Comments by "Gaza is not Amalek" (@Ass_of_Amalek) on "Animal rights protesters disrupt England's biggest horse race | DW News" video.

it would have been nice to even briefly mention the main animal welfare concerns with horse racing, which are not that "horses die", but rather that their lives are horrible off the race tracks, that they spend their entire lives either standing in boxes alone, or being ridden and tortured for training and racing, never even socialising properly with other horses. they get ridden from far too young an age, their bodies are destroyed in a few years (racing and especially jumping overstress their bodies), and the lucky ones that don't end up put down at the end of their racing careers, like a quarter of the way through a normal horse's lifespan, and instead get sold to horse hobbyists, all have psychiatric issues from the abuse and isolation, and are ill-prepared to adjust to a normal horse's life. in short, the problem is that absolutely no attention is paid to the horses' welfare beyond what is necessary for race performance. they don't live like horses, they live like cars!
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that's not true at all. even at high levels of horse racing, the horses are abused and isolated, and all except for breeding stallions die very young, mostly being put down after no longer winning races.
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@forsteaua do look up some documentaries, it really is surprising how badly race horses are treated. there are huge differences between caring for a horse's welfare and caring for its racing performance.
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obviously they don't want to stop at horses. horse races are a.special opportunity to protest for animap rights because they get so much more attention than factory farms.
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@leighsherval1023 the horses are physically healthy (other than injuries caused by racing and training). lots of prisoners are also physically healthy, that doesn't mean that they live well.
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 @321findus ban sitting, let's stand close together
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they probably do become pet food. food safety regulations generally dictate that for human consumption, animals must be killed and processed in a standardised manner at slaughterhouses. pet food regulations are less strict.
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@dein3086 I don't believe that there are vegan pet food options at this point for cats and dogs, but especially cats, that are nutritionally adequate. if you own a pet, you are responsible for its proper nutrition. what the other commenter said about feeding cats with offal already has a lot of potential to not contribute in any noteworthy way to the proliferation of meat production, because if you buy the right parts, they are so cheap that you contribute almost no money to the slaughter of that animal, you're more likely to just be the difference between your pet eating that offal, and it being thrown away - you're mostly paying the butcher to cut off those bits and get them to you. and if you choose well, you can get even better nutrition for your pet than you would get from buying expensive meat cuts, or probably most pet food (most wild carnivores prefer to eat a lot of organ meat due to its higher content of some nutrients, and that organ meat is super cheap in many countries due to low human demand). commercial pet food is also made from cheaply sourced meat including offal, but due to the scale and efficiency of production, it does contribute a bit to the profitability of animal agriculture. or, if you buy pet food containing fish, it contributes to particularly irresponsible fishing practices, since pet food is how fishing operations monetise bycatch.
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@susantunbridge4612 a bunch of armies probably still do. the US only uses mules for some special forces.
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clown
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@First-Last_name I know about the horse lasagna scandal, but those horses are generally slaughtered at slaughterhouses. at least if the meat is entering the market legally. in the EU at least, there is no allowable amount of contamination with horse meat, it has to be declared like any other meat. but there generally are no laws against it, not eating horse is just an old custom that I believe was part of the christianisation of germanic pagans, by whom horse meat was eaten as part of pagan rituals.
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certainly not all, and generally unlikely since they're all very likely to be vegans.
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@YorkshireBob if we ever do manage to phase out animal agriculture (though we shouldn't entirely, probably just 80-90%, since some applications of animal agriculture complement plant agriculture very well), then by that time, we would be able to make nutritionally perfect vegan dog and cat food, too. I don't recommend vegan feeding for carnivores right now at all, but it's definitely possible to develop nutritionally perfect replacements. maybe along the lines of using various genetically modified yeasts to produce various nutrients and vitamins.
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@YorkshireBob the thought emporium youtube channel has interesting videos on genetically modified yeast. apparently you can make yeasts produce a huge variety of substances, with the advantages that they only need very simple and cheap input substances to feed the yeast and little energy, and they don't tend to produce troublesome byproducts (other than some CO2, but I don't think that's comparable to what animals produce in quantity).
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@YorkshireBob it's the most impressive nerd youtube channel I know. the second would be stuff made here, but that's mostly electrical engineering, rather than biochemistry.
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@dein3086 well, peta for one does oppose pet ownership. that's why they run those "animal rescues" that kill almost all pets given to them, because they think that death is better for the animal than life as a pet. 🙄 so if you have an animal to give up, DO NOT give it to peta! the humane society for example would be good. even city shelters usually have lower euthanasia rates than peta, though in places with bad pet overpopulation, they are also very bad, to the point of sometimes killing even healthy puppies and kittens.
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@First-Last_name well, when you have no mules, horses will do. I would guess that they used those horses as pack animals rather than for riding, and for that, mules are better, especially in mountains (mules and donkeys walk better on bad terrain). even for riding, I think mules would be better than horses in the mountains.
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@First-Last_name I don't think that "beef substitute" is a legally permissible way to declare horse meat. EU rules even require the specific listing of mechanically separated meat (though that regulation is bypassed all the time), I'm sure that they require the explicit declaration of every species of animal whose meat is contained in a product. though I think for some more processed animal products it does not, for example I believe that gelatine is commonly not attributed to an animal species.
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