This is Fine Rule
EDIT: here's a source for that figure
Previous studies have estimated that 73% of all antimicrobials sold globally are used in animals raised for food
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7766021/pdf/antibiotics-09-00918.pdf
Sorry ya'll, but if you are still shoveling these idiots money for most of your meals, then you personally are the problem. You should feel guilty every time you do it. You are hurting yourself. You are hurting your children. Tou are hurting your granchildren and future generations. You are hurting strangers. You are hurting everyone you care about. You are doing this all out of addiction and laziness. Not to mention the extreme torture that you are inflicting on the animals. It is time to grow up and take responsibility. You are not innocent because "other people do it too." You are guilty. Please admit this very clear fact to yourself and do better.
I totally get you, but if you want really convince other people of doing the right thing you need to change your tone. This kind of approach is terrible, no one wants to be called evil or dumb for something they never had the time to think about it. You have to do better than that otherwise you are just preaching to people who agree with you.
Yeah, absolutely, you're totally right. That's definitely the most common way to go about it, and maybe the most effective, I really don't know. There is a bunch of gentle nudging going on, though, and everyone responds to different things. For some people, no amount of loving hints will get them to do anything. Some people just need the genuine blunt truth to get them to actually think about something. Honestly, it's like any other addiction, the desire needs to come from within, nobody can force them to get better.
I dont buy that many people are unaware or never thought about it before. It's brought up all the time. The issue isn't a lack of information, it is that most people just have almost no personal moral compass, they just rely on the behavior of the masses to dictate to them what is right/wrong. The more people remind them that what they are doing is disgusting, the more likely they will be to eventually change. I figure just machine gun 'em with all various forms of reminders, and we'll get through to some. Eventually, we will hit a critical mass, and the sheep will follow. The most pathetic will cling to their cruelty addiction until they are dead, but that's the same as what happened to the racists, rapists, child abusers or anything else that used to be more accepted.
Oh yeah! Love my burgers from the Stockyard restaurant in Brighton. Occasionally, I'll get the filet. Oh my!!
It is NOT my fault the Earth is fucked.
Corporate and politicians can eat the shit out of the ass of every meat eater.
GFY for trying to blame the "little guy". You're a prick stain.
You can try to pass the blame onto them all you want, but the obvious reality is that the billionaires can't sell disgusting over-drugged factory farm meat to billions of people if billions of people don't buy it. They only have power if you willingly give it to them.
The game is over, YOU are the problem, and only YOU can stop your own disgusting habits. No more blaming everyone else for your own complete and utter lack of self-control. Live in your guilt. You are screwing us all over because you are unable to admit responsibility. You are an abusive husband who beats his wife and then blames her for it. Nobody with any amout of common sense is still believing your tired old excuses.
Future generations will know what you did, and you will disgust them. They won't even be able to comprehend how you could be so vile and uncaring. Get used to it, Grandpa. That's your future.
If you will buy it, they will sell it.
Corperations are not people. They have no moral compass. They do what their customers will pay for.
Customers are people. Customers can choose based on any criteria. Convenience, morals, pleasure, whatever they value.
You are the customer. By buying from animal agriculture, you are saying you value what they are selling.
Yes, the thousands, millions, billions of customers matter. YOU are a customer. YOU MATTER. And if you choose to value something that is pure evil for all involved except your taste buds and their bottom line, then yes. You share in the blame. Especially now that you know what it causes.
That's why I avoid eating meat and only stick to eating vegans.
Love plants, eat vegans
Honestly most meat tastes like shit anyways. And vegan alternatives taste amazing, are often prepared and ready to go into a meal and you don't have to worry about it being undercooked.
not really? farming meat doesn't necessarily have to involve so much antibiotics
sure you can reduce the amount of antibiotics used by reducing the throughput of meat but you can also just put in tighter regulations
We already have tightened regulations. In the USA you can no longer buy antibiotics off the shelf. You have to now get an RX. We here in the US aren't really the main driver of this. It's been mainly foreign beef production in countries where there is little regulation.
it's not just the antibiotics that are the issue. animal agriculture is a giant contributor to pollution of water, lands, and air as well as being a major cause for the destruction of rain forrests. the level of meat consumption in rich countries can not be scaled to the rest of the world.
thats ofc is ignoring that all animal agriculture is extremely fucking immoral and cruel and honestly unconscionable.
