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.