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IceRollMenu297 karma

If you're gonna follow through with this, it's gonna take more effort than going vegan. You're gonna ask every waiter about the specifics of the facilities they buy their meat from (and cheese, and eggs,…), like in that Portlandia skit. You're not gonna buy processed foods if you can't trace back every animal ingredient. You're gonna refuse what your friends cooked you if it's from a place that doesn't hold up to your standards. As a vegan, you just check labels to make sure there's no animals in your food whatsoever. Being a true "humane-meater", by contrast, is basically a full time job.

Nobody does this. And that is why "humane" farming is a fig leaf for the bad practices in other places. And it helps keeping the demand for these unnecessary products so massively high that we can never satisfy it with humane methods.

IceRollMenu240 karma

Thanks for doing this. So what can I do to make sure I don't support horrible animal cruelty?

IceRollMenu229 karma

/u/kellyl725 probably knows more than me about these things, but separating cow and calf sooner rather than later is seen as the more humane choice, since the more they bond, the more they are in distress after separation. I have gathered some sources on the topic here. I'm just unashamedly going to quote myself here:

One of the results is that late separation (after a number of days as opposed to less than 24h) leads to more intense behavioural responses in cow and calf, and this is unambiguously taken as an indicator of decreased wellbeing. On the other hand, both cow and calf are physically healthier when they spend time together, and the calf is apparently less traumatized. Of course the elephant in the room is that the best thing from an animal welfare standpoint would be not to separate cow and calf at all, but this is obviously not an option in animal farming.

IceRollMenu219 karma

Too bad you're gonna kill them huh.

IceRollMenu215 karma

Just saying, there have been lots of threads on this question in /r/vegan. If you don't find what you want, you might ask yourself.