This is a complicated topic, with multiple responses, but I'm only going to touch on one specific aspect of it. Reducing violence in regular farming is an admirable goal that people should strive towards. It's also worth talking about the environmental costs of ingredients like palm oil, and it's worth talking about the human costs of products like cocoa.

I don't mean to diminish any of that at all, it's all worth paying attention to.

However, the majority of meat we eat today comes from factory farming, and the majority of the feed for those animals comes from... traditional crop farming. So it's not really like eating meat is ever going to result in less death. We would need to move entirely to free-grazing cattle, which frankly, I do not believe is scalable enough or cost-effective enough to meet food demand.

I know people who are not vegetarian or vegan, but who care very deeply about animal welfare, and who care a lot about where their beef/pork/chicken is sourced from. I admire that, I am not going to shame anyone for caring about anything. My own opinions about killing animals aside, at the very least ethically sourcing meat is miles better than not caring at all. But I no longer believe that's something that's feasible to expect most people to do; in a weird way I think going vegetarian is easier for many people than figuring out where their burger at a restaurant came from. And where factory farming is involved, getting rid of meat allows us to engage directly with the costs of farming and eliminate one of the extra steps (cattle) that are layered on top of that process.

There was a post of the front-page of reddit a few days ago saying that most Americans are lied to about the fish they are buying in restaurants and supermarkets. I think it hilarious when people like me, urban dwellers, tell me to my face they only buy meat from some small butcher because they only trust him, or some variation of that story. Truth is, we have no idea where our food comes from, labels lie, and sellers have all the incentive to manipulate the truth.

"I think it hilarious when people like me, urban dwellers, tell me to my face they only buy meat from some small butcher because they only trust him, or some variation of that story."

I bought half a pig some time ago; I have a copy of his (probably 'her'?) earmark here next to me on my desk. I get an invitation each year to go watch it when it goes out to pasture for the first time that year. I can choose to have the half delivered to me as a carcass, for me to do my own butchering, or I can choose to have it processed (and I can choose to give away the parts I'm not going to eat, like the blood sausage and the processed head, tails and ears (for which I don't know the English word - it's a grayish slab, often eaten on rye bread here in North-Western Europe; that is, when it's eaten at all, I don't know anyone under the age of 50 who eats it).

Anyway, my point is - it's very much possible to know exactly where meat comes from with small farmers/butchers, even for urban dwellers, to the point that I looked the animal that I ate a part of last night in its eyes several times.

> for which I don't know the English word - it's a grayish slab, often eaten on rye bread here in North-Western Europe

In British English, that would be "Head Cheese" or "Brawn", or at least head cheese is likely to be a similar product, made from the animal's head, that's the only thing I can think of. I've never eaten it and it's regarded as kinda gross.

Now blood sausage, that can be tasty :)

Fromage de tête in French, if you can get over the idea of it, it's well worth trying it. When it's well made with good quality ethically sourced meat (we used to do the same and buy a pig with neighbours and then process it), it's super tasty.

Oh, TIL! In Latin America we call that "queso de puerco" (literally "pork cheese"). Americans call it "head cheese".

I've always avoided it because it didn't look like cheese, but like fatty ham.

Yes that's it, after some Googling it turns out that the word I had in mind is a regional word and the 'official' word is the literal translation into Dutch of 'head cheese'.

There is a simple solution to this: buy it local. It might solve all issues with the meat (how do they feed these animals, etc.) but you at least know where it comes from.

I know it's not possible for everyone, but there is currently a big surge in local farm shops. I'm lucky enough to have a farming cooperative in my town where i can order weekly food from local farms and shops. I eat mostly vegetarian, but it's nice to have an option for some decent meat once in a while.

Local does prevent harm to animals. Local also does not change the metrics on how resource-intensive the product is (lentils are so much more env friendly than meat it's not the same league).

> decent meat

In my world that does not exist. "Decent" is just the level of harm/destruction that you're willing to accept.

I don't know about the whole world.

But in the small town I grew up, the butcher would buy live animals and kill them in the backyard.

You could even come and watch and he would tell you where he bought it then go to the farmer and look at the animals.

I think that's why the commenter qualified with "urban dwellers". Modern urban life abstracts away a lot of the realities of our industries.

Some butchers definitely have better meat, you can taste the difference, and the colour/texture of the flesh is notably different.

Some are Mennonites and often you can even pick up the meat at their farm, if you are willing to make the drive.

It was the same meat.

> However, the majority of meat we eat today comes from factory farming, and the majority of the feed for those animals comes from... traditional crop farming.

This is incorrect. Cattle is fed primarily on grass. They are grain finished to increase weight at the end. A lot of that space is unusable as crop fields. Also a lot of animal feed is based off of plant byproduct, corn husk, wheat

"What most livestock in the world mostly don’t eat is grain fit for human consumption."

"What most livestock in the world mostly eat is grass and other forages and crop ‘wastes’ and by-products."

Additionaly:

> This study determines that 86% of livestock feed is not suitable for human consumption. If not consumed by livestock, crop residues and by-products could quickly become an environmental burden as the human population grows and consumes more and more processed food.

http://www.fao.org/ag/againfo/home/en/news_archive/2017_More...

There is a legitimate usage of livestock, they can graze in areas not suitable for crop production (especially sheep and goats). They can consume and digest plant matter that we cannot (which is the whole point of utilizing livestock in the first place).

I think in general (as an American) we eat too much meat. And the consumption needs to go down (and it's been staying flat which is saying something). But I think that livestock has a very useful purpose of converting non-crop farmable lands and plant based byproducts into useful food.

What the OP is talking about mostly is factory farming, where cows will likely not eat very much grass, and where animals will not be free to graze.

I think most people would agree that traditional livestock farming is a much better system, ethically and environmentally, but it would struggle to meet global demand.

> but it would struggle to meet global demand.

Probably correct. I guess meat consumption should go down.

However as someone who has worked on farms and even studied farming at least here in Norway there is plenty of room for increasing meat production from traditional farming, it just isn't economically viable in most cases.

I personally could agree to see meat prices rise 10 or 20% overnight if I knew the price difference would go to the farmers and especially if more of it went to the ones who use their resources reasonably.

> A lot of that space is unusable as crop fields.

It may be unusable as crop fields, but grazing it often prevents it from developing into a richer ecosystem that might be able to support a greater variety of wildlife and sink more carbon dioxide.

