The Argument That Farming Doesn't Hurt Animals..."It doesn't hurt animals," is another argument that I hear commonly for why it is okay to eat meat products. I think this one is very similar to the "animals are made to be eaten," and "if we all stopped eating animals, what would we do with the surplus?" First of all, we have all been deceived about how farm animals are treated. "Old MacDonald had a farm. E-I-E-I-E-I-O."
Unfortunately, that's just not the way it is. Click here to learn about factory farms, which is the flat-out truth about how our meat is made. No watering-down of the facts, just the truth. This goes not only for the slaughtering of animals for meat, but also for the over-milking of cows and the over-laying of hens and other mother animals.
My concern with factory farming is not some sob story about fluffy animals having to live uncomfortably, or as my brother teases, "being talked to impolitely." Rather, it's a concern about another being being tortured to death so that we can eat happily. It's just not right. It's not that I simply care about hurt animals. I think everyone in the world would care if they knew what was actually happening.
Now, that animals are made to be eaten is an interesting one. Realistically, in the chain of life, almost everything is eaten by some larger and stronger animal. That is how our planet has survived. But, I think we can all agree that we've gone far beyond the days of humans realistically being part of that food chain.
As for a surplus of those animals hanging around, my guess is that the process of humans quitting eating animals would take some time and therefore the supply would simply be scaled back until it became "normal" again. I'd rather make the move to start eating less meat as a society and then deal with downsizing on our supply of cows, a supply that is overstocked at the moment. Let's help our hurt animals now.
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Yes, humans can be hunted by lions, tigers, sharks, and other large carnivores, but it only happens when we put ourselves in their environment, which happens very infrequently. We could choose to stop eating the animals below us on the chain, and the chain would be fine. Cows, chickens, pigs, and other animals would just be hunted by their natural predators.
