The problem is that it costs slightly more and our society is more concerned with cost than animal suffering.
Breeding animals _specifically for killing them_, no matter how they are killed, is not what I'd consider humane. If we take 'humane' literally, it means to be treated as you would treat a human. I doubt we'd do this to humans. So the only way to be okay with this is adhering to a form of specieism.
Not too different from humans in that respect; humans are bred systematically (we have dedicated hormonal supplements, birth facilities, documented birthing procedures, standardized post-birth checklists of forms of vaccination regiments, standardized mass schooling, government-subsidized feeding programs, etc) and most are used machinistically by society exclusively for productive output, regardless of whether the society is corporatist, capitalist, socialist, communist, etc.
But still, egg and dairy animals are culled when productivity drops. The human equivalent would be killing all male babies, and females after age ~40.
This does not seem more "humane" than the human equivalent of meat farming, where all human offspring would be harvested at age ~15.
And pregnancy is _hard_ on animals (including humans), it changes your physiology and psychology. Even if we take for granted that a cow isn't as conscious as a human (IMO consciousness is a sliding scale, not a binary), then they are still being primed for giving birth and taking care of offspring which never comes. Imagine doing that to a human - it's a definite form of cruelty.
It is not at all a logical, ethical, or emotional contradiction to say that we should have humanely-raised livestock whose purpose is to be slaughtered for meat. We can ensure that they are kept in healthy, safe, and humane ways during their lifetimes, and are killed as quickly, cleanly, and painlessly as we can reasonably manage.
And, um, the meaning of "humane" is only loosely related to "treat like a human." It means "treat well, view with compassion", and similar. We talk of things being "humane" or "inhumane" in how we treat each other, too. [0]
Humans have been raising meat animals with compassion and treating them well during their lifetimes for longer than we have had written language. Veganism/vegetarianism is not even physically an option for many people, excludes many cultures' traditional practices, and very, very often requires (or at least tends toward) supplementing with foods that are at least as unethical as factory farming practices.
That's the first time I ear about supplement being unethical, let alone "compared to factory farming". Stretching the usual arguments, it may be almonds' water or soy in brazil ? I'd be glad you clarify your point.
Soy is a strange pick at it’s mostly cultivated to feed livestock (77%) and using it instead for humans instead would require substantially less crops.
https://www.deforestationimportee.ecologie.gouv.fr/en/affect...
Agave… is mostly water and glucose, without much minerals or protein. How does vegs requires or tends toward that aliment more than other?
Quinoa original region doesn’t have the same working standards as un US/UE but I’m not aware of a difference with banana, coffee, avocado, cacao, vanilla, coconut, palm oil (or soy)… however Quinoa also grow in other regions: here in France you can find local quinoa at the same price as the one from Bolivia: around 8€/kg (organic). It’s super healthy but not very popular through.
Beans and lentils are more popular I think (self non-scientific estimation) but yeah soy is great and tasty.
I don’t think you can call it a compassion when you own an animal with sole purpose of efficiently growing it and then killing it so its body can be dismembered and sold off. This is treating animals as property, that produces profit.
Raising animals compassionately, slaughtering them for meat as painlessly as possible after a healthy, happy life
OR
Letting people who require meat in their diet to live (there are a number of reasons this may be the case) die slow, painful deaths as their bodies fail around them?
It's real easy to say that "no one should ever kill an animal to live" when you ignore the disabilities and chronic conditions that make surviving on plants alone impossible, or prohibitively expensive.
The obvious historical pointer to the Holocaust as a well covered example of people being treated like that - and a fact often swept under the rug: people are being treated essentially like that in North Korea, today.
An older interview but still good to watch
Instead people are outraged about the dictators in the middle east etc.
Whatever you wanna say about the Gaza atrocities - it applies 100x to North Korea. And yet, nobody cares.
I think that's the real thing you can take away from these issues: nobody cares unless there is a politically motivated party that wants to achieve their goals and thus shapes the public narrative enough to get it's will through
Wait, do we not agree that people are inherently more valuable than pigs?
