There is an immense difference between factory farming, and traditional farming, of which most countries and places still do.
I don't know what sort of fantasy lifestyle people think wild animals live, but it's constant fear of death all day long, fights with other of its kind over territory, constant predation, disease, pests (including bot flies and worms), starvation during population upswings, dying of thirst during drought, and very short lives.
Compare that with protection from predators, medical care, vaccination, shelter, reliable food and clean water, and stress free lives until a quick and fast death.
Lumping caring farmers in with factory farming is unfair, and again most of the world isn't the US.
For animals such as cows? Peace, contentment, and stress free life is indeed a boon.
Traditional farmers don't install automated cow scratchers for profit. They do it so animals are happy:
Then be angry at factory farming, not eating meat.
There are loads of people that still have a farm, just for them too. Yes, it's generally in rural areas in the West. Yet for thousands of years, people often just farmed to feed themselves!
Factory farming sucks. Yet this can be fixed, note that you don't need to full grass feed (as an example) to end factory farming. You just need room for mild grazing. We can easily feed people as we do now, not have factory farming, but still not have the tens of thousands of acres of grassland to feed a herd for 100% grass grazing.
This is just one example.
End factory farming. You have my support for that. You'll lose it if you take my dinner away. I suspect many are the same.
> Then be angry at factory farming, not eating meat.
When one of the most common responses to pointing out how awful factory farming is "well you can just buy from farms" when the reality is that 99% of consumption comes from factory farms, it's completely reasonable to associate the two
> We can easily feed people as we do now, not have factory farming, but still not have the tens of thousands of acres of grassland to feed a herd for 100% grass grazing.
Going to need a source for that because all the information i've seen shows that there is absolutely not enough land to be able to sustain the current levels of meat consumption.
Going to need a source for that because all the information i've seen shows that there is absolutely not enough land to be able to sustain the current levels of meat consumption.
You're sort of mixing up things here. Yes, there is enough land in some parts of the world (Canada, US), but that's not the point.
I specifically said not full grass feed. That's what people believe and assert there is not enough land for. You can still have some grass feeding, conjoined with grain feed. The animals get to be outside, have space to move around, but 1000 acres instead of 100k acres needed for full grass feeding the same herd.
As factory farms already feed those herds, clearly there's enough grain to feed them.
> As factory farms already feed those herds, clearly there's enough grain to feed them.
1. Feed Conversion Ratio is worse for pasture-raised vs. factory farmed so that's not a given - animals being able to move more, waste more calories that aren't being converted to meat
2. You still haven't provided a source for your claim about land usage
We already throw away 30% of our food, and everywhere I look there's fallow land ripe for crops where I live. Rural Canada.
That said, cattle don't need cropland to graze. They just need land that can grow some grass, and space to move around.
Yes there is a higher calorie count for moving around compared to sitting in a box every day. So? It's fairly widely known that we throw away massive amounts of grain due to lack of market.
No, I won't be providing sources or references. I'm the source and reference. You of course can disagree.
If you don't like this path to end factory farming, you may choose another. However I will fight anyone taking my food away. I will at the same time, help those working towards traditional humane farming methods.
Choose which battle you prefer. One with allies, one with enemies. Decide which will get closer to your current goal, even if it doesn't fully align with mine, and others like me.
Wow. ted.com has really fallen to the side of lame. Won't let me play with moderate lockdown for CORS and ublock origin in play. Thanks for the link, I'll try to get it to kick
> Compare that with protection from predators, medical care, vaccination, shelter, reliable food and clean water, and stress free lives until a quick and fast death.
Comparing farmed animals to wild animals is not really the point. A better comparison is a farmed animal compared to that animal not existing at all. We make the choice to bring them into existence.
Are farmed animals better off existing than not? I think in general the great majority of the 100 billion or so animals we slaughter per year are probably better off not existing. Their lives tend to be short, miserable and pointless.
If you insist on comparing farmed animals to wild animals, though, I don't think it's clear cut. They do live "safer" lives (at least until we kill them, as young as it is economical to do so), but they get to experience severe boredom, curtailment of their natural instincts, and distressing experiences such as separation from their offspring and overcrowding.
The same applied to humans before it did to non-human animals. We are prescribing our worldview of "safe" predictable lives to them, just as was done to us.
