Thread 5022644

The federal government is carrying out a multi-part war on overwhelmingly popular state-level animal welfare laws. These laws include California’s Prop 12 https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_12,_Farm_Animal_Confinement_Initiative_(2018) and Massachusetts’ Question 3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Massachusetts_Question_3 which require egg laying hens, pigs, and other animals to have enough space to lie down, stand up, extend their limbs, and turn around. In other words, the federal government is trying to outlaw efforts by states to ban locking animals in cages too small to turn around in.

Of course, were a person to lock a dog in a crate too small to turn around in for its entire life, they’d be unquestionably jailed for animal abuse. But the federal government, under the pay of big agriculture, is trying to mandate that states allow animals to be treated like unfeeling objects, and subjected to grotesque cruelty.

Pigs are smarter than dogs! Does a pregnant mother deserve this? We wouldn’t treat serial killers this way, and we should not treat innocent animals that way either, whose crime is only having body parts that taste nice. America does not suffer from an excess of burdensome animal cruelty laws, but from a shocking absence of animal cruelty laws. Requiring animals be allowed to stand and move is just about the most minimal requirement conceivable. And across most of the country, locking an animal in a crate for its entire life where it can never turn around, stretch, or see the sun is perfectly legal. Such a dystopian life is the reality for most of the nation’s animals.

>>5022644 (OP)
What Battery Cages for Hens Mean for Welfare, Explained
There are multiple prongs to the federal government’s assault on state animal cruelty laws. First, the DOJ has sued California https://sentientmedia.org/trump-suing-to-overturn-prop-12/ in an attempt to overturn Prop 12. Second, Congress has been moving to sneak https://x.com/Lewis_Bollard/status/1948066292717764949 elimination of state level animal welfare laws into the farm bill. Despite 19 previous failed judicial attempts by the pork industry https://animalwellnessaction.org/supreme-court-swats-away-pork-industrys-latest-challenge-to-prop-12#:~:text=WASHINGTON%2C%20D.C.%20%E2%80%94%20Today%2C%20the,animal%20welfare%20law%20banning%20the to overturn state level animal welfare laws, they are still trying, and this time relying on their puppets in Washington, to whom they give millions of dollars https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/contrib?cycle=2024&ind=A efforts
to sneak such provisions into the farm bill are particularly worrisome. Elimination of state animal welfare laws would never pass on its own, so they’re hoping they can sneak it in to a popular law without much scrutiny.

These initiatives are wildly unpopular https://www.thepigsite.com/news/2021/01/wap-study-shows-that-american-consumers-are-becoming-more-aware-of-pig-welfare , with most Americans believing that pig gestation crates are morally unacceptable. They’re right. Pigs deserve better—they deserve our compassion. They are neither robots nor consumer products, but thinking, feeling creatures who can feel pain and sadness, joy and loss, and deserve more than a lifetime in a dark and filthy cage, unable to turn around or express their natural behaviors. It’s just as unacceptable to confine a pig in a crate for months as to confine a dog in a crate for months.

>>5022645
Fur farm investigation exposes immense suffering and disease risk in China | Humane World for Animals
In order to justify these draconian measures, big ag has to lie and mislead and distort. The recent Congressional hearing on state animal welfare laws was a Stalinesque show trial https://x.com/Lewis_Bollard/status/1948066292717764949 where not a single supporter of animal welfare laws was allowed to speak. The hearing peddled ridiculous lies from big ag, with no one to push back.

One particularly ludicrous charge was that if pregnant pigs weren’t locked in crates too small to turn around in, then they might step on and smush young piglets. Now, perhaps by this logic we should keep all pregnant women in a cage when giving birth, so that they don’t step on their children! But this is even more ludicrous, because the https://x.com/Lewis_Bollard/status/1948066301316088228 law only applied to pregnant pigs, not to ones giving birth! https://sentientmedia.org/gestation-crates/ It has quite literally no effect on piglets.

All the people bemoaning the horrific impact of such laws on small, local pig farmers worked for organizations representing https://x.com/Lewis_Bollard/status/1948066303320723625 huge pig factory farms. In fact, small pig farmers likely benefit, because it’s primarily the giant factory farms that occupy most of the pork market and lock pigs in gestation crates. If you’re a farmer who doesn’t keep animals confined in a cage too small to turn around in, then you only benefit from the laws.

