Ethically raised animals

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Ethically raised animals

Postby DanielLC on 2014-05-29T04:00:00

I am not against eating animals. I am against how they tend to be raised. I think that's the common view here. My parents buy meat from a place where they apparently let people tour, which seems to make it pretty unlikely that they're raising the animals badly.

I don't really know enough about this to judge it well on my own. Do you guys think eating that kind of meat would be safe? Why or why not?
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Re: Ethically raised animals

Postby peterhurford on 2014-05-30T15:14:00

There's a similar Good Guy family farm near my house that I would definitely consider eating meat from. Sometimes I tell people that to appear less dogmatic and make my point more clear (against factory farming, not meat eating), but other times I worry that it comes across as hypocritical / inconsistent to deviate from not eating meat.

I'm also worried about perpetuating a wider "humane myth" that if these family farms are good, then we can just solve the problem with "Animal Welfare Approved" stickers.

Lastly, there's also a more deontological part of me that thinks any subjugation of nonhuman animals for food is unnecessary and therefore wrong, but I don't know how justified that intuition is.
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Re: Ethically raised animals

Postby Hedonic Treader on 2014-07-31T17:17:00

DanielLC wrote:I am not against eating animals.

Me neither. Technically, I'm not even against eating humans. The point is that the production causes suffering. if vegetarian alternatives are in demand, the market gets an incentive to improve the supply of vegetarian alternatives. Assuming that it is possible to create much better and much cheaper food without causing suffering brains as a byproduct, selecting for those alternatives will hopefully fund the R&D to get to those better products, via market incentives.

Do you guys think eating that kind of meat would be safe? Why or why not?

I think the methods of slaughter and transport should be factored in also. Transparency is good, in principle. But if it is more costly to produce meat this way, then it will never be a mass market.

The ideal should be to find a path to make painless food production so good and cheap that it becomes a mass market standard.
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