this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2025
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more elephants than I expected tbh
Livestock have to live through horrible agony, like the worst kind of torture. This means (by biomass, which some people correlate indirectly with moral worth), at least 60% of mammals on Earth undergo horrible torture. Bentham's Bulldog, "Factory Farming is Literally Torture."
Excess pigs were roasted to death. Specifically, these pigs were killed by having hot steam enter the barn, at around 150 degrees, leading to them choking, suffocating, and roasting to death. It’s hard to see how an industry that chokes and burns beings to death can be said to be anything other than nightmarish, especially given that pigs are smarter than dogs.
Ozy Brennan: the subjective experience of animal's suffering 10/10 intense agony is likely the same as the subjective experience of a human suffering such agony. (~6 paragraph article, well worth a read.)
i've been wondering for a time whether maybe, blood sacrifices didn't ever actually end but the factory farmings are just a modern decoy for the actual blood sacrifices ...
Now introducing Tyson's CEO: Cthulhu.
It says 60% of mammals are livestock, not 60% live in factory farms. I've been around cows in normal (non-factory) farms, and they seem fine. Way better off than wild animals that starve, die of disease, freeze to death, etc.
I have family members that have livestock and if something bad happens to them it's like someone hurt their child.
A seal in the 4% living in the wild may be eaten alive by a killer whale or torn to shreds by a great white shark.
We aren't going to prevent all animals from suffering, because how could we do that? Kill off all of the predators? Then there would be animal overpopulation and animals dying of starvation and disease.
Maybe we just focus on ending factory farms because that seems doable. But that effort won't be successful with obvious hyperbole claiming all livestock is treated like animals in the most horrible factory farms. Some people have actually been to farms that aren't like that you know.
People aren't stupid and if you misrepresent the facts, no one will believe anything else you're saying no matter how emotional you are when misrepresenting the facts.
60 % of mammals are livestock, not 60% live in factory farms
99% of US farmed animals live in factory farms, according to this random website I just found. I don't claim to be an expert, though, and worldwide is probably lower than than 99%, but I would bet you that the vast majority of livestock is factory-farmed.
Agreed though that not all livestock are factory farmed. I should have clarified.
I'll point out though that even some non-factory-farmed livestock are likely suffering. Bentham's Bulldog talks about how hens undergo severe agony:
Egg-laying hens in conventional farms endure about 400 hours (!!!!!) of this kind of disabling agony. Remember, this is agony about as bad as the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, unless you’ve had an experience as bad as being severely tortured.
(emphasis mine.)
--
A seal in the 4% living in the wild may be eaten alive by a killer whale or torn to shreds by a great white shark.
That's bad, though probably not anywhere near as much agony as being boiled alive for several hours until one's death. Regardless of whether you feel morally obligated to reduce wild animal suffering, you should admit that (a) from a utilitarian perspective, it's much easier to reduce factory farm suffering, and (b) from a deontological perspective, factory farming is (collectively) our fault, whereas the food chain isn't.
And how many percentage of all livestock do you think is "free range" like the cows you describe?
Estimates vary from 80% to 99% are factory farmed. Which means majority of meat anyone is eating is factory farm. Unless you can verify the source of your meat yourself, you most likely are eating tortured animals.
So this whole argument that I have friends and family that care for their livestock like it's their kids is the misrepresentation since, it maybe true that you know someone that is treating animals humane, it doesn't represent majority.
Sauce https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-are-factory-farmed
People aren't stupid and if you misrepresent the facts, no one will believe anything else you're saying no matter how emotional you are when misrepresenting the facts.
Like, say, if you were to imply that anything less than the vast overwhelming majority of all meat consumed comes from factory farms? Ignorance is bliss I suppose...
Carnies won't hear it
Lmao the slurs you make up are so cute
Nobody defends factory farms they're universally hated
Have you heard of the carnivore movement? There are genuinely people saying to stop eating vegetables. It's probably mostly ragebait, but it exists.
ok
Not saying at all this isn't a problem, but I hate bullshit statements that are deliberately deceiving.
These numbers are all by mass. Not actual number. Cows are huge. So are chickens, for birds. How this comic is laid out infers that there's 60 cows for every 40 of every other mammal, and that isn't even remotely close to true.
I think biomass is probably more important than sheer number for these comparisons. Although I would also accept 'proportion of world's arable land being used to sustain them' as I suspect the ratios come out pretty similar for obvious reasons.
