Pros : reduce a lot of suffering. We do a lot to reduce human suffering, but don't animals also deserve a life without suffering.
Cons : No right to interfere with nature; knowing people, we will probably screw it up completely.
Thoughts?
- In nature getting eaten (and hence killed) is part of life
- Humans are in my opinion mainly carnivorous (basically because we have a handful of needed animal amino acids that we cannot synthesize ourselves and that our intestines composition is much, much closer to carnivores "averages" than vegetarian "averages")
I do buy grass fed cows and pig whenever I can (I don't really eat any poultry), even at far greater cost.
Farmed animals on grass from a caring farmer does not suffer much. Maybe half an hour of elevated stress (due to transport to the slaughter house) and a swift death (bolt pistol usually).
I am very skeptical on the "plant based meats" idea. Most of them thinks that the idea is to make something that tastes and has the same texture than real meat.
But I think, that is plainly wrong. Meat is an essential source of animal fat with amino acids, that (due to being fauna) cannot come from the plant kingdom (flora).
Also biology is much, much more complex than "we need to make it taste like meat", both ours and the animals we eat.
So I basically see no way of the plant based "meats" ever (in my life time) succeeding in getting as good food source as the real stuff designed by millions of years of evolution..
Not exactly sure what that means, but anything we do interferes with nature. Our meat eating massively interferes with nature.
If the idea is about saving that gazelle from getting attacked by lions by ensuring all wild carnivores are constantly feed so much artificial meat that they're too full to hunt, then that seems like a weird angle of attacking the problem of suffering. Because you can reduce both suffering and interference by firstly tackling factory farms where billions of animals are tortured and killed with industrial precision. In fact at this point the majority of mammals isn't even free and living in the wild anymore but they're in human captivity. And since we're going through a man-made mass extinction on a scale that the world hasn't seen in millions of years (Holocene extinction or Anthropocene extinction) these numbers are only going to get worse.
So, isn't that a bit of an alibi concern? We can worry about the edge cases and philosophical questions like 'should Komodo dragons be allowed to kill' once we've we've figured it out for ourselves.
I think domesticated animals and humans are a different story. While I highly doubt that any plant based methods will be able to replace a healthy carnivorous diet for obligate carnivores like cats, I have high hopes for cultured meat options in pet food. I believe there is already research and product development ongoing into this for dogs[1]
[0] https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/wildlife/wolf-r...
[1] https://www.londonstockexchange.com/news-article/ANIC/launch...
By feeding plant based meats to Komodo dragons instead of their normal diet, you are assuaging your human suffering that you feel over watching the deer get eaten as nature intended, not lessening the animal’s suffering.
I would be highly skeptical that we could manage to grow enough/manufacture plant based "meat". Then we would have to somehow distribute it to all the wild animals. We would still need to find a way to prevent attacks between feedings when the opportunity arises. Some animals will kill for "fun" or practice (like coyotes killing domestic sheep).
Basically it's an insurmountable task. We can't even manage to end human suffering.