I'm not sure there is a moral question with regards to the animals.
If we stop breeding pigs and cows we won't have the huge amount we do now. The pigs and cows don't care if their species go extinct.
Letting them go into the wild would be cruel since they aren't prepared to exist out there, but letting them die in the wild vs die in a factory farm isn't much worse of a fate.
In reality, we should stop breeding them, send existing aninals to sanctuarys (which we should fund) and be done with it. Within 20 years, all of the existing farm animals will die out from natural causes.
The real moral question is: how do we support the farmers?
We should ensure that they get their wages replaced and get assistance in moving to a less cruel industry than animal farming. There are already groups that help with this, but they'd need funds to scale their work.
Saying pigs and cows don't care if they go extinct is a bit of a weird stance. Sure nonextant cows don't care about not existing, but neither do dead cows care about being killed, so it's a bit of a weird criterium.
Do current cows care about being alive? I'd say yes, but then never being born or being killed should seem about equally bad from their perspective. If anything not existing is worse.
I think their point is that a species cannot suffer, only individuals can. Under that consideration, it seems downright hilarious to keep individuals perpetually suffering just to keep a species that didn't occur naturally anyway alive.
The whole topic becomes a straight farce once we realize that our "conservation" of these species costs us thousands of other, far more ecologically useful species. Like in the rainforest, for example, where we grow feed for cows, and pasture cows.
> In reality, we should stop breeding them, send existing aninals to sanctuarys (which we should fund) and be done with it. Within 20 years, all of the existing farm animals will die out from natural causes.
I’ve never heard (or thought of) this proposal before.
It makes sense from a harm-minimizing perspective, but in practice, even as a vegetarian who thinks the world would be better off if people didn’t eat meat, I’d be okay with the current crop of animals being eaten as the end to factory farming.
If we stop breeding pigs and cows we won't have the huge amount we do now. The pigs and cows don't care if their species go extinct.
Letting them go into the wild would be cruel since they aren't prepared to exist out there, but letting them die in the wild vs die in a factory farm isn't much worse of a fate.
In reality, we should stop breeding them, send existing aninals to sanctuarys (which we should fund) and be done with it. Within 20 years, all of the existing farm animals will die out from natural causes.
The real moral question is: how do we support the farmers?
We should ensure that they get their wages replaced and get assistance in moving to a less cruel industry than animal farming. There are already groups that help with this, but they'd need funds to scale their work.