I'm not being ironic here; I'm genuinely curious.
One argument against this sort of intervention comes from my experience living with our family dog (we've had him for five years). He is a calm and intelligent dog who I feel has had a good life, but I feel sometimes that it is a very restrictive one. He can't do whatever he wants, and is separated from other creatures like himself. My feeling is that his life was worth living, but there is an element of guilt when I think about how free he is, and once he passes away I don't think I will keep a pet in a future family I start.
It's very hard to say what these creatures who cannot speak up for themselves really want, and whether we should interfere with their lives to prevent suffering that's inherent in nature.
Do you have any thoughts on this? Please let me know if you have any books/resources to recommend. I'm planning to read Singer's Animal Liberation soon, which will probably discuss this question.
I don't have any background in philosophy or ethics, but I found it relatively accessible and well-argued; it helped to crystallize a lot of my thoughts on the topic.
For instance, you might be able to infer what a dairy cow desires, but that dairy cow's intelligence was molded by a dairy system. It is impossible to project that onto another instance even of the same species.
Is one wild deer thriving and happy with a meaningful attachment to family, and another suffering for nourishment daily? Likely.
Even concerted conservation efforts end up with unanticipated ramifications for the target and other species. The preservation of endangered species, particularly megafauna, is largely for the sake of human desires and human scientific purposes. And ironically, some of these preserved species are so captive (imprinted by our human environment for them) that they decide not to breed, not to continue their entire species. And it is the humans that are sad about it, not them.
For human morality's sake, then, I would posit that we are left only with the choice to take no action. We will either let wild be wild, or will be playing a human-centric game for eternity. There is no way to construct a world that is somehow better for other species and for us.
We either wild our own species, divide ourselves from the wild geographically, or live with the moral baggage of subjugating other species... Trying to minimize suffering based on our folly human ideas of where righteousness begins and ends.
PS I also play that righteousness game and eat a plant-based diet, take part in conservation efforts, etc. But I do so knowing it is a delusion :)
Sheep generally cannot live without human care because they need to be shorn because their wool doesn’t stop growing, and have their tails docked else they get fly blown.
Also, the brutality of nature in the wild is irrelevant in the context of human’s farming animals for food.
Edit: fixed some grammar
This is the reality of farm life for most animals, despite what you often see in commercials etc.
That video is not the reality of farm life for most animals, especially not most farm animals.
It is a video of the stereotypical view of farm life that most people who haven't lived within 100 miles of a farm think that farm life looks like.
Using data from the 2017 USDA Census of Agriculture, which was released this month, it is estimated that 70.4 percent of cows, 98.3 percent of pigs, 99.8 percent of turkeys, 98.2 percent of chickens raised for eggs, and over 99.9 percent of chickens raised for meat are raised in factory farms.
The percentage of animals raised on small family farms is negligible. That people like you aren't aware of this just shows how well this industry is hiding the truth.
https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estima...
The video is not representative of factory farms across the US. It is representative of some factory farms, but not the vast majority of them.
That people like you aren't aware that most factory farms operate differently from the few depicted in a vegan propaganda video just shows how well the progaganda is working.
Some states have gag laws because activists kept trespassing onto farms and disrupting activities, including harassing workers and endangering themselves in order to get footage. There are several shots in the video in which the camera person could have fallen into the machinery and become sausage or fillets.
I claim that most of the practices in the film are unusual in the West, especially since they violate farm safety laws passed after the mad cow outbreak several decades ago. It's also not clear why footage from Asian factory fish farms is relevant to a discussion of factory farms in the West.
https://www.aspca.org/animal-protection/public-policy/what-a...
If the problem was just trespassing then existing trespassing laws would be sufficient.
It's literally just pictures of animals being slaughtered in (primarily) overseas food facilities, at least one of which appears to be an open-air fish market. So, not representative of the claims about factory farming.