These three amigos seem to be gobbling, "Choose me ... choose me ... choose me" to the hens just outside the frame. The hens seemed thoroughly unimpressed.
Nonetheless, it's mating season the local toms are strutting around our yard like contestants in a charity bachelor auction. Not that we need a baby boom out here; just before the weather broke, I counted 52 birds in a single flock.
I don't know how the habitat can support such numbers. Clearly the coyotes aren't doing their job.
Appetite for Destruction: You may already know the effects that meat-based diets have on our planet, but did you know that the largest impact actually comes from what we're feeding our livestock? (source)
No Human Will Starve in a Plant Based World (source)
Why are we Fattening Animals While Humans Starve? (source)
Why factory farming is not just cruel – but also a threat to all life on the planet (source)
“The world desperately needs joined-up action on industrial farming if it is to avoid catastrophic impacts on life on earth, according to the head of one of the world’s most highly regarded animal campaign groups.Philip Lymbery, chief executive of Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) and the author of Farmageddon and more recently Deadzone, said: ‘Every day there is a new confirmation of how destructive, inefficient, wasteful, cruel and unhealthy the industrial agriculture machine is. We need a total rethink of our food and farming systems before it’s too late.’ ”
“The UN has warned that if we continue as we are, the world’s soils will have effectively gone within 60 years. And then what? We shouldn’t look to the sea to bail us out because commercial fisheries are expected to be finished by 2048 …”
“The rainforest homes of the likes of jaguars and the critically endangered sumatran elephants are being razed to make way for intensive crop production and plantations that are feeding factory farm animals ... the mixed farm habitats of once common farmland birds such as barn owls, turtle doves and skylarks are being stripped away, and ... vast quantities of wild fish are being scooped up to feed industrially reared farmed fish and chickens and pigs, leaving the likes of penguins, puffins and other species starving.”
Vast animal-feed crops to satisfy our meat needs are destroying planet (source)
“The ongoing global appetite for meat is having a devastating impact on the environment driven by the production of crop-based feed for animals, a new report has warned. The vast scale of growing crops such as soy to rear chickens, pigs and other animals puts an enormous strain on natural resources leading to the wide-scale loss of land and species, according to the study from the conservation charity WWF.”
“The study entitled Appetite for Destruction launches on Thursday at the 2017 Extinction and Livestock Conference in London, in conjunction with Compassion in World Farming (CIFW), and warns of the vast amount of land needed to grow the crops used for animal feed and cites some of the world’s most vulnerable areas such as the Amazon, Congo Basin and the Himalayas.”
“Protein-rich soy is now produced in such huge quantities that the average European consumes approximately 61kg each year, largely indirectly by eating animal products such as chicken, pork, salmon, cheese, milk and eggs.
In 2010, the British livestock industry needed an area the size of Yorkshire to produce the soy used in feed. But if global demand for meat grows as expected, the report says, soy production would need to increase by nearly 80% by 2050.
‘The world is consuming more animal protein than it needs and this is having a devastating effect on wildlife,’ said Duncan Williamson, WWF food policy manager. ‘A staggering 60% of global biodiversity loss is down to the food we eat. We know a lot of people are aware that a meat-based diet has an impact on water and land, as well as causing greenhouse gas emissions, but few know the biggest issue of all comes from the crop-based feed the animals eat.’ ”
And finally, this: Goodbye – and good riddance – to livestock farming (source)
“What will future generations, looking back on our age, see as its monstrosities? We think of slavery, the subjugation of women, judicial torture, the murder of heretics, imperial conquest and genocide, the first world war and the rise of fascism, and ask ourselves how people could have failed to see the horror of what they did. What madness of our times will revolt our descendants?
There are plenty to choose from. But one of them, I believe, will be the mass incarceration of animals, to enable us to eat their flesh or eggs or drink their milk. While we call ourselves animal lovers, and lavish kindness on our dogs and cats, we inflict brutal deprivations on billions of animals that are just as capable of suffering. The hypocrisy is so rank that future generations will marvel at how we could have failed to see it.”
“The answer, we are told by celebrity chefs and food writers, is to keep livestock outdoors: eat free-range beef or lamb, not battery pork. But all this does is to swap one disaster – mass cruelty – for another: mass destruction. Almost all forms of animal farming cause environmental damage, but none more so than keeping them outdoors. The reason is inefficiency. Grazing is not just slightly inefficient, it is stupendously wasteful. Roughly twice as much of the world’s surface is used for grazing as for growing crops, yet animals fed entirely on pasture produce just one gram out of the 81g of protein consumed per person per day.
