I disagree. First of all, I seriously doubt factory farming creates a neat amount of biomass: each of our farmed animals come from human appropriation of ecological primary production.
Vaclav Smil suggest we have appropriated around 40 percent of primary production of terrestrial ecosystems. So if you think that suffering intensity by unit of biomass is not very different between our artificial ecology, and the natural ecology, then we are probably “neutral”.
Of course I think factory farming (chicken and pigs) is far more intense in suffering than nature, while ruminants husbandry is less intense in terms of suffering than wild life.
This argument illustrates why we should make the morality we use towards animals be distinct from that which we use for people.
I disagree. First of all, I seriously doubt factory farming creates a neat amount of biomass: each of our farmed animals come from human appropriation of ecological primary production.
Vaclav Smil suggest we have appropriated around 40 percent of primary production of terrestrial ecosystems. So if you think that suffering intensity by unit of biomass is not very different between our artificial ecology, and the natural ecology, then we are probably “neutral”.
Of course I think factory farming (chicken and pigs) is far more intense in suffering than nature, while ruminants husbandry is less intense in terms of suffering than wild life.