A rather extreme example of this somewhat famously happens down in Brazil, but there's also a not completely off-the-wall hypothesis that this phenomenon also at least partially explains the Little Ice Age. IIRC, the basic goes that the American peoples relied heavily on a version pasture-based livestock agriculture, which involved limiting the growth of forests in order to ensure plenty of grassland for large bison herds. The wave of plague that killed people off after European contact meant that the pasture land was no longer being maintained, and began to revert back to forest. This, in turn, sucked so much CO2 out of the atmosphere that it altered the world climate.

I would argue that you can't point to a single source like that in ecology.

Grasslands are the way they are due to draught as well. They have dry periods, and during these they catch on fire and the whole thing burns down.

> "A grassland can become either a desert or a forest if conditions like temperature, amount of rainfall, how often fires occur and how many herbivores live in these areas change. As more and more trees grow in a grassland, it is sometimes called a savanna."

https://askabiologist.asu.edu/explore/grassland#:~:text=Fore....

I have noted that the best way forward would be to create stricter eutrophication laws and tax artificial fertilizers produced from fossil fuels. This would feel very contradicting to vegetarians and vegans, but factory farming would be hit comparable much harder and it would directly address the environmental factors of factory farming without harming biodiversity.

A complicating factor in this discussion is that a large portion of the feed to cattle comes as a by-product from ethanol production in things like bio fuel. The process result in about 1/3 of the original crop becoming fuel, 1/3 becomes feed, and the rest is waste/water. With more and more focus on producing bio fuel, a natural result is the creation of more feed as a by-product.

>and the majority of the feed for those animals comes from... traditional crop farming.

I don't know how to find data but I thought that "grain-fed" cattle largely don't exist outside the USA (chicken/pork are different), so the only crop farmed is hay. And that may not impose as heavy costs as other crops?

Netherlands is the 2nd largest argricultural exporter [1], and has heavy factory animal farming that are all fed farmed crops. Very little grazing for meat animals.

[1] https://www.deheus.com/articles/news/the-netherlands-are-alm...

Interested in elaborating?

Factory farming is where the majority of our meat comes from, and I've seen no evidence that direct crop farming would result in more small animal lives lost than the meat industry in its current form. I also see little to no evidence that efforts to reform the meat industry are likely to succeed, the "ethical meat" movement is smaller than the vegetarian movement by most measures I can find, and far more susceptible to marketing lies (cage free eggs are not particularly much of an improvement over caged).

If you want to personally find a local butcher where you look your cow in its satisfied, well-lived eyes before it dies, and you want to argue with people about their ingredient supply chain every time you eat out or buy a frozen dinner or go to an office party, then fine, you do you. But I think it's somewhat naive to argue that's a model that can realistically work for most people. For the majority of consumers, vegetarianism would be both less expensive and less difficult.

And I just think it's strictly inaccurate to say that small animal deaths would increase if the meat industry in its current form went away. I don't see any evidence of that, not enough cattle/chicken/beef is raised on grass to make that a realistic claim.

I guess I should have been more clear.

I think the argument "all consumption of food kills animals, therefore no food is truly vegetarian/vegan, therefore there's no moral distinction between quote-unquote vegan food and factory-farmed meat" is a no-true-Scotsman fallacy.

In other words, I agree with you. :)

:) Apologies, I need to get better about not assuming intent on here.

It's definitely true that just switching over to plant-based foods and away from animal-based foods won't solve all the issues, it's also worth noting that a lot of cattle, at least in the US, are not raised on a foraging model, so most feed that cattle consume come from plants raised elsewhere, which are going to largely be those same cropping properties. And, further, the amount of feed to raise cattle mean that those cropping properties have to grow significantly more product than if they were producing for plant-based foods.

I do have a lot of respect for smaller cattle operations that run an ecologically sensitive operation, such that the land is used in a way that sustains itself and the cattle on it. It's just that, those are the exceptions, at least in countries like the US.

To add to that, even grass fed, free range animals are often fed more grain at the end of their lives so the grow quicker in the last couple months.

While not as efficient as if we'd eat that grain directly, it doesn't seem terribly inefficient, and it may reduce the number of individuals that need to be born & die. (Of course under a stark analysis of whether to have cattle at all, the conclusion could be different, so the question is what analysis you're using this info for). Anyway, if on top of that you subscribe to the hypothesis that grain is not good for human health, grain-finishing may do net good.

From what I understand grain used for animal feed is of a poorer quality and can't be used to make bread. And so it's essentially a waste product (usually because of rain just before a harvest).

I won't claim to be an expert, this information was given to me by an arable farmer friend of mine.

Meanwhile “More than half the U.S. grain and nearly 40 percent of world grain is being fed to livestock rather than being consumed directly by humans.”

Your anecdote makes it sound like animal feed is just a fixed waste cost of growing food for humans.

Correct but at the same time, the grain production wouldn’t be there if humans were the only market for grain and that grain being produced is not for human consumption. No one should think that people are going hungry because grain is being fed to livestock. Our food needs are met by agriculture.

I don't get the feel that you're having a go, no worries :)

I think there are two parts to this: we can't raise the animals that folks want to eat without _also_ growing plants to feed those animals, so from my perspective it seems that we can apply most or all points about the negatives of cropping to the cropping that is done to support animal agriculture. So if cropping is bad, it's still bad when we do it for the animals we intend to eat.

Secondly, and this is argument I don't make often because its _really_ not popular (but you seem like a great person so I'm happy to share!), I just don't think animals exist to provide or serve us. They are their own beings, and we are ours. Personally, I don't care if someone treats their animals like absolute royalty. If we kill them, or we forcibly impregnate them and remove their children so we can have their milk, it's wrong to me. But again, this is not an argument many people are swayed by, so I don't generally mention it.

  we can't raise the animals that folks want to eat without _also_ growing plants to feed those animals

But... we can raise food and dairy animals on a combination of natural range grazing and agricultural byproducts that otherwise need to be disposed of (e.g. cotton seeds, almond hulls, distillers' and brewers' spent grains, etc.)

Not unless worldwide (and particularly US) total meat and dairy consumption drops precipitously.

Right, but "Let's not eat any animals at all ever" is a different target than "Let's raise and kill animals in a way that's ecologically sustainable and humane". I'd argue that working towards #1 is actively working against #2.