A paper in Science of the Total Environment reports that ‘livestock production is the single largest driver of habitat loss’. Grazing livestock are a fully automated system for ecological destruction: you need only release them on to the land and they do the rest, browsing out tree seedlings, simplifying complex ecosystems. Their keepers augment this assault by slaughtering large predators.’ ”
“In the UK, for example, sheep supply around 1% of our diet in terms of calories. Yet they occupy around 4m hectares of the uplands. This is more or less equivalent to all the land under crops in this country, and more than twice the area of the built environment (1.7m hectares). The rich mosaic of rainforest and other habitats that once covered our hills has been erased, the wildlife reduced to a handful of hardy species. The damage caused is out of all proportion to the meat produced.
Replacing the meat in our diets with soya spectacularly reduces the land area required per kilo of protein: by 70% in the case of chicken, 89% in the case of pork and 97% in the case of beef. One study suggests that if we were all to switch to a plant-based diet, 15m hectares of land in Britain currently used for farming could be returned to nature. Alternatively, this country could feed 200 million people. An end to animal farming would be the salvation of the world’s wildlife, our natural wonders and magnificent habitats.”
The comments section in this one are a jolly good time! Typical assholes!
Climate change aid to poor nations lags behind Paris pledges (source)
“Finance for poor countries to help them reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and deal with climate change is lagging behind the promises of rich countries, an Oxfam report finds.
While taxpayer-funded finance has increased, and the private sector has stepped up with some initiatives, the amount raised could still fall short of the goal of providing $100bn a year to the developing world by 2020.The 2015 Paris agreement on climate change re-stated the $100bn financial target, but Oxfam says the taxpayer-funded finance from rich countries in 2015-16 stood at about $48bn, or nearly half the amount promised for 2020.”
“Tracy Carty, senior climate-change policy adviser at Oxfam, said the money flowing to the world’s poorest and most vulnerable to tackle climate change was ‘sadly inadequate’.”
How many Earths do we need? (source)
“It has been suggested that if everyone on the planet consumed as much as the average US citizen, four Earths would be needed to sustain them.”
Methane From Livestock: Scientists Underestimated Impact Of Cow Fart On Climate Change (source)
Reach ‘peak meat’ by 2030 to tackle climate crisis, say scientists: Reducing meat and dairy consumption will cut methane and allow forests to thrive (source)
Huge reduction in meat-eating ‘essential’ to avoid climate breakdown: Major study also finds huge changes to farming are needed to avoid destroying Earth’s ability to feed its population (source)
Per Capita Consumption of Poultry and Livestock, 1960 to Forecast 2021, in Pounds (source)
We know for a fact that meat based diet requires more land, energy, and water than a vegetarian diet. Why won’t you shift? The fact that many of you hide behind the “indigenous people”, which are killed for the deforestation, is sickening! Then we have this from basic Google search.
But, you see, the corporations, man! They’re overfishing, overeating, overconsuming, and breeding like rats! It’s funny, but you rich white countries continue to fuck up the world, don’t you, supporting mass-slaughter campaigns fought by your countries aside, of course? Because who wants to talk about that? You make up about 1/7th of the world’s population but consume about 80% of the resources! But, hey, it’s the corporations, man, certainly not hyper-consumerism that’s ruining all life on earth as we know it.
I mean, tumblr loves animals. Can’t you see that they “like” and “reblog” doggie pictures? How can you say that they don’t love the environment, animals, and poor people that are starving to death in poor countries over hyper-consumerism? Pfft, nonsense. Being vegan is evil! Some vegan fed his doggie a carrot--something, something, something. As the saying goes: If you want something to change, hope someone else will change it. AmIright, guys?
I lost count at around 50. And, stretch as it might, my camera lens couldn’t quite wrap its view-finder around the throng that trotted into our backyard Friday morning.
We’re accustomed to seeing large flocks of wild turkeys out here, but never like this.
In fact, it’s probably too much of a good thing. Overpopulation can lead to food shortages and the rapid spread of disease, ultimately leading to a population crash.
Hunting alone isn’t doing the job. I know of only two turkey hunters in the immediate area (including me) and the maximum bag limit is two turkeys per year, per hunter.
This has just kind of been on my mind, between some of the stuff I used to think about, triggered by some recent activities here on Tumblr, and kind of culminated by a video that I'm watching on YouTube from a handful of months ago.
