“Judas goats” were once key players in meatpacking plants (opens in new tab)

There are 31,557,600 seconds in a year. And every year, 55 * 10^9 animals are killed (in the U.S.). That means at a frequency of 1.743kHz, life is extinguished, day and night. Just image a single wince of pain coming from getting punched unconscious. And then in the semi-hazy state, throat is slit as life grinds to halt, skin is removed. But it doesn't happen just once... it happens so often that if there was a single faint tick of clock each time, it would blur together into a high-pitched whine in the center of the most sensitive portion of hearing (between 1kHz and 4 kHz). 24 hours per day, every day of the year!

dsp@diydsp:~/sim$ bc -l bc 1.07.1 Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2012-2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. For details type `warranty'. 5510^9 ( 3.17*10^-8) 1743.50000000000000000000

Other animals do the same. Dolphins and whales will create bubble nets and dive into them scooping up fish or krill until they're completely full. Seabirds then swoop in in droves and devour any fish left as they panic and jump into the air. Lions and other predators would run killing floors if their prey weren't so unbelievably fast with dangerous hooves and antlers. We just do it so efficiently that it's disgusting, and we do it for profit rather than subsistence.

Few other predators take the same trouble to ensure their prey is beyond suffering before beginning to eat.

There would be far less suffering if we all lived on a plant-based diet. As well it would help in the fight against climate change, reducing environmental impacts.

And then ripping their delicious burnt flesh of their bones with our teeth.

All species that consume other life forms are, we are just more efficient.

If we can digest it and gain nutrition from it, then we are meant to eat it. We didn't design ourselves.

If we weren't meant to eat animals they wouldn't be so darned tasty.

The argument that animals suffer so we can eat them tells me that sentimentality has its limits.

It happened with equal systematic design for our own species, for which this article prompted me to spend ten minutes to read through this [0] again.

Though to be honest, the German wikipedia article paints a way more visceral picture of the systematic murders. The english version does not scare the reader, which I see as an oversight.

Edit: The German version includes the deception of the victims, to keep them calm, which is what reminded me of the article.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Gas_chambers

I don't find it jarring or disconnected. In many worldviews, the most problematic aspect of meat is the pain and discomfort inflicted during the rearing and slaughter process. I've met hunters who will tell you they're far more at-ease with eating meat from an animal they killed in the wild (thus knowing it did not live in a cage and died instantly) than they are with factory farming.

Dr Grandin is autistic. That jarring sense is you being normal. Normal people who feel empathy for something have a hard time killing it.

This plays out in ugly ways in that business -- they either hire psychos who enjoy being cruel _because_ then know that the animals suffer, or the people doing the work convince themselves that the animals are too "dumb" to understand what's happening, and are incapable of suffering. Grandin complains that workers often undo her changes after the fact (e.g. removing a piece of metal that blocks a view of the killing bolt) because they don't understand that the changes aren't to make _their_ jobs easier, and the workers are either constitutionally incapable of understanding how those changes serve the cows, or that the cows deserve any consideration at all.

Any fisherman will tell you that fish can't suffer.

She was trying IIRC to prevent them suffering nearly so much before slaughter which seems like a better thing.

It seemed strange to me as well. IIRC she cares about (empathises with) cows only as not to be a disturbance in the killing process.

Eg. single column access, remove direct sight of blood, steps to "guarantee" the painless death, etc.

But there is nothing what can be done with the smells and sounds, all animals know beforehand they're gonna be killed, and with the nature of the killing job causing unnecessary 'mistakes' and violence. It's something different to see her talking in a meat processing facility, cleaned up and ready for filming, and then see hidden recording of the process (won't describe it here, it's too gruesome).

And she can do nothing for the slaughtermen and their families themselves. They have a plethora of psychologic problems themselves, have to see a shrink every 3 months, if i'm not mistaken, and their families often have higher numbers of domestic violence than normal.

effective altruism?

People assume that empathy is something that nice people do. It isn't. It's just another tool. Back when I cared about liberal politics [0] one of the points I constantly made was that we needed to be sympathetic and understand conservative worries even if ultimately we didn't care. I had managed to get dozens of hard right people to consider ditching the GOP when attacking the party in a way that their base understood.

[0] Having OWS raided in the middle of the night with flashbangs and killdozers made me seriously reconsider who you support politically. Thanks Obama!

Erm, I hate to break it to you.

Shepherds work in the life stock industry, a Shepherd that doesn't bring sheep to slaughter is eventually going to have too many sheep.

Heh:

> Assembly ship, also known as a Judas goat, a bomber aircraft used by the U.S. Air Force in World War II to lead formations.

Imagine being the pilot. Funny name.

(I tried pasting the link too, but apparently the back button no longer remembers input text on iPad. If only there was a kill buffer. Regardless, it’s via the bottom of that page -> Judas goat -> disambiguation.)

> Judas was the betrayer symbol maybe most familiar to US people then:

Probably still so now. Judas is the betrayer par excellence in American culture.

This had 3-4 upvotes quickly, then got to -1. It's about the meaning of the name, and I thought in the same vein as the article.

Sounds like sci-fi movie "Under the Skin" with Scarlet Jojansson (based on book by Michel Faber). A beautiful girl is used to attract males to a masked alien slaughterhouse.