Lilly Rocha https://docs.house.gov/committee/Calendar/ByEvent.aspx?EventID=118529 complained that “Proposition 12 is not something that the people of California understood when it was passed,” but instead was “a pet project of the very wealthy, financed by the Silicon Valley billionaires and Hollywood stars.”

I don't care. Give me the beef and the eggs

>>5022646
Apparently, the voters of California who overwhelmingly passed the initiative, were too stupid to understand a rather simple law, that kept pigs out of farrowing crates.
She also complained that such laws would “continue to dismantle the cultural and economic fabric of California’s communities, leaving families without access to their heritage and businesses on the brink of collapse,” and be a “detriment [to] its most diverse and vulnerable populations.”

This illustrates the way that woke corporate HR speak often acts as a smokescreen for corporate cruelty. There’s something particularly outrageous about complaining about an overwhelmingly popular initiative—including with ethnic minorities—that keeps pigs out of crates, on grounds that it is a detriment to California’s most vulnerable populations. There’s a special place in hell for those who use woke language about diversity to justify unspeakable cruelty against the most vulnerable population on the planet.

The genuinely vulnerable populations affected by these laws are the pigs who must spend the entire time they’re pregnant in a tiny crate because big agriculture is allowed to practice flagrant and horrifying cruelty without legal sanction. If it would be wrong to hit and kick a pig, how wrong must it be to inflict the vastly greater suffering of trapping them for months in a cage? Those who are against oppression are the ones trying to keep hens and pigs out of the ghastly cages.

The industry also claimed that state animal welfare laws have majorly raised the costs of animal products. In reality, however, the https://thehumaneleague.org/article/prop-12-prices-consumer-investigation? impact on animal product costs was fairly https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/jpur/vol13/iss1/11/? minor. The overwhelming reason for elevated recent egg prices was the bird-flu https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/420978/proposition-12-california-eggs-pork-doj-lawsuit outbreak,

>>5022650
as a result of the industry cruelly cramming together huge numbers of birds.
It is big ag’s malfeasance, not animal welfare laws, that have raised animal costs.

But as economists https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/glossary/pigovian-tax/ overwhelmingly agree, when an industry inflicts immense harms on https://statesofexception.substack.com/p/eggs-should-be-more-expensive?utm_source=publication-search others, it should pay higher prices. If a company pollutes, then it should have to pay for the harm it causes to others, for otherwise it has an incentive to continue polluting even if doing so https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigouvian_tax produces less benefit than harm. If the animal industry fully internalized its externalities, every animal product would cost vastly more.

Even if we buy pretty high-end estimates, such laws may have increased egg prices by around 50 cents for a dozen eggs. Hens lay about 250 eggs a year, or 20 egg cartons per year. This means it takes a hen about 18 days to produce an egg carton. Thus, consumers pay about a penny per 8 additional hours hens spend in a cage. What kind of a craven cost benefit analysis values a penny more than 8 hours spent in a cage too small to turn around in? If a dog was to be trapped in a cage for 8 hours unless you spent one penny freeing it, morality would require such an action. At the very least, it would require that companies that killed dogs not trap them in tiny crates for their life. If meat companies had to pay for the suffering they inflict on animals, they’d switch to cage free overnight.

A morally decent society must value the interests of vulnerable animals, suffering by the billions, more than dirt. If we are going to consume animals, at the very least we owe them more than a life in a cage. And other animal welfare laws have even smaller impacts on costs.

>>5022651

Though I am not very old, I am old enough to remember a different era of American politics in which politicians actually discussed morality. There was endless discussion of the moral majority, what we owed to other countries, and what the ideals of the founding fathers demanded of us. America was seen not merely as a band united by common interest, but as a nation founded on an idea, founded on a moral vision.

Something has gone badly wrong in our politics if moral appeals no longer hold sway. Morality demands that we treat animals better than we have so far. Cheap eggs are sinful https://dominicoption.substack.com/p/cheap-eggs-are-a-sin if they were produced in a way that we wouldn’t hesitate to call abuse if done to a dog. We condemn China when it locks dogs in crates too small to turn around in—if we do the same to pigs and to chickens, then on what basis can we judge them?

