"Being around" as a farmed animal may bear little relation to being around as a free, wild creature. Given a few generations, we tend to turn the animals we farm into a parody of the original creature. How well would the average battery chicken survive if it were set free?
> How well would the average battery chicken survive if it were set free?
This was tested in a Dutch TV program some years ago ("Keuringsdienst van waarde") where they got some newborn battery chickens and placed them on a regular farm, amongst healthy free-roaming chickens. They got the same food, but still 'exploded' in size until they couldn't walk. Their feathers look awful. On the whole they looked sick and miserable. Just like battery chickens, actually
What do you do if a snake or a cockroach appears in your house?
What happens if a bear wants to share the same living space you live in?
I understand your position, but the simple fact that we live in a modern World and we are at the top of it "inflicts animals this existence"
I like to not do it on purpose and I don't own a fur, if that's what you are curious about, but I'm not lying to myself believing that mink farming is worse than living in big cities that pollute the environment irreparably
We’re talking about farming animals and killing them for food or fur here.
I personally go out of my way to not kill anything. I catch bugs and throw them outside. I move frogs and snails off the road when I get the chance so people or cars don’t step on them. I’ve never faced a bear yet though. But that’s a bit extreme. How many people face bears?
It’s not a competition, because something is worse than something else or not doesn’t mean we should keep doing it. Farming animals is unnecessary in the vast majority of cases so why not stop doing it? Same with cities and pollution, it’s not all or nothing. There are more and less damaging ways of building, ways that are a bit less obnoxious than the way we’ve mostly been doing it for the last couple of centuries.
> We’re talking about farming animals and killing them for food or fur here
and they are two completely different categories, orders of magnitude different, and serve two completely different purposes
the amount of furs produced every year has been dropping for decades, meat consumption is not
> I personally go out of my way to not kill anything
Everyone does.
But being a S. Francesco is something we do for ourselves, it doesn't change much (it is nothing actually, but I don't want to sound insensitive)
Assuming you save 10 animals a day (which is very very very hard) it's 400 thousands animals in a lifespan of 100 years.
Meanwhile millions die everyday to keep our lifestyle going.
Meanwhile
Cats kill billions of birds every year and even more tiny rodents and other mammals in the United States
It's a matter of scale, not of will of the individual.
> because something is worse than something else or not doesn’t mean we should keep doing it
But maybe we should have priorities, so if something is not impacting the ecosystem in a meaningful way, the time used to fight it it's wasted and could be better spent on something vastly more dangerous.
> it doesn't change much (it is nothing actually, but I don't want to sound insensitive)
Of course, I also don’t eat meat eggs or milk, don’t wear leather, and haven’t for over 15 years now. But it didn’t happen all at once, and if I just thought that moving snails out of the way wouldn’t make any difference anyway I probably would have given up there and then. But instead I did a little bit more every once in a while until I’m at the point where I am.
So yes cats kill billions of animals a day for example but that’s only if you let your cat out. Every vet we spoke to said that it’s better to keep cats indoors because they live longer lives, don’t get diseases, don’t get maimed, don’t fight, don’t get hot by cars or even caught and tortured by humans (that’s a thing), don’t get obese from eating at home and at the neighbor’s and as long as you make sure they have toys and windows to look through they don’t mind.
My cat has killed maybe four mice in the 8 years I have her, tops. It’s unfortunate that cats must eat meat to survive but the canned food is pretty much the only meat we buy which is a fraction of what most people consume. That cat was abandoned and we took her in.
In conclusion, yes, focusing on the wrong thing is diminishing your impact. But I’d bet that for most people it’s not choosing between high impact and lower impact actions, but rather between nothing at all and anything at all. In that case I still believe anything at all is better than nothing at all. And doing anything at all might raise your awareness to do more and more on top of it.