#industrial animal agriculture

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Grist:

Recent data analysis conducted by a human rights advocacy organization found that nearly a dozen international finance institutions directed over $3 billion to animal agriculture in 2023. The majority of those funds — upwards of $2.27 billion — came from development banks and went towards projects that support factory farming, a practice that contributes to greenhouse gas emissions as well as biodiversity loss. 

The researchers behind the analysis are calling on the development banks — which include the International Finance Corporation, or IFC, part of the World Bank — to scrutinize the climate and environmental impacts of the projects they fund, especially in light of the World Bank’s climate pledges.

The analysis comes from the International Accountability Project, which reviewed disclosure documents from 15 development banks and the Green Climate Fund, established in 2010 at COP16 to support climate action in developing countries. Researchers found that 10 of those development banks, as well as the Green Climate Fund, financed projects directly supporting animal agriculture. The data serves as the basis for a new white paper from Stop Financing Factory Farming, or S3F, a coalition of advocacy groups that seeks to block development banks from funding agribusiness, released last month. 

The International Accountability Project, which advocates for human and environmental rights, hopes that its findings will pressure international financial institutions like the World Bank to see the contradiction in financing industrial animal agriculture projects while also promising to help reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions.

Agriculture accounts for a significant portion of global greenhouse gas emissions, so much so that research has suggested limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) is not possible without changing how we grow food and what we eat. Within the agricultural sector, livestock production is the main source of greenhouse emissions — as ruminants like cows and sheep release methane into the atmosphere whenever they burp. 

[thatveganwhiterose]

Tumblr, I promise you that animal agriculture does not need you licking their boots.

[horseimagebarn]

https://archive.is/LAwFB <- Here is a link to a 2023 National Geographic article about horse slaughter in the Americas. You might be interested to know that thoroughbreds actually make up only 10% of horses exported for slaughter. The vast majority of retired racehorses in the US and the UK that aren't kept for breeding purposes go on to second careers or are simply kept as companion animals. This is *NOT* to say that the racing industry doesn't have horrific problems, but rather that even when they don't succeed on the racetrack, the horses are still worth more alive than they are as food. Quarter horses, on the other hand...YEESH. Let's just say the Jockey Club keeps meticulous track of how many thoroughbreds are foaled every year. The AQHA...doesn't.

for context this ask is referring to this post i made yesterday

i have much to say on this and ended up just rambling about horse which i love to do when given an intriguing ask so here we go

punctuation and capitalization usage for ease of understanding GO!

sorry if this makes no sense i just went crazy and hate proofreading

Thoroughbreds are not the only racehorse, their racing is just the most popular kind in the States. Quarter horses are actually a bit faster than thoroughbreds, but that makes their races quicker and less entertaining to rich betters. Standardbreds and arabians are also popular racers, but standardbreds are used more in harness racing, and arabians for endurance. 

"Pinhooking" is a popular thing in horse racing. According to horseologyinc.com, "Pinhooking is a fancy term that describes the practice of buying a horse at one stage of development and selling them at the next." This makes it difficult to track every single horse's purchase history, because there are just so many transactions being made. The Jockey Club can track births, sure, and it can do its best to track deaths, but the births of potential successful racehorses are much more interesting to the organization than the deaths of former ones. Even if deaths were monitored with the same vigor, horses would slip through the cracks, and oh brother, they already do. It's impossible to expect an organization that facilitates the often-fatal exploitation of horses to be stalwart advocates of its victims' aftercare. Even if they witnessed the slaughter of thoroughbreds in Canadian slaughterhouses, what's the difference between a horse that died for meat and a horse that died for the entertainment of the bourgeoisie? They both end up dead, and the Jockey Club doesn't deal in dead horses, it deals in eventually dead horses.

