Eating more chickens (maybe fish too) instead of mammals is a very bad thing. They are smaller (than the mammals people usually eat, pigs and cows) and have less meat per individual, which means more individuals live under conditions worse than death and then get killed per pound of meat. Julia Galef and Brian Tomasik have done estimates of deaths per calorie and suffering per kilogram, and come to basically the same conclusions.
Are all animal lives equal? I would think you need to weight for sapience or conscientiousness or whatever. By the metric of “lives taken of any kind per calorie” worms are a much worse form of of animal food, even though they have a very primitive nervous system.
I don’t think so, but with a difference of 2 orders of magnitude between how many cows and chickens you would kill per calorie, the numbers are most important in this case, I think.
Not necessarily, at least if you’re considering it on a negative basis. Allan Savory’s work suggests raising cows (or similar animals) has a net positive impact if done properly in the correct regions.
(Not to mention there are more parts of the world suited to grazing than to farm agriculture.)
Eating more chickens (maybe fish too) instead of mammals is a very bad thing. They are smaller (than the mammals people usually eat, pigs and cows) and have less meat per individual, which means more individuals live under conditions worse than death and then get killed per pound of meat. Julia Galef and Brian Tomasik have done estimates of deaths per calorie and suffering per kilogram, and come to basically the same conclusions.
Are all animal lives equal? I would think you need to weight for sapience or conscientiousness or whatever. By the metric of “lives taken of any kind per calorie” worms are a much worse form of of animal food, even though they have a very primitive nervous system.
I don’t think so, but with a difference of 2 orders of magnitude between how many cows and chickens you would kill per calorie, the numbers are most important in this case, I think.
If you’re concerned about eating meat for ecological reasons, raising cows has more impact on the environment on a per-calorie basis.
Not necessarily, at least if you’re considering it on a negative basis. Allan Savory’s work suggests raising cows (or similar animals) has a net positive impact if done properly in the correct regions.
(Not to mention there are more parts of the world suited to grazing than to farm agriculture.)
Does he consider the climate change implications of methane from cows in that analysis?