I don't really have a thesis, just some random thoughts. More below the cut because this is a full-on essay.
About ten or so years ago, I think over-population was a much greater concern than I think/understand it has mellowed into. So let's kind of start at the beginning of my thought process on this:
To begin, over-population is kind of a scary thought. There's only so much water, only so much space that can be reasonably occupied by humans--we can't realistically expect to have massive, both sprawling and towering metropolises in the middle of the ocean. The more human bodies there are locking up this precious resource of water, and also needing to consume regular quantities of water, the less free water there is for other bodies to drink. Kind of scary, right?
But I'm not sure if it's just gaining some distance, or putting the pieces together or whatnot, but I've realized for a long time that all species have natural built in defenses against just straight-up blasting all of our resources. Obviously, we, living, carbon-based genetic organisms existing on the limited resource that is the planet earth, we don't want to consume ourselves into oblivion. That's not very genetically fit.
So.
One of the solutions that I remember kind of locking onto as an older teen, barely an adult, as gay people became part of my reality and I realized that people were upset about gay people, yada, yada, early 2010's drama. I heard about that, what, first gay penguin couple in the zoo that hatched that egg, and I was like
Ohhhh! Gay people, in a smaller community, they wouldn't be reproducing, but they could act "as a village", you know 'it takes a village to raise a child'. They could theoretically still have participated in the community, as we see in history that they often did. My very very cold analysis of the 'purpose' of gay people in communities, was that they would choose to not compete for resources and instead be a resource. About a decade, very objectively, I think I still generally agree, from an evolutionary standpoint removed from 'human things' like humanities and science and culture and that kind of stuff, gay members of a species still deserve to socialize and have love and culture and community and be parts of society--otherwise they wouldn't exist, as they would have no purpose.
Actually, it was also about this time that I become intent on what people did before capitalism, before you could just buy your bed in a nursing home and/or lock your aging and possibly decrepit parents away to be forgotten. Like, why would our species have old people if.....like, they're just meant to be locked away in old people homes?? That doesn't make any sense evolutionarily.
I didn't really have my parents' parents as part of my life, so I really didn't understand what old people might contribute to a family or community. Anyway. I recently had a paper suggested to me in my news feed that seemed to posit exactly that, so.....great job science? Or am I just a fucking weirdo obsessed with the idea of science and too floofy to pursue the theses to all my stupid science/evolution hypotheses. Good science does take time and is willing to change its opinions. I just don't think I have the temperament to be a proper scientist.
So even though babies can't necessarily agree or consent to being born and having to exist, there does appear to be some kind of checks-and-balances system, this silent....agreement? That this portion of humans are infertile and this portion of humans will just have no interest in the opposite sex and for the most part, not reproduce, in theory. And then of course, there are just the regular hets who are absolutely not interested in babies at all.
I guess my thing is, I'm mildly obsessed with 'finding my place' (I mean, aren't we all, all of us who don't feel like we have, and maybe even some of us who are confident we have??). Humans are social creatures, so I don't think there's actually one of us (yes, even sociopathic maniacs who commit genocide or adults who have come under the, ummm, mistaken understanding that children are sexual beings) who doesn't belong on the chart somewhere.
Additionally, intrinsically as a species, we aren't suicidal. We want to continue as organisms, to reproduce and evolve. So on the balance, each of us, elderly, gay, disabled, uninterested in children, infertile, etc, we all have a place, a purpose in our communities. And somehow--and this is what I'd be really fascinated to learn more about--somehow we all combine perfectly and seem to understand when the population is good where it is, and when we're secure enough that we can reproduce less and we don't need to be having fifteen kids in hopes that one or two make it two adulthood.
So, yeah, mass efforts of de-population, at this point, they only target countries that are still stabilizing to the twenty-first century. The US and much of the 'developed' world/economies, our populations are stabilizing, for the most part. And it is weird and, at the very least, uncomfortable, to stand here, with my fantastic vista of the world, and say, hey, we need to cut the population of the earth.
When we as a species, we've already agreed to do that. We're working on it.
I don't think I, myself, personally, have ever been very...genocidal.
I mean, I think genocide is dumb. As a teen, there is no humanly possible way I could have remarked on all the values one populace contributes to all other populaces. I'm not sure I could do that now, but genetically--we all evolved the way we did because it was beneficial. What if, in wiping out an entire population, we lose something genetically very important, something that would, at best, take dozens of generations to get back--time that our species probably wouldn't have.
That's just the utilitarian view.
