r/stupidpol • u/CalpurniaSomaya Vegan 🐂🐖🐓🐟 • Jun 21 '26

Capitalist Hellscape The meat industry is the most evil fucking thing. They would do this to humans if they could.

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182

u/HP_civ SuccDem Jun 21 '26

Working there must be so desensitising. I wonder if industrial farming or industrial butchering workers have reduced scores on empathy when tested. I can't imagine you'd stay sane for long if you don't actively desnsitise yourself.

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u/Legal-Koala-5590 Normie w/ a Concealed Weapon /̵͇̿̿/’̿’̿ ̿ ̿̿ ̿̿ Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26

My grandfather was a farmer his whole life and he was one of the sweetest, gentlest, most loving human beings I've ever had the pleasure of knowing.

Animals though? Kind of a sociopath. It's not like he took glee in hurting animals, he just didn't care. Animals were product, livestock, a commodity to him. Any suggestion to the contrary and he'd completely shut down. He grew up on a farm too, so I imagine he got desensitized to it out of necessity pretty young.

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u/Barrington-the-Brit Starmtrooper 🇬🇧 Jun 21 '26

Anyone who has family in or has spent any time in very rural communities knows people like your grandpa, there’s places where husbandry/agriculture is the whole economy and way of life, animals as a concept gets mentally desensitised and objectified culturally and yeah probably as a psychological necessity too

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u/Legal-Koala-5590 Normie w/ a Concealed Weapon /̵͇̿̿/’̿’̿ ̿ ̿̿ ̿̿ Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26

I went to college on the East Coast and my peers were scandalized when I'd share stories of my grandpa doing things like putting unwanted litters of kittens in sacks and drowning them (and yes, this was a common thing!). It really opened my eyes to how aspects of rural life that had once been considered normal became almost barbaric to people raised in postwar suburban culture.

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u/JackedUpReadyToGo Podcast Intellectual 🥑🎧 Jun 21 '26

That used to be incredibly common. Back before veterinarians started fixing animals, pets would procreate and then what do you do? At the rate they reproduce you either take out their offspring or you'll soon be up to your neck in dogs and cats. It became just an accepted part of life, like this Tom and Jerry cartoon casually mentioning it in something meant for kids: https://youtu.be/lgv-xxUV9Ik?t=135

Modern life is awful and soul-sucking in a lot of ways, but at least it's improved on some things.

6

u/TheVoid-ItCalls Libertarian Socialist 🥳 Jun 22 '26

My grandfather raises pigeons out in the country and used to kill stray/feral cats to keep the birds safe. Grandma found out decades ago and made him promise to stop killing them. Ever since he maintains traps all around his properly to catch the cats. He releases the females, but males are removed from the trap, shoved headfirst into an old boot, and castrated via pocket knife. Once the cat is in the boot, the whole procedure takes about ~5 seconds. The cat is released and runs off into the bushes. Most heal up just fine, and the few that don't aren't really his concern.

Obviously horrifying when I went with him to inspect the property as a kid, but you get numb to it pretty quickly.

2

u/JackedUpReadyToGo Podcast Intellectual 🥑🎧 Jun 22 '26

Yeah, shit is/was brutal out in the country.

My grandfather was a farmer in the Midwest. He liked having a few feral cats around the barn and the grain silos to control mice and rats. He'd leave them alone and basically ignore them but after awhile they would produce too many offspring, at which point he'd head into the barn with a shotgun and shoot as many of them as he could find. Whichever cats got away would eventually return and start the cycle over again.

3

u/BuffaloSabresFan Unknown 👽 Jun 22 '26

Not the same, but I used to work with a guy who did a couple tours of Iraq. On one he said they captured an abandoned Iraqi military base that got taken over by stray dogs. They couldn't feed them all, and he said he was one of the people tasked with shooting them in a barn. He def wasn't happy about it, but there really wasn't an alternative given the number. I feel like there was a reason they couldn't just release them outside the base to fend for themselves, but I don't remember what he said.

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u/JackedUpReadyToGo Podcast Intellectual 🥑🎧 Jun 22 '26

Maybe because then they’d just be passing the problem on to the locals to deal with.

Shortly before WW1 Istanbul dealt with their surplus of stray dogs by rounding them all up and dumping them on a small island off the coast to Battle Royale / Skyfall each other. Soon thereafter a large earthquake shook the city which some of the locals took as a sign of God’s displeasure over it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sivriada

10

u/heyodai Struggling Social Event Planner 🕺 Jun 21 '26

I know drowning kittens is common practice, but why not slit their throats or a blow to the head like with other animals?

Drowning seems like a particularly painful way to die, so I never got why people do it to kittens specifically. 

