Comic Strips

Sorry, I would have answered sooner but my Lemmy instance was down and I took some time to look into the things you've mentioned.

Regarding cows and cattle. I have to admit I was wrong in my conception of a cattle cows lifespan. The cattle I was familiar with are dairy cows with the longest productive lifespan of roughly 5-6 years. Most other cattle for meat production are being culled at thr age of 2-3 (Bulls) or <1 (Calves). Which compared to their avarege natural life expectancy of 20-25 years is a lot lower. Here's a nice Article, detailing the reasons for said culling age as well as implications of higher or lower culling age. An interesting factor is that an increase in culling age of dairy cows suggest an increase in offspring and therefore the surplus of cows being used for meat purposes and therefore being culled younger.

In an effort to find out the averege lifespan of wild cows (to make a comparison between forced culling and natural death causes like predetors and disease) I've stubbled oppon the fact that there are no more wild cows left in Europe. The reason being that the orignial european wild cows called Aurochs have gone extinct a couple of centuries ago. The main reason being our own expansion into their habitant and hunting. We cut down forests that they used for shelter to get wood and claimed their grassing land for our own domesticated animals and farms. Domestication efforts of Aurochs in Europe, Africa and Asia began somewhere around 9000BC and let to the cattle that we have now.
But this still didn't answer my question about a wild cows averege life span. So I looked into a place were killing cows is considered illegal - India. Turns out their cattle is treated just as badly as you would expect from a third world country. Just as in Europe or the US, dairy cattle in India becomes unprofitable beyond 5 - 6 years of age. Afterwards they are either illegally slaughtered in secrecy or driven to slaughter houses outside of India. An Article (which I dont fully trust because it doesn't provide any sources) mentioned the inability of cattle to survive outside of farms in the modern world, due to extensive energy requirements that simple grasing can't provide.
All this hints at the fact that grasing animals are not compatible with inevidable human expansion outside of domestication and farming. If we were to release all our cattle it would either die due to inability to sustain itself or would become a threat to our other agricultural branches. So its either cattle at farms or no cattle at all. You said it yourself, nature would wipe those freaks out in a second.

As for Pigs, I have the same stance as with chickens. We selectively bread them to produce as much meat as possible in the shortest amount of time and the consequence is that the meat tastes horrible. Industrial pigs meat has the highest water to meat ratio to the point where its basically an inexcusable financial scam on top of an ethical atrocity. Compared to flavor rich and dense wild boar meat (which are hunted because they mutliply like bunnies, are highly invasive/territorial and an actual threat to hikers and other wildlife in europe), its sad to think that people are OK with the billions of pigs beings being inhumanly held and slaughtered to ditch out some subpar watery meat. But on the filp side, I can understand why some find it a lot harder to sympathise with pigs, because, while they are still innocent animals and the cruelty in our treatment is unjustified, a pig would gladly eat you or your family without thinking twice if given the chance. I've found numerous sources that suggest that animals like Pigs have consciousness and feel pain, but none that they have a simple sense of morality - which some animals actually do.

I would like to hear your opinion on the possibility of lab grown meat. Basically just muscle and fat tissue with no consciousness or nervous system.

As for fish, I think fishing as a hobby is absolutely fine, as long as you don't do it because you simply want to kill fish for sport. Mostly it encourages a healthier lifestyle and enviromental awareness. 99% of fishing as a hobby is research, preparation and patience, not the killing part. Here is a beautiful poetic take on that topic by somebody who is far better versed than I am.
Because recreational anglers are not doing it for profit, they also directly oppose the philosophy of industrial fisheries. There is no incentive to take more fish than you need, so every angler potetialy denies a whole family of people as customers of industrial fishieries. As far as my personal experience goes, nearly 100% of the fish caught has been consumed and none of it has gone to waste. The same can not be said about industrial fisheries.
Theres also a big diffence between fishing with a kilometer wide netting on a ship, or a hook and some bread. There's a big lid on the damage you can do to the fish population with a fishing rod. Fishing with a rod is a matter of chance, sometimes you fish for a whole day and nothing bites and thats fine. It just means you got unlucky or haven't fully understood your enviroment.
Furthemore, those are wild fish, they already have many predetors and humans are just one of them. This goes back to what I said earlier about us being "damn good hunters". Fish are literally far outside of our element, naturally we do not excell at fishing to the extend that adapted aquatic predetors are. I've seen caught fish that have clearly been recently attacked by other predetors and saw the bread on a hook as an easy snack. We also kill them way more humanly than nature does. They often get eaten alive and slowly suffocate in a bigger fishes stomach, or have chunks bitten out of them and succumb to the infection or loss of mobility (those are both cases I personal saw). Sure, the process of reeling a fish in by a hook in its mouth is pretty gruesome, but so is fighting a predator with razor sharp fins and teeth. And once we got them we just hit them with a stick and put their lights out. And yes, just like any other being with a nervous system we can expect the fish to feel pain. But we can also expect it to make it's own decision for survival. A lot of fish can swim by a lure and only the ones with bad instict will bite. Their natural predetors are not above using even crueler tactics.
Plus the fish has to be counted, weighed and payed for at a station. That way the population is being tracked and its ensured that the lake is not overfished. That is in my opinion by far the most humane way to get fish if you want one. I think at that point you are not asking somebody not to do something, but rather not to want something, and that's an entirely different story.

As mentioned before I am against any form of industrial mass slaughter of animals. If a farming animals life span and quality of life is solely dependent on it's profitability, then let meat and milk be as expensive as gold, even if it means that I never will be able to afford another steak again.
I am however not against private family owned farms and butchers. I'd rather have them take proper care of their animals all through the late stages of their life, than let yet another species go extinct, because we stopped supporting its existence. Right now the dail of meat production is turned all the way up to corporate and we have to turn it back to local to make eating meat moraly acceptable in my opinion.

I also just don't understand the moral duality of everything on the planet being allowed to kill each other in the most cruel and brutal ways imaginable, except us humans, who must stand above everything and have a zero tolerance policy. Yes we kill tens of billions of animals a year, but what is that compared to the trillions that kill each other? It's just biomass turnaround that has been going on for billions of years. The real issue is the loss of biodiversity in the oceans and on land. We have clear preferences of animals we want and don't want in our surroundings, regardless of the consequences of their vanishing.

The discussion about meat consumption is mostly an environmental one. As evidence shows its far easier for people to look past the cruelty of the subject, but ignoring rising prices and temperatures isn't. And this I believe, is what will eventually cause a global change in regard to our meat based diets. It is getting more difficult to provide food for our growing population due to climate extremes, and radical methods in animal handling are a product of that.
Isn't this the fight that advocates for veganism are actually fighting? It's not about getting every last person to never touch meat again, but rather to get corporations to dip into red numbers long enough to have them do a 180 on meat. The same thing is happening now with car manufacturers and electric vehicles. Before they were industrialized, combustion engines where a luxury item and once the industry moves on, they will become one once again. I hope that the same thing will happen to the meat industry. Thats where my full support lies.