Off-Topic III: The Revengening!

[Psychosplodge]

Dude, the biggest worry in my life is the health of my SO, after that its the stress of trying to climb onto the housing ladder, beyond that there's very little I have time to lose sleep over.

[Tzeentch's Dark Agent]

I was aiming that at Wolfshade.

[Psychosplodge]

No worries, thought it might have been a neutral neutral reply

[Wolfshade]

No.

It is quite complicated and there are many different things that one needs to take into account.

The cost of maintaining a herd is expensive, but there are economies of scale. So the more heads of cow you have the cheaper they become. But there is a hard limit on this, the amount space you have.

Post WW2 the demand for beef increased, also so did wages, so meat became more accessible so people wanted more.
The pressure to create more beef led to some people realising that if they were to feed them grains (for instance) they would need less grass for grazing so you could then for instance a grass field might have previously supported 30 cows, could now support 60. This economy made this the new normal, then someone realised that if you were to keep them in sheds you could give them spaces, but you didn't need to worry about bad weather and use "natural" lights to get more breeding cycles in as well.
Then people reasied you could mess about with their hormones and get more meat per cow and so on and so forth.

Ultimately, the most cost effective method of meat farming is battery as you minimise the space per animal. So going back to jsut grass fed is not practical at this levels of production.

If we reduced the amount of cattle then we could do that, unfortunately, the population size has swelled massively from 46 million to 59 million so the demand has increased and the space for farming has reduced.

The other issue that one has to consider with grass fed option. Grass fed cows produces significiantly more methane than grain fed, so if you had grass fed you massively increase green house gasses. Indeed some stats suggest that 14% of global greenhouse emissions are from agriculture.

[Tzeentch's Dark Agent]

I just don't understand how you can defend battery farming on a mere situational point of view.
Animals are born to be animals, they aren't born for a specific purpose, and quite frankly, laboratory experimentation on animals is inhumane and appalling.

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Your attitude towards animals is disgusting Wolfshade.

[Wolfshade]

I have never defended battery farming. I have explained how it is a consequence of societies demand for more and cheaper meat. I have also never stated what my attitude is towards animals. You make many assumptions.

Animals born in domesticated settings are born for a reason. That is the reality of the situation.

I shall give you another example, a woman I know breeds pedigree miniature bull terriers. Now her dogs are pets and she does not do it on a commerical scale, rearing at most 1 litter every 7 years. With only having 1 breeding ***** and only breeding one litter.

That ***** only breeds because my friend wants it to breed, she selects the mate based on pedigree and ensuring that they are not too closely related.

Those puppies are not born because the dog wants to raise puppies, they are raised to be sold for a siginficant amount of money. That is the truth, her biotch does not mate randomly, those puppies are commodities to be sold.

Another situation, breeding programs in zoos. The zoo deliberately breeds rare creatures to populate other zoos and to re-intorudce them into the wild, they would not be able to bread otherwise.

Of course laboratory experimentation on animals is inhuman, they are using animals not humans. It is the very deffinition. I am not sure where I stand on animal experimentation. For cosmetic purproses it is wrong. But when it comes to other things I am not so sure. We must consider humans to be above animals, otherwise we would eat people, so if we are above them, then it is more morally just to experiment on animals than it is to do it on people. I have heard passionate arguments on both sides of the fence for this and I am unsure which is best. I suppose the steel test is this. If you are afflicted by an illness that would mean certain death would you take a cure that was only discovered and proven safe by animal experimentation? For me the answer would be yes. So I suppose I must be in favour of it.

[Tzeentch's Dark Agent]

You are actually just rattling off facts over why factory farming is economically better, ergo, defending it's existence. If more people actually just ate organically then there would be no need for vegetarianism. Cruelty to animals, on any level, in any setting, is evil and abhorrent. Tolerance of this is JUST as bad.

[Wolfshade]

So a history student explaining a certain Adolf H's rise to power therefore is defending it?

I find your logic quite baffeling.

If the world eat only organic food, we would need to seriously depopulate it. I mean signficant %s equating to many many million, and yet I am the monster...

[Tzeentch's Dark Agent]

As you have stated, things breed, why do we need to keep them in a cage?

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Anyway, I'm going out. Enjoy your carcass.

[Mr Mystery]

We will. Meat tastes good, and as a species we're adapted for it. No need to go getting morally smug on either side of the fence.

In other news, I've now taken delivery of 'Vault of Horror' by Amicus Studios.

This now completes my collection of the Amicus Horror Anthology movies. HURRAH!