Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective

> You can see that if you take a slow train ride through the French countryside, for example. You'll see houses, barns, trees, grass and small herds of cows busking in the sun, peacefully chewing cud, just like large beef and dairy industries want you to think their animals are kept (which obviously they're not).

Over the last 15 years (thus quickly), this has changed a lot in France. Now the standard is having 100 cows kept most of the year in a huge shed (newly built on subsidies), on a concrete slab partially covered with straw, behind galvanised steel fences, fed from a tractor a mix of straw or hay and "powdered" soja and stuff.

My place is a mountain "hay" area, meaning it's wet and ideal for cows, and yet most pastures are abandoned and we can see articulated lorries coming from Spain, loaded with straw. They don't bother cutting the hay on slopes, like they still do in Austria/Switzerland/Germany. A few farmers like my neighbour are even reluctant to cut the hay on a good, easy area; he usually waits 2 months after it's "ripe" for a first cut and lets it go bad, and then also misses the second cut.

Yes, you can still see cows in the remaining meadows, but they represent a vanishing part. Also, when you had 10 or 20 cows, it was easy to take them out, or leave them out and move them from meadow to meadow; but doing the same with 100 of them? There isn't enough open meadow land around to sustain a proper rotation (this is not at all a country of huge ranches like a few other countries like the USA), and even if there were, it would require manual (foot) work, while farmers are less and less inclined to leave their tractor seat.

Oh, on the paper, they have the needed surface to feed the cows, because it is mandatory to present a good ratio to get subsidies. But that's because they "took" (bought, rented or just declared as used) fields/meadows/woods here and there: 10 miles away one way, 20 or 30 miles away another way. It's not practical at all. I let you imagine how well they take care of some of them.

Icing on the cake, there are quite many cheese dairies around. The good cheese for the good cows for the good pastures of our good mountain. Well, truth is 75% of the milk doesn't come from here, it is imported from other regions. How comes, in such a "cow area"? Simple: because dairy farming is more work and yet brings much less subsidies than livestock farming for meat which is a true jackpot when you live in a area like mine, classified as "difficult": most cow farmers (1-2 persons) here will get around 40,000-60,000€ subsidies a year for their 99 cows (the 100th and following do not bring more subsidies so they all have about 99 cows) and 75-90 ha declared surfaces (subsidised until the 75th, but a bit more can be needed to have the right head/ha ratio to maximize head subsidies).

There can of course be a few pathological cases too in that domain: one former neighbour was a cheese maker. First they moved to a bigger village in the valley, while keeping the name of the higher altitude, smaller village for their cheese, which was already a bit of a dubious commercial practice, but well, let's say it wasn't a big deal. But then when the daughter in law took over the business, she soon got tired of actually performing the work; so she now buys ready-made cheese from a bigger factory in another area, make it grow old a bit (if you are lucky), sticks the same old brand and traditional picture over it, and sells it to tourists as a local product (except the fine print).

> I know one particular dairy farm on a Mediterranean island, with a fully modern barn and automatic milking machine, where, if you visit during the day, you'll see maybe a dozen goats in the barn that can house a couple hundred.

Yeah, well, that French "Mediterranean island" is famous for its VIRTUAL cattle which only exist in documents filed for subsidies. This small area represents the majority of such frauds in the whole country.

> The countries which you claim aren’t factory farming are just importing much of their meat from countries which do, see: https://oec.world/en/profile/hs92/poultry-meat

That's not what the data you link to ("your data") shows. It shows who are the biggest single country net exporters and importers of poultry, but it doesn't show you who sells to whom and who buys from whom, for example, Germany and France are in the groups of both biggest net importers and exporters.

Further, that import/export data is not at all representative of the amount of meat consumed by people in the different countries in "your data". The following is from Our World in Data and it shows that, for example, China, which is listed in "your data" as one of the largest net importers of poultry, has a very low rate of overall meat consumption compared with the countries that are net exporters:

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

So, perhaps counter-intuitively, it is possible for a country to be both a large net exporter and exporter, or one of the two and at the same time not have a large per-capita meat consumption.

Finally, "your data" is only about poultry, whereas factory farming and slaughterhouses in the Americas produce primarily beef cattle. Certainly, in my comment I mentioned beef cattle, not poultry.

> And even if you assume the existence of supposedly “ethical” animal agriculture — which is considerably farcical given the non-consensuality of murder in any case — it’s inherently irrelevant because these niche models of food production don’t scale to feeding the world.

Killing non-human animals is not "murder" in any legal system I'm aware of. Where do you live?

As I say in another comment, yes, small-scale farming can absolutely feed the world. Most of the world eats way too much meat, way much more than any human needs to. We have factory farms because of the way the economy works, not because of what humans need to eat to survive. Healthy adult humans only need to eat meat a few times a year and can fulfill their needs for nutrients found only in animal products with eggs and dairy, and I guess fish, depending on whether one considers fish to be "meat" or not. Humans are omnivores, but there's a lot of other stuff we need to eat, besides meat, and to have a balanced diet we really need to eat everything - in proportional amounts.

