Value Collector
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It’s not what I would recommend.
But it’s a pretty big issue they are trying to draw attention to.
Animal rights and ethical food production
- Thread starter SirRumpole
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It’s not what I would recommend.
But it’s a pretty big issue they are trying to draw attention to.
PZ99
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
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Unfortunately, this sort of illegal militant behaviour will only evoke anger from the very people they're trying to draw attention from and that's exactly what happened in Melbourne.
https://www.news.com.au/technology/...a/news-story/6602af8e996426c749837bb10c7ad65c
Talk about throwing stones from a glasshouse.
https://www.news.com.au/technology/...a/news-story/6602af8e996426c749837bb10c7ad65c
Talk about throwing stones from a glasshouse.
IFocus
You are arguing with a Galah
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Nice to see some real activism next stop the banks and government.
Value Collector
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Views of the animals rights film that they were trying to promote have gone through the roof.
So while you will always have the idiots posting "Bacon" in response to a serious issue, a lot more eyes are people focused on the message.
Garpal Gumnut
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What is your evidence that "views of the animals rights film that they were trying to promote have gone through the roof " ?
gg
Value Collector
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I have a few vegan groups on my Facebook news feed, and one of them had the makers of the film talking about it.
I don’t doubt there claim, images of their signs have been broadcast on national tv and social media round the world
wayneL
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Stolen from FaceAche, from a guy called Tom Marland:
****
“Vegandals”
I did a post last week about “vegans”. It went a bit viral - it reached 500,000 people. Not bad for sitting on the front deck on my iPhone.
I’ve rightly coped a bit of constructive criticism from some vegans about painting them all as vandals.
There are many vegans quietly chewing on their lettuce, sipping on soy lattes minding their own business.
But for some it’s a chance to shout down and impose their idiotic ideology on others.
To avoid offending the former, I’ll started calling the later, Vegandals.
I’m happy for vegans to eat the food I don’t and I’m happy for them not to eat the meat that I do.
But I can’t cop these vegandals.
They want both their food and mine too!
A vegandal’s first issue is farming, killing and eating animals for food is not only cruel but unnecessary.
A vegandal’s second proposition is that livestock emit a lot of methane and thus are bad for the environment. Livestock also eat crops and drink a lot of water that could be used by humans.
The first reality is that livestock (cows, sheep, goats etc) eat grass (cellulose) and through their highly refined rumens are able to convert that grass into protein.
58% of Australia’s land mass grows grass naturally. It’s not suitable for farming but is highly adaptive to extensive (non intensive) livestock grazing.
Livestock do eat fodder crops on farms and in feedlots. However 86% of this produce is inedible to humans.
Vegandals argue that those inputs could be better put to growing plant based protein.
Putting aside the fact plant based protein tastes like paper and needs a lot of sauce and wine to digest, it is also very hard and expensive to grow in the first instance and even harder to grow to a standard that someone could (or would want) to eat.
You only have to walk into a Coles or Woolworths and see the wonderful fresh produce on display and then walk out the back and see how much is thrown away to work out humans are picky bastards.
You only have to go to a packing shed and see what is thrown away as “seconds” to work out that growing fruit and vegetables is a hard business.
You only have to drive past a crop wilting in the paddock to work our markets and seasonal conditions are fickle.
Simply converting areas used for grazing livestock or used to supply feed for livestock to areas for human consumption isn’t a simple process.
The amount of water, fertiliser, pesticide, investment and management required to produce commercial crops for human consumption is immense.
Crops like chick pea, soya bean and mung beans are also very difficult to grow.
Mung beans aren’t colloquially referred to as “mongrel beans” for better marketing.
Pulse crops are highly water reliant, are highly susceptible to seasonal changes (too hot, too cold), are loved by insects and are thirsty on soil nutrients.
They need even larger amounts of fertiliser, herbicide and insecticides than conventional crops to survive. This is even before you have to harvest them, fumigate them, store, transport and sell them.
Pulse crops are usually grown as rotation crops around other more reliable and consistent crops like cotton, sorghum, wheat, cane or other vegetables.
If the crop comes off, it’s a bonus. If India impose a 40% tariff on imports because we beat them in cricket or won’t give them a coal mine - it’s a bugger. If it fails completely it is ploughed in as fertiliser as it’s a good legume for fixing nitrogen for other crops.
Vegandals also tend to like organic produce. You can grow organic pulse crops but the risks are even higher and more unpredictable.
Organic farming is great but it also needs more plowing (diesel), more soil disturbance (sediment run off) and more water. More ploughing also releases more soil carbon and greater inputs to replace. These inputs are usually replaced by livestock grazing through integrated management systems.
High yield organic produce for human consumption can’t be grown everywhere because not everywhere has enough water or the right climate to produce them.
