Sorry, I will, but I don’t think a casual conversation on how much food is in a hypothetical edible cat is animal cruelty. We aren’t actually going to eat her.
Mention to family that cat attempted to eat thyroid meds this morning, comment that human-sized dose of thyroid meds is probably not good for cats. Comment that human-sized dose of any meds probably not good for cats.
Brother puts forth the idea of food.
Wonder if a cat even contains 2000 calories.
Google many things including weight of chicken. Deduce that cat probably contains roughly as much food as large meat-breed chicken if not counting bones and organs. Deduce that small local cat therefore probably contains 1400 calories or so.
Brother notes that “how many calories are in a cat” and variations thereof only brings up search results for how many calories a cat should eat.
Point out that people who are eating cats are probably not in a mood to count calories. Also note that cats are not frequently eaten, likely due to the difficulty of catching and/or farming them. Proceed to defend this notion to snickering family, mostly pointing out that cats fight and are difficult to confine and handle.
Mom is writing a Facebook post about this whole conversation.
Uhhhh i’m really bad at explaining things lmao. What I mean is you don’t open the abdominal cavity or whatever.
Its not just skin and then organs directly underneath. There is a thick layer of muscle directly under the skin that just looks like raw meat. When skinning something you don’t go through that muscle layer. Or at least you try not to, it can sometimes happen if you are inexperienced.
Here I tried to illustrate what I mean.
If you also wanted to butcher the animal for meat you would have to cut through the muscle layer and remove the organs. That’s a normal part of the butchering process. But if you just want the skin for taxidermy you don’t have to. I don’t hunt and most of my animals come from natural death or whatever so I don’t eat the meat, wouldn’t be safe. I just put things I don’t use back out in the woods for the scavengers and get the bones later.
When you skin an animal, you end up with an intact animal skin on one side and the naked animal body on the other. It looks just like the animal before, except that it’s all muscle, like an anatomy class model. The organs are contained inside a bag in the guts, which has muscle around it. It’s stinky and messy if you cut into the gut bag, so you try not to do that.
Also, skin isn’t very strongly attached, it’s held on by membranes and can be pretty easily peeled away from most small animals. There’s minimal cutting on, say, a m.ouse, you just have to cut through the skin down the belly and then peel the skin off. For bigger animals like a d.eer, you have to keep cutting membranes as you peel the skin off.
sorry if i’m being a party pooper but because rabies is apparently the new joke on here ??? please remember that rabies has an almost 100% fatality rate after symptoms develop so if you’re bitten or scratched by an animal that you aren’t 100% sure is vaccinated then GO TO A DOCTOR. it’s not a joke. really.
You’re being kind when you say “almost 100% fatality”. What people need to hear is: if you get to develop rabies symptoms, you’re dead. If you get heavy treatment after developping symptoms, you still need a miracle. Like, a real miracle, you should enter some religion if you escape that.
ALSO, I don’t want people feeling confident about petting stray/wild animals because there’s a vaccine available, either. I’ll explain why from my own experience (I’m not a doctor).
I got bitten by a wild tamarin once, on the pulp of my index finger. It drew blood, there are many wild animals in the area (tamarins, possums, bats, foxes) and it isn’t that uncommon to hear about 1 or 2 rabies cases every now and again (a puppy we gave to a friend got it, for instance), so I went to an ambulatory immediately.
Because I was bitten in an ultrasensitive area, I needed fast treatment. But it was also a small area, so the usual thing they do – inject the vaccine in the place – wasn’t a choice. They told me they’d divide the shot in 5 small ones, and inject me all over my body, so the antidote would get to my entire system fast.
Please stop for a moment and think that the disease is so worrysome that they’d rather needle me all over than to give me one shot and wait until it spread through my system.
Then they said that, okay, but there was a catch first. I needed to take an antiallergic shot. “Why?” “Because the virus is devastating, and as the vaccine is made from it, but weakened (like almost every vaccine) it will still create a reaction, and it’s a strong one, and it’s veru common for people to have strong allergic reactions to it.” YOU HAVE TO TAKE AN ANTIALLERGIC SHOT IN ORDER TO TAKE THE VACCINE COZ THE VACCINE COULD POTENTIALLY MAKE YOU REALLY SICK
ALSO IT WASN’T JUST “A LITTLE ANTIALLERGIC SHOT”
IT WAS ONE OF THESE FUCKERS HERE.
