It’s harm reduction, which is never popular. Reducing the suffering in the world is a good cause, even if you don’t ascribe to animal autonomy or full rights or whatever you want to call it. You won’t make many friends, sadly, but it’s a much better philosophy than many.
The thing with animal autonomy is that while it is the best outcome it’s simply not realistic - people don’t care for animals for free, and many animals cannot care for themselves anymore after millennia of breeding them to amplify “desirable” traits. Chicken for example, when not locking them into a save area for a single night they’re usually gone - they’re too slow and too bad at flying nowadays to escape from a fox (the result of fully focusing on how many eggs they lay and how much they weigh for millenia of breeding).
The closest we currently have to autonomy are organic farms where they at least can roam around while “fulfilling their function” - whether that’s getting butchered one day for meat, or giving milk, or both, or giving eggs or wool etc. depends on the animal of course. For example when they get butchered at the end one could argue that they traded some of their lifetime for a happy life - is that even different from us humans? Our lifes don’t get ended earlier, but we constantly trade lifetime for money and money for things that enable a happy life. We also sadly don’t get a happy life for nothing, and while it’d be the best outcome if we one day wouldn’t need to do anything we don’t like anymore, it’s simply not realistic (yet).
It’s harm reduction, which is never popular. Reducing the suffering in the world is a good cause, even if you don’t ascribe to animal autonomy or full rights or whatever you want to call it. You won’t make many friends, sadly, but it’s a much better philosophy than many.
The thing with animal autonomy is that while it is the best outcome it’s simply not realistic - people don’t care for animals for free, and many animals cannot care for themselves anymore after millennia of breeding them to amplify “desirable” traits. Chicken for example, when not locking them into a save area for a single night they’re usually gone - they’re too slow and too bad at flying nowadays to escape from a fox (the result of fully focusing on how many eggs they lay and how much they weigh for millenia of breeding).
The closest we currently have to autonomy are organic farms where they at least can roam around while “fulfilling their function” - whether that’s getting butchered one day for meat, or giving milk, or both, or giving eggs or wool etc. depends on the animal of course. For example when they get butchered at the end one could argue that they traded some of their lifetime for a happy life - is that even different from us humans? Our lifes don’t get ended earlier, but we constantly trade lifetime for money and money for things that enable a happy life. We also sadly don’t get a happy life for nothing, and while it’d be the best outcome if we one day wouldn’t need to do anything we don’t like anymore, it’s simply not realistic (yet).