Do pigs play?
To their credit, the voters have not bought these ludicrous appeals. The voters have consistently recognized that it’s worth paying a bit of extra money for animal products if doing so enables us to be free of particularly pernicious kinds of animal abuse. If a company produces cheap eggs by trapping vulnerable animals in crates and cages, then the voters have every right to demand better practices for animals. Such wickedness and torment and cruelty has no place in a civilized society.

If the Trump administration dismantles state-level animal welfare laws by sneaking these wildly unpopular provisions into the farm bill, this won’t just be a major assault on federalism and a serious capitulation to big agriculture—it will be the cause of hundreds of millions of vulnerable animals languishing in cages. It will be a source of animal cruelty like little else. Please, contact your local representative about this and give money to organizations combating animal cruelty nationwide. https://animalcharityevaluators.org/charity-review/legal-impact-for-chickens/

>>5022651
>A morally decent society must value the interests of vulnerable animals, suffering by the billions, more than dirt.
A morally decent society keeps their people well fed

>>5022653
gross

>>5022660
Nah, just 'ungry. Simple as.

This is ethics, not morality. Dumb kid. You dont know jack shit about America. Your absurdly grandiose moralizing bullshit is not convincing anyone of anything.

You think people who can watch men burn to death give a fuck about any of this? You dont live in the 1950s. "Morals" are a relic. Might as well tell me its a sin lmfao.

>>5022663
It is a sin assuming those exist
https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-christian-case-for-animal-welfare?utm_source=publication-search

>>5022644 (OP)
This is caused by Jews trying to maximize profits so they can use taxpayer dollars to stuff minorities with fried meat until they geacelessly expire at a hospital.

>>5022666
Life is nightmarish if you look for it.

Just look away. What can we fix? Almost nothing.

>>5022644 (OP)
>Pigs are smarter than dogs
This is jewish ARA propaganda. At no point have dogs and pigs intelligence been compared with valid means.

The "pigs are smarter" study came from finding pigs, a rooting animal, would gladly move a joystick with their nose, and dogs would not, without accounting for differences in visual refresh rates etc. Non-scientists have no problems training dogs to use their paws to play video games with buttons and joysticks. Somehow, the junk scientists came to the conclusion that this was indisputable proof that pigs were self aware, dogs were not, and the torah, talmud, tanach, and mishnah torah had it right all along, that pigs should not be eaten and dogs should not be kept. What a coincidence.

>>5022772
pigs have roughly the same amount of neurons in their cerebral cortex as an average medium-large dog and seem to be biased towards spatial reasoning and away from several dimensions of social reasoning and dogs are the opposite

if anything they are equally intelligent in the way two people who mastered divergent disciplines in STEM are

>>5022651
Sin taxes do not make businesses behave better. Carbon taxes and green incentives for example have done jack shit. Like libertarianism, these assume all people are good rational actors who pursue their long term benefit and follow the rules.

That is not true at all.

if you tax an industry for doing something you don't like, that industry will immediately find a way to evade the tax or just pass it on to someone else.

the ONLY solution to any problem is tyranny and violence. we operated under despotic monarchies for thousands of years specifically because nothing works but "the king says so. you are not the kings equal. you are a merchant. obey, or fucking die."

>>5022774
>s-surely people will just not buy the more expensive product and good will prevail! it's logical! its's truth!
>corporations, all owned and operated by an in-group: lol these guys are fucking idiots

>>5022765
If I can save a single animal that's huge to me.
If it was my life it'd be a big deal to me too

>>5022774
The cost should be passed onto the consumer and meat should be made more expensive so more people can't afford it and choose cheaper plant based options

All these 'animal welfare' laws do is push farming to China where there are no animal welfare laws whatsoever and disease is rampant. Driving farmers in the US out of business helps nobody.
I say these animals traded comfort for survival when they decided to become domesticated. They get to reproduce in the billions, we get food. Fair deal, evolution is a bitch.

