there are probably pastures that don't kill roosters but ultimately get their hens from places that do, whether at birth or for their meat. that's a complication of choosing to eat milk and dairy for sure. ultimately i'd rather buy from a place that lets the males live and kills them for meat as humanely as possible. its not economical to keep the hens and roosters apart and to just have roosters and let them die naturally. those would be really expensive eggs if they existed.

indian vegetarians eat eggs so i'm not too worried, they were considered sattvic at one point

violence is so hard to avoid in this world

@wowaname still a very good vow to make

i admire jain vegetarianism a lot (especially not eating plants killed in a way that would harm insects or pull up the whole plant) but they forbid honey which is something i don't understand. i think they didn't anticipate modern honey farming and the current endangerment of bees.

like they saw it as taking honey from bees, before beekeeping made bees have a surplus amount of honey

@Moon that's an edge case inferred from an ethic for sure, veganism/vegetarianism are just terms for diets, what matters on that scale where global conservation is considered is their implications for industrial agriculture and husbandry. consider the populations threatened by hunting in the first place, or by clearing land for agriculture and farming, or by soil erosion/desertification caused by animal husbandry, or by toxic soil runoff. land that supports domesticated animals could and would support wild ecosystems in the absence of pasture farming and ranching. animal husbandry also contributes disproportionately to the emissions that threaten global species, including causing ocean acidification. ultimately its no cost/benefit where life itself is concerned, it is maximizing welfare, and whether someone having to "manage populations" in is unforgivable himsa (as jains would say) is an irrelevant ethical quandary.

one thing vegetarians/vegans may neglect to mention is that if vegetarianism/veganism were applied at scale using current global production methods to compensate for the loss of calories from meat (this is less true for lactovegetarians, because milk is highly nutritive and not all cattle ranching is unsustainable, and there are also sustainable methods of fishing), the current paradigm of food production would still contribute to ecological catastrophe with time. they focus so much on animal husbandry as the singular evil. there are balanced ways to mitigate this but they are a significant investment, everyone becomes obsessed with the transhumanist or primitivist solutions instead, because they seem to propel themselves, following the inexorable "progress" of information-capital or as a reaction to it. but for now, more corn subsidies i guess.

vegetarianism with parthenogenic all-female chickens and cows is a kind of transhumanism i support tbh

@Arcana i used to be really excited about lab grown meat, but in terms of eggs and milk i'd rather just have a pasture with naturally all-female chickens and cows i feel like that would be a perfectly idyllic compromise between futurism and primitivism

@Arcana
https://www.nature.com/articles/243171a0
damn this is cool, parthenogenesis has happened randomly in chickens

anyway yeah, milk production is often violent. it doesn't have to be but its so hard to avoid, they'd need to commit to keeping cows for life after they stop producing milk and to not taking away calves. my highly sanguine thinking is if all the calves were female (as in the case of some reptiles) they wouldn't be taken away. this sort of genetic modification is much more likely to be successful in chickens (who are sauropsids) than cows.

a much more likely and sane solution is selecting for female chickens only by centrifuging the male haploid contribution instead of killing male chicks at birth, but why keep so many male cows/roosters around if not for meat? far less males than females are needed yes, it is possible, but somewhat unnatural, and a vegetarian food production model in that regard could be very expensive or violent considering. parthenogenesis is thus the ideal but very ambitious, certainly.
its possible to coax female-female reproduction in individual cases, without germline editing, as in the case of the bimaternal mice, this is also a nice medium.

@shmibs @Arcana yeah i realized this from arcanas comment...
stuff just keeps getting trickier the more i think about it makes me want to just eat eggs, but i'd miss butterfat :(

@shmibs @Arcana i wonder if you think forced impregnation of cows itself is necessarily violent? i think there is a degree of anthropocentric thinking in such a judgement, separating natural cattle reproduction from induced insemination. most female mammals don't have particularly mutually participative sex, classically exhibiting lordosis behavior. but dairy cows are certainly pregnant much more frequently than wild aurochs would be. there are many lactovegetarian traditions in the world including jainism, which forbids honey. violence-free sustainable dairy farming is possible, its just expensive, and at that point is it even worth it? i ask myself this. :/

@ARCONITE i don't want to cause violence or suffering if i can help it

@shibao @Arcana the bimaternal mice are SO COOL i hope lesbians can reproduce bimaternally in my lifetime

@shmibs @Moon i can confirm this, meat is gross to me now after i stopped eating it. except for raw fish which i still crave...

@Moon @shmibs raw oysters are my favorite food. in theory they can be farmed very ethically and sustainably (oyster farming is great for water quality) and they are not more conscious than the more-interactive plants. the problem for me about eating bivalves is that i worry about disturbing other marine life, the ocean is really such an incredible mass of intermixed living, dying, and dead things, it would be deliberately naive to claim that nothing else is in the target when i want an oyster (at my birthday there was a tiny crab in my clam boil bag, this just illustrates the point). it just sucks, i love them so much, and if i were harvesting them i'd be very cognizant about where i step and only select the shells without periwinkles on them. i don't know if such an operation exists, ostroveganism is so niche. but of course, vegetable cultivation and harvesting injures and kills snails and insects, is it really any different? it's just so hard to avoid violence. my habit of consuming foods with normal milk is more unethical than eating oysters i feel. ultimately it will become easier to control what i eat when i move out.

the other thing about eating bivalve flesh is i find myself craving flesh after. not like beef but fish if i see it and the really meatlike substitutes (normally i prefer the less meatlike meat substitutes)

@shmibs @Arcana the kids taken away is particularly upsetting for me, its pretty much unavoidable in dairy farming and its why i'll stop consuming milk products before i stop eggs. ethical meat farming (raising an animal, having it on a pasture for years before killing it humanely) is more humane and significantly more analogous to what animals experience without human intervention than the life of a dairy cow. i've really just put off thinking about it but it still makes me sad.

how is this a secret they do this with baby chicks too, its just obvious

@shmibs @Arcana there are farms that keep calves and let calves have their mothers milk first. they're just quite rare.

@meowski @Moon @shmibs i'm going the pasture raised milk and egg route tbh. and i eat a lot of protein concentrated from vegetables rather than necessarily from soy. its not true that separation from our food supply is what motivated my vegetarianism. modern vegetarianism is very much a reaction to industrial society but vegetarianism itself is far older. i would never say the violence of eating meat is fundamentally unnatural and wrong but i wish to separate from all violence that i can for my own self. its not even about the environment for me (i understand modern agriculture including monocrop plant farming is harmful in general) but a personal choice that rests on avoiding violence where i can.

@a7 damn forreal?

@shmibs @meowski @Moon i took iron and nothing else for a while (the funny thing is i was on a multivitamin but they were gelatin so i stopped them) but probably should take them again i'm realizing i always get kinda tired and sad after my period post quitting meat ._.

@a7 lmao yeah it makes sense, i don't think any sex ratios are that skewed

@a7 living their best life

@Flick @Arcana oh i had no idea you can take a homogametic egg and shift it to female and it only makes males... that's so fascinating