Comment by threetonesun
2 days ago
Raising animals to eat for meat is a very different endeavor than raising them for milk/eggs. Especially if you eat meat daily (or more than once a day!), do some mental math on how many animals you'd need to sustain yourself.
Not to mention, raising meat chickens is sad. We've bread them to gorge themselves so they bulk up fast. That results in essentially morbidly obese chickens. We ended up with two on accident and they couldn't even climb the ramp into the coop after a few weeks. The just gorged and sat around in the dirt. It was very sad. Raising non-meat chickens takes a lot longer and the meat output is much lower.
There are such things as heritage and forager breeds, not to mention dual purpose breeds. The industrial meat birds are the only ones that really have the issues you describe. Look into Kosher Kings or Freedom Rangers and you'll see they don't have those problems. As others have mentioned, raising them yourself is much more humane than buying it in the store. The only reason it would be more sad is because the suffering of the birds in the store is hidden from you.
Picture in the following article shows the difference in size of chickens since the 1950s.
see https://www.zmescience.com/feature-post/how-chickens-tripled...
It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
Anyways, one buck and 2-3 doe rabbits can give you something like 300+ pounds of meat per year. Close to a pound a day would be sufficient for most people. Of course you aren't going to eat only one thing, so you will have other sources of meat for variety