Leaving aside pigs being intelligent creatures almost akin to humans for medical purposes, pigs fetch a lot more per kilo than humans do.
I'm not sure there's even much of an open market for human meat.
Unless you mean some nebulous human centic notion of "valuable" that takes no account of the pigs PoV.
It's so normalized to think of animals as worthless that I don't blame anyone for not having thought about it, but the moral calculus is really easy. Most people wouldn't be comfortable with killing a dog, and yet, every three days, we have two more Holocaust-worths of a smarter animal (namely, pigs).
If those animals would not be grown by humans, it could still be said that in their natural conditions they are grown specifically to be killed at some time, since few animals die "of natural causes", instead of being killed either by predators or by parasites.
For examples, my grandparents grew chicken. There is no doubt that those chicken had a more pleasant life than any wild chicken. During the day, they roamed through a vast space with abundant vegetation, insects and worms, where they fed exactly like any wild chicken would do. They also received from time to time some grain supplement that was greatly appreciated. They were not permanently harassed and stressed by predators, as it would have happened in their natural environment.
From time to time, some chicken was caught and killed out of sight. This would shorten the lives of the chicken that were not left for egg laying, but in comparison with the lives of wild chicken, most of these domestic chicken would have still lived longer on average.
So I think that as long as domestic animals do not live worse than their wild ancestors, this can be called as a "humane way", even when they are grown with the purpose of eventually being killed. At least being grown by humans has ensured the survival of the species of domesticated animals, while all species of not very small non-domesticated terrestrial animals have been reduced to negligible numbers of individuals in comparison with humans and domestic animals and for most of them extinction is very likely.
Unfortunately, today it has become unlikely to see animals grown in such conditions, like at my grandparents. Most are grown in industrial farms in conditions that cannot be called anything else but continuous torture, and I despise the people who torture animals in order to increase their revenues.
Also many domesticated animals would be completely extinct if we didn't eat or farm them, which isn't a great prize, but it isn't nothing either.
Personally I don't believe, until energy is so plentifully produced to be approaching on free for individuals, that we can even really afford to forgo animal agriculture. Oh yeah sure, we use farmland to grow animal feed and not human feed, but the animal feed we grow is often much easier to grow, and in many cases reduces artificial fertilizer usage which is a huge usage of fossil fuels. Take cows for example, they are fed 90% grass or alfalfa to grow, yeah their last month or two of life they are given grain to fatten them up (which is optional but customers prefer it), but that alfalfa they ate for 90% of their growth required no fertilizer or pesticides, and even produces nitrogen fertilizer in the ground, while harvesting consists of mowing it down and packing it into bails, and can be stored for years almost anywhere, including outside or in just random pits or 100 year old barns. Dent corn does require fertilizer (especially if you don't rotate with alfalfa or other legumes), however dent corn can also be stored for years with no more processing than is done within 10 seconds of harvest by the combine that is harvesting it, and can be fed to animals directly, while sweet corn is far more delicate, less fertilizer efficient, and doesn't store for long without refrigeration, canning, or freezing. Also animals like pigs are often fed otherwise bad or inedible food.
Meat/animals it also a great emergency store of food for disaster. A volcano can reduce global yields by 30%, and while crop subsidization will help as we might have an extra 10% growing to start with, that still may end with shortages because people keep fighting crop subsidization to keep it low not understanding why it exists (to prevent famine which it has successfully done for over 100 years in every country that implements it). But you can give yourself an extra few years of food from animal stores by slaughtering them down and feeding them on old animal feed stockpiles, either just to wait for overall crop yields to increase again, or to give time to increase farming efforts.
In a more ideal world I would definitely go along with reducing or even eliminating most animal agriculture, but in the world we currently live in it seems like a liability to me. I simply don't trust the people controlling most of our capital and wielding most of the power of human civilization to manage it well enough now or anytime in the near future. Not to mention the educational requirements to most cultures to switch to a pure vegetarian diet without all sorts of side effects from poor nutritional balance.