Then there's the humanitarian view--the arts, culture, language, all the trickle-down impacts of language on thought and culture and perception. Stories, which yes, I know fall under arts and culture. The perceptions of each of these cultures, if those cultures could get some kind of megaphone handed to them, they might contribute something, if not today, then tomorrow, which might change.....something. It could be small and have a knock-on effect. It could be tremendous right out of the gate.
But it wouldn't be right to eliminate that either.
So.
How do you...solve over-population?
See above: We as a species want to continue to propagate and develop and evolve and keep passing on our genes.
We are, I think pretty obviously, a rather fit species. We're no alligators and crocodiles; we're no sharks or sponges. But we did rather conquer the planet, and I hope that says something about our ability to keep specie'ing.
I don't disagree that over-population is a bit of an issue, but for the past ten years or so, whenever it's been brought to my attention, I've struggled--and I know I'm just one person--to think of a way to preserve extent life with dignity, without some kind of lottery or some shit, to say, oh yeah, we're going to just fucking execute this entire like, fucking east Asian tribe, and then this central African tribe, and uh, yeah, these poor freaks living in the Arctic circle *dusts palms*. Tadaaa! Problem solved!!
No. Problem not solved holy shit what the fuck no!!!
Because the humans that are presently here on this planet--if it weren't for capitalism, we could fucking feed and clothe and shelter and doctor every single last one of them. I mean, okay, I've heard about the problem with eliminating, what is it, polio? In...what, central or like, south-ish Africa? But leaving off those kinds of hurdles, we have the prosperity as a species to take care of our own, ourselves.
In fact, that's the real fucking problem here.
Not over-population. Which, like, is that a dog-whistle? Because it's starting to feel like one.
The real fucking problem is (uber)rich, generally men, in fucking board rooms, insulated from fucking reality. Honestly, we should drag these fuckers, suits, heels, expensive watches and all, out of their fucking towers and down with the poor fuckers picking garbage off the sides of busy roads and down to ocean beaches to pick plastic out of the sand. Once each of them have collected at least their body-weight (huehuehue; get it, because of the obesity crisis? They'd have to collect more garbage? Okay, I'll stop, sorry) in garbage, then they can fucking.....idk whatever, cry about how some thug stole their expensive watch?
These fucking....CEOs and shit, they literally don't live in fucking consensus reality!! And they're spearheading the destruction of the planet, for fucking what, a hundredth watch and a seven property and a fifth super-yacht???? What....just....what the fuck do these things do for anyone?? What does it do for a person to never have to wear the same outfit twice, to have a closet bigger than most people's bedrooms, to have no idea what a fucking loaf of bread costs??? What does it do to have more vacation homes than......than fucking what???
And to bring this point home, what the fuck are these fucking anonymous boardrooms of assholes doing buying up apartment buildings in cities that they've never fucking been to, never even mind fucking lived in? You have no idea what this city is like, you have no fucking idea what this community, this culture is like. Who the fucking fuck are you??? You don't fucking know me, I can't bang on your door in the middle of the night because your shitty contractor didn't actually fix my toilet. You don't even know your own fucking contractors!?!?!
Anyway, at this point, if you've read this far, I'm getting off topic. I've come a long way from being at the back of the over-population boat. I think there is good evidence that we continue to be a fit species.....well, in some aspects...and then we have sociopaths who have been allowed to acquire massive resources. Soooooo, maybe if I had to choose anyone to put on the de-population block.... I actually do have a group in mind who does not appear to actually be benefitting the species.
If you take on the decision to bring an animal into the home, that commitment is for the lifetime of the animal and arrangements must be made for the animal if someone passes before the animal, like another family member or be rehomed to a loving home rather than dumped in a shelter.
Animals are living beings with emotions and require their needs met. They may not understand that someone will…
Remember not long ago, I told you that Popeye’s had come out with a chicken sandwich that was said to be the equal of Chick-Fil-A’s? I was happy to hear this, for I refuse to set foot in a Chick-Fil-A restaurant because of their overt bigotry, but I did like their chicken sandwiches long ago. Well, before the girls and I got around to trying Popeye’s new sandwich, it was announced that they…
Huge reduction in meat-eating ‘essential’ to avoid climate breakdown
Huge reductions in meat-eating are essential to avoid dangerous climate change, according to the most comprehensive analysis yet of the food system’s impact on the environment. In western countries, beef consumption needs to fall by 90% and be replaced by five times more beans and lentils.
The research also finds that enormous changes to farming are needed to avoid destroying the planet’s ability…
