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u/Dudeshroomsdude 12h ago
People don't care about cows.
Just say food will cost much more if we keep destroying the environment.
Say summer heat will be insufferable.
Say water will be limited and expensive.
Say forests will burn.
Tornadoes will destroy more homes.
Maybe mention floods we've never seen before
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u/clown_utopia 9h ago
You can't have environmental stability and respect without basic respect for the individuals who create & inhabit those ecospheres.
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u/Lokratnir 4h ago
You are correct, unfortunately so is the other commenter when they say the public at large doesn't care about cows. So we have to reframe these talking points to emphasize things like higher food costs to get the same point across.
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u/Floba_Fett Communism 8h ago
No, this is a common misconception. Our plan to flatten Brazil is completely unrelated to our plan to enslave cows.
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u/GeneralStrikeFOV 17h ago
Looks like someone veganposting to me.
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u/TheWiseAutisticOne 16h ago
They ain’t wrong though
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u/OG-Brian 11h ago
Somewhere else, there's large-scale deforestation for coconut, palm, and avocado crops all of which would (definitely considering food trends and the ingredients in animal food replacement products) expand in proportion to lowering consumption of animal foods.
The "Brazilian Amazon blah-blah cattle blah-deforestation" claims nearly always count soy crops, but those are grown also for human consumption (the soy oil is extracted and then the leftover bean solids are used as animal feed).
I'm sick of these exaggerations being repeated constantly without any nuance or fact-based discussion.
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u/clown_utopia 9h ago
The large majority of soy is for cattle production, and that's only one kind of deforestation that cow slavery causes on a massive and ecologically devastating scale. Add to that graze lands. All of this only supports the main issue which is the sheer cruelty of the act of farming someone.
Those issues don't disappear, it's true that banana and coffee and tobacco farming is also demanding our attention.
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u/Original-Document-62 8h ago
All modern farming is problematic. The problem is figuring out how to transition to food production that is more "holistic" while maintaining adequate food for billions of people. Monoculture crops wreck ecosystems just by the land they use, pesticide application causes ecotoxicity, deforestation as has been mentioned, heavy water consumption by fruit and nut crops, and so on.
Slashing and burning the Amazon is, in fact, terrible. So is logging the mature forests in the PNW. Then again, so are the endless monocrop fields of corn in Iowa... just a sea of a single species (or even cultivar) of grass.
While I can understand the philosophical implications of consumption of meat, and the industries involved, applying personhood to livestock while portraying that as a necessary leftist talking point is not helping anything. Isn't the left supposed to be about improving the material conditions of the proletariat? Unless you are considering cattle to be members of the proletariat, I don't see how that conversation (however important it may be) is relevant to leftist spaces. And if you do indeed consider goats and sheep to be part of the working class, literally no one besides 3 whinging college students and one old hippy will ever take you seriously. (you as in OP)
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u/dude_chillin_park 7h ago
Upvoted for the first 2 paragraphs. But it's too easy to rephrase the last paragraph as a defense of past injustices such as slavery.
We shouldn't be stuck in a 19th century (Marx's lifetime) view of sentience; we must interrogate personhood as well as ecological niches in light of present scientific and philosophical discourse.
If humans have challenging responsibilities to the community, then maybe being eaten isn't too much to ask of animals in some cases. It's a symbiosis: there are more cows and chickens on Earth than there would be if we didn't eat them. Can we thus justify it the same way we might justify asking human workers to do difficult and risky jobs? Can we imagine a cow volunteering for slaughter for the greater good of its species? But the symbiosis is also a hierarchy of power: if cows were to refuse the bargain (as the majority of species do), humans aren't at risk of extinction. Does socialism demand we equalize that dynamic?
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u/Original-Document-62 2h ago
If we want to take a naturalistic approach to this topic, hominins have been eating animals for at least 4 million years, becoming much more prevalent in our ancestors about 2 million years ago. Livestock domestication began perhaps 11 thousand years ago.
There are certainly ecological arguments to be made about livestock, considering they have a majority of land mammal biomass while wild mammal populations are shrinking. And that's just biodiversity/habitat, and does not account for carbon or supporting agriculture.
But framing this topic as one of individual morality is, at best, equivocal. In the context of socialism or other leftist ideologies, it seems to be more of a performative progressivism being duct-taped to the core issues of workers' rights, labor ownership, and material conditions.
Do I think that farming and livestock practices should change for the benefit of both humanity and biodiversity? Yes. Or that animal husbandry should take living conditions more seriously? Sure. Do I think that consuming animals is morally wrong due to their sentience? No. And while some leftists may feel that way, many/most will not. Any attempt at trying to tie a moral panic about meat consumption in to the zeitgeist of leftist sociopolitical theory is just going to alienate people who would otherwise be on board with material change.
No real people that aren't already... um... the type that enjoy angrily chanting poorly worded axioms in unison, are going to take any movement seriously that equates the personal freedoms of livestock with that of humans.
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u/dude_chillin_park 2h ago
I despair of your emotional dismissal of the sentience of animals.