It was OBVIOUSLY dripped in my body and not injected because HAHAHAHA. Truth be told I was an adult already and I’m tall so I have a lot of mass but STILL.
So after I had taken the antiallegic and was starting to feel drowsy (as a side effect of it) the doctor came with the 5 shots.
– One in each buttock
– One in each thigh
– One in my left arm
They all stung like a bitch and I usually don’t care about shots.
“Okay so can I go home now?”
“No, we have to keep you under observation for 2h so we’re SURE the vaccine won’t give you any reaction.”
BINCH I WAS GIVEN A BUTTLOAD OF MEDICINE BUT THERE WAS STILL A RISK.
I slept through the two hours and then was liberated to go home. My legs, butt, and left arm hurt all over, like I had been punched there, for a few days. I also had a fever (not feverish, a fever)
BUT DID YOU THINK IT WAS OVER?
WRONG!!!
I had to take four reinforcement shots in the next month, one a week, so I could be positively be considered immunized.Every time I took a shot, my arm would swell and hurt like it’d been hit, and when night came I’d have a fever. Because that’s how fucking strong the vaccine is, BECAUSE THAT’S HOW VICIOUS THE VIRUS IS.
So yeah. DO NOT PUT YOURSELF IN RISK, GODDAMNIT. Rabies is a rare condition all over, THANK GOD, and 1 confirmed case can be already considered a surge and a reason for mass campaigning, AND FOR A REASON.
If you like messing with stray/wild animals, don’t go picking them up and be extra careful. Or just, like, DON’T – call a vet or an authority that can handle them safely.
I must add that I live in a country with universal healthcare, so I didn’t pay a single penny for my treatment. Is this your reality? If not, ONE MORE REASON TO NOT FUCKING PLAY WITH THIS SHIT.
Rabies is 100% lethal. Period. If you are scratched or bitten by an animal you’re not positive is vaccinated, you need to find treatment NOW. And probably go through all that shit I’ve been through (also if you are immunosupressed? I DON’T KNOW WHAT’D HAPPEN)
Stay safe and don’t be stupid ffs
Guys, I know this isn’t art nor anything like that, but I’ve been hearing about this rabies thing and ???? Look I trust none of you would risk yourselves like this, but maybe you can educate someone through my experience and stuff.
Also rabies does not necessarily cause frothing-at-the-mouth aggression in animals. Docility is also a very common symptom so any wild animal that is ‘friendly’ or ‘likes to be pet’ is suspect. Literally any wild animal is a vector.
Finally, you don’t need to be bitten. All you need is to come into contact with an infected animal’s bodily fluids through a cut that maybe you didn’t notice when you were handling it when it drooled on you.
Never touch a wild animal.
Infection with the rabies virus progresses through three distinct stages.
Prodromal: Stage One. Marked by altered behavioral patterns. “Docility” and “likes to be pet” are very common in the prodromal stage. Usually lasts 1-3 days. An animal in this stage carries virus bodies in its saliva and is infectious.
Excitative: Stage Two. Also called “furious” rabies. This is what everyone thinks rabies is–hyperreacting to stimuli and biting everything. Excessive salivation occurs. Animals in this stage also exhibit hydrophobia or the fear of water; they cannot drink (swallowing causes painful spasms of the throat muscles), and will panic if shown water. Usually lasts 3-4 days before rapidly progressing into the next stage.
Paralytic: Stage Three. Also called “dumb” rabies. As the infection runs its course, the virus starts degrading the nervous system. Limbs begin to fail; animals in this stage will often limp or drag their haunches behind them. If the animal has survived all this way, death will usually come through respiratory arrest: Their diaphragm becomes paralyzed and they stop breathing.
And to add onto the above, saliva isn’t the only infectious fluid. Brain matter is, too. If, somehow, you find yourself in possession of a firearm and faced with a rabid animal, do not go for a head shot. If you do, you will aerosolize the brain matter and effectively create a cloud of infectious material. Breathe it in, and you’ll give yourself an infection.
When I worked in wildlife rehabilitation, I actually did see a rabid animal in person, and it remains one of the most terrifying experiences of my life, because I was literally looking death in the eyes.
