So if I'm understanding this correctly, it sounds like we gave the minks COVID-19, the virus mutated and then the minks gave it back to the Danes. Yikes.
I wonder what challenges we'll unlock on chapter 12 of Apocalypse 2020.
Well, what good can possibly come from packing as many animals as possible in as miserable living conditions as possible while there is a virus going around? Minks apparently have a very similar upper respiratory system as ours, so what could possibly go wrong?
Chinese people eating wild cute animals were being finger pointed at the beginning of this pandemic but that’s really not much better.
It’s not like it’s a surprise either, ask anyone researching viruses and they’ll tell you one of the worst case scenario is a virus that migrates back and forth between humans and animals as it’ll mutate into very interesting strains in the process.
But we must have our fur coats, our 1$ burgers, and our meat every day.
It’s suspected that something similar like this happened to create the 1918 Flu Pandemic, except the theory is that it was a human (and maybe a chicken too) giving the flu to a pig where it mutated into something much more virulent than normal.
I got a head start in January by watching an apartment 5 floors below mine completely melt on fire at 2am on a cold Winter night... Luckily nobody died.
It was one of those things you never think will happen to you / near you, but then it does. My parents had a fire in their building a couple months after that.
"Mink causes new covid-mutation in humans – is Denmark the new Wuhan" :
"The virus mutation has so far been found to have spread to 12 individuals who have been found to have an impaired reaction to antibodies, which could mean that any future vaccine will not have the intended effect."
We are currently killing 17 million Mink to stop the spread, and starting "serious lockdown measures" in the local areas affected.
But if 12 people already have this new version - it's probably all over the place already.
"Health authorities found virus strains in humans and in mink which showed decreased sensitivity against antibodies, potentially lowering the efficacy of future vaccines, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said at a press conference."
“The mutated virus in mink may pose a risk to the effectiveness of a future vaccine,” Frederiksen said, adding that it “risks being spread from Denmark to other countries.”
I dont know why you are being downvoted but yes minks are caged just so celebrity/rich people can show off their shiny fur based cloths. And later they blame minks is a threat lol.
Human spread-ed them virus, tortured for whole life, killed them mercillesly and now minks are thread? Common just wear faux based clothing and problem solved.
My mother and father were born in 1930. Being from that era, my mother always wanted a mink coat because it would mean she had "made it", but it wasn't until they were about 60 and all the kids were grown and out of college that my dad bought one for her birthday.
She wore it once and was so self-conscious that people would think her callous that it stayed in the closet until she died 20 years later.
Well, that problem is solved, but there are new ones.
Once no one needs minks for coats, they just wipe them out as nuisances, making them endangered or extinct. As it is, I believe the mink has been eradicated from many parts of the world.
Now, we may not need mink. But at least making coats from them mean they will be around.
"Being around" as a farmed animal may bear little relation to being around as a free, wild creature. Given a few generations, we tend to turn the animals we farm into a parody of the original creature. How well would the average battery chicken survive if it were set free?
> How well would the average battery chicken survive if it were set free?
This was tested in a Dutch TV program some years ago ("Keuringsdienst van waarde") where they got some newborn battery chickens and placed them on a regular farm, amongst healthy free-roaming chickens. They got the same food, but still 'exploded' in size until they couldn't walk. Their feathers look awful. On the whole they looked sick and miserable. Just like battery chickens, actually
What do you do if a snake or a cockroach appears in your house?
What happens if a bear wants to share the same living space you live in?
I understand your position, but the simple fact that we live in a modern World and we are at the top of it "inflicts animals this existence"
I like to not do it on purpose and I don't own a fur, if that's what you are curious about, but I'm not lying to myself believing that mink farming is worse than living in big cities that pollute the environment irreparably
We’re talking about farming animals and killing them for food or fur here.
I personally go out of my way to not kill anything. I catch bugs and throw them outside. I move frogs and snails off the road when I get the chance so people or cars don’t step on them. I’ve never faced a bear yet though. But that’s a bit extreme. How many people face bears?
It’s not a competition, because something is worse than something else or not doesn’t mean we should keep doing it. Farming animals is unnecessary in the vast majority of cases so why not stop doing it? Same with cities and pollution, it’s not all or nothing. There are more and less damaging ways of building, ways that are a bit less obnoxious than the way we’ve mostly been doing it for the last couple of centuries.
> We’re talking about farming animals and killing them for food or fur here
and they are two completely different categories, orders of magnitude different, and serve two completely different purposes
the amount of furs produced every year has been dropping for decades, meat consumption is not
> I personally go out of my way to not kill anything
Everyone does.
