[ComputerGuru]

> though I eat a lot of eggs and some dairy still.

See, I feel like this just erodes from your argument. There’s not necessarily any trauma at all to the chickens or the cows involved in the production of eggs or milk. Trying to group that with the consumption of meat feels just very irrational.

[ornornor]

Yes there is.

Egg farms grind male chicks alive. They burn off the tip of the hens beak without anesthesia (which we know is high in nerves) so they don’t fight each other in captivity; which they don’t do nearly as much in nature because surprise surprise they’re not as stressed. Hens laying eggs every single day of their lives (because they’re taken away daily) live much much shorter lives and develop physiological issues more often. When they’re finally exhausted after a few short years and stop producing as much, they’re turned into chicken nuggets or broth cubes.

Cows producing milk are constantly inseminated. Maybe they don’t care or maybe it’s a form of rape. Nevertheless, their calves are taken away from them shortly after they’re born (so they don’t eat the milk instead of the factory) and slaughtered. Cows call for their missing baby for several days. Dairy cows are also living much much shorter lives (imagine how long a human that does nothing but give birth would live) and are turned into hamburgers afterwards.

Not to mention cheese which need casein to be made and that can’t be obtained without killing cows as it’s the acid in their stomach, basically.

So, yes, eating milk or eggs doesn’t directly require the animal to die. But it’s so close and it enables such a cruel, abhorrent, and revolting meat industry that it’s impossible in my opinion to ethically justify eating eggs and milk (let alone meat or fish)

[cheese_goddess]

> Not to mention cheese which need casein to be made and that can’t be obtained without killing cows as it’s the acid in their stomach, basically.

Casein is not the acid in animals' stomachs. Caseins are one group of proteins in milk, and the main component of cheese.

You're probably thinking of rennet, the enzymes in animals' stomachs that help them digest their milk.

Rennet is used to coagulate milk to make cheese, but in modern cheesmaking practice the vast majority of it is produced by bacterial or fungal fermentation. Rennet taken from the stomachs of young ruminants is used only by a minority of "artisanal" or traditional producers.

Since you got this one completely wrong, is there a chance that the rest of the information in your comment is also slightly off, do you think? Would you find it very hard to re-examine the source of what you know about animal agriculture and try to find out how much of it is really true?

[ornornor]

My mother tongue isn’t English and I indeed mixed up rennet and casein because they sound completely different in my language.

Natural rennet cheese may be “artisanal” in your corner of the world, it’s 99% of cheese where I live —just in case, 99% might not be totally accurate, it’s an exaggeration to mean “the vast majority”

[cheese_goddess]

My mother tongue isn't English either and I live in a corner of the world that has many traditional cheesemakers and a proud cheesemaking culture that goes back centuries if not millenia. Most cheese where I live as in the rest of the world is made with microbial rennet simply because it's cheaper, more available and easier to store and handle.

I'm sorry but I don't believe that 99% (or "the vast majority") of cheese where you live is made with animal rennet. If that's true, please let me know how you know this.

[ornornor]

> how you know this

https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empr%C3%A9surage

“ En France, l'utilisation de présure d'origine animale est une des conditions des cahiers des charges pour prétendre aux dénominations de protections fromage fermier, appellation d'origine contrôlée et la marque de l'Union européenne, Label rouge.”

Loosely translated, it means that for a French to cheese to have one of the protected names (Roquefort, Brie de Meaux, Camembert de Normandie, etc) they must use animal rennet. Since farms making these want the protected names because they sell so much better, they use animal rennet.

In the supermarket you can also buy industrial cheese which doesn’t have to use animal rennet. But at the fromagerie they mostly (only?) sell artisanal cheeses, all using animal rennet.

[cheese_goddess]

Yes, that agrees with what I said above: supermarket cheese is the vast majority of cheese that's produced and consumed worldwide, quite unfortunately I might add. PDO cheeses are a minority of all cheeses and only produced in the EU. French PDO cheeses are a minority within a minority, and only produced in France.

Even in EU and even in France, most cheese made and eaten is not PDO and PDO cheeses are made by few and small producers. Camembert de Normandie fermier is famously made by a handful of farmers (five, I think?) and regulators are constantly pressured by the dairy industry to loosen the standards of the PDO, for example to allow pasteurised milk to be used and to allow the "Camembert de Normandie" label to be applied to cheese made in Normandy but with cows other than the race Normande that the traditional producers make it with.

Even in the rest of the EU, outside France, there are bsically two kinds of PDO cheese. There's the kind that are made by few producers in limited amounts and have more stringent requirements like the use of animal rennet, or the use of traditional wooden implements to preserve artisanal bacterial cultures, and that sort of thing, like Camembert de Normandie and Mozzarella di Buffalla Campagna. Or they are made at a larger scale with modern equipment and materials allowed (but not required), of which bacterial rennet is one example, like Manchego or Feta.

The kind of PDO cheeses that must be made with traditional methods, materials and equipments and for which modern alternatives are not allowed are basically artisanal products and again very unfortunately, few and far between, because they tend to be the best cheeses one can have.

This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine because I recognise the supermarket cheese that most people eat as inferior quality, and I'm really worried that most people have forgotten what cheese should really be like.

[marliechiller]

im sorry, but you cant dismiss the rest of his valid points purely because he got 1 out of many incorrect. I detect a hint of bias might be present on your side from your username also...

