New farm bill would condemn pigs to a lifetime in gestation crates

https://twitter.com/Lewis_Bollard/status/2030985704902099335

by bilsbie • 5 months ago

207 222 5 months ago

twitter.com

hansbo• 5 months ago

Gestation crates are up there among the most immoral things created by man.

Ancapistani3• 5 months ago

In their current implementation, yeah, they’re pretty bad.

There is a need for something like it, though. A sow will absolutely lay down on her piglets and suffocate them.

hangonhn• 5 months ago

A sow will absolutely lay down on her piglets and suffocate them.

This makes me really curious because that behavior seems very maladaptive for a species. That leads me to wonder if something else, ie. the environment or domestication, is leading to this behavior rather than pigs being really, really prone to wiping out their own species. Does anyone know why they do this in a farm environment?

bayarearefugee4• 5 months ago

Humanity is almost definitely going to wipe itself out in the not too distant future through an avoidable (if not for the selfish greed of many of us) climate change resource war Great Filter event.

This used to really bother me, but lately I'm thinking it is probably for the best.

abound• 5 months ago

One of my favorite questions to ask people is something like: "Imagine a button appears in front of you. Pressing it will snap all human beings painlessly out of existence. Do you push the button?"

Some people get caught in minutiae about downstream effects, I tell them it can go however they want (house pets are free or gone too, planes land harmlessly, etc)

In my circles, I've found it's about 50/50 button pushers to non-button pushers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, vegetarians are more likely to be button pushers.

mock-possum2• 5 months ago

God what an awful prospect. How about when you push the button it only removes the button pushers, so the rest of us are free to continue enjoying our existence.

wincy2• 5 months ago

That’s wild to me. I’d hazard a guess that 0% of my friends would push the button (okay, lizardman tax, I’m sure I could find someone I know who would say yes). I think they’d also feel a need to go find whoever made said button and lock them in a cell for safekeeping.

moribvndvs2• 5 months ago

My first serious programming job was at a start up and the owner asked me this question. I was caught off guard, of course I wouldn’t! I couldn’t really explain why at the time, but it essentially revolved around the fact that I was young and optimistic. 25 years later, I’m not so sure. Now, said optimism has almost vanished and there are days pushing seems like the path to least suffering, but I also feel it’s unethical for one person to decide for everyone else.

glenstein2• 5 months ago

It's impossible to refute anecdotes purporting to represent populations based on what they might do in a hypothetical, and the people being described fade further out of tangible existence at every next layer of abstraction.

But Most Vegans I Know (tm) regard human life as valuabe, speak in terms of harm reduction, and tend not to fantasize about making Vault Tec real.

bayarearefugee4• 5 months ago

FWIW I wouldn't push the button.

I just think we are going to absolutely deserve the outcome as we collectively and metaphorically push that button... which we continue to do and are regressing on stopping ourselves from doing so a handful of super wealthy can watch gamified number go up.

hrimfaxi• 5 months ago

Are you in silicon valley by any chance?

pmarreck5• 5 months ago

If I were to implement such a button, I'd make it so that only the people who said "yes" would disappear.

Life is a gift. A painless life has no value. In fact, if you are genetically immune to pain, your lifetime survival rate is something like the teens.

pmarreck5• 5 months ago

We have examples of how that actually plays out (in a limited form).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

tengbretson• 5 months ago

Ehhh no they wouldn't.

diacritical8• 4 months ago

Look up on negative utilitarianism and the Benevolent World Exploder if you want to find more info on the button idea.

Basically the idea is that if minimizing suffering is more important than maximizing pleasure, a world with no life would have no suffering whatsoever.

