Animals (including us) eat other animals. That's part of life. It's nothing to feel bad about.
We don't need to eat other animals to survive.
It is very possible (and very easy, in some places) to survive and thrive without animal products at all. Why should animals suffer for our pleasure and/or convenience?
Everything that lives suffers and dies eventually. Why is it better for an animal to die and feed maggots than to die and feed a human?
These aren't the only two options. We could also stop breeding animals into miserable existences in order to fatten them up and slaughter them for our consumption (which, in addition to causing suffering, causes great harm to the environment as well).
> It's doubtful that the industrialized society that enables a portion of the population to live without using animal products would ever have developed if we hadn't used animal products in the first place.
I don't disagree that this was the case. In the past, people had fewer choices (and sadly, many people today do not have the luxury of choosing which foods they eat -- if they can get enough food at all). I am lucky to have a ton of options available to me, and so I choose to not support suffering.
We could also sterilize the planet and end suffering entirely.
Why should animals suffer for our pleasure and/or convenience?
Define suffering.
If you raise them in conditions not worse than they'd face in the wild, and kill them in a way that they die quickly (which is far better than they'd face in the wild), what's the problem?
Come back to us when any form of fishing, especially commercial fishing, is like this.
There isn't that implicit assumption. It was simply speaking of the double standard of "humane" people have of land animals vs fish. And how that standard might not actually be justified - in other words a cultural myth.
It even said "For aquaculture, at least, we have some control, and I suspect the movement will begin there. I could envision having Atlantic salmon, say, from a farm, that has some sort of humane treatment approval — free-range, or whatever — for people who are willing to pay a little more for some animal that's been treated reasonably well."