The industry calls it “eyestalk ablation”—a method used to force female shrimp to reproduce faster. According to shrimp welfare project : “Researchers discovered that when shrimps are subjected to ESA, they try to escape it. They also flick their tails and rub their eye area. When the wounds are covered or medicine is given, the shrimps calm down. This suggests that the ablation caused them pain and distress. Ablated females’ offspring are less tolerant of stress. They are also more likely to get diseases. There are many possible stress factors for animals in aquaculture. These include handling, crowding, high stocking densities and poor water quality. Eyestalk ablation is one more thing that worsens their welfare.”
There is so much wrong there I don’t even know where to begin. First off that is not how lactation works. Anyone with female breasts and children want to weigh in on whether they were pregnant during or before they were lactating?
Yeah actually I can weigh in, I worked in a dairy farm for a summer, and besides I have a bachelor’s degree and a Masters in animal biology and ecology.
Dairy production is at best questionable, most often barbaric. Cows undergo forced impregnation as soon as they are of age, go through pregnancy (a stressful situation for most mammals), have their baby almost immediately taken away from them so that all their milk is available for farming, and are again impregnated as soon as production starts to dry up. The cycle goes on until the cow’s body can’t take it anymore, then it’s killed.
Some farms, especially smaller ones, are more humane, with the newborns able to stay with the mother, and a more delicate milking procedure, sometimes even keeping the older cows in the fields instead of sending them to the slaughter, but it’s VERY rare.
And to be precise, I am neither vegan nor even vegetarian, but I am definitely politically opiniated against the agricultural industry as a whole, and meat industry first and foremost
You… Don’t think women lactate after pregnancy?
I’ve known people who admitted to breast feeding up to the age of five. Of course it was only logically possible for them to do that while their mother was still pregnant with them.
Did you just blow in from stupid town or something?
They didn’t say “before pregnancy” they said they have to “continuously” be pregnant. Which is true, the mammal body only produces milk for an upcoming child. Which dairy farmers strip the child away from the mother right after birth, to then take that nutrients from the mother (meant for the baby) for human gullets. They then need to repeat this process until the mother is no longer of use to them. It’s fucking rape and constant exploitation for these animals. I fail to see what your gotcha was here.
Please continue though with the explicit details of your animal exploitation experience, it isn’t the badge of honor you think it is.
Uh no, they get pregnant at most once a year.
Your lack of knowledge isn’t the badge of honor you think it is either. Continuously pregnant? What kind of idiot are you?
Yeah, it’s a little oversimplified. I’ll provide the correct version.
After a cow gives birth, you can milk her for the rest of her life, but you shouldn’t do that, because her nipples won’t get a chance to heal. You’ll get lower yields and the nipples won’t be very healthy. So farmers give most dairy cows 2 months a year off, to heal their nipples. Problem is, this causes them to stop producing milk. So, the farmers will make sure the cows get pregnant every year. They time the birth to match up with the end of the planned milking holiday. It’s milk, pregnant, milk, pregnant. As for how they get them pregnant? Well, bulls are very rough when they’re having a fuck, and farmers don’t want cows with sex injuries. So to make the process safer, they collect the sperm and shoot it up the cow’s vagina with a giant plastic syringe. There are special exemptions in bestiality laws that say a farmer forcibly impregnating a cow is NOT bestiality. Because if those special exemptions weren’t written into the laws, it absolutely would be. Legally speaking.
So that’s how your dairy might have done it, but ours just let the bulls fuck. I don’t know why (they sold the farm when I was like 12) but that’s how they did it. Most of what I did was buck hay and hook up the milking machine.