Comment by stbtrax
7 years ago
I'm not vegetarian but are you arguing that effort put into raising an animal gives you more of a right to slaughter it?
7 years ago
I'm not vegetarian but are you arguing that effort put into raising an animal gives you more of a right to slaughter it?
If everyone in the world becomes vegan, what exactly do you think is going to happen to all of those domesticated cows, sheep, and chickens? Are people going to continue raising them as pets in the same quantities, out of the goodness of their hearts? Of course not -- they would basically go extinct.
I think that on the whole, I think that having a reasonably comfortable and safe life and then being humanely slaughtered for food is better than not existing at all. So while I'm definitely ethically against "industrial" meat production that treats live animals like meat-generating machines, I think that raising animals in reasonable living conditions before killing them to eat is perfectly ethical.
(Whether we have the resources to raise them is a different question; I'm resigned to the fact that eventually we'll all be on plant-based diets for planet sustainability reasons.)
FYI, some land is well suited to grow food crops, other land isn't. The share varies by region, of course. There's a limit to how much meat we can eat if we are to use the land optimally. That limit isn't zero.
The limit surely isn't anywhere near having meat in every single meal, including bacon in milkshakes.
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I'm not vegan, but that's absurd. Right now we spend an inordinate amount of land on the relative monocultures of raising these animals, consuming vegetable matter is generally more efficient when it comes to land use.
So we'd have fewer chickens, but we'd have more land left to the wilderness. I don't really care about the interest of 100 chickens somewhere, but purely from a conservation point of view veganism is one of the worthwhile things we can be doing. Those animals are taking up land that we can replace with a more varied ecology.
But these species are never going to become extinct, we won't have 100% veganism, and some of them will still be raised even if they're not being eaten. E.g. chickens are very useful for pest control and to dispose of food waste.
> I'm not vegan, but that's absurd.
Sorry, I'm having trouble figuring out from your response what it is that you disagree with. The main point of my post is to address the question of whether it's ethical to raise and eat animals at all: whether, all things being equal, a world in which nobody eats cows or sheep or chickens is better than a world in which we eat cows and sheep and chickens, but give them decent living conditions.
Obviously other things are not equal, as I alluded to in my final paragraph.
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Can you cite that because my understanding is it takes less space to have live stock as you don’t need to do crop rotation. Organic is the worst as the yields are low you need to plant more to attempt to come close to the same yields as a GM crop.
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Expecting the entire world to turn vegetarian, seems unrealistic, unless there is some major collapse of the entire ecosystem. The ideal solution is that meat goes back to being a luxury or treat, instead of consuming it daily multiple times. With a majority of our calories coming from vegetables. There is just far too much cheap meat available.
> If everyone in the world becomes vegan, what exactly do you think is going to happen to all of those domesticated cows, sheep, and chickens? Are people going to continue raising them as pets in the same quantities, out of the goodness of their hearts? Of course not -- they would basically go extinct.
Maybe they’d be put in zoos?
> Maybe they’d be put in zoos?
I googled "How many zoos in the world", and got an estimate of about 1500. If every single zoo had 10 chickens, that would make about 15,000 chickens in the entire world. I think going from however many millions of chickens there are worldwide down to 15k would count as "basically exctinct".
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That raising an animal for slaughter is permitted.
You can't separate those two; the choice doesn't happen between the raising and the slaughter. Farmers don't breed animals and only then consider whether to slaughter them, the choice happens earlier.
So the argument is that letting an animal see the light of day on condition that it'll be slaughtered at the right age is a valid thing to do. (Digressing: my own opinion is that it depends on how the animal gets to spend its time on earth. But that's just my opinion, not really relevant to the argument.)
To some extent, yes. I'm not saying it should put that over your own moral line, but I definitely think that sacrificing an animal you cared for is more acceptable than hunting a wild animal, for example.
Consider the relationship between ants and aphids. Ants care for aphids and they survive because of ants. But ants have also been known to physically tear wings off of aphids to prevent them from flying away!
And of course, farming is far different than hunting and fighting, which ants do as well.