From xkcd.com/1338
Image
It's just loss.
Submitted 16 hours ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/5749a140-c030-45a4-89a4-f28e2b582908.jpeg
Comments
Pierre121000@lemmy.ml 5 hours ago
grrgyle@slrpnk.net 1 hour ago
I don’t want to sound all Malthusian but that’s kind of fucked??
jsomae@lemmy.ml 5 hours ago
more elephants than I expected tbh
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 10 hours ago
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.
silasmariner@programming.dev 8 hours ago
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.
Limonene@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
The problem is that the infographic says “of all the mammals on Earth”, which means individuals, not biomass. So the infographic is objectively false.
davidagain@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
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.
aeternum@lemmy.blahaj.zone 16 hours ago
we kill 3T animals a year for food/medicine/clothing/etc. Maybe we should stop?
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
I’m going to go brutally murder and deep-fry my dog just to cancel out whatever grass you ate today, you foolish vegoon! something something lions something desert island grumble grumble muh canines
jol@discuss.tchncs.de 14 hours ago
Look I get you but
points at fangs
Canines though
TimewornTraveler@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 hours ago
not sure what the edit is for… you looking to be disagreed with? are there comments I can’t see?
aeternum@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 hours ago
I was merely pointing out that people call people extremists for not eating animals, but they don’t recognise that killing TRILLIONS of animals a year is not extreme.
QuoVadisHomines@sh.itjust.works 14 hours ago
Do ypu have a source for that 4 trillion?
aeternum@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 hours ago
Cypher@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
There are too many cultural factors involved to get a majority of people to stop eating meat.
The best way to reduce the number of livestock killed is to reduce the number of humans.
CybranM@feddit.nu 12 hours ago
You can shift culture, at least slowly. I think our best shot at significantly reducing animals killed is probably investing more into lab-grown meat
scratchee@feddit.uk 13 hours ago
If you’re worried about cultural factors, you might find removing any significant percentage of the total population will likely run into even more implacable “cultural factors” than meat reduction would.
This is regardless of the method of population reduction, save perhaps “slow decline” which seems to be promising atm, but that obviously has the downside that it’ll take a few generations to really have an impact.
sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml 10 hours ago
I don’t think a single vegan is expecting animal exploitation to completely end in their lifetime. This will require a cultural shift that could take so fucking long. Despite that, we all think it is worth doing and being a part of.
MML@sh.itjust.works 12 hours ago
I mean okay
KingGimpicus@sh.itjust.works 13 hours ago
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 3 farm cows for every wild rat on earth?
Horse. Shit.
needanke@feddit.org 12 hours ago
The source 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.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 4 hours ago
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, 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.
then_three_more@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
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.
hellfire103@lemmy.ca 11 hours ago
in the comments section. straight up ‘sourcing it’. and by ‘it’, haha, well. let’s justr say. My pnas.
theparadox@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Quick Internet search… 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
KingGimpicus@sh.itjust.works 12 hours ago
OK so how many tons of cow are accounted for by whales?
Or does the survey cherry pick land animals too?
-
mysticpickle@lemmy.ca 12 hours ago
infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net 11 hours ago
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
Deme@sopuli.xyz 11 hours ago
Gustephan@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
I don’t think this is loss. I’m ready to eat crow if I’m proven wrong, but I think the real joke is the amount of time people will spend staring at this image and trying to figure out how it’s loss
floo@retrolemmy.com 15 hours ago
I’ve eaten crow. I would not recommend it.
pHr34kY@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
This sounds like a way to cause an outbreak of Corvid-19.
Bosht@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Title made me think they were doing some 4 levels deep “loss” meme. It almost has it but frame 3 isn’t close.
Anahkiasen@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 hours ago
Yeah this has my pattern matching in scrambles like I can see it kinda??
sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 hours ago
Now even things that aren’t loss are loss :c
echodot@feddit.uk 10 hours ago
I didn’t realise rhinos were so small. No wonder I never see them.
ryedaft@sh.itjust.works 16 hours ago
By mass.
fossilesque@mander.xyz 15 hours ago
End of the Holocene, Last of the Megafauna party.
FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 hours ago
It’s so fucking surreal to me how much megafauna extinctions have happened in the past 50’000 years.
I don’t think people realise we had like giant land birds, megasloths, literal humungus kangaroos roaming round not that long ago.
fossilesque@mander.xyz 13 hours ago
The garden burned. We were best adapted.
floo@retrolemmy.com 15 hours ago
Nearly 8,000,000,000 humans require a lot of food. And it’s better that we eat livestock then depleting the local wildlife for nourishment. That’s a whole point of farming.
It’s still baffles me that anyone, especially in the last 10 or 15 years, suddenly thinks that this is a barbaric practice that must immediately end.
lowleekun@ani.social 15 hours ago
Only that we waste a ton of space that we could grow crops for humans to eat instead of feeding it to animals and wasting 90% of the energy. So saying 8 billion people need a lot of food while arguing for animal agriculture is very contradicting. Not even talking about all the greenhouse gases and the way we treat animals.
Maybe you should engage with some of the arguments these pretentious, condescending jerks are having because your comment has the same energy but none of the arguments.
QuoVadisHomines@sh.itjust.works 14 hours ago
yup we need to eat food. It does not have to be meat centric or involve meat.
floo@retrolemmy.com 15 hours ago
The problem is, as you describe, poor logistics management. Not what we actually eat.
I’m sorry, you’re religious food fanaticism has blinded you to more rational options for dealing with greenhouse gases and animal cruelty. Your black-and-white approach is, clearly, not convincing me enough people to make a difference. So maybe you should focus on something that will make an actual difference: stop being a domineering, asshole, and lecturing people on how they should live their lives.
AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.space 15 hours ago
So, I do get where you are coming from - but there are some things to consider. Firstly: while domestication and animal husbandry are pretty old, factory farming and such is very recent and has given everything a pretty new touch. While I think it’s still valid to bring up as an argument, “X has existed as a pillar of our life for thousands of years” is usually not a great argument in and of itself, the same could easily be used to argue for slavery and a lot of other fucked up shit in history.
Besides that, there is sustainability. Yes grass-fed cattle can actually be sustainable, and allow for utilising land that is otherwise not usable to produce food. Also there is plant matter and “waste” from farming and food production more broadly, that can be utilised in feeding livestock sustainably, which would otherwise be composted anyway (and in some cases, gets pre-composted pretty well by said animals). So, yes, there are ways to produce meat and other animal-derived products sustainably … but that is usually a bit of a cop-out, trying to divert attention from how the vast, vast majority of meat production is not sustainable in mostly water and CO2 numbers.
floo@retrolemmy.com 15 hours ago
The only people who believe that animals cannot be raised as livestock in a sustainable fashion are the closed minded food, fanatics known as vegans.
It can be done, but not with your limited imagination and viewpoint on the world.
The problem is that people like you don’t want a solution. You want to be able to simultaneously claim victimhood while also lecturing and condescending to the entire world. Veganism is nothing more than an addiction to the sense of superiority over others.
If you actually cared about greenhouse gases, or animal cruelty, you’d be willing to explore other options. But vegans are extremists. It’s their way or no way.
Hi, on the other hand, care about greenhouse, gases, and animal, cruelty, and all of the other downsides to factory farming, but I’m not so stupid, I don’t have a big chunk of my brain, scooped out by religious fanaticism, so I can actually see alternatives.
apotheotic@beehaw.org 13 hours ago
Just because things are the way they have been for ages, does not mean they are correct.
It is a brutal, awful practice and completely unnecessary.
I am not being condescending or pretentious when I say these things. I understand that it is very, very hard to alter what you’ve done your entire life, and harder still to see the issues with those things.
Those 8bn humans could be sustained by a fraction of the environmental impact, suffering to life, and land usage if they were on a plant based diet.
