So, for those of you who have been living under a rock, most of the birds and mammals we eat today, like cows, chickens, pigs, turkeys, and so on, are raised in factories, in small cages or otherwise very tight to each other, and never see the grass. To prevent aggressive behavior under such conditions, they are painfully mutilated. That is, they usually aren't given expensive anesthetics. So, there is no way we can make their lives worse by not giving money to factory farms. Also, since grass doesn't grow in factories, they have to feed them with something else, which is usually grains and soy, which starving children could also eat. Of course, farmers are able to pay more for grains and soy than starving children are able to pay. So, the factory farms don't make food, they destroy it. In fact, factory farms are where most of the grain and soy goes today. Since that's not their natural food, they require a lot of water to digest them and therefore they produce a lot of, well, waste, which usually stays unregulated. They also produce quite a lot of methane, which is a very damaging green-house gas. The nutritional value of meat has also changed drastically. Meat used to be the main source of omega-3, which grazing animals get from grass. But now, even though we eat more meat than ever before, almost nobody has enough omega-3 in their blood. In case you didn't know, lack of omega-3 causes, among other things, heart-disease. Also, meat of grain-fed cows is more rich in cholesterol and saturated fat, which are the main cause of heart-disease. Similarly goes for the famous Vitamin B12. It's produced, mainly, by the bacteria in the stomach of the ruminants. Well, for animals to stay healthy on factory farms, they are preventively given antibiotics, which, you've guessed it, kill, among other things, those bacteria. So, again, even though we eat more meat than ever before, there is a pandemic of the vitamin B12 deficiency. It causes anaemia and neurological problems, including dementia. But the scariest thing is what follows, according to the scientific consensus. See, preventive use of antibiotics, as is done on most of the factory farms, leads to the antibiotic resistance. And said factory farms consume way more antibiotics than humans do. So, is that what you want? A world where surgeries are virtually impossible? A world where young people die of illnesses which would be perfectly curable only if factory farms didn't exist? Because that's what we could expect in a few decades, mainly because of the factory farms.
I am not just making stuff up. Here are a few sources:
http://www.cowspiracy.com/facts (more like a blog-post, but linking to a bunch of studies)
http://www.collective-evolution.com/2014/03/21/10-alarming-facts-about-factory-farms-that-will-break-your-heart/ (again, linking to a bunch of studies)
http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr/2000/000802.htmhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12442909http://who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/antibiotic-resistance/en/So, who is to be blamed for factory farming, which could, as you can see, be the biggest crime in history? I think that we should blame, more than anyone else, non-vegetarians for buying meat from factory farms and therefore supporting it. I don't think that them eating meat is so much of a problem, I think that the problem is that they are willfully ignorant of where the meat in the super-markets and grocery-stores, where they buy it, comes from. Animal agriculture would become better if its customers were rational, and they aren't. Congratulations, the exceptions! Don't say that animals are not sapient and therefore don't know what's happening to them, so that it doesn't matter. The question is not whether they can reason or think, but whether they can suffer. Also, the Moravec's paradox, when applied to the computers inside most of the animals, their brains, implies that the power of the animal's brain has more to do with how deft an animal is than with what it can think about. And, contrary to popular belief, it's a scientific consensus that all the birds and mammals, and many other animals, are conscious.
http://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdfDon't say that the sacred texts support factory farming, they don't. The situation today is completely different than it was when they were written. Some sacred texts say that eating meat is permitted for the same reason some sacred texts say that having slaves is permitted.
Don't say that eating meat is somehow necessary for human beings to be healthy. There are hundreds of millions of vegetarians worldwide. In fact, mortality rate among vegetarians appears to be even lower when compared to non-vegetarians.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19562864Besides, how do you imagine that the first humans, before the tools were invented, hunted? They could eat insects, but that's something completely different from what most of us do today.
Don't say that factory farming is necessary to eat meat. There is a lot of land suitable only for grazing. We don't have to feed the animals food we could otherwise eat.
I've been on a few other forums with this topic and I don't want to engage in identical or nearly-identical discussions. That's why I made a very long post.
BTW, FE-ers, I'd encourage you to see this:
https://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/index.php?topic=67051.0