Now we call them "social influencers" convincing their followers that the latest crypto is going to the moon. The Judas goats are among us, and we are but sheep.

Orson Scott Card has a short story called "Kingsmeat" which also considers this situation. I read a lot of OSC short stories when I appreciated his fiction more, but this one has been particularly memorable.

So, the legendary low-budget movie "Bad Taste" by Peter Jackson has antropotarian aliens as well.

Including the director himself making a cameo.

The term 'Judas goat' goat is also used in political organizing, albeit casually rather than technically. That's where I first heard of it.

I was gonna say, there's plenty of modern analogues in the human meatspace.

Does anyone actually listen to influencers?

At traffic lights, it's very common when one person starts crossing the street while the lights are still red, for others to follow immediately. It takes surprisingly much conscious effort to resist the instinct and look at the traffic lights first.

At the cinema, when there are multiple exits, everyone goes through the door the first person went through.

When I was a teen, my next door neighbor raised sheep and I helped with various tasks for pocket money and sheep are indeed sheep. The large gate could be wide open, but they wouldn't go through until you got one past the line, then the rest would follow.

Similar with cattle. When pushing cattle down a run you try to leave one in the crush (cage furth down the run) when directing more in as they are more willing to go where there is another.

Missing context here is that humans bring goats to islands and the goats wreak havoc on the ecosystem there, and then they are very hard to find and remove.

Goats are inherently social, and so a lone goat will find a new group to interact with. What you end up with is a single, ultra-traumatized goat repeatedly finding a group of friends who all get murdered by a flying machine. I suppose it's worth it because otherwise the whole island ecosystem collapses?

There was a wonderful radiolab episode about this in the galapagos[0]

[0] https://radiolab.org/episodes/galapagos

You shouldn't have written that down, it will give future AI Terminators a good idea.

Given the references to thanksgiving and the FDA in the other top articles, the site appears catered for a US audience, and the privacy policy expects users to be over 13. What percentage of Americans over 13 wouldn't get the Judas reference? Has to be under 0.1%

"Judas" is also just a word in English that is a synonym for "traitor", derived from the same etymology.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Judas#English

A "Judas" has long been part of the popular English lexicon. Any US or UK centric blog could comfortably employ this term with a reasonable expectation that the majority of the readership would instantly understand it.

I believe bacon just describes the cut. In my area of the US, you can buy a package of uncured bacon right alongside the usual cured varieties. I don't know for sure, but I'd imagine the slaughterhouses described here wouldn't be doing any processing outside of the slaughtering, butchering, and packing.

It's called pipelining. If you have 5 floors of space to work with, there's no reason you couldn't run a 48 or 72 hour bacon-making process on a portion of the pork running through the facility.

I think there is a bit of poetic license there.

Its involved but seems like it can be done pretty quickly https://nassaufoods.com/resources/basic-manufacturing-of-bac...

New Zealand pioneered this with goats painted bright pink. Our conservation workers helped out in the Galapagos.

These days they use radio collars to achieve the same.

But it's not so much about attracting other goats out in the open, it's using the desire of the Judas goat to be with other goats to make it easy to locate herds.

I've always felt a bit sorry for the Judas goat, all their new friends keep dying.

there's a nice podcast episode from radiolab about the goats on galapagos!

https://radiolab.org/episodes/galapagos-2206

You can see this if you watch the huge mobs of sheep being moved in Australia: if one of them trips, the one behind will also jump when it gets to the same point, and the next one will do the same, until one of them fails to notice and it stops. So you look across and see a small standing wave spontaneously develop in the flock, that then eventually spontaneously damps.

Wow. This truly cannot be connected, but so glad you posted this.

George Orwell's Animal Farm portrays it well. Most people are sheeplike and follow the herd. After you are fattened up, you are led into the meat grinder.

i mean they literally follow a goat to their certain death.

Sort of like the formula for public speaking: Tell them what you're going to tell them. Tell them. Tell them what you told them.

I think the plants are no longer "gravity powered", so there's no need to try to get them up to the top of the big building.

Genocides in both Rwanda and Cambodia were carried out by broad swathes of the populations. In Rwanda in particular, you had neighbor killing neighbor using machetes. Something similar happened in Indonesia. Likewise the Cultural Revolution in China. There wasn't much need for a Judas as there was nowhere to hide or no small group of people to hide from.

Though given the scope of these events you'd expect to see every variation of human behavior many times over, so of course there are countless situations of betrayal and subterfuge, and these stories tend to resonate with people as they're highly personal and emotionally charged. People in more developed societies (or maybe just societies which emphasis individualism and individual moral agency, like many Western nations) find it difficult to fathom how such brutality could unfold at the hands of individuals without the interpersonal drama to help contextualize and connect to their own experiences.

Why presumably accidental? The article is written in the same style. It's not a styleI care for, but the writer knew what they were doing.

You're not a current or former smoker to say that. Nicotine is incredibly powerful.

Came here to comment on the headline but you a better job at it!

Clickbait for sure, but it really delivered

Reading the headline my mind went immediately to humans and not livestock.

Sheep don't wear pants!