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I'm interested to understand your perspective better- are you saying that the idea smaller less industrialized farms are less harmful to animal welfare than industrial ones, is a myth?
If so, I'd like to better understand why. I have an eating disorder and am not in a position to go vegan from a health standpoint, but I'd hoped that as I'm able (financially, and with respect to my eating issues) I'd be able to reduce my animal product intake and purchase my animal products from sources that treat animals better like smaller local farms, either shopping at a local butcher or farmers market.
Obviously I can still reduce my animal product intake as I'm able, but are you of the perspective that smaller, less industrialized farms are just as damaging to animal welfare? Or are you saying all farms these days, even small ones, are industrialized in the ways that negatively affect animal welfare?
If so, I'd love to hear about why, and if you know any sources I could take a look at I'd really appreciate it. That had been my plan in the future and if my plans might not yield what I was hoping for, I may need to re-evaluate what I can do, and what goals I might want to find ways to work towards.
Thanks for your time, hope you have a good one :)
One big issue is that the term "free range" is essentially meaningless as defined by the USDA, and often gives consumers the false sense that products marked as "free range" come from animals who had a higher standard of living than non-free range, therefore making their farming more ethical. In reality, this is basically never true.
To qualify as "free range" an animal needs to have "continuous access to the outdoors for 50% of its life". Sounds good on paper, but "outdoors" isn't rigorously defined in this standard. This means that situations that no reasonable person would call "continuous access to the outdoors" still count. For example, you could cram 1000 chickens into a small barn to the point where they barely have space to move, but as long as there's a hole in one wall that opens into a tiny one-foot-by-one-foot pen with no roof, it still counts. If that teeny tiny "outdoor" space can fit at least 1 chicken, then congratulations, all 1000 are now "free range". As long as you cater to some very specific loopholes, you can get away with factory farming while still having the legal right to claim on your packaging that your animals were treated humanely.
Terms like "organic" and "pasture raised" are similarly deceptive to the point of being meaningless, and so it's basically impossible to know what conditions your food was subjected to during it's life based on the packaging alone. Of course you can always try to do your own research about individual companies (or if you're lucky enough to have access, individual farms), but there are lots of laws on the books protecting them from having to disclose specific details to anyone but the USDA, so good luck getting any meaningful information. There have even been cases of farm workers and journalists being prosecuted for things like sharing pictures of farm conditions or publishing personal accounts of how livestock were treated on private farms. Fortunately the "ag gag" laws that allow these whistleblowers to be prosecuted are rarer than they used to be, but there are still a handful of states that have them (if you tried to guess which ones, you'd probably get most of them right).
In reality, the only way to know if an animal was raised to your own standards of ethics is to raise it yourself.
Thank you very much for taking the time to explain, that was very helpful :)
My pleasure!