Gae Bolga Wrote:Do you eat your Macbook?Why would it make any difference whether it's food, medicine, or electronical products. It's a product America produces, which many Americans can't afford to buy, so it's sold to rich people elsewhere in the world. The same is true for food in Ethiopia. And it's not immoral to buy food from there, for the same reason it's not immoral to buy computers from America.
Gae Bolga Wrote:Conventional methods are low labor high cap investment, but that isn't a good fit for economically depressed areas anywhere.And don't you think that raising chickens may be a slightly better idea than raising cows in the developed world? Or, even better, grasshoppers? Grasshoppers almost certainly don't feel pain, so there are no welfare concerns. And raising grasshoppers for food is even more efficient than growing demanding plants such as tomato and lettuce for food.
Anyway, done a little reasearch, and it still seems to me that it's true that most of the grain that can be consumed by humans is given to animals. Estimates vary, but if we take the estimate that 85% of grains worldwide is given to animals, and that 80% of that grain isn't edible by humans (and those appear to be the mean estimates), that means that ((100-80)/100*85)/((100-85)+(100-80)/100*85)=53% of human-edible grain is given to the farmed animals today.
Gae Bolga Wrote:I'm not overly concerned about the pain fish feel.I don't think that's the right analogy here. For all we know, fish probably don't feel pain. C-type neurofibres are necessary for pain in humans (people with congenital insensitivity to pain have very little of them them), and they are absent or nearly absent in fish. And if they do feel pain, they don't feel it the way we do, so what works for reducing pain in humans and animals related to us may be counter-productive in fish.
Gae Bolga Wrote:As Grandin put it, while there are cruel people who shouldn't be in this sort of industry, most people want to do it the right way and know the right way when they see it.Well, yes, most of the people here who have chickens and pigs don't slaughter them themselves, they pay for somebody else to slaughter them when they don't see it. That's, if you ask me, insane.