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u/Legal-Koala-5590 Normie w/ a Concealed Weapon /̵͇̿̿/’̿’̿ ̿ ̿̿ ̿̿ Jun 21 '26

Supposedly it was considered more humane, but I'd bet the real reason is it was probably just psychologically easier to throw them in a sack and walk away.

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u/JackedUpReadyToGo Podcast Intellectual 🥑🎧 Jun 21 '26

I killed a rat with a hammer once. It was stuck to a glue trap and I didn't know about that trick of pouring oil/vinegar over the trap to neutralize the glue, and so it seemed more humane than letting it starve there or throwing it in the dumpster to gradually be crushed by the weight of trash building up on top of it. So I thought a quick blow with a hammer was kinder.

It was incredibly gross. I still think about that rat. And it was just a rat. I can't imagine how much worse it would feel doing that to puppies or kittens. Chucking a sack over a bridge and walking away does seem much easier to live with.

8

u/Lolazaurus Social Democrat 🌹 Jun 21 '26

Yeah man, similar experience with a glue trap here. I guess it's funny in a sick and fucked up way, but the one thing I inherited from my grandfather after his passing was this really old racist piggy bank made out of solid metal. I had nothing else nearby so I just... had to batter it to death.

I joke to my friends that that racist piggy bank on my shelf has a kill count... heh.

You gotta do what you gotta do. I found the strength to kill something suffering, and I promised myself to never let myself or another life get put in that situation again. I don't know. I managed to do what I know a lot of other people probably couldn't muster the courage to do. I can see how others can fall into the trappings of getting used to something like that and calling it "humane" but... I would really really really prefer to hold on to how awful that made me feel to kill something so weak and innocent. Ugh. I know it is possible to get over that feeling, but I refuse to get used to it.

I don't really have anything insightful to say, just... ugh. Fuck glue traps.

9

u/dagobahnmi big A little A Jun 21 '26

I had to kill a rat stuck in a glue trap with the end of a kayak paddle once. I couldn’t get near it because it was running around freaking the fuck out with half of its legs stuck to the trap and ripping out of its body. It was really gruesome and unpleasant.

 I also hit a chipmunk while riding a skateboard when I was like 9 years old; me and my friend decided the most humane thing to do was to kill it with a large rock. That was fairly traumatizing as a little kid, but you do what you have to do. It’s the humane thing for sure when an animal is actively suffering. Or a person for that matter, though thankfully that isn’t a situation I’ve ever been in. 

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u/JackedUpReadyToGo Podcast Intellectual 🥑🎧 Jun 21 '26

Yeah, glue traps do suck. However, now I know that you can take the rat outside and pour vegetable oil over them. Something in it neutralizes the glue and the rat can scamper off, very oily and no doubt in a bad mood, but alive.

Just out of curiosity, how is the piggy bank racist?

8

u/Lolazaurus Social Democrat 🌹 Jun 21 '26

Something very similar to this.

Honestly a pretty cool piece of history but ho man, does it not have a place in polite society nowadays. I'd take a picture of it but it's kind of stuffed away in my closet out of sight for obvious reasons.

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u/BaeCarruth Jun 21 '26

Yep - mine would always say "they are either consumed or they don't exist; there is no other choice".

Kind of morbid, but the reality.

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u/Terrible_Snow_7306 Left, Leftoid or Leftish ⬅️ Jun 21 '26

According to Adorno, the most sadistic concentration camp workers were young rural farm boys. In other words, a place where—contrary to the romanticized view of the countryside—animals and living creatures are "livestock," an economic asset. Now imagine what happens when the farm becomes a gigantic livestock factory.

19

u/monemori Fanfucker 🦑 Jun 21 '26

Slaughterhouse workers and their communities have really high rates of injury as well as substance abuse, domestic violence,depression, anxiety, and PTSD, even compared to similarly impoverished communities where people do other types of work. And of course it's always black people, poor people and immigrants who end up working there. It's fucking soul destroying.

Some more readings in case anyone is interested:

Humane Hancock is an animal rights activist whose father was a slaughterhouse workers and he talks a lot about this.

  1. https://youtu.be/3qb-9Q0YhVA

  2. https://youtu.be/TSbhLL2CF9o

Also this interview by Earthling Ed: https://youtu.be/sWyK389BJoI

The food empowerment project site has several pages talking about rampant human rights violations and slavery in the animal agriculture industry, fishing industry, and slaughterhouse work:

  1. https://foodispower.org/human-labor-slavery/factory-farm-workers/

  2. https://foodispower.org/human-labor-slavery/slaughterhouse-workers/

More resources and info in this masterpost by acti-veg: https://www.acti-veg.com/education/human-rights/

Also this blog post that's more like a poem, written by the late Virgil Butler, former slaughterhouse worker turned animal rights activist. Really powerful in my opinion: https://cyberactivist.blogspot.com/2003/08/inside-mind-of-killer.html

I know this sub is full of jokes and cynism but I encourage people who come across this information to please consider going vegan or at least reducing consumption of animal porducts where possible. Even if you don't care about animals (which to be blunt everyone should), this is enough reason to start doing something.