The problem is that the infographic says "of all the mammals on Earth", which means individuals, not biomass. So the infographic is objectively false.
Intentionally misleading
Sadly it's not objectively false, it's merely vague. There's no equivocation whereby it actually specifies that the unit of measure is the individual animal, rather than, say, kg. It's just playing on your assumptions (I did assume biomass fwiw, but who cares).
But anyway, the point made by sheer fucking biomass imbalance is surely the thing to focus on here? Now that we know what it means, and are in agreement that the wording should be clearer, the statistic is still egregious, isn't it? Humans have taken far too much of the world for themselves IMO. Vastly diminishing returns for us, devestatingly larger impact on the environment, the more we push it.
I'm in fact under the impression that the "number must go up" plot was played on us as well. Humans are increasing in quantity ever since the industrial revolution, but instead we should be focusing on the quality of life.
Couldn't agree with you more. In particular, the way most state pensions are structured imply infinite exponential growth. It's gonna be a tough drug to wean off of.
On top of that, it's an annoyingly disproportionate graphic. The cow is much wider than the human so its area is much more than 60% of the area of the graphic.
The owl might be 3cm high and the hen 6cm high, but 9cm² and 36cm² would be the rough areas, even if it weren't for the fact that again, the hen picture is much, much wider than the owl.
With 30% and 70%, the owl should just be a little under half as big as the hen, but it looks like about 1/4 or 1/5 of the size of the hen.
I didn't realise rhinos were so small. No wonder I never see them.
Title made me think they were doing some 4 levels deep "loss" meme. It almost has it but frame 3 isn't close.
Yeah this has my pattern matching in scrambles like I can see it kinda??
Now even things that aren't loss are loss :c
Source?
Im gonna go out on a limb and say this is udder cowshit. Rats are mammals, as are raccoons, squirrels, and whole fucking masses of little basically unfarmable varmints. You're telling me that there's like 12 farm cows for every wild rat on earth?
Horse. Shit.
The source apperently takes the percentages by biomass, not by count as it seems. So small varmints will not have as much of an impact as a human or cow would.
Yeah the reason why biomass is used instead of number of individuals becomes rather clear when you consider the following:
- what counts as an individual? is an unborn already an individual? (that one's a heated debate, as you can see by the abortion debate)
- if unborns are individuals, then at what age are they?
- if they are from the moment of fertilization, then some animals, like spiders or frogs (idk any mammal examples, but there might be some), might lay a shitload number of eggs, like a million or sth, and it would drive up the number of individuals dramatically. But it would be a bullshit metric, because 99% of these individuals are never gonna survive a single year on earth. so it would be utterly confusing and misleading.
Going by mass solves all of these problems because it's more clear and more direct. And on top of that it has the nice side-benefit of also giving an estimate of land usage. Land usage is roughly proportional to biomass, so measuring biomass is meaningful to estimate land usage as well, and that one really matters as that's the limited resource that you're trying to distribute among all species on earth.
Which I think is intentionally disingenuous as it massively favours the large mammals over the far higher number of species of smaller mammals.
For example you'd need over 70 squeal monkeys to make to the biomass of an average American.
Humans and other great apes can be considered mega fauna, so it doesn't seem surprising that us and the animals we consume make up a higher percentage of bio mass. Were bigger.
I don't think it's disingenuous. It represents the total share of resource consumption. If something has 2x the biomass, it consumed 2x the materials needed to produce that biomass (purely in terms of the makeup of the body, that is)
I don't think count by itself is very relevant. There's more bacteria in a glass of water than there are humans in a country, but what does that tell you, exactly?
Although I do agree the infographic should be changed to specify biomass
in the comments section. straight up 'sourcing it'. and by 'it', haha, well. let's justr say. My pnas.
Quick Internet search.... https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass
They are referring to biomass.
-
1 cow ~ 1200 lbs / 545 kg
-
1 rat ~ 0.5 lbs / 0.25 kg
1 cow ~ 2400 rats by biomass
Well thats not what the infographic says. It specifies "mammals", not "mammals by weight".
OK so how many tons of cow are accounted for by whales?
Or does the survey cherry pick land animals too?
You forgot the citation bro.
It's by biomass.
It's from this article: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/21/human-race-just-001-of-all-life-but-has-destroyed-over-80-of-wild-mammals-study
Which is discussing this research: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115
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