Doesn't it follow from this that it would be beneficial to kill wild animals so that their far more numerous offspring won't die grisly natural deaths?
We then do indeed kill wild animals so that their populations don't explode due to a lack of predators - in Canada and the US you typically need a "tag" to hunt wild animals, basically a ticket that allows you to kill X number of a specific species.
These tags are distributed in limited numbers, and extensive work goes into surveying populations of wild animals to distribute the right number of tags. Proceeds from selling tags go to conservation efforts, including the surveying efforts previously mentioned.
As someone trying their hardest to follow a vegan diet, I fully support hunting wild animals for food and population control. However, that situation is worlds removed from animals that are bred for the sole purpose of being raised and slaughtered in factory farms.
EDIT: to rip off another comment in this chain - the issue of hunting wild animals is orthogonal to the issue of factory farming. i.e., the two issues have little to do with each other and you cannot/should not use one as moral justification for the other.
I'm not a fan of factory farming, but I don't agree that hunting and raising farm animals are orthogonal issues. My own views are more complicated than I care to get into here, but I think it boils down to - 1) Is it always wrong to kill animals for food? and 2) Would those animals rather exist than not, prior to dying?
I think the answers to those questions are no (or else we have to declare eg lions immoral) and yes (assuming the conditions they live in aren't absolutely horrific, which also leads me to believe that factory farming should basically go away and we should reduce our meat consumption as much as we need to to make that possible).
I try to limit my meat consumption and find meat that I believe has been raised ethically, but I don't believe veganism is required (though I totally respect those beliefs!)
What burst my bubble on that idea, however, and really gave me the urge to strive towards a vegan diet, was just how completely implausible that image is. Even if your meat comes from "ethical" sources, I have three big issues:
1. Animals are typically slaughtered far short of their natural lifespans. Cows, pigs, and chickens have natural lifespans of 20, 20, and 10 years, and live 3, 2, and 0.2 years under factory farming conditions [1]. Even if the meat you're consuming comes from animals that live fantastic lives - the stereotypical image of open pastures, a "natural" diet, loving care from the farmer - those lives are almost definitely being cut short for the sake of profitability.
2. The animal products industry puts a humongous amount of effort into keeping consumers from thinking about the origins of their food. Part of this effort is whitewashing the process as much as possible. I don't feel like finding specific examples off the top of my head, but it's cases like "cage free chicken" meaning that the birds are kept in a massive, communal shed with 24/7 artificial lighting, very little cleaning, veterinary care, etc. It's very possible that even if the meat you're buying is labelled with "humane" and "ethical" terms like free-range, cage-free, etc. that those terms mean very different things than you might assume.
3. Modern livestock are bred to produce the maximum amount of product (meat, milk, eggs, wool) as possible. This leads to chickens whose legs collapse underneath them from their weight after a few months of life, cows which have chronically infected udders from the quantity of milk they produce, etc. Even if you take these breeds and raise them under "humane" conditions, they'll still have miserable lives without extensive veterinary care.
That all said, if you do indeed source your meat from sources that you have verified give their animals fantastic comfortable lives, let them live (most) of their natural lifespan before slaughter, and only raise heritage breeds that don't suffer just from being alive, then I'm all for your meat consumption - and very curious how much your meat costs!
[1] https://www.four-paws.us/campaigns-topics/topics/farm-animal...
1. I guess it doesn't bother me so much that their lives are being cut short, for the same reasons that the killing in general doesn't bother me. I would say that waiting until they're old may make the meat taste bad enough that it would be better to not bother (in which case, veganism!)
2. I agree wholeheartedly with this point. Somewhat related, we recently bought a freshly butchered duck from a small local farm and when I looked up how long we could wait before cooking it, I was shocked at how long freshly butchered meat lasts! It makes the shelf life of meat from the store seem almost disgusting, how close it is to going bad on the day you buy it. But that information has been obscured to the point that we all think raw meat is just naturally gross.
3. I also agree completely with this point, if the animal's existence is misery, then it shouldn't happen.
We really don't eat very much meat, we buy from nice, little, local farms (and that's expensive) and we raise our own meat rabbits and try to give them as much room and freedom as we can while making sure they don't get disease from the wild rabbits in our area. I decided a while ago that I wouldn't eat meat if I wasn't willing to do at least some of the slaughtering myself. It felt too important to outsource completely.
And it may sound weird, but the slaughtering itself has made me appreciate nature way more, and really changed my relationship with death, in that I see death less as a horrible thing that happens and more as part of a cycle whereby nutrients are redistributed and renewal is allowed to occur. We happen to live long enough that lots of things will die while we live, and it's easy to forget that we'll die and something will consume us, too, even if it's just a microbe or a plant.
And factory farming is way more... extractive? It feels like it doesn't allow for the redistribution and renewal, the same way that mono-culture farming on a massive scale can leach away nutrients and destroy biodiversity.
> but the slaughtering itself has made me appreciate nature way more
Sounds like we're mostly on the same page then :)
edit: http://www.jpe.ox.ac.uk/papers/consistent-vegetarianism-and-...
Ethical consequentialist vegetarians believe that farmed animals have lives that are worse than non-existence. In this paper, I sketch out an argument that wild animals have worse lives than farmed animals, and that consistent vegetarians should therefore reduce the number of wild animals as a top priority.