Regardless of whether you believe that, removing humans only would still leave the unfathomably huge amount of suffering of wild animals and after a while someone else will evolve and take the role of humans. However, if we leave humans exist, they could either destroy everything anyway (like with nukes or AI) or eliminate suffering like David Pearce and others imagine.

squibonpig2• 4 months ago

If you've ever flown in an airplane and looked down at a town, it's outskirts and interface with nature, and the natural environment that surrounds it, you'll probably know the feeling. Our species, if it's even right to lay some kind of claim to the species or to the amalgam of biological, social, technical processes that we lump under that label, is a great colonial organism pervading a larger body. But like the bacteria that inhabit our bodies, even in the cases of bacterial infestations that are unhealthy for us, there's no ontological distinction between the bacteria and the body. The body is eating itself or burning itself up always like the body of a starving person; in doing so it produces beautiful and complex arrangements and unknowable futures, it produces itself anew and becomes somebody else. When we take moral judgements, which are no more than functional elements at work within the body, and attempt to apply them to the body at large, or to our representational, projected image of it, all we're doing is helping along the same process of self consumption (or immolation) that the body is already undertaking. Whether you press the button or don't press the button, the process, its beauty and its horror, continues along uninterrupted.

varispeed2• 5 months ago

We live in a sandbox. Unless we decide to work together to escape it, then there is no point in humanity to exist. All we essentially do is produce rubbish, poo and suffering.

giraffe_lady2• 5 months ago

If you can’t find anything worthwhile here what makes you think you’ll find it out there?

HoldOnAMinute• 5 months ago

The suffering is mainly because of overcrowding

dylan604• 5 months ago

there is no point in humanity to exist

Did any one ever state that there was? Religious types will argue, but my counter is just humanity came up with religion as a stop gap in knowledge.

digitalsushi• 5 months ago

This used to really bother me, but lately I'm thinking it is probably for the best.

The older I get, the more careful I am to remember there's young people left in my wake and I get to decide whether I owe them anything or not - and, I make a personal belief that I do, a very great deal in fact. So getting comfortable that the whole system is damned and worth tossing is very convenient but too cavalier for me to find comfort in

bayarearefugee4• 5 months ago

The older I get, the more careful I am to remember there's young people left in my wake and I get to decide whether I owe them anything or not - and, I make a personal belief that I do, a very great deal in fact.

I don't disagree with this at all, and on a personal level I do everything I can to reasonably leave things as good or better than I found them. I just no longer believe anything I do is going to pull humanity as a whole back from the edge.

greygoo2229• 5 months ago

Unlikely. See some expert analysis here: https://forecastingresearch.org/xpt

nekusar• 5 months ago

Farming practices are already absolutely terrible.

And for reasons of arbitrary weight increase, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ractopamine is used in the USA. Doesnt degrade when cooked, so humans also get fat from it amongst other bad side effects. Banned in most countries, but not the USA. This is also why pork export is banned in most countries.

I know 1 person who is "allergic to pork". But European pork is fine. Even Canadian pork is fine. But what's different with US pork? Ractopamine.

To me, this is yet another reason why capitalism initially was great at making an economy, but profit-seeking behavior gets legally and ethically worse and one trades ethics for money.

bananalychee• 5 months ago

Ractopamine is authorized in Canada per the article you linked.

1234letshaveatw• 5 months ago

Let's not let that pesky detail get in the way of the USA bad narrative he has going.

shakna2• 5 months ago

Likely due to trade agreement, with a geological neighbour.

jedberg• 5 months ago

This is fascinating to me. I am allergic to pork (or I would say intolerant, when I eat it I get a headache and/or stomach ache). But I did try a piece of wild boar once, and was fine after that. I will have to look into this!

Aurornis• 5 months ago

I know 1 person who is "allergic to pork". But European pork is fine. Even Canadian pork is fine. But what's different with US pork? Ractopamine.

Ractopamine is used in Canada.

This sounds like a possible case of the nocebo effect: Someone experiences symptoms based on a belief that an ingredient is bad for them. When they consume the same thing without the belief that the ingredient is present, the effects are absent even though the ingredient is present.

This happens with people who believe they have WiFi sensitivity disorders, too. If you put them next to a WiFi router with blinking lights they will experience the pain of their condition. If you turn off the lights on the router but leave the WiFi transmitting, they stop feeling the effects.

imjonse• 5 months ago

To me, this is yet another reason why capitalism initially was great at making an economy,

Initially it wasn't that great either if you were a slave or worked 14 hours a day .

akramachamarei7• 5 months ago

Capitalism precludes slavery.