The other factor that I don't quite get about think-of-the-animals vegans is this: What exactly do you think is going to happen to all those cows and chickens if the entire world becomes vegetarian? Are people going to keep them as pets? No -- they're simply not going to exist. Isn't it better to have free-range chicken and cattle, which have happy little animal lives, and then are quickly and painlessly killed, than to have (almost) no chicken and cattle at all?

Uhm ... I would personally say yes. First of all, the "painlessly killed" part is pretty wishful thinking/rationalization on your behalf. In many cases, the killing is not at all painful.

Of course the other part makes for a pretty good ethical debate. Is it better to live a miserable life and die and early and unnatural death than it is to never be born at all? There is no right answer, but I myself feel like I wouldn't wish that kind of life on ANY conscious being. Is that a life you would want to life?

Last, none of the think-of-the-animals vegans, as you so nicely put it, would kid themselves about what were to happen to the already existing farm animals, should be stop/greatly reduce our collective meat intake. They are already doomed. They were doomed the second they were given birth to, which brings us back to the original part. Most of us think-of-the-animals vegans would prefer if we could stop doing that going forward.

I'm sorry to shake up your picture of happy little animal-life living chicken and cattle, frolicking on a green meadow, until one day they drop dead and become happy little meals. That is among the most delusional view of modern farming I can think of. Don't buy into the pictures companies put on their products. And if you say "well but I buy my meat from my local butcher..." ok cool. Most people still don't, and won't, and that's the real issue.

> And if you say "well but I buy my meat from my local butcher..." ok cool. Most people still don't, and won't, and that's the real issue.

Right, but this goes back to my first paragraph. I would argue that most people do not have the moral effort to entirely give up meat voluntarily. There is some subset of people who are willing to make inconvenient life choices out of consideration of the lives of animals. You can convince these people to become vegans; or you can convince these people to only buy ecologically sound and minimum-suffering animal products. (For the sake of argument, let's call these "ethical" animal products, even though I know you may not agree with that label.) The more people you convince to become vegans, the fewer people are buying "ethical" animal products. The smaller the market for "ethical" animal products, the less incentive there is for people selling animal products to try to do so "ethically".

> Is that a life you would want to life?

Imagine a future where some hyper-intelligent alien species has taken over basically most habitable places in the galaxy, including the most habitable places on earth. We are unable to understand nearly any of these aliens' motivations or thought processes, much less their technology, and unable to offer them anything of value in terms of economic production: there is nothing we can do that they, or their machines, can't do better.

There are a few "reserves" for humans on earth where we're allowed to live "wild", but these are overcrowded and have no natural resources other than sunlight and (relatively poor) soil: all the minerals of value are extracted by the aliens.

But, there is one thing we can offer them: we ourselves are a delicacy, and some of the aliens at least are willing to pay a high price for the chance of consuming (whatever that means -- nobody's quite sure if it's eating or something else) a healthy 30-year-old human.

These aliens aren't ethical enough to let us spread throughout the galaxy on our own terms; but they are ethical enough not to do anything we haven't consented to.

So there's always an open offer, available between the ages of 12 and 18, to any human: to stay in one of the "human reserves", or enter the "cattle" program. If you're on the cattle program, you have freedom of movement through many places in the galaxy. Your health is taken care of, and there are lots of opportunities to socialize with other humans, to learn from them, to express art or music or whatever; but, the vast majority of you will, at the age of 30, be quickly killed and consumed by the aliens.

Particularly healthy men may be allowed to live longer for "captive breeding" programs (if they consent to do so); and many women will have the option to enter a "captive breeding" program as well, in which they bear children every two or three years until they're 40.

Children raised in the captive breeding program are also given the option, between 12 and 18, of going to the "human reserve" to live out their life there as well as they can.

So, here's the question: You're about to turn 18. Life in a human reserve is little better than stone age, since there are no natural resources upon which to build technology. Do you live out your 50 or 60 years (average life expectancy without advanced health care) in the freedom of a stone age society? Or do you travel the galaxy, having advanced technology and medical care, until you're 30?

Of course some people would chose to live in freedom; but I'm pretty sure there would be a pretty big uptake for being eaten.

I'm pretty sure cows, if they could be made to understand the proposition would be the same way. A handful would prefer to live in the wild, getting their own food, having no health care or shelter or protection from predators; but most would probably choose the life of free-range cattle, ending in death.

That was a wild ride.

> The more people you convince to become vegans, the fewer people are buying "ethical" animal products.

Ok, good. In my mind, it goes no killing > ethical killing > unethical killing. I would try to maximize the amount in the no killing camp. I think I know what you're getting at overall, but I feel like this is in very speculative territory. I doubt that more people going vegan actually increases the amount of unethical killing, but I have nothing to back that up. I don't think you have anything to back it up either, which is why I think this won't lead anywhere. You have a hypothesis, I have a different one. I can only say that from experience, most people "move up" in the camps I defined above. I know I had no trouble destroying a few cheeseburgers just a few years back. At some point I started reflecting, and figured well it's best to buy from a butcher. It took a few years until I was no longer able to rationalize that either. I know pretty much only eat meat if I'm at my grandma's :) That is just to show I'm not religiously vegan, and I'm not trying to make people feel bad for the choices and rationalizations they make.

Regarding your short story: I appreciate the amount of effort you stuck into it, but I'm afraid you lost me throughout. There is just too much presupposing going on, which makes it a little difficult to apply to our ethical dilemma. For one, it completely disregards that we grew these animals in such a way that they're for the most part not able any longer to survive in the wild. I want to believe that the meat you buy comes from cows that had a life equivalent of us having traveled the galaxy and have expressed art and music throughout. But to me this reads like you yourself want to believe that the animals that had to die for your dishes had lives so good that given the choice, they would do it all over again.

This is simply not the case for 90%+ of all meat that finds its way onto a plate. And I will go one step further and say that this short story has not convinced me that the other <10% would choose to.

> And I will go one step further and say that this short story has not convinced me that the other <10% would choose to.

Is this based on your own experience with pasture-raised farm animals, or reading in your own feelings into it?

My great aunt raised sheep for a while, and I spent a couple of summers as a farmhand. From what I can tell, those sheep lived reasonably happy sheep lives. Ewes had babies that grew up with them in the flock. They all hung out together in a big flock; they were rotated around a number of different fields on a regular basis, fed hay and other feed as supplements, given a shelter to stay and regular medical care. The rams were kept separate from the ewes most of the time so that births happened in a predictable fashion; but other than that, the sheep were given what sheep need.

