The future you imagine will have very few animals in it. I love animals, so I am glad they serve so many useful purposes, since otherwise the cost of feeding, sheltering and caring for them would be enormous. Raising a token number in preserves is not an equitable substitute.
Two thoughts: I certainly hope that technology and space colonization can expand the definition of animal preserve. However, Wilson's proposals are fantastic and don't factor the benefits animals gain from symbiotic living with humans.
And I believe there are several problems with overly specialized diets, not just that we're willing to preserve only a few species in significant numbers. It would be very good for world hunger if the west began to eat more kinds of meat again.
When this technology finally gets there, and I see no reason to think it won't eventually, it will change the world so dramatically. The amount of land and water we won't need to raise animals or food for animals it's staggering. The amount of meat the world consumes will double by the end of the century (will it? I made that up). As the world gets richer, people eat more meat. Combine that with a rising population and the amount of land we need for livestock dwarfs the remaining agricultural land we'll need (again, I made that up, but it could be true.)
We could rewild huge parts of the Earth, returning the habitat to nature.
How will a future where are animals that humans consume leading happy lives decrease demand? Doesn't decreasing demand counter your point about creating more lives being a better thing, since that would lead to less lives?
Even if I was optimistic about farming being able to have animals leading happy lives, it would still ignore many negative factors dealing with animal consumption:
1. The environmental impact from animal consumption would increase if all animals lead happy lives and consumption stayed the same.
2. Dairy products could no longer be produced as that would lead to unhappy animals
3. The sustainability of eating animals, we produce feed for them, and then we eat them. It would make much more sense to only produce feed for us.
consider fruit in the supermarket, that came in plane from another continent. By not buying them, in the short term, there'll be a bit of waste and donations to associations. In the mid/long term supermakets reshape their strategy, stop buying them as well, exporters then reduce their shippings, etc..
same goes for fish/meat productions, if you cut down the consumer stream, the producers will be forced to adapt, takes time sure..
About pets, our planet is overpopulated (at least over-consuming), the fact there are over a billion of pets is already a nonsense, it's like virtually increasing human population by 5-10%, do we really need this?
Ironically, while at least some of the motivation for this is to prevent animal suffering, once we figure out how to grow meat directly, we will have little use for many livestock species and this could actually cause them to greatly decrease in numbers if not disappear entirely. I'm interested to see what we do with pigs, etc if we aren't going to eat them.
I wonder how it will change the livestock industry. Not having to feed animals alleviates the environmental concerns about eating meat, and would make meat cheaper.
Hell, I would buy myself some photosynthesizing cows and pigs if I can just put them in a pen outside and not have to feed them.
I've always wondered - when synthetic meat becomes economically viable, and animal rights come even closer to human, will we end up in much greater need systematically controlling most animal populations? What are we going to do with all those caracases? Feed the poor?
I'm not vegan, but that's absurd. Right now we spend an inordinate amount of land on the relative monocultures of raising these animals, consuming vegetable matter is generally more efficient when it comes to land use.
So we'd have fewer chickens, but we'd have more land left to the wilderness. I don't really care about the interest of 100 chickens somewhere, but purely from a conservation point of view veganism is one of the worthwhile things we can be doing. Those animals are taking up land that we can replace with a more varied ecology.
But these species are never going to become extinct, we won't have 100% veganism, and some of them will still be raised even if they're not being eaten. E.g. chickens are very useful for pest control and to dispose of food waste.
And honestly, animals will play an important role in sustainable agriculture, so animal products will still be part of our lives. I was watching a presentation about soil health by a farmer. They don't use fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, etc because of a system of cover crops, free range animals, and mob grazing(a dense herd moved through the field quickly to trample and poop all over) to build healthy soil. The problems we have are from factory farms, monocultures, and destroying old growth ecosystems so more people can consume in excess, instead of moderation.
Possibly, but this could also be the day that animals we now eat are considered useless to us and so not worth caring about. They could be driven to extinction if we decide to use the land for other purposes, such as building huge labs to produce the meat. So we'll need to think about keeping areas available for animals. And enough people will need to care.
This makes no sense whatsoever. 8 billion is too many, for what, for whom? Next to 8 billion of us, we also take the luxury of keeping and feeding billions of animals, which is enormously expensive and horrible for the environment.
Let's start first by making sure we only keep and feed animals that we actually need, and then discuss if we are too many. I wonder how many humans this planet can sustain for every cow that is out there.
This in some ways even understates the problem e.g. Fish stocks.
There are different kinds of limits other than say, the Soylent Green limit. One is whether our planet is cooler with wild animals or having a few percent more cows.
Cows are cool but not as much as that!
We can have billions more people on Earth but in order for that to happen we need radical, radical technology changes. The most obvious step forward is Vat Meat. No animals required.
As a consumer, I don't care a tiny bit about making my food less expensive (by making production more efficient). Food is already very cheap.
I care very very much about reducing the suffering of farm animals. I do not want to become vegan (for health reasons), but the guilt I feel because of my contribution to animal suffering is one of the worst parts of my life.
Please, please, smart young technologists out there: figure out some cool technology to make it possible to raise farm animals efficiently while also ensuring that they live comfortable, decent lives.
Responsible or sustainable animal agriculture is a pipe dream at this point. With 7+ billion people on a planet facing environmental destruction it’s irresponsible to advocate for the consumption of meat.
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