It doesn’t matter how we get people to be less reliant on factory farms, so long as we do.
We must examine every avenue that allows us to reduce the suffering of animals.
If meat alternatives and lab grown meat become cheap and indistinguishable from real sources, I predict that within the span of two generations our descendants are going to look back on us as immoral savages. I use cognitive dissonance and distance from how my food is made to get over how horrible industrial farming is and how brutal life can be for livestock. They'll wonder how we were able to tolerate such brutality and all the answers come back to either 'out of sight, out of mind' or 'it's tasty'.
But the farms and ranches I grew up around, and that I buy most of my meat from, never seem that brutal when I’ve visited them, and the animals seem well cared for and mostly doing their own thing on the pasture most of the time.
I wanted to take more responsibility for my consumption, so I’ve been increasingly substituting in meat that I hunt for that which I buy from farmers. The North American model of wildlife management maintains an abundance of wildlife compared to other continents, and the hunting community pours billions of dollars into land conservation and re-establishing extirpated species into their natural ranges. There’s a paradox in hunting—killing an individual animal but pouring resources and votes into maintaining populations, and the existence of that species in the face of industrial exploitation of the land. The system is set up so that the populations don’t decline year over year, the number of animals harvested by hunters is often simply subtracted from the total number of animals that would have died from starvation over winter.
The damage done to the natural environment by the sort of soy and legume monoculture that makes industrial meat substitutes profitable has its own issues, and anyone who’s lived near a farm and seen the vultures and raptors circling a freshly combined field knows that the number of rodents killed to produce a cows worth of veggie burgers is significant. I’m not arguing that we should, or could, go one way or the other, but I hope that a hundred years from now the moral certitude that you’re describing has not been adopted. We’ve been eating other animals for as long as we’ve been a species, and hunting just as long, and farming for 12,000 years. Long term, the species and environment would probable be best served by some diversity in approaches.
Any farm suggestions?
It’s more expensive, but you treasure every bite. When it’s something you’ve hunted yourself, you couldn’t imagine letting a scrap go to waste.
I do not doubt what you’ve observed however the scale of the process virtually guarantees suffering.
The United States slaughters over 30 million cattle per year. If one out of 500 [1] slaughters falls on a range from major pain to unimaginable cognitive experience of trauma, it’s pretty bad.
It says nothing of mishaps and disease resulting from their keeping.
While some feel relative intelligence is not a good way to determine suffering, pigs are regarded as one of the smartest animals on the planet. As another HN friendly example, pigs demonstrate self-agency: they can use a joystick to manipulate a cursor. [2]
The US slaughters over 75 million hogs a year. Run the same stats and you end up with a commanding species that is nothing short of barbaric.
I agree with the comment upthread, that in due time our cruelty to animals in this time will be one of our great shames.
[1] I think suffering is likely far more common than this, but for HN perspective, here are some estimates in bugs per lines of code: https://stackoverflow.com/a/56043694
[2] https://escholarship.org/content/qt8sx4s79c/qt8sx4s79c.pdf?t...
and let's not kid ourselves - with 50+ /billion/ land animals killed per year, almost all of which are factory farmed, the idea that joe farmer is going to pick up the tab with his 100 chickens isn't realistic, or that joe hunter is going to make a dent in that number.
as far as animals dying when crops are harvested, yeah, we can and should do better. at least they weren't castrated without anesthesia or lived their entire lives in gestation crates or getting inseminated (pigs), beak shaved off (chickens), or eyes cut off so they grow faster (crustaceans). the suffering isn't comparable; comparing it as such is asinine.
Outside of being a Jainist monk, there’s no escaping that your life on this planet doesn’t cost other animals’ lives. If you were to argue that all lives are equally important (I wouldn’t, but lots of vegans seem to), then you can reasonably make the argument that the calories you get from killing a single free range bison or moose costs fewer total lives than getting the equivalent calories from soy-based substitutes.
Not everyone is comfortable with things being that direct, and that’s ok. It’s a better moral choice for me, and I don’t believe a world where the option was foreclosed, or where everyone was eating meat substitutes would necessarily be a better one.
In your last paragraph, you are making the case for eating crops directly instead of growing incredible excess to feed animals, especially if you're going to bring up crop monoculture.
https://www.beyondmeat.com/whats-new/is-meat-production-an-e...
I’m pointing out that I mostly eat animals that eat grass, and there are lots of them, more than a lot of people realize. I’m arguing for viewpoint and food source diversity, and against moral certitude and simplistic reasoning.