this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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Culling is not cruel or even morally ambiguous. It is morally and ethically right to cull out of control populations of animals for the betterment of the whole. Culling isn't even necessarily for the sick or weak. Sometimes healthy young animals have to be put down for the betterment of the environment. Look into native American hunting practice and land conservation methodology.
Modern farming is very much none of those things though.
Honestly, culling is besides the point I am making, since the primary goal of culling is not meat production.
There are morally more ambiguous cases (than with slaughter for meat) in which killing an animal can be arguably better than to let it live. Putting down a terminally sick pet is an example. Culling might also be argued, but I would not say that it is "not cruel or even morally ambiguous".
With culling, my thoughts on it are these. When we refer to culling, we most often talk about culling in farm animal situation. As in, there is a sick animal that has to be culled so that the population doesn't become infected. Or we kill the male chicks because we cannot raise them to become egg producing hens and keeping a lot of roosters together can cause problems. The killing of farm cows that underproduce is also a form of culling. I would argue that none of these killings would be necessary in the first place if we didn't have big scale farming (or, for that matter, farming of any kind) of lifestock. My guess is that with
we agree here.
Culling of wild animals is more controversial. As far as I am aware of, hunters are being told how many animals of a certain species and sex they can kill in a hunting season and it is regardes as population control. (Whilst we ofter created conditions in which the population cannot control itself.) Or they get an order from a farmer etc. to kill a chicken ripping wolf. If you have to kill a wolf because it regularly attacks your chicken farm, then the chicken farm is the actual problem, not the wolf. Apart from that, you'll end up fucking with natural selection. Arguably not very great. But since we can't just go back to the caves and restore nature the way it was before civilization and so on, some form of culling of wild animals will probably stay necessary for human survival and artifical balance of and artificialized nature - even without farming of lifestock. I would not call this ethical or morally right, but a realistic, awful necessity.
I'm not sure about the point you're making with native americans. When I search for native american hunting practices the first thing that pops up is how they hunted bisons and nearly drove them to extinction, which is also the most prominent example I know of. This goes into the territory of the idea of the Noble Native. But I doubt you meant that as an example.
Native Americans curated bison populations for thousands of years. Idk where you're getting "almost drove the bison to extinction" from. In 1850, there were between 30 and 60 million bison on the plains. By 1870, there were less than 500 wild bison left. That's not native American hunting. That's white genocide. Don't get it confused. Some plains Indians even claim kinship with the Bison as their spiritual totem.
Look into accounts by settlers first traveling the America's. They often wonder at how the forests seem to have wild orchards of berries and fruits, or how certain woods seem to have been maintained almost as if by a forester. It's no coincidence. The plagues brought by the settlers killed 95% of my people, and those same settlers came and occupied the same space where me and mine had lived for eons. And then they had the temerity to call it divine providence. Filthy diseased savages tend to build filthy diseased societies, and here we are now.
Yep, I was totally wrong about that. I apologize. I don't know where I had that info from, I think either school or I was distracted at the point about bison when I listened to Guns Germs and Steel. Anyway, I take that back and you are absolutely right here.
And I'm very sorry about what happened to your people.
But to go back to meat eating, I'm not sure it plays a big role for today. Hunting bison without rifles while living with rather low population density in nature is not the same as farming. I'm not sure whether meat eating was necessary for survival back then, it probably was an important source of nutrients. Plus the sacred aspects, the cultural ones, the actual gratitude, the use of the whole animal... But this is not how we use livestock today at all. And most importantly: we don't need it. We have an abundance of alternatives.
But again, I don't ask anyone to quit meat all together. I don't think it is fair to ask this from individuals and attribute all of the responsibility to them. If we want to decrease meat production and consumption, we need to do this from a regulatory basis. So all I am saying is that we meat eaters should simply be aware of it. That it is neither necessary from a nutritional point of view, nor that any kind of farming and slaughtering can be seen as "humane". We cause suffering with our choice and keep promoting a system that will always be cruel. You take away babies from their mothers. You raise animals in unnatural conditions. If they are lucky, they end up at the butcher healthy enough so that their short and miserable life will be terminated untimely and with them very likely experiencing existential threat. For nothing more than us having a moment of joy, convenience, pleasure. Their carcass becomes a banality.
Step away from the emotional argument for a bit and simply consider the logistics. There is no evil in profiting from the cycle of life. Do you also believe herding to be cruel and unnatural? What about other animal product harvesting, like bee keeping or silkworm cultivation? Is it ethically dubious to mine limestone because the ancient crustaceans couldn't consent?
