Right, but "Let's not eat any animals at all ever" is a different target than "Let's raise and kill animals in a way that's ecologically sustainable and humane". I'd argue that working towards #1 is actively working against #2.

The other factor that I don't quite get about think-of-the-animals vegans is this: What exactly do you think is going to happen to all those cows and chickens if the entire world becomes vegetarian? Are people going to keep them as pets? No -- they're simply not going to exist. Isn't it better to have free-range chicken and cattle, which have happy little animal lives, and then are quickly and painlessly killed, than to have (almost) no chicken and cattle at all?

Uhm ... I would personally say yes. First of all, the "painlessly killed" part is pretty wishful thinking/rationalization on your behalf. In many cases, the killing is not at all painful.

Of course the other part makes for a pretty good ethical debate. Is it better to live a miserable life and die and early and unnatural death than it is to never be born at all? There is no right answer, but I myself feel like I wouldn't wish that kind of life on ANY conscious being. Is that a life you would want to life?

Last, none of the think-of-the-animals vegans, as you so nicely put it, would kid themselves about what were to happen to the already existing farm animals, should be stop/greatly reduce our collective meat intake. They are already doomed. They were doomed the second they were given birth to, which brings us back to the original part. Most of us think-of-the-animals vegans would prefer if we could stop doing that going forward.

I'm sorry to shake up your picture of happy little animal-life living chicken and cattle, frolicking on a green meadow, until one day they drop dead and become happy little meals. That is among the most delusional view of modern farming I can think of. Don't buy into the pictures companies put on their products. And if you say "well but I buy my meat from my local butcher..." ok cool. Most people still don't, and won't, and that's the real issue.

> And if you say "well but I buy my meat from my local butcher..." ok cool. Most people still don't, and won't, and that's the real issue.

Right, but this goes back to my first paragraph. I would argue that most people do not have the moral effort to entirely give up meat voluntarily. There is some subset of people who are willing to make inconvenient life choices out of consideration of the lives of animals. You can convince these people to become vegans; or you can convince these people to only buy ecologically sound and minimum-suffering animal products. (For the sake of argument, let's call these "ethical" animal products, even though I know you may not agree with that label.) The more people you convince to become vegans, the fewer people are buying "ethical" animal products. The smaller the market for "ethical" animal products, the less incentive there is for people selling animal products to try to do so "ethically".

> Is that a life you would want to life?

Imagine a future where some hyper-intelligent alien species has taken over basically most habitable places in the galaxy, including the most habitable places on earth. We are unable to understand nearly any of these aliens' motivations or thought processes, much less their technology, and unable to offer them anything of value in terms of economic production: there is nothing we can do that they, or their machines, can't do better.

There are a few "reserves" for humans on earth where we're allowed to live "wild", but these are overcrowded and have no natural resources other than sunlight and (relatively poor) soil: all the minerals of value are extracted by the aliens.

But, there is one thing we can offer them: we ourselves are a delicacy, and some of the aliens at least are willing to pay a high price for the chance of consuming (whatever that means -- nobody's quite sure if it's eating or something else) a healthy 30-year-old human.

These aliens aren't ethical enough to let us spread throughout the galaxy on our own terms; but they are ethical enough not to do anything we haven't consented to.

So there's always an open offer, available between the ages of 12 and 18, to any human: to stay in one of the "human reserves", or enter the "cattle" program. If you're on the cattle program, you have freedom of movement through many places in the galaxy. Your health is taken care of, and there are lots of opportunities to socialize with other humans, to learn from them, to express art or music or whatever; but, the vast majority of you will, at the age of 30, be quickly killed and consumed by the aliens.

Particularly healthy men may be allowed to live longer for "captive breeding" programs (if they consent to do so); and many women will have the option to enter a "captive breeding" program as well, in which they bear children every two or three years until they're 40.

Children raised in the captive breeding program are also given the option, between 12 and 18, of going to the "human reserve" to live out their life there as well as they can.

So, here's the question: You're about to turn 18. Life in a human reserve is little better than stone age, since there are no natural resources upon which to build technology. Do you live out your 50 or 60 years (average life expectancy without advanced health care) in the freedom of a stone age society? Or do you travel the galaxy, having advanced technology and medical care, until you're 30?

