I keep seeing people make this claim that cattle spend their entire lives on feed lots, but I've never seen this anywhere and I've been all over cattle country. Where do they do this? Because around here feedlots are only for finishing cattle and typically only spend about 2-3 months there after having very happy lives as calves on a ranch.
> I keep seeing people make this claim that cattle spend their entire lives on feed lots, but I've never seen this anywhere and I've been all over cattle country. Where do they do this?
Nobody does that, it’d be way too expensive. People here on HN have absolutely zero knowledge of how industrial cattle farming operates and have some really bizarre beliefs about the process. Largely because their only experience with it is the supermarket meat section and passing those massive stinky feedlots along the CA I5.
For everyone else: After a calf is raised and weaned from their mother, they are sent to “background” on pasture and the last few months a cow spends packed in a feedlot is just to fatten it up for human consumption. These are usually steps done by different companies altogether. The whole point of beef is utilizing marginal land that can’t grow human food. It converts tons of grassland to usable farmland, and that pasture makes up 2/3 of the total agricultural land in the US.
>"The whole point of beef is utilizing marginal land that can’t grow human food."
FYI: 36% of corn is grown just to feed cattle/livestock. I'm trying to breed chickens that are less dependent on commercial foods, so I'm somewhat familiar with the topic.
That's also very misleading because the vast majority of the corn we feed cows isn't fed to them fresh. It's distillers grains, an industrial waste from ethanol production: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distillers_grains
It's a cheap type of corn [1] only grown on marginal farmland that is one step above pasture land.
I'm not here to police tone, but it sounded like you were disagreeing with the parent comment but your factual claims do not appear to disagree.
>> typically only spend about 2-3 months there after having very happy lives as calves on a ranch.
> After a calf is raised and weaned from their mother, they are sent to “background” on pasture and the last few months a cow spends packed in a feedlot is just to fatten it up for human consumption.
The only difference is the introduction of "sent to “background” on pasture" which arguably is not different from "happy lives as calves on a ranch" given different interpretations of calf to distinguish between baby and adolescent cattle.
There is no hypocrisy in cattle farming. No species on earth other than humans care about another species existence other than how it will benefit their own species.
I'm not saying humans shouldn't be different, but there is no hypocrisy in keeping in line with every other species in the known universe.
I don't disagree with you, but I'm unaware (naive?) of any other species farming/enslaving/capturing hordes of another species and effectively torturing them the way humans do
Being suddenly killed by a lion is a rather short torture/cruel experience compared to what humans do at larger and larger scales. I think animals even have a mechanism that I forget the name of that spares them a lot of the pain involved in such a situation (adrenaline, "going into shock", etc)
I really do wish I/we could do something to be less cruel but everything seems driven by profit margins and that makes it rather difficult/impossible. They're outlawing 'lab grown' meat! :|
(I eat meat, but I don't feel good about it when I think about it)
Humans didn't care either until very recently, when it became apparant just how much capacity we have to drive other animals to extinction. Our ability to destroy is many orders of magnitude beyond any other animal, so having at least a little more restraint is basically a requirement for a sustainable society.
Yes. Fundamentally, most people, including myself, believe that it's fine to kill animals and eat them.
There's no hypocrisy here, disgusting or otherwise. You have your own concept of morality, I have mine, yours is considered extreme by society at large, mine is a shared moral belief of the great majority.
most people also do not care about factory farming. think the claim is that it is hypocrisy if you care about the animal suffering when you will just kill it at the end
It's not hypocrisy to believe that a) animals can be killed for their meat, but also b) they should be treated humanely until then and killed as humanely as feasible.
That's the great thing about human intelligence; we can ensure a humane kill of our prey as opposed to ripping it apart with fangs and claws like other predators.
I guess my threshold for care is if it is sufficient to motivate any action to be taken at all, whether that is eating slightly less meat or switching to non-factory farmed. The vast majority of people don’t do that, so their revealed “care” is very little.
Frankly, I don’t really care which type they eat, meat is meat and has pretty much the same environmental (and ethics of killing) issues.
What is the "disgusting hypocrisy of cattle farming?" The term "happiness" is an anthropomorphic emotion term to describe animals not living in the distress so well characterized by Temple Grandin. The theory is growing the animal in a low stress environment leads to a higher quality product. Given the scary prions which spread in part by feeding cows to themselves, it makes sense to avoid some of the conditions humans often find aesthetically or morally objectionable.
