- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
Last year, I wrote a great deal about the rise of “ventilation shutdown plus” (VSD+), a method being used to mass kill poultry birds on factory farms by sealing off the airflow inside barns and pumping in extreme heat using industrial-scale heaters, so that the animals die of heatstroke over the course of hours. It is one of the worst forms of cruelty being inflicted on animals in the US food system — the equivalent of roasting animals to death — and it’s been used to kill tens of millions of poultry birds during the current avian flu outbreak.
As of this summer, the most recent period for which data is available, more than 49 million birds, or over 80 percent of the depopulated total, were killed in culls that used VSD+ either alone or in combination with other methods, according to an analysis of USDA data by Gwendolen Reyes-Illg, a veterinary adviser to the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), an animal advocacy nonprofit. These mass killings, or “depopulations,” in the industry’s jargon, are paid for with public dollars through a USDA program that compensates livestock farmers for their losses.
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Just pump nitrogen in the sealed pens. The animal doesn’t panic due to perceived oxygen deprivation. They just get sleepy and die.
Hell it would be the way I’d want to go if I was sick with terminal cancer. Cheap, easy, and painless.
I imagine that would be pretty difficult to do in a chicken coop. These are barns made out of corrugated steel and generally aren’t even remotely air tight. You will, ultimately, need about 10x the nitrogen you would otherwise need, and that’s if it even works.
So a special coop would need to be built for this purpose.
Chicken farmers are some of the poorest farmers in the country. They generally don’t have the means to build a special kill shed to humanely euthanize their flock. They barely have the means to keep up with Tyson and Perdue’s ridiculous bullshit.
So, while I agree, heat stroke is a fucking awful way to kill these animals, the issue isn’t just “there’s a humane method bro, just build a kill house bro”
The issue is, we are paying FAR too little for chicken, and most meat, honestly.
If you have millions of chickens to kill, you’re not so poor of a farmer that be you can’t afford to come up with a humane method to do this job.
There are several documentaries on this topic, but they don’t have a lot of authority over how many chickens they buy. They’re dictated a flock size, they pay for it, and then they pay to feed and raise them, then they sell them back to the people they bought the chicks from. Inevitably every year the chicken processor, whoever it may be, makes additional demands that they also have to pay out of pocket for.
I’m not justifying their actions, I’m saying they are stuck between two masters and they have no room to wiggle.
Out of complete ignorance - do Purdue or Tyson even run their own hatcheries/coops?
No.
It’s cheaper to out source it this way because as their farmers are contractors they don’t have to adhere to the legal responsibilities they would if they ran them in their own.
They can keep their contracted farmers in debt to them indefinitely and essentially have a class of indentured servants.
I have learned more in this discussion about chicken farming than I ever thought I would.
Sometimes I just love the internet.
Welcome to the Internet, come and take a seat.
I thought that was the case. They probably own the IP rights to the breed too, so they keep the money circulating within their own pockets
You’re not wrong and nuance is often the bane of rationality. I didn’t say it was an easy solution just a more humane one.
I imagine there are a handful of ways to do it besides “long, slow heat stroke”
I imagine the long, slow, painful, heat stroke method is the cheapest, thus the suffering is capitalist-approved!
We are getting that heat stroke thing thrown back to us soon lol
Us: pumping heat into the atmosphere.
Mother earth: oh you guys cold? Don’t worry, I got you fam!
Doesn’t sound as cheap as running the heater for a few hours.
Think of the power/gas savings!
Carbon monoxide would be cheaper. We used it for euthanizing animals that couldn’t be saved at the wildlife rehab center I worked at. Though, it was done with sealed induction box, not a drafty barn like someone mentioned
Sounds like it would be more expensive? Nitrogen is incredibly cheap to concentrate out of the air, 70% of what we breath is nitrogen after all.
Monoxide is incredibly cheap to produce with a crappy farm truck or old tractor. You doing need to distill or concentrate anything, just a hose and the exhaust pipe and a couple hours of fuel for idling.
We used it to gas a nest of rats that had settled in under a grain bin floor. Only a couple rats popped out and they were dazed, the dogs quickly snacked them up. The rest expired rapidly.
