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.
We don't have to anything for it. Someone artificially inseminates the animal, raises the animal, keeps it in mostly in terrible conditions we would cry about if we saw them, drives them somewhere for slaughter, processes the remains until it looks appetizing for you to just heat up and eat. All for couple of dollars per pound. Unbelievable privilege of not seeing the suffering involved.
Animals go out and kill other animals for food, have to deal with the family and friends of the animal it just killed, compete with other animals for the meat, etc. Much more vulnerable and involved.
But what about raising a crop right up to the point where it's helicoptered its genitals enough to have found a gullible pollinator or sprayed it's pollen widely enough to produce the seed for the next generation and then killing it, thus cutting it down in the prime of its life with no opportunity for that plant's descendants to sprout and grow (especially if they are Monsanto seeds) and reach the point where they too can wag their privates while looking for PILFs (plants ...)?
Everything has to eat something. Humans are omnivorous. We have a choice and some choose to base their diets on plant consumption while others eat a little meat and still others eat mostly meat. It's all okay. The universe is working as intended. Villifying those who choose a different diet than yours seems like a petty exercise by people who need to invent a reason to feel better about themselves.
If you enjoy and love the foods that you eat then you are doing it right. There is no requirement and no need to proselytize about your choices. We have enough other religions who have forgotten the main message to deal with. It will be just as easy for people to tune yours out.
The problem I have with being vegetarian is that you can't prove that it's actually healthier, because the current state of dietary science is pretty poor.
Even if you could, you would also need to explain all of the evolutionary problems that could come from some humans going vegetarian while others don't.
What if being vegetarian makes you smaller and weaker physically (perhaps the case in some vegetarian countries now). If you had the answer, and it was clear a diet consisting of vegetables causes reduction in physical size, then I have to ask:
Would you want your kids to be shorter and physically weaker than you are?
'What if' is pointless. What if vegetarianism makes you stronger than eating meat? What if it increases your IQ by 20 points or makes you live 200 years? What if you can code faster drinking rare pygmy tree sap or the blood of certain albino poison toads?
> you can't prove that it's actually healthier, because the current state of dietary science is pretty poor.
Almost every decision in life must be made without proof, but with evidence and judgment. We know a lot about nutrition, and a lot of evidence points toward health benefits in eating more vegetables and less meat. We can also see lots of vegetarians in our communities and they don't seem sickly or shorter, etc. - we also see elite athletes in public who are vegetarians.
> a diet consisting of vegetables
Vegetarianim is much more than vegetables; it's everything but meat - legumes (generally beans), vegetables, fruits, grains, nuts - plus eggs and cheese. Vegans cut out the latter two items.
> What if being vegetarian makes you smaller and weaker physically (perhaps the case in some vegetarian countries now).
Where?
> evolutionary problems that could come from some humans going vegetarian while others don't.
What problems? How does diet affect evolution? We'll lose our hunting muscles over the next 500,000 years? Remember humans haven't changed much biologically in 200,000+ years.
>Would you want your kids to be shorter and physically weaker than you are?
As someone who eats meat, that's probably one of the worse arguments against vegetarianism/veganism I've heard. If eating animals is immoral, sure why not? If pillaging your neighbors makes your society better off, do you think a good objection to "maybe we shouldn't pillage our neighbors" is "Would you want your kids to be shorter and physically weaker than you are"?
Do you want your kids to have colon cancer or heart disease because there is pretty strong evidence to suggest red meat contributes to these. And there's much stronger evidence for that than there is that suggests that vegetarian kids will be shorter and physically weaker (in fact I don't think there is much good evidence at all suggesting that).
Conversely, I'm not sure why we shouldn't limit our tender feelings to the individual animals we personally relate to. Values are based on other values, and equality is based on freedom of thought and the value of knowledge. Being kind to animals is about humans really, I think.
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.
> Why is okay to kill a tree to build a home, kill a plant to eat, but not okay to kill an animal to eat?
> Does the biological complexity of the organism make it more or less okay to kill it?
The ability to suffer is the distinguishing/relevant factor. We all know what suffering feels like and we know that animals have the capacity to suffer. We don't really know that trees do. I want to reduce the suffering I am responsible for.
> Is it okay to kill a cockroach or a rat in your home?
I probably would get rid of infestations in my home and feel bad about it.
It's not about having a 100% perfect record with not killing animals. It's about striving to minimize animal suffering as much as practicable. You're never going to reduce this to 0 animals. But you can get to 95% better than the average human pretty easily if you want.
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.
