Comment by EGreg

7 years ago

I think that the main question is about how animals are killed and how they live until then.

To me, slaughtering a cow quickly is not bad because the cow may have had problems in its old age and we are causing one minute of pain vs long years of potentially serious discomfort. Also the animal’s experience is considered pretty limited so robbing the cow of many more years of experiencing life as a cow is not considered very bad. On the upside you get to use the cow’s meat, hide etc.

In the animal kingdom, deaths are often far more brutal, including from bacteria etc. so humane slaughter is far better.

The problem starts when you have to breed far more cows and keep them in terrible conditions during their lives. Especially how they used to keep veal. To this day I avoid veal out of principle. But it’s also the dairy industry, the National Dairy Checkoff and how cows are forcefully inseminated, the calves taken from them and the cows milked without being able to move.

The problem is induced demand and the explosion of number of people on the planet. The farms are not your grandparents’ farms. And cows have it relatively good compared to turkeys and chickens.

What’s really immoral is the way they keep these animals confined, cut off their beaks so they don’t peck each other, and let them live in their own dung and stench. The chickens can’t spread a single wing.

The way they use antibiotics to both combat the rampant spread of disease in confined conditions (from feces, etc.) and to fatten up the animal has heavily contributed to antibiotic resistance of MRSA strains etc. So there are negative externalities for humans even if you don’t care about animal welfare.

We must do something about ending factory farms in the USA. When you are not paying you are the product. Capitalism always selects for the farm with the lowest overhead, though. So we will have to use non-market mechanisms to solve this. Does anyone here have good ideas? Here are some of mine:

Regulations (like in Europe)

Nonprofit offering farm subsidies and to build vertical space to house animals in exchange for cameras and seizing the farm / fining it (like a government) if violations occur.

Make more people lactose intolerant by encouraging interracial marriages with non-Europeans like Asians (far fetched and works only for cows, if it works at all)

Impossible burger may be the best thing to get people to switch. Just like Qbix and Matrix.org and Solid and Mastodon need to exist as alternatives for people to switch from centralized systems.