Raising animals for meat is theoretically doable with no suffering (not sure about milk), but it's not happening in practice. With pets the situation is better - a lot of people adopt and some care about how their pet was raised if they buy it from a breeder.
I also think we need to be careful with the idea that we should entirely avoid suffering because it's impossible to do.
I think most people are aware of animal cruelty in factory farms (the chicken in cages, the pigs in cages, etc.), which represents 90% of all farm animals globally (https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/global-animal-farming-est...).
For pets, I don't think you understood what GP was saying: pet breeding involves massive amounts of death of puppies/kittens that aren't pretty enough or don't manage to survive infancy, the female breeders are basically confined to cages and "producing" all their life, some short-nosed breeds of dogs and cats are even illegal in some countries because they spend their life unable to breathe properly, pets are abandoned and killed, etc. The happy pets you see in the street are not representative of what it is to be a pet. But yes, these ones are not suffering.
As for long and harmonious, as much as we tend to see anything in the distant past as innocent, I'd remind you that the systematic killing of male chicks, the killing of veals to avoid them drinking all the milk, the killing of all animals as soon as productivity drops beyond a threshold, are not new practices. No animal wants to be enslaved. Same as no human wants to be enslaved.
I'm not attacking you, just attempting to give you an idea of why other commenters believe animal domestication is not ethical.
> The problem is that it costs slightly more and our society is more concerned with cost than animal suffering.
IDK about other livestock, but this definitely doesn't hold for chickens, one of the cheaper meat sources in the US. Switching to breeds that could live more than a very-few weeks(!) before getting too overweight to walk, would increase price by far more than "slightly more", and there's no hope of anything fitting any sane definition of "humane chicken farming" without that step.
I suspect it's also true for pigs, not necessarily the "we bred them so wrong that their very existence is a crime against god and nature" part but that the price increase from a "healthy, happy life" would be a lot larger than "slightly more". Maybe also cows, dunno about that one.
> society is more concerned with cost than animal suffering.
Yes, and it's politically very hard to change. I totally understand price sensitivity around food. At least where I live milk and meat is extremely subsidised. How can you have chicken that is grown, slaughtered, cleaned, packaged, distributed, kept cold all the way, etc. and sell it for 5eur/kg (and cheaper on discounts). There's s much human work, resources, fuel used - I cannot understand.
Also - being a vegetarian/vegan is more expensive than being omnivore.
Being vegan is cheaper where I live regardless of whether we factor in the subsidies or not. Beans, chickpeas, lentils and sometimes soy (examples of protein sources) are pretty inexpensive. Peanuts, some other nuts (in the culinary sense of the word) and some of the vegetable oils are also inexpensive.
If you factor in foods meant to replace or replicate the taste of a carnivore diet like vegan yogurt, milk or cheese, or things like Beyond Meat burgers, it might become expensive, but you don't have to limit yourself by trying to replicate what you used to eat - you can make lots of things from 10-20 basic ingredients.
Being vegan is easy for someone who does hard physical work, so they have to eat more than 3000 kcal per day. In that case, eating enough proteins that come from plant sources will still leave enough in the energy budget to also eat other food, for a complete diet.
On the other hand, if you have a sedentary lifestyle, working in the front of a computer, it is impossible to eat enough protein without eating too many calories.
There are plant protein extracts, but those are at least 3 to 5 times more expensive than cheap animal protein, e.g. chicken breast.
I have eaten for 4 years only plant-based proteins, but to satisfy simultaneously 3 constraints, enough proteins, not so many calories as to cause weight gain and price no greater than when eating chicken meat, in Europe where I live there was only 1 solution, with no alternatives.
The solution was to extract at home gluten from wheat flour, to supplement the proteins provided by lentils or other legumes. Any plant-based product that I could buy for enough protein would have been more expensive than chicken meat.
