Comment by Insanity
1 day ago
It’s like this with most animals that we have learned to live with in close proximity. Zoonotic viruses are responsible for many of our diseases today, but through natural selection we are adapted to many.
This is partly why European disease wiped out Native American populations to a large extent. Europeans carrying diseases from animals they lived closely with.
But it's not (just) about us living in close proximity to them, it's about putting them in an environment that makes it impossible for them to live healthy lives and incubates potential zoonotic diseases.
Which has been happening for centuries.
I’m actually not arguing against this being a bad idea though lol, just giving some historic trivia.
We have not been factory farming for centuries. More like a century. And it hasn't been a century with a sterling track record! I think we can all recall an event in recent memory where having a lot of animals in close proximity and unhealthy conditions went super duper wrong. And we have problems with new strains of bird flu every couple of years.
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Animals living on a farm are a far cry from modern factory farming.
Living in close proximity is one thing, but growing them at the speed and scale which we do with factory farming must massively increase the rate of development of viruses. It’s almost as if we designed a special program just to develop a virus that would wipe us all out.
But hey, cheap food!
Not even cheap food, just cheap meat. We could still have plenty of cheap, salty, fatty food without the livestock.
Yeah. It's very cheap to grow large amounts of canola seed, soybeans, potatoes, corn, and wheat to make all manner of high-salt, high-fat, high-carb junk food.
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