But being a S. Francesco is something we do for ourselves, it doesn't change much (it is nothing actually, but I don't want to sound insensitive)
Assuming you save 10 animals a day (which is very very very hard) it's 400 thousands animals in a lifespan of 100 years.
Meanwhile millions die everyday to keep our lifestyle going.
Meanwhile
Cats kill billions of birds every year and even more tiny rodents and other mammals in the United States
It's a matter of scale, not of will of the individual.
> because something is worse than something else or not doesn’t mean we should keep doing it
But maybe we should have priorities, so if something is not impacting the ecosystem in a meaningful way, the time used to fight it it's wasted and could be better spent on something vastly more dangerous.
> it doesn't change much (it is nothing actually, but I don't want to sound insensitive)
Of course, I also don’t eat meat eggs or milk, don’t wear leather, and haven’t for over 15 years now. But it didn’t happen all at once, and if I just thought that moving snails out of the way wouldn’t make any difference anyway I probably would have given up there and then. But instead I did a little bit more every once in a while until I’m at the point where I am.
So yes cats kill billions of animals a day for example but that’s only if you let your cat out. Every vet we spoke to said that it’s better to keep cats indoors because they live longer lives, don’t get diseases, don’t get maimed, don’t fight, don’t get hot by cars or even caught and tortured by humans (that’s a thing), don’t get obese from eating at home and at the neighbor’s and as long as you make sure they have toys and windows to look through they don’t mind.
My cat has killed maybe four mice in the 8 years I have her, tops. It’s unfortunate that cats must eat meat to survive but the canned food is pretty much the only meat we buy which is a fraction of what most people consume. That cat was abandoned and we took her in.
In conclusion, yes, focusing on the wrong thing is diminishing your impact. But I’d bet that for most people it’s not choosing between high impact and lower impact actions, but rather between nothing at all and anything at all. In that case I still believe anything at all is better than nothing at all. And doing anything at all might raise your awareness to do more and more on top of it.
It's a change for you, that's for sure, but not for the World.
For example: in US in the past 50 years meat consumption per capita has not gone down, but what radically changed is what kind of meat Americans eat.
Once was beef all the time, now more than 50% of the meat is poultry, only about 20% is beef.
Why?
Have people become more aware of the beef feelings?
The industry simply realized that poultry is a lot cheaper to farm, you can stuff a lot more of them in the same space and take a lot less time (poultry 3-4 months, vile 12-18 months)
But the margins are higher, if you sell beef (for example, just as a measure) at 10 monetary units/kg you can sell poultry at 6/kg. It will look cheaper than beef so it's gonna sell more, but truth is beef costed 6/kg to produce, poultry probably something around 0.5-1/kg.
And that's what really drives a change in habits in societies and economic system where free market is the only available choice.
It works much better and without all the friction that ethics or beliefs pose.
Next big thing is gonna be plant based food, because it's even cheaper than poultry, it's not evident if the plant is suffering or not (it's easy to recognize a limping chicken, what about a peronospora on lettuce?) but you can sell it at the same price of poultry.
Even better, thanks to the small portions packaging, you can buy at the supermarket 250gr of salad at 1.50 euro in Italy (and that's the price of the cheap one), which is 6 euros/kg, avocados cost about 7-8 euros/kg, but roasted chicken costs about 5 euros/kg!
And it's ready to eat!
That's something we should also be careful about.
But we don't.
> that’s only if you let your cat out. Every
Not really.
But suppose we do all the time.
What do they eat then?
not their owners' flesh I suppose...
They eat other animals
The meat you don't eat is gonna become food for pets (cats and dogs have a special tendency to not care about humans' religions and eat meat to survive), it's already happening, pet food is an ever growing market, which is already valued around 100 billion dollars and guess who is the primary segment for this market?
It's the US with 40% of the global market.
Cats and dogs in US are already eating, today, in 2020, 30% of the meat produced.
It they were a Nation, they would rank 5th in the World for meat consumption.
When I talk about priorities, this is what I actually mean: how many animals can we save fighting the fur industry and how many by giving up on keeping pets confined in our houses?
(the irony, minks in a cage are considered a crime, a cat in an apartment that can never go out it's caring...)
But nobody asks this question, because it's an uncomfortable one and it would mean to actually face the consequences of our actions and rethink our societies from the ground up, instead we prefer as a species to "Tilting at Windmills" the same way Don Quixote did.
> It doesn't change a lot anyway.
It's a change for you, that's for sure, but not for the World.
