US chicken companies pioneered restricting sleep to keep birds eating around the clock.
A new study (Li et al., 2026) recommends giving chickens just 2 hours of darkness nightly to maximize the time they spend eating. The study and photo are Chinese.
We know chickens have far better hapiness with 7–8 hours of darkness to sleep.
But they eat more and grow faster when they are sleep deprived.
Before capitalism, people used to only kill as many animals as were necessary to feed them, all while ensuring they don’t suffer needlessly and respecting their natural habitats.
Under capitalism, animals are just resources to be extracted and turned into products and profits. The conditions of this extraction may vary slightly, but ultimately this is never going to change under a system that fundamentally removes humans from nature, as well as focuses on accumulation of capital above all else.
Are you serious? Abusing animals for sport and gambling was widespread, across many cultures, millennia before modern capitalism.
The Wikipedia article on bloodsport lists plenty of examples of human on animal or animal on animal violence to the death.
And that’s to say nothing of the use of non-consenting human slaves for blood sport.
There’s something to be said for the cruelty of industrialized slaughter, but let’s not pretend that human cruelty to animals isn’t part of our nature that predates capitalism.
Foie gras was developed like half a millenia ago… humans have always had the capacity for and willingness to be cruel for our own individual betterment. There was never any “before” time that we can go back to where there werent shitty people doing shitty things. We have been exploiting and exterminating animals for centuries and centuries, we just have the best tools to do it, that weve ever had now.
Half a millennia ago was about the same time as early-modern capitalism was developed… It’s just a coincidence I’m sure, but still thought it was funny to point out. That being said, I agree with you that there wasn’t a time “before people were shitty”, but I must point out that we’ve developed tech to such a level that we’re actively destroying our own environment. Also, OP is correct when they said that we actively shifted from killing what was needed and saving the rest for later, to our current profit-driven method of breeding and butchering as many animals as physically possible just for the sake of selling more and keeping the machines running efficiently.
I’d be willing to forgive all of that if we were somehow able to eliminate hunger through these production methods (something well within our capability to accomplish), but having worked in the food service industry for over a decade, being told to throw away pounds and pounds and pounds of perfectly good food every day, watching coworkers get punished for even ASKING if they could take any of it home, and constantly given some bullshit reasoning of “oh we wouldn’t want to be sued if someone claims they ate our food and got sick” as the sole justification to why it was immediately trashed, I’m honestly just sick of all the bullshit. The fact that we have a hyper-efficient food industrial complex that produces more than we know what to do with AND a nation-wide food-affordability problem that seems to exclusively effect the most vulnerable, should not be two facts that coexist
that would be the advent of agriculture probably, and i’m an early 19th century CE history nerd not a beginnings of civilization history nerd wikipedia can teach you better than i can
i mean, i grew up near an ancient american indian limestone mine. I do not know the history well enough, but i hear there was a sizeable city. the second ghost town on the site (built in the 1900s) reached a population of around 500. I hear that was the small one, but again, you’re getting it from an unreliable narrator after a few hundred to a thousand years.
The “early 19th century CE history nerd” trying to detract from the harmful consequences of the Industrial Revolution by trying to claim ‘we’ve always been like that’? I never could’ve seen this coming 🙄
You know all too well what I’m talking about. In fact, by your own admission, you should know it better than me. So the fact that you’re so eager to use one of the oldest (and weakest) rhetorical defenses in the book should speak volumes to anyone else listening/reading this
yes, i do know all too well what you’re talking about. when do you expect the land around the limestone mine to recover? and when was it opened?
aww, i’m sorry my data point (and i can provide more if you’d like) disagrees with your argument so you want to fall back onto the old ben shapiro debate style.
Around the same time you stop using whataboutisms and goal-post-shifts to attempt to win all your arguments. So probably never in our lifetimes
A counter example is not whataboutism. Try again.
An example of whataboutism: you complain about environmental destruction but you are using a computer and talking to us through a data center.
Unironically you
I did work in warehouse of a company that sells perishables on amazon. There were times in summer when half the inventory would get molds or maggots.
It was apparently still cheaper than keeping everything refrigerated tho because the company simply bought twice as much food needed and just let the rest waste.
There was still some time where pre-industrial husbandry including breeding of animals was a thing and capitalism didn’t exist in the form we criticise it now.
Capitalism wasn’t the cause of animal cruelty, no. You’re spot-on there. But OP is correct that there was a shift between ‘killing what was needed/could be stored’, to what we currently have which is ‘get as many animals through the process as quickly as possible for the sake of profit’. And now we have a problem of having so much food available for businesses and not enough available for individuals (or at least not for a comparable cost). Having worked in the food service industry for over a decade, being told to throw away pounds and pounds and pounds of perfectly good food every day, watching coworkers get punished for even ASKING if they could take any of it home, and constantly given some half-assed reasoning of “oh we wouldn’t want to be sued if someone claims they ate our food and got sick” (even though that would be the simplest court case possible, almost an automatic win for the business if it even got to that point) as the sole justification to why it was immediately trashed, I’m honestly just sick of all the bullshit.
Completely unrelated to food or animals, I personally also know this from the tech industry. Instead of giving away old devices to schools or for universities, you rather shredder them because support may be expensive, it may canibalize the sale of newer devices, etc. Millions of dollars just made to e-waste because the system is sick. I am sure every industry has these stories.
Even humans are resources bro under capitalism.
I’ve always thought human resources was a creepy way to describe a group of people.
yes, animals are resources under capitalism.