A pair of well-intentioned women brought us a raccoon that they thought had been hit by a car. They had found it on the side of the road, dragging its hind legs. They managed–somehow–to get it into a cat carrier and brought it to us.
As they brought it in, I remember how eerily silent it was. Normal raccoons chatter almost constantly. They fidget. They bump around. They purr and mumble and make little grabby-hands at everything. Even when they’re in pain, and especially when they’re stressed. But this one wasn’t moving around inside the carrier, and it wasn’t making a sound.
The clinic director also noticed this, and he asked in a calm but urgent voice for the women to hand the carrier to him. He took it to the exam room and set it on the table while they filled out some forms in the next room. I took a step towards the carrier, to look at our new patient, and without turning around, he told me, “Go to the other side of the room, and stay there.”
He took a small penlight out of the drawer and shone it briefly into the carrier, then sighed. “Bear, if you want to come look at this, you can put on a mask,” he said. “It’s really pretty neat, but I know you’re not vaccinated and I don’t want to take any chances.”
And at that point, I knew exactly what we were dealing with, and I knew that this would be the closest I had ever been to certain death. So I grabbed a respirator from the table and put it on, and held my breath for good measure as I approached the table. The clinic director pointed where I should stand, well back from the carrier door. He shone the light inside again, and I saw two brilliant flashes of emerald green–the most vivid, unnatural eyeshine I had ever seen.
“I don’t know why it does it,” the director murmured, “but it turns their eyes green.”
“What does?” one of the women asked, with uncanny, unintentionally dramatic timing, as she poked her head around the corner.
“Rabies,” the director said. “The raccoon is rabid. Did it bite either of you, or even lick you?” They told us no, said they had even used leather garden gloves when they herded it into the carrier. He told them to throw away the gloves as soon as possible, and steam-clean the upholstery in their car. They asked how they should clean the cat carrier; they wanted it back and couldn’t be convinced otherwise, so he told them to soak it in just barely diluted bleach.
But before we could give them the carrier back, we had to remove the raccoon. The rabid raccoon.
The clinic director readied a syringe with tranquilizers and attached it to the end of a short pole. I don’t remember how it was rigged exactly–whether he had a way to push down the plunger or if the needle would inject with pressure–but all he would have to do was stick the animal to inject it. And so, after sending me and the women back to the other side of the room, he made his fist jab.
He missed the raccoon.
The sound that that animal made on being brushed by the pole can only be described as a roar. It was throaty and ragged and ungodly loud. It was not a sound that a raccoon should ever make. I’m convinced it was a sound that a raccoon physically could not make.
It thrashed inside the carrier, sending it tipping from side to side. Its claws clattered against the walls. It bellowed that throaty, rasping sound again. It was absolutely frenzied, and I was genuinely scared that it would break loose from inside those plastic walls.
Somehow, the clinic director kept his calm, and as the raccoon jolted around inside the cat carrier, he moved in with the syringe again, and this time, he hit it. He emptied the syringe into its body and withdrew the pole.
And then we waited.
We waited for those awful screams, that horrible thrashing, to die down. As we did, the director loaded up another syringe with even more tranquilizer, and as the raccoon dropped off into unconsciousness, he stuck it a second time with the heavier dose. Even then, it growled at him and flailed a paw against the wall.
More waiting, this time to make sure the animal was truly down for the count.
Then, while wearing welder’s gloves, the director opened the door of the carrier and removed the raccoon. She was limp, bedraggled, and utterly emaciated, but she was still alive. We bagged up the cat carrier and gave it to the women again, advising them that now was a good time to leave. They heeded our warning.
I asked if I could come closer to see, and the clinic director pointed where I could stand. I pushed the mask up against my face and tried to breathe as little as possible.
He and his co-director–who I think he was grooming to be his successor, but the clinic actually went under later that year–examined the raccoon together. Donning a pair of nitrile gloves, he reached down and pulled up a handful, a literal fistful, of the raccoon’s skin and released it. It stayed pulled up.
Severe dehydration causes a phenomenon called “skin tenting”. The skin loses its elasticity somewhat, and will be slow to return to its “normal” shape when manipulated. The clinic director estimated that it had been at least four or five days since the raccoon had had anything to eat or drink.
