Re:How to Love Animals in a Human-Shaped World
by verall on Friday July 02, 2021 @12:36PM
(#27713735)
If people stop eating meat, who is paying for the well being of those billions of animals?
I'm not trying to be glib. If humans did not ever eat meat, we would not have ever domesticated cattle, but we did. So if everyone stops eating meat, what happens to all of cattle?
We can set them free, but we have bred out most of their ability to compete in nature on their own, we would be leaving most for death. Or we can continue to farm historically domesticated animals benevolently.
Re:How to Love Animals in a Human-Shaped World
by sweetheart on Friday July 02, 2021 @12:43PM
(#27713831)
You're totally right, we can't just set them all free, as it would ruin ecosystems. What we can do is taper our meat consumption down so the animals that are alive now will be killed and used, but we would stop adding new ones to the system.
That way we ween off of livestock, their suffering ends, and we avoid an ecological disaster. Farms will have top adapt, because we don't want all the folks in animal agriculture to be out of a job all of a sudden, so it'd take some time. But we can do it, for sure.
But asking those kinds of questions is really important, so thank you for posing it.
"Vegan and vegetarian diets are both very healthy ways of eating. They’ve been linked to multiple health benefits and a lower risk of excess weight, heart disease, and even some types of cancer."
Which was an interesting choice for you, I think. Also there are some seriously misleading facts in the article:
B12 doesn't from from meat, and meat only has B12 today because animals are supplemented with it.
DHA comes from algae, so again, the animals you eat have it as a result of having eaten plants.
Creatine, carnosine, and taurine are considered nonessential, in the very article.
And with regard to iron: "However, iron deficiency is easy to avoid on a well-planned vegan diet", according to the article.
But this is kind of irrelevant, because even if these things _were_ hard to get for vegans and supplements were needed, it still makes veganism a moral imperative, because the small price to pay of taking a pill to save billions of sentient animals every year is a no brainer.