Extracting gluten, which is done by washing dough with abundant water, works. However it requires much time and much water. Extracting pure gluten requires so much water and so much time that I never did this regularly. I was typically removing around 75% of the starch from wheat flour, and with the result I was baking a bread that had about 50% to 60% protein content.
Besides wasting a lot of water and time every day, this procedure had the additional disadvantage that the amount of calories provided by eating enough protein was still rather large. This limited severely the possible menus, e.g. any starchy vegetables, e.g. potatoes or sweet potatoes or rice, and any starchy fruits, e.g. bananas, had to be forbidden. I gain weight extremely easily if I exceed my allowable daily energy intake.
These inconveniences have made me eventually abandon this approach. While I still eat mostly vegan food, I also use in cooking some whey protein concentrate, which can increase enough the protein content of plant-based food.
There already exists a technology for making whey protein concentrate otherwise than by the filtration of milk, i.e. by extracting it from a culture of genetically-modified Trichoderma fungus. I hope that this technology will become viable commercially, because unlike with fake meat produced from cell cultures, it is certain that with such a fungal culture one can make proteins less costly than by growing chicken or other domestic animals.
The availability of such a protein powder would solve completely the problem of vegan food for me. I do not need fake meat.
> On the other hand, if you have a sedentary lifestyle, working in the front of a computer, it is impossible to eat enough protein without eating too many calories.
Anecdotal counterpoint - I've done hard physical work for ~2 years. For ~10 years before that and for about 1.5 after I stopped the physical work I've been spending most of my days sitting in front of the computer with the occasional walk to the grocery store. No sport or hiking or fitness.
I don't eat TVP or other condensed protein food. I don't count calories or even consciously decide when to eat protein rich food. Sometimes I'll even just eat pasta or other food relatively low in protein and rich in carbs and calories. Yet, I'm in the same physical health as I've always been. Not athletic, but normal weight - the type of weight an annoying aunt would see and say "ooh, you gotta eat more". :) The first BMI calc I tried put me right in the middle of the green zone (yes, I know BMI is not that important). And I could return to the same physical work if I wanted to.
Besides my anecdotal counterpoint, there are many sources online you can find where people discuss their diet, how much it costs and their lifestyle.
> The solution was to extract at home gluten from wheat flour, to supplement the proteins provided by lentils or other legumes.
> any starchy vegetables, e.g. potatoes or sweet potatoes or rice, and any starchy fruits, e.g. bananas, had to be forbidden.
That seems very extreme to me. Were you trying to be a bodybuilder or maintain some low body fat or something while maintaining this sedentary lifestyle? I eat potatoes, sweet potatoes and bananas all the time.
> I gain weight extremely easily if I exceed my allowable daily energy intake.
If that's the case, why not spend some of the calories on exercise? Although I find it hard to believe that with my current and previous sedentary lifestyle I expend enough calories to not care what I eat on a vegan diet, but you gain weight "extremely easily". Do you have some rare disease, if you don't mind my asking? Cause the only fat people I know are the ones who overeat, regardless of diet. Even if they start blaming "slow metabolism" or something else, it's obvious when you see them eat.
> There are plant protein extracts, but those are at least 3 to 5 times more expensive than cheap animal protein, e.g. chicken breast.
Economy of scale and subsidies.
> There already exists a technology for making whey protein concentrate otherwise than by the filtration of milk, i.e. by extracting it from a culture of genetically-modified Trichoderma fungus.
Interesting. Although I don't see myself buying it, I'll look it up.
> fake meat
It's as real as you can get. "Fake meat" would be TVP prepared like meat. You wouldn't say "fake whey protein" if you extract it from genetically-modified Trichoderma fungus.
I read this often but the long term vegs usually says the opposite as does the studies [0]. Bonus point: The veg options are often the cheapest in the non-vegan restaurants (although not the tastiest). I have some hypothesis where it comes from:
- Meat substitues are seen as a necessary replacement. They are transformed, which require more work - and therefore more expensive. However they are as (un)necessary as a fined-prepared piece of charcuterie, which isn't cheap neither.