Havoc2• 5 months ago

The sooner we get to true lab grown meat the better

Meat is nice but would be better if we can skip the whole suffering thing

okokwhatever• 5 months ago

I'll be pleased to let you eat that for me.

Havoc2• 5 months ago

I mean if it’s functionally identical then I would.

Not super interested in pink slime style concoctions either

globular-toast3• 5 months ago

It's not even nice. People ate meat because fresh fruit and vegetables weren't available all year round or even at all. All good food has plants to make it taste nice. You can easily just skip the meat and go straight for the flavour.

snowe2010• 5 months ago

Your comment makes no sense. If plants weren’t around for humans to eat then how did the animals humans eat survive?

Humans eat animals because they are a denser faster nutrition than plants. More bang for your buck. Trying to act like humans “only eat animals because” is ignoring reality.

pmarreck5• 5 months ago

The Alaskan word for "vegetables" is literally "boring food"

anonym293• 5 months ago

Yeah, I hate being stuck with a luscious rare filet mignon basked in clarified butter, it's so flavorless that I have to chase it with celery, cucumbers, and lettuce just to stomach it... /s

noosphr• 5 months ago

Lab grown mean doesn't work.

But debrained animals are certainly more plausible.

You just need a miminum interface to keep their bodies running. Cruelty free meat.

pmarreck5• 5 months ago

I understand that at least chicken works.

also, you misspelled "meat" as "mean"

dehrmann4• 5 months ago

Oysters don't have a central nervous system.

scotty793• 4 months ago

Would debrained humans for organ harvesting and possibly meat also be cruelty free?

sosodev4• 5 months ago

This is a false dichotomy. The choice is not lab grown or suffering. Farmed animals could live happy, healthy lives and then be culled in a humane way.

The problem is that it costs slightly more and our society is more concerned with cost than animal suffering.

block_dagger• 5 months ago

Any kind of domination of one species over another raises serious ethical questions. Avoiding suffering on the dominated side is nearly impossible.

diacritical8• 5 months ago

That's exactly why lab grown meat is the best way to solve the issue.

Society is only concerned with cost, regulations are weak and rarely enforced and companies are operating in a capitalistic market where they can't compete unless they squeeze every last cent out of each animal. That's hard to change as lots of people have an interest in keeping the status quo and the citizens who vote don't have the time to read everything that comes their way. We can't expect that society will wake up, that people will start voting with more conscience or that everyone will go vegan.

Lab grown meat (or growing brainless animals or something similar) is a technological solution. When it becomes cheaper than normally-grown meat and similar in quality, the atrocities committed in the farms would cease to exist as the farms themselves would cease to exist. The same market forces that are responsible for what's happening to the animals now would prevent any future torture.

Insanity4• 5 months ago

Farmed animals could live happy, healthy lives and then be culled in a humane way.

Breeding animals _specifically for killing them_, no matter how they are killed, is not what I'd consider humane. If we take 'humane' literally, it means to be treated as you would treat a human. I doubt we'd do this to humans. So the only way to be okay with this is adhering to a form of specieism.

mrguyorama• 5 months ago

Worse. We were told we couldn't have happy, cruelty free meat because it would be expensive. We were told we couldn't have clean meat because it would be expensive. We couldn't have sustainable meat because it's too expensive. We couldn't reduce the environmental harms of meat because it's too expensive. We couldn't have locally produced meat because it's too expensive.

Well we got none of those things. But beef steak is still $25 a pound. I don't really care if it gets more expensive because at current prices I can't eat it regularly anyway and rich assholes will have no problems eating their steaks every day even at $100 a pound so why don't we just have a sustainable, clean, less cruel industry?

Countries reduced their demand of our meat, because of horseshit tradewar games, and yet the price went up. Demand for American industrial crops like soybeans, which is used significantly as a cattle feed, cratered, to the point we will have to hand the farms tens of billions of dollars, yet somehow beef still got more expensive. Meat processing uses illegal immigrant labor, sometimes even child labor, and all regulation of those facilities has dramatically curtailed under Trump administrations, and yet beef still gets more expensive.