A chicken barn is big and drafty but you could just use multiple tractors or detune them on purpose. Any engine running rich produces a lot of CO.
Nitrogen is expensive and these buildings aren’t airtight
These are engineering problems. The point is it’s way more humane than dying in a sweat lodge.
Eh, the atmosphere is 70% nitrogen, making liquid nitrogen is basically just a suped up AC.
There are also various methods of simply filtering the nitrogen out of the air. Having on site machines doesn’t seem too bad.
Those big coops are not anything close to airtight. Heat, however, doesn’t require it to be airtight.
wouldnt that be more expensive than just cutting off the ventilation? on top of paying for disposal afterwards & whatnot?
Disposal of what? The air we breathe is 75% nitrogen. The chickens are already going to have be disposed of.
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Or… and this is crazy… not kill them?
They are already dead. (Infected) Better to kill then now and not risk even more birds life.
Or… and this is crazy… not cram thousands of them together in such a tiny area. Then disease wouldn’t spread so rapidly.
No ❤
This is specifically talking about mitigation for highly pathogenic avian influenza. HPAI kills chickens fairly quickly, so to contain the spread and minimize the risk of zoonotic spread to people, they kill every bird on every property that it’s detected on.
This is one of those situations where no one thinks it’s a great solution, it’s just a pragmatic one that minimizes the risk towards workers while quickly depopulating the barn. The problem is that this is one of the cheapest and least humane ways to depopulate a barn, and shouldn’t be allowed. We should insist that barns allow humane depopulation, or at least less inhumane methods.
Or, and I know this sounds even craizer… not farm them and stop this from happening to begin with?
And then do what with them?
Crazy how you can’t think past this. Maybe not factory farm them? Shocker, I know.
Yeah we shouldn’t, but we did, so we are stuck having to do shit like this now. And shamefully it’s not going to change anytime soon. Corporate interests essentially control the country now to a degree that they haven’t since the late 19th century. Especially in the farming industry.
Nah mate, I can totally think past it, but think past the problem doesn’t solve it.
The one today? No, but the one tomorrow? Yes
Keep moving the goal posts where ever you need to do you can sleep at night babe.
Interesting that you say that, projecting maybe?
So you want to pay $50 for a McDonald’s chicken sandwich? I don’t think it’s right. These chickens are bred to be oversized and grow fast. They get so big that they can barely move. Full of antibiotics so they don’t get infected from sitting in their own leavings.
I am really hoping for lab grown meat personally.
And since you may have missed it, these chickens are all female. There are technically ways to determine sex before they hatch but if you really want to get upset Google ‘Chick Grinder’. It’s as horrible as it sounds so maybe don’t Google it.
That being said, I don’t want to pay for $50 chickens as much as I don’t want to pay for $2,000 iPhones because that’s what having them made without slave/child labor would probably cost…
Ugh
I think it’s kind of a false dichotomy, between spending a lower amount of money (i.e. being poor), and being ethical. I think there’s a lot more we could take issue with, on how society is structured, than accept this false dichotomy. There’s a better universe out there where instead of having to use paper straws, we all just switch to biodegradable, and it is incentivized that people use metal straws. Same shit with this. There’s a universe out there where we eat less meat, where this meat is more sustainably sourced and is locally sourced, which cuts down on logistics, and where, as a result, we don’t have to pay 50 bucks for a frankly pretty gross chicken sandwich.
Capitalism is a race to the bottom. Maximum profit/gain and minimal loss.
Not to overly malign chicken sandwiches, but the point of capitalism is to charge the maximum that the market will bear while paying the least to extract it. And morals have nothing to do with capitalism. Even if it was mandated to have humane farming we would have a boutique pampered chicken sandwich (until they’re mechanically separated in 35 seconds) and foreign-sourced bleached chicken.
Anyway I prefer the tortured beef from Burger King.
Capitalism is a race to the bottom.
Yeah. I agree. I was kind of more on the side that we should maybe not have a race to the bottom, if you can see what I’m getting at
edit: sorry if that didn’t come across in my comment, I tend to not want to label every single thing as “capitalism is the problem bro!” because that puts people off, but then I kind of struggle with tiptoeing around the phrasing.
Jeez, either you are great at walking the line between idiotic and good sarcasm or you are not
Love them
I do love them, fried and slathered in buffalo sauce.
