending the empathy I felt for my pets to all these other unseen animals that really aren't much different. I thought I'd try it for a week to see how hard it was. It was so easy that I never looked back. These numbers all could be pretty close to zero and we humans would still thrive just as much as we are now, but causing much less suffering to other beings.
Even just being aware of one’s privilege to eat animals or even animal products and the impact on other living beings for our “pleasure”. A little more humility would go a long way in terms of animal welfare.
Personally that would be even worse for me, though I understand maybe "better" on a societal scale by some metrics. To feed a being every day and care for it, to gain its trust, to appreciate their individuality, then to have them killed when they reach some fraction of its potential lifespan, I just don't want to do that. I'm perfectly happy eating legumes.
I'm not sure if it would be better on a societal scale in terms of pollution and efficiency, but instead in ethical concerns with how the animals were treated.
What about raising cows or chickens, then consuming their milk and eggs?
Presumably you only would acquire female chickens to lay eggs. What happened to the male ones? (I don't recommend googling this).
What do you do with the cow when its milk yield drops after several pregnancies? what do you do with the male calves? Just keep them all as pets?
I think there are situations I could contrive where I'd say yeah its fine ethically to eat these things, but the general case still has victims.
And again, since maybe the first week without them, I truly haven't missed milk or eggs or anything else after eliminating them from my diet. Plant options are pretty good too and there are plenty of plants.
In dairy farming, calves are usually separated from their mothers shortly after birth so the milk can be used for production. There are a few farms that keep calves with their mothers, but this isn’t something that scales in industrial systems. I worked on a farm for a while, and the day I had to take a newborn calf away from its mother, I became vegan. Farmers often say that cows don’t form a bond after giving birth, but that doesn’t match what I experienced. I have never heard anything as deeply sad as a mother cow calling for her baby.
There's also the significant cost to climate change because growing crops to feed to animals instead of eating crops directly loses the majority of calories, but it gets ignored because doing something about it is going to be unpopular:
> More than three-quarters of global agricultural land is used for livestock, despite meat and dairy making up a much smaller share of the world's protein and calories.
> Despite the vast land used for livestock animals, they contribute quite a small share of the global calorie and protein supply. Meat, dairy, and farmed fish provide just 17% of the world’s calories and 38% of its protein.
> Livestock are fed from two sources – lands on which the animals graze and land on which feeding crops, such as soy and cereals, are grown. How much would our agricultural land use decline if the world adopted a plant-based diet?
> Research suggests that if everyone shifted to a plant-based diet, we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%.
In the US 8/10 of the environmental organizations with most membership oppose nuclear power broadly and the majority oppose wind and solar locally so I think we can safely conclude that climate change is not important to US environmental causes.
Not really; but talking about it more also seems like it will have approximately zero marginal benefit, and trying to insinuate that other people are immoral is probably net counterproductive.
I do not see the point of large numbers. If its not OK to eat meat, then its not OK to eat one. If is OK, why does scale make it not OK?
I did not expect Asia to be quite so dominant. I did expect, but interesting to see confirmation, that the Americas grow so much grain for animal feed.
I understand this kind of people is allergic to “per capita”, but really, showing a list of consumption by region when the regions are of such different sizes is next to worthless.
I personally find the "animals killed since you opened this page" number to be the most unsettling. YTD numbers are so large, I find them hard to process.
If you choose to eat meat, please be aware of the conditions most of these animals exist in and how they die. I'll spare you more numbers, because they don't do the cruel reality justice anyway. Instead, I'll leave you with some video material: https://animalequality.org/blog/factory-farming-facts/
I went vegan six months ago after being exposed to numbers like this and thinking about it a bit. In particular, imagining extending the empathy I felt for my pets to all these other unseen animals that really aren't much different. I thought I'd try it for a week to see how hard it was. It was so easy that I never looked back. These numbers all could be pretty close to zero and we humans would still thrive just as much as we are now, but causing much less suffering to other beings.
Even just being aware of one’s privilege to eat animals or even animal products and the impact on other living beings for our “pleasure”. A little more humility would go a long way in terms of animal welfare.