Many racehorses are later sold out of the industry once they've served their two potential purposes: racing and breeding. Once a horse is sold to a private owner that isn't involved in the racing industry—including the Amish, who often buy ex-racers as work animals—the Jockey Club's influence, if there is any, can falter. Sure, some are treated with a lavish retirement at Old Friends or Akindale or even Puerto Rico, but many, many horses do not have that privilege. Horses do not have the pull (pun intended) they once did in American society. They are a luxury to most, as their cost of upkeep and maintenance often outweighs their function when compared to machinery that performs similar jobs. Kill buyers—those who buy horses in bulk to export for slaughter—buy horses private owners either cannot or do not want to keep investing in their companion. More often than not, they don't register their purchase of horses for slaughter with the Jockey Club, nor really with anyone, as laws surrounding horse slaughter and export are murky at best and nonexistent at worst. I want to provide you more evidence of this, but the Jockey Club's website keeps timing out for me, so I'll try later.

USA Today estimates that 7500 thoroughbreds are slaughtered for meat each year. When compared to the 57000 total horses slaughtered annually, this resembles the 10% number you gave me. Compare this to the 600 thoroughbreds estimated to die each year in race-related accidents. The racing industry is constantly criticized for its mistreatment of its horses and the deadliness of its sport, and yet, slaughter claims over 12 times the amount of thoroughbreds each year—likely more. I personally believe that it is very unlikely that kill buyers accurately judge the breeds of the horses they slaughter. These buyers process thousands of horses each year and transport them in large quantities. They do not care what breed the horses they process are. It's the meat that matters. Similarly, these kill buyers are not checking the lip of every horse they buy to see if it's a former racer. Some might, if they're looking to "ransom" some of their horses off—sell the horses to non-slaughterhouse buyers for much higher than the ~60 cents/pound they get for their meat—but it's unlikely. Mike McBarron, a long-time kill buyer in Texas, told USA Today Sports, "It’s just a job to me. I mean, I don’t attach myself to them." He went on to say that he has "bought and sold retired racehorses for slaughter [and] sent tens of thousands of horses to slaughter plants," generating "millions of dollars in revenue." To kill buyers like McBarron, these horses are products to be processed and shipped, not beings whose personalities and histories are meant to be known, or whose breeds are significant to their new function: becoming meat.

And this is just thoroughbreds. Quarter horses are the most popular breed of horse in the U.S., and, like you said, there's even less regulation of the sales of other breeds. I just think it's unfair to say that the Jockey Club cares enough about its horses that they don't end up in slaughterhouses.

By the way, I don't think it is morally wrong to eat horses. Cows, pigs, goats, sheep, chickens, and other livestock animals can have just as much personality as your average horse and are not afforded the public outcry horses receive when it comes to their slaughter. Horse lives are not worth more than other "farm" animals just because they are viewed as companion animals while the rest are not. I instead have a problem with the fact that horses used for meat are often severely mistreated, just as they are in the racing industry. Regulations have been put in place to improve the lives of many meat animals, and yet, the government largely shuffles its feet when it comes to regulating the production of horse meat. This encourages kill buyers to do shady business and mistreat their animals, exploiting a loophole in the government's weak implication of a ban on horse meat: in their 2006 budget, U.S. Congress decided to simply forbid the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) from using taxpayers' money to inspect horse slaughter plants. This sort of banned horse slaughter by preventing horse slaughter plants from being USDA inspected or approved, making them functionally illegal, as they require regulation, but meant that kill buyers could instead simply collect horses and then sell them to slaughterhouses in Mexico and Canada for slaughter. This encourages a shitty, shady business of horse exportation, leading to horrible temporary holding conditions as horses wait to be transported across country borders in equally horrible trucks and trailers. If the industry was legal and faced the same regulations as other types of meat production, these horses would have much better lives. Though I am very aware of the many, many flaws of the meat industry, denying horses even those basic protections that are applied to meat animals, especially large ones like cows, only encourages abuse and mistreatment. Big advancements in animal welfare in the meat industry have been made in the past few decades, and it is not the ethical win many think it is to force horses to live in horrible, barely-legal conditions because it is hard to accept the facts that:

Horses are large, hard-to-care-for animals whose main function in American society has mostly become obsolete 

Even in their current major societal role, racing, they face massive amounts of abuse and mistreatment

There are a LOT of horses in the world (so many, in fact, that they sometimes become pests or invasive species)