I bet you're the life of the party.
Maybe someday you'll get invited to the party so you can stop speculating about what's going on at it.
If you don't stop I'll eat my dam grandchildren, how would you feel about that bucko
I would be unsurprised by the natural progression of your selfish depravity. Hopefully, you take it far enough that you just eat yourself to death, and we can get to work fixing the selfish shitshow that you leave in your wake.
"Does it make us money right now? Then it's fine."
Nothing good comes from the meat industry. Nothing at all.
Except for delicious meat, of course /s
If you bang your knee every day, you might be so used to the pain eventually that it's like you don't feel it anymore.
Physically if you don't know what it feels like to not consume a damaging and inflammatory diet, it's easy to mistake feeling like shit all the time with normalcy. But it's not normal, it's killing you.
And emotionally if you only know what it's like to do something that causes so much trauma and suffering (both to the animals, and the people who do the slaughtering), you might be so used to a background noise of guilt that you're not even aware that you're carrying it. The only way to know the difference is to change and watch what happens in your mind when you stop running away from the violence you're complicit in.
Where does that figure come from? That's wild, if true
For global estimates (~73%)
Previous studies have estimated that 73% of all antimicrobials sold globally are used in animals raised for food
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7766021/pdf/antibiotics-09-00918.pdf
For US in particular (~80%)
Of all antibiotics sold in the United States, approximately 80% are sold for use in animal agriculture; about 70% of these are “medically important” (i.e., from classes important to human medicine).2 Antibiotics are administered to animals in feed to marginally improve growth rates and to prevent infections, a practice projected to increase dramatically worldwide over the next 15 years.3 There is growing evidence that antibiotic resistance in humans is promoted by the widespread use of nontherapeutic antibiotics in animals. Resistant bacteria are transmitted to humans through direct contact with animals, by exposure to animal manure, through consumption of undercooked meat, and through contact with uncooked meat or surfaces meat has touched.4
I dug in (thanks for linking sources) and there are some promising details. The ~80% figure for the US is from a 2011 report (even though the citation states 2014...), so it's very old. In 2019, the US began an initiative to increase awareness of this issue and address it, see the progress here (pdf link).
Not trying to counter the narrative, but at least we're talking about it on the federal level, so maybe that can provide some optimism to people.
In Germany 2015 1700 tons of antibiotics were used, thereof only 300 t for human use.
We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). These actions have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (eight times less).
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/pdf
what does this have to do with anything
Can someone explain why antibiotics are used in the meat industry? Are lots of animals dying to bacterial infections so they need antibiotics to aid the yield, or are antibiotics incidentally also growth hormones, or something else? Always been curious
Both of the two. The two main reasons are that it incidentally boost growth and there are lots of circulating diseases due to heavy overcrowding conditions. Note that the use is not on those who are sick, but to everyone even if they show no symptoms
Antibiotics are administered to animals in feed to marginally improve growth rates and to prevent infections, a practice projected to increase dramatically worldwide over the next 15 years.There is growing evidence that antibiotic resistance in humans is promoted by the widespread use of nontherapeutic antibiotics in animals.
Don't worry, it gets worse! Certain farmed animals are particularly susceptible to infections like shrimp and oysters. These animals are kept in open water pens and antibiotics are routinely DUMPED INTO THE OCEAN to protect the stock, naturally contaminating the ocean at large and giving bacteria in the wild just enough exposure to antibiotics to develop resistance.
If you want to support responsible antibiotic use, avoid all farmed shellfish, don't buy any meats from India or China, and only buy free range chicken; these are the biggest global offenders. If you're European, avoid meats from Greece or italy.
On top of the other answers, animals are more likely to get sick if they get cramped together in extremely tight spaces, facilitating the spread of diseases, and meat industries do systematically cramp animals together because it's economically efficient, at the detriment of both the animals and the quality of the meat.
Sorry I'm too lazy to look up a source, but the way I've heard it explained is that while they might occasionally give them to sick animals as a sort of panacea, they often just give all of them a low dose. Apparently it like, makes their immune system not have to work as hard so they gain weight faster. Which is basically textbook how to make resistant bacteria.
