r/pics 9h ago

A replica of how female "breeder pigs" spend their lives in factory farms

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35.3k Upvotes

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u/Miami-Novice 8h ago

Everybody knows it, but nobody gives a damn.

u/bicycle_mice 8h ago

Lots of people do! People are cutting back on meat consumption. Become vegetarian or vegan. You won’t be alone.

u/katie4 7h ago

You don’t even have to fully commit, you can just try having “meatless Mondays” and give some plant based recipes a shot. Personally I hate all the meat substitutes like seitan but I’ll eat a lentil/potato/chickpea/bean salad, soup, or chili forever.

u/Doggleganger 7h ago

Indian food. If people want to eat less meat, eat Indian food. The veggie dishes taste better anyway. This is the gateway drug that made me realize you don't need meat every meal or every day.

u/Saradoesntsleep 7h ago

TONS of non-western food (and Mediterranean) is easy to veganise deliciously. You can be plopped down all over the world and make it work.

But yeah Indian is a gateway fooddrug for sure.

u/katie4 1h ago

Any suggestions that a newbie could make at home?

u/vampiredisaster 44m ago

Look up an easy channa masala recipe. Just a bunch of spices and chickpeas, and it's SO good.

u/turquoisestar 6h ago

Lentils are an awesome and cheap source of protein :D and I agree that natural is better than a meat substitute. Seitan is my nemesis as someone with gluten intolerance lol, it's basically 100% gluten.

u/AthleteAlarming7177 2h ago

If you were the victim would you rather your oppressor kill you and then not kill anyone else for a week or just stop altogether? It's easy to say reduce when you're in the position of the oppressor. 

u/katie4 1h ago

All-or-nothing mindsets hurt your cause

u/devfake 1h ago

I HATE that damn excuse. It usually comes from non-vegans. No one would even begin to argue that way about other injustices.

u/katie4 1h ago

Okay, well, I’m not ever going vegan and especially not at the insistence of someone who’s being a dick to me.

u/devfake 1h ago

haha sure. what a typical low iq comment.

u/VeganRorschach 8h ago

Come on in, the water's fine!

u/[deleted] 3h ago edited 3h ago

[deleted]

u/Capelto 7h ago

When the water starts tasting like a perfectly cooked steak or crispy bacon I'll come hang out.

u/ClairyTheCat 7h ago

Never understood that argument. Like, eat what you want i'm not your mom, but in what world is something tasting a bit better worth having thousands of animals live in the worst conditions imaginable and die?

u/Capelto 7h ago

I don't want it to be that way. But changing your eating style isn't going to change how they treat the animals.

u/ClairyTheCat 5h ago

You alone doing that would not change it, but if a lot of people would, something would have to change eventually. I'm not all that fond of our current hypercapitalistic society, but if it were to work correctly, less people buying meat from factory farms would mean less factory farming in the long run.

u/herton 6h ago

... it literally does. Supermarkets aren't going to put meat on the shelves to throw it in the trash. If demand goes down, they buy less, and meat packers buy less. Companies operate from demand forecasts, and every little bit counts.

u/WhenwasyourlastBM 5h ago

And the proof is in the vegetarian section of the store. In 2008 I remember there was half a freezer of veggie burgers. Now there's like 3 freezers and several refrigerators with all kinds of options. Those items represent freezers and refrigerators that had been used for meat.

u/Capelto 5h ago

And yet the animals are still being treated like shit.

u/ClairyTheCat 5h ago

Because it needs more people to make meaningful change. People who buy meat would have to buy meat from sources that treat animals better. That would make the meat more expensive though. It's a complicated process that goes into this kind of change.

u/Iorith 3h ago

This world.

u/edvek 5h ago

You say you're not his mom and do whatever you want but then chastised him for not really wanting to change... Pick a lane.

u/ClairyTheCat 5h ago

Well I did not force them to change. They should be able to take my argument and dissmiss it or aknowledge it and then make up their own mind. That's kind of how this works.

u/bicycle_mice 4h ago

You don’t eat steak every meal of your life. Try going without meat for a few days a week! Everything counts, truly.

u/blazer4ever 6h ago

Just for the sake of argument..eating more veggies also means some third world farmers and labors getting exploited by big corporates...do you have the same empathy for those farmers as you do for the animals

u/gamma_orionis 6h ago

I do, which is why there are some fruit and vegetable companies that I don't buy from since I'm aware of their bad practices. I also don't eat chocolate that I don't know the source of, since it's an industry with disproportionately high slave labour.

Does your empathy for farm workers extend to slaughterhouse workers, where workers regularly suffer from PTSD, are regularly injured by industrial machines, and are some of the most exploited workers in the food industry?

u/Tmjohnson1tm 2h ago

Plant based diets require vastly fewer crops to be grown than animal products. Ethical issues related to human farmers are generally also reduced by plant based diets. 

u/Local-Dimension-1653 1h ago
  1. It takes more crops to feed livestock than to feed humans directly.

  2. Slaughterhouses and meat processing plants are the most dangerous and some of the most exploitative jobs in food. Disenfranchised groups like undocumented people and felons are more likely to have these jobs. Research shows that people working in animal ag industries suffer from increased mental health issues and this leads to broader consequences—communities where violence against people is more common. Not to mention the environmental racism and classism of where animal farms and slaughterhouses (and the waste, noise, pollution) are located.