She was already on death’s doorstep, but her rabies infection had driven her exhausted body to scream and lunge and bite.
Because, the scariest thing about rabies (if you ask me) is the way that it alters the behavior of those it infects to increase chances of spreading.
The prodromal stage? Nocturnal animals become diurnal–allowing them to potentially infect most hosts than if they remained nocturnal.
The excitative stage? The infected animal bites at the slightest provocation. Swallowing causes painful spasms, so they drool, coating their bodies in infectious matter. A drink could wash away the virus-charged saliva from their mouth and bodies, so the virus drives them to panic at the sight of water.
(The paralytic stage? By that point, the animal has probably spread its infection to new hosts, so the virus has no need for it any longer.)
Rabies is deadly. Rabies is dangerous. In all of recorded history, one person survived an infection after she became symptomatic, and so far we haven’t been able to replicate that success. The Milwaukee Protocol hasn’t saved anyone else. Just one person. And even then, she still had to struggle to gain back control of her body after all that nerve damage.
Please, please, take rabies seriously.
This has been a warning from your old pal Bear.
I knew how bad it was, but I had never read anything like the raccoon story.
I am not exaggerating when I say that is literally terrifying.
Y’all please read this. That is absolutely hideous. That’s literally like something from a horror movie.
Do not fuck around with wildlife. Or weird strays.
Look! The actual slaughter process. No bad lighting, potato level pocket cams, spooky music, or rare bad handling practices. Just the way it actually happens
Is this cos they see them as a threat to their eggs or are they just blood thirsty like Horses when they chew on a mouse lol
They’re bloody predators if they feel like it. Even the chicks are dangerous to smaller animals.
Chickens are omnivores. In addition to grains, seeds, fruit, and insects, they’ll happily eat snakes, lizards, mice, baby birds, even adult birds if the bird is already injured. If they can kill it, they’ll eat it, and they are remarkably proficient at killing things.
Calf with 6 legs. Stillborn, thrown away, went through a trash compactor, and I dug through a landfill to find it. 2 extra front legs on the right side, deformed spine, fused ribs, split knee joint, and other deformities.
Poor baby, I’m glad you recovered it’s body and showed it some respect after being thrown away
I always find it interesting that people asking about this topic always bring up halal, and never kosher or other religious slaughter. So I’m going to talk about both.
I’ve been to exactly two slaughterhouses through my education. One was for pigs only, so certainly not halal or kosher in any way. The other did sheep and cattle, and was both halal and kosher, and I have to say I greatly preferred the second.
So let me tell you about the halal/kosher place.The sheep would come up single file into the ‘box’, which has doors that close behind them so the others couldn’t see. They were rendered unconscious with a reversible captive bolt pistol to the skull, then their throat is slit before they’re hung up.
So what makes this both halal and kosher instead of non-religious slaughter?
The captive bolt is reversible. Once a year, for certification, one animal is allowed to recover from it to prove it’s not lethal.
There’s a little room beside the ‘box’ where a Muslim prays over each animal to make it halal, and a Jew prays over each animal to make it kosher. So they are both halal and kosher at the same time, because capitalism.
That’s it. It’s otherwise exactly the same as a non-religious slaughter plant. Non-religious slaughter just doesn’t care whether their captive bolt is reversible or not.
There’s a lot of… venom… about religious slaughter, fueled by islamophobia and anti-semitism, and at least within Australia there is absolutely no reason for it. I can make no comments about other nations with laxer animal welfare laws, but that’s how it’s done at the large commercial plants here.
And if you look at the rules and consider it in an early history context, then throat slitting isn’t a bad way to go in the absence of captive bolt guns and firearms. Having a very religious person doing all the slaughter is probably a decent way to make sure you don’t have a psychopath doing all that killing.
Which is also why I wonder about pigs being forbidden. It’s harder to kill a pig humanely with less stress by throat slitting than a goat, sheep or cow is. They’re good protein and efficient to raise, is it possible that someone way back when said “If we can’t kill it well, don’t kill them to eat?”
I think it’s plausible that these rules came about out of a desire to do right by the animals to be eaten, before our modern understanding. Not a religious scholar though, so probably not the best person to ask.