- Cost is evaluated at the supermarket shelf but as you noted the animal products are extremely subsidised. Vegs pays for them but don't use it. Infrastructures like airport, rails, road and urban amenities are not free either even if you don't pay for them. How you evaluate the price is at your own discretion.
- Fancy products are placed in the most visible shelf and thats the people see first, but they compare it with the cheapest animal alternative. I'm an engineer and by my fancy organic tofu 7-20€/kg but used to buy chicken at 25-35€/kg in the same fancy segment. If I'd be on a budget I'll probably buy the bottom shelf one at 3.5€/kg, next to the 5€/kg chicken.
- Cost of change: changing habits require to re-create the optimization you build during the previous years: where to find the best price for the product X, what quantity should you get or what daily stable you can add in the routine for cheap (fake meat and fancy milk aren't).
0:
> Main findings suggest that food expenditure negatively relates to vegetarian food self-identity, and unemployment status mediates the link between vegetarianism and food expenditure.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-06353-y
Vegan diet is always the cheapest - but not in the lower income countries. However it is when including costs of climate change and health care.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...
There is no humane way to kill a creature against its will.
To be clear, free range represents a major improvement over the unconscionable horrors of factory farms, but it is not flatly “humane” without qualification.
Ok but why stop there
Society is only concerned with cost, regulations are weak and rarely enforced and companies are operating in a capitalistic market where they can't compete unless they squeeze every last cent out of each animal. That's hard to change as lots of people have an interest in keeping the status quo and the citizens who vote don't have the time to read everything that comes their way. We can't expect that society will wake up, that people will start voting with more conscience or that everyone will go vegan.
Lab grown meat (or growing brainless animals or something similar) is a technological solution. When it becomes cheaper than normally-grown meat and similar in quality, the atrocities committed in the farms would cease to exist as the farms themselves would cease to exist. The same market forces that are responsible for what's happening to the animals now would prevent any future torture.
I find it hard to believe you could convince a large portion of Americans to eat lab grown meat just to save a buck.
But if lab grown meat is cheaper, some part of the population would buy it. The farms would lose part of their business so economy of scale would help lab grown meat and hurt the farms. I think it would lead to a feedback loop where lab grown meat will get even cheaper and farm meat would get more expensive.
With lab grown meat you also have the option not only for a perfect piece of meat, but for different kinds of tastes, textures and compositions that haven't existed before. Just like people eat processed meat (think ham or nuggets or deep fried pieces), they would love to try the new tastes. I know I would.
And to be glib, I'm not thrilled about the idea of catering to the bar set by "things they don't understand" from that group in particular.
that YT video about killbots is being proved right in Eastern Ukraine right now
only a matter of time 'till those metaphorical chickens come home to roost
Well we got none of those things. But beef steak is still $25 a pound. I don't really care if it gets more expensive because at current prices I can't eat it regularly anyway and rich assholes will have no problems eating their steaks every day even at $100 a pound so why don't we just have a sustainable, clean, less cruel industry?
Countries reduced their demand of our meat, because of horseshit tradewar games, and yet the price went up. Demand for American industrial crops like soybeans, which is used significantly as a cattle feed, cratered, to the point we will have to hand the farms tens of billions of dollars, yet somehow beef still got more expensive. Meat processing uses illegal immigrant labor, sometimes even child labor, and all regulation of those facilities has dramatically curtailed under Trump administrations, and yet beef still gets more expensive.
Here's what beef producers say:
>“It’s hard as a beef producer to necessarily say that beef prices are too high. I mean, if people are paying $6 for a latte at Starbucks, but then they’re paying $6 for a pound of beef, they’re able to feed a family for a family of three with that pound of beef,” said Taylon Lienemann, co-owner of Linetics Ranch in Princeton, Nebraksa.
In other words, fuck you pay me. "Starbucks makes great profit so we should make more". The reason for the price increase is a "very small herd", which producers have been reducing because of droughts and otherwise because they don't think the profit is high enough to invest in future production.