Here's what beef producers say:

“It’s hard as a beef producer to necessarily say that beef prices are too high. I mean, if people are paying $6 for a latte at Starbucks, but then they’re paying $6 for a pound of beef, they’re able to feed a family for a family of three with that pound of beef,” said Taylon Lienemann, co-owner of Linetics Ranch in Princeton, Nebraksa.

In other words, fuck you pay me. "Starbucks makes great profit so we should make more". The reason for the price increase is a "very small herd", which producers have been reducing because of droughts and otherwise because they don't think the profit is high enough to invest in future production.

trymas• 5 months ago

I am too lazy to do the math, but I somehow think it would cost _multiple times_ more: https://www.farmtransparency.org/kb/food/abattoirs/age-anima...

society is more concerned with cost than animal suffering.

Yes, and it's politically very hard to change. I totally understand price sensitivity around food. At least where I live milk and meat is extremely subsidised. How can you have chicken that is grown, slaughtered, cleaned, packaged, distributed, kept cold all the way, etc. and sell it for 5eur/kg (and cheaper on discounts). There's s much human work, resources, fuel used - I cannot understand.

Also - being a vegetarian/vegan is more expensive than being omnivore.

ritlo2• 5 months ago

Farmed animals could live happy, healthy lives and then be culled in a humane way.
The problem is that it costs slightly more and our society is more concerned with cost than animal suffering.

IDK about other livestock, but this definitely doesn't hold for chickens, one of the cheaper meat sources in the US. Switching to breeds that could live more than a very-few weeks(!) before getting too overweight to walk, would increase price by far more than "slightly more", and there's no hope of anything fitting any sane definition of "humane chicken farming" without that step.

I suspect it's also true for pigs, not necessarily the "we bred them so wrong that their very existence is a crime against god and nature" part but that the price increase from a "healthy, happy life" would be a lot larger than "slightly more". Maybe also cows, dunno about that one.

philistine• 5 months ago

At the scale to feed the world, and at the prices we require, absolutely not. Eating meat means making another creature suffer. Don't delude yourself.

blks3• 5 months ago

This is whitewashing to make consumers happy and less concern. Nothing is humane about murdering an animal to sell its body parts for profit. Thats just marketing.

Hammershaft• 5 months ago

Cost is not a minor thing considering the suffering that poverty creates.

SequoiaHope• 4 months ago

Strong disagree. There absolutely are “more humane” methods but they are still not humane. Forced separation of mothers from their children (standard practice) and killing the animals before their natural death are two inhumane features of even “free range” practices.

There is no humane way to kill a creature against its will.

To be clear, free range represents a major improvement over the unconscionable horrors of factory farms, but it is not flatly “humane” without qualification.

hshdhdhj44442• 4 months ago

What’s the humane way you would like to be culled?

nsonha• 4 months ago

Farmed animals could live happy, healthy lives and then be culled in a humane way

Ok but why stop there

dehrmann4• 5 months ago

I actually had some this weekend.

If you support this, visit one of the handful of restaurants selling it to show interest and support the companies. The salmon I had was ready for prime time in the right context, and if you didn't know, you probably wouldn't have noticed.

delecti2• 5 months ago

I'm surprised to hear that it works with fish in particular. I wouldn't have thought it could replicate the flakiness of real fish. That's great to hear honestly.

I'd assumed it would mostly be limited to cultured ground beef and chicken nuggets.

hackable_sand2• 5 months ago

What a weird compromise.

pmarreck5• 5 months ago

In nature, animals are routinely torn apart and devoured while still breathing.

In a proper rending facility, a captive bolt pneumatic/hydraulic pistol punctures their skull and sends a shockwave through their brains, killing them like Tony in the last scene of the Sopranos.

filoeleven2• 4 months ago

And those "proper rendering facilities" don't exist in reality. This is why ag-gag laws exist.

JungleGymSam2• 5 months ago

what a disgusting idea.

clickety_clack• 5 months ago

At least the thing with live animals is that they have to be kept within some kind of parameters to survive, with those parameters hopefully also leading to some level of food standards for us. I can’t even conceive of the kind of chemicals and processes that would be required to keep random meat-like cells alive without the rest of the body.

flowerbreeze• 5 months ago

I think not so long from now the exotic meal experience for the young ones will be real grilled chicken that looks like a chicken. Like zebra or crocodile meat was for us northerners.