So I don’t have any objections to halal and kosher slaughter over non-religious slaughter.
Deer and all animals naturally overpopulate and depopulate as the population threshold is reached
They are NOT permanently overpopulated and in need of super-predators. There is no “excess” of any wild animal
Cows create breast milk for their calfs and only their calf. There is no extra milk left when a calf is breast feeding.
Dairy cows are ripped from their newborns so their milk can be harvested. There is only “excess” when a cow has no baby to feed.
Fish communicate through sound waves that travel farther and we can not hear. They are very social, creating bonds and relationships. Even sharks have been observed expressing playfulness, fear, and joy. They are sentient and feel pain.
All types of fishing reap anything and everything it’s it’s way, this includes dolphins and turtles who often drown in fishing nets. Unwanted fish are thrown back into the ocean, who often die soon after due to the rapid change in pressure. If hunted fish to not suffocate in cramped containers, they’re throats are slit and bleed to death. Fishing is cruel and unsustainable. There is no “excess” of fish
Chickens eat their own eggs when they know it is not fertilized. This helps them get valuable nutrients and calcium back. A hen left to herself only creates 12 eggs a year
Egg laying hens are selectively bred to make eggs as fast as possible. Their eggs are taken away from them before they get a chance to get the nutrients back. To ensure hens do not eat their eggs before they are stolen, their beaks are sawed with heat off at the tip. This creates untold pain to their sensitive body part. Because hens make so many eggs and they are not allowed to get their nutrients back, they often have broken bones due to osteoporosis. When egg production declines, hens are shocked into rapid egg laying through starvation.
There is no “excess” of eggs without hens going through suffering and abuse.
Animals are not ours to harvest. They are sentient and deserving of rich, fulfilling lives. If you want to help end this suffering, go vegan. There are many resources online to help you through your journey and transition.
Literally everything is this post is wrong. Like all of it. Every part.
Why are vegans like this? Why do they know the least about animals of out of everyone on the planet? Actually I can answer it. It’s because if you’re a rancher and you raise animals you have to actually learn about animal husbandry. It’s because you need permits to hunt or fish and have to report your harvest to local Fish and Wildlife, who use this information to track and measure populations, as well as to check the health of herd. It’s because if your life depends on the health and well-being of an animal, you’re more invested in it than a cabbage-headed idiot who’s never been within 50ft of an actual deer.
Vegans like this have to be the second most useless people on the planet because they’re a bunch of absolute fucking morons that don’t know anything about animals and yet they protest the loudest about animal welfare. They shout over people who’s entire lives depends on the delicate balance of these animals, because eating animals hurts their feelings, not because they have quantifiable scientific evidence that local wildlife populations are hurting.
Because I’m not a complete fucking idiot, here’s some ways you can actually help your local animal populations (instead of posting dumb shit on the internet);
Protest laws that negatively target native carnivores (ex; wolves) such as efforts to prevent them being reintroduced locally or the introduction of permits to hunt them. We have eradicated the most effective herd control method in the United States, and that’s what makes hunting deer a necessity. Educate yourself on your local regional wildlife and see which animals are in most need of support.
Educate yourself about Chronic Wasting Disease. Spread the information and make people aware of the epidemic facing our deer herds. Deer could literally go extinct in our lifetime if a solution is not found.
Support state and federal wild life parks and reserves. These are the people that care most about your local wildlife and know the most about them. Ask them questions about what you can do, what programs you can donate to, or about laws affecting conservation efforts. Volunteer, if they have programs for it.
Buy hunting and fishing permits. Even if you don’t make use of them, the money from these permits directly funds conservation efforts in state (may vary by state).
Stop spreading un-sourced arguments from vegan blogs and consuming PETA-made propaganda. It’s literally all lies.
Don’t say you never learned anything from my blog. Animals have literally always been essential to my livelyhood, and I am a fierce conservationist, and I will take no fucking shit from ‘animal lovers’ who don’t know one damn fact about animals.
I also didn’t even touch on cattle and chickens, which there are other comments on this fucking abysmal trainwreck of a post explaining it, but if anyone has questions about why this human cauliflower is wrong, I’d be happy to answer them or point you in the direction of resources to help support ethical farming practices. It would be 5xs as long as this post that’s mostly about deer though.
