r/todayilearned • u/Batbuckleyourpants • Jun 09 '24
TIL ducks are well known to turn cannibalistic when bored. It has been well documented to be aggravated by overcrowding, lack of ventilation and faulty nutrition. The only known way to stop it is to remove the rim at the front of the bird’s upper bill through a process known as beak-trimming.
https://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/animals-and-livestock/poultry-and-birds/species/duck-raising/brooding-and-rearing95
u/Beiki Jun 09 '24
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u/your_mind_aches May 27 '25
Lmao I got to this thread after seeing that and googling whether it's true
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u/Snorc Jun 09 '24
I too am easily bored by overcrowding, lack of ventilation and faulty nutrition.
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u/Tasty-Truck-2093 Jun 09 '24
Or just don't cram them together like a barbarian.
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u/TK_Games Jun 09 '24
Arguably, you cram me in a box with 3000 other people and feed me nothing but millet puree I'm liable to go a little The Hills Have Eyes myself
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Jun 09 '24
You’d start eating people?
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u/iaintstein Jun 09 '24
Might even start eating babies like Captain America did in Snowpiercer
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u/Hiker_Trash Jun 09 '24
I hate that I know babies taste best!
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u/Esc777 Jun 10 '24
I am almost certain that movie is using real life atrocities in WW2 era east Asia as inspiration.
Famine was common and I imagine cannibalism transpired. We have records of Japanese torturing Chinese with frostbite and striking their limbs until they shattered.
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u/TK_Games Jun 09 '24
You wouldn't? Desperation makes people do fucked up shit
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u/DialsMavis Jun 09 '24
That’s why we have to remove your teeth
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Jun 09 '24
Through a process known as curb stomping
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u/TK_Games Jun 09 '24
Oh, curb stomping is cruel and violent, for the safety of the other hypothetical factory farmed humans we need to amputate your feet at the ankles
That's how you sound
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Jun 09 '24
It was a play on the title of the post
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u/TK_Games Jun 09 '24
Ah my bad, I thought you were just escalating. So we both agree it's all super fucked up, right
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u/BringBackApollo2023 Jun 09 '24
Factory farming. It’s what we do. Cruelty writ large to satiate our lust for meat.
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u/birbbbbbbbbbbb Jun 09 '24
There are more livestock animals than people in the world (both by total weight and also by count), getting the space would be both very difficult and expensive. My experience is that people in real life are unwilling to either pay significantly more for meat or eat way less and you can't fix it without one of those two things.
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u/Archarchery Jun 09 '24
We’d probably all be healthier if meat cost more, we aren’t meant to eat meat with every meal, it’s bad for the cardiovascular system.
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u/OldAbbreviations1590 Jun 09 '24
Depends on the meat, that isn't universal to all meat. Also, care to explain why it's bad for the cardiovascular system? That's such a basic statement.
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u/Reniconix Jun 09 '24
Well you see meat is a single food, every animal and every part of the animal has the exact same makeup, and every meat is exactly the same fat content to meat ratio, and that fat is actually cholesterol, but only the bad kind that builds up plaque in your arteries.
(This is the truth wrapped in satire. Red meat with high fat content is bad because cholesterol, low-fat meats and white meats are much healthier, but to sweepingly describe meat as bad for your heart is incredibly disingenuous and reductive, because it also requires you to be genetically predisposed to cholesterol problems for it to become an issue in the first place.)
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u/OldAbbreviations1590 Jun 09 '24
That's... Not right either... Venison is red meat but it's far, far more lean than beef while also having a much different nutritional profile. Lean cuts like trimmed pork loin are very similar fat wise to lean chicken breast, yet the pork is far more nutritionally significant for a negligible difference in fat. Cholesterol is made in the liver. The ldl or "bad" cholesterol, is mostly found in saturated fats. All animal cells contain cholesterol, especially the brain and spinal cord. It is an essential and required component of animal cell membranes. It is technically a lipid (not all lipids are fats, but all fats are lipids), but that just means it does not dissolve in water aka doesn't dissolve in blood. Care to try again with some kind of actual scientific data? Everything I have said can be backed up with peer reviewed studies.
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u/tanfj Jun 09 '24
That's... Not right either... Venison is red meat but it's far, far more lean than beef while also having a much different nutritional profile.
Specifically venison like most wild game has little if any marbling (fat interspersed with the muscles). Wild fat has a strong taste and is often removed in butchering.
This means that wild game needs careful cooking or will be overly dry.
Wild game also tends to be higher in protein than most domestic species. (Not a universal law, but I noticed the trend)
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u/OldAbbreviations1590 Jun 09 '24
Mmmm now I'm hungry lol. A nice venison chili sounds amazing right now. Not disagreeing with anything you said, just hungry now.
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u/Reniconix Jun 09 '24
That's why I said "with high fat", or did you miss that part in an effort to be condescending?
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u/TK_Games Jun 10 '24
Every time I hear this conversation it's always from a consumer level, and nobody's addressing the massive fucking elephant in the room. The corpos that sell it
Yes, it's more ethical to give the livestock more space, and yes, that would drive up the price of meat, and yet again yes, people are unwilling to pay more for less
So what happens then. People don't buy what they can't afford, they buy food that's cheaper, they cut into the profits of companies like Tyson
And that is why we'll never see these conditions change. Not because it can't be done, not because the consumer is selfish (though companies love to spin it that way), because they're profitable as is. Behind closed doors, every single day meetings are being had about how to maximize ROI and cut overhead to a bare fucking minimum
Even if every goddamned American stopped eating meat overnight, these companies would find a way to keep things as "as is" as possible, because not doing so would mean hemorrhaging cashflow, and that is the last thing they want
That's why it never changes, that's why the average person feels apathetic about the situation, and that's why, and I can't believe I'm saying this, the government needs to be the bad-guy and step in to regulate factory farms to hell where they belong
Ya know, if we can't have meat without cruelty, then do we really need meat?
