(October 4, 2018 at 1:20 pm)Aegon Wrote: I guess we can go in circles all day talking about how our actions and diet impact animals of varying intelligence. . It's hard to feed people without damaging it, I suppose. But 39 million cows, 115 million pigs, and 9 billion chickens die every year for US meat consumption. General factory farming practices, in addition to the level of sentience and feeling these animals enjoy, dwarfs my concerns about those ground animals. Especially considering there is a big difference, mentally, between eating vegetables or grain where animals might've been killed in the process VS actually eating meat from the animal itself.
I also recall reading somewhere that grass-fed cattle in the Amazonian region is the number one cause of deforestation.
Oh, no doubt. As I said, I'm vegetarian, and have been for well over half of my life.
Industrial cattle are disgusting for very many reasons-- the overuse of hormones and antibiotics, refeeding of dead cattle (not sure if they do this any more), and the truly abysmal and abusive conditions in which the animals live. Not only that, they're fed grain, so they have all those other problems I mentioned with deaths of ground animals, pesticides and so on.
