Comment by maxbond
1 day ago
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.
Consider how many fewer people interact with livestock now than before factory farms.
I don't know if it matters but there are significantly fewer farmers than there used to be by several orders of magnitude.
Also, before cars, the streets of major cities were covered in horse shit.
1 reply →
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.