Of course some people would chose to live in freedom; but I'm pretty sure there would be a pretty big uptake for being eaten.

I'm pretty sure cows, if they could be made to understand the proposition would be the same way. A handful would prefer to live in the wild, getting their own food, having no health care or shelter or protection from predators; but most would probably choose the life of free-range cattle, ending in death.

That was a wild ride.

> The more people you convince to become vegans, the fewer people are buying "ethical" animal products.

Ok, good. In my mind, it goes no killing > ethical killing > unethical killing. I would try to maximize the amount in the no killing camp. I think I know what you're getting at overall, but I feel like this is in very speculative territory. I doubt that more people going vegan actually increases the amount of unethical killing, but I have nothing to back that up. I don't think you have anything to back it up either, which is why I think this won't lead anywhere. You have a hypothesis, I have a different one. I can only say that from experience, most people "move up" in the camps I defined above. I know I had no trouble destroying a few cheeseburgers just a few years back. At some point I started reflecting, and figured well it's best to buy from a butcher. It took a few years until I was no longer able to rationalize that either. I know pretty much only eat meat if I'm at my grandma's :) That is just to show I'm not religiously vegan, and I'm not trying to make people feel bad for the choices and rationalizations they make.

Regarding your short story: I appreciate the amount of effort you stuck into it, but I'm afraid you lost me throughout. There is just too much presupposing going on, which makes it a little difficult to apply to our ethical dilemma. For one, it completely disregards that we grew these animals in such a way that they're for the most part not able any longer to survive in the wild. I want to believe that the meat you buy comes from cows that had a life equivalent of us having traveled the galaxy and have expressed art and music throughout. But to me this reads like you yourself want to believe that the animals that had to die for your dishes had lives so good that given the choice, they would do it all over again.

This is simply not the case for 90%+ of all meat that finds its way onto a plate. And I will go one step further and say that this short story has not convinced me that the other <10% would choose to.

> And I will go one step further and say that this short story has not convinced me that the other <10% would choose to.

Is this based on your own experience with pasture-raised farm animals, or reading in your own feelings into it?

My great aunt raised sheep for a while, and I spent a couple of summers as a farmhand. From what I can tell, those sheep lived reasonably happy sheep lives. Ewes had babies that grew up with them in the flock. They all hung out together in a big flock; they were rotated around a number of different fields on a regular basis, fed hay and other feed as supplements, given a shelter to stay and regular medical care. The rams were kept separate from the ewes most of the time so that births happened in a predictable fashion; but other than that, the sheep were given what sheep need.

Where I live now I'm a short drive from free-range cows and chickens too; the cows seem about as happy wandering round fields eating grass as the sheep did.

I've certainly seen depictions of factory farming that make me sick; I'd be happy to have those kinds of practices banned. But I don't see what my great aunt did as unethical at all: if anything, I think the lives of those sheep did have value, and the world was a better place because of their little sheepy lives than it would have been entirely without them.

My own view is that grazing animals (cows, sheep, goats) are an excellent thing to have when you have land where human-relevant nutrition won't grow. Those sheep wandering the Scottish (and Welsh, and Lake District) hillsides, eating some of the fairly few plants that will grow in that soil (and climate) is a fairly smart thing to do (given a high level of control, given the total reshaping of those landscapes caused by overgrazing in past).

Same thing with cows and goats in other parts of the world, where they (somehow) do OK munching on plants that grow where the stuff we'd eat will not (similar concerns about overgrazing, shit production and soil damage).

It's also true of small-scale poultry production, though my impression is that you need pretty high quality soil conditions and plants to grow chickens without supplementary food.

That's a far cry from anything we have now, and tends to imply a reduction in meat consumption on a level that I don't think many Americans (and perhaps quite a few Europeans) would currently endorse.

I don't think vegans are going to convince the rest of us to give up eating meat overnight. At most there would be a gradual shift to vegan ism over a period of years. If that happened you'd see a similar gradual drop in meat production to match falling demand.

You can "trivially" solve that by increasing the cost of the meat: if "non-humane" animal raising was forbidden, as a mental exercise, what would happen other than prices going up?

Before the expansion of animal farming (60-100 years ago), meat was usually Sunday-lunch material in most of the world.