The thing is, people don't really care about animals. Especially not the kind, calm and docile ones.
A holocaust is happening currently, 60 billion most docile and mostly female cows and fowls are eliminated every year. No one gives a damn.
Heck, even I don't. I drink my milk and eat my chicken. I consider those things mine and don't care if the milk is a product of forced selection that created a monster of a species, or that chicken is a flesh of an innocent animal.
I do not even care about what it does to the environment.
I'm voting with my money to have this practice continue.
The whole system is built for meat and milk to work. Yeah, it's some wierd suboptimal local minimum but that's what it is. I live in a meat culture and don't care if I can survive eating only plants.
Man is not killing earth, man is killing man and there will be casualties along the way, but earth will continue without man. Species go extinct all the time, and homo sapiens shall join the list in turn.
I straight up started to taste grass when drinking milk. Then later I realized how bland meat is. I can cook much more flavor and texture into a plant based meal than ever achievable with traditional animal products. Low sodium,cholesterol free, etc etc.
Iirc beef tasted similarly “grassy”. Essentially my tastebuds changed. Food suddenly had different tastes than I remembered. Could be age changing my taste buds, could be focusing my diet on healthier choices changed my tastebuds, etc.
Its common for people who closely monitor their salt intake to be unable to eat many packaged food items - as they suddenly taste all the added salt.
> I can cook much more flavor and texture into a plant based meal than ever achievable with traditional animal products.
That's a bit of a strange way to put the comparison, as non-vegan meals can include all of those plant based options (just with meat in addition to them). And whether you like meat flavour and texture or not, there is a lot of unique variety in meat flavour and texture that's distinct from what's in plant-based options.
People care enough to pay extra for cage-free chicken eggs at the supermarket. My local Safeway has about as many cage-free offerings as not. So people do care, and enough that catering to it is profitable. The question is whether they care enough to pay enough extra to significantly affect treatment of animals.
And who knows what the limit is as we grow wealthy enough to willingly pay extra to salve our souls. With enough wealth and wokeness, could we someday provide our livestock with an actually good, and perhaps even idyllic life ... before we kill and eat them?
Because of how confusing all those labels are, here in Seattle some grocery stores display a cheatsheet explaining the difference between them and even some info about the certifications.
But you and I do pay extra even for that small improvement, to buy eggs with a little less self imposed shame. We'd probably pay a bit more for a bit more improvement. It'll never be as cheap to raise animals without cruelty. But we could become wealthy and horrified enough to be willing to pay the difference.
>could we someday provide our livestock with an actually good, and perhaps even idyllic life ... before we kill and eat them?
I would say yes. It's certainly not a new concept, if unfamiliar with Judiasm, part of the Jewish dietary laws knows as Kashrut (where the term kosher is derived) address this.
I have an old book somewhere that said the dairy cow is the most efficient way to convert the grass on a rocky hillside into human-usable protein.
Meat is rather inefficient. Temple Grandin is an autistic woman who designed more humane slaughterhouse systems. A quote in the HBO movie about her sticks with me: "Nature is cruel, but we don't have to be."
Switzerland/France. I've seen farmers take their mobile milk-carts up mountains to milk them in-situ. Not sure whether they do the same thing with calves or not though.
So called "Mutterkuh-Haltung", where the calves are kept with the mother, is increasingly popular. This occasionally causes problems, as hiking paths often intersect grazing ranges, and cows will defend their calves aggressively from perceived threats.
" The thing is, people don't really care about animals. Especially not the kind, calm and docile ones."
That's the beauty of our modern society. Most of us never see the dirty stuff that's going on. We only get a very sterilized image of the world. Just go into a chicken or pig farm and see how horrific the conditions really are. But we get protected from having to see this and get our meat with nice clean pictures on it.
Some years ago I saw a video some journalists that got in a "surgical" airstrike. Same thing. We only see clean images from above but their footage showed had terrible such a strike is. Cut off limbs everywhere, people screaming, badly burned children. This took my excitement for modern weaponry down a lot.
We are now as cruel or probably more cruel than people in that past. We just don't have to see it anymore because only a few people will do the dirty work.
I do have an addition to offer to your first sentence. The thing is, people don't care about almost anything that affects others (or even themselves). Most people act or react based on their habits and what's convenient for them. If most people were rational, then things would be a lot better for humans and non-humans.
Since you yourself referred to it as "a holocaust", and seem to know more, you could still make changes, however small they may seem to anyone else (or even to you).
Jeez. You do know that Israel had it's 70th birthday only a couple of days ago and you sit here and, basically, relativize the Holocaust. Please don't do that. Thanks.
> I did not call the non-human animal holocaust as The Holocaust (committed by the nazis).
Maybe this is because (at least in Germany and France) any kind of Holocaust comparison is widely deemed offensive. It may be seen as OK in the US sphere, but not in Europe. We actually have a word for this in German ("Holocaustrelativierung"), and organizations like PETA which routinely use Holocaust comparisons when talking about e.g. chick sexing, regularly get flamed for it.
The AfD are far more frightening a right-wing group, and have far more power, than e.g. UKIP in Britain. I believe that because Germans refuse to see the Holocaust as anything other than a singular event they are now at risk of repeating it all over again. Their inability to relativise it (if that can be taken to mean to put it in a historical continuum in which other events of comparable atrocity are committed) means it's snugly in the past. I think this leads to a false sense of security.
Cows and other animals involving factory farming are the least endangered species on the planet. There is literally zero effort to eliminate cows from the gene pool, except by activists who want to see these animals fend hilariously ineffectively for themselves in the wild. Their predators and their reliance on humans would ensure the genocide you speak of would actually happen.
The parent post wasn't claiming extinction or genocide in their post, they were using Holocaust in the sense of a continuous, horrific mass slaughter.
Most animal rights activists I know know that cattle mostly exist due to animal agriculture. They would rather the cows not exist at all then to suffer corralled, forcefully bred, fed and slaughtered in a short brutal life. The human diet does not require animal protein to live.
A holocaust is happening currently, 60 billion most docile and mostly female cows and fowls are eliminated every year. No one gives a damn.
Heck, even I don't. I drink my milk and eat my chicken. I consider those things mine and don't care if the milk is a product of forced selection that created a monster of a species, or that chicken is a flesh of an innocent animal.
I do not even care about what it does to the environment.
I'm voting with my money to have this practice continue.
The whole system is built for meat and milk to work. Yeah, it's some wierd suboptimal local minimum but that's what it is. I live in a meat culture and don't care if I can survive eating only plants.