Wait till you get into the other agricultural practices like raising sheep for wool or selecting your herd bulls.
Sheep get castrated, ears notched and tail docked. Then they get set out to pasture.
A bull is selected to be your herd bull and any cows either get milked as you described or pastured to be mama cows for building a herd. Any bull calves either get sold off to be someone else's herd bulls if the genetics are good enough or they get castrated, notched ears and in at least one herd I have seen, their tails are docked.
As the old ag teacher in high school explained, you castrate them to keep their minds off of the ass and put 'em on the grass.
There are many good arguments I think, but not this one. Nature is eating your neighbor's children; it's starvation, epidemics, and massive forest fires; it's unrestrained homicide and rape; it's leaving your physically weakened child to die; it's eating the head of your spouse; it's survival of the fittest; ... (you get my point).
The other animals in nature are not my standard of behavior. In a sense, the point of any culture is to exceed nature and by as much as possible.
Yes. That is far more harmonious with nature than using machines of industry to enslave animal species and slaughter them on profit-driven schedules.
Don't get me wrong, I eat meat, but I also understand that the grand majority of fellow meat-eaters have never hunted or reared livestock. Instead they are complete soyboys (ironic isn't it) who merely consume the output from the machine. These same beta cucks will open their mouths to screech "but animals eat animals in the wild!" Completely missing how unnatural an industrialized slaughter machine is.
The only reason they are enslaved is that they lack organization and understanding. Had they those two, they could kill us all.
I thought it was a page about recipes for cannibals or tuberculosis tracking from the name. Luckily the title helped clarify the misleading website name.
Y'all some hungry mofos. That counter zipped thru 13 million poor tasty, little critters while I was on that page. The cattle numbers seemed low relative to others. Maybe because they are larger and each feeds more individuals.
What about normal game animals like deer, squirrel, wild turkey, rabbit, dove, quail, pigeon, etc? I think this site only gives a glimpse of the true scope of animal deliciousness.
I also disagree with the numbers since most look they are wild-ass guesses intended to inflate or mislead so as to cause those of us who consume all this delicious meat to switch to more sensitive plants, insects, or algae, or fungi.
Imagine the numbers you'd have to report if you were accurately reporting seed consumption of typical grains, legumes, leafy vegetables, herbs (which are delicious with meats), and spices and all the other things that vegetarians or vegans profess such deep attractions to that they can ignore all the destruction wrought by the agricultural practices relevant to their foodstocks. Some of the agricultural lands being tallied are used for growing crops like soybeans for consumption as pseudo-meat by vegans who couldn't be morally outraged enough about habitat loss for their beany things to worry about their own destructive impact on mother earth.
What happens to the collective consciousness of a fungal colony when someone comes along and rips off a few warty things for their supper? Do you think that the fungus stores a memory of the event and the participants so that once they finally hit the dirt that memory can pass along the subterranean chain so that the fungus can move in return the favor?
> I thought it was a page about recipes for cannibals or tuberculosis tracking from the name. Luckily the title helped clarify the misleading website name.
Agreed. It's called "human consumption", but it neither relates to the consumption of humans, nor the phenomenon in humans called "consumption", nor does it cover all consumption by humans, or even all food consumption.
> Y'all some hungry mofos.
Less than one animal per person per day, and the overwhelming majority of them are fish and invertebrate sea life (two thirds of that in the Asia-Pacific region).
It takes a lot of small sea critters to make on big fish like a tuna.
If we weren't supposed to eat all this stuff then why did Jesus feed those hungry people in Matthew (14:14-21) bread (vegan food) and fish (non-vegan food)? Was he just covering all his bases or was it because fish really aren't meat?
And if fish aren't meat then that website needs to account for that since the numbers would definitely seem to be greatly exaggerated on top of probably being invented.
The post title makes more sense now. The website name is a bit misleading but is out of your control. Leading with that initially created the opportunity to lampoon them in a good-natured sort of way.
If anyone's feelings were hurt by anything I posted here today I remind you to think of the plants. Mine have spent more than a week nearly frozen under a thick blanket of sleet waiting for me to have the opportunity to remove their cold weather protections so that they can once again feel the warmth of Mr Sunshine for a few hours before being covered again to protect them from the hard freeze we'll have again tonight. I love my plants and they grow well for me. And then I eat them, all the edible parts anyway, sometimes with meat but not always.
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'm "allergic to per capita" specifically in cases where it doesn't matter but keeps getting brought up as a bad faith retort.
