I will never understand how people can treat other creatures like this.
And then still eat them.
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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Not just evil, it's dangerous. This is how we get prions, like the one that caused Mad Cow Disease and subsequently tainted an entire generation of British people who can't be proven not to be carriers, and forced an enormous cull of affected livestock.
It's good that you won't. Being able to understand this is probably a cognitohazard.
The real prions were the cognito hazards we fell into along the way
Isn't this why mad cow disease was ever a real problem in the first place?
Yep feeding dead cows to cows is the main way that mad cow disease shows up (there is also sometimes atypical mad cow disease where it shows up randomly too)
Well, since MCD is caused by prions, which can occur spontaneously in any healthy animal, it makes sense.
Prions are an amazing thing, the Wikipedia has a whole rabbit hole about them.
They come from naturally occurring protein building blocks, which unlike most proteins, are "flexible", so they can flex into different shapes to join with multiple different proteins.
Well, it turns out sometimes they flex in an unusual way, matching proteins they weren't supposed to, forming a "prion" protein that causes more of the flexible ones join proteins they shouldn't, in a cascading effect.
There is no predicting when this could happen, and no way of preventing it since the flexible building blocks are essential for the normal functioning of many proteins. They just have a certain possibility of catastrophic failure, and that's it.
Yeah, they're really cool!
As a Brit who is old enough to remember the BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy/mad cow disease) epidemic, this is astonishingly reckless and dangerous. This is how you get prion diseases. And you don't necessarily know you have a build-up of deformed prions until decades later.
The meat industry is unethical, water is wet, and the pope is a Catholic. More at 11.
Animal cruelty and reading stuff like this hurts my soul deeply
Fuck sake.
I'm extra glad now that I don't eat pork.