• Posadas [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netOP
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      7 months ago

      It’s not like they’re the ones working the fields.

      They’re just sitting in lifted f150 raptors with the full luxury kits while the ac is blasting on full.

    • tocopherol@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      7 months ago

      One of the most depressing sights in my drives across the US was in Nebraska. There was a massive cow farm, you could smell it long before you got close. Hundreds of cattle packed in a tiny area, hardly even room for them to move side to side in their pen. It was a nice day out, we had to roll up the windows because the fumes were absolutely suffocating.

      • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        7 months ago

        Just south of the Nebraska border there’s a beautiful preserve called Pawnee National Grasslands. It’s open to cattle grazing, which while not as good as buffalo grazing is actually a needed part of that ecosystem which the eradication of bison herds took away so I’m fine with that being a strictly regulated thing. Next to this infinite bounty of grass though are the feed lots and dairies and wool farms. The saddest animals standing in the mud without any space to move, being gorged on nothing but ersatz grain to fatten them, staring at their natural diet through barbed wire and electric fences.

        That’s such an obscene level of cruelty that we would feed that rancher molten gold in a more civilised time.

    • RNAi [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      7 months ago

      You can put code for prion-forming-prone proteins in the virus genome.

      It probably won’t replicate as fast as not having it, but it’s worth a try it’s possible

      Prions in lungs might be an innovative way of dying really fast

      Oh yeah and corona loves infecting and replicating inside neurons

  • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]@hexbear.net
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    7 months ago

    It’s kind of insane how we grow grains and soy to feed to livestock hundreds of miles away.

    The smart way to do it is to put the cows thru the pasture, then move the cows to the next pasture and move chickens into the vacated pasture, add another distinct animal plus a fallow stage, rinse and repeat… for minimal feed expenses.

    But instead we have land and labor at a premium, and to address that we build gigantic tortuous ultra-prisons to keep livestock in, and mix trucked-in grain with an overload of antibiotics to feed birds and mammals that are already wallowing in their own shit.

    Outlawing the CAFO is probably the #1 most plausible and effectual policy for mitigating global environmental disaster.

    • Gucci_Minh [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      7 months ago

      But that would mean instead of raising wildly inefficient cattle so people can get their Texas mandated 5 kilos of beef per day, they might have to only have 1 kilo, and eat the rest as vegetables.

    • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      7 months ago

      “I’m just asking questions” I say as I talk about maybe overloading the reactor and causing a thermonuclear meltdown that irradiates a chunk the planet the size of the Indian subcontinent.

  • Xx_Aru_xX [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    7 months ago

    BSE possibly originated as a result of feeding cattle meat-and-bone meal that contained BSE-infected products from a spontaneously occurring case of BSE or scrapie-infected sheep products. Scrapie is a prion disease of sheep.

  • CharlieTheOctopus [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    7 months ago

    Using waste products in the production of animal feed is actually pretty standard practice. For example, urea is a waste product found in urine that is routinely added to cattle feed to help with ruminant digestion.

    On its face it can seem very strange though, so there is that.

    • Owl [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      7 months ago

      On the one hand, yeah animals eat poop, get over it.

      On the other hand, densely packed, sickly animals with poor diets are a recipe for new diseases, and putting them in contact with products from other densely packed, sickly animals with poor diets is a recipe for increasingly novel new diseases.

  • macabrett[they/them]@lemmy.ml
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    7 months ago

    Congratulations, you have invented Mad Cow x Bird Flu, both a prion disease and a virus. It makes you, ya guessed it, violently shit yourself until you die all while losing your mind.

  • Formerlyfarman [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    7 months ago

    In mexico this is mixed with other stuff and sold as gallnasa, gallina being hen in spanish. I live in a rural area and a fewomnths ago there was these unknown disiese killing cattle. ranchers already living in subsistence conditions lost most of their wealth wich was in cattle. Some people maingth have eaten the contaminated meat and died. The really scary thing is that vultres ate some of the dead cattle and started to die off. And those guys are suposedly adapted to eat all sorts of diseases and not die.

    Eventually it was concluded that a batch of gallinasa was contaminated with something. No one was held acountable.