[cheese_goddess]

Where did I dismiss any of "his valid points"? I asked if they thought they might want to re-examine where their information comes from. How is that a dismissal of any point, valid or not?

> I detect a hint of bias might be present on your side from your username also...

What bias do you mean? I make cheese so I know a couple of things about how it's done.

[ornornor]

Thank you

[ComputerGuru]

Great job arguing something I already agree about and similarly abhor while also completely missing the point: I specifically said “necessarily.”

We have family friends that provide eggs and milk from their free range chickens and cows and that’s certainly not how they do it. Your fight is with greed enabled by capitalism leading to these animal abuses, not people who want to eat/drink their eggs or dairy.

[hackernewds]

you're generalizing quite a bit here, perhaps driven by emotion. it's possible given the movement for compassion for animals to purchase local, free-range, cruelty-free sourced eggs at any decent grocer.

[ornornor]

You can’t make eggs without killing male chicks, shortening hens lives, and killing them off. Free range, organic, local, or factory. The specifics of it may vary depending on the mode of production but not the reality: it enables animal exploitation and suffering.

[cheese_goddess]

> You can’t make eggs without killing male chicks, shortening hens lives, and killing them off.

Yes, you absolutely can. Hens lay eggs whether there's a rooster around or not.

I live in a farm (not mine, I'm a guest) and we get a few eggs each day from the hens in the coop outside my window. We don't kill the male chicks off. I don't think anyone on the farm can even tell which chicks are male befor they grow up. We occasionally slaughter a rooster when there's too many of them and they start to fight each other. We also slaughter a hen once in a while. Last year, we slaughtered four animals, altogether, one rooster and three hens.

In factory farms, male chicks are killed off, but there's no reason for that other than the industrialisation of production and consumer demand for plump birds with big breasts (at least in the US as far as I can tell). The birds in our farm are lean, their meat is dark, chewy and wiry because of all the muscle fibers and it has to be coooked for several hours before it is edible. Their bones are also hard and impossible to snap with your fingers, like you can the bones of factory chicken. The taste also doesn't compare. Real free-range chicken (not "free range" as in growing up in a factory with a 2 x 2 concrete yard outside) actually has taste and it tastes of game bird, not what supermarket chicken tastes like. Chickens and factory chickens could as well be a different species. Tasting the flesh of the farm chickens has put me off eating the supermarket birds, just because it makes me think that it can't be healthy eating something that was raised to be degenerate and fat like that.

So you're talking about factory farming but there are other kinds of farming that have very different effect on the animals farmed. Maybe you should try to learn more about that?

[ornornor]

My point of view is that exploiting animals for food is wrong. No brand of “ethical” farming can change that fact for me. Raising animals to kill them for food before the end of their natural life is something I refuse to partake in.

Male chicks aren’t ground at birth in your farm, that’s better in my book. But they’re still raised to be eaten. I’d still argue that hens laying eggs every day shortens their lifespan because it puts strain on their system. As far as I know, hens don’t naturally lay eggs every day, all year. They lay an egg and keep it around for a while to see if it’s growing or not. After a while they eat it and start over. They also don’t produce eggs all year but only part of it. But because farm hens are there for their eggs and later their meat, we take their egg every day and they have to lay another the next day. Some farms also use lights and heaters to trick the hens into thinking the season never ends and have then lay all year long.

[cheese_goddess]

I don't know what hens do what you say. The hens we have here, when we leave the eggs in their nest, the next day they've laid a few more. Once they have laid around ten eggs they'll incubate them until they hatch. That's how we end up with new hens. Some eggs we take and eat, some we let them hatch into chicks. I've never seen a hen eat an egg. What they do eat is the egg shells when the eggs have hatched. Appparently it helps them replenish the calcium needed to make new eggs. Is that what you have in mind, perhaps?

I don't think laying eggs puts strain on hens' system. Far as I can tell, that's what hens are made to do.

> Raising animals to kill them for food before the end of their natural life is something I refuse to partake in.

That's fine by me. Nobody's forcing you to partake in anything. I don't agree that raising animals for food is wrong or exploitative.

Edit: sorry for the Fisking. I wanted to address this too:

> But they’re still raised to be eaten.

Yes, absolutely! That's why we raise farm animals. We raise them for food. We breed them, we tend to them, we keep them safe from predators and disease, we feed them, we care for them and then we kill them and eat them. That's the deal.

[eulenteufel]

You (kind of) can by now. Killing male chickens after hatching is outlawed in Germany since the beginning of this year. From [1] it reads like Germany subsised research into preselecting female eggs and only hatching these ones. This is still killing male chickens in some way, but arguably less gruesome than how the industry has dealt with male chickens before.

[1] https://www-bmel-de.translate.goog/DE/themen/tiere/tierschut...

[prteja11]

Do you believe that there’s no trauma involved in the dairy and egg industry? Spend a few minutes watching this about dairy. https://youtu.be/roIWg4ntj9k

Earthling Ed also has videos about egg industry, but the gist is make chicks are crushed in a meat grinder alive.

[ComputerGuru]

That’s greed enabled by modern capitalism and general “don’t ask don’t tell” apathy. That’s not how milk and eggs were produced for the majority of mankind’s existence after the transition from hunter/gatherer to farming.

[WaxProlix]

There isn't necessarily, but there is in practice nearly 100% of the time - enough so that it doesn't matter.