From my own little box I think that that if lab grown meat was available and affordable, I would never eat a bit of real chicken, pork or beef again. I know veganism is an option too, but... I grew up with meat and it's very difficult to give up.

aziaziazi6• 5 months ago

Have you tried tempeh? It solves 95% of my chicken craving since I found the right recipe and spices. It's also cheaper, nutritious, faster to cook and almost no processed.

https://tempeh.info/

znpy• 5 months ago

Lab meat is essentially proprietary food.

I hope that never takes off. I’m not eating that shit for sure.

whycome• 4 months ago

Sometimes people look back on slavery as an institution and wonder "how did they ever do that?" But the thing is, it was so ingrained economically and culturally.

In a hundred years (or less?) we will look back on meat from tortured animals with similar incredulity.

The abolitionist movement coincided with the industrial revolution. Maybe accessible meat replacements will have the same result.

nebula88042• 4 months ago

The ship may have sailed for a lot of consumers. This along with EVs are one of those things that people try once and if they don't like it they won't try again. Probably helps to explain why all the stocks of these companies were riding high for quite a while but then collapsed.

How do you rebrand after people have already associated your product with past failed incumbents?

hshdhdhj44442• 4 months ago

What are the failed cultivated meats that people have tried?

wktmeow3• 4 months ago

In the mean time you could stop eating it

hulitu• 4 months ago

The sooner we get to true lab grown meat the better

lab grown meat is cancer. Good luck eating that.

aquir• 5 months ago

Anyone who's ever looked after and cared for pigs knows that this is very-very cruel. I would do the same with those humans(?) who wants this. Greed over everything. Disgusting

SunshineTheCat• 5 months ago

Does anyone else ever find it odd that in posts like this the person posts a sad picture of a pig instead of a screenshot of the page of the bill they're talking about?

I think "a provision that would condemn millions of pigs to a lifetime in gestation crates" is in fact horrific, however, outrage is the currency on places like X.

Posting a page number sounds specific, but then why not post the page (or quote it)? Particularly in any even remotely political environment where the default is "vote for (or oppose) this bill or you want [insert cute animal, baby, person, minority group] to die."

Just a tiny bit of source referencing could go a long way to help people better understand what you want them to support (or oppose).

jagged-chisel2• 5 months ago

Whoa there - can’t shape public sentiment if you let people go read it for themselves.

gowld4• 5 months ago

2 seconds on Google leads you the sponsor of the bill bragging about doing what the OP is complaining about: : https://hinson.house.gov/media/press-releases/hinson-introdu...

The insane language in the sponsor's own press release tells me all I need to know about who the evil side on this bill is.

California prop 12: https://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/nu/fd/mb-fdp-03-2022-a.asp

djcannabiz• 5 months ago

fwiw, i found it helpful, i had no idea what a gestation crate is. i don’t think the photo is sad or manipulative, the sad part is what is being done to the pigs! and seeing a photo of what is done to the pigs is all i needed to make up my mind. it’s like the difference between posting a document that references “enhanced interrogation techniques” vs seeing a photo of what was actually done, it has a very different impact. i agree some kind of a citation would be nice though, so i don’t have to go digging about what to say when i contact my representative about.

lux-lux-lux• 5 months ago

Yeah, why would someone trying to drum up opposition to the measure show the real-world impacts of it instead of the (easily Googlable) dry legalese? Real thinker, there.

megabless123• 5 months ago

https://xcancel.com/Lewis_Bollard/status/2030985704902099335...

criddell• 5 months ago

Here's a link to the bill if you are interested in who sponsored and cosponsored it. It's a total of 24 people, so it had a fair bit of support.

If you live in the district of one of these people you might consider contacting them to let them know your opinion.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4673...

diacritical8• 5 months ago

The "R-" after their names means they're all Republicans, right?

evan_• 5 months ago

Yes, [R-IA-4] means Republican from Iowa's 4th Congressional District.

red-iron-pine2• 4 months ago

if it's a farm bill you can almost always assume R

R- means Republican

butILoveLife2• 5 months ago

I find it odd we need legislation to prevent this.