Where I live now I'm a short drive from free-range cows and chickens too; the cows seem about as happy wandering round fields eating grass as the sheep did.

I've certainly seen depictions of factory farming that make me sick; I'd be happy to have those kinds of practices banned. But I don't see what my great aunt did as unethical at all: if anything, I think the lives of those sheep did have value, and the world was a better place because of their little sheepy lives than it would have been entirely without them.

My own view is that grazing animals (cows, sheep, goats) are an excellent thing to have when you have land where human-relevant nutrition won't grow. Those sheep wandering the Scottish (and Welsh, and Lake District) hillsides, eating some of the fairly few plants that will grow in that soil (and climate) is a fairly smart thing to do (given a high level of control, given the total reshaping of those landscapes caused by overgrazing in past).

Same thing with cows and goats in other parts of the world, where they (somehow) do OK munching on plants that grow where the stuff we'd eat will not (similar concerns about overgrazing, shit production and soil damage).

It's also true of small-scale poultry production, though my impression is that you need pretty high quality soil conditions and plants to grow chickens without supplementary food.

That's a far cry from anything we have now, and tends to imply a reduction in meat consumption on a level that I don't think many Americans (and perhaps quite a few Europeans) would currently endorse.

I don't think vegans are going to convince the rest of us to give up eating meat overnight. At most there would be a gradual shift to vegan ism over a period of years. If that happened you'd see a similar gradual drop in meat production to match falling demand.

You can "trivially" solve that by increasing the cost of the meat: if "non-humane" animal raising was forbidden, as a mental exercise, what would happen other than prices going up?

Before the expansion of animal farming (60-100 years ago), meat was usually Sunday-lunch material in most of the world.

I feel you. I stopped eating meat for 40 years for the same reason. But... they are on the same food chain we are, and they’d eat us in a heartbeat, right?

> I feel you. I stopped eating meat for 40 years for the same reason. But... they are on the same food chain we are, and they’d eat us in a heartbeat, right?

Herbivorous ruminants like cows would never eat you, and would generally never harm you unless provoked. Breeding intelligent lifeforms in a bespoke way to murder them for cash — whatever the reason or creature involved — is diabolically evil. If you do this for a living, you’re a merchant of death in my book.

I absolutely respect your choices and your opinion, but I don't understand them. Is the wolf diabolically evil? No cash involved of course. Is that the issue? What if I hunt the animal and kill it and then consume it, like the lion, the tiger, the hawk, and the dolphin? Is the hunter morally superior to the farmer who raises a steer, providing clean water, well grassed pasture, and then kills in a humane manner for personal consumption? Is that diabolically evil? What about the middle man who makes some cash bringing the meat product to someone else who can use it. Is that where the evilness enters the picture?

I am asking the fundamental question. I will agree completely that large scale food production has some real problems with animal treatment. I'm not defending or commenting on that. I'm just trying to understand the moral judgements associated with consuming another animal, as is done at just about all levels of the food chain in the natural world. Our digestive systems, our teeth, our nutritional requirements are all tuned to omnivorous consumption. Why is it wrong to exercise our natural nutritional choices, plant and animal, that have resulted from millions of years of evolution?

I'm not even 100% vegetarian myself but looking at how animals are treated repulses me, watch this video and tell me what you think about good and evil again (nsfw): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O15Owo7jGtU

--

I think you missed the entire point of the comment you're replying to. It specifically mentions breeding and slaughtering animals, this has nothing to do with wolves or hunters

> Is the wolf diabolically evil?

Do wolves have a sense of good and evil ?

Do wolves talk about the ethical and moral implications of breeding and slaughtering millions of animals every single day ?

> Our digestive systems, our teeth, our nutritional requirements are all tuned to omnivorous consumption. Why is it wrong to exercise our natural nutritional choices, plant and animal, that have resulted from millions of years of evolution?

A lot of people in the west eat meat two or three times a day, sometimes from multiple animals during the same meal, we didn't evolve to do that at all. We didn't evolve to sit all day in front of a computer, but here I am. We didn't evolve to use cars but we almost all do. Using evolution as an argument for anything usually is a very poor choice....

I personally have no issue with the idea of killing to eat, the problem is everything else in the process. We don't have to treat amimals like we do, we don't have to eat so much meat every single day

But killing is not humane if the individual does not want to die.

Humans give themselves incredible characteristics compared to other animals, it's like they are miles ahead of every animal when it comes to self awareness, emotion, rational thought, it's like evolution in their case made a giant leap and not an incremental step like it is for everyone.

Why are then humans comparing themselves to obligate carnivores like lions, tigers to justify their actions? Why are they looking at their natural bodies to justify the actions? How come when it comes to taking a life of another animal for sustenance, sustenance that can be achieved without the kill, they do not want to lift themselves up and draw a line between nature and themselves?

There are many things that come naturally yet we do not want to mimic that.

> Humans give themselves incredible characteristics compared to other animals, it's like they are miles ahead of every animal when it comes to self awareness, emotion, rational thought, it's like evolution in their case made a giant leap and not an incremental step like it is for everyone.

Didn't that leap in evolution come from being able to control our food supply to the point where we were able to consume energy at such an efficient rate that we evolved emotion, rational thought, society, etc?

It could be argued that now we've achieved that we should be looking at the next stage of evolution, which may be mulch made into fake meat loaded with salt and preservatives, or even growing laboratory meat; but surely the reason we're here and having this discussion at all is because of our domestication and consumption of animals. It seems a circular argument to say that's immoral.

Are we really evolved enough to move past that? We are certainly domesticating ourselves as every generation goes by, we see that from the massive decline in human-to-human violence over many millennia, and so a reduction in violence toward animals could also be seen in that evolutionary sense. I'm not convinced we're at a point where we're ready to 100% wean ourselves off animals for food. It certainly comes with its own set of problems.

> Is the wolf diabolically evil? ... What if I hunt the animal and kill it and then consume it, like the lion, the tiger, the hawk, and the dolphin?

As much as I respect the intelligence of those animals, what a remarkably low bar to measure ourselves against. May as well justify manslaughter and rape as while we're at it. Drawing a line that arbitrarily suits certain primal desires and justifying it by pointing at animals is how we move backward, not forward.

