If you have so much as tried to grow a garden, much less farm at scale, you have a lot less sympathy for animals and their destructiveness. When you have racoons coming along at night knocking down your corn for the sheer hell of it, and not even eating it, or porcupines doing the same thing, or crows plucking out the stocks just as soon as they poke out of the ground, or deer mowing flat anything that isn't encased in an eight foot high fence, they lose their cute and cuddly charismatic aspects, and you start to view them like a horde of locusts, stealing the bread from your table, and prosecuting them with extreme prejudice becomes very, very attractive.
It's almost as if you've built your garden right in the middle of their habitat.
But seriously, I come from a family of farmers, and I know that the things that farmers do to animals is way worse than anything you've described here.
There’s really no amount of nice treatment that makes taking a calf away from its mother alright. I’m not aware of any ways to produce dairy without systematic animal abuse.
I found a method that leaves them together for 3 months. That's an improvement at least.
(Of course that means that the calf will take most -but not all- of the milk during that time. But then it is stated that the cost for the vet goes down a lot in exchange.)
Another option I found is to give several calves to one cow for 6 months, which has advantages and disadvantages compared to the first way. (Longer time with milk and natural suckling behaviour but calves without their mother and the smaller ones might get less milk.)
edit: Here is a list with places in Germany that do that:
By not taking the calves away from their mothers? That's how we did it for centuries, we only started taking calves away from their mothers when artificial milk replacements made it more profitable to do so.
Not nearly as many, of course, and the same products are eaten by meat eaters as well, and most plants are grown for animal feeding, but yes, it's impossible to live a regular human life and not indirectly hurt animals, humans or the environment. You can try to minimize it, though.
>We should care about unnecessary suffering because we can.
"We should because we can"? There are many things that we "can" do that we better not do. There's no automatic logical deduction from "we can" to "so we should".
Avoiding unnecessary suffering is sometimes used as the basis for whole ethics systems. It's inherently good and doesn't need to be deduced from anything.
But we have been eating meat for millennia, naturally, before we ever concerned ourselves about reading/writing and math, so there's that.
>If ducks stopped raping other ducks, they'd go extinct too. Not really sure if that's an argument in favor of human rapists, though.
That would have mattered only if the same conditions applied (e.g. extinction threat otherwise), which they don't. So it's looks more like a way to force the argument against eating meat based on a strong association with something obviously negative ("think of the children" style argument).
> That would have mattered only if the same conditions applied (e.g. extinction threat otherwise)
Exactly the point I'm making. Humans don't face extinction if we stop eating animal products, so comparing us to lions is not a valid argument for why we should eat meat.
Eating animals (some of which can`t reproduce naturaly anymore) raised in CAFOS, fed unnatural foods and pumped with hormones and antibiotics is all but natural evolutionary behavior and hurts both animals and humans.
>Whether something is “natural” has no bearing on its goodness.
Well, goodness also is not a logical argument. Good according to what, some arbitrary morals? Other people find it perfectly good to eat burgers.
>And certainly plenty of the behaviors that cause human suffering are 100% natural.
Only in the contrived sense, that we are part of nature as a species.
But we have long made the distinction that our more advanced developments concerning invention, historical developments, innovation, etc, are part of "civilization", and it's the behaviors that we already had before we developed those that are our "natural" part.
And we did ate meat before we had writing, and mobile phones.
>This is a fine conclusion that just doesn’t happen to follow from anything else you said.
Isn't not meant to be a logical deduction from something said earlier, it's meant to be about prioritization.
Rape, murder, and infanticide are all natural human behaviors by this definition, and they’ve become less common as we’ve become more divorced from nature. Also natural: having about half of your children die what are now preventable deaths. Life in nature is complete shit.
And I was assuming here a basically utilitarian definition of the good, because of your concern with suffering. Of course it’s debatable.
