We support the animal species by farming them

The argument

The argument inverts the usual framing of farming as harm done to animal species. Measured by the standard a species is ordinarily measured by — how many of its members exist — farmed animals are among the most successful animals on earth, and they are successful because they are farmed. The mechanism is economic value. Humans maintain, breed and protect what is valuable to them, and farmed animals are valuable, so effort goes into ensuring there are more of them: they are fed, sheltered, bred deliberately and defended against the predation, disease and scarcity that regulate wild populations. That investment is what allows them to be sustainably maintained at numbers no wild species of comparable size approaches. A species outside the economic relationship receives none of it and remains subject to whatever pressures its habitat imposes. The figures the argument cites make the point concrete. Other than squirrels, bats, mice, rats and humans, the most populous mammals in the world are cows, sheep and pigs — that is, the animals we eat. The exceptions are instructive: the other populous mammals are small, fast-breeding creatures that thrive alongside human settlement. Among large mammals, the ones that have flourished are precisely those with economic value to us. The ethical conclusion follows from taking the species rather than the individual as the unit of concern. If what matters is whether a kind of animal continues and multiplies, then eating animal products is the practice sustaining the most numerous large mammals on the planet. Ending it would not release those populations into better lives; it would remove the reason for their existing in such numbers at all. So proponents present farming as support rather than exploitation. We have made cows, sheep and pigs among the most abundant mammals alive — and on this reasoning that is a form of species-level success any ethical account has to weigh.

Context

In the past we have seen how many non-profits or governmental institutions use farms in order to protect endangered species by ensuring they feed and breed.

Premises

Counter-arguments

A life as a farmed animal destined to the slaughterhouse at a young age is not worth it. There is little point in keeping a species alive if they do not live life as they mean to. Them just being alive is therefore not an excuse enough to eat meat.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Their survival is not important if we are ensuring they are doomed to a horrible life.