Preface: I'm a hypocritical omnivore who likes 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'.
I imagine this sentiment is often from seeing documentaries about the worst conditions in farming, and the general cosseting away from life and death that most of us have enjoyed.
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.
I’ve never watched one of those documentaries. My views on this shifted in part due to personal experiences with animals and the shooting of Harambe.
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
you seemed to have missed the industrial part of the original comment. there is a reason you haven't waltzed into the horrible facilities that end up in documentaries, etc., to include: they are not approved on any non-cable network due to gore etc., not approved on Facebook, YouTube ToS (graphic violence), ag-gag laws, and so forth. you are not invited.
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.
It's concerning that you aren't aware that the largest segment of US crops is grown for animal feed. I have to wonder what you think feedlot animals eat when you present this sort of dichotomy.
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.
I’m aware of that of course, I was a vegan for 3 years in the nineties, I know all the beats, I just have come to different conclusions than you. Where was I arguing in favour of feedlots for all?
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.
Weak argument about rodents getting ground up in combines -- almost all cattle in the US are crop-fed, so it's the same thing happening to a much greater extent with meat consumption.
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.
Not unless you’re in BC. Start with your local farmer’s market, a lot of ranchers will sell there and can arrange for larger frozen boxes or cattle shares. Look for grass-fed and grass-finished. The ranch I recently bought from even grew large leaf kale to feed its cattle over the winter. You can literally taste the local grasses and the land.
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 know of Polyface Farms in Virginia, used to get whole chickens and cows from them working in some high end restaurants in the area, and they’ll ship to you: https://www.polyfacefarms.com
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'.