Let them recover from the sickness?
You seem to be vastly overestimating the general health of factory farmed poultry.
Crazy how you can’t think past this. Maybe not factory farm them? Shocker, I know.
Crazy how you went on repeat, can you not think past this argument?
If it aint broke dont fix it
I’m addressing that they’re factory farmed birds so they probably won’t get better, which makes your statement a bad idea. Don’t just move the goalpost if you want to discuss stopping factory farming because I never indicated I was wanting to talk about that.
And how is that going to happen in a coupe with 200,000 packed into it?
Crazy how you can’t think past this. Maybe not factory farm them? Shocker, I know.
We really need some humanitarian regulation in this country.
You can hope for that or you can become vegan today to no longer contribute to those industries.
I already eat very little meat just through personal preference. I think that is a reasonable way to go for the average person. Not everybody has to be vegan; they just need to consume a small amount of meat if they’re going to consume it at all.
Not contributing isn’t enough honestly. There are not enough meat alternatives, and there are way too many people unwilling to give up meat.
This. There’s people out there who would sooner commit cannibalism than give up meat.
Hello aliens I’m a vegan and condemn this bullshit
I’m not and I condemn this bullshit.
“capitalism is more effective than alternatives”
Capitalism showing why it is more effective :
Lmao how does this have more upvotes than the one you’re replying to.
Because vegans are annoying AF?
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You do understand you’re not doing your cause any favours by being a fundamentalist right?
A vegan that can’t resist antagonizing others over their diet is being rather counterproductive. It’s an easier lifestyle choice to keep your mouth shut and not be snarky than it is to completely change your diet.
It begs the question, if this person criticizing me can’t make an easier lifestyle change than what they want me to do, why should I even listen?
(And I’m going to get replies that completely miss the point and continue to moralize at me)
Most vegans can’t keep up the lifestyle more than about 5-7 years, as health issues start to creep in.
The diet isn’t as nutritious as they claim, and there is no good replacement for animal fat and protein.
The meat industry has problems. Don’t get me wrong. But they’re not at the same scale most vegans will tell you they are, and as it happens herbivores are much better at turning plants in to energy than we are. Plus it’s not like we’re treating the actual humans picking tomatoes much better than we treat cattle.
Gonna cite these stats or are you just parroting Joe Rogan? Obviously there’s a large amount of gastronomic variation among humans, some people can’t go vegan easily. But the idea meat has anything you can’t get from plants is absolutely a myth: I eat dark chocolate and nuts for iron, and B12 is in all sorts of shit from mushrooms to potatoes (and is easy to supplement with vitamin water or fortified cereal if not pills). And protein? Protein is the textbook example of this. Y’all just have some weird thing against broccoli and chickpeas.
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The meat industry is fucking sick and demented but people need their meats so animal ethics be damned…. Fucking bullshit, fucking human cancer
Take the subsidies from animal farming and give them to meat alternatives.
We will be awash in lentils!
You’d better get all your meat free-range or hunt it yourself.
Um, just not eating meat is a fairly straightforward option…
I started incorporating more meat alternatives (Beyond, Impossible, Gardein, etc) into my diet for heart health reasons, but damn, it’s starting to make me feel a little better morally as well.
Good for you for working towards eating less meat, and caring about your heart health! Meat is definitely not good for the cardiovascular system, but it’s important to keep in mind that these meat alternative products are not healthier, even though they’re plant-based. Those products should still be eaten in moderation, just as with red meats, because they’re both really high in saturated fat and sodium. They, like meat, also tend to char when cooked, and char is loaded with carcinogens and oxidants. (even though that taste can be divine…)
Anyway - for me, meat alternatives were a helpful introduction to the plant-based/vegan diet, and emboldened me to try out other plant based recipes. “Vegan” can be such a loaded term, but there are a lot of good recipes out there with the term. Search for recipes incorporating tempeh as the protein source - it’s a bit easier to cook than tofu, which often gets a bad rap for being bland when it’s usually just been cooked incorrectly (it requires some preparation/a good marinade and sauce/specific handling and patience to cook it well, but I digress). Tempeh is more forgiving, in that it carries more flavors/textures of its own, which are complimented well by many sauces.