>>5022873
I'd rather never exist then be incarnated as an animal on a factory farm

>>5022873
Only if it's cheaper to produce and ship from china with no regulations then produce and consume here with some regulations

European and don't know the English terms for everything but:
Hens kept caged individually are much happier than hens kept caged in groups. Chicken society is brutal, and when you shove a bunch of them in a tiny cage with no escape paths they're gonna be stressed to shit. Obviously the best is free range, but banning individual cages in favor of group cages like they've done here only serves to reduce animal welfare even though it might feel more natural on the surface.
The sow crating isn't a space issue, when you introduce new pigs to a flock all the pigs will get more violent with each other as they try to establish where they stand in the social hierarchy. When you're unlucky or incompetent you'll have to move sows to unfamiliar flocks as you fail to syncronize their pregnancies. Even if you aren't there'll still be tension as the animals have been seperated during their piglet rearing period. If your pigstyes are poorly designed or your staff is incompetent or indifferent sows will eventually seriously injure or kill each other. American style sow keeping has been illegal here for a long time, and even when it wasn't almost no one did it as it doesn't really provide any benefits if you pay attention to your animals and it's just pointless cruelty. We've even recently banned restraining farrowing sows, this is much more tricky for various reasons, but people are mostly making it work.

>>5022895
They still mutilate them without anesthetic

Bump

>>5022644 (OP)
>Pigs are smarter than dogs!
False

>>5022985
They're very capable of experiencing suffering and well-being and that's all that should really matter

>>5023029
Single celled organisms can experience pain and suffering. So what?

>>5022870
Humans need meat to live. Although vegans start out higher IQ due to actually being bored, narcissistic, mildly sociopathic upper classmen, people actually raised on their insane diet consistently turn out shorter and dumber than meat fed humans.

>>5023074
uhm, NO. you do not need to be as smart and tall as your genes say you should. that is LITERALLY NOT THE *SCIENTIFIC* DEFINITION OF NEED! you WILL be shorter and dumber and you WILL be happy because only your rulers need to meet their potential peasant!

>>5023074
Humans do not "need meat to live".
Carnivorism is only found in starving populations. All animals, including humans, are primarily herbivores. There is no such thing as a "carnivore" in the truest sense.

>>5023079
Yes, humans need meat to live.

Herbivory is actually what's found in starving populations. Enforced herbivory has been used to separate lower and higher castes because people who don't eat enough meat turn out short and dumb.

The basal condition for all animal life is carnivory. Herbivores are devolved.

>>5023083
You have a very interesting definition of need

>>5023134
Oh so you're this guy >>5023075

My idea of need is to fully develop. Not turn out as a stunted slave and merely "not die". If you want to be a stunted slave that doesn't eat meat, go live in india with the rest of them.

>>5023135
>Oh so you're this guy >>5023075

No I'm not that anon.

>My idea of need is to fully develop. Not turn out as a stunted slave and merely "not die". If you want to be a stunted slave that doesn't eat meat, go live in india with the rest of them.

Do you have any idea how entitled you sound? Inequality between human beings exists some have more resources then others should anyone who is even somewhat poor just be allowed to steal from anyone wealthier then them just so they can be an extra cm taller? I'm allowed to breed as many animals as I want into existence and give them miserable lives in factory farms or give them happy lives on a pasture and then cut those good lives extremely short just so I can be an extra cm taller? Are you kidding me?

>No not an extra cm you'll be many inches taller and like a dozen IQ points higher

Exactly how much taller, smarter etc must you be in order to justify violating the rights of other humans or animals?

>>5023138
>You want to eat the food you need? YOU ARE SO ENTITLED!
Animals don't have rights and any "humans" that can't fulfill their dietary needs in this present year are literally unable to keep a cohesive society running, so I don't give a shit.

Go starve yourself instead of whacking off to your godless morals. Go die "right according to me" while everyone else lives well.

>>5023144
>can't refute anything
>has tantrum screeching about trannies
more and more /an/ gets filled with these types of "people"

>>5023332
>you need to logically refute "you should be starved because thirdies cant maintain society and muh animal rights"
your entire ethical system is invalid. we are not global citizens. membership in animalia does not confer automatic moral value. speciesism is not wrong. nationalism is an obligation. these are fundamental truths. those who follow them thrive. those who do not are replaced - or ruled - by those who do.

