Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

As a rule of thumb, as our biology professor put it, just make sure the animal you're experimenting on do not look like a baby (big head, big eyes, small mouth, makes squeaking sounds). This is why experiments on fish were ok but "fish embryo" would get much more scrutiny.

>Around 30% of the world’s population is currently exposed to climatic conditions exceeding this deadly threshold for at least 20 days a year. By 2100, this percentage is projected to increase to ∼48% under a scenario with drastic reductions of greenhouse gas emissions and ∼74% under a scenario of growing emissions.

Meat and dairy are separate considerations. Even in industrial farming, meat animals and dairy animals are raised separately and often belong to different breeds. They are certainly treated differently.

So for example, where I'm staying, about 80% of the dairy products are made with the milk of sheep and goats in small farms where the animals range freely, in the summer, and eat stored wild grassses as hay in the winter. On the other hand, most of the meat consumed is chicken and pork and of those animals, at least the chicken are kept in large battery operations. I don't know about pig farming. Also, where I stay there are very few cows, most of them raised for dairy, and the country has one of the smallest, if not the smallest number of cattle in Europe. It's in South Europe, but I don't want to say exactly where.

Anyway when you ask questions like the one above, please consider that the conditions you know from the Americas are not the same in all of the rest of the world, and that most of the rest of the world simply does not eat as much meat, of all kids, as Americans (and by "Americans" I mean people in the US, Argentina and Brazil).

> You can't fulfill a country like the US's meat and dairy demand with pasture raised animals.

"Demand", maybe not. But "need"? It seems to me that this can be done perfectly well simply because the amount currently consumed is extravagant. People in the US eat way too much meat, per capita, compared to almost everyone else in the world, including most industrialised nations. My selection below:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/meat-supply-per-person?ta...

Nobody needs to eat that much meat. If there is "demand" for it, that is the matter that should be addressed. Why do people want to eat so much meat? There is something incredibly wrong in the data above, when you look at how the US, Argentina, Spain and Brazil eat, compared to the other industrialised countries in the chart.

> Because I believe it’s immoral to cause needless suffering.

It's immoral for the OP to eat meat because you believe it's immmoral?

Also, if you think that the need for tasty food, or any food, is trivial, you haven't been around animals much. The ones I know, and I don't mean only the humans, go absolutely batshit insane at the thought of food. A few days ago one of the cats over here gave birth and I realised what is that keening noise adult cats make when they beg for food: it's the same noise the kittens make when they want their mother to breastfeed them. The dogs, a solemn matriarch and her huge son start jumping up and down and cry like little puppies when it's time for food. The cats mob us everytime we step out of the house, just on the off chance we'll drop some tasty morsel. The goats used to not come near me and my friend, but then we fed them a couple of times and now they gallop to us when we enter their enclosure. The chickens catapult themselves from their perches and run like little raptor dragsters when we take them scraps to recycle (there's nothing I've seen that looks more awkward than a chicken running). A small, grey-speckled hen that I fed once or twice now runs to me whenever it sees me because it has forever now associated me with food.

Animals are crazy for food. And so are humans, because we, too, are animals and there's no use trying to shame people with facile moralising, humans have bodies that go absolutely nuts for tasty food and that food includes the meat of other animals.

Edit: vegans are no different. Here's three interviews with three ex-vegan "influencers" and writers, who quit because they just couldn't stand it:

https://www.womenshealthmag.com/food/a32211871/vegan-influen...

I have a few friends who were very vocal vegans, who later started eating animal products again. It's always made me wonder just how many vegans switch back to at least vegetarian diets, after a few years. I looked around, but there's not much in the way of good scholarship on the subject. Anyway, every vegan has the option of going back to eating meat whenever they decide it (one can even "take breaks" and enjoy some meat once in a rare while, then go right back to their fierce advocacy of veganism) which to me makes a lot of the claims about moral superiority a little empty. It's very easy to preach, but who knows exactly what vegans actually eat?