This post is weirdly misinformed and ridiculous so I thank you @argonian-alchemist for disrupting it.
Please please please be critical of blanket statements and sensationalized articles. If it seems off, please fact check it.
Let me get into disputing the thing about deer real quick tho. Apex predators such as wolves and cougars have been hunted to extinction in some areas of the world due to farmers protecting their livestock. How many of you guys have had to defend your house from a pack of wolves recently? That’s right, you haven’t. This is a widely known concept.
However, with no natural predators to keep their population under control, they can grow as large as they want. You say deer populations will “naturally” regulate? Yeah, that’s because there’s supposed to be predators around to eat the deer and keep the population under control. (Source) When you take out the predators, it’ll keep growing so long as there’s enough forage to graze. Which brings me to my next point – deer will decimate forests.(source) Literally, if there’s enough of them in one small area they can strip a forest to its bare bones, killing trees and small shrubbery. They will also outcompete with other wildlife and throw ecosystems into shit. That’s why hunting is not only GOOD for deer populations but it’s essential to keep ecosystems healthy and balanced. There’s no more natural predators in many of the places where humans live now, so we have to become the predators. If people didn’t hunt, our natural world would not look the same. There wouldn’t be lush forests or green fields. There would be very little biodiversity. (Source) And you also probably wouldn’t see deer anymore bc they probably would had eaten themselves to extinction.
Trust me, I don’t like hunting. I hate guns and the whole sub-culture of hunting just rubs me wrong. But I also understand that hunting is absolutely essential and necessary. If I didn’t support hunting, then I couldn’t call myself an environmentalist.
My sources are spread throughout this little blurb, but my biggest source? I have a degree in environmental studies and I’ve taken multiple classes on this topics.
I could get more into disputing some of the wildly false information you’ve just listed but, again, I’d be writing a damn book.
Seriously. Like, if you choose to be vegetarian or vegan because you don’t like the idea that you’re harming animals, by all means, go for it. But don’t go spreading falsehoods either. Learn about actual conservation efforts. Understand that killing animals (through population-control hunting, reintroducing predators, and even targeting infected populations) can be a necessity. Direct your energy towards making a positive impact on the environment.
By demonizing farmers, hunters, fishers, and other groups, you actively harm what few systems exist that do promote conservation and animal care. For example, hunting is a huge thing in Texas, and not just because people here love their guns. Because on top of native deer populations, Texas also has a big problem with wild boars. Boars are incredibly voracious, will eat not only plants but also animals if they have the opportunity, and breed incredibly quickly. Compared to deer, boars are also far more dangerous, as their tusks can easily cause severe wounds, combined with the fact that they will literally fight to the death (tenacity, a trait attributed to boars since ancient times). On top of that, any natural predators they once had are either extinct or driven to the absolute fringes. So it falls on hunters to keep them in check now. And even then, despite hunting efforts, they always rebound in great numbers.
So if you wanna keep eating your kale burgers, fine by me. But if you really wanna help the environment, go after the real threats to it. Big industry, non-sustainable practices, threats to endangered plant and animal populations, and individuals+groups that value profit at the expense of nature.
Absolutely. All of this. Thank you.
Demonizing people who need animals to survive accomplishes NOTHING. You’re not making a difference for those animals, you’re just creating headaches with your blatant misinformation. Don’t kid yourself. I’m sorry if the people giving negative feedback are being harsh. You clearly have an intense passion for animals and that’s admirable.
I could go into further detail as to what’s wrong with your arguments, but there’s something else that’s a huge, glaring problem with this entire thread. You say “fact check me” but you do not have credible sources. They literally mean nothing. “meat-kills.org” and “vegan-or-starvation.com” is not a source – it’s propaganda. Nobody will take you seriously if you use such websites as “sources.” And let me tell you, they would not count as an actual source if you used them in a higher education research paper either. Learn to tell the difference between sensationalism and actual facts. Only take your information from credible sources. What is a credible source, you ask? Peer reviewed papers, articles taken from newspaper journals, magazines, books; statements from actual researches who have personally conducted actual research over a certain period of time. You must also take information that is CONSISTENT, information that you see multiple times between multiple credible sources.
