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The necessary technologies
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this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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The morality of raising animals to slaughter them in their prime for meat seems bankrupt at best and repugnant to me personally. An animal that has lived it's life, produced products for us naturally, and has done so humanely I see no problems with whatsoever. If a bird wants to use the hair I cut off my head for their nest, I wouldn't consider them morally wrong for using what I produce to benefit themselves.
Animals who get too old and are past their prime will stop producing and are near their natural death. They've lived their lives, hopefully in humane conditions, but are on the way out. Using them for meat at this point, to me, feels like giving them one final purpose rather than just allowing them to become fertilizer.
I get that doesn't sound morally pure and it probably isn't, but I would rather old animals be turned into food than allow humans to go hungry out of pretentious moral aspirations. If we can afford to be moral we should be but if we can't, we can't. I won't lose sleep knowing a family gets to eat because we didn't allow that animal to either away naturally.
As far as replacements go, that's genuinely fantastic. I hope we scale that up and don't let meat farmers lobby to destroy it. Like I said if we can replace products to the degree we don't suffer by insisting on morality, we should. Full stop.
I think we have fundamentally different outlooks on animal agriculture. It seems like your position is based on the idea that animals used for milk and eggs are treated well, live long natural lives and are killed at the end of their lives when they would have died naturally.
Animals used for milk and egg production live a small percentage of their potential lifespan. The effects on dairy cows of repeatedly being impregnated, giving birth, producing enormous quantities of milk, and going through the cycle again takes a harsh toll on their bodies. It's normal for a dairy cow to only endure 4 or 5 cycles of this before they literally cannot physically continue, at which point they're no longer profitable and are sold for slaughter. Similarly for egg-laying hens, the stress and mineral demand of ovulating multiple times a day means that they rarely live past two years. For the males of these breeds, it's even worse. Male chickens of the egg-laying breeds are mostly useless to the industry, so they are killed immediately after hatching, usually by way of an industrial macerator or gas chamber. Male calves might live to 8 months to be slaughtered for veal, but if there's no market for veal they are frequently killed immediately after birth.
Modern egg laying chickens and dairy cows are man-made breeds far removed from their natural wild counterparts. Hens trace their lineage to red jungle fowls, who naturally ovulate at a similar rate to humans, about once a month. Selective breeding has increased this amount to once a day, sometimes even more. The extreme pressure on their reproductive system frequently causes health issues like egg yolk peritonitis, cloacal prolapse, and osteoporosis. Similarly with modern dairy cows, bovine mastitis, udder sores and infections are common due to our selective breeding to maximize milk yields. Even otherwise healthy animals face grueling lives because they're part of a species that was engineered for one purpose: profit.
Modern animal agriculture is overwhelmingly inhumane, which is why livestock animals are almost always excluded from animal abuse legislation. Ignoring the above points about how they've been selectively bred and are worked to exhaustion, investigations into egg and dairy farms have found absolutely shocking treatment. If you have the stomach for it, they're worth watching to understand the scope of animal abuse that is commonplace in our society.