• naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.comM
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      3 months ago

      Idk about turkeys but broiler hens (hens bred for slaughter) frequently grow so fast their bones don’t get strong enough to support their own weight.

      It is horrifying.

    • snooggums@midwest.social
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      3 months ago

      Pretty sure most birds grow to full size in a few months, so turkeys just grow to their human modified bodies in the same time period they would have grown to their natural size.

  • iiGxC@slrpnk.netM
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    3 months ago

    I know their lives are cut way short, but do you happen to have a source on this?

    • Dkarma@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      It doesn’t matter because without them being born for meat they would live 0 years. No one is going to pay to feed an animal for 20 years when the prime butchering time is far less than that. It’s a huge waste of money and creation of greenhouse gases.

      Cows wouldn’t exist if humans didn’t eat them or use them for labor. End of story.

  • Sotuanduso@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    “Animals that people consume were killed as babies or toddlers, relative to their natural lifespan.”

    Well human life expectancy is 70 years, so:
    Cow - 17.5
    Sheep - 2.3
    Pig - 2.3
    Turkey - 1.2
    Duck - 5.3
    Chicken - 13.1

    So that holds for most of the animals listed, but not cows or chickens.

    Anyways, fact checking time. Quick googling[1] says that the life expectancy of these animals is actually:

    Cow - 20
    Sheep - 12
    Pig - 12
    Turkey - 10
    Duck - 12
    Chicken - 7

    So that would make the human-scaled ages be:
    Cow - 17.5
    Sheep - 3.9
    Pig - 2.9
    Turkey - 1.2
    Duck - 4.4
    Chicken - 15.0

    Hope this helps anyone curious about the data.


    1. Yeah, I don’t have a robust source, but neither does the image. ↩︎

    • Shou@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      This is awesome. It should be mentioned though that every animal ages differently. So the relative age is purely chronologically scaled, not scaled developmentally to its own species.

  • Donjuanme@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I don’t think dairy cows are slaughtered that young, meat cows definitely are (often younger)

    • toomanypancakes@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      No, that’s about right by my understanding. Dairy cows are typically impregnated annually from 1 year old onward to keep milk production at maximum, which continues until their bodies physically give out, around five or six years, after which they’re slaughtered for their flesh as they’re no longer useful.

      Beef cows are around 1-2 I believe