Bottom line, perhaps factory farms are needed to cover the demand for meat in the Americas, but they are not in any way "needed" to cover the need of meat of any humans anywhere.

Because they believe that the net suffering is reduced by the joy being brought into the world via the birth.

And there are people who believe we should stop giving birth and let our species die. They are antinatalists. I think they are too extreme, imho, but you asked where they are: just google them.

Interestingly, in another thread a user of HN who is, I presume, vegan, is arguing that because humans are morally superior, we should not eat meat.

I have this sneaking suspicion that human superiority has been used historically by both sides of the debate: one side claims that humans are superior to other animals and so we should treat those other animals in ways that other animals would never treat each other, by refusing to eat them; and the other claims that humans are superior to other animals and so we can treat those other animals in the same way that other animals treat each other, by eating them.

I think both sides are missing the point: we are not superior to other animals. We are better equipped to eat them. As a species, but not as individuals. Other animals are genearlly better equipped to eat us and so, for example, lions, sharks, etc carnivores kill a few individual humans mostly for food (but not always) every year.

And then there's the fact that cows kill a few humans every year (intentionally, after attacking them deliberately, not by accident), as do hippos and elephants: obligate plant-eaters that don't want to eat us, just kill us.

So to me it's clear that we're animals that treat other animals like other animals treat other animals and there isn't a hint of moral or other superiority anywhere to be found.

The problem is that it's you who thinks it's "fundamentally immoral" to kill another animal to eat it. It's your morality and noone else is obliged to subscribe to it, just because you do.

For instance, if I thought it's immoral not to eat meat because an animal died for you to eat its flesh and it's disgusting that you should let it go to waste, would you accept it if I tried to foist my morality upon you? I'm pretty sure that not. But then, why should anyone else accept your morality? Because you say it's good?

> Also to this point, I don’t think it’s relevant how other animals react to food. We are not those animals. We don’t need to hold ourselves to the standards that species without agriculture and advanced supply lines are held. We are more advanced, can make complex decisions, and have more options.

That really confuses me when I speak to vegans and other animal rights advocates. You're essentially saying that we're in some sense, better than, superior, to other animals. But, isn't that claimed superiority exactly the argument used to justify killing and even mistreating non-human animals? I mean, I'm sure I've heard it said that non-human animals don't experience pain as humans do, so it's OK to for example drip toxic chemicals in their eyballs (like the article says), because they don't really hurt, their reactions are just autonomic responses etc. I've read papers studying animal pain and they invariably assume that "animals don't feel pain as humans do" and try to disprove that. In my mind, it's obvious that animals feel pain as humans do, and that humans are not, as you say "more advanced", in any way, shape or form.

Vegans I've spoken to have tried to convince me to become vegan by telling me how farm animals, like sheep and goats and pigs, are intelligent, sensitive, how they have an internal life, etc. Which makes sense to me, of course they are all that. Yet you say that "we can make complex decisions", as if those other animals can't? It's confusing. I appreciate I'm not talking to the same vegans all the time, but it's still, yes, confusing.

Can you tell me, do you really think you're more than those other animals? Never mind me and others who eat meat, obviously you think we're all some kind of sub-life, but do you think yourself to be something "more advanced" than say a sheep or a cow?

> Lastly, you say nobody knows what vegans actually eat, but I can tell you definitely: anything except animal products. That is, after all, the point.

And the point of Christianity is to love thy neighbour and turn the other cheek, or anyway that is the credo. And yet, throughout history, faithful Christans have killed, maimed, murdered, pillaged, raped and looted all over the world with abandon and with the blessings of their respective churches. It is very easy to preach one thing and practice a whole 'nother one. Everyone does it all the time. Why not vegans?

Edit: anyway, how do you know what vegans eat? Are you vegan? Even so, have you any way to know what other vegans eat?

> If you disagree with that, I can recommend some vegan cook books which I think will change your mind.

Thanks, I think I'll pass. I'm from a Mediterrannean country and 80% of the food we eat traditionally is what you would call vegetarian or vegan, not least because we use olive oil as shortening. But that's just the food we eat, not some kind of political ideal. Anyway I'm pretty sure I can cook much better than anyone who discovered in late life that -OMG- vegetables have taste. I knew that since I knew what food is.

But, I still eat meat once in a while and make my own cheese. Actual cheese, that is. Because the tastes and flavours of meat and dairy cannot be replaced by vegetables and fruit, no matter how well the latter are cooked. Sometimes I crave a nice aubergine and zucchini casserole, overflowing with olive oil and tomato sauce; sometimes I just want kokorec:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kokoretsi