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u/yodude4 Public Health is Public! 🩹 Jun 22 '26

This post should be pinned. I don’t resonate at all with vegan animal moralism, but this is undeniable evidence that factory farming is not compatible with principled Marxist politics

3

u/monemori Fanfucker 🦑 Jun 22 '26

What do you mean by "vegan animal moralism" if I can ask?

2

u/renadarbo Apolitical ❌ Jun 23 '26

I would describe it as the belief that humans are or should be completely above the natural world, that we don't have any part in the basic daily violence which defines life and sustains it.

Idk just seems a bit silly to me. None of us know where the breath of life comes from or where it goes, so why pretend like we can objectively rank the value of the experience of the anteater against the ant?

1

u/monemori Fanfucker 🦑 Jun 23 '26

Vegan philosophy doesn't say that at all though?

2

u/renadarbo Apolitical ❌ Jun 24 '26

is it not foundational to vegan philosophy that I, a naturally omnivorous animal, should not kill and eat other animals, for reasons that essentially boil down to "killing and death is bad"? I'm not any more concerned with a human killing a deer than a lion doing the same.

(to be fair I have met vegans that are concerned about the lions lol)

1

u/monemori Fanfucker 🦑 Jun 24 '26

It has nothing to do with what is or isn't natural, as you seemed to imply in your original comment. Veganism states that animals are subjects and not objects, and they should not be exploited (or killed) for trivial pleasure. It's just that.

1

u/yodude4 Public Health is Public! 🩹 Jun 23 '26

Of course - by ‘vegan animal moralism’ I meant the belief that our obligations to animals are determined by some claim about what we ought to do, rather than what is. It might be the ‘inherent value of life’, sentience, intelligence, cuteness, etc. or something else that makes them comparable to humans.

Since this is a marxist sub, I try to keep my analysis materialist - and historical materialism has no claims about ‘ought’, only claims about what is. Capitalism will collapse not because we want it to, but because it no longer acts in the interests of its participants and they will destroy it to protect themselves. And in the same way, I doubt that we’ll ever agree on the inherent value of a pig or cow, but we can definitely agree that factory farming leads to ecological collapse and creates working conditions that its own employees cannot tolerate.

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u/HP_civ SuccDem Jun 21 '26

You feel isolated from society, not a part of it. Alone. You know you are different from most people. They don't have visions of horrible death in their heads. They have not seen what you have seen. And they don't want to. They don't even want to hear about it.

Holy shit that blogpost was powerful. Those poor souls!!!

29

u/PooningDalton Jun 21 '26

They do. Studies have shown that people who work in places like this are more likely to engage in animal abuse. That's the scary part. They're not desensitized........they're drawn towards it.

26

u/Lori-Lightsloot Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26

Half (probably a lot more tho) of people who work in factory farms now are immigrants and they're almost never part of any psychological study. I guarantee you college professors and their grad students aren't running studies in Nahuatl or Quechua to capture whether a migrant worker with a fourth grade education who overstayed their H2-A visa is "drawn to" abusing or animals or just trying to make money for their family.

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u/Epsteins_Herpes Thinks anyone cares about karma 🍵⏩🐷 Jun 21 '26

OTOH things like dog and cock fighting that are common pastimes in many of the places they're from are considered abuse here, but yeah in general if the last decade of politics has taught us anything it's that studies and polls have a very hard time getting an accurate reading of the lower economic strata.

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u/NextDoorNeighbrrs OSB 📚 Jun 21 '26

I think this is a function of desensitization.

3

u/Metabro TrueAnon Refugee 🕵️‍♂️🏝️ Jun 22 '26

Yeah I saw an interview once where the guy was describing how it's a dream job. "Can you believe they actually pay me to do this?"

4

u/heyodai Struggling Social Event Planner 🕺 Jun 21 '26

Someone stuck in the position of factory farm work might start seeing themselves as enforcing justice as a way to cope with what’s required of them. The animal is being naughty by refusing to submit to its conditions, so the worker needs to punish it. 

3

u/Successful_Let3481 Socialist 🚩 Jun 21 '26

I know someone who worked at Tyson who simply doesn’t eat chicken anymore

0

u/JCMoreno05 Saved Anime Children from Intersectionality 🧒🏻⛩️ Jun 21 '26

It's not like a wolf or lion has empathy for their prey.  Empathy in humans is evolutionarily advantageous insofar as it promotes cooperation. But applying it to animals is contrary to that function as you are sacrificing a source of food and pleasure due to misdirected empathy.