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.
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.