Factory farming should be outlawed for a number of reasons. It's inhumane, devastating to the environment, and bad in a million other ways. It's not even efficient, except in jurisdictions that allow the farms to (freely) dump their effluent-- an externalized cost. Factory farms are literally putting huge quantities of shit into their local water tables.
That would be a start. Then we put a ban on the sale, for human consumption, of animals that were treated with antibiotics. If you want to save your pet cat's life-- or your pig's-- that's fine. Just don't sell it as food.
That's the low-hanging fruit. It will make meat slightly more expensive, but I'm okay with that. People in the developed world eat too much meat for their own health anyway.
What remains is educating people about antibiotics so they stop asking for them when they get colds and flus (they don't do a damn bit of good for a viral infection). Doctors in the US tend to be over-liberal with the drugs, even knowing that they have no effect on viruses.
It's funny how everyone has solutions for our eating up the planet. But it's never the obvious: stop having children like there's no tomorrow. If you think you have the right to have 90 children if you feel so inclined, then you'll have to acknowledge the planet must turn into a massive farm.
Do you mean to imply that the only thing we need to do is "stop having children like there's no tomorrow?" michaelochurch didn't say that outlawing factory farming was the only thing we should do like you seem to imply.
Western fertility rates are on average ~2. Development and education in poorer nations - especially for women - also results in declining birthrates.
Interesting side point though: reduced birthrates don't result in any benefits to drug-resistant bacteria though, since a small population can still run high density feedlots which promote them!
>Interesting side point though: reduced birthrates don't result in any benefits to drug-resistant bacteria though, since a small population can still run high density feedlots which promote them!
Side-note is incorrect. It's a probability game. Going from (hypothetically) 1000 CAFOs to 10 would drop the rate of production by 100x.
Which doesn't matter, because it only has to happen once.
Literally nothing about reducing the population density of an area addresses the horrific practices of the meat industry. They would still be a bad idea if there was exactly 1 next to a town of 1000 people, because that town would still be wiped out by drug-resistant bacteria.
We don't need current meat production practices - they're about corporate profit, not long-term efficiency.
No, you're incorrect. Reducing the human population density would decrease meat consumption, which would decrease cattle population density, which would decrease anti-bacterial consumption.
There's a known method to get reproductive rates down currently being applied across the globe: affluence. There's no need to mandate it, people are getting there on their own.
Of course, affluence is where most of the problem lies. The difference in environmental impact between a rich human and a poor human is much greater than between a poor human and no human.
Which leads to a more accurate description of the problem: how do you make not destroying the planet more appealing than destroying the planet on an individual level?
Who exactly is having children like there's no tomorrow? If not for immigration, the US population would be declining already. Educate people (esp women) and suddenly your major western nation can't maintain population replacement levels of births.
>>That's the low-hanging fruit. It will make meat slightly more expensive, but I'm okay with that.
You may be okay with that, but there are a large number of low-income people who are not.
I'm not disagreeing with you - I think factory farming and antibiotic usage for farm animals should be banned. I just think it's worth keeping a broad perspective so that we can appreciate that these problems are in fact very difficult to solve.
Maybe these low-income people could make a decent living out of tending to farm animals if it was more of a concern to the industry than it is now.
... or we could all deal with the fact that meat isn't a human right, and the lack of it would be a slight inconvenience compared to the implications of antibiotic resistance.
> or we could all deal with the fact that meat isn't a human right
Neither is food, if you really want to go that route. The point of civilization is that we try to provide for ourselves things that are not just our rights, but our desires.
(Show me where nature will automatically provide food for humans.)
I think GP was saying that access to meat is not a survival requirement, or even a requirement to be happy. I know people who would miss steak and ribs in a nostalgic sense, but anyone who hasn't found tasty vegan food hasn't looked very hard.
Access to basic nutrition is a de facto human right, in the modern civic sense. Nature doesn't guarantee that humans are fed, but many governments try to, with welfare and food stamps.
Erm, pre-agriculture, that's all nature did. Hunter gatherers today still literally walk up to their food and pick it up (or pull it from bushes, etc.). Or run it to exhaustion. Sure, it takes a minimal amount of effort (and took a lot less when there weren't 6 billion people crowding out natural food supplies), but the state of nature provides plenty of food for a small population. What you're saying is essentially that there's no natural right to free speech, because nature doesn't provide you with language (it takes other humans teaching you how to speak before you can access your right to free speech).
By the universal declaration of human rights, every person has the right to life. I'm sure you can figure out a way that wouldn't entail food.
I'm not sure how nature automatically providing food has anything to do with it. The point of human rights is to provide for ourselves things that are not just facts of nature, but satisfy our ethical beliefs.
> Then we put a ban on the sale, for human consumption, of animals that were treated with antibiotics. If you want to save your pet cat's life-- or your pig's-- that's fine. Just don't sell it as food.
This is an interesting proposal I haven't heard before, and it sounds like a good idea. I think it's going to be difficult to convince ranchers that they have to suck up the loss of a $5000 steer to a bacterial infection that could have been cured with $10 of antibiotics.
That would be a start. Then we put a ban on the sale, for human consumption, of animals that were treated with antibiotics. If you want to save your pet cat's life-- or your pig's-- that's fine. Just don't sell it as food.
That's the low-hanging fruit. It will make meat slightly more expensive, but I'm okay with that. People in the developed world eat too much meat for their own health anyway.
What remains is educating people about antibiotics so they stop asking for them when they get colds and flus (they don't do a damn bit of good for a viral infection). Doctors in the US tend to be over-liberal with the drugs, even knowing that they have no effect on viruses.