Nothing against vegans btw, I'm cutting dowen on my meawt consumptwuon OWO. And yes, I am a leftist, yes, I eat meat, GET OVER IT. Not everyone is as PRIVILEGED as you vegans!

  • star_wraith [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 years ago

    My domestic situation makes it not possible at the moment (it's more complicated than just "my partner's making a meal with meat"). But when I'm responsible for my own food choices (usually 2X a day), I do vegetarian. I would do vegan but I will be honest, I don't feel the same compunction about eggs and don't know where I stand on dairy.

    • Good_Username [they/them,e/em/eir]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Ok, so, I won't touch your domestic situation as I don't know enough about it to say anything.

      I will talk about eggs and dairy though. They have exactly the same problems as meat. Namely, they're unhealthy, bad for the environment, and incredibly horrible for the animals who are exploited and then killed to produce them.

      I don't know as much about egg production because I've never liked eggs so it was simple to cut them out of my diet. But here's what I would ask you: female chickens lay all the eggs. What do you think happens to the males, who are useless to this whole process? Did you guess ground up alive the day that they hatch? Because that's the answer. It's pretty horrific. Also, the female chickens don't have a great life either. Chickens were never meant to lay an egg a day, they've been selectively bred to do so and it's quite hard on their bodies. Impacted eggs happen frequently, they're almost always nutritionally deficient in some way, just bad news all around. Not to mention, the vast majority, like 90-something percent of eggs are from factory farms, so the egg-laying chickens live in the same squalid, over-crowded, miserable situations as the meat chickens. So yeah, eggs are no good.

      For dairy I know quite a bit more because I loved cheese before I went vegan and it was really hard at first not to eat cheese. I actually remember, the day that I'd say I went from eating plant-based to being a vegan was the day I really, really wanted some mac and cheese, so I googled something like "why is dairy bad?" A couple of hours and a good cry later, I was over my cheese addiction and haven't touched the stuff since.

      So here's the life of a dairy cow. They are born and spend less than 48 hours with their mother before being taken away and separated based on sex, because again, male cows don't produce milk. The males become veal (so if you're anti-veal, you should be anti-dairy, veal wouldn't exist without dairy). The females live in tiny huts drinking fake milk-like product made from powder and warm water. When I was young I actually helped my next-door neighbor feed the dozens of young calves that lived in her backyard. I'm intimately, personally aware of this stage in a young dairy cow's life. It sucks. The huts are disgusting, the calves barely have room to turn around, they can't frolic or hang out in a herd (as cows do, they're creatures meant for life in a herd). Also, the fake milk is gross. It smells awful, stains anything it gets into contact with, gets gloopy and stuck in the nipples in the bottles. Just, ugghhh.

      And yet, for dairy cows, that's about as good as it gets! At least they're outside and not being milked several times a day. Once a cow is old enough to be impregnated, the next stage in her life begins. She is impregnated and starts producing milk. (By the way, cows are mammals, so they have to be pregnant or recently pregnant in order to produce milk. Dairy cows are basically constantly pregnant.) The vast majority of dairy cows live in factory farms and almost never get to see the sun. They just stand around in their own poop and get milked. And, like with chickens, cows were never supposed to produce as much milk as they do. It's very common for cows to have lesions on their udders as well as more serious conditions. And as long as the milk they're producing doesn't have too much pus and blood in it, it's all good! (Seriously, there are FDA standards for how much blood in milk is too much. I'd say any blood is too much, but that's not what the standards say.)

      So now our cow has been pregnant for 9-10 months. It's time to give birth. Once the baby cow is born, they spend less than 48 hours with their mother, as I said above. Here's the thing: mother cows care about their babies. They care enough so that when the baby is taken away, the mother suffers, emotionally. It's incredibly common for the mother cows to cry and scream when their babies are taken from them. And it's also quite easy to find videos of mother cows chasing after trucks and 4-wheelers in which ranchers are carrying their stolen babies. Let me say this again:mother cows feel an emotional bond with their babies, who are stolen from them within 48 hours of birth, causing the mother great anguish. It's fucking horrific.

      After a couple of weeks, the dairy cow is impregnated again and the cycle repeats. Now the natural lifetime of a cow is about 20 years. Dairy cows live for 4-5 years. Their bodies are so exhausted and broken after yearly pregnancies that they stop producing enough milk to be profitable after just a quarter of their natural lifespan. So they're killed and turned into cheap meat, frequently pet food since their flesh isn't considered tasty enough for human consumption.

      So yeah, if you read all this, thank you. Hopefully you understand a little more now why eggs and dairy are just as bad as, if not worse than, meat.

      • NPa [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Some dairy producers here in Denmark have started milking the cow only after the calf has gotten its fill. They don't separate them. Would this be an acceptable alternative? Of course, it will still be damaging to the environment and the yield is only 10% or so of conventional milk production.

      • star_wraith [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        I read it all, it's definitely something I'm gonna be thinking about.