But but it worked on my machine
In 2004, the FDA estimated that 92 percent of drugs that pass preclinical tests, including “pivotal” animal tests, fail to proceed to the market.More recent analysis suggests that, despite efforts to improve the predictability of animal testing, the failure rate has actually increased and is now closer to 96 percent
We’ve solved ethics. Pack it up everyone
The fight against horrible things often benefits from people doing the right thing for the dumbest of reasons
The chart says it’s only looking at eligible voters
But looking it up shows around 4.6 million were disenfranchised in 2022 because of convictions. In semi-good news, it’s gone down recently in part because more states are starting to allow people to vote after they’ve served time. So if people keep pushing in other states, it can hopefully keep going that way
A good place to start is by changing consumption levels as not doing doing so would make things much harder. It’d be difficult to maintain current consumption levels with slow-growing birds as it’d require a much larger number of chickens to be slaughtered
Maintaining this level of consumption entirely with a slower-growing breed would require a 44.6%–86.8% larger population of chickens and a 19.2%–27.2% higher annual slaughter rate, relative to the current demographics of primarily ‘Ross 308’ chickens that are slaughtered at a rate of 9.25 billion per year.
[…]
In sum, without a drastic reduction in consumption, switching to alternative breeds will lead to a substantial increase in the number of individuals killed each year, an untenable increase in land use, and a possible decrease in aggregate chicken welfare at the country-level scale
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.210478#d1e265
The places one get chickens from are likely going to be the same or similar to the common commercial breeds.
It’s also worth noting that domesticated breeds of egg-laying chickens haven’t been spared either :( They have been selected to lay so many eggs that it harms their bone health. It takes a lot of calcium to make eggs, so naturally they don’t lay them as much. In the wild, they would also often eat their own unfertilized eggs to recover the calcium too. I’ve read that a fair number of animal sanctuaries actually give them medications to lower their rate of egg laying and let them eat their own eggs to recover that calcium
Hens will often lay around 300 eggs per year. That’s very different from the wild ancestor of modern chickens – the red junglefowl – which lays around a dozen per year. And much higher than in 1900, when commercial hens would lay around 80 eggs yearly
They have been artificially selected to grow faster. The breeds of chickens are not natural in the slightest. They are even patented so only one company can for instance sell the Ross 308. The changes in breeds that are most common are due to intensive selection. The breeds themselves will get classified differently as those selections happen, so comparing the same one wouldn’t make as much sense
They can already barely walk…
It’s not just feeding them more that’s caused this. To get chickens this large they genetically selected/modified for what was more profitable. I.e they may lead to features being changed unevenly
This is all at expense of pretty everything else like their health
Some have used the term “Frankenchicken” to refer to them because of their numerous health and pain problems from their fast growth
Quite a lot,
The science is clear that fast-growing chickens like the Ross 308 are doomed by their genetics. These have been engineered to grow so incredibly fast, and their bodies just cannot handle it.”
Jackson said secret filming at broiler farms supplying big supermarkets has shown birds struggling to walk or collapsing under their own weight, or dying from heart failure, and dead birds were filmed lying among the flocks.
[…]
Andrew Knight, a professor of animal welfare and ethics at the University of Winchester, said: “With these really rapid growth rates, it can be difficult for the heart and circulatory system to keep up with the expanding body mass. A proportion of these animals suffer from heart failure. It’s also difficult for the bones, ligaments and tendons to keep up with the rapidly increasing body mass, meaning that a proportion of these birds become severely lame [inability to walk properly].”
