Quote:
Originally Posted by Devils'Advocate
There are wild turkeys running through Barrhaven, Ottawa. There are plenty of wild cows roaming through India. Wild boar throughout the world. The only things that would go extinct would be the tortured hormone-laden creatures that live lives of utter misery day in and day out. These genetic mutations that we call cows today are nothing like what nature intended and no, they are not suited to surviving in the wild... we've invented chickens that fall over because their chests are so large that their legs cannot support them. And I think letting those kind of chickens go extinct would be the most humane thing to do.
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As a goal I try to avoid feedlot mass production meat and would agree especially in the case pf chickens raised in cages that it is a cruel way to raise food. But to say that a food animal has no value or is in all cases tortured is a very extreme position to be taking. The standard hormone laden beef cow in canada doesnt have it to bad. The grass fed and finished beef from small farms have great lives, probably better than the average wild animal that might replace them if the grazing land not suitable for farming was returned to the wild.
The infant mortality for farm animals is going to be far less than that of a wild animal. I think the issue is a lot more complex than just not eating meat means no animal suffering.
For example if rangeland in wild spaces was not used for cattle and was replaced with wolves and deer you would still have a lot of animals suffering and starving. Now it might make some feel better that it is now the natural world causing the suffering but the level of cruelty and suffering that a wild animal faces is far greater than a small farm animal.
Anyway I am very comfortable eating meat and outside of commercial chicken operations dont see excessive suffering. And I would argue that small farmed grass finished beef, real free range chickens, and non industrial pig operations might be the animals that suffer the least over the course of their lives compared to their wild counterparts.