Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat

• LustyArgonianMana@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  The solution for meat eaters is something like a farm co-op where you can literally drive by your food and see how it is

  source

  • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    this is why i think chicken is the best meat, no other animal is so easy and normal to literally raise in your backyard, plus they can get a decent amount of their food from bugs and foodscraps

    it’s entirely feasible for basically everyone with a yard to own chickens and call the butcher when they get too old to lay eggs (or just near death), and this would make eggs basically free and meat very cheap, plus massive quantities of free fertilizer for farmers!

    source

    • LustyArgonianMana@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Yes, this is the gold standard (owning your own food sources) but owning your own land has become vanishingly rare these days

      source

      • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        there’s still a lot of people who live in a place with a yard, and if most of them come together to require the ability to keep chickens there then it’ll be untenable for that permission to be denied by HOAs/landlords/local government

        source
• chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  but it’s a lot easier to have free range chickens than it is to have cows doing the same.

  I don’t know about that, it’s pretty difficult to keep (what I would consider) genuinely free range chickens because of predators and various other factors, and the commercial definition of free range doesn’t necessarily guarantee a good quality of life. There’s also how meat chickens are mostly all a specific type of crossbreed that is perpetually hungry, prone to cannibalism and health problems, and not meant to live longer than a few months.

  But even if you could say that the average chicken raised for meat is better off than the average cow raised for meat, there’s still how you need vastly more of them for the same amount of meat, so if their lives are still a net negative and you’re weighing it by sum of individual experiences, it could be considered worse from a utilitarian perspective because of the numbers.

  source

  • Baguette@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Yea in fairness to (genuinely) free range, it’s probably best if chickens are raised in just not cages but still within an area a farmer can manage. I was thinking of free range as moreso outdoors, with a minimum area per livestock.

    For meat chickens, yes they probably have the lowest quality of life. The ones that aren’t stuffed in cages are usually not meat chickens though, but a different breed. I’d say they have a decent life because they’re not being stuffed full of steroids and are given space to roam.

    I’m not sure on bird flu. From what I’ve read, the conditions of meat chickens living in cages is the reason why bird flu spread so much. The chickens are so cramped, and so unsanitary that they essentially need to be pumped with antibiotics, which caused bird flu to develop a resistant strain. If companies weren’t so hellbent at maximizing value, providing just an increase in living space would have hindered the spread of bird flu.

    My perspective is that it’s more ethical to be able to provide a good quality of life for the animals you raise. One cow with a low quality of life imo is less ethical than a bunch of chickens with a decent quality of life, even if we consider numbers. If you can provide that to a cow, then yea it’s probably more ethical than a bunch of chickens. It’s just a lot easier to have a chicken live a good life than it is for a cow.

    This is all my perspective though

    source

    • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      the conditions of meat chickens living in cages is the reason why bird flu spread so much

      There is actually a bad epidemic in wild birds recently, and there is a big risk of it transferring from them to chicken flocks when they have access to the same space.

      One cow with a low quality of life imo is less ethical than a bunch of chickens with a decent quality of life, even if we consider numbers.

      I guess that makes sense, if you can make an animal’s life good overall, in that situation maybe it wouldn’t be a net negative to farm more of them. Though realistically I think it’s going to be very difficult to have any confidence you’re buying such meat at the grocery (if you can even afford the stuff claiming to be more ethical) and you’d probably have to raise the animals yourself for that.

      source