I have to admit there is something amiss with the way we treat livestock. I am, I think, at least open to changing my mind. I do wonder though, if humans didn't eat them, would there be any cows at all?
I think there would be some. Dairy and preservation herds, but they aren't wild. They could probably survive in an area without too much competition.
I think we should at a minimum give livestock lives outside of a stockyard. There should be grass under their feet and sky over their head.
They were here before we started eating them, so of course their prolonged existence depends on having an ecosystem to thrive in. Most factory farming doesn't take up the amount of land available on earth. There is plenty of room for cows to thrive alongside civilized humans. They are just as much a part of Earth's ecology as the butterflies and the birds and the bees and the beavers and vultures and snakes. We take them for granted.
I try to see some way that humans have benefitted from the current system of meat production.
At the very least, there is a chance that harvesting meat saved us from a path of trail and error in terms of global factory plant farming. I mean, we could have possibly wrecked the world in a way that was more destructive than animal production.
I don't know enough to say one way or the other.
Factory farming of animals is quite destructive ecologically so I hope we can deploy ecologically-friendly and ethical farming of plants in a reasonable timeframe. We should aim to restore nature to its own order instead of intervening at every level. We prey on each other more than anything. We should be preying on our oppressors.
