Other animals do the same. Dolphins and whales will create bubble nets and dive into them scooping up fish or krill until they're completely full. Seabirds then swoop in in droves and devour any fish left as they panic and jump into the air. Lions and other predators would run killing floors if their prey weren't so unbelievably fast with dangerous hooves and antlers. We just do it so efficiently that it's disgusting, and we do it for profit rather than subsistence.
The scale and necessity are not sidenotes - those are the substance of the problem. Killing 100 animals out of necessity? Fine. Killing 1 animal for more abstract-than-subsistence needs (connection with nature, culture, etc)? Still seems dramatically less bad than killing billions of animals mechanically and without necessity.
Does factoring in population size really change things that much? 55 billion animals being killed in the US every year divided by the US population of 330 million is 167 animals killed per capita per year. So the average American is paying slaughter houses (somewhat indirectly) to kill an animal nearly every other day. That frequency doesn't seem a little excessive to you?
Not really, because if we were doing it for subsistence we wouldn't be doing it like this at all. It's incredibly inefficient even aside from the ethical considerations. The only thing that overcomes that thermodynamic inefficiency is preference, and that has nothing to do with subsistence.
if you didn't have a farm system to pull from, how many animals would you slaughter to subsist? Where would you raise the animal? what things would you give up for proper animal husbandry? I'd argue it is incredibly efficient!
It is incredibly efficient if you start with the assumption that raised meat is the required way to feed people. It's not, obviously, and less so every day.
Yep. It was the supply of cheap meat that drove demand. Before large scale animal husbandry, it was super expensive to butcher healthy animals, and comparatively cheap to keep them around for milk and cheese. Pigs and chickens are an exception because they eat everything and they thrive pretty easily.
