On a more serious note, why do ethical vegan proponents feel it is better for an animal to never live at all? To be devoid of purpose due to lack of existence?
> why do ethical vegan proponents feel it is better for an animal to never live at all?
The same reason that I feel it'd have been better for someone who abused and murdered their child to have never had any children.
Bringing something into this world does not permit us to treat it however we want. We all know that, some people just think it for some reasons doesn't apply to chickens, cows, pigs, etc.
Backyard chickens is another thing, and anyone who wants fresh eggs should go that route. The same applies to chickens raised for meat.
To know that you aren’t supporting such violence, it’s easy: just don’t eat animal products.
As you mention, the problem is scale, but then everyone doesn't have to live in a city. Different solutions for different situations and all that.
Even if you treat an animal like royalty for years and decide one day to kill it for food or clothing or whatever, you are still doing something wrong. Our treatment of anything does not grant us the privilege to end its life.
We feel this way about dogs and cats, and other humans, but never pigs or cows or sheep or goats or fish, etc. And there is no reasonable explanation for why, other than speciesism.
If just chickens and cows ceased to exist, I don't think the world would suffer too much. Goose and ducks would fill the role chickens have in aerating the soil.
> To be devoid of purpose due to lack of existence?
Plenty of people and creatures commit suicide when life is too much to bear. Sometimes depriving oneself of life can be a blessing. If I was hooked up to a machine that just drained me of blood, milk, or something else and I was force fed, I'd probably kill myself if able. Why do we not afford a creature the same pity?
And again, I say this as someone who eats meat.
I mean... if you want eggs on an industrial scale, yes, obviously you do. Chickens live 5-10 years; laying hens are typically killed at about a year in.
If you get all your eggs from your pet backyard chickens, that's one thing, but most people don't.
Are you seriously suggesting torturing and slaughtering animals is a better alternative to a world where that doesn't happen and that might have less chickens?
1. Let die naturally of old age 2. Slaughter after a productive life 3. Slaughter mid life because disease 4. Slaughter mid life because money (e.g., price of feed) 5. Slaughter/cull young for sexing 6. Use fertilized eggs 7. Prevent fertilization, use unfertilized 8. Eliminate laying of eggs
Prevention of life is death in the limit.
In all cases, yours and the above, I find the argument less than compelling because life isn’t something that exists prior to birth; you’re not denying a soul from physical form because you happen to farm fewer chickens.
Arguing that the absence of life is the same as death is really just a clever way of justifying selfish ideals.
Yes, it’s better not to live at all if the alternative is to be tortured for your whole life
Instead we should focus on quality of life and how humane the death is.
If you disagree and equate owning a chicken to owning a human, then I have no reasoning which will satisfy you or your hypothetical.
Our entire western society is built upon humans being special and having dominion, over both plants _and_ animals.
2. Farming chickens and enslaving people is not even remotely on the same level.
You would be very surprised how quickly animals can adapt to a new environment. There are plenty of examples of domesticated animals being released into the wild and doing just fine.
Yes, dogs, horses, and others can in certain instances.
Chickens would become food for other animals in days, at most. It's hard enough to keep that from happening when they're kept, let alone in the wild.
Cows are like giant, extremely stupid deer, so I doubt we'd tolerate them in the wild anywhere even slightly near civilization, putting aside their ability to survive on their own (which I also doubt—first bad Winter would take care of them, I reckon).
I've raised turkeys, chickens, cows, and horses. The turkeys and chickens people eat are not the same as wild turkeys, they would not survive without humans.
1 - how they do it -- male chicks are often just thrown alive in to grinders
2 - the debeaking of chickens
If this was happening to humans there'd be outrage, but because it happens to animals most people don't care.
Life should have a shot at consciousness. It's your privilege to be able to decide that you would have preferred not to have been born. Other lifeforms may come to an opposing belief, and they deserve that chance.
Most likely a chicken doesn't have complex enough thought to reach that, but that means it also doesn't worry about the day of slaughter, it just enjoys life, assuming it has a good range.
We’re getting into “every sperm is sacred” territory here.
Have you seen what goes into industrial egg operations? How on Earth could you not call it exploitative or bad?
White Leghorns, New Hampshire Reds, and Barred Plymouth Rocks (the common egg-laying chickens in industrial farms) are not exactly existential.
Farming grasshoppers and maggots is at one end of the spectrum, with Orcas at Sea World on the other end.
Egg farming is somewhere in between.
There are, incidentally, non-animal-welfare-related reasons that this stuff is interesting. In particular, there's the potential to considerably reduce the CO2 cost of producing egg whites this way, and the product could reasonably be expected to be safer.
It seems like you don’t know much about the poultry industry in general. Your statement is like saying — to use an analogy — that human women give birth to human children as a fact of life, and that it’s ok to force them to give birth consecutively for decades without a break. Left to themselves, chickens would probably lay about 25 eggs in a whole year. In the industry, they’re forced to lay more than 300 eggs a year. There is simply no way that this is not constant physical abuse (even if you ignore battery cages, starvation, light exposure, etc.).