The problem with pulse crops (or any crop) is they aren’t very flexible. For instance, if it’s dry you can move a cow to paddock with grass, put them on agistment, feed them or put in a feedlot.
You can’t pick up a pulse crop and move to where it has rained. They just die.
Trying to rely solely on plant based protein opens up a really problematic situation - starvation.
So you’ll either need bigger dams (eek), more rainfall or you’ll need more water efficient, pest resistant varieties. These will need some form of GMO or synthetic manipulation.
I have clients who are organic wheat farmers. They were the only organic wheat farmer in Australia to plant and harvest spelt (gluten free) wheat last year. They won’t do it again as it didn’t make enough money for the risk.
On their normal crops they aim for 1 bumper crop in 10. 4 out of 10 to break even and 5 failures. Failure is not producing enough to harvest for human consumption. This is in 25 inch rainfall on deep black soil country.
They only survive because they can offset the failed crops by feeding the stubble off to livestock or selling the lower yield crop as hay (for livestock) or feedlot mix (for livestock). The livestock is the underwriter. Without the livestock there would be no wheat farmer.
The prime hard goes into bread. The remainder into making the sausage.
Admittedly there are some exceptional farmers who produce crops year in year out purely for human consumption. They are rarer than a Greens voter in Barcaldine but they are out there. However the bank only loans them money to plant on the basis that there is a fall back market if the seasons don’t work - that’s livestock markets.
Some of these really exceptional farmers farm without artificial fertiliser, herbicides or pesticides. However the large majority are zero til and rely heavily on artificial inputs to survive.
The risks for a farmer to grow produce at a high enough level for human produce is difficult. Asking them to do it without the back up of livestock is impossible as it is commercially unviable.
If a vegandal is happy with non organic and GMO pulse crops - the fun doesn’t stop there.
The irony is lost on most vegandals when they champion protein crop farmers over livestock producers, when one has to consider the amount of “animals” that are killed through farming. Farmers hate bugs so they spray them. Birds eat bugs. Lizards eat bugs. No bugs no birds and lizards.
Farming paddocks also aren’t great for trees. One, they do damage to tractors when they drive into them and also it’s a pain to change the GPS to get around them.
However, intensively farmed areas are important as they produce our high quality food and fibre. But so is grazing in grasslands and woodlands as an offset.
Pulse crops don’t grow under trees but cows can.
Also, as I’ve said before, to produce 1 kg of tomatoes takes 10 times more inputs than to produce 1 kg of chicken. That’s because a chicken can convert lower quality feed into higher quality protein. A tomato converts water and nutrients into - well a tomato. To get that tomato to a high enough quality so it won’t be thrown in the seconds bin needs higher inputs.
I’m honestly not sure what the conversion of soya bean v meat to protein is. It matters little because no one in their right mind would grow a soya bean crop for human consumption without the fall back to sell their lower quality product for livestock feed.
A soya bean doesn’t exist without a highly refined ruminant.
I know it’s hard for some to see livestock farmed, trucked and slaughtered. But we have to put our big boy and big girl pants on and understand that our food sources - vegetable, fruit, grains and meat are all inter-related and reliant upon each other. One can’t survive without the other.
We also have to understand the complex market dynamics that goes into producing our food and the huge risks our farmers take each day.
Ideas of flipping our entire food production system on its head because it suits your ethical viewpoint might make a cool Uni assignment but it’s not based in any reality or rationality.
I’ve also nominated “vegandal” for the word of the year. Trade marks pending.
****
“Vegandals”
I did a post last week about “vegans”. It went a bit viral - it reached 500,000 people. Not bad for sitting on the front deck on my iPhone.
I’ve rightly coped a bit of constructive criticism from some vegans about painting them all as vandals.
There are many vegans quietly chewing on their lettuce, sipping on soy lattes minding their own business.
But for some it’s a chance to shout down and impose their idiotic ideology on others.
To avoid offending the former, I’ll started calling the later, Vegandals.
I’m happy for vegans to eat the food I don’t and I’m happy for them not to eat the meat that I do.
But I can’t cop these vegandals.
They want both their food and mine too!
A vegandal’s first issue is farming, killing and eating animals for food is not only cruel but unnecessary.
A vegandal’s second proposition is that livestock emit a lot of methane and thus are bad for the environment. Livestock also eat crops and drink a lot of water that could be used by humans.
The first reality is that livestock (cows, sheep, goats etc) eat grass (cellulose) and through their highly refined rumens are able to convert that grass into protein.
58% of Australia’s land mass grows grass naturally. It’s not suitable for farming but is highly adaptive to extensive (non intensive) livestock grazing.
Livestock do eat fodder crops on farms and in feedlots. However 86% of this produce is inedible to humans.
Vegandals argue that those inputs could be better put to growing plant based protein.
Putting aside the fact plant based protein tastes like paper and needs a lot of sauce and wine to digest, it is also very hard and expensive to grow in the first instance and even harder to grow to a standard that someone could (or would want) to eat.