Would you raise your own animals to kill and eat? Animals eat other animals, it's nature.
Animals do a whole bunch of things to other animals we wouldn’t consider acceptable.
Cannibalism, eating your young, rape, etc.
I’m not sure why killing for food is the one place we should choose to define our values and ethics based on what animals in the wild do.
Murder and rape are also part of nature, but humans can reflect and consider the effects of their actions in ways other animals can't.
Personally that would be even worse for me, though I understand maybe "better" on a societal scale by some metrics. To feed a being every day and care for it, to gain its trust, to appreciate their individuality, then to have them killed when they reach some fraction of its potential lifespan, I just don't want to do that. I'm perfectly happy eating legumes.
I'm not sure if it would be better on a societal scale in terms of pollution and efficiency, but instead in ethical concerns with how the animals were treated.
What about raising cows or chickens, then consuming their milk and eggs?
Presumably you only would acquire female chickens to lay eggs. What happened to the male ones? (I don't recommend googling this).
What do you do with the cow when its milk yield drops after several pregnancies? what do you do with the male calves? Just keep them all as pets?
I think there are situations I could contrive where I'd say yeah its fine ethically to eat these things, but the general case still has victims.
And again, since maybe the first week without them, I truly haven't missed milk or eggs or anything else after eliminating them from my diet. Plant options are pretty good too and there are plenty of plants.
In dairy farming, calves are usually separated from their mothers shortly after birth so the milk can be used for production. There are a few farms that keep calves with their mothers, but this isn’t something that scales in industrial systems. I worked on a farm for a while, and the day I had to take a newborn calf away from its mother, I became vegan. Farmers often say that cows don’t form a bond after giving birth, but that doesn’t match what I experienced. I have never heard anything as deeply sad as a mother cow calling for her baby.
There's also the significant cost to climate change because growing crops to feed to animals instead of eating crops directly loses the majority of calories, but it gets ignored because doing something about it is going to be unpopular:
https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
> More than three-quarters of global agricultural land is used for livestock, despite meat and dairy making up a much smaller share of the world's protein and calories.
> Despite the vast land used for livestock animals, they contribute quite a small share of the global calorie and protein supply. Meat, dairy, and farmed fish provide just 17% of the world’s calories and 38% of its protein.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
> Livestock are fed from two sources – lands on which the animals graze and land on which feeding crops, such as soy and cereals, are grown. How much would our agricultural land use decline if the world adopted a plant-based diet?
> Research suggests that if everyone shifted to a plant-based diet, we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%.
> but it gets ignored because doing something about it is going to be unpopular
It gets talked about all the time.
Do you think it widely leads to behavior changes among people that support environmental causes?
In the US 8/10 of the environmental organizations with most membership oppose nuclear power broadly and the majority oppose wind and solar locally so I think we can safely conclude that climate change is not important to US environmental causes.
Not really; but talking about it more also seems like it will have approximately zero marginal benefit, and trying to insinuate that other people are immoral is probably net counterproductive.
I don't consume animal products, but -while well intentioned- I'm not sure a dashboard with these types of huge numbers does much as an advocacy tool.
People are ill equipped to put such large numbers in context, let alone ~40 of them.
Like a slide deck, better to limit to one number and one message per page(/screen). Otherwise, it's just a data dump.
I do not see the point of large numbers. If its not OK to eat meat, then its not OK to eat one. If is OK, why does scale make it not OK?
I did not expect Asia to be quite so dominant. I did expect, but interesting to see confirmation, that the Americas grow so much grain for animal feed.
The scale is highly relevant for environmental issues.
https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
Edit: replaced scattered numbers with a proper source.
I understand this kind of people is allergic to “per capita”, but really, showing a list of consumption by region when the regions are of such different sizes is next to worthless.
Per capita would be great. The absolute numbers are still mind boggling.
Hell yeah, live leaderboard of humans.
Add a K/D Ratio next plz
Something interesting to see is a version of if this that displayed a % of total animals instead of absolutes.
Wait so when I ate the steak, it actually went up, how did it know?