I’m not saying veganism is dumb or pointless. It’s good in many aspects. Frankly, you do you with your own lifestyle. Honestly, my hat is off to you that you’re able to maintain it so diligently. It definitely not easy. But it becomes a problem when you expect everyone else to follow your lifestyle otherwise you consider them to be sick, horrible people. Like I said before, this rhetoric hurts the very animals you’re trying to save. You’re not being an animal activist – you’re being brainwashed. I implore you to reconsider your knowledge and think more critically about your arguments.
Lastly – dairy cows are not “raped.” Artificial insemination does not equal rape. It is actually a fairly normal process in animal science and MANY animals would not be able to reproduce without it. It is painless for the animal to experience and the process is overseen by vets and qualified professionals.(source) It also helps with securing a safe reproduction in endangered animals. (source)
If you continue to imply that safely inseminating animals is the same as rape, then you owe a 10 page hand written apology to every single human being who has ever been sexually assaulted. You also should explain to them why you think that the brutal, humiliating way their body was forcibly violated was exactly the same experience felt by a cow.
Here’s a homestead dairy cow with a arm up her ass
Please tell me these animals are not being violated in any way
Lol. Okay dokey.
So the cow isn’t being fisted for shits and giggles, you soggy almond. The actual process of artificially inseminating is less violent and invasive than a 2000lb bull mating with her. It’s also easier on the owner because there’s less risk of the cow being injured when you do it yourself. When you’re invested in your animals, you want to make sure they are as comfortable and safe as possible. This process is easier for the cow than naturally mating. So really, they’re doing the cow a favor. Also, even if they weren’t inseminating her, a vet would still have to stick his hand up there occasionally to examine her lady bits and make sure she’s healthy. But you’d rather her suffer and potentially die from a disease than be “raped” for a minute.
As for a bull – again, this process is less stressful for the bull than to let him naturally mate and is safer for him. It’s also MUCH safer for the handlers, since bulls can easily become dangerous. I won’t go into more detail since clearly you’re not going to listen to me anyway and had already made your decision when you opened this reblog and decided that you refused to be educated.
Please keep your ridiculous, idiotic, and ignorant vegan propaganda out of the fishblr and animalblr tags. And also, go outside. Have a good day.
Jesus Christ, I knew more about animals than OP does when I was six. This is honestly scary.
Also dairy cows make more milk than a calf could possibly drink. Even if they kept their calves they would still need to be milked. Some women suffer from oversupply when they lactate and their babies can’t drink all that so they pump, all dairy cows were bred to have oversupply so they too have to be pumped.
Since I’m a bee scientists and no one’s really touched of the bee part; bees have been selectively bred to create an excess in honey. The fact that you think beekeepers take the food stores that bees need over winter is laughable because beekeepers don’t want to kill off their hives. That makes zero sense.
If the excess honey is not harvested it also runs the risk of the hive swarming and leaving the hive box, so not only have you lost your bees, but they’ve probably gone and taken up estate in a place that’s going to harm humans or wild animals.
Beekeeping is a complex process that requires I love for bees, and I’m sick to death of people who’ve never seen a hive box let alone understand the first thing about keeping bees or the industry, spreading nonsense.
If you aren’t educated or experienced in a subject then no one needs or requires you to open your mouth and spew misinformation.
Yes, commercially caught fish (and privately caught ones) are very often cruelly treated. Concern for their welfare is usually nil. They’re typically thrown onto ice to suffocate or freeze to death. Fishermen catching fish for fun/their own dinner will usually just throw a caught fish into a container to suffocate. That is cruel and needs to change. And, yes, amounts of bycatch are huge. I won’t disagree with that. There need to be massive changes to the fishing industry and how fish in general are treated. They do feel pain, recent scientific studies and basic observation have shown this. They do not, however, all communicate through sound waves. Some do, and some form social bonds. Some do not.
Hens DO NOT eat unfertilized eggs. Hens that go broody will sit on unfertilized eggs until the eggs rot and burst under them. They will sit on fake eggs until they waste away if allowed to do so. When they go broody, they sit on eggs until they hear baby chicks or are removed from the nest for long enough that they stop being broody. When they are not broody, they ignore eggs. Any good diet for laying hens provides enough nutrients to compensate for the lost eggs, especially when a calcium supplement (oystershell, usually) is provided for them to pick at if they want. You do NOT want your hens eating whole eggs, because they don’t understand what an egg is. If hens get into the habit of breaking and eating whole eggs, they’ll often eat any eggs that are laid, fertilized or not.