Granted, one person out of the 6 or 7 billions we are makes no difference at all. But that’s not the reality. It’s becoming more and more popular to do this so it snowballs. Until you reach a tipping point where there is enough people doing it that companies start seeing an opportunity to make money and offer new products/lowers the price/increases availability/reduces friction. And that all started from individuals doing anything as opposed to nothing. It didn’t tip the balance individually but as more and more people started doing it, it is now shifting. I can go to the supermarket and find meat alternatives. It wasn’t the case 20 or 30 years ago. It’s still a drop in the bucket but it’s more than no drop in the bucket.
> minks in a cage vs cats confined
You see the difference though? An indoors cat with access to windows, toys, and plenty of space to move about (if it’s a livable amount of space for a human, surely it is for a cat that is 1/30th the volume of a human) vs minks raised with no other concerns than the quality of their furs at the expense of everything else and stacked up in overcrowded cages is a different situation. I’d think minks and cat are on the same intelligence and awareness level.
> plants suffering
Yeah that’s a bit tenuous. I always see this argument as a reason not to do anything as a copout. We know that animals suffer and experience pain, you’d have to be really dishonest to say it’s not certain that animals experience pain at the very least. Plants on the other hand it’s really not obvious. From what we know, they don’t seem to. Of course it’s not 100% certain and it’s hard to conclusively prove a negative. But there is a lot more evidence towards animals being sentient and experiencing pain than there is for plants.
> number of animals saved
I’d say it doesn’t matter as much as you say it does. You seem to assume that it’s a choice between doing something with a lower impact and something with a higher impact. But I’m arguing that for the vast majority of people it’s between doing nothing at all and save no animals by changing their habits va doing something that might not be the single thing they could do to save the most animals but still spare a few. And with that, I am convinced that saving, say 5 animals a year by changing your habits vs saving 0 a year is a worthwhile improvement. Yes it’s not saving 100% of the animals from cruelty and suffering by making a bigger change in your life but it’s still something. And, again, I think that once you develop the awareness and go down that path it has a snowball effect in that individual’s habit. It makes that individual start questioning their lifestyle and society’s values which create a bigger impact than what it started with.
> dogs and cats eating the meat I don’t eat
I don’t think that’s true. My cat eats something like 300g of food per day. If I were to eat meat I’d eat a lot more than that in a day (that includes not only a steak but more insidious things like the gelatin in candies or desserts which usually comes form porks for instance, or the milk and eggs powder that is an additive in large numbers of products). It would take more than one pet to “absorb” the amount of animals I spare from ever being raised and slaughtered. There is a reason why the UN I’m has been saying for years that we must drastically lower our meat consumption if we want to keep feeding everyone! Part of it is because it’s a lot more efficient to eat the crops directly rather than have an animal eat them and lose the majority in the process (I don’t know the numbers off hand but it takes say 1000 kcal of crops to make 10 kcal of meat), but also because the demand for meat would drop and thus not require nearly as many animals raised for meat and eating crops we could feed people directly.
Furthermore, it’s not 100% comparable. Although dogs don’t need to eat meat (they can live healthily on a vegetables diet), cats don’t have this option. Their digestive tract is too short to process vegetal proteins so they must eat meat. Humans aren’t like that either. We can absorb vegetal proteins and there is no reason to eat all the meat we do. It’s not a requirement. Never mind the amount of antibiotics and hormones they come with that we also absorb. Or the effects of industrial animal farming in a pandemic. In the end of the day, choosing to not eat animals anymore has a larger impact than keeping feeding your cat meat. And the first one is totally doable while the second one would make the cat unhealthy. It’s still not saving as many animals as quitting animal products AND killing your cat so it doesn’t have to eat meat anymore but it’s a massive improvement if only your cat (1/30th of your weight) eats meat and you don’t vs you and your cat changing nothing and eat meat as usual.
You’re forgetting about all the indirect meat we eat. Gelatin is everywhere and usually comes from porks. That’s not a steak but that kills an animal. Same for milk and eggs, you don’t get these without killing calves early so you can take all of the cow’s milk and you don’t get eggs without shredding newly hatched male chickens or killing hens after a couple of years when they stop laying eggs.
I’m pretty sure the kg of meat consumed in your statistic above is kg of meat in the plate as in a steak or a kebab only and ignores the rest.
Also, the cat food is usually between 40 and 90% meat while the rest is fillers (depending on quality and price)
> You’re forgetting about all the indirect meat we eat
Why do you assume I am forgetting something?
Do yo have some special power that lets you know what other people know or don't know?
I simply posted a well respected and openly published statistics created by international organizations devoted to food, one of them is called FAO.
Do you know it?
Second: any "non meat related meat" is also in pets food, because, surprise surprise, IT'S THE SAME FOOD REPACKAGED.
