MOS, what is ethical or moral, is a question of subjective opinion. My point is that farming of animals does not need to be cruel, as is claimed.

I am the first to agree that parts of the planet should be preserved for other species to do their thing and for nature to take its course.

In a way, yes you are farmed lol. You live in a given environment,
like a country, you live by certain Govt rules, many leftie workers in fact call themselves wage slaves :) The Govt provides basic
healthcare and makes sure you don’t starve. That’s exactly what
good farmers do. Who eats us when we die, is basically irrelevant. We all get recycled, the worms will eat you too one day.

Lizey, go to places like India, Europe or Japan, to see how people cram onto public transport.. In fact if animals were loose on those trucks, they would tend to fall around the place.

Having some bad farmers does not mean that all farmers are bad.
Some husbands beat their wives, but they haven’t banned marriage yet. Good farmers will provide shelter, food and water for their livestock, its in their interest that the animals thrive after all. The worst offenders that I have seen in neglecting their animals are in fact hobby farmers.

Yes I have been in a meatworks and I never saw cruelty. I am also aware that you can remove an animals head and electrical
impulses can keep twitching those muscles for a long time after that. That does not mean that the animal is suffering.

If you think that killing all animals is wrong, I think you are putting emotion before reason and will in fact cause more suffering. Read up on what happened, when 29 reindeer were released on St Mathews island, as ecologists are well aware of. There were no predators to limit the population. It increased to 4000, double the sustainable population, eventually 99% died of starvation, a very cruel death. The same would happen to any herbivores, if they kept breeding unchecked.

Hi again Yabby,
I'm not sure whether I would find being crammed into a train in India or Japan a pleasant experience but in any case people on public transport in these countries are not taken on long journeys across hundreds of kilometres against their will. While a human will know what’s going on and will feel relatively safe in a moving vehicle a cow might not feel the same way. But I’m sure the poor Jews who were actually crammed into the back of cattle trucks to be taken to places like Auschwitz didn’t find it much fun either.
While all farmers may not be cruel I am sure you would be surprised at how cruel some are. But even a naturally kind person will get frustrated and hit out at an animal if “it” is refusing to do something because “it” is scared and is wasting the farmer time and money.
But if you are buying meat you are supporting ALL farmers, including the horribly cruel ones. Is this really where you want your money to go?
I am somewhat surprised you have been to a meatworks. Even if you didn’t see cruelty when you went (By the way what is your idea of cruelty?), there is no guarantee that all slaughterhouses are “humane” places and have a killing floor separated from the place where the animals wait to be killed and have working stun guns that don’t subject animals to painful heart attacks (I gather the abattoir you went to must have had at least these if you didn’t see cruelty).
And I was talking about animals still kicking and breathing when they injure workers, not some nervous twitching after death. But even so do you want people to have to work in such a high risk job and have to kill for a living?

(continued) I do believe any killing is wrong and though you seem to think your example of some idiotic ecologists will prove something, I don’t believe it does. You see, cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys and sheep are bred at an unnaturally high rate to provide flesh to meat-eaters. We see farm-animals (Except for the ones hidden in factory farms) everywhere because of this demand. If people gradually stop eating meat, less and less animals will be bred and they won’t somehow starve to death. There won’t be as many animals and even if somehow there were I believe there is nothing wrong with neutering an animal if anaesthesia is used. Farmed animals generally don’t breed by themselves and artificial insemination is often used to speed the breeding rate. So don’t worry if we all go vegan the world won’t be over run the animals we used to eat.

Lizey, you are not meant to cheat on OLO, lol, but limit your words to 2 posts a day per topic, as I do. I could say much more, but I stick to the rules.

Nobody knows what cattle or sheep think about whilst on a truck,
So you cannot claim to know. As a kid it happened to me all the time, I just went along with the system.

You are clearly out of touch with the laws of nature. Any species will create far more potential individuals, then can ever survive.
Resources will limit the amount of individuals who do, that is basic
Darwinian evolution theory. Those ecologists are not fools at all,
they simply understand natures laws a lot better then you do.

Have a look at what happens to wild kangaroos in Australia, when there is a drought. They die by their tens of thousands, starving to death. As out of sight is out of mind, because you don’t see it, does not mean it isn’t happening. Get off your arse into the outback and have a look at the carcasses of those starving animals, it won’t happen in the suburb where you live.

Lizey you are trying to ignore millions of years of evolution.
Herbivores will breed far more then can ever survive, the fittest in that given environment will survive, the rest will die a miserable death. Mother nature does not give a sh*t.

Cruelty to me is as per Australian Oxford Dictionary, ie causing pain and suffering. If an animal is suffering and cannot be helped,
what would you do? Let it suffer until it dies or kill it to save it suffering?

Lizey, your defence of people keeping pets smacks of special pleading.

You suggest that cats and dogs now lead lives that are "natural" to them?

How natural is it to neuter them? How natural is it to keep them entrapped in a confined space until it is your pleasure to take them for a walk?

The fact that you have a "large and shady paddock" only means that your pets have a far more relaxed lifestyle than the two dogs kept by my next-door-neighbour in the heart of the city. But it still does not make it a normal animal experience, does it?

>>Adopting an animal from a shelter saves a life and luckily doesn’t support the people who continue to breed animals for “pets”<<

Well I'm sorry to break it to you, but this is exactly what it does.

If people did not keep pets, the pet population would rapidly decline, and there wouldn't be a need for the shelter in the first place, except in a wildlife protection capacity.

Your position is completely inconsistent. On the one hand, you are advocating that we no longer raise animals for food, because it is unnatural and cruel, but you are passionately in favour of enslaving them to a regime that is equally unnatural and cruel.

If you take a look at the slave-owning South, in the days before emancipation, you will find many a slave-owner using the same "we give them a comfortable enough life" arguments that you put forward. It sounds seductive, all that food and shelter, doesn't it?

But at least castration was relatively rare.

Pericles, sorry if the quote from “Animal Liberation” by Peter Singer was a bit obscure. What I was trying to say (and I understand Singer to say) is that it’s hard to imagine anyone being so dedicated to solving human problems that they could not afford the minimal time or intellectual effort required to address the problem of “the wasteful, ruthless exploitation of farm animals" and take the simple step (the move toward veganism) to help remedy that problem.

And in my own experience, at rallies such as those against war, world hunger or our treatment of refugees etc., I often run into colleagues from Animal Lib and/or the Veg Society. We humans can address the wellbeing of all animals – human and nonhuman – concurrently.