Every single horse will not have the privilege of a forever home that can provide for them the utmost care

Some horses can live satisfactory lives as PROPERLY CARED FOR meat animals if given the chance

Horse meat is a valid, valued food source for many people

I know it's crazy for The Horse Blog to say they support horse meat production and consumption, but honestly, I've tried my best to express on this blog that no being is greater than another and all things deserve equal love and appreciation. It would be hypocritical of me to condemn horse meat consumption when I myself eat the meat of cows, pigs, and chickens, who are just as valuable as horses in the grand scheme of the universe. All living things have value that is not contingent on their perceived purpose or use. Meat consumption is a necessity for many in the world, both human and inhuman, and the consumption of meat on its own is not unethical. To live is to consume, be it meat, vegetation, oxygen, water, time, space, etc. and I believe that we should strive not to abhor consumption but do it ethically, in alignment with our world's fragile, functional balance of creation and destruction, and with utmost respect for that which we consume. Horses deserve that respect.

anyway yeah feel free to engage with me on this i like discussing stuff like this and spent way too long thinking and researching and stuff

Sources: "Horses go from racetracks to slaughterhouses: 'It's just a job to me'" by Josh Peter with USA Today

"Horse racing deaths mount as states spend billions to keep tracks alive" by Frank Esposito and Stephen Edelson with USA Today Network

"What is Pinhooking? The History and Practice of Pinhooking." from horseologyinc.com

"Horse Racing Fact Sheet" from fundforhorses.org

ps this wasnt made as an attack on you anon or anything i like to write horse essay style posts sometimes like this and this because its honestly super fun for me and i love receiving these types of asks i am always happy to talk about horse stuff at length like this because i end up learning a lot about these subjects too as i go

[peripateticavian]

H5N1 bird flu outbreak response could be hampered by USDA, FDA turf war

[homeofhousechickens]

Things I like

-Most birds are active and in good spirits

-no beak mutilation

-bedding in the indoor area looks clean and cozy and good for dust batheing

-plenty of natural safe enrichment. You don't want very tall perches for battery hens they could break a bone.

-Communal roosting

-cockerels used for meat rather than culled at a day old

-use of solar for energy

-when the birdflu isn't a threat they have outdoor pastures the birds can access anytime during foraging time.

-natural daylight

Things I don't like

-birds seem dirty due to communal roosting situation, they are getting pooped on basically. Changing the layout to a almost look like stairs would probably help.

-some birds still show evidence of feather picking, obviously not as bad as American battery farms but always room for improvement. They didn't have as much evidence of this when they could go outside but unfortunately they can't right now for their own safety.

-their feed regime might contribute to the feather picking behavior and poor feather quality if they are truly only using byproducts in their feed. Wheat,soy, and corn byproducts are harder on a chickens gut microbiome than better ingredients.

Things to note-

-Leghorns are more prone to neurotic behaviors than other breeds (this can happen when you take a flighty land race and turn it into a production animal) if they had a different production breed they might see less feather picking. I think they chose pure production leghorns on purpose for sustainability reasons so can't fault them for that.

Their feathers will likely always look a bit shit. White feathers are structurally weaker than pigmented ones and that goes pretty much for all birds.

The feathers you see on the ground are just molted not from plucking of anything like that.

What do you think fellow chicken keepers?

[fjordfolk]

people really be out there like “I wonder what this breed called a Shetland sheepdog was used for historically? alas it’s impossible to tell, we may never know” 🤦‍♀️

There is, believe it or not, some actual controversy regarding the breed origins and most of it (imo) stems from many people's mental image of a working sheepdog is a border collie, and not quite grasping that border collies are freaks and the way that we now work border collies didn't exist prior to the development of the border collie, and in some parts the way we keep SHEEP didn't exist prior to the border collie. There's also been some debate around old letters written by non-shetlanders after visiting the isles or talking to locals and having mmm interesting ideas of how people handled sheep over there. This leads to statements like:

Sheltie legs are too short to outrun sheep

They're also too small to grab the sheep and hold it (don't get me started)

A sheltie could never take sheep through a- (name specific type of herding trial)

Maybe they were actually placed with flocks on peripheral islands to keep watch for birds??

