Not in the sense I was using it above, namely, “We kill them all at once to remove their population.” What’s happening at present is more like “we kill them in batches to meet production demands, and bring in more.” Aggregated over the very long term a whole lot more pigs can suffer and die in the second case; I’m simply saying I don’t find “One sudden, nearly-complete mass slaughter” to be a preferable alternative.
My point is that the lifetime of a pig (EDIT: being farmed for meat) isn’t very long (about 6 months from what I can find on the internet). Thus all we would have to do is stop breeding them for a while and we very quickly wouldn’t have many pigs.
Isn’t this what’s happening all the time anyway?
Not in the sense I was using it above, namely, “We kill them all at once to remove their population.” What’s happening at present is more like “we kill them in batches to meet production demands, and bring in more.” Aggregated over the very long term a whole lot more pigs can suffer and die in the second case; I’m simply saying I don’t find “One sudden, nearly-complete mass slaughter” to be a preferable alternative.
My point is that the lifetime of a pig (EDIT: being farmed for meat) isn’t very long (about 6 months from what I can find on the internet). Thus all we would have to do is stop breeding them for a while and we very quickly wouldn’t have many pigs.
That’s totally true, but it feels a bit tangential to what I was saying.