This is such a good point to make. Us humans should definitely strive to hold ourselves to a higher standard than that.

Also, it's a hell of a difference between the wolf, who has to kill in order to survive, and the man, who just has to choose something else to eat in the supermarket or restaurant. Justifying ones choice by comparing oneself to a wolf is incredibly flawed. No one here would bat an eye if, for whatever reason, people have to hunt and kill in order to sustain themselves, like some tribes probably still do. We wouldn't call them evil for it. What can be called evil on the other hand, is the systematic raising, torturing, and killing of billions of animals every year. Because it's needless. We could easily survive without it, but we choose not to, because bacon. I get it, it's delicious. But at some point it becomes very questionable, and I'm even setting aside the sustainability aspect.

Who is us on that regard? Who decides the standard?

Sorry, that is my personal expectation that I would hope the majority of the world would agree with, but I'm not trying to decide that standard for you. You do you.

It's cheesy, but the with great power comes great responsibility quote kind of holds up the way I see it. We pretty much dominate every other species, but we shouldn't pick and choose traits of other species in order to win arguments. We aren't wolves, we aren't dolphins. We have the capabilities to make the choice and don't kill and still survive. All it takes is changing ones habits a bit. We also have the capabilities to understand and decide that rape is wrong, and most people don't do it. Can you imagine what it would sound like if an accused rapist would point to dolphins as defense?

I'm not trying to set a standard for you. All I want to say is that pointing at other animals to justify our behavior is flawed and something we should be above as a species as a whole.

It's always very strange for me to hear this argument made. It seems you've elevated yourself above the other animals, and I gather, plants as well. Why do you believe that you are anything but another mammal, intricately woven into the biosphere and the food chain? Life eats life. This is the reality. You are an animal. You eat life. The plants that vegetarians and vegans are eating, also ate life. The microbes and fungus that fed the plants, also ate life. To pretend plants have no feelings, emotions, and capability to communicate intelligently (especially plants much much older than humans) is a common mistake, and one made out of lack of observation, and human hubris.

animals do not have a concept of good and evil so why would we apply it to them?

I think looking at how things in the animal kingdom work and using that as a justification for our actions is a very low bar. We have the cognitive and emotional ability to understand that things like murder/rape/etc. are wrong do we not? If you just take a small step from that and recognize the sentience of animals, it doesn't seem too unreasonable to afford them the same respect.

PS: I think the idea of good/evil is pretty reductionist to begin with, but I understand it's a common way of looking at things

They don't have words for it but if you've met shelter dogs or animals that have suffered abuse, they definitely understand the concept of evil. I have a rescue pig that I adore but he doesn't trust men because he lived a life of abuse. I can only assume that he sees men as evil, even if he can't make that statement. Some things are just natural. Humans seem to think we have a superior understanding of all things but some things are immutable truths and natural law. They don't require calculus to understand, just to describe.

Your example of evil just seems like the animals having a sense of danger to me. Animals usually instinctively will try to avoid danger. This doesn't require them to have a concept of evil.

What's your definition of evil? If an animal finds a specific set of traits to be characteristic of something that's dangerous and/or likely to inflict harm, is that not the definition of evil?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/evil

We wrote these things down so that we describe them to each other. The concepts already existed. We didn't invent evil, we defined it but it was already there. We've also used arguments like this to separate ourselves from what consider be lesser, to distance us from our actions. This is mental gymnastics though.

Whatever you have to do to feel ok about eating a chicken is fine but pretending we have some better sense of self than anything else feels like hubris. If our position in the world is truly better because we can articulate out feelings and we're smarter, why don't we eat dogs and mutes and the mentally handicapped?

good and evil is a moral concept. Unless you believe in moral realism (which you would have a hard time proving) then yes, we did invent evil. You could probably snag yourself a Nobel Prize if you could prove morality is objective and that animals have an awareness of it.

> why don't we eat dogs and mutes and the mentally handicapped?

This is exactly the kind of point you would have to bite the bullet on if you were to be logically consistent and made arguments for meat eating being ok because you believe animals are intellectually/morally inferior. If you believe a cow is ok to eat because they are not as smart then you would have to be ok (being logically consistent) with eating anything that is not as smart as you such as the mentally handicapped.

This comment is a fantastic example demonstrating why everyone hates vegans[1]. I'm all for everyone being more aware of where and how their food is made. If you come out of it choosing not to consume certain categories, that's fantastic. But the moment you start demonizing others for not making the same choices as you, you become an anti-social and dislikable person, and one that's not conducive to building a better society that moves forward positively. (This applies to politics and the woke movement too)

[1]: generalizing obviously

The dislikable and anti-social part is, in the end, just because they make feel the rest of us guilty. Very few people would say with a straight face "Yeah, I like that humans farm and kill animals so I can enjoy a juicier dish". All of us omnivores do that, but only few ones will face that reality happily. The rest of us will just blame the messenger.

>The dislikable and anti-social part is, in the end, just because they make feel the rest of us guilty.

Speak for yourself. When I hear vegans try to act like I'm a horrible person on par with people that murder humans like someone did elsewhere in this thread, I don't feel guilty. I simply thing its a ridiculous thing for them to say.

I'm going to leave it at that because unlike that person I don't feel the need to say inflammatory things to someone that has made different choices about what they want to eat.

I'm all for ensuring that animals are treated as well as possible and for regulating the industry to ensure that happens. When I hear about people doing abusive things to livestock I get as mad as any vegan. It should be severely punished.

I can also get behind the idea that we should eat less meat. Its healthier and I can easily see the point that eating a large amount of meat for every single meal like a lot of Americans do it needlessly gratuitous.

Some of my favorite meals are vegetarian meals, but I mean like chickpea or lentil curry and stuff like that. Fake/simulated/lab grown/artificial food is going to be a hard pass for me until it gets good enough to be indistinguishable from the real thing.

Actually, most people throughout human history have done just that. Being squeamish about seeing animals getting killed is a pretty modern development, at least outside nobility.

And even today, most people in the world likely still participate occasionally in the slaughter of animals, as this is still routine in all rural areas of the world, even in the US and Europe.

Yeah, I perfectly know. But at the same time we used to beat children (and in some places and some persons still do) to educate them and now this is not welcomed anymore. So, society changes, morality changes over time, things we didn't do, now we do. Things we didn't have the tech to do, now we do have and that can lead to further changes in our morality.