There are not enough consumers to care? Or maybe with legislation we get better outcomes due to scaling effects?

If we are willing to use legislation, could we tax such gestation crates, and use that tax revenue to breed unconscious pigs? Or find a way to disable consciousness in their brain? Or fund lab meat? I'm sure small labs are doing this, but if we are at the point of legislation, I imagine there is enough willpower to solve this problem rather than bandaids.

stetrain• 5 months ago

Consumers probably don't know all of the conditions involved in making any of the products they buy. That information is generally not on the label, and even environmental and conditions based labels are often vague and hard to interpret.

Also in an economy of rising costs, people are going to choose affordable options even if they might be vaguely aware of worse conditions happening somewhere else, far away from the grocery store aisle where they are making that choice for their family.

post-it• 5 months ago

If we are willing to use legislation, could we tax such gestation crates, and use that tax revenue to breed unconscious pigs? Or find a way to disable consciousness in their brain? Or fund lab meat?

This is the kind of "big government libertarian" thinking that you only find on HN. It's like virtue signalling but the virtue is contrarianism. What you've suggested is more complicated, less ethical, less effective, and likely to be opposed by just about everyone across the political spectrum.

butILoveLife2• 5 months ago

Lmao, you did describe me so hard.

But I think I'd push back that this is less ethical.

All sorts of things are unpopular, but the masses can't logic their way through it.

hackable_sand2• 5 months ago

Everything you suggested are bandaids

Spivak• 5 months ago

Voters do care, in both blue and red states, they already passed laws in their state to this effect. This is the federal government invalidating those laws.

ryandrake• 5 months ago

If the billionaires in power thought that they could grow their wealth 1% more by forcing the rest of us humans into gestation crates, they would do it in a heartbeat.

doublerabbit• 4 months ago

Don't they already do that? The same as the office cubicle.

Work, Sleep, Eat. Your limited freedom is controlled by money which is earned by being forced to work in an office. The difference is your allowed to go home at X but must return at Y.

hermannj314• 5 months ago

Pigs outnumber the humans 7-to-1 in Iowa, but they don't vote so here we are.

As an Iowan, it is obligatory to show love for Herbert Hoover and our pig population when called upon.

jpfromlondon• 5 months ago

some pigs vote

metalman• 5 months ago

crates are wastefull , gestation tubes, amputate there irrelevant legs, and keep them in nice cozy tubes.

gowld4• 5 months ago

Ashley Hinson, sponsor of Save Our Bacon Act, endorses bombing people thought to be dangerous. Pig-torturers are dangerous.

https://www.kcrg.com/2026/03/06/rep-hinson-speaks-iran-confl...

aristofun3• 5 months ago

I can understand and respect no meat people’s position (vegans etc), because it is consistent. Even if I disagree generally.

But how can I comprehend people who eat meat and okay with killing animals, but get outraged by so and so practices of growing them? Isn’t it a textbook definition of inconsistency and hypocrisy?

xboxnolifes• 5 months ago

Where is the inconsistency in being ok with killing an animal and eating it and wanting the time leading up to their death to not be misery?

aristofun3• 5 months ago

How it can be more miserable than it already is - being animal slave from birth to guaranteed death (don’t tell me animals can’t feel it from adjacent room/building)?

wktmeow3• 4 months ago

Stop eating them if you give a shit then

silexia• 4 months ago

I just raised, slaughtered, and butchered five pigs myself.

My pigs took longer to raise because it is winter here and I gave them lots of room to run. The pigs had a good life right up until their kill time.

The reason pork is so cheap is that overseas meat providers can break all of these humane rules we have in the USA. We badly need high tariffs so businesses don't just go around all of our environmental and labor protection laws by importing products from overseas.

xtiansimon• 4 months ago

Sounds like veal, which I won’t eat.

https://www.humaneworld.org/en/blog/heres-why-pork-new-veal

New farm bill would condemn pigs to a lifetime in gestation crates

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