Red meat has a huge carbon footprint because cattle requires a large amount of land and water.
https://sph.tulane.edu/climate-and-food-environmental-impact-beef-consumption
Demand for steaks and burgers is the primary driver of Deforestation:
https://e360.yale.edu/features/marcel-gomes-interview
If you don’t have a car and rarely eat red meat, you are doing GREAT 🙌🙌 🙌
Sure, you can drink tap water instead of plastic water. You can switch to Tea. You can travel by train. You can use Linux instead of Windows AI’s crap. Those are great ideas. But, don’t drive yourself crazy. If you are only an ordinary citizen, remember that perfect is the enemy of good.
Yea in fairness to (genuinely) free range, it’s probably best if chickens are raised in just not cages but still within an area a farmer can manage. I was thinking of free range as moreso outdoors, with a minimum area per livestock.
For meat chickens, yes they probably have the lowest quality of life. The ones that aren’t stuffed in cages are usually not meat chickens though, but a different breed. I’d say they have a decent life because they’re not being stuffed full of steroids and are given space to roam.
I’m not sure on bird flu. From what I’ve read, the conditions of meat chickens living in cages is the reason why bird flu spread so much. The chickens are so cramped, and so unsanitary that they essentially need to be pumped with antibiotics, which caused bird flu to develop a resistant strain. If companies weren’t so hellbent at maximizing value, providing just an increase in living space would have hindered the spread of bird flu.
My perspective is that it’s more ethical to be able to provide a good quality of life for the animals you raise. One cow with a low quality of life imo is less ethical than a bunch of chickens with a decent quality of life, even if we consider numbers. If you can provide that to a cow, then yea it’s probably more ethical than a bunch of chickens. It’s just a lot easier to have a chicken live a good life than it is for a cow.
This is all my perspective though
There is actually a bad epidemic in wild birds recently, and there is a big risk of it transferring from them to chicken flocks when they have access to the same space.
I guess that makes sense, if you can make an animal’s life good overall, in that situation maybe it wouldn’t be a net negative to farm more of them. Though realistically I think it’s going to be very difficult to have any confidence you’re buying such meat at the grocery (if you can even afford the stuff claiming to be more ethical) and you’d probably have to raise the animals yourself for that.