Last year, I wrote a great deal about the rise of “ventilation shutdown plus” (VSD+), a method being used to mass kill poultry birds on factory farms by sealing off the airflow inside barns and pumping in extreme heat using industrial-scale heaters, so that the animals die of heatstroke over the course of hours. It is one of the worst forms of cruelty being inflicted on animals in the US food system — the equivalent of roasting animals to death — and it’s been used to kill tens of millions of poultry birds during the current avian flu outbreak.
As of this summer, the most recent period for which data is available, more than 49 million birds, or over 80 percent of the depopulated total, were killed in culls that used VSD+ either alone or in combination with other methods, according to an analysis of USDA data by Gwendolen Reyes-Illg, a veterinary adviser to the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), an animal advocacy nonprofit. These mass killings, or “depopulations,” in the industry’s jargon, are paid for with public dollars through a USDA program that compensates livestock farmers for their losses.
The thing about civilization is that ideally it advances. If 200k years is the sample size you wish to view, houses are fairly new. Plumbing is newer than houses. Insulation even more new. Fire safety and building regulations even more new still. Asbestos was new, and now it’s old. This is progress. To keep with this analogy, in my opinion meat will become the asbestos, the lead paint, or the knob and tube wiring, of food.
Yeah, and give it another 100 years or so, a veritable eye blink in the timeline discussed, and meat will be lab grown or replaced with something else. Essentially complaining that civilization is taking more than a generation or two to advance in specific places is mildly mind boggling, because civilization almost never moves that fast. Not everything moves at the speed of the development of powered flight, and meat has an unfathomable level of inertia being on the base of the hierarchy of needs.