After doing some more research, I've found meat isn't as cruel as most think it is, and even vegetable farming isn't as animal injury / cruelty free as people would think.
Often many, many small animals get basically wood chipped by agricultural machinery or poisoned by pest traps and pesticides. If you go by pure numbers of "non-insect brains" made to feel pain or die in horrible ways from human agricultural activity, vegetable farming would actually far outpace meat farming.
Also a lot of meat ranching can use land that is plain unusable for vegetables, but cows, chickens, sheep and pigs can use just fine. That will not go away. Also meat such as cows especially are not subject to the 'cows living in shit up to their knees' type of reality everyone thinks most cheap cow meat lives in, which is actually a small minority of badly run farms. All cow meat lives in a pasture for at least %70 of their lives. That last %30 is the difference between 'grass fed' and conventional beef.
All food has blood on its hands, and in the end, that is the way of life in human and non-human reality. I think a big part of the push to be vegetarian or vegan comes from a disconnect on how food is made. Societies used to be +%90 agricultural workers and processed their food in far more raw forms than the typical "abstract shapes of meat" that we typically deal with today, so a lot of the rhetoric did not connect, because it conflicted with their lived experience.
Often many, many small animals get basically wood chipped by agricultural machinery or poisoned by pest traps and pesticides. If you go by pure numbers of "non-insect brains" made to feel pain or die in horrible ways from human agricultural activity, vegetable farming would actually far outpace meat farming.
Also a lot of meat ranching can use land that is plain unusable for vegetables, but cows, chickens, sheep and pigs can use just fine. That will not go away. Also meat such as cows especially are not subject to the 'cows living in shit up to their knees' type of reality everyone thinks most cheap cow meat lives in, which is actually a small minority of badly run farms. All cow meat lives in a pasture for at least %70 of their lives. That last %30 is the difference between 'grass fed' and conventional beef.
All food has blood on its hands, and in the end, that is the way of life in human and non-human reality. I think a big part of the push to be vegetarian or vegan comes from a disconnect on how food is made. Societies used to be +%90 agricultural workers and processed their food in far more raw forms than the typical "abstract shapes of meat" that we typically deal with today, so a lot of the rhetoric did not connect, because it conflicted with their lived experience.