> I’m pretty sure
Yeah, I was pretty sure you were going to be pretty sure, without having actual knowledge.
There's a thing called methodology in statics, you should check it out.
The stats I posted used this methodology
> The figures tabulated below do not represent per capita amounts of meat eaten by humans. Instead, they represent FAO figures for carcass mass availability (with "carcass mass" for poultry estimated as ready-to-cook mass),[2] divided by population. The amount eaten by humans differs from carcass mass availability because the latter does not account for losses, which include bones, losses in retail and food service or home preparation (including trim and cooking), spoilage and "downstream" waste, and amounts consumed by pets (compare dressed weight)
So, in short, human meat consumption in this stats is always overstated (for good reasons, we produce it anyway, it's not coming from outer space).
> For example, the FAO (2002) figure for Denmark, which has one of the highest meat export rates compared to its population, was 145.9 kg (322 lb) (highest in the world). More recent FAO figures (2009) have taken the earlier discrepancy into account, resulting in a significantly lower 95.2 kg (210 lb) for Denmark (13th in the world). When further adjusted for loss, calculations by DTU Fødevareinstituttet suggest the actual consumption was 48 kg (106 lb) per adult
But your cat instead eats 300 grams of meat everyday, there's no margin of error, multiplied by 365 days it amount to 109,5 kgs.
Make no mistake, your cat could be actually eating 2.28 times more meat than the average Danish person.
> the cat food is usually between 40 and 90% meat while the rest is fillers
While instead humans eat only filet and steaks, no bones, no fat, nothing else, only steaks, right?
Well, haggis would like to show you something.
Also, the centenarian Italian tradition of cooking entrails would like a word.
If you seat at a table with my mom and her four sisters, they constantly fight to eat the neck and feet of the chicken.
While my sister prefers the liver and the giblets.
I, on the other hand, love the "fagioli con le cotiche" (beans and pork rind) cooked in the pignata and served with a tomato sauce cooked together with an ham bone. What's not to love?
> And that all started from individuals doing anything as opposed to nothing
> It wasn’t the case 20 or 30 years ago
An example?
In just 20 years China has gone from 5kg of meat/year on average to 60kg/year (and growing) on average.
And they are more than a billion people.
Simply when you are not poor, you don't want to live like poor people anymore, with all its drawbacks.
In particular people that go from poor to less poor try to avoid dietary deficiencies, that caused so much pain in their past, especially for their children.
> say 5 animals a year by changing your habits vs saving 0 a year is a worthwhile improvement
Worthwhile for whom?
You can save 5 of them by sheer luck.
I know one can find meaning in almost anything, but structural change must have a structure.
> You seem to assume that it’s a choice between doing something with a lower impact and something with a higher impact.
Because it is.
Something with negligible impact has no impact, by definition.
> . There is a reason why the UN I’m has been saying for years that we must drastically lower our meat consumption if we want to keep feeding everyone
Yeah - we - means mainly US, where people eat on average around 120kg/year of meat.
It doesn't mean meat is bad, when Africa is gonna raise there gonna be almost 1 billion people that will exit food shortages and countries like Kenya or Uganda will finally pass from eating 4-5kg of meat a year, to something better for their nutritional needs, something like 30-40kg/year.
Another billion will reach a lifestyle more similar to ours.
Thew west is gonna need to share its surplus, it's not the World that needs to stop eating something because others ate too much of in the past.
That's injustice.
> I don’t think that’s true.
But unfortunately it is.
There are more than 160 million dogs and cats in USA alone, think about the entire West.
It is possible, but no advisable, for many reasons:
- it's incredibly expensive
- takes a lot of care
- takes a lot of time
- chances of failure are astronomically high
- dogs are omnivore, like pandas are omnivore bears, pandas spend the entire time they are awake eating, because the nutrients of vegetables are much less energetic than eating meat directly. dogs deprived of meat would follow the same destiny.
Indeed, not only the majority of human civilizations but no evidence of a single paleolithic pre-"civilized" group that didn't consume meat or seafood.
Choosing a vegetarian diet is something we can do now, and is always an ideological or religious choice. It was not a choice for our ancestors, even if they often ate way less of it.
The way these groups did it and the way we do it aren’t even comparable.
They didn’t keep animals in piss poor conditions where they can’t even turn around in their cages or are so deformed they can’t stand up (battery chickens are engineered that way so their breasts are more meaty for instance)
Seafood eating didn’t involve dragging dozens of kilometers of net across the sea floor destroying everything in its passage to throw most of it away (dead) because we can’t eat it anyway/it sells too cheap.