On the contrary, a lot of people are fine with it. That's why most people don't think about it much.

I don't have any real data to prove my point but I think that many people would not like to watch how a cow is killed and transformed into steak. But nobody has problem watching as someone picks apples from a tree, or how a press creates olive oil.

As long as it's not one of those halal killings, I don't see a problem. Bullet to the head, done. I've rotated spit roast as a child and didn't find it creepy.

This is not at all how it’s done. I encourage you to watch footage of how cows are killed in factory farms.

It often takes several attempts to kill the cow, even with a bullet to the head. Their throats are often slit while they are alive. There is pleeenty of footage of exactly this in Dominion. I suggest you watch it.

Well that sucks, not how we did it when I was a kid.

I'm a vegan and I try to be respectful to non-vegans and their choices but moral decisions implicitly contain moral judgements. If I think eating animals is wrong and you eat animals there is no way around me thinking that you are doing something wrong. I don't need to harangue you about it, which in any case is not at all effective as a method of persuasion, but usually I don't need to for people not to like it. I expect most of the anger towards vegans is because of that implicit (and to be fair in the case of some vegans explicit) moral judgement.

Opposition to an assertion--and make no mistake, it's purely an assertion--of moral superiority isn't anger. Reaction to haranguing born of that same assertion can be anger, but that's a different matter.

I think if the 'campaigning vegan' spent more time trying to espouse the virtues of reducing meat intake than the, frankly, bullying approach I often see, I suspect they'd have a larger impact on the issues they feel are important.

A statement like:

   "Have you thought of eating meat one day less per week?"

Followed by:

   "benefits the climate because..."

or:

    "Have you thought of buying your meat from <insert local farm with good animal welfare>"

followed by:

    "benefits the animal because..."

Is a lot more likely to have a positive impact over:

    "you're the same as a murderer"

Perhaps, just perhaps, the meatatarian would realise that the non-meaty food they have one day per week is pretty good, and worth expanding to more days. Even these small changes could have a positive impact on animal welfare and climate if enough of us did it.

People don't hate vegans. They hate preachy jerks. Hyper bacon eaters are just as annoying. Nobody wants to talk about your religion, no matter what it is.

serious question to consider it from the other side: if a/the holocaust was occurring in your country and people turned a blind eye to it, would you softly ask those propping it up to discontinue or would you be more empassioned about it? This is the view that some vegans have with respect to the current treatment of animals. Whether you choose to acknowledge it that way or not, I can completely understand why some people adopt "bullying" tactics, conciously or not, especially when some people palm them off as "hippies" or the like

Well... look up things like “cow eating chicken” or “deer eating bird” on YouTube. Not saying it’s common, but “never” is perhaps too strong a word. And of course I really meant it in a larger sense, not the direct ruminant/person relationship.

I've seen a cow eating the carcass of another cow before. Kind of fascinating and morbid at the same time.

Why morbid? Even cute and fluffy little critters like rabbits will happily go specifically after flowers with bugs in them if given the chance.

The circle of life is far more complicated than herbivores/carnivores and many animals will happily grab a meaty snack if opportunity arises.

Oh because it was in the middle of a drought, and it was pretty clear that the only reason that it was eating meat was due to a severe lacking of anything else to eat

Droughts are horrifying. Animals will simply do what they need to in order to stay alive.

The scary part is that droughts are getting more common.

Those are exceptions, should not change view based on that. No animal can harm humans like we do others.

There are animals that harm humans (and other animals) in much worse ways, most notably parasites.

This is such an untenable moral ground... The death we offer animals is orders of magnitude better than nature subjects them to, almost without exception.

If we could offer them a better life as well, as we once did, I would have 0 moral qualms about our meat eating.

I don't necessarily agree with the earlier poster but how we slaughter the animals isn't really the issue they have. If aliens came and promised to provide for you for your whole life but on your 30th birthday they would kill you painlessly would you take that deal? What gives us the right to impose that kind of deal on other living beings?

Cows are opportunistic omnivorous and will eat meat if its small enough to be swallowed whole. They don't have much of an instinct to hunt, they not have the teeth to cut large animals into parts, nor do they have the stomach acid or immune system to eat partially rotten meat. There is nothing however to stop them from eating small amount of fresh meat, such as the very young of other animals and insects.

Farmers raising livestock are diabolically evil merchants of death? I usually reserve that level of vitriol for the military industrial complex, global arms dealers, etc... not a family with some cows...

I've been feeling more conflicted about consuming meat lately, but it's blanket assertions like this that trigger my inner libertarian hard, and I come out swinging. There is considerable evidence suggesting meat consumption contributed significantly to our cerebral expansion (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/701477?mob...). Unlike most great apes today, whose diet is primarily plant based, we can thank the incredible nutrient density in meat and our incredible hunting and tool creating ability for prefrontal cortex development. Humans are alpha predators, more so than any other animal in the world. We were pack hunters, forging tools and strategies capable of taking down mammoths. Call it 'diabolicaly evil' if you want, but this is simply nature and survival. Eat solely plants without supplementation and you will become deficient in B12 and iron (amongst other things, contributing to early age mortality). I don't personally believe highly processed plant alternatives such as Beyond meat are a long term option if you're even vaguely interested in your own health. So call me evil, I see myself as a pragmatist, more in touch with nature than you are. I recognize the alpha predator in myself. I lift weights, consume lean, well sourced and organic meat. I've hunted and eaten what I've killed as my forebears. I'm resilient and healthy. If that makes me diabolical I'll take it.

Human evolution is poorly understood, and the assumption that any choice $X supposedly made by early humans led to our forefathers’ anamolously rapid brain development is flatly speculative.

> Unlike most great apes today, whose diet is primarily plant based, we can thank the incredible nutrient density in meat and our incredible hunting and tool creating ability for prefrontal cortex development.

Complete and utter speculation.

> We were pack hunters, forging tools and strategies capable of taking down mammoths. Call it 'diabolicaly evil' if you want, but this is simply nature and survival.

Subsistence hunting amongst early human tribes is not comparable to modern day factory farming in any conceivable way.

B12 doesn’t come from eating plants OR animals: it comes from bacteria, and ironically that bacteria is in such short supply on factory farms that the animals need to be injected with synthetic B12.

> I don't personally believe highly processed plant alternatives such as Beyond meat are a long term option if you're even vaguely interested in your own health.