Shelties never existed and were made up in the late 1800s just for shetlanders to make money off of selling cute puppies to gullible tourists

There was an original sheepdog on Shetland but it was a much bigger dog (see reasons above) and the current sheltie was made up in the late 1800s, by breeding cavaliers to pomeranians and maybe a collie, just for shetlanders to sell puppies to tourists

...and so, clearly, they can't have been sheepdogs and we have No Clue what they were actually for (except scamming foreigners)

Meanwhile we know that traditional shepherding on Shetland relied on roaming sheep, keeping them off the property rather than on it (because that's where your crops are) and you'd only be rounding up your sheep a couple of times a year, and that island-bred shelties were smaller and spitzier type than even the current UK type.

[vegandude73]

[notwiselybuttoowell]

Former officials in the UN’s farming wing have said they were censored, sabotaged, undermined and victimised for more than a decade after they wrote about the hugely damaging contribution of methane emissions from livestock to global heating.

Team members at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) tasked with estimating cattle’s contribution to soaring temperatures said that pressure from farm-friendly funding states was felt throughout the FAO’s Rome headquarters and coincided with attempts by FAO leadership to muzzle their work.

The allegations date back to the years after 2006, when some of the officials who spoke exclusively to the Guardian on condition of anonymity wrote Livestock’s Long Shadow (LLS), a landmark report that pushed farm emissions on to the climate agenda for the first time. LLS included the first tally of the meat and dairy sector’s ecological cost, attributing 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions to livestock, mostly cattle. It shocked an industry that had long seen the FAO as a reliable ally – and spurred an internal clampdown by FAO hierarchy, according to the officials.

“The lobbyists obviously managed to influence things,” one ex-official said. “They had a strong impact on the way things were done at the FAO and there was a lot of censorship. It was always an uphill struggle getting the documents you produced past the office for corporate communications and one had to fend off a good deal of editorial vandalism.”

Serving and former FAO experts said that between 2006 and 2019, management made numerous attempts to suppress investigations into the cow/climate change connection. Top officials rewrote and diluted key passages in another report on the same topic, “buried” another paper critical of big agriculture, excluded critical officials from meetings and summits, and briefed against their work.

"There was substantial pressure internally and there were consequences for permanent staff who worked on this, in terms of their careers. It wasn’t really a healthy environment to work in,” said another ex-official.

Scientists also expressed concern about the way the FAO’s estimate of livestock’s overall contribution to emissions is continuing to fall. The 18% number that was published in 2006 was revised downwards to 14.5% in a follow-up paper, Tackling Climate Change Emissions in 2013. It is currently being assessed at about 11.2% based on a new “Gleam 3.0” model.

But many scientists plot farm emissions on a very different trajectory. One recent study concluded that greenhouse gas emissions from animal products made up 20% of the global total and a 2021 study found that the figure should be between 16.5% and 28.1%.

[sidewalkchemistry]

The whole world is obsessed today with cutting down plastic straw consumption. But the reality of it is, that if you take all the straws around the world, and you put them all in the ocean, that is still less than a tenth of a percent (0.1%) of the plastic that goes into the ocean every year. In fact, more than 40% of all the plastic that goes into the ocean is plastic fishing nets. - Vikas Garg in Let Us Be Heroes - The True Cost of Our Food Choices (2018)

[wanderingandfound]

After having a lot of trouble falling asleep, then a lot of trouble staying asleep, I have woken up earlier than I would like with a sore throat and a worryingly precarious mental state for first thing in the morning.

[plethoraworldatlas]

Critics of factory farming renewed demands for U.S. policy reforms on Tuesday in response to new federal data on the nation's agricultural activity, which is released every five years.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) put out its report about the 1.9 million farms and ranches that collectively spanned more than 880 million acres as of 2022—a loss of nearly 142,000 operations and over 20 million acres since 2017. The document features state tallies and other details including inventory and values for crops and livestock.

