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It's just loss.
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Nearly 8,000,000,000 humans require a lot of food. And it’s better that we eat livestock then depleting the local wildlife for nourishment. That’s a whole point of farming.
It’s still baffles me that anyone, especially in the last 10 or 15 years, suddenly thinks that this is a barbaric practice that must immediately end, despite the fact that this is the way it’s been for tens of thousands of years.
Because a bunch of pretentious, condescending jerks with some sort of food fanaticism should be able to bully everyone into their way of thinking.
So, I do get where you are coming from - but there are some things to consider. Firstly: while domestication and animal husbandry are pretty old, factory farming and such is very recent and has given everything a pretty new touch. While I think it's still valid to bring up as an argument, "X has existed as a pillar of our life for thousands of years" is usually not a great argument in and of itself, the same could easily be used to argue for slavery and a lot of other fucked up shit in history.
Besides that, there is sustainability. Yes grass-fed cattle can actually be sustainable, and allow for utilising land that is otherwise not usable to produce food. Also there is plant matter and "waste" from farming and food production more broadly, that can be utilised in feeding livestock sustainably, which would otherwise be composted anyway (and in some cases, gets pre-composted pretty well by said animals). So, yes, there are ways to produce meat and other animal-derived products sustainably ... but that is usually a bit of a cop-out, trying to divert attention from how the vast, vast majority of meat production is not sustainable in mostly water and CO2 numbers.
Personally speaking, I am also not vegan and not an animal rights activist - but claiming it is simply a continuation does miss some aspects.
The only people who believe that animals cannot be raised as livestock in a sustainable fashion are the closed minded food, fanatics known as vegans.
It can be done, but not with your limited imagination and viewpoint on the world.
The problem is that people like you don’t want a solution. You want to be able to simultaneously claim victimhood while also lecturing and condescending to the entire world. Veganism is nothing more than an addiction to the sense of superiority over others.
If you actually cared about greenhouse gases, or animal cruelty, you’d be willing to explore other options. But vegans are extremists. It’s their way or no way.
I (and most people), on the other hand, care about greenhouse, gases, and animal, cruelty, and all of the other downsides to factory farming, but I’m not so stupid, I don’t have a big chunk of my brain, scooped out by religious fanaticism, so I can actually see alternatives.
Factory farming has never been done sustainably. Give an example if you disagree. Or are you one of those homesteader guys who thinks he can raise two cows and four sheep on an acre alongside your field of corn and miniature orchard?