In my mind, the real problem is cruelty for profit. It should not be profitable to treat animals cruel, and that can only change with legislation. The system is too easy to abuse, and humans will almost always make pick the easy option over anything else.
Humanity made the Amazon rainforest. It wasn't easy. It probably wasn't even on purpose. But the existence of the Amazon Rainforest as we know it today is the direct result of millions of people working hard for generations. The difference between the tens of millions of today and those millions of before is the mindset. The modern world has forgotten respect for the ground that births us. They do not see the creatures as brothers or cousins, but as resources to put on a spreadsheet. Everyone is so focused on wealth that they forget to consider the cycles all around us. Hell, when was the last time you considered that our planet is in the middle of an ice age? We've had 10,000 years of warmth and we so easily forget. How well do you think a plant based diet is going to work on a glacier?
These are good questions. I'm not too sure about bee keeping or silk production since I don't know exactly how their products are being harvested and what happens to the insects during this. With herding, it's not the herding I have a problem with but what it is done for. I would not say we are profiting from the cycle of life if we kill a cow. The premature separation of cow and calf to gain more milk is another thing. If we just got milk by pumping a "breastfeeding" cow (as you might have guessed English is not my first language) and otherwise let it be - go for it. I wouldn't see anything wrong with that. But this isn't how it works, and you are very right that profit is to blame.
I agree with this absolutelty.
Maybe if we found a way to go back to eating meat on very rare occasions, eating mostly game that was hunted for other reasons than meat or something alike, we could find a balance with it as a product for consumption.
I mean, would you want to be reborn as a cow on a free range organic farm? Where you are still being inseminated without ever having seen a bull or knowing what's going on. Where you give birth to a baby that you still will be separated from before it's time. Where your kid will have a similar destiny as you. If it even makes it to adulthood. Most likely it will be killed and eaten while you are still being pumped. Where your life is ended by a machine and your body sold to people who toss half of you in the trash because they cooked too big of a portion. Like, yeah, maybe you get to keep your horns and see some grass once in a while and your cage is slightly bigger than the low class conventional farming cows but at the end of the day it is still a miserable life.
Fwiw, I enjoyed the paragraph that led to that sentence, it was beautifully written. Just so that there are no misunderstandings: I'm not necessarily for a plant based diet under any circumstances. There are people with metabolic diseases that might need to eat more animal products for their health. Or nomadic cultures, indigenous tribes with hunter gatherer societies, and also people on glaciers.
And this is actually exactly why I do have a guilty conscience when I personally consume meat (and again, I am a huge hypocrite, I do eat meat!). I don't need to. There is a time and place where hunting and killing and slaughtering and herding are necessary for survival, but it is not in my life. I can buy a B12 supplement that will last me a year for like 10€, probably less. I can choose from a huge variety of plant milk alternatives in every supermarket. Let's not kid ourselves, nothing I eat is "natural". It's not natural to get a huge watermelon or a cloned banana or refrigerated milk in tetra packs and avocado from the other side of the world. If I drink carbonated soda or an energy drink that tastes like gummi bears then I can also not claim that supplements are "unnatural" and not what nature intended. Nothing I do is natural. I wake up by an electricity powered alarm clock. But with all of that privilege, advancement, technology and detachment I am supposed to somehow justify cruel animal farming and killing?
There's a good cartoon clip out there somewhere that's about a preserve raised deer meeting a wild deer and talking about how their lives are so different. These animals are born on the preserves and live their whole lives there. They live 5 or 6 years in a protected environment with basically zero predators or parasites and never go hungry. They don't even fear the hunters that pay to come and hunt them. They literally have never experienced being hunted before then. Who wouldn't want to get reborn in deer heaven?
Beekeeping is especially interesting because it's the only animal husbandry I know of that has implicit concent. You can't keep bees in captivity. Not really. The hive always goes crazy and dies. We still aren't sure why. What we do know is that bees who aren't being taken care of will abandon their apiary and go wild. The trick to keeping bees is that you have to make your apiaries better than anything the bees can make themselves. Protected, maintained, and warm mainly.
Silk worms also have been selectively bred to the point that the species we use for harvesting can no longer survive without human intervention in most cases. If humans stopped harvesting the silk from these insects, they would eventually die off due to being unable to escape their coccoons naturally.