Comment by Insanity
1 day ago
Which has been happening for centuries.
I’m actually not arguing against this being a bad idea though lol, just giving some historic trivia.
1 day ago
Which has been happening for centuries.
I’m actually not arguing against this being a bad idea though lol, just giving some historic trivia.
We have not been factory farming for centuries. More like a century. And it hasn't been a century with a sterling track record! I think we can all recall an event in recent memory where having a lot of animals in close proximity and unhealthy conditions went super duper wrong. And we have problems with new strains of bird flu every couple of years.
People used to literally live with the livestock attached to home or even under the same roof. This was probably the case for most of agricultural history.
Factory farming is bad, over use of antibiotics in live stock is bad. But OP's point is that this is how many of the diseases in human history and therefor unlikely we would ever be able to avoid this while raising animals for food. As they said, both are true
Some places would put the livestock on the ground floor/basement so their heat would warm up the house. I can only imagine what that would smell like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German_house
I can't speak for OP, they may have been advocating for giving up farming animals (or fowl) altogether, but personally I see a huge inflection point between traditional and factory farming methods with regards to the level of risk. When you are compromising the immunity of your livestock, you beg trouble.
I understand the temptation to zoom out to a several hundred year timespan, that can be clarifying. But when (as in this case) there are substantive differences in recent history, it muddies the waters. I totally buy that endemic diseases are largely zoonotic diseases plus time. But that doesn't clarify how much risk exists in our current methods of farming. Factory farming is not equivalent to traditional farming in this respect. History is not featureless and when we flatten it we lose important details.
2 replies →
I agree, I agree. I’m not a fan of the farming methods we have today mostly because of ethical reasons (hence why I’m vegetarian as well).
We are definitely making things worse, also by our use of antibiotics in livestock.
Animals living on a farm are a far cry from modern factory farming.