They are more likely to have all kinds of other health issues not listed in the quote above such as hock burns
At their expense
The very study that you cite found it uses more human-edible feed than it produces. That is the more relevant figure
Contrary to commonly cited figures, 1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2 for monogastrics
The first study’s I cited in the previous comment whole goal was to directly measure what amount of their feed was human-edible. It still found it takes more kg of human-edible feed than it produces in kg of meat. These studies aren’t leaving things out, they are just finding the opposite result
Repeating the claim without any evidence does not make it more true
I disagree with your premise that it is misleading at all. Including things that the majority of the population does not do nor can scale to the overall population would not work for a modeling study. Most people are not hunters, including that in a cost estimation study would just be giving people a false sense of true cost. Real world data would be more reliable way for that if you wanted to try to include that in a more realistic way
The article also talks about physical injuries as well. The injury rate is uniquely high for meatpacking
Together, poultry slaughtering and processing companies reported more severe injuries to the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) than many industries that are popularly recognized as hazardous, such as sawmills, industrial building construction, and oil and gas well drilling
I cited more than one study. The other ones looked at average real world spending data
I think you may be underestimating the heavy level of subsidies here
Research from 2015 shows this subsidization reduces the price of Big Macs from $13 to $5 and the price of a pound of hamburger meat from $30 to the $5 we see today.
https://www.aier.org/article/the-true-cost-of-a-hamburger/
Even despite that, overall in most countries it actually ends up being cheaper to do a healthy plant-based diet assuming you have more whole-foods and less say plant-based meats
It found that in high-income countries:
• Vegan diets were the most affordable and reduced food costs by up to one third.
• Vegetarian diets were a close second.
• Flexitarian diets with low amounts of meat and dairy reduced costs by 14%.
• By contrast, pescatarian diets increased costs by up to 2%.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-11-11-sustainable-eating-cheaper-and-healthier-oxford-study
And real world data backs this up
Compared to meat eaters, results show that “true” vegetarians do indeed report lower food expenditures
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921800915301488?via%3Dihub —(looking at the US)
Based on primary data (n = 1040) collected through an online survey, representative of the Portuguese population, through logistic regressions, it was possible to conclude that plant-based consumers, particularly vegan, are associated with lower food expenditures compared to omnivorous consumers. In fact, plant-based consumers are shown to spend less than all other consumers assessed
https://agrifoodecon.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40100-022-00224-9
It still takes more human-edible crops in than it produces out
1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2 for monogastrics
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013
Per unit crop land you can produce a lot more with plant-based production
we show that plant-based replacements for each of the major animal categories in the United States (beef, pork, dairy, poultry, and eggs) can produce twofold to 20-fold more nutritionally similar food per unit cropland. Replacing all animal-based items with plant-based replacement diets can add enough food to feed 350 million additional people, more than the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food loss.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1713820115
For another study
We find that, given the current mix of crop uses, growing food exclusively for direct human consumption could, in principle, increase available food calories by as much as 70%, which could feed an additional 4 billion people (more than the projected 2–3 billion people arriving through population growth)
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/034015/pdf
For water usage, it’s also draining from places like the drying up Colorado river. We really don’t want to use more water from that area at all
Correspondingly, our hydrologic modelling reveals that cattle-feed irrigation is the leading driver of flow depletion in one-third of all western US sub-watersheds; cattle-feed irrigation accounts for an average of 75% of all consumptive use in these 369 sub-watersheds. During drought years (that is, the driest 10% of years), more than one-quarter of all rivers in the western US are depleted by more than 75% during summer months (Fig. 2 and Supplementary Fig. 2) and cattle-feed irrigation is the largest water use in more than half of these heavily depleted rivers
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=wffdocs
The good news is that some progress has been made in the US. The semi-recent (2022) FDA modernization act 2.0 removes mandates for animal testing in law and allows other testing methods to be used instead
There’s another bill (FDA modernization act 3.0) that was just reintroduced a few days ago to not just allow the FDA to use non-animal testing, but to require that the FDA start actually working to allow it and setup pathways, rules, requirements, etc. And prioritize the review of drugs done via approved non-animal testing
It includes various reporting, safety, etc. requirements laid out so it wouldn’t just be handing it blindly to the current admin
The 2.0 act was suprisingly bipartisan, so it’s not a given that the 3.0 act would be doomed. Call your house representative and senators to make sure it gets through!