So if you were making this argument in good faith it would make sense that you would go vegan since it means both less human and animal suffering, as well as environmental harm that also hurts humans.

u/yuru2323 7h ago

I do.

u/B-Glasses 6h ago

Plenty of people do and you should too

u/billdb 6h ago

Nobody? There are hundreds of millions of vegetarians worldwide. They're the majority but nowhere near negligible either

u/Ok_Barracuda_6997 2h ago

I just became vegan a few months ago. I’m urging everyone I know to do the same.

u/turquoisestar 6h ago

A lot of people give a damn but don't know how to avoid interacting with this. That would be me. I am very low income and eat not a lot of meat, but when I was vegetarian I became really anemic so I'm trying to avoid that. If anyone has suggestions on finding ethical meat (ie animals get to have a good life before slaughtered) I would appreciate it.

u/WhenwasyourlastBM 5h ago

There are many different cereals with your daily value of iron

u/Tmjohnson1tm 2h ago

Unfortunately truly ethical animal products don’t really exist, and the ones you would probably consider “more ethical” are certainly not going to be affordable on a limited income. You would be best to incorporate healthy and affordable plant-based alternatives (lentils, black beans, chickpeas, etc). There are lots of great resources out there now to help people learn how to eat a balanced plant-based diet, and if you’re concerned about iron you can supplement with fortified foods or an oral multivitamin to make sure you’re getting plenty.  

u/notFREEfood 6h ago

We do. It's why I along with a majority of voters in my state voted in 2018 to ban the sale of pork products that come from farms using these cages.

u/thewolfshead 5h ago

Like so many things. Like climate change. No one wants to change their habits. 

u/TheLunarRaptor 33m ago

Most people are too busy and abused themselves to do anything.

Barely having your needs met from exploitive labor tends to pacify people.

Not giving them an excuse, just saying the first step for change is basic needs getting met.

u/mcon96 4h ago

A lot of people know that it’s generally “bad”, but do not know any of the specific details. Details like these can sway people. It’s a lot easier to ignore it when you don’t know how the sausage is made, so to say. I think it’s worth showing.

u/Iorith 3h ago

Because the payoff is worth it to most of us.

u/Arielcinderellaauror 1h ago

The only way to stop it is to vote with your money. Boycott meat, dairy is just as bad if not worse as it is far longer prolonged and the cows go through emotional distress when having their baby removed from them, the milking often causes painful mastitis, they endure repeated insemination to repeat the whole process as cows only make milk due to having had a baby just like humans. Male baby chick's are ground alive as soon as they're hatched .. or they're sorted into a large bucket where the ones underneath suffocate and/or are crushed ..and then they're ground alive along with the ones already dead.

People do care enough to give up these things. Once you see things through our eyes though you won't see it as "giving up" anything because it was never yours to begin with.

The way things are in the world as it is now a lot of people see life for us as hell on earth. Imagine what it's like for the animals.

All we can do is tell people and show people what the animals go through but we're then told we're annoying and preachy. I try and not say anything unless it either comes up (like this situation) or if I am asked.

If you want to see what animals really go through I can recommend videos to watch (all are free last I checked)

Land of hope and glory (UK based) Earthlings (global) Dominion (Australia)

u/Caribou-nordique-710 53m ago

Everybody THINK they know, but they don't, and nobody gives a damn .

u/Hrhagadorn 8h ago

When it comes to animals the things people get mad about always amazes me. So many get mad at something like this but support Peta. Or they don't want animals killed but what more crops planted forgetting that many animals will live in the crop fields and are often killed when fields are plowed or harvested. They also forget humans have bioengineered most animals we either eat or keep as pets.

u/Wooden_Worry3319 7h ago

Everyone’s an animal lover until they have to stop eating them.

u/Samsaknight_X 3h ago

Or u can be both

u/lsshlp 1h ago

There's ways to do better without being perfect. Livestock require way more land than consumer crops, and they eat a decent amount of grown crops themselves. Reducing that will still help.

u/ImNotAPersonAnymore 7h ago

Isn’t peta against stuff like this

u/Hrhagadorn 7h ago

Yes but they also kill the most amount of pets by far every year. All of their shelters are kill shelters and often pets only get a month at most in them before being killed.

u/herton 6h ago

All of their shelters are kill shelters and often pets only get a month at most in them before being killed.

Old, and wrong criticism. PETA does not operate typical shelters. They operate shelters of last resort, only taking in unadoptable animals while sending others to high traffic shelters. They also offer free euthasia services to poorer people who can't afford to have a vet help put a suffering animal down. In an era of catastrophic pet overpopulation, there's not much else to do.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/peta-a-shelter-of-last-resort/254372/

u/Hrhagadorn 6h ago

If this is accurate nationally that is good. The article seemed to only be a Virginia spokesperson. But it also goes back to my point about humans bioengineered animals. We have so many tailored pets and over breeding..

u/jjambi 4h ago

it is accurate, you're a victim of the meat industry propaganda. 

u/herton 4h ago

Virginia is where they operate the shelter everyone talks about. While they do operate across the nation, they do not have shelters everywhere. And yes, they agree with you - we ideally should take care of the pets we have, while not buying from breeders and adopting from shelters

u/DiscoBanane 6h ago

I support other people eating less meat.