I don’t care what happens to chickens.

Only cats and dogs.

>PROVE IT LOGICALLY!
Passion is truth. Logic is folly. Emotion and intuition are superior modes of thought for making value judgements. Logic leads to stagnation, death, and degeneration or the admission of pure evil. There is no other way for life to exist. A logical people obligate themselves to go extinct or become maximally aggressive or self serving. It is a natural and unavoidable dichotomy.

>>5023347
>Follow the path of passion
>Logically, through combat and conflict, people naturally predisposed to shitty passions die out
Based romulan

long as they also deregulate zoning/hoa bullshit that prevents homesteading like texas is doing

>>5023347
Frankly, people like you ought not to be considered human but something lesser.

>>5023347
frankly, people like you are the only real humans

Contrarianism and the "based gigachad who does the wrong/stupid thing but says it confidently" meme have been an absolute disaster for this website.

>>5022772
Anon your soul and morality runs up against the reality almost immediately in this thread: people are fucking bastards. Godspeed to you, though.

>>5022873
Fuck off you low-IQ corporate psychopath. Chinksect agriculture is so filled with pollution/chemicals that any sane person wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole. And that's because of lax regulations. We barely import any meat from chinksects anyways.

>>5022895
Cool, that has nothing to do with keeping chickens in cages they can actually move in.

>>5023347
Spoken like a true low-IQ sociopath. You are a disease in the body of humanity.

>>5023347
Based high IQ empath

>>5024898
Cringe abhuman autist zoophile

>>5022644 (OP)
I heard about this. Brutal as fuck and depressing. Hopefully other countries do not follow this example.

>>5023347
The eggs taste better and they are also healthier.

>>5022772
I've worked at a farm and ranch for 5 years. Taken care of and observed the pigs a lot. They are so much more intelligent than dogs. They have clear empathy for other their own kind. We have a bonded pair of pigs, the male goes to the hay bales we feed the horses and carries bundles in his mouth, then insulates the sleeping stall that him and his pigwife sleep at. Not only that, he figured out that plastic is waterproof, so when it's raining and wet, he covers his wife with plastic to keep her dry. They also know their names and we've taught them to sit and roll over. And the female pig literally plays tag with me. She makes a specific noise to initiate it, and taps my ankle with her nose to tag me. they also play with balls.

>>5022652
>Something has gone badly wrong in our politics if moral appeals no longer hold sway.
Because in the last 15 years morality has been unequivocally been used exclusively as a way to make people continuously accept less.
It's a two way street.
If you're not treated equitably by those abroad and those above you morality quickly becomes tantamount to justified abuse.

>>5025704
People pretend animals are dumb as an excuse to mistreat them. Same with kids.

>>5023079
>All animals, including humans, are primarily herbivores

>>5025704
Pigs are not more intelligent than dogs at all lmao. Both cats and dogs do all of that. It's not special. Maybe you just only adopt inbred dogs.

>>5025704
Pigs are super smart and I have also observed them showing empathy towards me and definitely the other pigs. One pig we call big mama tried to warn me when I put my hand close to the electric wires I have set up.

When I picked up a piglet and it started screaming every pig I own ran over and started making a huge fuss. The boars I have will sleep with their favorite sow and all of them are really good with the babies. They're smart, but also hungry fuckers lol.

>>5022644 (OP)
Is there any justification for the feds meddling in state laws like this other than they were bribed? Since I don’t see the point in the feds trying to negate state level animal welfare laws

>>5025997
The feds get the blame for inflation, and food inflation is the kind consumers feel the most. Since meat is an interstate market the increased costs won't be isolated to the states that pass animal welfare laws and will be affect the whole country. But don't get me wrong, they were just bribed.

>>5025999
You can confirm any bribe by doing the simple mental exercise of thinking what would be better on practice

If it looks bad someone bad did something bad to make it look bad

No one see a free chicken and says this is terrible and animal abuse

>>5025895
Herding dogs do all of this

>>5026018
And? I never brought up dogs. Are you insecure about dog intelligence when put up against pigs or something?