I don't have an argument with you there but that is an entirely different topic from claiming meat eating itself as an aberation or vice.
The problem is agricultural meat eating doesn't scale to industrial levels without abject cruelty. To be frank, industrialism itself requires abject cruelty towards humans, too. I feel worse about humans labouring in brutal factory conditions in China making trinkets than I do about chickens in cages..
FWIW I like chickens. We have two pet chickens who stopped laying a long time ago and just live a life of leisure hanging out under a couple very large mullberry trees. I like humans more.
Considering how much environmental damage and how much suffering our modern day meat eating generates, it’s not that much of a leap to see it as a vice: it’s unnecessary and does a lot of collateral harm; mostly benefiting the individual who indulges in it at the expense of everyone and everything else. Isn’t that what a vice is?
It’s not either/or. If we wanted, we could make durable cloth clothing. No need to farm and kill animals for that. Ask your grandparents how long did their clothing last when they were young compared to the junk we get now. It’s not like we don’t know how to weave durable textiles, we just choose not to.
I want, you want, everybody say they want them, but then fashion industry makes billions.
And not for the lack of durable clothing
My real leather shoes are 20 years old
My sneaker are less than a year old and already not good enough to walk
The problem is I can't wear leather shoes all the time and even if I buy expensive clothing,they are not durable enough to be on par with the ones my grandfather (he was a tailor) made 50-60 years ago.
The offer is simply not there (except luxury goods, which are usually made with old school materials, that's why they cost so much) and the bulk of the demand is simply made of cheap and affordable sh*t.
On the other hand my girlfriends owns a fur that belonged to here grand-grandmother, it's 60 years old, it still looks brand new.
1 human of the past = 1 fur for life
1 modern human = at least 2 or 3 jackets every season.
You want durable stuff and not pollute the environment with dangerous chemicals?
The old way it's still the best.
> No need to farm and kill animals for that
The pollution already kills a lot lot more of them than the fur industry.
Simply owning a cat is already a threat to ecosystem that compared to it the number of minks killed for their fur is an insignificant number.
I guess you have to start somewhere though. Anyone could always be doing more but doing anything beats doing nothing at all. Even if pollution kills animals (and humans), it doesn’t mean it’s ok to just throw our arms in the air and say fuck it I’ll keep doing everything the same. There are things you can do to pollute less. There are things you can do so your cat doesn’t kill wildlife.
I think it’s a matter of inertia. Look at oil for instance. For decades, oil companies have made money hand over fist even though people wanted something better it just wasn’t there and it didn’t make a dent in their profits. But now, solar is the cheapest energy we can buy apparently and fully electric car company is a viable business model.
I think it’s a similar situation here. If I wanted to buy durable clothing made out of vegetal materials, I wouldn’t even know where to go. And paying obscene amounts of money for the more expensive stuff just guarantees that I’ll make a statement. The durability of the item will be marginally better than h&m etc but nowhere near the increase in price. And so then, why should anyone not buy the 5$ t-shirt you have to rebuy every year since the 200$ t-shirt doesn’t last 40 times as long?
Same as for energy I believe, when we’ll get credible alternatives then disposable fashion companies won’t make as much money anymore. But the fast that they’re making money now doesn’t necessarily mean people give them their money because it’s what they want... more because it’s all we have.
> Anyone could always be doing more but doing anything beats doing nothing at all.
That's a common misconception though.
US top the charts for meat consumption in the World, Kenya and Uganda are at the bottom.
Does it mean Kenya and Uganda are doing more than US?
I'm asking, because I don't have the answer, but I don't think that farming animals for fur amounts to some significant number and stopping it would change the situation in a meaningful way.
Energy consumption for example is a good indicator of lifestyle.
Norway consumes 3 times on average the average amount of energy consumed by all the other European countries.
Does that mean they are doing three times less than the average EU country?
Oil stayed with us because it's a very dense and easy to transport energy source.
You can' t transport wind or sun, you could use batteries, but they are not as dense and not as easy to stock pile.
Inertia, if you look closely, it's just another world for "lack of equally good alternatives".
The lack of durable clothing is not a direct consequence of not using vegetable materials, hemp has been used for millenia, what changed is that we buy a lot more clothes and recycle/reuse very little of them.
Because, mainly, they go out of fashion!
I believe the way we live has a much bigger impact than anything else and in that regard, even if I would never buy a fur for obvious reasons, I think fur farming is not the worst offender.
You don’t need meat to get nutrition. It was fine to eat meat when it meant hunting it and eating it once in a while. Not so much anymore when the environmental cost is so high and we eat meat every single day.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24990724