I dunno why so many people discount hunting as a good alternative to sourcing your own meat.
Sometimes the whitetail deer populations are fucking insanely out of control because we killed off their predators like 100 years ago in some areas, and similar things happen all over because predators require larger ranges and are less able to integrate with human developments. Sort of like how we have a shit ton of crows and rats and pidgeons, and raccoons. I think it would probably make more sense to source meat from doing your part to clamp down on the populations, than the alternatives, which are predator reintroduction, which isn’t always guaranteed to work and comes with complications, as the native species are usually totally extinct, or just like. ecological collapse from overgrazing, which sucks and is bad.
This is why the core of the issue that nobody ever talks about is human overpopulation. The demented levels of factory farming we have is only a thing because 8 billion people need to be fed.
The demented level of factory farming had nothing to do with human overpopulation, but everything to do with human culture’s demand for animal products that are entirely unnecessary for survival. If we change our culture to eliminate animal products, we will eliminate a huge source of wasted resources and labor. Think of how much less plant agriculture would be required if we didn’t have to feed 33 billion chickens, almost two billion sheep, a billion and a half cattle, a billion pigs.
If we just grew food we can eat, instead of wasting land, effort, and resources both directly and indirectly supporting animal agra, we wouldn’t have such huge problems.
“But baaaaaaconnnnnn.” “I can’t liiiiiive without eeeeegggggs.” “Cheeseburgers taaaaaaaste too good give up” “it’s because there’s too many huuuuuumanssss”
Consuming meat is natural and vital for us as species.
“cOnSuMiNg MeAt Is nAtUrAl”
Setting aside the inherent ethnocentrism of this statement, which, in classic Western fashion, completely bulldozes the many cultures that have thrived on entirely plant-based diets for centuries, possibly millennia…
This is still a shit argument, when you realize that EVERYTHING humanity does aims to separate ourselves from “nature,” and move beyond what is “natural.”
If we actually lived according to nature, we wouldn’t have plastics, cell phones, cars, airplanes, air conditioning, and all the other myriad things that make our soft squishy lives easier.
But you keep chowing down on your “aLl-NaTuRaL” chicken wings and Mountain Dew, you fucking neanderthal.
You are giving mixed signals. Is separating ourselves from nature good or bad?
“cOnSuMiNg MeAt Is nAtUrAl”
Stop clowning around, please.
Though I have opinions, I will not take the bait, as it is not relevant to my point whether humans distancing themselves from nature is “good” or “bad.”
I think my signal is pretty clear - Your “it’s natural” argument fails entirely when one picks and chooses the aspects of human life to which they apply it.
As an example - you wake up in your climate controlled house, put on your synthetic fiber clothing, jump into your Ford F150 Pickup Truck, Drive to a gas station, pick up a mountain dew in a plastic bottle, and buy a slice of pizza - in all that context, your big brained argument is that it is more natural for that pizza to have animal pepperoni and dairy cheese, vs plant-based alternatives.
Tell me, who is the clown in this situation?
It’s you. You’re the clown.
Our body still is natural by all means. And omnivorous diet is natural to our body.
Natural, sure. Vital? Something like 350,000,000 Indians would like a word with you
They have chicken.
I don’t think they do, considering they’re vegetarian. Around 24% of the country consider themselves vegetarian, while about 8% consider themselves pescatarian (the ones that eat birds and fish)
And the rest 68%?
But cheeseburgers are Delicious.
Animal agriculture is very inefficient, because of tropic levels.
Looking on Wikipedia, dressed broiler chicken carcasses have a feed conversion ratio of about 4. That is to say, a 4lb whole chicken you buy from the butchers case would have required about 12 lbs of feed over its ~2 month life.
An online calorie counter says 4lb of raw whole chicken is 3856 calories. By contrast, a 1lb bag of cornmeal has ~3300 calories. 12 lbs of cornmeal have just over 10x the calories of 1 chicken.
Even comparing the differences in yield between chickpeas and corn, we get way more calories per acre from hummus than Buffalo wings.
In the US, we get 36% of our calories from animals, but use an order of magnitude more space to raise them. We grow more acreage of feed crops than crops that get directly eaten by humans. Fully 40% of the continental US is devoted to raising livestock, which is insane.
