I always thought of veganism or vegetarianism as the products of myopic sentimentality, and therefore token and irrelevant. If you don't eat meat, those animals aren't being saved, even if everyone decided to stop eating meat, they're still doomed. The cows, chickens, whatever, they're a doomed species, they only continue living at our demand, and if the demand ceases, then I highly doubt they can live in the wild from the centuries of focused selective breeding that only cared about bigger, meatier, and more delicious, and nothing else. So if their demand ceases, they all die, fish and other animals harvested from natural environments will appreciate it, but commercially farm harvested animals will perish.
Then, is the actual goal to show mercy to those creatures by exterminating them? Or is it more humane thing to continue just being a meat eater, therefore prolonging the cycle of these creature's suffering? I think it kinda reflects on what life is, and why people cherish it so much.
To be clear though, veganism or vegetarianism for any other reason, like you just don't like meat, obviously doesn't apply, I'm just thinking about sentimental vegetarianism.
Writing this down, I have the strongest feeling I'm badly wrong about something, as it's just my musing on the topic and I haven't done any hard research, it's just the first conclusion I came to, which makes sense as I'm so pessimistic I suppose...
Personally yeah, I'd prefer to cause a massive kill-off in livestock. Most of them are living very unhappy lives, and represent very inefficient use of land. It's both inhumane and a waste of resources, and I don't care about most types of animals
dying. Even if I do, it's better to reduce the cycle.
Sure, modern hunger is mostly due to the economics of distribution rather than scarcity. That doesn't justify so much waste, and better land use would still help.
But I don't have any moral qualm with eating meat. I agree with Tack, it should be a delicacy. It's one thing to enjoy meat, it's another to eat it constantly because it's cheap and everywhere. It's demeaning to the animals, which irrationally bothers me a little. So raising animals should be a thing, just... not on the same scale. For economic reasons and I guess moral ones maybe.