You only have to walk into a Coles or Woolworths and see the wonderful fresh produce on display and then walk out the back and see how much is thrown away to work out humans are picky bastards.
You only have to go to a packing shed and see what is thrown away as “seconds” to work out that growing fruit and vegetables is a hard business.
You only have to drive past a crop wilting in the paddock to work our markets and seasonal conditions are fickle.
Simply converting areas used for grazing livestock or used to supply feed for livestock to areas for human consumption isn’t a simple process.
The amount of water, fertiliser, pesticide, investment and management required to produce commercial crops for human consumption is immense.
Crops like chick pea, soya bean and mung beans are also very difficult to grow.
Mung beans aren’t colloquially referred to as “mongrel beans” for better marketing.
Pulse crops are highly water reliant, are highly susceptible to seasonal changes (too hot, too cold), are loved by insects and are thirsty on soil nutrients.
They need even larger amounts of fertiliser, herbicide and insecticides than conventional crops to survive. This is even before you have to harvest them, fumigate them, store, transport and sell them.
Pulse crops are usually grown as rotation crops around other more reliable and consistent crops like cotton, sorghum, wheat, cane or other vegetables.
If the crop comes off, it’s a bonus. If India impose a 40% tariff on imports because we beat them in cricket or won’t give them a coal mine - it’s a bugger. If it fails completely it is ploughed in as fertiliser as it’s a good legume for fixing nitrogen for other crops.
Vegandals also tend to like organic produce. You can grow organic pulse crops but the risks are even higher and more unpredictable.
Organic farming is great but it also needs more plowing (diesel), more soil disturbance (sediment run off) and more water. More ploughing also releases more soil carbon and greater inputs to replace. These inputs are usually replaced by livestock grazing through integrated management systems.
High yield organic produce for human consumption can’t be grown everywhere because not everywhere has enough water or the right climate to produce them.
The problem with pulse crops (or any crop) is they aren’t very flexible. For instance, if it’s dry you can move a cow to paddock with grass, put them on agistment, feed them or put in a feedlot.
You can’t pick up a pulse crop and move to where it has rained. They just die.
Trying to rely solely on plant based protein opens up a really problematic situation - starvation.
So you’ll either need bigger dams (eek), more rainfall or you’ll need more water efficient, pest resistant varieties. These will need some form of GMO or synthetic manipulation.
I have clients who are organic wheat farmers. They were the only organic wheat farmer in Australia to plant and harvest spelt (gluten free) wheat last year. They won’t do it again as it didn’t make enough money for the risk.
On their normal crops they aim for 1 bumper crop in 10. 4 out of 10 to break even and 5 failures. Failure is not producing enough to harvest for human consumption. This is in 25 inch rainfall on deep black soil country.
They only survive because they can offset the failed crops by feeding the stubble off to livestock or selling the lower yield crop as hay (for livestock) or feedlot mix (for livestock). The livestock is the underwriter. Without the livestock there would be no wheat farmer.
The prime hard goes into bread. The remainder into making the sausage.
Admittedly there are some exceptional farmers who produce crops year in year out purely for human consumption. They are rarer than a Greens voter in Barcaldine but they are out there. However the bank only loans them money to plant on the basis that there is a fall back market if the seasons don’t work - that’s livestock markets.
Some of these really exceptional farmers farm without artificial fertiliser, herbicides or pesticides. However the large majority are zero til and rely heavily on artificial inputs to survive.
The risks for a farmer to grow produce at a high enough level for human produce is difficult. Asking them to do it without the back up of livestock is impossible as it is commercially unviable.
If a vegandal is happy with non organic and GMO pulse crops - the fun doesn’t stop there.
The irony is lost on most vegandals when they champion protein crop farmers over livestock producers, when one has to consider the amount of “animals” that are killed through farming. Farmers hate bugs so they spray them. Birds eat bugs. Lizards eat bugs. No bugs no birds and lizards.
Farming paddocks also aren’t great for trees. One, they do damage to tractors when they drive into them and also it’s a pain to change the GPS to get around them.
However, intensively farmed areas are important as they produce our high quality food and fibre. But so is grazing in grasslands and woodlands as an offset.
Pulse crops don’t grow under trees but cows can.
Also, as I’ve said before, to produce 1 kg of tomatoes takes 10 times more inputs than to produce 1 kg of chicken. That’s because a chicken can convert lower quality feed into higher quality protein. A tomato converts water and nutrients into - well a tomato. To get that tomato to a high enough quality so it won’t be thrown in the seconds bin needs higher inputs.
I’m honestly not sure what the conversion of soya bean v meat to protein is. It matters little because no one in their right mind would grow a soya bean crop for human consumption without the fall back to sell their lower quality product for livestock feed.
