I have to admit straight up that I am a meat eater. I love meat as well as other assorted animal products. So perhaps this trail of thought is biased but I will try as hard as possible to justify all schools of thoughts. Today I want to share some of my thoughts to you about my views on animal cruelty and particularly the meat industry. I will try to stray away from moral conundrums such as is a chicken better of lobotomized and being breed from a tree or is it better off the way it is now as these are purely dependant on individual views.
There seems to be an increasing trend of vegetarians and vegans around. This is perhaps because the lifestyle now is much more affordable so more people choose to adopt it. Vegetarians/vegans mostly live this lifestyle due to them not wanting to eat animals because they are either treated horribly or just because they are dead animals. I will talk about the treatment side here. I don’t like it as much as you. The horrible graphic images, the poor treatment of animals in battery farms, the antibiotic full chickens(for those of you not aware, there are a lot of videos online showing the stuff that are going on at a butcheries etc), all make me feel horrible. On the other hand though, I am maintaining a realistic attitude. I tend to shop free-range meat and if possible organic meat (although most of the time free-range may be all that I can afford. I am a student after all!) but I feel that meat production will decrease significantly if all the battery farms were to switch to free range or organic. Let me give you an example to understand where I am getting at.
This is a made up example though so keep that in mind. John is a livestock owner. He has 3 acres of land. In those 3 acres he can fit 300 chickens in a battery building. Of those 300 chickens he sells 250(some will die off, diseased, not enough meat etc) for about 2 dollars a chicken. That means that John gets 500 dollars. John has to then pay for food, medicine, maintenance, new chickens etc which cost about 100 dollars. So in total John’s profit is 400 dollars and so he keeps the business going. John however is then forced to convert to free range farm. So in his 3 acres he can now hold only 100 chickens. John then sells 84 chickens (assuming the same amount of mortality, which may be less as chickens won’t be so crammed and disease won’t spread that easily or chickens won’t heat themselves to death etc., but I assume it is the same mortality just to make a point) Originally he could sell the chickens for 2 dollars each. If he does so then he will get 168 dollars if his costs are the same then that means he will only gain 68 dollars out of the chickens. So John will be forced to raise his price to 5 dollars in order to make the previous profit as before. Hence meat is more expensive; Bear with me, some more assumptions to go. Now, free range or organic meat is more expensive anyway so what’s the deal? The deal is that despite it being more expensive, meat will also be scarcer. Even if John is satisfied with a 68 dollar profit, or even if his profit was highest because there would be less mortality and less maintenance, John would only be able to provide the market with 100 chickens at best. That is 150 chickens less than he could before. That means that 150 people will go to the supermarket and not be able to buy chicken. And as always the rarer the item the more the price increases. John will increase the price in an attempt to make more money so chicken will be expensive and rare.
Don’t get me wrong. I would love to have free range/organic farms around. But with an ever-growing population and with most of it being raised with meat as a stable part of their diet, a conversion to all free range/organic will lead to less meat being consumed and people freaking out because of that. I won’t leave it here though I promise. This is a very controversial subject one on which, in my opinion, both sides have valid points so I will attempt to delve into it more in later posts.
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