"The USDA's new data show that without policy changes, factory farms will continue to get bigger and bigger, wreaking havoc on public health, the environment, and the climate," warned Environmental Working Group (EWG) Midwest director Anne Schechinger.

...

Food & Water Watch (FWW), which also analyzed the new government data, found that "there are currently 1.7 billion animals raised on U.S. factory farms every year; an increase of 6% since 2017, 47% more than roughly 20 years ago in 2002.

"The group emphasized that "as factory farms take over, the number of small dairies raising animals outside the factory farm system plummeted, with barely one-third as many today compared to 20 years ago."

[watermelinoe]

and see how dialogue isn't possible when you block someone who doesn't even disagree with your movement, just with certain premises behind it? see how it doesn't allow for practicing harm reduction or nuance? when i'm struggling to get myself to eat anything at all, which can last for days or weeks at a time, what i do eat needs to count. sorry, i'm eating the cheese stick because it's the only thing that sounds palatable and it gives me seven grams of protein. sorry there's no room for women with eating disorders and deficiencies because "eat less animal products" isn't good enough when your ideology values non-human animals more than women's health. but of course the burden falls on women to make ourselves tired and weak while the male-led industry overproduces and overconsumes. at least you stayed true to your logically inconsistent, female-socialized emotion-based beliefs and allowed for zero compromise! there's no way your airtight ethical philosophy has blatant logical flaws at the slightest nudge of critical thought, the people who point out fallacies are just heartless!

[makerscockandballs]

if you think vegan food is just shit like quinoa and imported "exotic" foods you dont know jackshit about veganism outside of movie stereotypes and animal agriculture industry propaganda (which is a real thing, big surprise. capitalism is full of industry propaganda) and should inform yourself outside of that. read a fucking cookbook at this point.

[woodruff]

:(

[shame-kink]

my sympathy for vegans getting a flood of “DEBATE MEEEE” comments versus my frustration that their explanations and reasoning for vegan-ness still being fucking shit

[azeutreciathewicked]

Back to the bees, and here's something that'll be very uncomfortable:

Those almonds and orchard fruits everyone loves? Bee labor.

We wouldn't have the massive industrial cultivation of these favorite plant based foods without the use of industrial bee pollination. And that is one of the big contributors to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD): monocultures and lack of diverse diet for bees. Other factors also come into play: pesticides, especially neonicotinoids, the stress of being transported around to all the different orchards and farms as they come into season, and the massive exposure to bees from other colonies that happen in those places.

Honey is a byproduct of that industry - the main income for industrial beekeepers comes from pollinating all those almond (and other) trees so everyone (especially vegans) can have their almond milk. No bees, no almonds. Unless you want humans to do that work by hand (which is how it's done in China) for infinitesimal pay. These massive monocultures also are a big reason why wild bees (non-honeybees) and other pollinators (wasps are hugely diverse and get a bad rap, but most of them are friendly pollinators or eat pest insects) are struggling to survive too. They aren't able to consume a variety of foods that keep them healthy.

I'm not going to say you can't eat almonds and still be vegan. But everyone needs a bit of perspective and needs to stop fixating on one signal of virtue (refusing to eat honey) thinking that is sufficient, or even makes sense. It doesn't. Not consuming honey while chugging almond milk and eating orchard fruits not only does nothing to stop bee suffering, it continues to blindly support the very system that is hurting them.

It's harder to think in systems, and doing work to try to dismantle those systems doesn't feel as good or have immediate consequences. But that's what really needs to happen if you really want to make things better for pollinators of all sorts - honeybees and native bees and wasps.

We need to recognize the impacts of the massive, abusive industrial agriculture system and work to fix it (or present a viable alternative).

Sure, you may not be eating bee spit by avoiding honey, but you sure are drinking bee tears in your almond milk. Enjoy.

Vegans of tumblr, listen up. Harvesting agave in the quantities required so you dont have to eat honey is killing mexican long-nosed bats. They feed off the nectar and pollinate the plants. They need the agave. You want to help the environment? Go back to honey. Your liver and thyroid will thank you, as well. Agave is 90% fructose, which can cause a host of issues. Bye.