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This is partly why European disease wiped out Native American populations to a large extent. Europeans carrying diseases from animals they lived closely with.
I’m actually not arguing against this being a bad idea though lol, just giving some historic trivia.
Factory farming is bad, over use of antibiotics in live stock is bad. But OP's point is that this is how many of the diseases in human history and therefor unlikely we would ever be able to avoid this while raising animals for food. As they said, both are true
I understand the temptation to zoom out to a several hundred year timespan, that can be clarifying. But when (as in this case) there are substantive differences in recent history, it muddies the waters. I totally buy that endemic diseases are largely zoonotic diseases plus time. But that doesn't clarify how much risk exists in our current methods of farming. Factory farming is not equivalent to traditional farming in this respect. History is not featureless and when we flatten it we lose important details.
I don't know if it matters but there are significantly fewer farmers than there used to be by several orders of magnitude.
Also, before cars, the streets of major cities were covered in horse shit.
We are definitely making things worse, also by our use of antibiotics in livestock.
But hey, cheap food!
The processing is simply unnecessary and the output isn’t food but essentially drugs that people get addicted to. That’s completely different from the actual food that we grow.
Humans (and our ancestors) have been eating meat for around 2.5–3 million years, and possibly even earlier if you include earlier hominin species.
I have been hearing this and the climate change stuff since I was young as a threat to humans and I think there must be a lot more than science in here, at least, in my humble opinion.