Yes, factory farms cut the beak tips off chicks. No, it’s not done with heat, usually with clippers or a saw. Yes, this is cruel. It is not, however, to prevent egg eating. It’s because they’re kept in such crowded conditions that their beaks have to be cut to prevent them inflicting serious damage on each other when they fight.
Are farmed chickens cruelly treated? Sometimes. Do extremely high-yield egg layers frequently suffer from reproductive cancer and have a shortened lifespan? Yes. Does that mean that the entire concept of raising chickens for eggs is inherently cruel? No. Chickens, domesticated chickens that lay upwards of 200 eggs a year, can live long and healthy lives if properly fed.
The “example” video of bovine AI features an extremely inept human. Watch a video of properly done AI. The cows seem, at most, annoyed, and may not even notice. Besides that, have you seen how most animals mate? In many mammal species, the male has to catch and hang onto the female. Ducks are also startlingly rough with each other. This is a survival strategy, ensuring that only fit males can reproduce, and is good for the species but rough on the female. If animals could be raped, most female members of many animal species would be visibly traumatized. Animals do not understand the concept of rape. Again, watch ducks- the male will jump on a female and hold onto her neck feathers for several moments, with the female attempting to get free the entire time. When the male lets go, the female will escape, shuffle her feathers, and behave as if nothing happened. She may avoid a particularly aggressive male, but won’t act afraid of or overly aggressive towards male ducks. The concept of violation is a uniquely human concept, animals don’t have the self-awareness to feel anything like it.
Hunting deer in the US, hunting kangaroos in Australia – both are necessary. We killed almost all their natural predators, but that doesn’t stop them from breeding (deer usually have twin fawns mind). They deplete their food resources and it leads to deer slowly dying of starvation, which is much worse than being shot imo. While we shouldn’t have killed all our apex predators, hindsight isn’t exactly useful in these situations. Death by predation has always been an important part of nature, but without any predators I don’t take issue with humans taking charge. Nature isn’t “pro-life” as it were – things have to die to maintain a balance. Also, hunters give a lot of money for conservation causes – they want to keep being able to hunt. I don’t hunt personally but I live in the Midwest where just about everyone else does and I don’t have a big problem with it.
I heard of a case of some people who owned houses together on a farm. This farm had a number of wild blesbok and some jackals. The majority of the property owners refused to have the jackals culled even when they attacked sheep on the neighboring farms. They also refused to have the blesbok even when the herd had more rams than ewes. One of the property owners was the veterinarian that told his story. He and a friend found a blesbok that had gotten stuck between two electric fences, the animal had run up and down the fence the whole night. They caught and released it, exhausted, back onto the property. It was killed the same day and it’s carcass was consumed in 2 days. That same year, every blesbok calf that was born, was killed by jackals before it was a week old. Only then did the property owners consent to jackal culling. More than 20 animals were culled and even then some remained.
Humans have interfered so much in nature, changing ecosystems and putting up fences. It would be unethical to just leave nature to sort itself out after we wiped out its normal structures. This is why I have no problem with hunting for the sake of population control.
Back when I lived in Minnesota there was one year where they PAID people to hunt deer. They paid YOU to get a deer tag and hunt a deer. They even had rangers hunt deer and donate the meat to local zoos and homless shelters. This is because the deer had overpopulated so badly that you would see a dead one every 100 yards on the road. They were so overpopulated that they were just dying everywhere. Then the eagles and scavangers would have a party on the roads and guess what, more roadkill. It was really really sad to see. And it’s all because people killed off most of the wolf and coyote population. And still to this day they insist on letting people hunt the miniscule number of wolves in the state.
So I’ve seen the bad side and the good side of hunting all in one year. The side that is just for money and the side that is meant to help the environment.
This is why I’m against hunting things like coywolves. After hundreds of years a capable predictor is finally making it’s way back into the ecosystem to help control prey populations. Even if it is a “new” species it’s still a part of nature.
There needs to be a lot of control and regulation over hunting. And there is. But I think money will always have more priority over actual conservation efforts sometimes.
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