One of the biggest reasons is because cattle growers (especially in North America) feed their cows corn instead of grass or other things that cows actually evolved to eat. They do this because long standing US government subsidies on corn production mean that it can be sold for less than the cost of production; the farms are literally paid to grow it. This is also why high fructose corn syrup is in everything you eat. The corn makes the cattle sick, so the farms pump them full of antibiotics, because that's cheaper than just feeding them properly.
what
Big Meat uses a lot of antibiotics, which causes bacteria populations to evolve and no longer be affected by antibiotics. When this happens, the now-used antibiotics become less effective, causing unnecessary deaths.
Tl;dr: go vegan
Also, a cause of 14.5% of human caused greenhouse gas emissions
what is this Frankenstein's meme
Vegan products still use land and farm equipment won't stop for any mouse or insect in the way
Farmers also shoot pests that eat their crops
A vegan diet is not sustainable for the average person. Ex-vegans vastly outnumber current vegans, of which the majority have only been vegan for a short time. Common reasons for quitting are: concerns about health (23%), cravings (37%), social problems (63%), not seeing veganism as part of their identity (58%). 29% had health problems such as nutrient deficiencies, depression or thyroid issues, of which 82% improved after reintroducing meat.
Many environmental studies that vegans use are heavily flawed because they were made by people who have no clue about agriculture, e.g. by the SDA church. A common mistake is that they use irrational theoretical models that assume we grow crops for animals because most of the plant weight is used as feed, The reality is that 86% of livestock feed is inedible by humans. They consume forage, food-waste and crop residues that could otherwise become an environmental burden. 13% of animal feed consists of potentially edible low-quality grains, which make up a third of global cereal (not total crop) production. All US beef cattle spend the majority of their life on pasture and upcycle protein even when grain-finished (0.6 to 1). Hence, UN FAO considers livestock crucial for food security and does not endorse veganism at all.
Vegans have never been able to define or measure that their diet causes less deaths/suffering than an omnivorous one. They are ignorantly contributing to an absolute bloodbath of trillions of zooplankton, mites, worms, crickets, grasshoppers, snails, frogs, turtles, rats, squirrels, possum, raccoons, moles, rabbits, boars, deer, 75% of insect biomass, half of all bird species and 20,000 humans per year. Two grass-fed cows are enough to feed someone for a year and, if managed properly, can restore biodiversity. The textbook vegan excuse where they try to blame plant agriculture on animals and use only mice deaths, fabricated feed conversion ratios of 20:1 and a coincidentally favourable per-calorie metric is nonsense because:
The majority of animal feed is either low-maintenance forage or a by-product that only exists because of human food harvest.
It literally shows that grass-fed beef kills fewer animals.
It still take more human-edible feed than it produces out. From the same study that produced the cited figure:
1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2 for monogastrics
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013
For the claims about sequestration
There’s not been a single study to say that we can have carbon-neutral beef
[...]
We also have to ask how much of the sequestered carbon in these systems is actually due to the cattle. What would happen to the land if it were simply left fallow?
The answer is, depending on the land, and on the kind of grazing, it might sequester even more carbon
https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/10/03/beef-soil-carbon-sequestration/
And good luck scaling up grass-fed production even if it did sequester more
We model a nationwide transition [in the US] from grain- to grass-finishing systems using demographics of present-day beef cattle. In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates
[…]
If beef consumption is not reduced and is instead satisfied by greater imports of grass-fed beef, a switch to purely grass-fed systems would likely result in higher environmental costs, including higher overall methane emissions. Thus, only reductions in beef consumption can guarantee reductions in the environmental impact of US food systems.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401
And it is perfectly healthy
It is the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that appropriately planned vegetarian, including vegan, diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits for the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. These diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, adolescence, older adulthood, and for athletes. Plant-based diets are more environmentally sustainable than diets rich in animal products because they use fewer natural resources and are associated with much less environmental damage. Vegetarians and vegans are at reduced risk of certain health conditions, including ischemic heart disease, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, certain types of cancer, and obesity. Low intake of saturated fat and high intakes of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, soy products, nuts, and seeds (all rich in fiber and phytochemicals) are characteristics of vegetarian and vegan diets that produce lower total and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels and better serum glucose control. These factors contribute to reduction of chronic disease
that is not the position of the academy and hasn't been for years
What are you going on about bruh??? Did you read the study? It was about antibiotics. Triggered much?
This link simply shows what rubbish you are talking. https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass
