Red meat has a huge carbon footprint because cattle requires a large amount of land and water.
https://sph.tulane.edu/climate-and-food-environmental-impact-beef-consumption
Demand for steaks and burgers is the primary driver of Deforestation:
https://e360.yale.edu/features/marcel-gomes-interview
If you don’t have a car and rarely eat red meat, you are doing GREAT 🙌 🙌
Sure, you can drink tap water instead of plastic water. You can switch to Tea. You can travel by train. You can use Linux instead of Windows AI’s crap. Those are great ideas. Also, don’t drive yourself crazy. If you are only an ordinary citizen, remember that perfect is the enemy of good.
Ontop of that, factory farming is a lovecraftian horror that floods the universe with terrible agony. And there’s very good reason to believe that the suffering of animals is as real and awful as yours or mine.
One thing I never see brought up about the factory farm systems, maybe cause it is a bit of a distraction from animal rights, is that hypothetically these systems are turnkey human genocide infrastructure. It is infrastructure for a sort of perpetual animal, uh… regenocide? afterall.
Seems outlandish and unthinkable, maybe. But then again, all bets are off with the current administration in the US.
Given the amount of perpetual torture these very-likely-to-be-sentient creatures go through, it’s certainly worse than any genocide in history has ever been. Even if you only think that animals are capable of 5% of the suffering of humans.
Agreed. It’s depressing that everyone who continues relying on animal products and exploitation have so many psychological barriers put up to even facing and contemplating the other animal atrocities openly. It becomes more heart-wrenching the more you think about it.
Okay so I must be in the minority, but I don’t feel any particular pathos for these billions of slaughtered animals. Seeing myriads of baby chicks ground into dust doesn’t really move me in the slightest. Just understanding that the farm industry causes intense, agonizing, slow deaths for billions if not trillions of creatures every year is enough for me to understand its morally imperative to not consume the vast majority of animal products. Bentham’s Bulldog has been quite moving for me.
Yesterday I decided to stop buying honey after reading his article about how honey plausibly causes orders of magnitude more suffering than everything else. I’m also vegetarian, and I have replaced most of the dairy in my diet with plant-based alternatives. I still haven’t eliminated cheese and eggs from my diet though. For cheese it’s because I don’t think there’s good evidence the cheese I buy causes any agony in particular, but eggs is the next step for me.