But… I haz both.
Most food animals would go extinct if humans stopped raising them for food. A number of food plants too.
A “food animal” … Most of the animal breeds slaughtered for meat were basically genetically modified through selective breeding by humans to be more profitable.
Fast and unhealthy growth of muscle mass, additional rips, laying eggs much more often, etc.
These modification come with a great price the animals have to pay in pain. Most of them can’t live without human help anymore. We made them this way and we are responsible. To keep them in an endless cycle of suffering after we created them like this is probably the pinnacle of cruelness. And all of that just because they have a voice we do not understand or recognise.
Why would that be an issue? Those animals only live lives of suffering and the environment would benefit greatly if we stopped breeding them.
Domesticated species are selectively bred by humans to enhance characteristics we find desirable. Many of these characteristic would be weeded out by natural selection within one generation. Cultivated banana trees, for example, cannot reproduce; and Dairy cows can die if not milked regularly.
That’s a big part of what makes them “domesticated”.
Man, here’s the thing. I can’t digest fermenting ogliosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides and polyols.
So no beans, mushrooms, onions garlic wheat rye or barley, apples, apricots, most berries, etc etc etc.
I also lead a “fairly” active lifestyle against my own wishes. So where does my protein come from? Meat. Chicken, eggs, and hard tofu.
If I cut meat from my diet, I’m eating three meals a day of hard tofu. What even is the point of life, then?
I’ve been vegetarian for around 3 years after I discovered how badly we treat animals, and also by connecting meat and animals in my mind… Realising that the same pets that I adore are the steaks that I ate. But still, I went vegetarian because I could. I could manage to find time in my life to change my diet and to make sure I had no deficiency in nutrients… So don’t be too hard on yourself mate, your situation is totally understandable! Actually I strongly disagree with people saying that anyone could become vegetarian if they wanted to, it takes a lot of thought, trial and error, time and obviously a lack of allergies… Saying that, anyone can fight for animal rights in their own way, being vegetarian is only one of the many tools we have…
I’m grateful that you say that (not OP). So many vegetarians/vegans are convinced anyone who isn’t vegan hates animals, or is at least “worse” than them on some magical scale they came up with.
I fought for my state’s free range chicken law, but I wouldn’t fight for bans of consuming chicken or eggs. I would love a law that banned chick-killing (the practice of immediately killing all newborn chickens of the “wrong gender” when reselling chickens to farms or growing egg breeds). I’m sure they’d find a way around that. Despite that, I’ll still eat chicken.
I resent that. I eat more than 3 species of animals.
Chicken, Beef, Pork, Fish/Seafood… What am I missing from my diet? Reptile?
Lamb, my dude.
Get some lamb shanks braised with rosemary, mint, and onions.
Come to think of it, is lamb a popular meat in the US? Here in Aus, its about on par with pork in popularity, after beef, then chicken.
Kangaroo is available in supermarkets, but its only about 5% as popular as beef.
Damn I forgot about lamb, goat, and their cloven hoofed friends like deer
Lamb is readily available in the US, but we (excluding farmers and active hunters) tend to eat it selectively like duck or veal as a delicacy or a meal for a special occasion. Normal everyday people don’t eat lamb, veal, or duck when cheaper chicken, beef, fish, etc is available. Americans have an aversion to eating cute animals.
Really? They have almost every hallmark of a bad-tasting meat. Highly muscular, non-herbivorous diet, etc.
I mean, I’d still try it.
I’ve eaten bear. It’s gamey as hell. Tried it multiple times and prepared multiple ways. The cooking methods that make it the most palatable are the ones that take forever like slow roasting and smoking. It’s a very tough meat so it takes a lot of tenderizing methods. Large predator meat is typically not great eating.
Before everyone jumps on me for being a hunter, I am a native Ojibwe. I don’t want to dox myself by revealing much more than that.
"You ever plow a field? To plant the quinoa or sorghum or whatever the hell it is you eat. You kill everything on the ground and under it.
You kill every snake, every frog, every mouse, mole, vole, worm, quail… you kill them all.
So, I guess the only real question is: how cute does an animal have to be before you care if it dies to feed you?”
-John Dutton
Cows and chickens gotta eat too, and that food is coming from fields as well.
By reducing meat consumption also way less critters will end up dying.
Are you from a farm town?
A supermajority of animal feed comes from the waste product of crops we that were being grown anyway, or grass from a fallow field that needs to be harvested anyway (not enough the latter due to logistics, but my local farms all do). That whole “8 to 1” calorie to cow thing leaves out the part that it’s 8 calories of landfill material to make 1 calorie of beef. Nobody has an “animal only” corn field. And nobody is using harsh animal-killing chemicals on the fallow fields.
And cows are still being fed things whether you eat them or not. We need their manure and it’s overall better for the environment than synthetic fertilizer. Without some form of fertilizer, we need much more farmland, which means more animals killed per calorie. All compared to 700,000 calories in a cow.
Unfortunately, nobody has ever demonstrated in a defensible manner that a horticulture-only scenario would be anywhere near as efficient on animal lives as what we have now. It’s one thing to cut animal intake 10%, entirely another to try to rebuild our farming industry without animals.
A supermajority of animal feed comes from the waste product of crops we that were being grown anyway
According to the Alberta Cattle Feeders Association, 80% of the feed is composed of corn. According to the USDA itself half the corn grown in the US was used for animal feed, and 78% of the world’s soy production is made for animal feed.
Is the waste product of corn and soy included in these numbers?