A soya bean doesn’t exist without a highly refined ruminant.
I know it’s hard for some to see livestock farmed, trucked and slaughtered. But we have to put our big boy and big girl pants on and understand that our food sources - vegetable, fruit, grains and meat are all inter-related and reliant upon each other. One can’t survive without the other.
We also have to understand the complex market dynamics that goes into producing our food and the huge risks our farmers take each day.
Ideas of flipping our entire food production system on its head because it suits your ethical viewpoint might make a cool Uni assignment but it’s not based in any reality or rationality.
I’ve also nominated “vegandal” for the word of the year. Trade marks pending.
Value Collector
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They don’t really get a life.
The females are killed at 4-6 weeks old, the males are killed the day they hatch.
The male chicks are considered worthless to both the egg and meat industry, so are either shredded alive or choked to death on carbon dioxide.
Watch he first 30 seconds of this video to see how cheap (and expensive) chicken and eggs are created.
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I know mate, scary. I have also seen similar priced cuts like chicken Maryland and chicken wings at the local shops and supermarkets.
Rather than being happy to pay less for food, I am concerned when I see $3/Kg chicken and $1/Lt milk ! Which country are we living in ? 1st, 2nd or 3rd world ? Even if there was a category below 3rd, they would treat their animals with more respect by valuing their life (meat) or their life giving products (milk, eggs) at a decent price.
I am not vegetarian or anything or not trying to influence anyone. Neither am I a farmer or producer trying to increase my own profits. But I would like to see some form of animal justice, and that baby male chicken slaughter video really showed the attitude and value given to animals.
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Thank you for posting Value Collector. I don't want to give a 'like' since it could be confused with being interpreted in the wrong way. As in if I like the slaughter. Absolutely not, this is appalling to see newly hatched chicks suffering like that. Some of them took multiple shredding blade cuts before the suffering ended, how cruel !
So_Cynical
The Contrarian Averager
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~
That's brutal...somehow that just should not be allowed, dont know what the alternatives are but thats just wrong.
Value Collector
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I chose to slowly start cutting out and substituting animal products, it took me a while but I am now practically 100% vegan.
The only animal products I eat every now and then are mussels and honey, which aren’t technically “vegan”, but mussels don’t have a brain so I am fine with eating them.
Value Collector
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Yeah it is pretty crazy, you can see why the vegan groups are protesting so hard against this stuff.
Unfortunately a lot of people in the media try and shoot the messenger rather than listen to the message.
This documentary is based on Australian farming practices, all footage is of Australian farms and slaughter houses, it’s the video the protesters have been trying to get Australians to see, because for some reason the average person seems to think Australian farms and slaughter houses are humane.
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As consumers we need to be aware of these practices. Only then there can be changes made at a State and National level to protect the welfare of these farm animals. The problem is as you said, the information is hidden and people are not aware of what they are consuming.
Yes it's going to cost more to purchase animal products produced using humane practices but I think most people will be happy to know how it was produced and pay the higher price. If on the other hand the longer the injustice practices continue and the more awareness of it happens people will either change the system or they will more away from consuming animal products.
We don't need more quantity at the cheapest prices, but what we need is quality I think. So if buying some chicken or ham or milk becomes more of a luxury type item, personally I say 'so be it'. If that was the case, I will only buy meat, poultry, milk, eggs and any other animal products that I know has been produced like in the good old days allowed to run around freely in farms and fed and looked after and treated kindly.
The problem now is it's quite hard to find such quality produce as most stuff is mass produced in confined spaces such as battery chickens and other animals as shown in the video documentary. I am going to reduce the animal product consumption and replace it with vegetarian options. I think my family will be healthier with such a change as well.
Thank you very much for sharing this information. I've been living in the dark, being unaware of this kind of animal mistreatment.
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This is not an appropriate thread to be talking about these things guys. Inghams produce chicken meat. Both male and female birds are grown for meat. Chicks don't go through the grinder for chicken meat as they use both sexes for food. It just happens for egg layers. Go and take your protest over to FRM thread.
Value Collector
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Yes, any chicks that are found to be weak, sick or have deformation are still send to the grinder.
The fate of the healthy chicks in the meat industry isn’t any better either.
This stuff is relevant to the future Ingham. Change is happening eventually raising animals for food will be obselete, growing just the meat itself, or even complete moves to plant based diets will happen.
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Certainly hope so
Value Collector
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As I mentioned below, the weak sick or deformed will likely still get minced.
Not to mention all the females end up going to slaughter any way once their temporary use as egg laying machines ends after 12 months or so.
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True. I suppose it's still a small step in the right direction.
I may be dreaming, but it would be great if there was a way to purchase the animal products that are produced in the old fashioned way. There was a time long ago when farm animals were allowed to run around in large open spaces, treated well with kindness right until put down including the slaughter process. Till then I would be a minimalist consumer.