The ethics if factory farming

[bennyboy]

In the former, there's a net loss in the quality of the species. In the latter, there's a net gain-- the suffering of the individuals is compensated by the advantage to the survival of the species overall.

As our livestock operations -are- their environment (and more broadly an earth dominated in many ways by our species is the overall environment for -all- forms of life), anything that makes the population more amenable to food production and domesticity - is an "improvement" in that species (if we simply insist upon using such terms).

The caveat is that we were talking about coyotes 'n' sich, and animals living natural lives. If you want to define humans as animals and say that living in factories is therefore part of natural life, okay. But I don't think it's a good definition.

Being "strong", "fast, or "intelligent" confers no advantage. Therefore, predation by wolves or cougars could not be said to improve their "quality". Their suffering, in the livestock model,confers survival advantages - and those advantages seem to be overwhelming, for example, there are no Aurochs left.

Domesticated cattle outplayed them in the game of life. As dogs outplayed wolves, and cats outplayed....well...other stronger, faster cats.
(it helps to remember that we are just as much an agent of natural selection as any other predator, and possibly much more so, as we are also capable of vastly altering the environment in which -all- must play the game)

Yes, this is kind of the point. We've created species that probably are no longer even viable. But to say their continued existence is a special reward for their selective interaction with hungry humans is pretty unreasonable. Existing for no other purpose than guaranteed confinement, separation from mates and offspring, and death with not even a slight statistical chance of successfully escaping, is hardly a plus-- even if there are many millions of the species in existence.

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Also, we all live "naturally". The idea that something is artificial (especially regarding biology) is not that it is "not natural"- though admittedly we use the word this way constantly, but that it is "artifice" - made by humans. The distinction is in whether or not human beings made it, not whether or not it is fundamentally or intrinsically "not-natural". It's subtle, but important. It's also a distinction which serves to highlight our own opinions of ourselves more than anything objectively present, or some sort of attribute divorced from those opinions, in the world around us. If there was a word for things that wolves made, then it would be conceptually similar to the word artificial, and wolves could be said to be engaging in "wolficial" selection - as opposed to the "natural selection" that would occur in their absence (or in the absence of their efforts).

I think this is a distraction. It doesn't really matter what semantic lines we draw-- the fact is that for wild animals, their behavior matters. They can engage with their environment meaningfully-- attempting to fight, or to flee, or to mate. You can say that bovines are "evolving" to match the "human environment," but while there is some chance involved (meatier bulls being chosen as sires, for example), there's really no chance for the animal to interact meaningfully with its environment.

This ability to interact with the environment is found on any list of the defining features of life-- therefore if anything is robbed of this ability, it cannot really be said to be living a life. Zombie cows are bad, and creating zombie cows on purpose is pretty evil (and I define evil as anything which corrupts a living organism to the point that it cannot be said to be meaningfully alive).