To produce at scale, other animals will essentially have to be seen as solely a means. Factory farming is the inevitable outcome of mass meat consumption. There is not much way around that. Any system like that - rooted in the idea of minimizing other animals’ value as individuals - will consistently produce exceptionally cruel outcomes.
To go a bit into the why factory farming is the inevitable outcome.
Let’s look at just cattle for the moment. Many often trumpet grass-fed production, but in practice just doesn’t scale. For instance, the US would require a 75% reduction in beef consumption just for it to have enough grassland for it. That’s while increasing method emissions and also creating high deforestation pressure if we came anywhere close to that. Not to mention the legal and logistical headaches involved in getting all that land
We model a nationwide transition [in the US] from grain- to grass-finishing systems using demographics of present-day beef cattle. In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates
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If beef consumption is not reduced and is instead satisfied by greater imports of grass-fed beef, a switch to purely grass-fed systems would likely result in higher environmental costs, including higher overall methane emissions. Thus, only reductions in beef consumption can guarantee reductions in the environmental impact of US food systems.
Taken together, an exclusively grass-fed beef cattle herd would raise the United States’ total methane emissions by approximately 8%.