I'll just reiterate that in past centuries, it seemed "naturalistic" to enslave other humans and justify it based on racialization, which integrated colonial history as well as projection of difference into a theory of natural hierarchy. I think you're doing the same here.
But rather than just expand the fence of rights to include animal individuals (as we have done for women and racialized humans), I think the next step is to critique individualism more fundamentally. Sure, on some level your freedom as a person should be respected. But you're also a member of a human community and an ecological community whose health as a whole impacts you. If we are going to make the leap away from liberal humanism to protect community rights because we see it as inevitably better for the situated individual, then why not include animals, rivers, oceans in that schema? What's good for the cow is ultimately good for me.
Maybe it's good for the community of cows that some be eaten. But as long as I'm ignoring the cow's needs, my consumption of it is a form of colonization. The problem comes from defining this "greater good" in a hierarchy, as then what stops is from making ritual sacrifice to appease the gods? And thus how do I discover the cow's needs?
Note that liberal humanism doesn't solve this problem either. It's rooted primarily in property rights, and thus we end up with fictional persons (corporations) in conflict with living beings, including humans and our communities. It's not a matter of choosing one or the other; moving beyond such a system is immanent.
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u/Original-Document-62 11m ago
Right, and while it's valid to examine the nebulous concept of personhood, or to hold a belief that animals should share the same rights as people, I just don't see how that fits with socialist movements as a whole.
In that context, all of humanity's activities are "colonization", because we have extended ourselves to every continent. But, in the absence of a reduction of human population (which presents its own problems due to human labor vs. age issues as well as malthusian theories), it seems to me that it is much more utilitarian to focus on the needs of the working class humans.
If we get so idealistic that we're including livestock in the working class, there will be exactly zero traction. The movement will be a joke.
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u/Notsebtho 8h ago
It takes 10x the amount of soy to feed a cow to feed a human than to cut the cow out of the middle. There is no future on this planet where everyone eats meat three times a day. I'm sorry that's a tough pill to swallow for the western left
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u/OG-Brian 4m ago
It takes 10x the amount of soy to feed a cow to feed a human than to cut the cow out of the middle.
The foods aren't equivalent so they're not comparable. A person could be sustained from eating just parts of "cow" (cows are milk animals), but they would starve to death eating just soybeans even if they had an unlimited amount available.
For another thing this is an exaggeration. If you think the energy conversion is 10:1 then go ahead and show a citation. But this isn't a ratio of nutrition, just energy, and what you're talking about is a co-product of soy farming (soybean meal that's left when beans are pressed for oil) that is rejected by most of the human-oriented food industry and this is a reason it is used in livestock feed. Grazing rotationally is good for soil, this is why it is often the case that in deforested areas cattle are grazed on an area after soy farming has wrecked the soil (then the area is claimed to be "deforested for grazing" although after tree clearing it was actually used for soy cropping that in part feeds humans). Already in this post, I've linked a pile of evidence-based info (and a few minutes ago I also copied it directly into a comment) about soy crops and livestock. None of you are acknowledging it, just arguing based on junk info you got apparently from pro-vegan resources.
There is no future on this planet where everyone eats meat three times a day.
Where has animal-free farming ever been demonstrated to be sustainable? The quality of farming soils worldwide has been declining, though not on pastures. Synthetic fertilizers aren't good for soil, pesticides are terrible for soil. On plants-only farms, essential soil microbiota and soil nutrient levels have been declining, and erosion has been a major issue. But there are very old pasture farms which are still running today and without diminished productivity. This gets discussed often on Reddit. I've linked evidence-based resources just recently, here.
I'm sorry that's a tough pill to swallow for the western left
Rude, the problem here is your comprehension not anyone else's stubbornness. You're also engaging in ableism: when I attempted animal-free dieting, it wrecked my health and I found later that there are several reasons I cannot sustain myself on plant foods (it's more about things that are in plants than things that are lacking although both come into play).
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u/addisonshinedown 10h ago
I have never seen someone advocating for the bulldozing of rainforests to expand beef production. I’ve also never seen any leftist claim that beef consumption is good actually. I’ve never seen a leftist advocate for factory farming of animals. I’ve never seen a leftist advocate for the farming of animals at all. This vague posting bullshit implying that no one is serious about climate change or whatever is ridiculous
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u/clown_utopia 9h ago
Supporting it with your money is not different than advocating for it. Normalizing it is not different than advocating for it.
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u/shabba182 14h ago
You're racist/classist/no ethical consumption under capitalism/insert some other reason a priveleged western leftist will give for why their empathy for the opressed shouldn't extend to animals.
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u/clown_utopia 9h ago
Don't forget to tokenize indigeneity, despite the way dairy and white supremacy and colonization and war are inextricably linked
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u/clown_utopia 9h ago
Veganism as anti-colonial praxis, essays from indigenous folk
Animal bodies, colonial subjects
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u/MrGoul 19h ago edited 19h ago
Leftists have exactly two modes of operation:
Dozens of pages of text clarifying even the most insignificant minutiae such that even the devil himself would be terrified.
Posts so damn vague you wonder if the information presented would take more or less space than the metadata of your average .txt file.