Thank you so much for your response, Thom. Would you be able to clarify whether the meat-eating challenge “in which three competitive eaters will consume nothing but animal products for a whole day”, as reported in the Telegraph and Daily Mail, were misrepresentations by these outlets, or was this originally part of the campaign and FarmKind then changed course in response to the backlash? The articles still have the same headlines and no corrections have been made with regards to the meat-eating competition in either of the articles, as far as I can tell.
Thank you, that’s good to know! If the campaign isn’t encouraging meat-eating, why does it feature competitive meat eating? Are you concerned that it’s been reported as a “meat-eating campaign” in several outlets?
You say that you put a disconcertingly high probability that plants are sentient, yet seem to understate this possibility for bivalves despite their nerve ganglia, which allow for nociception and make them biologically closer to the organisms we associate with sentience than plants.
I find your encouragement of backyard eggs to be particularly concerning. Keeping hens in backyards does not address important welfare concerns around unnaturally frequent laying and still supports the commercial breeding industry which commonly macerates and suffocates male chicks. The wild ancestors of domestic chickens (i.e., red jungle fowl) laid around 8 to 12 eggs per year, limited to particular seasons. Meanwhile, modern laying hens have been selectively bred to lay upwards of 300 eggs year-round, which is far beyond their natural reproductive capacity. This causes nutrient deficiencies (especially for calcium, which is taken from bones and eggshell formation), and increases the risk of egg binding and egg peritonitis, both of which are painful conditions. If you have the time and resources to keep backyard hens, you can probably afford to take a multivitamin to cover your bases.
Your recommendation with regards to wild-caught fish I think is oversimplistic. The WFI recently published a study which found that trout experience an estimated 10 minutes of significant pain when slaughtered by air asphyxiation. Standardised per kilogram, this equates to an average of 24 minutes of significant pain per kg, with upper estimates reaching 74 minutes/kg. The RSPCA estimates that other slaughter methods can take hours to induce insensibility. Commercial fishing also frequently involves the capture, injury and death of many non-target species, including crustaceans, sea turtles, seabirds, dolphins, porpoises, and even whales. It is not clear to me that the our impact on wild-caught fish can be summed up as “killing them earlier than they would’ve died anyway.” If you’re eating wild-caught fish for health reasons, you might want to be careful about exposure to mercury, PCBs and dioxins, which accumulate in fish tissues and biomagnify up the food chain.
Creatine and taurine are not essential amino acids. Our body synthesises them from essential amino acids (e.g., arginine, glycine, methionine, etc.). If protein intake is sufficient and varied, this is enough for most people, though can be a concern for infants and elderly people. The other nutrients you mentioned are often available in combined multivitamins. Specific formulations for vegans are especially helpful, and B12 supplementation in particular is inexpensive and highly effective.
You note that observational studies cannot establish causation when undermining evidence on the healthfulness of vegan diets, but appear to be less concerned about this when citing studies that are negative. You also rely on individual anecdotes as evidence that a vegan diet is responsible for x and y health problems, which contradicts your earlier cautious reasoning about correlation vs. causation. I think in general your use and interpretation of evidence/anecdotes reveal a vulnerability to confirmation bias in support of your premature conclusion that vegan diets are unhealthy.
While I agree with other comments that the animal movement often focuses too much on personal diets, this post actually makes the same mistake, but I think much more irresponsibly.
I believe that a world in which we encourage systematic violence towards sentient beings, even if implicitly, is counterproductive to our shared goal of ending factory farming.
Thank you so much for your response, Thom. Would you be able to clarify whether the meat-eating challenge “in which three competitive eaters will consume nothing but animal products for a whole day”, as reported in the Telegraph and Daily Mail, were misrepresentations by these outlets, or was this originally part of the campaign and FarmKind then changed course in response to the backlash? The articles still have the same headlines and no corrections have been made with regards to the meat-eating competition in either of the articles, as far as I can tell.
Thank you, that’s good to know! If the campaign isn’t encouraging meat-eating, why does it feature competitive meat eating? Are you concerned that it’s been reported as a “meat-eating campaign” in several outlets?
You say that you put a disconcertingly high probability that plants are sentient, yet seem to understate this possibility for bivalves despite their nerve ganglia, which allow for nociception and make them biologically closer to the organisms we associate with sentience than plants.
I find your encouragement of backyard eggs to be particularly concerning. Keeping hens in backyards does not address important welfare concerns around unnaturally frequent laying and still supports the commercial breeding industry which commonly macerates and suffocates male chicks. The wild ancestors of domestic chickens (i.e., red jungle fowl) laid around 8 to 12 eggs per year, limited to particular seasons. Meanwhile, modern laying hens have been selectively bred to lay upwards of 300 eggs year-round, which is far beyond their natural reproductive capacity. This causes nutrient deficiencies (especially for calcium, which is taken from bones and eggshell formation), and increases the risk of egg binding and egg peritonitis, both of which are painful conditions. If you have the time and resources to keep backyard hens, you can probably afford to take a multivitamin to cover your bases.
Your recommendation with regards to wild-caught fish I think is oversimplistic. The WFI recently published a study which found that trout experience an estimated 10 minutes of significant pain when slaughtered by air asphyxiation. Standardised per kilogram, this equates to an average of 24 minutes of significant pain per kg, with upper estimates reaching 74 minutes/kg. The RSPCA estimates that other slaughter methods can take hours to induce insensibility. Commercial fishing also frequently involves the capture, injury and death of many non-target species, including crustaceans, sea turtles, seabirds, dolphins, porpoises, and even whales. It is not clear to me that the our impact on wild-caught fish can be summed up as “killing them earlier than they would’ve died anyway.” If you’re eating wild-caught fish for health reasons, you might want to be careful about exposure to mercury, PCBs and dioxins, which accumulate in fish tissues and biomagnify up the food chain.
Creatine and taurine are not essential amino acids. Our body synthesises them from essential amino acids (e.g., arginine, glycine, methionine, etc.). If protein intake is sufficient and varied, this is enough for most people, though can be a concern for infants and elderly people. The other nutrients you mentioned are often available in combined multivitamins. Specific formulations for vegans are especially helpful, and B12 supplementation in particular is inexpensive and highly effective.
You note that observational studies cannot establish causation when undermining evidence on the healthfulness of vegan diets, but appear to be less concerned about this when citing studies that are negative. You also rely on individual anecdotes as evidence that a vegan diet is responsible for x and y health problems, which contradicts your earlier cautious reasoning about correlation vs. causation. I think in general your use and interpretation of evidence/anecdotes reveal a vulnerability to confirmation bias in support of your premature conclusion that vegan diets are unhealthy.
While I agree with other comments that the animal movement often focuses too much on personal diets, this post actually makes the same mistake, but I think much more irresponsibly.
I believe that a world in which we encourage systematic violence towards sentient beings, even if implicitly, is counterproductive to our shared goal of ending factory farming.