I eat raw soybeans, legumes, grains, nuts and seeds. I’d recommend watching the documentary Forks Over Knives [1] if you care about your personal health, and the documentary Dominion [2], if you’d like to see what really happens on factory farms.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtnlwqEii2I

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko

Whether that specifically is speculation or not, it is a fact that we have adapted to live off of both meat and plants, and are some of the best known generalists (in terms of adaptation), among large land-dwelling animals. Other apes are much better at specific things that help them do what they do (specialists). We're just different, and we gradually became to be that way. There are specially adapted humans as well, less-speculatively as a result of rare rich protein sources like fish, milk. By extension, it's also probably inarguable that certain groups of people would have disappeared completely had it not been for the capability of them to adapt, bioculturally, to a changing world or simply changing circumstances. By saying their claim about meat and big brains is "Complete and utter speculation", you're at least implying that there's very little substance to the claim, and that you have a better explanation with more than a documentary to point to. But why is it that we're not competing with other apes at this moment? Why are we well-adapted to eat animals? Do you have a more substantial proposition?

Zero speculation regarding the diets of chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas (well studied and documented) [1].

[2] B12 sources up until it was possible to synthesize in the 60s were exclusively from animal products. Also, if you're even vaguely predisposed to anemia, you will likely struggle getting enough hema-available iron from plant sources without supplementation.

Glad you are able to live off of entirely soybeans, legumes, grains, nuts and seeds. For a lot of people, this isn't sustainable. Would love to see your bloods, discuss athletic performance and energy.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/diet-and-primate-....

[2] https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminB12-HealthProfessio....

Actually, there are top of the line athletes with a vegan diet. It's not very popular, but that is probably because being vegan is not popular. The B12 source argument has recently been solved as well. Most animals source their B12 from micro-organisms in the soil. If humans stop washing their food excessively, this would fix the B12 intake problem.

I am pretty certain GP was objecting to the meat-based diet being responsible for

> prefrontal cortex development

Raw soybeans are pretty toxic

I don't have a problem with eating meat.

I think hunting might be one of the most ethical ways consume meat.

I have a problem with factory farming because I feel like the amount of suffering involved is disproportionately high compared to other methods.

I also have a problem with the negative environmental externalities of big agriculture.

Alternatively it has been suggested that harnessing fire to cook our food was the breakthrough that allowed that cerebral expansion. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cooking-up-bigger...

Colon cancer risk is increased by 28% due to excessive consumption of red meat.

> Herbivorous ruminants like cows would never eat you

You can find YouTube videos of cows eating chickens.

Good point except we are the woke moral and intelligent beings?

That’s a pretty compelling argument of course.

The nature argument falls apart quicker because we're mainly talking about the massive animal breeding complex we have built where we force breed billions of animals specifically to kill them. If a cow could kill you (in self defense), they would, but most of these cows are never given the chance.

It's funny how the counter argument (even if friendly) will always be "But your solution is not perfect and also doesn't solve the issue completely".

It doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to be better.

>doesn't solve the issue completely

I don't see an issue with animal suffering but I do see an issue with greenhouse emissions. Greenhouse emissions are concrete and measurable.

It's not one step removed, it's 90 steps out of 100 removed, right? The important part here is the consumption of resources, 90% less land/water/energy also means 90% fewer animals that had to die for the product. (Also we could enforce more environmental protection measures while still being able to feed everyone.)

To raise cows, you need crop. So real burgers already include the suffering from cropping, even more so because you need a lot more crop per calorie of you have a cow between you and the plant.

Now I want to emphasis that guilt is not a good reason to start with beyond meat.

The desire to try to do a nice thing can be, but as a vegetarian, it's important that people are not pushed out of meat because of some negative emotion.

I'd rather have happy meat eaters than frutsrated veggies.

But give it a try, just for curiosity sake.

I like the taste of BM, but find them hard to digest.

Also remember it's still process food, and organic free range steak is likely healthier.

Definition of veganism:

"Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment"[1]

The key parts being "seeks to" and "as far as is possible and practicable". Veganism is not about being perfect (that's impossible), and although some might speak as if it is, they should not be taken seriously.

What we do know is that striving for a more vegan way of living is unequivocally less harmful for sentient beings and I and many others think that is a very noble endeavor.

1. https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/definition-veganism

> I find this interesting, in that cropping has plenty of violent against animals but one step removed.

This is true, the produce farmers kills pests insects and animals to produce crops at high volume.

The issue for me is scale. You need to feed the farm animals which leads to more soy and grain being produced which leads to more death.

I also can’t guarantee that the produce farmer or the farm owner is vegan which means I might be indirectly supporting animal agriculture multiple steps removed.

That way of thinking provides no viable solutions. I can at least control myself and know that I am taking steps to minimize harm.

Firstly, thank you for preserving some of the natural ecosystem on your farm. That is a tricky choice to make but from what I see driving about you are in a minority.

You take a drive from Melbourne to Sydney and you get to see the effect of livestock farming, it's been completely denuded of natural vegetation everywhere where it's flat enough to smash down.

The destruction is right there in front of your eyes. Knocking down scrub for cattle farming wipes out the natural environment, there are some species where it does good for them or kangaroos and birds that like open grasslands but for everything else it's really bad.

Drive from Melbourne to Adelaide you get the same thing.

Australia knocked down more open forest in the last four years than they did in the Amazon - 90% for beef farming.

You can grow crops on a much smaller area, without even mentioning organic crop growing where you don't use chemicals to wipe everything out.

I'm not sure it's fair to compare cropping and slaughterhouses.

Anyone looking at that (nsfw) video and telling me "but what about the insects/pests" have to be trolling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O15Owo7jGtU

Anything we do will have an impact on the rest of our eco system, even if we just ate wild berries you'd find someone complaining about the beetle you stepped on while walking in the woods. But putting everything in perspective I doubt cropping comes anywhere close to animal slaughtering in term of crime against nature.

I think anyone will agree that modern industrial agriculture comes with its own set of problems.

If animal and insect death from cropping is a big concern, then what does it mean to feed other animals many more crops, then kill them as well?

To those that don't want to become 100% vegetarians, even though we all know it's better for everyone including the animal that'slaughtered;

How about just using meat in small quantities, and for seasoning?

A little bit of beef/chicken goes a long way. Most Americans do not need more protein.

I have gotten by with a few pounds (less than 5 lbs) of meat a year.

