However it shifts our perspective, the chicken-induced Anthropocene is more writing on the wall that industrialized animal agriculture has gone too far. Without radically reimagining our food system, our future in the Anthropocene looks just like the lives of those 66 billion chickens every year: nasty, brutish and short.
We’re all living ever longer lives as a result of having a secure food supply. Nasty, brutish, short? Don’t these people understand the origin of these phrases? It’s a description of life before industrialised animal agriculture….
When dinner on our table is proposed alongside atomic bombs, concrete and plastic in its long-term impact on our planet, we need to step back and think deeply about how we got here and where we are headed.
I’d take this stuff more seriously if it didn’t always come from soygrin blokes wot look like they carry rape whistles in their manpurses.
It’s pretty obvious that vegans will never willingly stop trying to snatch the food off your plate, so the only question is when, not if, some enterprising politician proposes to put them all in couscous camps and let nature take its course from there.
We keep chickens at home. Some were bought as point of lay pullets some were rescue hens which would have been bumped off because they produce too few eggs to be commercially viable. They produce enough to make a back garden flock useful though. The thing is, chickens don’t live that long anyway. We had one that lived about ten years but between two and four is more usual.
Regarding the impending thermapocolypse, just nonsense spouted by people who have no clue how the real world works.
I just can’t figure what the article is there to explain.
Author: Lots of chickens, i mean lots.
Me: Yeah that is a lot…. Err and?
Author: Man’s landfill sites contain lots of bones. They didn’t used to.
Me: Oh Yeah ok suppose so. and?
Author: well Its all gone too far.
Oh: oh, too far for whom, i mean people like chicken
Author: oh can’t explain that here. Read this link.
Me: Cool story bro.
HB – top kek
Ground down, animal bones are a valuable source of phosphorus, calcium and other minerals, and make great plant food.
I expect Cambodia had lots of stuff like this going around a decade or so before the Khmer Rouge took over.
If he wants “nasty, brutish and short” lives, then simply “radically reimagining our food system” will ensure they happen.
Without radically reimagining our food system, our future in the Anthropocene looks just like the lives of those 66 billion chickens every year: nasty, brutish and short.
I’m wondering what the life of a chicken in the wild is like. I’m guessing nasty, brutish and short. Probably the same for most animals in the wild…
The article seems to leap from “there’s fucking loads of chickens” to “we’re all DOOMED!” without any intervening argument.
Read the comments BTL. Veggies are proper mental.
‘Some experts argue that humans have fundamentally altered the earth’s biosphere to the point where we now live in a new age called the Anthropocene,’
No we don’t. Anthropocene is a political term; no scientific body recognizes it.
‘radically reimagining our food system’
I can translate. 7,000,000,000 of you humans are going to have to be eliminated as we transition to the neoneolithic (I can make up words, too).
‘Our planet is covered with chickens.’
The ignorance burns. 71% of the planet is covered with . . . ocean. Hyperbole in a quasi scientific report invalidates it.
It seems writing for the Guardian lowers people’s IQ by 30 points.
“It seems writing for the Guardian lowers people’s IQ by 30 points”
IQ can go negative?
The decline in what we used to call religion has left a gap in the market for this sort of thing. As has the need to fill column inches.
CD: All farmed animals, bar none, wouldn’t survive to breed in the wild. We bred their wild survival characteristics out of them millennia ago, so they could be husbanded.
MC, not so much that the world is covered with chickens but by god there are a lot of fuckwits about.
Max Elder says that the chickens could not survive into adolescence – so what lays the eggs from which they emerge?
The average human eats ten chickens a year? Possible but I – an omnivore in one of the wealthiest countries in the world with a preference for a higher protein diet – certainly do not.
Grauniad and facts – well maybe facts are too sacred to be used in their Cif columns!
Gamecock: “It seems writing for the Guardian lowers people’s IQ by 30 points.”
Imagine what reading it (not for the purpose of fisking it) does!
I am generally vegetarian 6 days out of 7. My new-year’s resolution is to eat one additional chicken, steak, pork chop, or pheasant for each and every time some acrid, condescending vegan/tarian tries to fuck with my diet.
@ Julia M
Increases the risk of a heart attack!
@ BiG
i hope you take lots of exercise (or eat eggs/cheese in the six meat-free days) because it is almost impossible to get adequate protein in a low-/moderate-calorie vegan diet
@BiG
I must take up the slack for you, generally eating meat 6 days out of 7. I eat fish on Fridays.
@ Tim the Coder
Maybe it just reduces it by 30%?
TG:
All farmed animals, bar none, wouldn’t survive to breed in the wild. We bred their wild survival characteristics out of them millennia ago, so they could be husbanded.
Indeed.
I wonder if the journalist realises that in arguing against us eating chickens, he’s arguing for the death of a lot of chickens…
Not sure about all farmed animals though. Some seem like they’d do ok. Goats don’t seem too far from wild goats for example.
“the chicken-induced Anthropocene”
Now there’s a phrase to conjure with.
“Well guv, we was ‘appily plodding along in our nice little ‘olocene when some bugger laid an egg an’ before we knew it we was covered in bloody chickens and now we’re stuck in this nasty old Anthropocene!”
Seriously, when are the going to make misanthropy a hate crime. I mean it must be twice as bad as misogyny and that’s on the list.
‘Author: Man’s landfill sites contain lots of bones. They didn’t used to.’
Obviously author knows very little about history and archaeology or what the word midden means
‘A midden is an old dump for domestic waste which may consist of animal bone, human excrement, botanical material, mollusc shells, sherds, lithics, and other artifacts and ecofacts associated with past human occupation.’
Two of the funnier sentences I’ve read in a long time.
John 77 – I’ll make up for you. I eat considerably more than 10 chickens a year.
Probably closer to 50.
I’ll have a whole chicken between me and the wife once a month plus a 5kg box of chicken fillets every month plus occasional takeaway (often we have chicken).
Its a good, cheap and quick growing source of meat.
Vegetarian, not vegan. Trust me, the quacks are measuring so many things so frequently I’d know if anything else were going wrong.
@ Martin,
In that case I may be falling into the Grauniad trap of projecting from my own observations (not just what I eat but also the stock in my local butcher – I’m not completely stupid: his clients eat far more beef, lamb and pork than chicken and some days he sells more pheasants than (free-range) chickens because they are better value-for-money). Chickens are cheaper but I and most of my neighbours choose other meats.
£4.75 for a pheasant that was quite a lot more than enough for Sunday lunch for two.