We don’t factory farm because there’s 8 billion humans to feed. We factory farm because we want “a chicken in every pot”.
”The problem that nobody ever talks about is overpopulation"
Outright untrue, in both ways. People always talk about it, and it remains not the problem. The problem is distribution, which is largely due to greed and overconsumption. The problem is that farmers breed what they can sell, and people buy so much meat just to have access to it in case they want it eventually.
I found a third way it’s incorrect: we don’t need animal farms to feed people in the first place. We could simply eat plants instead of feeding them to animals.
Getting downvoted but you are right.
Pretty much all of modern problems can be traced to overpopulation.
Oh cool, that’s completely horrifying. And not at all surprising from the meat industry. They’ve never cared about animal cruelty with anything else they do, so why would they care about this?
As an industry they necessitate not caring about cruelty, so anything they do isn’t surprising
hi frick
Fourty nine million just staggers my brain. Like, thats not even a blip in the production.
…nuts.
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If aliens do come to earth, and simply enslave us, torture us then kill us for reasons we can’t comprehend, there should be absolutely no question whether we deserve it or not. They would be doing what we do to other sentient creatures en masse. We have the intelligence and ability to simply not kill these animals in a fashion that is sadistic and agonizing(im not even saying not to kill them, just do it humanely, bare minimum), yet we do it anyway because of greed and capitalist profit motives, cutting costs, etc.
Yes please. End this horrorshow
I like veganism because it forces meat-eaters to eat their own shit and perform mental gymnastics that make them worthy of an Olympic gold medal to avoid admitting their contribution to the problem.
Really shows the cognitive dissonance among average people. And they’re proud of it, lol.
Eat shit, die, get in my belly!
They would be doing what we do to other sentient creatures en masse.
Chickens are sentient?
Yes, they are sentient. Sentience should not be confused with sapience.
I see this sentiment a lot regarding eating meat. I think a lot of people don’t realize how much these animals suffer.
Just look at your dog anytime you eat pork. Remember that that animal you’re eating is smarter than your dog. That pig used to play with its siblings, have love for its mother, and eventually live in complete terror before it is killed. People love to make fun of Asian societies for eating dogs when it is exactly the same as eating a pig.
That little bit of joy you gained from eating pork came at the cost of unfathomable suffering.
There is no excuse in 2023, I’ve been building muscle for the first time in my life and doing it on a vegetarian diet.Vegetarian diet or vegan diet?
Vegetarian, no dairy though because casein intolerance
There is evidence that plants may be sentient. How should we handle that consideration?
Conjecture isn’t evidence. Plants lack both the means to have thoughts and the reason to evolve those means in the first place. They react to stimuli in the same way my phone does. Should I be as worried that I’m hurting my phone by not charging it as I am that I’m hurting my cat by not feeding her?
Or is the entire premise stupid in the first place and we should stop wasting everyone’s time with it?
Also, if plant suffering is a concern, you should definitely be vegan, because trophic levels are a thing, and every calorie worth of meat you eat is 10 calories worth of plants that had to die.
Oh my god I’ve had this conversation more times than I can count.
Robots can react to stimulus too, are they sentient? No
Plants are biological machines devoid of the capacity suffering, as far as we know. There is no evidence that plants grieve the loss of their young or fear for their lives.
I sometimes hope for aliens to come to this planet and treat us like we treat other living beings.
Humanity is such a poor excuse for civilisation
Humans are fucking disgusting. If you zoom out far enough we are just a bacterial infection of the Earth. Spreading our gray cities like bacteria in a petri dish. Growth for the sake of growth is the mentality of a cancer cell.
Well Earth is about to pitch a fever to fight us off…
It’s the “mentality” of most everything. We just have the ability to reflect upon it and, perhaps, change it.
Fun fact: this Joe Rogan rant from 2011 you plagiarized wasn’t even written by him.
I don’t know what rants you’re talking about. This is not a new idea and I did not frame it as a new idea. Maybe stop living your life in podcasts, that is wild that you memorized a quote from 12 years ago
maybe one of the big filters for intelligent life in the universe is greed
The ferengi agree.
I’m looking forward to alien’s selectively breeding us for pets like we do dogs.