>>5022760
Number must go up

>>5026022
The discussion is about the common ARA claim that pigs are smarter than dogs.

They are actually about as smart as dogs with divergence in what each animal is smart *at*.

>>5026071
Modern behavioral research actually puts pigs as smarter than humans in some categories. It's far more moral to eat a human than it is to eat a pig.

>>5026079
Some humans

>>5023347
This except cats. They deserve to get wiped out.

>>5026079
>Modern research puts calculators as smarter than humans in some categories
This is what you sound like, and you forget that intelligence isn't a real measure of value

It's being human, or adjacent enough to humans to trigger their empathy response. Ergo border collies should not be eaten but pitbulls can be used for target practice because they look like devolved goblin demons.

>>5023074
>>5023075
>>5023079
>>5023083
>>5023134
>>5023135
>>5023138
>>5023142
You are both... no, let's be real, it's one schizophrenic samefagging - you are mentally ill
There's nothing magical about meat, herbivores aren't devolved etc.
You just need to get the nutrients your body requires and it will grow to the full size... if you also get other things you need like good sleep and some exercise. Stop sperging out, drop keto before you die of heart attack, get a job and maybe hit the books so you develop a coherent worldview instead of seething at some undefined carnivore elites while also thinking you are a part of them or something. Get out of the basement.

>>5027457
>You just need to get the nutrients your body requires and it will grow to the full size...
these only exist in meat
>undefined carnivore elites
these are well defined. they're called americans, especially the american anglosphere banking class. the people who push plant based diets hard but eat filet mignon nightly, or are so wealthy can they have 24/7 access to in depth health monitoring and a fuckload of exotic supplements and superfoods.

if you are the poorest fuck in the US you eat still better than the average indian.

and it is very easy to be part of this elite - be born in the US or another "western elite" area (white areas of canada, nordic europe, israel)

meat is important to our species and denying, and even encouraging abstention from meat IS one way humans have purposefully stratified society since time immemorial. never trust a vegan, they're either psyopped or a psyopper. there is a reason we send africans grain but not jerky despite throwing out half the meat we produce. meat fed africans would be smarter.

>>5027457
>Herbivores aren't devolved
Carnivory is basal to the entire animal kingdom. Herbivores basically exist to feed carnivores. They lost their ability to eat meat and quickly turned into prey due to the compromises needed to digest most plant matter. It takes millions of years for an herbivore to luck out and get big enough not to be eaten (until a larger predator specializing in large herbivores shows up)

Fuckin frugivores are higher in the great progression than herbivores.

>>5027476
>(until a larger predator specializing in large herbivores shows up)
when will the next felid/canid that specializes in eating elephants and hippos show up?

>>5027475
>>You just need to get the nutrients your body requires and it will grow to the full size...
>these only exist in meat
Mental retardation? I'm not even a vegan or a vegetarian but it's simply not true. You aren't going to get the nutrients your require from a carnivore diet either, unless you eat like an Innuit and devour entire seals, fat and internal organs included - which is not something that any ketoschizo does. Go outside and stop seething about Indians or whatever.

>>5027476
Evolution is not a video game. Grow up, go outside, get a job.

>>5027476
Herbivores eat meat when presented with its deer, horses, and more.
>>5027492
Many keto people eat organs. Also calling them schizo, when carbohydrates are not nutritionally necessary, shows your own bias.

>>5027480
The predator that specializes in larger herbivores is posting on 4chan right now.

>>5027492
>It's simply not true
It is. ALL vegan diets are deficient. Period. This is not up for debate. Every single vegan attempt to date has had inferior bioavailability. People raised on vegan diets are shorter and dumber every single time. Man has been evolving to subsist off at least 50% meat for over two million fucking years. Eat a fucking egg, you pseudo-religious dipshit.
>But the pure carnivore diet, without eating the whole animal
Retarded whataboutism

>>5027492
>evolution is not a video game
>scientists dont have values
>there is no such thing as devolving all changes are heccin valid
>humans are not le superior
yes, humans are superior

we are made in gods image to dominate the earth

anyone who disagrees with this has a 100x risk of dying childless and a 400x risk of suicide