This argument can be made about humans. Are modern humans better of existing than not? Our lives also tend to be short, miserable and pointless. Especially compared to just not existing and never having to bother with this world's bs.
Our lives in the developed world tend to be limited by biology; an average of about 80 years in many countries. Pigs get slaughtered at about 6 months, well before the lifespan they could potentially live to.
> miserable
If you're feeling constantly miserable, then please get some mental health treatment.
> and pointless
Possibly, but we are free to try to find some meaning for ourselves in our lives. Farm animals merely exist to grow as fast as possible and be slaughtered for food. The only point to their existence is to be food.
You have such a human perspective on things. Pigs are free to find their own meaning to their lives as well. Why should they be concerned what their lives mean to us? Long and short are relative terms. For you 80 years is long, for me it's short. For you, 6 months is short. For a domestic pig 6 months is long because it's 100% of their lifespan. What's the median lifespan of wild pigs?
For us and pigs our lifespans are dictated by the realities of our environment. Humans are part of pigs environment.
As for miserability of existence, there's no treatment for Weltschmerz.
Would you ask an amoeba the same thing? A plant? What about an insect? A mouse? Humans are capable of thought that cows are not. Chickens are not.
For example, cows cannot conceive of object persistence. Human infants do not until 2+ years, some parrots do, etc. So what you have to ask yourself, is would the animals even be aware they are captured? And do they have the intellect to care? Or do they entirely live "in the moment", and thus, are happy if healthy, fed, and not being hunted or fearful of a wolf nearby?
Or maybe you might want to ask yourself, would you prefer to be eaten alive? For an animal like a bison, death seldom comes instantly. Death comes while pieces of your body are ripped off of you, as you mewl and scream and cry and bleed to death slowly. Passing out, waking up again only to see you're still being eaten.
Trying to make a choice based upon your mind, your body, your reality is frankly unfair. An example being, there are pack animals and animals that live solo.
By your metric, that is by measuring happiness for an animal by how you would want to live, you'd take those animals that hate living together, and try to force them to? Because that's what you're asking...
What would I want?
So I ask you instead, if we shouldn't interfere, should we then ensure we don't succor or help wild animals in any way? Let's say we stop eating all meat. We do so because "it's wrong to keep an animal captive, even if they are happier and healthier". OK.
So, then by what metric do we have to help animals in the wild? If they have a plague, should we not care or try to help? We have helped wild animals in the past with such things.
Would the animals understand the question asked? Would a cow understand vaccination? Eradication of bot flies?
I think you're missing a key part of the argument. The question is, do you support inflicting excessive suffering on beings that are capable of suffering? Factory farming intentionally forces billions of animals, each capable of feeling pain and suffering, to more of that pain and suffering than is necessary, all in the pursuit of profit.
It is not a question of eating meat or not. It's about inflicting more pain and suffering than is necessary, for money. Some pain and suffering is inevitable for all animals, but there is absolutely no need to add to it because you like the taste of the results.
Just a quibble - children learn object permanence at around six months of age. Also, I don't think the jury is quite in on cows - I've seen papers that argue both ways.
One way we could quantify cow happiness, if we were interested in doing so, is in the amount of stress hormones they produce.
This reminds me of a story, where a utility had buried power lines near a farmer's grazing field. These were milk cows, and he didn't know why but they had stopped giving milk, and seemed sickly.
Vets couldn't figure it out. They seemed healthy otherwise.
Turned out that for some reason, the cows were constantly being low-level shocked.
Most people I know, prefer to think of eating an animal that was happy until it was killed, and killed mercifully. It could be an important metric, much like grass-fed or some other property.
I don't know what sort of fantasy lifestyle people think wild animals live, but it's constant fear of death all day long, fights with other of its kind over territory, constant predation, disease, pests (including bot flies and worms), starvation during population upswings, dying of thirst during drought, and very short lives.
Compare that with protection from predators, medical care, vaccination, shelter, reliable food and clean water, and stress free lives until a quick and fast death.
Lumping caring farmers in with factory farming is unfair, and again most of the world isn't the US.
For animals such as cows? Peace, contentment, and stress free life is indeed a boon.
Traditional farmers don't install automated cow scratchers for profit. They do it so animals are happy:
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/h3SG72cKA9o