It would be a trip to see how many dwarf albinos end up running around
Firefighting foam is full of PFAS that tends to pollute groundwater. The last thing we need is more uses for it.
Heaven forbid you actually vaccinate your livestock.There isn’t really a vaccine. One is being trialed but it is not available. The reason they are so extreme with this is that in affected birds they have about a 99% chance of dieing within 48 hours of infection. Waterfowl can carry it for longer but are still susceptible to death, they seem to be the major infection vector. HPAI highly contagious (highly pathonogenic avian influenza is the name), a bird brushing up on another is enough to spread it, due to birds cleaning their feathers with their mouths. So if a poultry farm tests positive they want to quarantine it ASAP so a sparrow doesn’t spread it to neighbors and wild populations.
Today I learned. Here’s hoping they have a vaccine soon.
And, setting up an entire culling operation, which would have to include transporting the birds, and contaminating another facility and several semi trailers, and staff, not to mention other wildlife is a huge risk. Shutting the windows and turning up the heat is probably the safest and quickest way to do things in this situation
Truly heartbreaking… No words💔
Culling animals is never compassionate, but it must be done.
Why use a method that’s illegal most other places? The description is pretty insane sounding.
They never answer the question
Why is it illegal? I suppose in this instance you contain the birds in a barn that might be deseased and withdraw their oxygen. Probably the cleanest way to do it.
Right. So why are they normalizing this method? It’s illegal because it’s so cruel, that’s like the entire point of the article lol
They used to drive cattle into a pit and shoot them until they were all dead. Like I said at the outset, it’s always cruel.
I fail to see how shooting something in the head is the same as hours of torture. There are reasons we have animal welfare standards.
You think they were head shots? That’s funny,
This is equivalent of leaving a child in a hot car in cruelty.
But it’s not a child. It’s an animal that must be killed to stop the spread of disease.
What if a kid had an incurable spreadable disease? Throw them in the hot summer car?
Let me make it simple. It has nothing to do with a child. It’s about the food you eat and if you want any more of it.
Okay, so only cannibals can lock their children in hot cars?
Did you know that humans are animals? We are not some sort of godly being separated from nature, we came from it and we are a part of it.
You noticed that no one in here is arguing that these diseased animals should be kept alive, right? Your argument is in bad faith and it’s clear you barely thought about it before typing.
Our problem is with how it is done, euthanasia is supposed to be humane and fast. This is an extremely slow and painful process in which the chicken is subjected to extreme distress needlessly. Just to save a few bucks.
They could have at least incapacitated the birds first. They didn’t need to be awake for their brutal slow death.
Did you know that humans are animals? We are not some sort of godly being separated from nature, we came from it and we are a part of it.
Great, so you have no issues with people eating meat then? Since animals also eat meat, and humans are animals?
Yep! I have no problem with a human eating meat. Nice try tho
My only problem lies with the manner in which we obtain that meat.
I have the utmost respect for hunters, they actually earned their meat.
I have no respect for people who buy factory farmed meat in a grocery store. There is nothing natural about that.Calm down and have your mom make you some more tendies
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Sometimes yes, farmers do have to cull animals. All of the farmers I’ve met try to do it in a quick way at least, like cutting off the head of a chicken or a cattle gun to knock the animal out first.
Cutting off the heads of a thousand diseased chickens would take a bit of time, don’t you think?
Yes but at least it’s more humane than cooking the animals for hours
Culling isn’t humane. Culling is a necessity. Farmers and ranchers don’t like to cull, they lose money doing it. You give them a cleaner and cheaper way to do it, and they’ll do that. Culling prevents disease from spreading into the entire food system. Sitting on your couch and deciding the best tactic to do it is ridiculous.
They could have just not made the chickens in the first place
Then it wouldn’t need to be done
Gawd. That doesn’t make a lick of sense
Chickens don’t need to be treated ethically like people do. They’re birds ffs.
Condoning animal abuse? You’re a cool one. Hope you don’t have pets lol
Abuse of animals kept as pets is horrendous, good thing meat chickens aren’t pets
People keep chickens as pets. People farm dogs and cats.
Edit: Shit, people keep humans as pets/slaves
What’s the difference?
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