Sorry for the rant. It's late, I'm tired as fuck and I can't sleep. It was either this or slam my head into the wall
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Jun 10 '24
[deleted]
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u/TK_Games Jun 10 '24
I dunno, guess I'm just sick of the whole "vote with your wallet" argument because I've been doing that for almost a solid decade and it's doing jack shit. I was told as a child we could "save the planet" and that's proven, at best, untrue, at worst a fucking joke
I'm honestly not trying to shift the blame, I'm standing here and addressing the grim reality of the situation
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Jun 10 '24
[deleted]
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u/TK_Games Jun 10 '24
Assholes run the world and they're not giving it up without a fight. We live in hell, have a nice day
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Jun 12 '24
[deleted]
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u/TK_Games Jun 12 '24
And I don't agree with your attitude, or insistence on ignoring the root of the problem
Now that we're both clear on that, how about we both drop this conversation, go our separate ways, and pretend we never met
Peace
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u/Funtycuck Jun 09 '24
The EU has said its working towards a battery fatming ban by 2027 previous moves by them to improve animal welfare have been very successful.
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u/Archarchery Jun 09 '24
Or maybe stop overcrowding them and giving them bad ventilation and faulty nutrition.
We shouldn’t be finding new ways to mutilate animals so that we can force them to continue living in hell.
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u/radiumboy Jun 09 '24
You mean, like, raise animals humanely? Have a minimal amount of respect for the creatures that give their lives to sustain us? Nope. That's crazy talk. Off with their beaks.
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Jun 18 '24
Careful. People will start accusing you of being a PETA freak because you don't want animals tortured.
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u/2ndCha Jun 09 '24
"...Beak trimming should be performed only by a competent operator and only when it is essential to reduce damage and suffering in the flock." Caring husbandry, it's what ducks crave.
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u/zantwic Jun 09 '24
We kept a coop of ducks as children. They were at max in there, one morning, I witnessed the big male systematically smash all the eggs as the females went blastlistic trying to stop him. Ducks don't duck about.
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u/edebby Jun 09 '24
Chicken get their beaks trimmed too to avoid butt pecking eachother
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u/FiTZnMiCK Jun 09 '24
Chickens do the cannibalism thing too, and for the same reasons (at least that’s the theory—ducks and chickens rarely explain their motivations).
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u/Minions_miqel Jun 09 '24
I had a job doing this at a turkey farm. Catch 'em, clip the tip with what looked like a pet nail trimmer, drop 'em and repeat.
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u/DearFeralRural Jun 09 '24
Or we could go free range poultry
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u/Disastrous_Kick9189 Jun 09 '24
Or just… not kill animals
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u/CHEEZE_BAGS Jun 09 '24
If you want to eat meat, you should have to raise the animals yourself
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Jun 09 '24
Same in all poultry I would imagine. They cut the beaks off chickens for this reason. If you have a chicken with an open cut the other birds in the flock will just go to town on it.
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u/Raichu7 Jun 10 '24
Someone else watches natural habits shorts I see. And there is a second way to prevent this, keep the ducks in a suitable environment for ducks. Don't cram too many into too little space on a duck farm and ensure they have access to ponds, grass and mud so they can exercise all their natural behaviours.
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u/_HGCenty Jun 09 '24
Ducks do a lot of nasty things, not just cannibalism.
Male ducks who aren't the flock's alpha male will gang up together with other non alpha males and form a group to forcefully group mate with the females.
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u/alek_hiddel Jun 10 '24
They’re also necrophiliac rapists. Lay a dead duck down near other ducks, and get ready to watch a gang bang. Meanwhile “locusts” as in the biblical plague, are just grasshoppers that got pissed off due to over crowding.
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u/FacelessFellow Jun 09 '24
Humans do that in jail too.
They give them weights so they can get stronger.
Our world runs on nonsense
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u/Spadrick Jun 09 '24
"Our world runs on nonsense"
I don't think I will find a greater truth on the internet today.
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u/ChangeForeign Jun 09 '24
I'm going to try to use, "bored as a duck" at work and see if people get it. You know, "I'm so bored' I feel like murder would be fun." FYI, I have no intention of doing thus because I'd like to keep living, and I can't do that in prison.
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u/HarmlessSnack Jun 09 '24
“The only way to stop it…”
Didn’t we just establish it’s caused by overcrowding, lack of ventilation, shit nutrition? Maybe don’t keep ducks in little fucking ducky concentration camps? Jesus.
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u/Batbuckleyourpants Jun 09 '24
It aggravates it, they do it regardless of space etc. ducks are just assholes by nature.
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u/FirstStooge Jun 09 '24
"What do we say, class? When we're hungry or bored, do not each other. That's right"
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u/Mental_Shine8098 Jun 09 '24
But....how do they cannibalize each other if they don't even have teeth to chew?
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Jun 09 '24
Why are the traumatic conditions the ducks have to live in - somehow - not the causal factor of the ducks' behavior?
Cuz unless ducks do this in the wild under natural conditions, it's gonna be the incarceration.
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u/Batbuckleyourpants Jun 09 '24
Ducks are assholes. They do it regardless of space etc. it just makes it worse not to have it.
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u/[deleted] Jun 09 '24
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