If a cash strapped, loser, like myself can do it, anyone can.

I honestly believe that the best strategy to take at the moment is to teach people recepies for good and tasty vegetarian food.

I am not vegetarian but my absolutely favourite dish is Blueberry dumplings with sour cream.

I don't care if its vegetarian or not its simply good food.

Its much easier for people to make the 'ethical' choices when they are given good alternatives.

The whole thing with meat eaters are evil killers is counter productive signal virtue pandering to your own tribe.

Instead of picketing and protesting infront McD, create vegetarian cooking classes.

This is a good point about finding good recipes that use less animal products.

It seems like there's a lot of focus on replacing meat with something else pretending to be meat but I don't know that you're going to bring many people around that way. Vegetarian food needs to be good in it's own right, and it absolutely can be, but that generally means going beyond your grandma's copy of "Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook".

Really appreciate this perspective and the info. But I do think we shouldn't let perfection be the enemy of good here. Anything that moves the needle in the right direction should be encouraged.

> I admire vegetarians for their genuinely caring moral position

Actually vegetarians follow a diet along traditional lines (dairy okay, meat nay), they are not so much into moral positioning. Vegans are the ones making an ethical stance: "no animals harmed for me whenever I have the choice"

Hence vegans dont wear wool/silk/leather, dont go to zoos/animal races, and dont consume eggs/dairy.

As a vegetarian maybe I can provide some insight to my position.

The reason I consume dairy and eggs is because I think that fundamentally dairy and egg (honey too) production CAN be ethical, whereas I think intentionally killing an animal for food can never be ethical. I'm aware not everyone shares the same opinion - but for me, killing a conscious being for food is not something I want a part in, even if it had a great life before the slaughter.

However I should also note that I carefully select dairy and eggs I consume, only from organic, free range farms that I've researched. I choose the vegan option if I can't be sure of the provenance of the dairy/eggs. In practice I'm vegan most of the time and consume very little dairy/egg.

I do think I might become some form of vegan in the future though, once I've thought about it more.

However, there are a whole bunch of moral inconsistencies in my position. Per calorie, harvesting certain crops probably kills more conscious beings than certain types of fishing. And I'm not sure certain water creatures (bivalves?) even meet the threshold of consciousness, yet I nevertheless would refuse to eat them.

There are a lot of difficult moral issues at the edges that I think most people ignore. For me, the overall goal of my diet is to try and find a balance between providing me adequate nutrition for a healthy life while reducing overall negative moral and ecological impact to everything that isn't me.

Not to be condescending, but I practiced the exact same mental gymnastics for many years. I used the exact same reasoning ("can be ethical"). I also did select organic/etc eggs and dairy.

Buttt... This lead to people believe that I was okay with dairy/eggs, and when others picked for me I had a hard time rejecting.

And dairy and egg producing animals are hurt big time: children taken away, caged, slaughtered, selectively bread to have unnatural bodies (hen only lay ~12 eggs per year in nature vs. 300+ for domesticated variants). This is maybe worse than wild animals being killed.

After 12+ year vegetarian I went vegan 7+ years ago. I regret not doing so earlier.

What do you feel about keeping your own hens though?

I don't eat many eggs, but I find when I cut out dairy and eggs entirely, I do end up suffering some health problems.

If you have a few minutes, you should watch this. Backyard eggs are not ethical either.

https://youtu.be/7YFz99OT18k

TL:DR; 1) loss of nutrients and problems for the hen when they lay unnatural amount of eggs. 2) lot of issues to these hens such as loss of calcium, yolk and other items stuck inside and causing infection 3) killing these hens when they stop laying eggs (and therefore the implication that their life was only to serve you and treat them as a resource.)

That said, since there are so many vegans out there that don’t have any medical problems, do you think the health problems you face when not eating dairy and eggs are because you are not eating certain food groups? Perhaps a health exam will find out if you have some nutritional deficiencies?

>That said, since there are so many vegans out there that don’t have any medical problems...

Where is the data tracking the health of these 'so many vegans'? All of my lifelong vegan friends ran the gamut of health problems from Hashimoto's Disease and other thyroid-related issues, to severe obesity, seemingly from the highly processed food-like-products they ate. Most though were chronically under-weight, and had to take several supplements. Of course, I only know 8 vegans personally and well enough to comment on.

Canada just added an explicit recognition of grazing land into our carbon tax program for just this reason. Not only are pastures incredibly better for native plant/animal conservation (in North America) than crop fields but native grasslands are also incredible carbon sinks:

https://www.canadiancattlemen.ca/news/forage-program-aims-to...

Over the last couple of years my wife and I have been adopting what I jokingly refer to as a "local-etarian" diet. Essentially we've been paying attention more to how our food is sourced (trying to buy meat from folks like you!) rather than trying to cut out anything specific.

My take away from that experience specifically in the US is that if you want to be sustainable/humane/etc. the best effort to effectiveness ratio is probably just to be a vegetarian. Finding and vetting sources for meat in much of the US is not easy.

Most normal grocery stores simply don't stock anything resembling what you describe and even at our local Co-Op, the choices can be pretty inscrutable. Do I want the "We've ticked all the boxes to be labeled 'Organic'" or "We're Amish, so you should totally trust us" or the "We're too small to bother with fancy packaging or certifications"? It's hard to say, though generally we lean towards the last option.

It doesn't need to though.

https://www.soilassociation.org/take-action/organic-living/w...

You can grow crops without pesticides but you cannot have beef without killing cows.

You make an interesting point I have not considered before. I think it analogous to the argument that even electric cars have emissions, as almost all of them are charged on grids that are dirty. I personally think in both cases (vegetarians, electric car drivers), the first order benefit of not directly eating animals or burning gasoline exceeds the second order harms. Plus, one can pressure local utilities/politicians to clean up their electricity or only purchase from farms that do the least animal harm (though it's hard to entirely avoid).

Also not trying to have a go at you, thanks for the insightful comment.

Small cattle and typical burger meat are different. That said, do you think small cattle would scale replace factory style production? I doubt it.

Furthermore: Cows are not perfect machine and eat plants - you have to grow more plants for to make a meat burger than you have to make a pea protein burger. So if cropping is bad for animals, farming meat requires more of that too. You could argue your cows eat different, but what do most cows eat? For mass market, fake burgers are simply better for land use, water use, animal welfare, emissions, environment, and even health.