alt Hacker NewsWell it's kinda whataboutism, but I made a similar comment on a video about an environmental crime (a copper mine had dumped an entire lake's worth of toxic sludge into a valley).
The author of the mini documentary said something about how deeply disturbed he was and how he really thought humans were better than this.
I thought that was kind of funny since, yeah the sludge lake is nasty as hell (and if the dam holding it back breaks, it's not gonna be good), but I had to think, maybe he should visit a factory farm for his next video.
That's a far worse horror, and regular folks contribute to it every day without thinking. (I forget the exact number, but something like 80+ billion animals live through that every year.) So I think it should get a little more attention.
(Not vegan, just think we shouldn't be awful towards animals.)
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in civilized countries, industrially farmed animals live short, uneventful lives devoid of hunger and pain, injury and disease, heat and cold, then die instant, painless deaths. in the wild, the kind of animals we farm rarely get to die of old age - most end up being mauled and eaten alive by predators.
their lives are only bad if you assume they possess adult human level of conscience, which they obviously don't.
The issue associated with whataboutism is that it is a deflection strategy. It aims to steer the focus away from the issue at hand. Commonly regarded as intentional manipulation or lack of adherence to social conversation norms.
You got it right: around ~70 billion land animals in 2013, 1-2.7 trillion fishes [0] and 25 trillion shrimps [1]
But can you compare: - a fish that lived 1 year wild then died by pressure or asphyxia in a net during 15 minutes - a chicken that lived 40 days in a cage
Instead of raw count, the Welfare Footprint Institute [2] propose a framework:
> quantify animal welfare by systematically measuring animals’ affective experiences—specifically, the intensity and duration of their negative (painful) and positive (pleasurable) states […]
0 https://considerveganism.com/counter/
1 https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/shrimp-the-anima...
2 https://welfarefootprint.org/analytical-approach/