Evil_Shrubbery@lemmy.zip 11 hours ago
this is the way it’s been for tens of thousands of years
Human population needed to be fed 10+k years ago:
1.000.000
vs now
10.000.000.000stray@pawb.social 12 hours ago
Something I pretty much never see pointed out is that we don’t need billions of humans. Our governments keep encouraging us to have children, but they should be working to end the culture of pressuring people (especially women) into having children because they’re somehow incomplete without them. There should be more programs offering access to birth control and family counseling services. This endless and meaningless growth is as harmful to us as it is to the rest of our planet.
Deme@sopuli.xyz 12 hours ago
Our economic systems only work with infinite growth because otherwise what would be the point of lending money if it won’t grow interest. They are essentially giant pyramid schemes. And that requires new blood to provide labour. This is incredibly dumb on a finite planet with limited resources, but that’s mainstream economics for you.
Also if the population shrinks too fast, then the pyramid becomes unstable with not enough younger people to take care of all the old people (while also maintaining the economy).
floo@retrolemmy.com 12 hours ago
The only reason that governments keep pushing for us to breed is because it feeds the capitalist society which relies on a never-ending supply of willing laborers.
And, yes, all economies require laborers, capitalism is unique and how it consumes everything, even workers, as a resource rather than simply utilizing them.
TimewornTraveler@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 hours ago
people need to eat, but do they need to eat THAT?
dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works 13 hours ago
Its not as easy to go eat the wild ones, and people frown at eating from the human population. Those are all the options in the graphic.
space_comrade@hexbear.net 14 hours ago
Are these percentages referring to total biomass or population count?
Barabas@hexbear.net 14 hours ago
Has to be biomass, rats alone are etimated to be about as numerous as humans.
graycube@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Are pets livestock, or did they miss a category of mammals? In the US there are more dogs than children.
hakase@lemmy.zip 14 hours ago
It’s intentionally misleading, like most vegan propaganda. It’s by mass, not population.
FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 hours ago
Biomass is the usual way this sort of data is presented in environmental science. I think calling it “propaganda” is a bit much. But yes if would have been better if that were clear on the infographic.
Semjaza@lemmynsfw.com 12 hours ago
Do you think this info graphic is more or less worrying if it is numbers of living beings rather than biomass?
stray@pawb.social 13 hours ago
I believe pets are counted as livestock, but it’s not specifically referenced as far as I have the interest to read.
boiledfrog@hexbear.net 15 hours ago
I just cannot imagine a functioning planet like that tbh, there’s no way cattle industries are something we can keep in the world without killing ourselves slowly.
OpenStars@piefed.social 14 hours ago
birbs are only 2/3rds unreal confirmed ✅
renzhexiangjiao@piefed.blahaj.zone 12 hours ago
by number of organisms, biomass, species count, or something else?
Derpenheim@lemmy.zip 12 hours ago
That YOU know of
RuthBaderGonesburg@hexbear.net 11 hours ago
Land mammal biomass and bird biomass
pruwybn@discuss.tchncs.de 10 hours ago
They forgot to mention what percentage of birds are humans smh
topherp@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Does the wild animals include insects? What about single cell animals?
Evil_Shrubbery@lemmy.zip 11 hours ago
A planet used up for specific food cultivation (which left no ecosystem unaffected).
Should have invented (energy to) food replicators before having the hubris to feed 100s of millions.
Guamer@hexbear.net 10 hours ago
who would win: giant cow or giant chick?
jsomae@lemmy.ml 7 hours ago
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.”
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.
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 4 hours ago
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.
jsomae@lemmy.ml 3 hours ago
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.
That’s bad, though probably not anywhere near as much agony as being boiled alive for several hours. 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.
faintwhenfree@lemmus.org 3 hours ago
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 ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-are-factory-f…
ayyy@sh.itjust.works 1 hour ago
Do you source 100% of your meat from the one place you visited that one time? How many pounds of meat per year do you eat?
RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
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…
v4ld1z@lemmy.zip 5 hours ago
Carnies won’t hear it
Soulg@ani.social 4 hours ago
Lmao the slurs you make up are so cute
Nobody defends factory farms they’re universally hated
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 4 hours ago
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 …
RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
Now introducing Tyson’s CEO: Cthulhu.