As an example, it doesn't matter who emits CO2 or where from, since we're all emitting it into the same air, and the only thing that matters is the absolute amount. Similarly, I imagine it's cold comfort for domestic animals in subsaharan Africa that their torturers, rapists, and murderers are marginally less prolific than those in other regions.
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 only relevant when adjusted for animal size.
Raising and eating 10000 shrimp is a lot less impactful than raising and eating 10000 tuna. Counting them both as "one animal" means environmental issues is not something the page cares to illustrate.
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 out of the top 10 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.
The primary work by US environmentalists (or at least the popular ones) is in ensuring rich people’s homes abut publicly-maintained parks.
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.
If these numbers seem extraordinarily high to you, try and estimate the scale of deforestation it would take to replace all this food with grains and vegetables.
(Hint: about 5-10x the available fertile land on earth)
Someone else linked these in the replies, but that's simply not true. Most land taken up to grow plants is used to inefficiently feed livestock. Feeding humans plants only would be much much more efficient in terms of land use.
> Most land taken up to grow plants is used to inefficiently feed livestock.
Because it is just not suitable for growing crops that humans can realistically consume. If you can figure out a way to change this at scale, it'll be a discovery on par with Haber's process w.r.t. impact on human civilization.
I think we can eventually get there, as evidenced by billionaires and real estate companies buying up bad farmland over the last decade or so.
Now I'm curious. Why can't the same land be used to grow a soy bean for human consumption vs animal consumption? I would naively assume that at worst some land might yield top quality crops but that it would at least be usable as an ingredient or something?
Soybeans are an interesting example, because the almost all the soybeans we grow right now are sort of dual purpose.
But in a way that may be different from what you'd expect. The same crop yields both soy milk/oil/tofu/sauce and then the end products after extracting all that goes into animal feed.
Without the need to feed animals maybe this can be repurposed for bio-diesel or ethanol similar to corn, I'm sure there's some way to make that economically viable with enough scale. But this doesn't really free up much land to produce human food with.
All land is not equal. And unless you subscribe to 'interesting' ideas like forcing the world to survive on insect paste, either animal farming is here to stay or we cut down a bunch more forests.
You don’t have to keep feeding the chicken/pigs/etc. if you stop eating chicken/pigs/etc.
Most livestock is fed food specifically grown to feed livestock.
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/
The quantity of animals killed scales inversely with size. Most of the "animals killed since opening this page" are shrimp.
I am open to hearing evidence that shrimp have the capacity to care about the conditions in which they live and die but as of now I don't believe they do.
I am going to continue eating meat and plants but that's because the choice between eating plants or meat misses the point
The issue here is the industrialisation of the land and the shortcuts that farmers are doing that essentially kill the land, animals and plants in a way that is unmaintainable
The way this should work is animals should be herded on to land to eat and poo, once the grasses are nearly eaten the animals should be rotated on to other fields, the new grass regrows in this fresh environment because it has no competitor and plenty of fertiliser this process kills weeds and rejuvenates soil ready for planting
This mimics the nomadic lives that early humans would have led, following their herds of animals to fresh new pastures
Then the farmers worked out they didn't need animals to do this process they could just plow their fields and then that gets rid of the weeds, not quite as good as animals doing it in terms of soil health but effective and quick
Then the farmers were sold weed killers which meant they didn't need to plow their field, they just needed to buy GMO glyphosate resistant seeds and flood their fields with glyphosate, some types of crops are even killed close to harvest with glyphosate so it'll be in your food at high rates for certain crops
The problem with this approach is glyphosate is assumed safe because its mechanism for killing weeds is based on a system we don't directly have as humans, but our gut bacteria do, it also competes with glycine in our bodies used to create proteins, I wouldn't want to drink glyphosate from the bottle but it's being added to my food so effectively I do that
It also degrades the soil quality into dust, instead of being full of earth worms which would normally feed the birds, the local wildlife etc
So these mono culture fields are just turning huge swathe of land into sterile dust bowls that exacerbate climate change
Then these crops are either sold directly to me as a plant eater or given to the animals to make them bulk up and sick
As someone who eats a lot of meat I want my animals to be grass fed (or their natural diet) I don't want them to have to take antibiotics because the farmer needed to bulk them up with cheap glyphosate laced mono culture grains and cereals to get more profit out of the animal
So if you are vegan you cannot just wipe your hands of this problem because you're still contributing by eating these mono crops - What we really need from consumers is for them to care how their plants and animals are raised and not accept glyphosate or other weed killers in their supply chains
Animals should be pasture raised from a moral point of view but also a health and climate point of view
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